Send Lawyers, Guns and Money: Duncan Long on the Ruger .22
Written: Nov 16 '02
Product Rating:
Pros: Lucid, uncompromising, idiot-proof guide to the cited sidearm
Cons: None: admirably fit for its intended purpose
The Bottom Line: A classic Duncan Long guide, free of cant and mindful always of safety and responsibility; essential for firearms owners and useful to writers and historians as well
mshawpyle's Full Review: Duncan Long - The Ruger 22 Automatic Pistol: Stand...
We live in a very odd culture, an increasingly strange society. Michael Bellesiles garnered uncritical acclaim – until the wheels came off – for pandering to the beliefs of the Guns[1] Are Bad crowd. (I still say, I’d love to hear how colonial Americans went duck-hunting with an axe….) If you are amongst the people who get the vapors at the very idea that these wicked firearms are even allowed to exist – well, I’m tempted to suggest you run along and play, but in fact, you’re the very people who need to stay: it’s the sinners, not the choir, who really need the preachin’ to.
This is a book review. It is a review of a book about firearms, specifically, about the Ruger .22 personal weapon (AKA handgun). The book assumes as axiomatic that firearms exist, are there for a purpose, and should be dealt with seriously, as more than an Object of Declamatory Panic and Rabble-Rousing. Deal with it, people.
This is, in fact, a compact, lucid, and technically superb volume from the estimable Duncan Long, who has written copiously and well of these matters, in a succession of handy paperbacks published by Paladin Press.
A Socratic Digression: Defining Our Terms
Now, let me say at once that the full Paladin catalogue has a few – a scant few – elements that cause a raised eyebrow even in this red-meat conservative.[2] While it is geared mostly to the professional law enforcement community and the sport shooter, some of its more abstruse titles regarding unarmed combat and survivalism leave even me uneasy. But that is in a sense part of my point here – aside from my usual points about the free marketplace of ideas, and the free market in the Smithian sense: the Victorians had an elite culture that tried to pretend that generation and birth, much less lust, did not exist, and beneath that piety was a joyless pornography; we for our parts culturally deny aging and death, much less the threat of violence and the concept of self-defense (as well as the brute facts of how the steak got to the butcher), and in secret exalt wrongful violence. (I am not accusing the good folks at Paladin of complicity in this cultural morbidity, by the way, nor yet of pandering to it.)
One result of this societal schizophrenia is that the culture at once derides and fears lawful weapons ownership and use, whilst simultaneously exalting, and exulting in, dark fantasies of illicit violence and death: we waver between the pseudo-Buddhism, or pseudo-Jainism, of Hollywood, on the one hand, and gangster rap on the other. (Suge Knight, call your office. If anyone’s free to answer the phone, that is.) With the exceptions of Chuck Heston, numerous country singers, Ted Nugent, and, queerly enough, ’N Syncer Lance Bass, surely the only boybander to collect firearms and edged weapons, popular culture is positively inimical towards lawful, responsible arms ownership.
That is why it is tonic, salutary, to have such volumes to hand as those of Duncan Long’s, which treat seriously and sensibly of matters otherwise the subject of mass shouting matches.
The, Um, Red Meat of the Subject
Long writes, in a sense, to a formula – which in this instance is the meet and right thing to do.
Let us first consider the audience, the target market, for these works. The good folks at Writers Digest have, over the years, published a series of works for aspiring writers needing a quick and dirty guide to such subjects as poisons, wills, crime scenes, police procedure, ballistics, and other elements of the novelist’s (especially the mystery writer’s) stock in trade. With all due respect to the editors at WD’s books subsidiary, aspiring prose- and screen-writers would be well advised to consult Duncan Long’s works for background, as well.
Likewise, the presence, role, and impact of firearms in American life, civil, military, and cultural, has been very great. Each of Long’s succinct works provides a useful primer to the history of the firearm under discussion, and its uses (here, for example, as a personal weapon for some Services elements and, it is said, by some of the nice people at the Agency’s Directorate of Operations; in the case of his volume on the AK-47 and its variants such as the Valmet and the Galil, as the weapon of choice in some unpleasant situations for some markedly unpleasant people).[3] Historians of every stripe can profit from Long’s lucid abstracts of these weapons’s divers histories.
And of course, the primary, er, target audience – that came out wrong. The bulk of those to whom these works are addressed (that’s better) are the people who buy, own, and lawfully use these firearms in sport, for self-defense, and otherwise.
For these readers, Duncan Long’s admirably clear and concise volumes are treasure trove indeed. The bulk of the work is devoted to the features, the human factors aspects, good and bad, of the weapon; to the technical specifications, in wondrously uncluttered and untechnical language, of the firearm: its characteristics, uses, accuracy, range, and power; to its care and preservation; and to its modifications and accessories.
Moreover, fundamentally and laudably, the emphasis throughout is on lawfulness and safety above all else.
In the volume currently to hand, these aspects fall into place in classic style.
To begin with, the history of the Ruger .22, and by extension of the Sturm, Ruger company, is an inspiring one. As I had recent occasion to remark (in my review of Professor Edmund S. Morgan’s new biography of Benjamin Franklin), there was a time when the American public was annealed into the American story by exposure to the lives of great men. That time is now past; but for those of us old enough to have been brought up on the deeds of Morse and Whitney, Fulton and Edison and Steinmetz, on the stories of McCormick and his reaper and of Sam Colt and his pistol (and of that early Texas Ranger, Captain Walker, who suggested from field experience the improvements that made the Colt into the Walker Colt), the history of the Sturm, Ruger company and the character of Bill Ruger will strike an old, familiar note. William B. Ruger is something of a throwback to an earlier day, of the inventor as captain of industry, and Duncan Long’s account of his and his company’s rise to prominence through vision and sweat is well-handled and engaging.
Equally well-handled, in straightforward prose of high and admirable precision, are the succeeding chapters. Having myself spent a goodly chunk of my life inhaling the evocative scent of wire brushes, chamois leather, cloth, and cleaning oils, for my own and my familial hunting arms, and having spent a not insignificant portion of some few years regularly field-stripping and cleaning Uncle Mule’s loaner weapons, I can appreciate Long’s idiot-proof maintenance instructions. (To this day, I can still close my eyes and call up the purple-roseate sunset blush on a properly cleaned titanium alloy firing pin, or the heft of the bolt of a sidearm, as well as the taste of MREs and the abstruse calculations for the mortar section of a light infantry company. I wager I will be much older than I now am before I altogether forget how to field-strip an M-16, much less the still more familiar routines of my personal .45 – I’m of the pre-9mm generation – and the 60mm mortar.) Short of having one’s own drill sergeant to pound maintenance schedules and routines into one, or traveling with one’s personal armorer, it were difficult to improve upon Long’s work.
Especially worthy of commendation are the schematic diagrams. They are clear, and they are properly integrated with the (as I say) idiot-proof text. (And trust me, I know more than my share of idiots.)
Equally noteworthy is Long’s attention to ease of use, safety concerns, and human factors. This is particularly notable in this present volume, as the design, balance, and ergonomic aspects of the Ruger .22 give ample scope for lucid and intelligent discussion of such matters (and Long is of course perfectly correct: the grip of the Ruger .22 is a thing of beauty).
Finally, modifications and accessories, and the subtle differences between series, are covered with formidable intelligence and no nonsense, which indeed is the hallmark of Long’s whole approach. Equally, Long writes ‘without fear or favor,’ as is only just and right, and is not at all shy about pointing out troublesome areas, or red-flagging potential or actual caveats (though with a sidearm as fundamentally sound as the Ruger, there’s not much to complain about, unless perhaps it’s the left-side position of the safety).
Right On Target
In this volume as in the other volumes in this useful and commendable series, Duncan Long has done a masterful job. He is clear, concise, and impatient of nonsense and bull wherever it comes up. The only thing as clear as his prose is the set of diagrams with which each volume is dowered; the only thing clearer than his prose and his schematic diagrams is his abiding commitment to lawfulness and safety.
This is a work of great utility, and of welcome freedom from cant, which deserves the attention of historians and writers in search of background, and demands shelf-space in the library of every sane firearms owner. I commend it to you and recommend it unreservedly.
________________________________
[1] They meant, of course, ‘firearms.’ No cracks, please, about 49% of the populace’s having been born with a gun….
[2] Someone please explain to my cardiologist that that adjective is a metaphorical one.
[3] I do not of course include the IDF in that designation, God bless ’em.
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