Guns, Rights and People

Historians often seem to be custodians of knowledge mostly irrelevant to today’s concerns; indeed, they reinforce this view by condemning those accounts of the past written to support positions on modern issues. Even so, excellent scholars have written books that make (or unmistakably imply) a polemical point without sacrificing intellectual rigor. Such works can, under the right circumstances, powerfully influence policy and public opinion. C. Vann Woodward’s brief 1955 history of segregation, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” offers the classic example of how good history can have a powerful modern effect; Michael Bellesiles’ “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture,” a study of how Americans fell in love with firearms, may prove to be another.

Like Woodward, who demonstrated that segregation was hardly more than a half-century old and therefore less a reflection of timeless Southern mores than a bad habit capable of being broken, Bellesiles argues that colonial Americans had no innate love of firearms. Indeed, he shows, post-Revolutionary Americans only gradually became attached to them, despite the best efforts of the federal government to create an armed citizenry. Today’s “gun culture”--with its insistence that owning guns is an individual right on a par with free speech and trial by jury, its acceptance of gun violence and its sanctioning of firearms use by private citizens--reflects developments that took place only in the 1860s and 1870s, the end-point of his account. Insofar as this gun culture can be seen as a set of learned behaviors, values and norms, Bellesiles suggests, it must be susceptible to change; inasmuch as a powerful mythology sustains it, he believes, change must begin with an accurate understanding of historical reality.

For indeed, he writes, most Americans uncritically accept “the notion that . . . [pervasive firearms] violence is immutable, the product of a deeply embedded historical experience rooted in the frontier heritage.” We need not look far to see the implications of that assumption worked out. From Daniel Chester French’s statue of the Minuteman to National Rifle Assn. publicity campaigns and Mel Gibson in “The Patriot,” the image of the citizen-soldier taking up his musket to defend his home and community is so deeply ingrained as to seem axiomatic. Even most who advocate repealing the 2nd Amendment assume that it originated at a time when a musket hung over every mantel. They believe that the right to bear arms has become a dangerous anachronism only because Kalashnikov rifles and TEC-9s are so much more destructive than muzzleloaders.

But Bellesiles denies the accuracy of those deep-rooted, assumptions, marshaling evidence to demonstrate that early Americans in fact owned comparatively few guns and seldom used them effectively. Expensive, hard to maintain and often unsafe, the unrifled muskets of the 17th and 18th centuries made poor hunting arms; most were military weapons that colonial governments distributed to militiamen. Virtually all were imports. American “gunsmiths” seldom made weapons but tended to be general-purpose metalworkers who mainly repaired guns when they broke--something they did so frequently that 18th century professional armies expected to replace every musket within a decade of its manufacture.

Even that modest life expectancy was predicated on peacetime use by soldiers who fired their guns under close supervision, cleaned them regularly and had armorers on hand to make repairs. No such conditions existed in colonial America, where militia officers universally complained that militiamen who actually brought muskets to their annual drill sessions often carried weapons that were old, rusted and unserviceable. There were never enough weapons to go around; whenever wars threatened, colony governments begged the crown for arms. “By 1754 [at the outbreak of the French and Indian War],” Bellesiles notes, “there were only enough guns for a small percentage of the American population--at most one-sixth of those eligible for militia duty.”

Because “those eligible for militia duty” in most colonies were free white Protestant men between 16 and 50 years of age (a group that made up only about one-fifth of all whites), this level of gun ownership suggests that, on the eve of the Revolution, no more than about 4% of colonists were armed. Formal arms censuses conducted by the federal government in the early 19th century show that this modest level of gun possession was slow to rise, if indeed it rose at all. In 1803, the United States had enough weapons to arm 4.9% of its white citizens; in 1810, 4.3%; in 1820, 4.7%. (The 1830 census showed that the level had fallen to 3%.) By contrast, the FBI estimates that there are enough small arms in the United States today to equip every man, woman and child with a gun with enough left over to give 2.5% of Americans a second weapon.

Obviously much has changed since the early republic, and Bellesiles’ great achievement is to describe how those changes occurred. He argues that the federal government was the single greatest advocate of an armed population and that it did everything it could to promote an arms manufacturing industry in the first half of the 19th century. This stemmed in part from the desperate need for self-sufficiency in national defense: The Revolutionaries had faced critical shortages of guns and ammunition in 1775 and 1776 and could never have held out against the British army without massive transfusions of French muskets, lead and powder. In equally important ways, however, the desire for an armed citizenry was ideological, growing from the belief that standing armies, which in Europe were the preeminent tools by which monarchs cowed and controlled their populations, were inconsistent with the principles of liberty and virtue that sustained republics. The main burden of defending the new nation, American politicians agreed, had to fall on the people in arms--that is, on the militia.

But the greatest obstacle to realizing this plan, apart from the sheer difficulty of producing a sufficient quantity of muskets, lay in the fact that Americans showed remarkably little interest in keeping or bearing arms. This is not to say that they were pacifists--there was violence and bellicosity enough in the young republic to prove that Americans were no different from any other people--but it does suggest that they did not see anything particularly desirable about owning guns. Unlike military muskets, which symbolized militia obligations that most men preferred to avoid, sporting firearms remained expensive enough to appeal mainly to prosperous urbanites, members of hunting clubs and subscribers to such genteel ancestors of Guns & Ammo magazine as the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine. The influence of clubs and magazines in propagating a gentlemanly ideal of firearms ownership was sufficient, Bellesiles argues, to create “a gun subculture” among affluent men in the 1840s but remained too narrow to appeal to the population at large.

Four developments in the 20 years after 1845 changed everything. First was the popular militarism that arose with the Mexican-American War and survived it to sustain middle-class participation in volunteer militia companies (essentially fraternal organizations) like Chicago’s Zouaves and Hartford’s Putnam Phalanx. Second, advances in machine technology allowed Colt, Remington, Winchester, Smith & Wesson and other manufacturers to produce arms of a quality and durability never before seen in America and to sell them at prices ordinary middle-class consumers could afford. Third, those arms makers, especially Samuel Colt, relentlessly advertised their wares, trying to boost demand by suggesting to the hordes of Americans moving westward across the Plains that they faced perils that absolutely required the possession of the most modern and effective weaponry. Fourth, and most important, the Civil War created a colossal demand for arms and prompted technological advances that made breechloading revolvers and repeating rifles the postwar industry standard. By 1865, having pioneered modern mass-production techniques, the United States was poised to become the world’s leading arms manufacturer, a distinction it continues to hold today.

The Civil War trained a generation of men in the use of arm, even as it demonstrated the efficacy of violence as a means of settling otherwise irreconcilable differences. The U.S. government allowed Northern soldiers to take their rifles home and made little effort to keep Southerners from doing the same; not long thereafter it sold its surplus arms at bargain-basement rates. Post-Civil War America became the most heavily armed society in the world, and guns entered into daily life as never before.

Americans’ changed attitudes toward firearms can be traced in postwar increases in violent acts committed with guns. Before 1860, the usual murder weapon was a knife or an ax; guns were chosen infrequently enough that “their use in a homicide carried the assumption of premeditation”--unlike the use of kitchen or woodshed tools, which came so much more quickly to hand. Easier access to arms also made riots deadlier. Colonial mob actions had been ritualized demonstrations that threatened property, not life; in the worst of them, the riot accompanying the Boston Massacre, five rioters were killed by redcoat gunfire while a mob numbering in the thousands had replied with sticks and stones. In contrast, the New York draft riots of July 1863 involved exchanges of fire between crowds and police (and ultimately federal troops) that left 120 dead and hundreds wounded. And of course the combination of racism and guns proved the deadliest of all in the South, where Ku Klux Klan militias launched a reign of terror against hopelessly outgunned freedmen in the name of white supremacy.

The availability of guns, together with the conviction that they could be used to serve political or social ends (the preservation of the union, the expansion of freedom, the perpetuation of white supremacy, the protection of the family and so on) created America’s modern gun culture in the 1860s and 1870s. The mystique of an armed citizenry and myths of minutemen, frontiersmen and gunslingers sustain it to this day, despite mounting social costs. With thorough scholarship, lucid writing and impassioned argument, Bellesiles offers a brief against the myths that align freedom with the gun. “Arming America” will summon storms of denunciation by pro-gun elements and choruses of praise from advocates of gun control, but its real audience should be the majority of ambivalent Americans who stand between the two. The others will have made up their minds long before they open the cover; the rest of us need to consider Bellesiles’ arguments seriously, ponder the evidence he presents and decide for ourselves.