Author Frank Miniter: The Gun – Key to Freedom's Past, Indispensable to Freedom's Future

On August 11 Frank Miniter’s latest book, The Future of the Gun, was released. It presents an historical look at the important ties between freedom and firearms, combined with a focused look at how indispensable the gun will be to freedom in the future.

Miniter’s treatment of the historical ties between firearms and freedom is approached with positive examples from America’s rich firearm history.

This approach allows Miniter to highlight the ties that have bound the military firearm market and the civilian firearm market together throughout America’s history. In turn, this provides him the opportunity to show – both explicitly and implicitly – the crucial role firearms played in America’s past.

Miniter also highlights the role guns play in undergirding freedom by showing the negative consequences of gun control in the lives of the disarmed. He does this through a brilliantly written history of gun control in England during the last century.

He shows how gun control in England – once allowed following World War I – incrementally increased until the “Firearms Act of 1997 banned the private ownership of handguns almost completely.” In the aftermath, as law-abiding English citizens remained largely disarmed, the police have gone from carrying no arms “to becoming ever more heavily armed.”

Miniter suggests this has resulted in an “emasculation” of the British people via gun restrictions that undermine, rather than sustain, “more liberty, more courage, and a more self-reliant people.”

With the last portion of the book Miniter contrasts the way firearms were manufactured in the past with the way firearms are manufactured today and emphasizes what that means for firearm manufacturing in the future. He forecasts a move from large buildings full of heavy machines to computer-designed guns where the production of various parts can be outsourced and then brought together to be professionally and carefully assembled into the gun of the future.

Even now, the next generation of guns is not being designed on the drawing board, per se, but through special programs that allow gun manufacturers to see 3D images of their ideas on computer screens before the ideas are created for use in the real world.

Although Miniter takes various avenues throughout the book, the reader is certain to see that the central point never changes: the gun has been key to freedom’s past and is indispensable to freedom’s future.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.