Scary Hallowe’en stuff

It’s Hallowe’en, the best holiday of the year, and so it’s so long October. Those peak woodcock flights I mentioned in my last post ought to be done with (but I don’t think they are), and with the wind and rain out of the way I did set book business aside and get out yesterday and put some birds in the bag. So the dog is happy, at least.

A round-up of recent goings-on:

On the 29th, I did a local event, for a change: a reading and talk at the Masonville Branch of the London Public Library.

On the 26th, I travelled up to Ottawa and did an interview for CBC’s All in a Day, followed by an appearance at the Ottawa International Writer’s Festival. You can check out the CBC interview here.

Last week, an excerpt from the book went up at rabble.ca. It’s from a chapter on the history of the gun lobby, and it deals with how pressure for gun control in Canada in the 1970s created for the first time a coherent, national gun lobby for Canada — one that quickly rattled apart under the pressure of competing interests. Flash forward almost forty years, and not much has changed: Canada’s National Firearms Association has imploded under the pressure of competing interests (and egos), and the hard core is still preaching that everyone needs to stick together to protect the hard core’s interests. Le plus ca change.

Windsor-bound

Autumn weather has arrived, the woodcock are on the move, but instead of going out to shoot woodcock this weekend I’ll be at Bookfest Windsor with Mark Kingwell for a reading and talk. It’s 2 pm at the Capitol Theatre. Also upcoming, by the way, is an appearance on 26th October at the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival, with Camilla Gibb, which should coincide with the peak woodcock flights. Thanks, book.

Before I depart, a quick round-up of what’s been going on:

After the NRA’s “Cam & Company” and America’s First Freedom took potshots at me, I delighted in telling them that they’d made several factual mistakes, which might have been avoided if their guest from the Media Research Center had actually read the book. I offered to take them on, on their own turf. So Cam Edwards read it and invited me on his show, where he proceeded to praise my writing skills and condemn the book. You can listen to that here. Short version: I should not have written about the ideas used in the public discourse around guns; instead, I should have written about all the nasty criminals who cause the real problem.

So that was fun.

I also did an interview with Peter Darbyshire at the Vancouver Province, who has since called Arms “the most important and timely book of the year.” He posted an article at the Province, along with our entire interview, as a podcast.

He’s not the only one who thinks the book important. At The 49th Shelf, David Worsley of Wordsworth Books called Arms “a smart, at times uncomfortable, well-researched, and very necessary piece of work from a rare bird in contemporary political discourse: a radical moderate.”

The National Post also reviewed the book in today’s paper, where Philip Marchand does what no one else has: provides a review of the book without imposing his own external politics upon it (whatever they may be). It’s a clear and neutral assessment of what the book actually says.

Finally, a couple of pieces I wrote for newspapers over the past week. In the New York Daily News, I argued that the rhetoric of gun control is often unhelpful to its own cause, serving to drive moderate gun owners — folks who own guns but support some level of regulation — to the other side. And for the Globe & Mail, I wrote a summary of why the entire discussion goes nowhere, in spite of the fact that a clear majority of gun owners supports universal background checks.

In a time of universal deceit, to tell the truth is a revolutionary act – Orwell

Another more-than-a-week has passed, which means it is probably time for an update. Things have been busy and updating the old blog hasn’t been number one on my list. In any case:

The Wall Street Journal answered the Washington Post’s review of Arms with another view. (I make no guarantee that this will not be paywalled.) Barton Swaim did not like it. Not one little bit. But Swaim is entirely honest about his own politics here, so I can hardly object. In any case, the Wall Street Journal felt the book was important enough to merit attention.

I’m definitely not getting any Christmas cards this year from the “Media Research Center,” where fearless media researchers researched Arms by pulling quotations from various reviews, and proceeded to make a number of completely false statements about the book based on intensive media research that did not actually include, you know, reading the book. This theme has been picked up by a couple of organs of NRA News, the radio show “Cam & Company,” and the website of America’s First Freedom magazine — folks who apparently believe it’s the Second Amendment because it came first.

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms.

The Washington Post review, mentioned in my last post, spawned letters to the editor, one from Dan Gross of the Brady Campaign, and another from one Nellie Clem of Lovettsville, who points out that habitat loss is a far greater threat to the future of hunting than is gun control. Good point — and it’s one that has bothered me for years.

The Winston-Salem Journal picked up Michael Rosenwald’s review of my book, which spawned the usual entertaining stream of comments. Let me qualify that: it will depend on what you find entertaining.

Elsewhere, the Chicago Tribune took note of the book, however briefly, and the Washington Post mentioned it again in an article on the invisible moderate gun owner. This is suddenly becoming a strong theme of the American gun debate: the question of why moderate gun owners don’t speak up. Well, I have some thoughts on that, in the book, and upcoming elsewhere.