A Really Bad Book!

I posted this review of MR. GATLING'S TERRIBLE MARVEL on Amazon, where I figure it has about a 10% chance of actually showing up on the site. Dave Kopel told me the book would liss me off, and indeed it did:

This is a profoundly flawed book on a number of levels, not the least of which is Ms. Keller's relentless antigun stance, a view that only a resident of the "gun-free paradise" of Chicago — where crooked politicians are a protected species and murder the local equivalent of an evening playing bridge — could hold. Let me give you a quick example from Page 201:

"Colt was much more like what you'd expect a gunmaker to be: ruthless, blunt, profane..."

From Page 25: "To speak of a weapon's aesthetic qualities might seem rather perverse, even preposterous..."

To whom, one wonders? She seems amazed and somewhat repulsed that in the mid-1800s "Curiosity about guns was perfectly acceptable and gunmaking a thoroughly respectable profession..." {Page 29].

Here's a real shocker for Ms. Keller: Curiosity about guns is STILL perfectly acceptable, and gunmaking is STILL a thoroughly respectable profession...even in Hartford, where Colt and Gatling labored. Unlike Ms. Keller, I have interviewed and even had cordial social dinners with the top American (and many of the foreign) gunmakers, and not a single one of them belched, farted, scratched themselves in an untoward manner or in any way acted other than the professional people they are. Heck, most of them are even members of their respective Chambers of Commerce! Shocking, one supposes, to a resident of Chicago.

I have also spent much time with the renegade innovators and inventors — much like Richard Gatling — who still drive arms development...a group that Ms. Keller insists vanished with the Gilded Age.

More importantly, Ms. Keller's fundamental thesis...that the Gatling Gun redefined not only warfare but American society...doesn't necessarily hold up to scrutiny. Many of the changes in the nature of warfare, and society, described by Ms. Keller can be traced back to the rise of repeating firearms (Colt's revolver; Henry's lever-action rifle) as much as the Gatling. Ms. Keller's naive views on the nature of warfare, particularly the great charnel house of the Civil War, are views that could only be held by someone who hold's the self-described self-important position of "culture critic." Yes, the machine gun utterly changed warfare, but that is the nature of warfare. Ms. Keller freely mixes in the trenches in World War 1 to make her point (a point better made, BTW, in the far superior book MACHINE GUN by Anthony Smith) that the Allied generals, especially the British, were obtusely slow to respond to the changing battlefield, and hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers paid for that stupidity with their lives.

Ironically, what one DOESN'T learn about in this book ostensibly about the Gatling gun is much about the Gatling gun itself. Ms. Keller slaughters basic weapons terminology, for instance using "bullet" as a synonym for "cartridge," which might be acceptable when critiquing popular culture, but not in a book that purports to be the last word on a piece of hardware and its inventor. While her lurid descriptions of the evil, wicked, mean and nasty aspect of the Gatling do justice to the fervid dreams of antigunners everywhere, she clearly doesn't understand much about the gun and is even less interested. I doubt she's ever fired a vintage Gatling...I have fired several, as well as worked with experts on the gun, and shooting the gun told me more about the gun and its creator than Ms. Keller's endlessly repetitive book.

Finally, in speaking of the slaughter in the trenches in World War 1, Ms. Keller makes the following observation: "Honor and glory. Such words would be swept away in this war, along with eight and a half million lives and so much else...but words matter, too. The abstractions. The revelation that the concepts such as honor and glory were dead, as dead as a good chunk of Europe's young manhood. Had those concepts not been so persistently believed in, had they been recognized at the outset as empty words, the course of the conflict — one in which machine guns changed everything — might have been quite different."

Surely Ms. Keller is correct that the Elizabethan concept of "glory" as evidenced by the Allied generals in that war was the great sin and folly of pride. But to lump the term "honor" into the same sentence reveals the modern urban liberal's ultimate conceit. As a former newspaper reporter myself — who did indeed at one point in my career freelance for the Chicago Tribune, Ms. Keller's home — I know that in a newsroom, the concept of "personal honor" is the punchline from a dirty joke. Honor is indeed dead and, by extension, there is nothing worth dying for. Soldiers of any war are simply victims, too uneducated or unintelligent to understand that for which they really fight.

MR. GATLING'S TERRIBLE MARVEL is more a sad commentary on Ms. Keller's shallowness than Richard's Gatling's invention. Too bad...