Bookshelves full of Books and Guns

Michael Bane has a post up that has a quote from a new mystery novel by Jonathan Kellerman, Rage. Here is the pertinent quote:

"Don't users become pushers to pay for their habit? And all those guns he keeps — Lara wasn't raised with that, we never had so much as a BB gun in our home. All of a sudden they've got rifles, pistols, horrible stuff. He keeps them out in the open, in a wooden case — the way sophisticated people display books. If you're not doing something shady why do you need all those guns?" [Paperback; Page 143; graf 9; no Internet link]

Kellerman seems to be implying that if you have a gun collection, then you obviously must be an unsophisticated boor and probably don’t have any use for them book things.

This is bigotry, pure and simple and would be considered beyond the pale if it was directed at one of the protected groups.

I wonder what Kellerman would make of Denise and myself. Between the two of us, we have a substantial firearms collection and we do display some of them like those “sophisticated people display books”.
But, we also have a substantial book collection and our living room walls are covered in bookshelves. Between the two of us, we must have nearly 1000 books.

Is your paradigm breaking down yet, Mr. Kellerman?

Both of us are voracious readers and when we are not at the range, one or both of us has our nose stuck in a book.

These observations will come as no surprise to most gunnies. We already know that the gun owning community is better educated and wealthier than the average American. This isn’t surprising since gun collecting is an expensive hobby.

But these truths don’t fit the agenda of the gun bigots. To them we will always be backwoods, ignorant, hillbillies, just off the set of Deliverance.