The Liberator Gun

The Illustrated History of Guns

For the first time in paperback, a photographic history of civilization, as seen through the world's most deadly and fascinating firearms. The Illustrated History of Guns is a comprehensive look at the tools of battle. To craft this book, more than five hundred photographs of genuine specimens were specially commissioned from the six-thousand-piece collection of the Berman Museum of World History. The weapons featured span a period of close to four thousand years, ranging from Ancient Greece to World War II, and from the Crusades in Europe to the US Civil War. It features a wide array of diverse treasures, including the traveling pistols of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a royal Persian scimitar with 1,295 rose-cut diamonds and rubies, and a single 11-carat emerald set in gold, first owned by Shah Abbas I of Persia and given in tribute to Catherine the Great. The Illustrated History of Guns also offers information on weapons innovators, including Alexander Forsyth, Eliphalet Remington, Samuel Colt, Sergei Mosin, the Mauser brothers, Hiram Maxim, John Browning, Richard Gatling, John T. Thompson, John Garland, Feodor Tokarev, Oliver Winchester, and Mikhail Kalashnikov. With unparalleled historical perspective and background on persons significant to the development and advancements of weapons technology or military strategy, The Illustrated History of Guns belongs on the shelf of every history buff and firearms enthusiast.

The Lives of Guns

Guns have never been as prevalent in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns either highlight the gun as just a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended; eventually, whatever progress these debates foster in the public conversation tend to halt altogether once the old cliché, "guns don't kill people; people kill people" is trotted out. These gun control and gun violence discussions take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects. What happens if we reset the conversation and admit that guns, and not the people behind them, kill people? The Lives of Guns offers a new and compelling way of thinking about the role of the gun in our social and political lives. In gathering ideas from law, science studies, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as an object with agency. In approaching guns from a technological perspective, down to the very science of how they are created and how they fire, The Lives of Guns takes up a number of questions, such as: How does the presence of these objects shape civic ideology? What does it mean to develop and care for gun and gun accessories technology? What do guns mean to those who build them versus those who fight for-and against-them? What could happen when drone technology meets gun technology? In bringing together fresh perspectives from leading lawyers, political scientists, and historians, The Lives of Guns promises to move the gun debate forward by opening up new ways of thinking about these issues and broadening the scope of these perennial debates.

The Liberator Pistol