by Bart Kendrick

About the author: Bart Kendrick writes for Gun News Digest, a journal for gun advocates.

The love affair with mechanized tools has kept American men dreaming of levers and gears since long before the Industrial Revolution. It’s been an unending fascination with tools that empowers their lives and accelerates their wheels toward progress. This steady progress and improved performance has mingled a subtle hum of giddy pleasure with the resonance of machines at work.

The Industrial Revolution was a wider stone for stepping than many dreamt. Simple life made easier by simple machines moved us ever more rapidly toward building complex systems to handle complex tasks. Regardless of advances, the mechanical advantage that controls most automated activity is still the inclined plane. Gears, levers, wheels and the work each perform depend...