My friend Paul tells a story about riding his motorcycle through rural Oregon, where he stopped one afternoon at a craft sale. While perusing the wares, he discovered that he was being hawk-watched by one of the proprietors: a young woman with a pistol on her hip. Being Canadian—i.e., red-blooded if necessary, though not necessarily red-blooded—Paul blurted the obvious question: “Um, is that a real gun?”
It was.
“Um … is it loaded?”
As A.J. Somerset observes, it is a Canadian reflex to exclaim incredulously at the excesses of American gun culture. He utters a good many such exclamations himself in Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun, while rejecting the consoling assumption that we are immune to gun nuttery here at home. The book sets out to document the rise of gun culture on both sides of the border, and ultimately to track down what he calls the wellspring of crazy: the root cause(s) of the obsession with firearms. And...
Ian Weir is a West Coast novelist, playwright and screenwriter. His most recent novel, Will Starling, has been shortlisted for the Sunburst Award. He has not fired a gun since 1969, when his grade seven class was inexplicably taken on a field trip to a rifle range; someone evidently thought this was a good idea.
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