Wisdom from a gun-owning moderate
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/wisdom-from-a-gun-owning-moderate/2015/09/25/05f1e6b0-5256-11e5-9812-92d5948a40f8_story.html

The point of view of “Arms,” A.J. Somerset’s history of gun culture, might be more important than any of the stories he tells.

Somerset traces firearms history back to frontier times, through old westerns and battlefields (actual and, later, cultural), and onward to the National Rifle Association, mass shootings, fantasies of a zombie apocalypse and the white picket fences of suburbia, where housewives squeeze off rounds at the range with pink guns. (The color white plays an important role in this history: Somerset writes that “race war has long been the drunken uncle of American gun culture.”)

But what makes his book entertaining, often funny and ultimately an important addition to the limited canon on guns is that Somerset is a gun guy. He owns them, shoots them and loves them. And yet he is exasperated because gun owners, along with their culture and rhetoric, have increasingly “grown more radical,” leaving “anyone who breaks ranks” as a “traitor to the cause.”
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The loudest voices in the ensuing debates tend to be those at each extreme, leaving out the important middle, where solutions often emerge. “As the treetop squawking and screeching begins, the loudest monkeys take over, and the moderates find better ways to spend their time — partly because, as moderates, they don’t worry too much from day to day about apple pie, democracy and the AR-15,” Somerset writes. “And so the podium is left to the radical, the only one who really wants to stand at the mike and rant. The thing about living in a septic tank is the nasty stuff floats.”