Book Review

Three books this time, in a range of subject areas: shotgunning, Constitutional issues regarding firearms, and the art of bulino engraving. Let’s have a look!

Shotgunning: The Art and the Science
By Bob Brister (Skyhorse, 212-643-6816, www.skyhorsepublishing.com; 2008) 321 pp. $29.95.

When Shooting Sportsman first came out in 1987, Bob Brister’s Shotgunning: The Art and the Science already had been in shooters’ hands for 11 years. Since then the book review columnists for SSM (Steve Bodio, Bruce Buck and yours truly) have reported on shotgunning works by experts on both sides of the Atlantic, including Don Zutz, Michael McIntosh, Gene Hill, Elmer Keith, Gough Thomas, Robert Churchill and Michael Yardley. I’ve owned and referred to Brister’s Shotgunning for many years, and to me it remains one of the most thorough and best-written books on how to choose, use and understand shotguns.
    Now Skyhorse has reissued this American classic. The publisher is calling it a second edition, although when I compare it to my old copy it looks like a straight reprint. Brister died in 2005 at age 77. A Texan, he was a newspaper reporter who became the Outdoors Editor of the Houston Chronicle, and then the Shooting Editor for Field & Stream from 1971 to 1985. Brister was an avid hunter, a competitive trap and skeet shooter, and an early proponent of sporting clays, which he discovered on a trip to England in 1980.
    Brister begins with a chapter “Learning to Shoot,” in which he describes teaching a teenage girl how to shoot safely and effectively. He starts his pupil with a BB gun with its sights removed, having her plink at a ping-pong ball in the grass so that she naturally begins to shoot where she is looking. Next they move to a skeet range. “I asked her to stand in shooting position, watch for the target, and point at it as if she had an imaginary gun in her hands. If her point was jerky, high, or low she could see it as well as I could and correct it.”
    By the end of the first session on the range, Brister’s pupil is consistently breaking clays using a 20-gauge Remington 1100. When Brister asks if the gun is kicking, “a blank look came over her face. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said. ‘I was thinking about the target, and I don’t remember anything except the gun going off.’”
    The above example illustrates the book’s tone: an experienced and wise shooter imparting advice in a kindly, understandable way. The second chapter is “Shotgun Etiquette,” a safety-oriented topic given short shrift in all too many shooting manuals. Brister devotes eight pages to this important subject, ending with a series of practical tips, including “never start a youngster hunting with more than one shell in his gun” and on how to behave defensively when you’re one of a shooting party.
    Brister details the usage as well as the pluses and minuses of pump-action, autoloading and double-barreled shotguns. One chapter concentrates on the small gauges (the author often hunted with a 28 in an era when most shooters favored 12s). He even includes a section on the English two-inch 12 (remember, Brister was writing in the ’70s, when few American shotgunners were thinking about British side-by-sides, let alone those with two-inch chambers). There are lucid chapters on gunfit, recoil and balance, triggers and flinching, chokes and forcing cones, the effects of wind and weather on shotshell performance, velocity and penetration, forward allowance, waterfowl shooting, upland gunning, trap and skeet, and more.
    To explore the phenomenon of shotstringing, Brister rigged up a moving target: “plywood bolted to a frame welded to an old boat trailer to create a patterning area 16 feet long by 4 feet tall.” Over the plywood he stretched heavy brown wrapping paper, on which were stenciled silhouettes of birds and clay targets. The towing vehicle was “the family station wagon driven by my semi-brave wife Sandy.” Using this rig, Brister tested a range of shotshells from heavy duck loads to trap loads, analyzing their patterns and relating them to usage on the range and in the field. The 18-page chapter exemplifies the “science” in the book’s subtitle.
    Skyhorse has reprinted the book on lightweight sepia-toned stock, with the result that some of the photos (of which there are many) look muddy compared to the ones in my first edition. That flaw aside, Brister’s book remains a definitive reference that ought to be in every shooter’s library.

Gun Control on Trial
By Brian Doherty (Cato Institute, 202-842-0200, www.cato.org; 2008) 160 pp. $16.95.

Brian Doherty lives in Los Angeles; a gun-owner, he’s also a Senior Editor at Reason Magazine, which bills itself as “a political journal advocating the gamut of libertarian causes.” The subject of Doherty’s book is the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court case, which dealt with that old and thorny question of whether the Second Amendment, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” applies to individuals as well as organized militias.
    The case focused on the District’s 32-year-old ban on its citizens’ keeping usable firearms in their homes—“the most onerous and restrictive set of gun laws in the country,” avers Doherty. The author reaches back to English laws from the 17th Century that underpin the American tradition of owning personal weapons. He describes “the dual role early Americans saw weapons playing in their life” as both “necessary tools of self-defense and tools to meet the civic obligation of communal defense of liberty from both outside foes and their own government.”
    In this case the lead plaintiff, Dick Heller, wished to keep a handgun in his home for self-defense. After five years of battling city hall in courtrooms supported by sympathetic lawyers, he found success when the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the District’s gun laws were unconstitutional.
    Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion, affirming “the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” Scalia also wrote, sensibly, that “The Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” The majority opinion stated that it was permissible for governing bodies to pass laws denying felons or mentally ill persons the right to possess guns and prohibiting people from carrying guns into places like schools and government buildings. But in their homes people could keep guns for self-defense.
    Writes Doherty, “What the Supreme Court decided in Heller may be narrow in its direct and immediate effect; but it’s deep in its implications for the relationship between the government and the American people. It establishes a new shape to the arena in which the legal and political struggle over guns and gun control will be fought. And that fight assuredly continues.”
Gun Control on Trial isn’t a light read. It’s studious and generally well written, although complex sentences and cumbersome language bog it down in places.
    Doherty does a good job of presenting the history and past interpretations of the Second Amendment, albeit from a libertarian point of view. And his book tells the stories of the people involved: plaintiffs (altogether there were six, including Heller—folks who were black and white, gay and straight, male and female, all District residents who believed it was their right to keep functioning firearms in their homes for self defense), lawyers, Cato Institute scholars who provided research support, and also their opponents who sincerely believed that the District’s gun laws were necessary for the public well-being.

Firmo & Francesca Fracassi—Master Engravers
By Elena Micheli-Lamboy and Stephen Lamboy (Blue Book Publications, 800-877-4867, www.bluebookinc.com; 2008) 236 pp. $75.

Have you ever marveled at the detail that can be seen in good bulino engraving? If so, this book will delight you. Production values are superb, with high-quality varnished paper, excellent layout and design, and sharp black & white and color photographs.
    Firmo Fracassi is a master engraver who practices his art in his home in the Val Trompia of northern Italy. (His 33-year-old daughter, Francesca, is Firmo’s apprentice and works at the same bench as her 69-year-old father. The book also presents some of Francesca’s engraving.) Considered by many to be the leader and grand master of bulino, Firmo Fracassi is “strongly opinionated,” “perfectionistic” and “extraordinarily talented,” write co-authors Stephen Lamboy and his wife, Elena Micheli-Lamboy.
    The book is the second in a series on Italian gun engravers; the first, on Gianfranco Pedersoli, was reviewed here in July/August ’08. Like Pedersoli, Fracassi is self-taught. Write the Lamboys: “His artistic sense goes beyond photorealistic depictions of nature on steel into the realm of human emotion and spirit.”
    Bulino engraving incorporates the use of thousands upon thousands of tiny dots cut into steel using a tool called a burin. In a foreword, publisher Steven P. Fjestad explains how bulino works its magic: “[The] technique allows a spectrum of shadows ranging from the deepest black to the lightest shades of gray up to white. This infinite shadowing capability allows [Fracassi] to master how light is captured and used, especially when the subject matter is animals, birds, and landscapes.”
    Thus we see in exquisite detail the individual feathers in a hawk’s wing, the rippling muscles of a pointer, the fire in the eyes of a panther, the grace of the undraped human form, stormy skies, splashing water, craggy mountains and so on. (Fracassi also masterfully executes deeply chiseled sculpturing of steel as well as superb scroll engraving.)
    The book includes many life-size photos of the engraved actions of fine Italian shotguns, plus knives and other personal items such as belt buckles and bracelets. Numerous blow-ups, or macros, display five to six or even more magnifications of the original engraving. Fracassi’s comments are presented along with the images of his masterpieces.
    Fracassi’s first commission for top-quality bulino engraving came in the early 1970s. Since then he has completed only 57 firearms, many of which are shown here. His work deserves the elegant presentation given in this lavish coffee-table volume.

Charles Fergus’s most recent book about upland hunting, A Hunter’s Book of Days, is available for $27 from www.shootingsportsman.com.