Robert H. Boatman – July 2002

The author of Living with Glocks: The Complete Guide to the New Standard in Combat Handguns is a native Texan who has carried a gun, professionally and otherwise, since he was 14 years old. Fresh out of high school in the Dallas area – with a nationwide tour as the tenor saxophonist for a pioneering rock-and-roll band sandwiched in – he moved to the East Coast, where he soon became a member of the elite corps of dropouts from St. John's College in Annapolis.

He then went on to have parallel careers as a national political strategist for conservative Republicans, VIP bodyguard, creative executive with major advertising agencies, undercover cop, international publisher and editor of a computer software magazine, freelance journalist, and crusading newspaperman.

Boatman was instrumental in the start-up of the NRA's monthly magazine, America's 1st Freedom, for which he has written extensively. He has also been published in national law enforcement and conservative political magazines and has written highly controversial opinion pieces for daily newspapers. Until recently, he was the managing editor of the Owyhee Avalanche, the first daily newspaper in the Idaho Territory, where he initiated an ongoing war with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other bureaucratic agencies of the federal government.

Boatman worked primarily out of Los Angeles until California fell into the ocean and now lives primarily in southwestern Idaho and northern Arizona, where he is never without a brace of black pistols.

Living with Glocks is the first book Boatman has written for Paladin, but not the last.

Q & A

Paladin: One of your basic premises in Living with Glocks is that carrying a gun is not only a constitutional right but a social obligation. You say, in fact, that it is "sociopathically irresponsible" not to carry a gun. Are you armed now?
Boatman: Do I look like an irresponsible sociopath?

Paladin: What convinced you that Glocks are the superior weapons you obviously think they are?
Boatman: I carried a 2 1/2-pound Colt .45 auto for years before I finally wised up and made myself a lot more comfortable. When I started carrying a Glock, shooting it in competition, even hunting with it, I became aware of all the other advantages of the gun besides ease of carry. Now I carry nothing else.

Paladin: What are some of your favorite things and activities besides shooting?
Boatman: I like Cuban cigars, even if they are made by cringing communists debased by that megalomaniacal academic half-wit. And don't let me leave out exotic foods. I can never get enough of what the French did in Morocco, for instance. I like horses. I think they're the most beautiful animals in the world. And cattle and cats and dogs. I talk to dogs a lot because I like the way they think. I've bred some pretty good long-range racing pigeons. I generally get along well with animals because animals never lie to you. I also like to hunt everything under the sun. Like every other human being, I'm a predator, and I get great joy out of exercising my predatory instincts.

Paladin: Anything else?
Boatman: I used to drive racing cars and race sailboats but now I just like to sail for fun. I love trains and the elegance of traveling by train. It's too bad we never developed our train system as we should have. The European system is the best. On my first trip to Europe on business I was driven in very fast Fiats and Citroëns by private bodyguards who didn't even slow down at the borders, but when I went over with my son on a long vacation we traveled only by train. We criss-crossed virtually every country in Europe by train, and the only automobile we rode in was a taxi to Checkpoint Charlie. In short, I like a lot of things. But I must say that most of my friends are professional gun people of one kind or another and highly motivated political operatives, if that gives you an idea of how I spend most of my time.

Paladin: You're single now, and you have a son who's also a writer as well as a filmmaker. So you were married before?
Boatman: I've been married twice officially.

Paladin: Who are your favorite gun writers?
Boatman: There aren't many, because most of them write like – are you old enough to remember the kids in high school who used to operate the audio-visual equipment? Well, most gun writers today write like those guys would write if they could write. John Lott writes reasonably readable English for a researcher. Jeff Cooper is an excellent writer, and there are a few more but I can't think of them right now. Robert Ruark and Ernest Hemingway of course, but they can hardly be limited to that category.

Paladin: Any other favorite writers of the more literary sort?
Boatman: Gabriel García Márquez. Vladimir Nabokov. There's no other writer's name I can think of to utter in the same breath as Márquez and Nabokov, but I read a lot of lighter stuff these days for fun. McMurtry's Lonesome Dove was absolutely brilliant, but I haven't found any of his other stuff interesting at all. I've read every one of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels ever published, about 50 of them, and I think in a few months I'll start reading them all again. I've always been a Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) fan. I read a Tom Clancy book every few months. I can't stand any of the New York writers, past or present – what a bunch of self-obsessed, self-loathing crybabies they are. When I want to read something serious, I just go back and read the classics. That's mostly what I read when I was in high school, and that's why I only went to classes in high school about a third of the time, and that's also why I went to college at St. John's, where the professors had studied the great books of Western civilization and therefore knew how to think. With the descent of academia into hard-core communism over the last 35 years, I wonder if the St. Johnnies are still that good.

Paladin: What about political writers?
Boatman: Albert J. Nock, always. José Ortega y Gasset – his Meditations on Hunting is absolutely required reading. Ayn Rand is still quite relevant. The Greeks were the ones who opened up the political discussion in the first place, and that's still where you'll find the freshest look at the fundamentals.

Paladin: So you live on a ranch these days and you were running a newspaper at war with the BLM until you got fired. What's all that about?
Boatman: I love living on a ranch, living in the country. It keeps you in touch with reality, the rhythms and processes of nature. Keeps you honest, as a human being and as a writer. And I love other people who live on ranches because it affects them the same way. On the other hand, the BLM is a government bureaucracy, the lowest of the low, an affirmative-action tribe of lipless females with short hair and comfortable shoes followed around by a pack of overmothered twits with limp wrists and ponytails. There must be a factory somewhere out in the desert where they assemble rejected body parts in odd ways to fabricate all those little subhuman bureaucrats. Even in a new Republican administration, you've got these pitiful leftovers from the Clinton scumbath trying to bully around real men and real women who are tough, bright, and descended from the men and women who literally tamed this country. Who do you think will win in the long run? The bureaucrats got me fired from the paper, but they sure didn't silence my voice.

Paladin: Living with Glocks is moving off the shelves into bedrooms, armchairs, firearms academies, and lockers all across the country. What are you working on now?
Boatman: I'm under contract with Paladin for another book, a book about .50-caliber BMG rifles. I'm very excited about it. By the time I finish that it will be time to start on another Glock book. And simultaneously I'm working on a novel that is set in Owyhee County, Idaho, and deals with the ranchers vs. the BLM issue. The Western rancher and the armed citizen are fighting the same war against the same people. The war for individual freedom that began with the Greeks is still going on. It's being fought right here today on American soil, and it's heating up on a daily basis.

Paladin: Any parting words?
Boatman: Yes. If you don't know how to shoot, learn. If you're already well trained in the art of the gun, keep training. Buy a lot of Glocks, and always carry one or more every moment of every day no matter where you are or what you're doing or who you're doing it with. Make sure it's a man-stopping caliber and that you know tactics and how to use your weapon to the best terminal effect. I suggest you train with an AR-15, a high-capacity 12-gauge, and a .50-caliber rifle as well.

Most importantly, when the time comes to pull the trigger, shoot to kill.

Any questions? If so, please feel free to e-mail Bob.

LIVING WITH GLOCKS
The Complete Guide to the New Standard in Combat Handguns