Guns Books

Anyone looking for some guidance in the sport of muzzleloading can do no better than Dave Ehrig's new book. Ehrig's knowledge on the subject is on a par with anyone in the nation.

With page after page of detailed text, diagrams, charts and photos illustrating the principles, designs, configurations and performance of muzzleloaders, Ehrig lays out with simplicity and directness everything you need to know to choose a gun, care for it, and get the most from it. He covers it all, except for two things -- nowhere does he mention a kitchen sink, and the title lacks the word "complete".

Everything else is here, from the most primitive flintlocks to the latest in-line rifles -- including specific techniques for taking deer and turkey with a front loader.

These kittens are full of fun and games. It is a wonderful book for any child. It was written especially for the beginning reader. This book describes first what happens when newborn kittens are left alone and how important the mother cat is to babies, it then leads you through their little lives as they get older and more curious about the world around and these kittens, with each passing week, need their mother less and less. The pictures drawn in here are perfect for this book. Each one coincides perfectly with each page. The book will make even an adult smile as the troublesome kittens climb up the curtains and dig through drawers!

** If you are lucky enough to find this book I say by all means get it! This book is perfect for a child just learning to read or the kitten lover!**

Prior to WW2 The Territory of Papua was an Australian administered colony and New Guinea a Mandated Territory administered by Australia under the auspices of the then League of Nations.Each territory had separate police forces, The Royal Papuan Constabulary and the New Guinea Police Force. Following WW2 New Guinea became a Trust Territory under the auspices of the United Nations and in the early 1950's the two police forces were amalgamated as the Royal Papuan and New Guinea Constabulary.

The constabulary was in many respects para-military armed in later years with the standard SMLE Lee-Enfield .303 rifle on issue to all British Commonwealth military forces plus leather equipment, ammunition pouches and bayonet.

Dr Kituai has written what is no doubt the definitive history of the native constabulary covering the period 1920 to 1960 and makes the point that the large bulk of the force was under the command of the field staff of the then Department of District Services and Native Affairs responsible for administering the various districts, sub districts and patrol post areas throughout both territories.Field staff officers held commissioned rank in the police forces but did not wear uniform.

Towns like Port Moresby, Lae and Rabaul were gazetted as such and European uniformed police officers had jurisdiction and command of native police posted in confines of the town.

The native police were recruited from village life and after training were posted as required to outstations. Generally speaking few were literate and with very few exceptions spoke English. With over seven hundred language groups in PNG, Melanesian "Pidgin" or Police Motu were the common languages spoken within the police force and by field staff officers. On one of my own postings as a single officer on an isolated post in an uncontrolled area in the early 1950's I spoke no English for just over two years

As an ex Patrol Officer, later District Officer I believe that Dr. Kituai has written the definitive history of the native constabulary in Papua New Guinea during the years covered by his book. Those were the years of small isolated outstations manned by a Patrol Officer or two plus his native police detachment. Exploration patrols were still being carried out into what were termed uncontrolled territory and in my own case as late as the early 1960's I had come under attack by hostile tribesmen using spears and bows and arrows.

Without the loyalty, courage and devotion to duty of the native constabulary it would have been impossible to have brought PNG into the modern age. Some Patrol Officera and native police were killed in the line of duty by primitive tribes people during the early years of administration and into the 1920's and 30's. During WW2 field staff officers who had been commissioned into the Australian Army supported by native police operated in the areas under Japanese control gathering intelligence and engaging in covert guerilla warfare.

It is fitting and long overdue that such recognition has been given to the PNG native constabulary and Dr. Kituai is to be commended for doing so.

J. D Martin
ex Patrol Officer/District Officer

Describes the development and use of the classic Indian trade gun with its characteristic serpent or dragon-like side plate. Reprint of the now scarce 1956 hardcover edition. 86 pp., illustrated with more than 50 photos.

Gerry Reith (1959-1984) was not the typical marginal, since there isn't one, but he might have been the quintessential one. He grew up on a farm in Connecticut. In his teens he was placed in a mental hospital, I don't know why, an experience from which he never fully recovered. Soon afterwards he became a Bakuninist/Kropotkinist anarchist and got busted for anti-nuclear activism at Seabrook in New Hampshire. The anti-nuclear left of the late '70s wasn't enough to satiate his hunger for freedom, and he became a (laissez-faire) libertarian, influenced by popularizations of the Austrian-school economics of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises which seemed to offer a selfregulating market system of social freedom. Over the years in which he absorbed and engaged other, avant garde influences - dada, surrealism, situationism - he never completely sundered his ties to the Libertarians. In fact he was, at his death, the Vice Chairman and newsletter editor of the miniscule Wyoming Libertarian Party, although he had announced his withdrawal from its (electorally oriented) activities.

Kooks are an acquired taste not shared by many, but if Reith and other marginals are in some respects crackpots, there is more to them than that. Reith's honesty and his rapidly developing literary prowess earned him a central place in the transcontinental postal salon which brought together wayward poets, bare-knuckle artists and meta-leftist radicals in the early '80s. A voracious reader, Reith became a teacher; he brokered Mishima and Pynchon to the politicos, workers' councils to the libertarian right, and irreligion to the general public. Not all his syntheses came off, but the conventional wisdom was such obvious folly that Reith looked elsewhere, anywhere, for pieces to the puzzle. It came down to this. How could the cause of freedom, which (in any of the many formulations familiar to him) had few adherents, triumph except as the imposition of an enlightened elite and, in victory, defeat itself? Reith's Neutron Gun stories are maybe more realistic in regarding a few fortunately situated terrorists and assassins as the catalysts of a cleansing cataclysm, but Reith's nonfiction opinion was that such efforts - by the anarchist Direct Action bombers in Canada, for instance - were counter-productive. What did that leave?

Reith never met most of his closest friends. The very sophistication and systematic tenacity of his scrutiny of would-be-world-savers was a source of despair. He figured, reasonably enough, that if there was a viable strategy for social change, he would have gotten wind of it. A late text, "Note on the Impossibility of Reading Your Way to Liberty," says that he used to enthuse over a mailbox full of anarchism, but now it bored and bothered him. For someone like Reith, an article like this amounted to a suicide note, although the one he finally did write was more succinct. His enlarged ability to interpret the world in no way increased his power to change it.

A failed love affair deepened his depression. His book Neutron Gun seemed endlessly delayed by the publisher's financial and other problems, and didn't appear till a year after his death. Finally, the post office which had been his life-line to another world, albeit only a world of ideas, became the instrument of his destruction. A correspondent's letter was "accidentally" misdelivered to the local police, then turned over to the FBI, which questioned Reith's neighbors. Apparently the casual use of words like "anarchism" was enough to activate the G-Men of the High Plains. Reith called the FBI which refused to hand over the mail and added that "we know all about you." It was a bunch of bull and Reith, in his last letters, said so, but he'd been driven to the brink. He left a note that said, "I have to get out, or die." In the event, he died, he shot himself. Reportedly he'd toted up the pros and cons of life and death, and finding them evenly balanced, he flipped a coin.

From Goethe's fictional Werther to the not much more realistic punk bad boy Sid Vicious, the suicide of alienated youths has become a cliche. (It's also claiming the lives of more and more American teenagers.) Reith is representative of the marginals not by the way he went out (I know of only one other suicide in the marginals milieu) but rather in the range and intensity of his interests. His writing, though at times tendentious, at its best is crisp and vigorous, without wasted words. He saw the universe as essentially disorderly and depicted it through vignettes of stylized confrontation. The strain of humor which infuses much; marginals work is, in his case, mordant rather than manic. Reith's writing is by no means all downbeat or doctrinaire, either. On topics further away from the gut issues of freedom and truth he couldrelax and be charming. A good example is his - book review? operator's manual? - "Quixote: How to Use," which appears in John Bennett's anthology A Good Day to Die. But for his book Neutron Gun - half of it by Reith, half by his pen-pal partisans - Reith deliberately chose stories which directly forced political questions into the open. He wanted to settle accounts with modernism, liberalism, religion, consumer society, Marxism, et. al., because they stood in the way of what he wanted from life. Maybe he hoped his book would be the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the '80s. He'd tried everything else, after all.

Jack Saunders says that, while no great book goes unpublished, many great books go unwritten. Reith may be the author of some of those books. The book he did assemble is a promise of more to come and an unsettling ensemble of portents. As an anthology it introduces the American equivalent of the samizdat press. It discloses a level of discontent which is deeper than that of the issue-oriented '60s (with all due respect); there is more water under the bridge. But what is its capacity for action? That was the question that stumped Gerry Reith.

I have owned this book since it first came out in 1986. I actually have a first edition, first printing copy and although I have read it numerous times, you would not know it for how good of condition it is in. Anyhow, I just finished reading through it again after at least a couple of years of it sitting on the shelf collecting dust, and I marveled again at the sheer amount of practical and useful information that this book contains.

Now I feel that I must warn you that this book is not intended for those of you who may wish to "seek enlightenment" or find the "honorable path of the warrior," this book is intended for those of you who want to "win at all costs" and live to see another day. Regardless of what happens to the unfortunate piece of human scum who decided to attack you in the first place.

It would be a very difficult and quite lengthy process of attempting to include absolutely everything that this book has to offer in this review. Therefore, I am simply going to give you a brief rundown on the various subjects discussed in this book.

Lesson I: Ninja Wisdom

Lesson II: Basic Warrior Skills

Lesson III: Wisdom and Philosophy of the Ninja

Lesson IV: Tactics for Weapons and Tools

Lesson V: The Indirect Approach

Lesson VI: The Police Mentality

Lesson VII: Little Red Riding Hood Updated (one of my favorite stories)

Lesson VIII: Military Applications for the Fighting Man

Lesson IX: Knife Fighting for Combat

Lesson X: Types of Combat Knives

Lesson XI thru XV: Knife Technique

Lesson XVI: The Ultimate Weapon

Lesson XVII: Zen Mind

Lesson XVIII: Seeing, Listening, and Winning

Lesson XIV: The Power of the Voice

Lesson XX: Spirit Yell for Strength

Lesson XXI thru XXX: Hands vs. Guns

Lesson XXXI: Breath Control to Control Fear

Lesson XXXII: Some Watch While Some Must Sleep

Lesson XXXIII: The Number One Killer of Warriors

Lesson XXXIV: Secrecy and the Warrior's Family

Here are a couple of quotes from the book that I would like to share with you and give you an idea of what this book is all about.

"It is much better to be tried by twelve, than carried by six. But it's better yet to be tried by none."

"Most people are in a jail of their own choosing, although they may call it something else."

"Even experts should have a mind like a beginner. This does not mean an empty mind, but rather a ready mind that is always open to everything."

I would also recommend that you read and study the following two books. They will be of immeasurable help to you.

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace

Shawn Kovacich
Martial Artist/Author of the Achieving Kicking Excellence series.

I've been using the no-nonsense family contract suggested by Dr. Leftin for several years with my family. It was originally recommended to us when my son (now 17 and a HS graduate) was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder in the 6th grade. The suggestions and guidelines given helped us provide appropriate structure for all three of our children, letting them know exactly what our expectations and limits were. It worked beautifully for us, and I strongly recommend it to everyone who asks how we handled issues over homework, driving, chores, etc.

This book is another highly useful, straight forward book from the venerable NRA. It is well illustrated and covers a variety of useful topics. The information is relative and potentially life saving. Recommended for those who carry or keep a gun at home for protection.

Its a sad time once again,the passing of a sportsman who could convey our thoughts and outlook on our time afield. A great introduction to the novice on what our sport encompasses. Truly Hillesque!

From the back cover:
"V. Alexander Cullen shares his experience and knowledge of the extremely lucrative pawnbroking business, sometimes referred to as the "world's second oldest profession." When people need money fast and can't get it from a bank, they turn to their friendly neighborhood pawnshops. ...

By following Cullen's straightforward plan, you can save thousands of dollars in choosing the perfect location, evaluating merchandise, extending loans, advertising, establishing a reputation for honesty, making your shop secure, and much more. He also includes sources for wholesalers, used merchandise dealers, appraisal guides, and many other useful services and equipment."

Includes black and white photos of store displays.