Want To Write a Gun Book? First Learn Something About Guns.

I think it’s entirely appropriate that my review of a new book about guns appears the day after Kansas City celebrated its second, consecutive Super Bowl win by hosting a shooting which killed one person and put 21 others in the hospital with varying degrees of injury.

The book I am reviewing is Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns, which is basically a review of the political and media debates that have occurred every time the government and/or the courts focused on the legal environment which exists to regulate guns.

I’m not sure how much time, energy or interest the author has spent in or around gun owners, but what I find both interesting and somewhat depressing is how someone can write a book about guns and get so much completely wrong.

On his website, Erdozain claims to be “strongly committed to bringing history to bear on contemporary debates.” That’s fine, except that this commitment only works when you understand the history that you want to bring to bear, and this book falls far short of that mark.

For example, the author refers approvingly to a media notice that Ronald Reagan’s tenure was “one of the darkest hours for the cause of gun control in America.” It was? What gun-control law was either weakened or abolished under Reagan? In fact, it was during…