Book Recommendation: "Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada" by R. Blake Brown

The value in books like “Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada” by R. Blake Brown lies in their potential contribution to civic and political debates about firearm legislation and the civil discourse on ‘gun-politics’. For this reason I can highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to further arm themselves with a meaningful and coherent foundation in the history and development of Canadian firearm legislation. Obviously Canadians will primarily benefit from this book but many of the associated issues are universal and the legal details are similar to other jurisdictions.

 

Brown (Associate Professor of History at St. Mary’s University, Halifax, N.S.), has neatly collated a treatise of Canadian firearm law history from pre-Confederation through to the contemporary, ongoing debates subsequent to Bill C-68. The book is a research work and as such is not intended to be a source of ‘entertainment’. That said it is not nearly as dryly academic as one would expect from a journal article for example and is peppered throughout with interesting quotes, anecdotes and art from news media, citizens and politicians. He gives thorough treatment to varied issues ranging from state support for rifle skills through to the emergence of sophisticated gun-control and gun-owners lobby groups at work in Canada today. Along the way he deals with issues such as early state sanctioned firearm ownership, concerns over youth and firearms, early disarmament schemes that were xenophobic, racist and classist, Canada’s early forms of registration and the evolution of licensing and modern legislative requirements.

Book Review: "Game Changer- Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa's Wildlife" by Glen Martin.

They tell of the baby elephant that was saved in a specific locale, but they don’t tell of the scores of other elephants in the region that were killed because of crop depredation or land tenure disputes. IFAW’s methods have thus proved effective in saving individual elephants, and for this their strategy is sound. Setting up elephant rescue centres is doable. But the larger mission implied in their work – “saving” Africa’s elephants – remains unfulfilled and may in fact be sabotaged by IFAW’s own work. The lavishing of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the suckling of baby elephants while locals see their maize crops razed and their cattle stomped flat by irrate pachyderms sends the familiar, loud , and dissonant message to rural Africans: too bad about you; this cute little elephant comes first.(Glen Martin, pg 200).

Alongside biology, pecuniary incentives and conservation sociology are ever more important core foundations in wildlife management and in the efforts to conserve Africa’s – and the planets’- wildlife. In Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife, Glen Martin provides a thought provoking analysis of what he describes as the ‘ascendancy of animal rights based conservation policy’ and how it is driving the decline of many of Africa’s great game populations. The apotheosizing of Africa’s mega fauna as ‘untouchable’ has had perverse outcomes in many areas once rich in wildlife. While the reasons for decline in wildlife can stem from poaching, Malthusian population expansion and agrarian conflict, Martin highlights exactly how and why a hands-off legislative approach further compounds these threats and often provides a disincentive for local-level conservation efforts. If the people that live with and share the landscape with wildlife are divorced from conservation decision making processes, denied compensation for wildlife conflicts, edged out of wildlife-based incomes and generally  shut-off from legal and sustainable use they not only lose conservation incentives but often see wildlife as a menace to other land-based livelihoods. Simply put, the old adage of ‘if it pays it stays’, albeit often bandied about a bit casually, often underpins the most effective conservation policy.

Book Review: "Glock: The Rise of America's Gun" by Paul M. Barrett

 How did an unknown Austrian engineer who had barely ever touched a gun come to develop the most iconic modern handgun, with the largest market share in production today? Author Paul Barrett does an excellent job of tracking Glock’s meteoric rise from a Viennese suburb into a handgun empire that trounced the established monoliths of the American handgun industry, like Smith and Wesson. If you are interested in Glock’s, firearms, the gun industry and the wrangling’s of modern gun politics in America, you will thoroughly enjoy Glock.

I began reading this book with a basic knowledge of Glock’s history but Barrett provides a detailed account of the company’s character and inner workings, based on his research with industry insiders and Glock employees. One could say that Gaston Glock was a man who found himself in the right place at the right time, both in Austria and the US. The initially unassuming Austrian decided to compete for a government contract to supply pistols to the Austrian military. Lacking the infrastructural or a priori design path-dependency held by other companies, a factor later believed to have been a benefit as opposed to a constraint, he set about designing a unique handgun. His timing in the USA was also fortuitous – the late 80’s saw many police departments wanting to upgrade their duty side arms from predominantly 6 shot revolvers to higher capacity pistols. A number of high profile police shootouts that left the authorities feeling under-gunned precipitated this review of duty gun capabilities (many of these events also became slightly embellished).  Many in the US at that stage still saw ‘wonder 9’s’ as Euro-trash; the all-American 1911 .45 being the only pistol worthy of consideration. This alongside with the Glock’s unusual features and polymer frame meant that the pistol was initially met with scepticism. However it wasn’t just good timing that worked in Glock’s favour, the fact is that the pistol was, and remains, and very ergonomic, ultra-reliable and user-friendly handgun. It didn’t take the police long to see the light, in part because of the Glock’s capabilities and in part because of the company's innovations outside of pistol design.

Book Review: "The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance" by Tovar Cerulli

http://www.tovarcerulli.com/

Excerpt from the book: “…I saw beauty in my food. In salad greens, I saw the tiny, delicate leaves that first sprout from earth and seed. In strawberries, I saw the rain falling on Joey’s fields a couple miles down the road, and tasted the sun that warmed and fattened the fruit.

But in those same crop fields, I also saw missing forests and prairies. In tofu, I saw the rifles and shotguns used to plug deer in soybean fields. In grains, I saw the birds, mice, and rabbits sliced by combines. In cabbage, I saw caterpillars killed by insecticides, organic or not. I salad greens, I saw a whitetail cut open and dragged around the perimeter of a farm field, the scent of blood warning other deer not to eat the organic arugula and radicchio destined for upscale restaurants and grocery stores in San Francisco. In Joey’s kale and berries, I saw smoke-bombed [woodchuck] burrows.

Even in the vegetables from our garden –broccoli and green beans, lettuce and snap peas – I saw the wild grasses we uprooted, the earthworms we chopped with our shovels, the beetles I crushed between thumb and forefinger, the woodchucks I shot, and the dairy cows whose manure and carcasses fed the soil. In my own life and in the lives around me – heron and trout, hawk and hare, coyote and deer – I saw that the entire living breathing, eating world was more beautiful and more terrible than I had imagined. Like Richard, I saw that sentient beings fed on sentient beings”. Pgs246/7.

The above passage, for me, is an appropriate précis of the overarching lesson conveyed in Tovar Cerulli’s well written and though provoking book – The Mindful Carnivore. Through the personal narrative of his conversion from vegan to hunter, Cerulli paints a coherent picture of the ethical and biological rationale for this seemingly about-face decision.  What appears to be a transition between incompatible beliefs is shown to be the outcome of the same path to environmental enlightenment.