mikethegunguy

My Books About Guns

Here’s what you always wanted to know about guns. You won’t get it from Wayne LaPierre or Michael Bloomberg but you’ll get it here. All the real facts about how guns are made, how they are sold and how they are used. This 240-page book is based on my 35+ years experience in the gun business and is the only book about the gun “debate’ written by someone inside the industry. Its 6 chapters covers and critiques all the arguments made by both sides about guns, including whether carrying a gun makes us safer, who’s really killing whom with guns, whether more background checks work, and other hot topics that are argued back and forth. It’s balanced, it’s honest and it’s true. It’s published by Teetee Press and you can find it on Amazon.

Volume 2 of my 4-volume series on guns is out. And it’s a study of how hunting led to the whole economic development of the United States and the Industrial Revolution. It traces the history of hunters and trappers who first led the exploration away from the East Coast, over the mountains to the Mississippi, then across the Great Plains and the West. And what the book argues is that we were the only country in the entire world to both conquer a frontier and create an industrial economy at the same time - which not only spurred an enormous economic development far beyond that of any other industrial country, but also made guns part and parcel of our way of life. There are also a couple of chapters on the important role played by hunters in conservation and a very sober discussion in the final chapter about whether hunting will actually survive. For sale on Amazon.

Volume 3 in my series, Guns in America, was a tough book to write and it’s a tough book to read. Violence is never a pleasant subject, and gun violence in particular isn’t very pleasant. In fact, it’s very unpleasant and the people who commit it, as well as the people who are injured by it aren’t usually such wonderful folks. But the problem is that we don’t know a lot about the subject, even though we are obsessed with talking and arguing about it. And the real reason we don’t know much about the subject is because we don’t know much about the people who either do the shooting or get shot. Oh, we have lots of socio-economic data about them; there they live, how old they are, how much they earned, whether or not they worked. We have that kind of evidence in abundance. But why was the trigger pulled? This is what we don’t know. And it’s not fun or easy to write a book about something we don’t know, in particular when all the experts on gun violence seem to know everything about the subject. This book will shortly be on sale at Amazon and again, it won’t be a pleasant read. Available on Amazon.

Americans have been arguing about gun violence for the last twenty years, and I choose to call it an ‘argument’ rather than a ‘debate’ because when people argue, they tend to rarely, if ever, respond to what their opponent is really trying to say. And this is the problem with the public discussion about gun violence, precisely because the two sides aren’t talking to each other, so much as they are talking to the people who share their own point of view. What I try to do in this Volume 4 of Guns in America is to explain what the two sides are arguing about, which side has developed a more convincing (and honest) answer, and whether either side has a strategy for dealing with gun violence that will really work. At the very least, reading this book will give you what you need to know to sound convincing from whatever point of view you want to take. Available on Amazon.

This is Volume 5 of Guns in America and it examines the regulatory system that was created to deal with gun violence. In other words it’s a book about the ATF. And while the ATF is supposedly out there trying to stop gun trafficking, in fact what this book shows is that the ATF happens to be the biggest gun trafficking operation of all. After some preliminary text about how, when and why the ATF got started, it then looks closely at how the ATF dealt with the two largest gun-running operations in recent times: The Branch Davidians at Waco and Fast and Furious in Arizona. Based on primary documentation, some of which is analyzed for the very first time, the book needs to be read closely by everyone who believes that the folks who regulate guns have made any kind of difference in gun violence or should be the ones who define the regulatory agenda for guns. Buy it on Amazon.

The 6th and (as of now) final volume of Guns in America covers what are the truly hot topics in the gun debate today, namely, the role of the armed citizen in preventing crime. This entire issue made it to the forefront of the public discussion about guns thanks to the 2008 decision on the 2nd Amendment, which this book covers in depth. It also talks about CCW from a marketing point of view, in particular the spread of “shall issue’ licensing and what the research really tells us about the ability of armed citizens to protect themselves and others from crime. Amazon has it.