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...
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.
Advertisement
Advertisement