"UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES" BY JOHN ROSS

BOOK REVIEW | 5-10-05 | JOHN ROSS

[Jerrybob]

I kept bumping into people referencing “Unintended Consequences” by John Ross. It sounded impressive so I decided I should read it. It is impressive – and massive – 860 pages, and a novel.

The main character is Henry Bowman and the book follows him from youngster to present day.

The theme of the book is the gun culture in America. It outlines the US Government’s relentless and irrational war against the gun culture in general – and the private ownership of firearms in particular – in this country, for most of the 20th century.

It was impossible to read this book and fail to see the premise that the US Government’s actions toward gun owners and the gun culture have been an irrational and relentless war.

Without giving anything away, below are the words of Henry Bowman:

You’d think the government would leave me alone, but instead they pick the one thing I really like to do, something that’s a fundamental right supposedly secured by the Constitution, and they do everything they can to take that away from me.

You know all those hours I’ve spent developing my shooting skills? All the money I’ve spent on ammunition, and club memberships, and on my private range here, and all the time I’ve spent training other people to protect themselves, including lots of women and police departments, always for free? I think the government should say, “Hey, Henry Bowman, good job! We want people to be skilled and safe with guns; we want them to be able to protect themselves from harm; we want everyone to be self-reliant. We wish we had more people like you, with good gun skills and a lifetime of experience to pass along to others. Keep up the good work!”

Instead, they have treated me and others like me with utter contempt. They have confiscated our property and put people like me in maximum-security prisons over ownership of fender washers, claiming they were unassembled silencer parts; over pieces of muffler tubing. They have shot a man’s wife in the head because his gun’s butt-stock was too short; they beat another man’s pregnant wife until she miscarried, over a gun collection on which the guy had done all the stupid paperwork things the ATF wanted, but the feds temporarily lost the records. They burned ninety people alive over a disputed two hundred dollar tax.

If you believe you have the right to buy, own and shoot small arms in a safe manner, as much and as often as you want, and you exercise that right regularly, our government will brand you as the enemy; they will pursue you more relentlessly and attack you more severely than they do the people who pick up teenage runaways in the bus station and torture them to death on camera for black-market ‘snuff’ films.

These thugs are zeroing in on the most important thing in my life: being able to exercise my right to buy guns and shoot them is more valuable to me than all the millions of dollars of mine they’ve taken [in taxes]. The federal and state governments are doing everything in their power to take away my most important right, and they are doing this every single day.

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Below are the words of Tom Fleming, Henry’s friend:

Every single one of us believes that as honest adult citizens, we have the absolute right to own any and all small arms and shoot them just as often as we want. We have a specific culture; guns and shooting are important to us, just like living as nomads and hunting buffalo were important to Native Americans.

Our gun culture is important to us and we’re willing to pay for it. We have above-average educations and incomes; and criminal involvement is almost non-existent. You’d think those in Washington would be happy, but instead they are doing everything they can do destroy our culture.

In the 1920s, soldiers sat on their bunks in the cold at Camp Perry, cleaning the handmade .22 target rifles with which they would compete the following day. Then our President announces that, today, seventy years later, he is ordering these guns thrown into a blast furnace; we in the gun culture feel powerful emotions. They are the same emotions a Native American would feel if the President ordered the destruction of their war clubs and other sacred tribal artifacts; they are the same emotions that Jews felt watching newsreel footage of Nazi Storm Troopers burning copies of their Torah.

We offer to buy the government’s surplus guns, and instead they pay to have them cut up; we offer to buy their surplus military ammo, shoot it, sell the brass to a smelter, and give the government the proceeds, and instead they pay to have it burned.

They ban our guns and they ban our magazines and they ban our ammo; they ban suppressors that make our guns quieter and then they ban our outdoor shooting ranges because our guns are too loud. They ban steel-core ammunition because it’s ‘armor piercing’, then they close down our indoor ranges where people shoot lead-core bullets because they say we might get lead poisoning.

The members of the gun culture have a better safety record than any police department in the nation, but several states actually prohibit us from using guns for self-protection, and in every other state but one they make us buy a license. They tax us so we can have more police on the streets, and when crime still goes up, they tax us more and ban more of our guns.

People in the gun culture endure waiting periods that no other group would tolerate. We undergo background checks that no legislator, judge, doctor or police officer has to tolerate, and we submit to it not once, or once a year, but over and over again. Then, after we yield to this outrage, they smile and forbid us from buying more than one gun in a 30-day period.

[Billthedrill]

Sorry, the billing page isn’t taking input from the shopping cart. I’ll try again later.

[SovereignVA]

I just bought my copy, yay!