Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture

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How and when did Americans develop their obsession with guns? Is gun-related violence so deeply embedded in American historical experience as to be immutable? The accepted answers to these questions are “mythology,” says Michael A. Bellesiles.

Basing his arguments on sound and prodigious research, Bellesiles makes it clear that gun ownership was the exception–even on the frontier–until the age of industrialization. In Colonial The us the average citizen had virtually no access to or training in using firearms, and the few guns that did exist were kept under strict regulate. No guns were made in The us until after the Revolution, and there were few gunsmiths to keep them in repair.

Bellesiles shows that the U.S. government, almost from its inception, worked to arm its citizens, but it met only public indifference and resistance until the 1850s, when technological advances–such as repeating revolvers with self-contained bullets–contributed to a surge in gun manufacturing. After all, we see how the soaring gun production engendered by the Civil War, and the decision to allow soldiers to keep their weapons at the end of the conflict, transformed the gun from a seldom-needed tool to a perceived necessity–opposing ideas that are still at the center of the fight for and against gun regulate today.

Michael A. Bellesiles’s research set off a chain of passionate reaction after its publication in the Journal of American History in 1996, and Arming America is certain to be one of the controversial and widely read books on the subject.
Whilst gun supporters use the nation’s gun-toting history in defense of their way of life, and revolutionary enthusiasts replay skirmishes on historic battlefields, it now turns out that The us has not all the time had a gun culture, and wide-scale gun ownership is much newer than we think. After a 10-year search for “a world that isn’t there,” professor and scholar Michael Bellesiles discovered that Americans not only rarely owned guns prior to the Civil War, they wouldn’t even take them for free from a government that wanted to arm its reluctant public. No sharpshooters, no gun in every home, no children learning to hunt beside their fathers. Bellesiles–whose research methods have generated a substantial amount of controversy and even a subsequent investigation by Emory University–searched legal, probate, military, and business records; fiction and personal letters; hunting magazines; and legislation in his quest for the legendary gun-wielding frontiersman, only to discover that he is a myth. There are other revelations: gun ownership and storage was strictly legislated in colonial days, and frivolous shooting of a musket was backed by the death penalty; men rarely died in duels because the guns were far too inaccurate (duels were about honor, not murder); pioneers didn’t hunt (they trapped and farmed); frontier folk loved books, not guns; and the militia never won a war (it was too inept). In truth, prior to the Civil War, when mass production of higher quality guns became a reality, the republic’s greatest problem was a dearth of guns, and a public that was too peaceable to care about civil defense. As Bellesiles writes, “Probably the major reason why the American Revolution lasted eight years, longer than any war in American history before Vietnam, was that when that brave patriot reached above the mantel, he pulled down a rusty, decaying, unusable musket (not a rifle), or found no gun there at all.” Strangely, the eagle-eye frontiersman was created by East Coast fiction writers, Whilst the idea of a gun as a household necessity was an advertising ploy of gun maker Samuel Colt (both just prior to the Civil War). The former group fabricated a historic and heroic past Whilst Colt preyed on overblown fears of Indians and blacks.

Bellesiles, who is highly knowledgeable about weapons and military history, never comes out against guns. He is more interested in discovering the truth than in taking sides. On the other hand, his work shatters some time-honored myths and icons–including the usual reading of the Second Amendment–and will be hard to refute. This fascinating, eye-opening account is sure to both inform and inflame the already highly charged debate about guns in The us. –Lesly Reed