Books & Authors

 This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in Giving Up the Gun, with a note of reference.

Anyone wanting a full historical account of the period when guns flourished would naturally turn to C. R. Boxer’s the Christian Century in Japan.

Sir Charles Oman, in his History of the Art of War in the 16th Century, quotes a 16th-century joke about a matchlockman’s frantic motions as he loaded. ‘ it was said that muskets [that is, matchlocks] would be more practical if Nature had endowed mankind with three hands instead of two.

There is a scene in the famous Japanese play the battles of Coxinga (first produced in 1725, but sit in the year 1644) in which a loyal nobleman is helping an empress escape. ‘Suddenly’ says the play’s narrator, ‘ matchlock fire sweeps down on them like a driving rain from the surrounding woods and mountains. Go Sankei shields the empress, Taking bullet after bullet on his stoutly fashioned armor, but -– has her destiny run out? – a shot strikes her breast. The jeweled thread of her life is snapped, and she breathes her last.

A very famous battle near Kyoto began with a champion – a Buddhist monk, as it happens – striding out in front of the army. He was a romantic figure, wearing black armor, and carrying a black sword, a bow, and two dozen black-feathered arrows. The epic tale Heike Monogatari describes his next action: ‘In a mighty voice he named his name, saying, “You have long heard of me, now take a good look. I am Tsutsui no Meishu, known to all of Mii Temple as a warrior worth a thousand men.”’ Only then does he start shooting.

‘If you ain’t got a gun, why ain’t you got a gun?’ Sneers a character in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.’

No one is certain where or when the flintlock gun appeared. But in his classic History of Firearms, H. B. C. Pollard writes, ‘ there is also a possibility that the flintlock principle was brought back from Japan by Portuguese navigators, the Japanese having long used flint and steel mechanical lighters. To light their pipes, yes. But not to fire their guns. Why bother, if you don’t want to use guns at all?

In our own time, Arnold Toynbee, among others, has wanted to put the clock back several hours. His argument is that men can no more be trusted not to abuse modern technology than a kindergarten class could be trusted to play with machine guns. ‘If a vote could undo all the technological advances of the last three hundred years,’ Toynbee has written, ‘ many of us would cast that vote, in order to safeguard the survival of the human race while we remain in our present state of social and moral backwardness.’