Arms - The Culture and Credo of the Gun (Paperback)

"A one-time soldier, Somerset paints a convincing picture . . . self-deprecating, gruff, curmudgeonly."--"The Globe and Mail"

"Rambling, tragic, and suprisingly funny."--"Quill & Quire"

The first book to bring ballistics and legal history to bear on gun culture in fiction and film, "Arms" is the study of a tormented symbol. How did the gun become both an icon of freedom and the badge of vigilantes? Protection against violent crime yet the instigator of it? The sportsman's companion, the survivalist's god? In a cultural history like no other, where Canadian hunter and gun lover A.J. Somerset critiques the careers of ideologues from S.L.A. Marshall through David Grossman--where he traces apocalyptic rhetoric from George Orwell to the Patriot Movement--where he discusses cop ethics, race crimes, domestic coercion, and school shootings--where he takes Quentin Tarantino to task for shoddy spray patterns, muses on John Steinbeck and armed labor strikes, and surveys the rise of fear-culture through the work of Hunter S. Thompson--"Arms" demonstrates again and again that it's in the gun where North America's most irresolvable tensions explode.

Sharp-eyed, snarky, even-handed, and sportive, "Arms" is at once a gun lover's tribute to the weapon he adores and a devastating commentary on the rifts it has come to represent.

A.J. Somerset has been a soldier, a technical writer, a programmer, and a freelance photographer. His nonfiction has appeared in numerous outdoor magazines in Canada and the United States. His first novel, "Combat Camera," won the Metcalf-Rooke Award.