The author writes about his book, Negroes and the Gun, in The Washington Post:

Speaking to both fugitives and freemen in 1854, Frederick Douglass advocated, “A good revolver, a steady hand and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap…. Every slave hunter who meets a bloody death in his infernal business is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race.” Douglass, like others in the early freedom movement, would come to view slavery as basically a state of war.