The Amazon Man (surely an oxymoron) just left me one of their nice smiley boxes and inside was a brand-spankin' new copy of Boston's Gun Bible, one of my favorites.
I have just about worn out my first copy, plus I wanted to read what Boston had to say about the Supreme Court's Heller decision. He thinks it's a sell-out and a Trojan Horse. I disagree. I think it's a hard-fought victory, even if only one battle in a long war to restore the Second Amendment. But his reasoning is intriguing and thought-provoking.
The original BGB was published in 2000, with minor revisions in 2004 and 2005.
There are said to be ten new chapters and 200 additional pages in this latest edition, a total of 848 pages. If you've got a copy you already know that it has the oddest layout, typography and pagination of any book that you (or I) have ever seen. Italics, bold face, underlined text and all-caps run riot through the book and at first I found this very off-putting. But I pressed on and eventually came to like the format: it makes the text read a lot like the spoken word, if the speaker is keyed-up and excited about his subject, and Boston sure is that!
The downside, though, is that each chapter is paginated separately; for example, the last page of the text is paginated "46/8". There is no index, so it's hard to look things up. At first I found this very annoying, but I discovered, as I flipped through the book looking for something, that I was stumbling on new and fascinating items that I might have otherwise missed. So a bug became a feature.
There really isn't much new here about firearms that you can't find in ten or fifteen other books, and that's one of the beauties of it: it's all here between these green covers. Plus Boston says things that corporate publishers are sometimes reluctant to put into print, for fear of being too provocative or incurring potential liability.
The book does not cover hunting or other shooting sports or disciplines. The focus is on the concept of "American Riflemen" and "American Riflewomen"[1] and becoming an "armed libertarian".
Available at Amazon or Brownell's.
1) The spell-check dictionary in Firefox has no problem with "riflemen" but flags "riflewomen" as a misspelling; how can we fix that?
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2 comments:
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that one... Guess I need to spend some $$ :-)
He's a Wookie and his legal advice borders on . . . less than optimal.
He screws up the laws of several states, including Indiana.
As long as one reads it with only the gun nut stuff in mind, I think it is fine. Just one gun nut's opinion and we know how those are.
Shootin' Buddy
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