Survival Arts

Unintended Consequences, by John Ross

Over the next few weeks, I'll be stocking this new site with recommendations I've been wanting to make en masse somewhere... and this is the place. I've already mentioned Boston's Gun Bible in my opening salvo, so I'd be remiss not to follow up immediately with John Ross' Unintended Consequences.

I've never used this comparison with any other work, but I'm not the first to call it "the Atlas Shrugged of the gun freedom movement". As a matter of fact, Vin Suprynowicz is quoted saying so himself on the book's dustcover: "A modern novel of liberty to rival Rand's Atlas Shrugged... a masterwork." So, there you go... I stand in good company making such a bold comparison.

I should add that our own Dr. Edgar Suter proclaims on the same dustcover: "The most important work of fiction I have read in over a decade." There, I've shamelessly dropped friends' names to bolster my own already heady feelings about this work.

At 862 pages of small type on large pages, the novel rivals Rand's wordcount. Some people are put off by that, but I'm one of those people who loves this kind of Big American Novel. I'm also one who really likes the fact that it's what I've heard described as "a technical manual masquerading as a novel". It's not masquerading as such, it's blatantly such. Like Atlas Shrugged, it's an epic novel of ideas, sweeping a century's history seen through the lens of the gun rights movement. The technical manual characterization is a true one, and a big selling point: it's an in-depth crash course in gun culture, combat mindset, and the care & feeding of personal arms.

The centerpiece narrative of this work is the plight, flight, and fight of protagonist Henry Bowman, a self-made millionaire geologist cum petroleum prospector consultant who finds himself on the victim end of the BATF stick. Much of the book's early plotline, however, is taken up in historical narrative, a great deal of which is a compelling dramatization of the events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as another narrative surrounding the events leading up to the pivotal 1939 United States v Miller decision.

This is not a book for the faint of heart. It's not a limped-wristed attempt to justify private gun ownership from the "sporting arms" angle favored by the national NRA. It's a full-blooded celebration of the fundamental human, civil, and constitutionally protected individual right, the right to self-defense.