I always enjoy a book which seeks to humanize everyone on both sides of a contentious issue. In the case of Harel Shapira’s Basic Pistol, he is the liberal walking into the conservative world of guns. Shapira approaches this alien world from the perspective of a sociologist trying to understand the passion of the other side. Mostly, he wants the reader to get a full accounting of why people love their guns.
Shapira cannot be accused of skipping the legwork. He approaches multiple people connected to a gun safety and training facility. He is upfront about his angle. Everyone knows what he is writing about, and he makes sure everyone sees when he records their words and feelings. What results is an author who truly tries to document and even understand what guns mean to Americans. For the most part (more on that in a second), he successfully takes the villainy out of the people and even the weapon. What he arrives at is that the problem is not guns, but the gun mindset currently at play. It is a very interesting hypothesis, and some evidence exists.
My sole quibble with the book is that Shapira is still coming at this from a judgmental angle even while giving what he would consider a significant amount of grace to his subjects. He never condemns anyone, but especially in the final sections, his “us vs. them” mentality shows up just enough that I felt like Shapira undid some of the great work he showed in the first couple of hundred pages. However, it does not ruin the book. I might have this one critique, but overall, Shapira did the hardest work there is in the U.S. these days. He decided to listen to people he didn’t agree with. It would be great if this became a countrywide habit.
(This book was provided as a review copy by Pantheon Books.)
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