A lesson in respect
By John Silveira
Issue #65 • September/October, 2000
When I was 10, Dad lived on a farm in New Hampshire with my stepmother and two of my sisters, and I went to stay with them that...
My View: Gaining an Appreciation for Risk
By Dave Duffy
Now and then you have to make a daring move in your life or you’ll run the risk of losing your dreams. Some people do that by changing their job to one...
Home handgun defense — Simplicity suffices
By Massad Ayoob
Issue #54 • November/December, 1998
You can get as high-tech as you feel you might need when you select the firearm(s) you'll use to protect your family. I "do firearms" for a living,...
Gun control, race, and rotten politicians
By John Silveira
Issue #83 • September/October, 2003
Is gun control really about guns? Sounds like an odd question on the surface, but it's really right on target. In fact, the answer is: No, gun control...
Can the U.N. Ban America’s Guns?
By Claire Wolfe
Website Exclusive • April, 2013
The rumor flashed across the Internet last winter: the Obama administration is going to use a United Nations arms treaty to get around the Second Amendment and ban...
Why we have no “constitutional” rights
By John Silveira
Issue #92 • March/April, 2005
The other day I read an article concerning a suit brought against the government by some of the 550 or so detainees at the naval station at Guantanamo...
Every group needs a black sheep
By John Silveira
Issue #74 • March/April, 2002
I used to play a lot of poker and I learned things about people that surprised me. They were things other than the "Know when to hold 'em,...
The Coming American Dictatorship Part XI — The Tenth Amendement Movement
By John Silveira
Issue #119 • September/October, 2009
O.E. MacDougal, Dave Duffy's poker-playing buddy from Southern California, had come to town to fish the Rogue, a river that runs 215 miles from the heels of Crater...
A history lesson from Ayn Rand
By Dave Duffy
Issue #44 • March/April, 1997
For the past several weeks I've been reading the Letters of Ayn Rand, which is a collection covering her letters from 1926, when she arrived in America from...
Terrorist attack! Was this predictable?
By John Silveira
September 11, 2001
I was awakened to news about the suicide attacks by my daughter. Quite frankly, I thought it was the beginning of a bad joke she'd heard and I was expecting...
Is it time for an education revolution?
By Dave Duffy
Issue #77 • September/October, 2002
Education is important, right? Of course it is. Then college must be really important, right? ... Did I hear some of you pause before saying, "Well, yeah, I...
Questions about global warming
By John Silveira
Issue #108 • November/December, 2007
Global warming is in the news, infesting campaign rhetoric and the plot lines of many movies and TV programs. Our kids are being indoctrinated with its certainty in...
Avoiding legal traps
By Massad Ayoob
Issue #105 • May/June, 2007
Dave Duffy wrote recently on the plight of Brad Metcalf. There are several lessons to be learned.
Metcalf represented himself, pro se, in court. This is almost never a...
The meltdown and the bailout: why, how, and what they mean
By John Silveira
Issue #115 • January/February, 2009
To understand how the recent meltdown and bailout came about, you have to know what brought them on. According to some, there are PhDs who have problems grasping...
Justice Breyer is wrong about the 2nd Amendment
By John Silveira
Issue #128 • March/April, 2011
December 12, 2010, on Fox News Sunday, Justice Stephen Breyer said the Founding Fathers never intended for guns to go unregulated. His reasoning was that James Madison, often...
Putting it all on the Amtrak line for Self-Reliance magazine
By Dave Duffy
Issue #163 • January/February, 2017
As publisher of Backwoods Home Magazine for 28 years, I have not had to work as hard in recent years, as younger people like Managing Editor Jessie Denning...































