I love essays.  I love the essays of E.B. White and Joseph Epstein.  Some authors who have fine bodies of work in other fields, I know mostly through their essays: Cynthia Ozick and Stephen King come to mind.  They are enough to stimulate, while leaving enough room as an exercise to reader to keep from totally satisfying.

Every year, I try to get a hold of the latest Best American Essays edition.  Yesterday, with serious CFA studying closed to me because I can’t take notes or work problems, I hauled up the 2007 number.  There I found Loaded, an essay by one Garret Keizer, in favor of gun rights.  What makes the essay interesting is that, as a self-proclaimed Progressive, he argues in favor of basic self-reliance, the necessity of firearms in lightly-policed rural areas, and the racial history of gun-control laws.  Make no mistake, Mr. Keizer is pro-gun.

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