by Philip Mulivor recently sent me a copy of his book Proclaiming Liberty: What patriots and heroes really said about the right to keep and bear arms for review. It is a book of quotes on the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms by everyone from the Founding Fathers to modern-day bloggers such as Dave Hardy and Marko Kloos. While the quotations are primarily from the pro-rights side, Mulivor does include some quotes from the opposition.
Why a book of quotations?
Mulivor offers three reasons. First, the Internet is rife with either inaccurate or phony gun rights quotations. Because of this, it is important for our side of the debate to have accurate quotes that are properly attributed and sourced. Mulivor notes that his biggest job wasn’t assembling a set of quotes but rather verifying their word-for-word accuracy and vetting their original sources. All of the quotes are fully cited.
Second, the author wants to provide the reader a gateway to “to classic works that promise a genuine understanding of the Second Amendment.” He provides an extensive bibliography at the end of the book.
Finally, and in my opinion the most important, the author wants to better equip pro-rights people when we engage in debate with the gun prohibitionists.
Quotations are the haiku of political discourse, carrying a disproportionate amount of power for their size. That alone qualifies them as important, if not critical, elements of our gun rights conversation. Their efficacy is especially apparent today, when sound bites designed for arrested attention spans play a key role in shaping public opinion. One can indeed experience the sensation of pulling the pin on a grenade when preparing to quote a Founding Father.
Proclaiming Liberty is a useful little book and I recommend it highly. You can find it on Amazon.com or through the author’s website www.gunquotebook.com. It retails for $12.95 and is eligible for free Super Saver shipping on Amazon.
In my emails with the author, he reports that Kindle and Nook versions will be available very soon. I think having these quotations available on your Kindle or Nook equipped smart phone would be very useful when discussing gun rights with those occupying the middle ground in the gun rights debate. By this, I mean those who might be coming out of Gun Culture v.1.0 who are not strongly pro-gun rights but are not gun prohibitionists either.
To comply with the nanny-staters at the FTC, the author sent me a copy of this book for review purposes.
"Mulivor notes that his biggest job wasn't assembling a set of quotes but rather verifying their word-for-word accuracy and vetting their original sources. All of the quotes are fully cited."
That *is* significant effort. Kudos to the author.