Sunday, May 30, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: An easy-to-read starter kit

This weekend officially begins our summer reading season.

Of timely note is the fact that Loompanics Unlimited has withdrawn from print Claire Wolfe's classic "101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution" and the even more famous (more-or-less) sequel, "Don't Shoot the Bastards (Yet)." They've been replaced with a merged, expanded, "The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook: 179 Things to Do Until the Revolution," which they promise to have available by July 4. (Pre-order at www.loompanics.com, or dial 360-385-2230)

It was Claire who famously declared, some years back, "America is at that awkward stage: It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."

From sections on "Monkey-wrenching" and "Self-reliance" to the all important "Things You Can Quit Wasting Your Time On" (like firing off another fruitless letter to your "congresscritter") all the old favorites remain, in easy-to-read snippets.

Someone who really has no right to your Social Security number keeps demanding your 9-digit slave badge? It was Claire who first taught us to rattle off 577-60-1114. (The guy it was originally issued to, J. Edgar Hoover, isn't using it any more.) Though you may not want to stop there. Nine-digit numbers once belonging to Wladziu Liberace? Elvis? The ruler of Freedonia? "Dead singing communist" Paul Robeson? Or my favorite, Vito Genovese (145-24-5159)? Claire's got 'em.

"The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook" is the easy-to-read starter kit for those newbies to the freedom movement who keep asking, "But what can I do?" -- and still fun for us old-timers, too. Buy several copies; hand them out freely.

• I don't usually devote space to bad books -- there are so many -- but I couldn't let Caitlin Kelly's "Blown Away: American Women and Guns" slip by unmentioned.

The real culprits here are the publicists at Pocket Books, who offend so badly that we should consider boycotting not so much Ms. Kelly's work as the product of any publisher who would advertise this volume as "balanced in its analysis ... an unbiased exploration of the right to bear arms -- through the eyes of American women."

Where do these people live -- New York City?

Curiously absent from this "objective" account of gun ownership is any description of which firearms Ms. Kelly -- a Canadian and former journalism professor at New York University (oh dear) -- herself chooses to shoot and carry. Why do you suppose that is? When the author passes along unquestioned Rep. Carolyn McCarthy's advice that we should "buy a rifle over a handgun for home defense because of its greater accuracy" and advises us that, "Some women like smaller-caliber guns such as the .22, .25, or .38 because they are light, small and more easily carried ... (but) smaller guns also produce more recoil" ... one is amazed to learn she's even shot a firearm.

(.38 is not a small caliber -- police found them effective man-stoppers for decades. Little .22s and .25s have minimal recoil and are also next to worthless for stopping an assailant ... whereas even the heaviest .44 certainly does have some ability to sting the hand ... and rifles are pretty much the last choice for home defense, unless you plan to pick 'em off at the bottom of the driveway, because they're hard to handle in closed spaces and their effective range is up to a mile, meaning you could kill someone not merely in the next house but in the next neighborhood.)

Ms. Kelly demonstrates her downhome style with a chapter called "Guns for Fun," focusing on typical women who own $15,000 Perazzi shotguns, wherein she offers such insights as: "Like the bubbles in a glass of Veuve Clicquot, issues of wealth and social class quickly rise to the surface of American gun ownership. ..."

For Ms. Kelly, perhaps. In the real world, it's only nations that practice widespread victim disarmament where "issues of wealth and social class" are resolved through the deaths of hundreds of thousands of unarmed peasants at the hands of a thoroughly armed political elite -- think Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia and the nations of Rwanda and the Sudan.

On the other hand, there are few historical phenomena more democratic than America's tradition of widespread gun ownership (though Ms. Kelly would clearly like to end all that), in which even a poor woman of small stature has a right to defend her home and family with an "equalizer."

"How safe is a home that contains a firearm?" Ms. Kelly asks. "According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms are the third leading cause of death among American children. ... Why are we still accepting this?"

Maybe because the gun-grabbing CDC includes in those misleading statistics 18-year-old felons shot during commission of their crimes? Has Ms. Kelly even done the reading?

Since Ms. Kelly concludes most women who own guns handle them "carelessly," what does she advise is the solution to violence against women? Why, we must ... are you ready? ... boycott movies and television programs that "treat women as objects of submission and violence."

I can picture it now: The woman is heading for her car late at night. She spots a hulking figure, stalking her. Reaching into her purse, she finds her handgun has been removed like the parachutes in Joseph Heller's "Catch 22," replaced with a note from Ms. Kelly advising, "Don't worry: Now that we've talked NBC into canceling 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,' everything will be fine. So you didn't really need that stinky old Smith & Wesson, did you?"

Avoid this pernicious little piece of mislabeled drivel. If you want to know something about women and guns, read Paxton Quigley's comprehensive "Armed & Female," Robert A. Waters' "Guns Save Lives: True Stories of Americans Defending Their Lives with Firearms," John Lott's fine new "The Bias Against Guns" (a piece of real scholarship), or Aaron Zelman and Richard W. Stevens' "Death by Gun Control: The Human Cost of Victim Disarmament."

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us.