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.