Today I am wrapping up a four-session Virtual Book Club reading of historian Andrew McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America (Bookshop.org affiliate link).

I will surely have more to say about this book in the months and years to come, but for now I wanted to highlight something I found on the very last page of the book’s text. And I mean The. Last. Page. After the Epilogue. In the Acknowledgements.

Coming at the very end of the book, for many readers the acknowledgements are an afterthought. But as an author, they are one of my favorite parts of a book to write and I always read others’ acknowledgements closely.

Reading Andrew McKevitt’s acknowledgments was a revelation. Notably, this passage:

This project began a decade ago as a conversation over a drink or two with Brandon Proia, who cultivated the manuscript from a tiny seedling to a book at a terrific press.

When I first read this sentence I thought, this is an enviable author-editor relationship. But I couldn’t stop looking at it, because the name Brandon Proia seemed oddly familiar to me.

A quick search of my email reminded me why the name was familiar. Brandon Proia was one of the (thirty-three) editors contacted by my agent who passed on my Gun Curious book project. He was also good enough to explain his decision to my agent:

 I feel a bit perplexed about the politics of it all– I don’t actually think that there is a substantively pro-gun or gun-curious yet still avowedly liberal audience anymore, so I’m not totally sure how or to whom one would successfully market this book. 

This is a disappointing response to my proposal for a couple of reasons.

First, as I have said already on this blog, there absolutely is a substantively pro-gun yet still avowedly liberal audience for this book.

Second, my proposal made clear that there were multiple audiences for the book, with a liberal pro-gun/gun curious audience being just one segment. Those who are pro-gun/gun curious and other-than-liberal are also an audience. And those who are gun skeptics—readers like Proia himself—are an audience for the book, too. This, of course, assumes that gun skeptics are open-minded individuals, an assumption I cling to, sometimes bitterly, because of evidence to the contrary like this.

Seeing his embrace of Andrew McKevitt’s project and now having read Gun Country makes it clear (to me, at least) that Proia’s feeling of being “perplexed about the politics of it all” is really just him not agreeing with a politics of guns that does not hew to The Master Narrative of Democracy-Destroying Right-Wing Gun Culture as McKevitt’s does.

He not only doesn’t agree with it, he denies its very existence. He literally denied it in the form of my book.

So, it felt good yesterday to see the results of a promotion I ran encouraging people to pre-order my book to get a free signed bookplate: Amazon Best Seller.

Granted, it was the #1 best seller in the Law Enforcement category and #2 best seller in the Law Enforcement Politics category. I have no idea who decides on the categories, but considering that John Grisham was #3 in Law Enforcement, I will take it.

And it was also #45 in the sociology category, which I will also take. I am a sociologist after all. And to be in the company of Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, and The Ethical Slut ain’t half bad for a thirty-three-time reject.

So, if intellectual curiosity alone or a free signed bookplate is not enough to get you to buy a copy of Gun Curious, how about helping me prove Brandon Proia and others wrong, one purchase at a time?

Pre-Order Gun Curious

Or request it at your local bookstore like The Bookhouse in Winston-Salem.