Outta The Closet: A Less Terrible Coffee Table Book

If you're the “gun person” in your family, chances are someone has given you something similar to this book as a holiday gift. You just know that they were at a discount book store and grabbed the first thing gun-related that they saw. Our shelves (and dust bins) are absolutely full of these things. They have titles like The Best Guns Ever and All about Guns. In these books, chances are that if a modern AR-15 is featured it will be equipped straight out of the mall ninja handbook, chasing pure aesthetics over everything else. So when the book 50 Guns that Changed the World by Robert Sadowskii hit the desk, you can imagine our skepticism.

Changed the world how? By what objective metric?

Cracking it open, here is what the author had to say:

Picking the fifty best, most iconic firearms is no easy task. There were some obvious choices, like the Winchester Model 1873 lever-action rifle and the Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun as well as the Ruger Mark I semiautomatic rimfire pistols–guns that have indelibly changed the way we hunt, shoot competitively, and defend ourselves. Other selections may send you into fits of fury or have you sit back in contentment. Including firearms that everyone could purchase and own–depending on the thickness of your wallet, or lack thereof–was important. Not all of these guns are favorites of mine, but they made the list due to what their design brought to the shooting community and their influence on future firearm designs. Pop culture has had an influence on guns, though notoriety is not a substitute for performance. Production runs are a good indicator of a firearm's popularity and durability, and I figured that into my high unscientific equations. With no apologies, here are fifty guns that changed the world.

Alright, we dig the “Just deal with it” tone and suspect the title had more to do with the publisher rather than the author. But let's face it, “50 Guns that I think are Cool” doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Cracking it open, what you find inside are a smattering of mostly-American firearms from the last 150 years. Starting with the Parker Brothers VH Grade and ending with the Beretta AL391, they're in chronological order, with the sub headers:

• Ninteenth Century
• Early Twentieth Century
• Post-War
• 1960's
• 1970's-1990's

The selection of 50 are loosely divided among those categories. On average there are under four pages devoted to each firearm, so you can't expect a reference book here (though the 1911 gets more than twice that at 9 pages). Each section contains the basic information on each gun as well as some factoids sprinkled in.

You do get a book with clear pictures printed on very nice paper. The author also included some images from older advertisements which were fun to look at.

We're not saying you're going to pick up this book on an afternoon and read it through the night, but picking it up and turning to a random page is unlikely to start your eyes rolling upwards immediately. You probably don't want to go run out right now and buy it, but if you open up your present from old Aunt Eunice and this is inside, you don't have to cringe as hard as normal.

50 Guns That Changed the World: Iconic Firearms That Altered the Course of History is available from the publisher here, or on Amazon.

#outtathecloset #secondlook #takeanotherlookatthegear #reading #bookworm #bookstagram