A very nice article on the growing acceptance of guns in American culture with particular emphasis on women, gays, and Jews:

Natanel is a Buddhist, a self-avowed “spiritual person,”a 53-year-old divorcee who lives alone in a liberal-leaning suburb near Boston. She is 5-foot-1 (155 centimeters) and has blonde hair, dark eyes, a ready smile and a soothing voice, with a hint of Boston brogue. She’s a Tai Chi instructor who in classes invokes the benefits of meditation. And at least twice a month, she takes her German-made Walther PK380 to a shooting range and blazes away.

They give two token paragraphs to The Brady Campaign and a couple more to other anti-gun people but their arguments ring hollow with all the other very positive coverage.

And the icing that makes it so sweet is that it is on Bloomberg News.

I was scanning through the May 2011 issue of the American Rifleman before I threw it away and read the following (Page 56 in the article Military Marksmanship):

According to the Army standards and training manual, PAM 350-38 (2009 version), a Regular Army light infantryman should fire about 1,200 rounds a year, assuming he participates in everything: basic marksmanship, day-night qualification, unit live-fire exercises, shooting in NBC gear, thermal and infrared (IR) sights, etc. His Guard and Reserve colleague should expend 660 rounds. But interviews show that almost nobody comes remotely close to that figure. Furthermore, for “plain vanilla” soldiers with access to shooting simulators, and who do not use thermal or IR sights, the specified annual expenditure is 490 rounds for active and 294 for Guard and Reserve.

1,200 rounds per year? If I shoot in just one USPA or Steel Challenge match per month I will go through that many rounds in a year. And that doesn’t count the rounds I expend in practice. I have gone though that many rounds in a single day in practice. And “nobody comes remotely close to that figure”? Wow! And I feel I don’t get enough range time in. And we are sending our troops off to war with this level of training?

Those anti-gun people who claim it is a fantasy to believe the gun owners could hold our own against the Federal Government are totally clueless and whistling past the graveyard. We outnumber them, we can outshoot them, and that doesn’t even take into account that most of them would be on our side anyway.

Author Paul Barrett attended the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno last month. I spent several hours talking to him then and have since corresponded some with him. He send me an “Uncorrected Proof” of his new book, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. I finished reading it yesterday.

I liked the book. As he told us in Reno this is the story of how Gaston Glock came to dominate the handgun market in the U.S. It is primarily a book about a business and how success came from not only a great product as the right time but also how anti-gun people were his best salesmen. Paul loves the irony (his next book, unrelated to firearms will have it’s share of irony as well), it shows, and it makes the book all the more pleasurable to read.

Barrett and I come from about as disparate backgrounds as two U.S. citizens could. I grew up on a farm in Idaho with German roots which perhaps go back prior to the the birth of our nation (we are still investigating but it may be one of my great+++ grandfather Huffman’s was on the first U.S. census). I don’t own a Glock and probably have fired less than 50 rounds in a couple different Glock pistols. Barrett lives and works in New York City and his mother is Jewish. She escaped Europe as a little girl. Many of her relatives died in the camps during WWII. This difference lead to more irony as our discussion dove deeper into the issues around guns and it will surface again in my review of the book.

Our different perspective on things was a stressor during our conversations. Things we both thought were obvious to the most casual observer were, “You can’t possibly be serious!” moments for the other. I struggled with this stress and I’m pretty sure he did too. We both wanted this “relationship” to work.

If you want a one sentence summation of my thoughts on his book it is, “Gun owners as well many others will find the story of Glock fascinating and the irony will make you smile.” As I dig into specifics keep this in mind. I am deeply embedded in the movement to expand of the civil rights of gun ownership. So when the book touches on subjects I am an expert on and I think it is even slightly off base it really gets my attention. My disagreement on these items should not be taken as an overall disparagement of the book. It is a very enjoyable read and I recommend it.

There a lot of things that surprised me in the book. Of course there was the behind the scenes story of the creation of the gun, it’s marketing, the legal issues, and the criminals who embezzled from and even tried to murder Gaston Glock. That was all fascinating. But what surprised me was how thoroughly Barrett researched the topic and got into “the gun culture”. He attended the NRA convention, went to a small arms trade show in Germany. He spent a weekend with Massad Ayob. He shot in an IPDA match. He tells us that most police are not particularly good shooters and practice less than many private citizen gun owners. He refers to “the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9”, Heinlein’s famous quote, “An armed society is a polite society”, John Moses Browning, and tells the Suzanna Gratia Hupp story. He explains how a gun can malfunction by “limp wristing” it. He points out anti-gun advocates and that the New York times in particular tried to get Glock handguns banned by making claims for which there was no evidence. He points out Josh Sugarmann’s deliberate deception about “assault weapons”. He briefly tells the story of the efforts to ban “Saturday Night Specials” giving the reader the anti-gun people view:

… Saturday Night Specials had no redeeming social value; they couldn’t plausibly be marketed for target shooting, hunting, or police work. By their very nature, according to this view, cheap handguns were meant only to kill people and therefore were “unreasonably hazardous.”

Then he shoots them down with:

The plaintiffs’ argument had visceral appeal to gun foes, but also significant weaknesses: As a matter of economics and fairness, it didn’t address the concerns of people living in violence-ridden neighborhoods who might seek to defend themselves with cut-rate handguns.

He writes of how Glock advertising their pistol was “significantly more powerful with greater firepower and is much easier to shoot fast and true” drew fire from people like Sugarmann who wrote, “The rise of handguns to dominance in the marketplace has corresponded with an increase in their efficiency as killing machines”. And then he shots them down with the well aimed, “This tough rhetoric appeals to many liberal citizens and scholars. But when drained of emotion and set against firearm realities and crime trends, it loses force.”

I saw this again and again in his book and in my discussions with him. He even started to buy his own handgun but the paperwork required by New York City had a rather chilling effect. I was amazed with the details he knew about culture and the battles we have fought against less than ethical opponents.

With all the points he gets right I was occasionally shocked with his conclusions after correctly laying out the facts. Chapter 1 is about the 1986 FBI shootout in Miami. One of the lessons learned there was that a determined bad guy can take many, many hits (Michael Platt absorbed 12 shots before being stopped) and still be a threat. He correctly reports that law enforcement all over the U.S. concluded from this and other events that a six shot revolver wasn’t adequate for officer safety. Yet Barrett says things like, “It’s not obvious why a civilian handgun owner requires seventeen rounds in a magazine of a Glock pistol.” When I read that I wanted to scream at him, “Because if it is going to take 12 rounds to stop him he is going to really pissed off if I only fired ten!” And that doesn’t even get into the situations where there are multiple assailants and not all of your shots are going to be hits on a moving target that is shooting at you.

He refers to “the loophole that remains for private gun transactions” and says, “An estimated 40 percent of handguns are acquired by private transaction, for which no background check—no paperwork at all—is necessary. That makes no sense.”. Again, this guy lost many relatives to the Nazis in WWII. He is smart guy. Even if he has not read the story of the Belgium Corporal surely after digging that deeply into our culture he could formulate an argument about the risks of firearms registration rather than saying, “That makes no sense.” Barrett likes irony and here I, the German (descendent), am making the case to a descendent of a Holocaust survivor that Jews need to protect themselves from tyrannical governments.

He advocates for “ballistic fingerprinting” apparently without doing the usual research. Had he even read the Wikipedia entry he would have realized this scheme had serious and probably fatal flaws which make the database useless for anything other than gun owner registration.

Again and again I saw this. It was as if he had all the facts, he understood the anti-gun people frequently deliberately lied, relied on emotional appeals, and had their hypothesizes discredited. But when it came time to express his own opinion he wasn’t quite ready to give up many of their conclusions.

There are hints of condescension in places but this may have been editors or marketers rather than the author. A flyer included with the book states, “The Glock is a favorite among concealed-carry buffs”. I found that very insulting. Are people who attend church “religious buffs”? Or are people who marry someone of a different skin color “interracial marriage buffs”?

The back of the “UNCORRECTED PROOF : NOT FOR SALE” book includes some small print that looks like the promotion plans:

• National review and feature attention
• 20-city radio satellite tour
• Author events and interviews out of New York
• Outreach to law-enforcement blogs
• Paid search campaign
• Advertising on sites such as TownHall.com
• Coordinated outreach with academic marketing to colleges and universities with law-enforcement studies programs
• Advance reader’s edition available for distribution to urban law-enforcement agencies and mayors in cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Miami, Kansas City, and New Orleans
• eBook edition promoted in all advertising, promotion, and social media outreach

Why the emphasis on law enforcement and not a single mention of gun owner outreach? There are about 80 million gun owners in the U.S. Far, far more than there are police officers. Don’t they think gun owners can read? In addition to the obvious, to my readers, gun blogs there are many gun magazines which reach millions of readers, and there are even online stores that specialize in gun books.

I also found a minor mistake where he implied the “assault weapon ban” was part of the Brady Act. I reported this to him and he thinks he might still be able to get the “glitch” corrected before the book is released in January 2012.

It is still a good book. That his full time job is as a writer shows. I envy his writing skill. I highly recommend this book.

See also other reviews by Ry, Robert Farago, Jim Shepherd (and here), and my previous comments here, here, and here.

Update: Aaron has a review too.

Update2: Review by BobG.

Paul M. Barrett, the author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, showed up at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. We have been pushing him a little bit for some of the things he has written in the past. While he is someone I would characterize as mildly anti-gun* I don’t think I need to put on my tin-foil hat. With the limited information DirtCrashr had his suspicion was reasonable. But I’ve spent many hours with him now and I think he is probably being straight with us when he says he thinks we will like his book. I have agreed to read it and write a review of it. I expect I will get a preliminary version in a few days. My expectation is that I will find it an interesting read and will suggest it to others.

He went shooting with us yesterday and he shot a variety of guns and said he had a great time. He also said he tried to buy a handgun but going through the paperwork required by New York City had a rather chilling effect, “The police have no business knowing all the information they requested.” That was a very good sign to me.

In case you are wondering; after I showed him the video I made he showed me the video he made. We had a nice discussion afterward and (I believe this is correct) his position is that there might be some instances where the banning of possession of magazines greater than eight or ten rounds would save a few lives. He concedes there might be cases where such a ban would cost a few lives. In any case that’s not something worth investing political capital in. He put that in there mostly to point out that the 1994 “assault weapon” ban was totally worthless. The only thing that would have a chance of making people safer is a ban that would prohibit possession as well as manufacture and sale. But again the political difficulty of passing such legislation is not worth the effort.

The bigger story, again paraphrasing my discussions with Barrett, is that the anti-gun people biggest successes were the seeds of their failure. The Glock supposedly being “invisible to X-rays” got it unwanted attention by the Federal Legislature. But this increased its public profile and sales. The same with the 1994 ban on magazine capacity greater than 10 rounds. The irony is fascinating to him and he explores this in his book. This is part of what makes the book a very good read.

I’ll let you know after I read it but for now he has me about 90% sold when he says it is a good book that gun owners will enjoy.

*Update: After reading his comment I think that instead of “mildly anti-gun” it would be more accurate to say he is accepting of more gun regulation than I am comfortable with to call him pro-gun. And in any case as I have said before finding something to disagree with him on, which I could find many, is not the way you recruit people to your cause. Find the things that you agree on and work together on those issues. If necessary the points of disagreement can be revisited when you have accomplished everything you can as a team.