America's Gun Culture
Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, by Michael Bellesiles. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Guns are everywhere in America today. In fact, they play such a role in America that it is hard to imagine that matters have ever been different. Well, imagine away - America's "gun culture" is in fact a very recent invention. What is most interesting, however, is that it is possible to determine with great accuracy just when and why it started.
The traditional image of the American frontier is of a lone man or a single family struggling to survive in the wilderness, typically with a trusty gun to help them hunt or fight Indians. The part about the gun, unfortunately, may be more myth than fact. Prior to the manufacturing breakthroughs of the Civil War, guns tended to be unreliable, inaccurate, extremely difficult to maintain, and - for all of those reasons - rather rare. Even today, hunters are more successful with bow-and-arrow than with black powder guns.
All of this had a real impact upon the Revolutionary War. One of America's greatest myths is that the militia, filled with citizen-soldiers, fought bravely against professional soldiers from England and won the day. Nothing could be further from the truth - the militia was as inept as could be and rarely contributed anything significant to the battles.
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.
Bellesiles reports that between 1765 and 1790, only 14 percent of probate inventories from the frontiers included firearms, and that 53 percent of them were listed as dysfunctional. Although it is true that items like guns could certainly be passed along before a person died, it was common for wills to mention previous bequests (possibly to ensure that they would not be challenged or assumed to be theft). In all, only four such mentions included the previous bequests of firearms.
It is worth noting that between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, the mere fact that people had a right to own guns did not mean that they had a right to keep guns in their homes or hide them from government accounting. Very often, the guns people owned because of their involvement in the militia were centrally stored and under government control. Imagine someone suggesting today that guns be stored centrally! At the time, however, there seems to have been little complaint.
It also wasn't unusual for the government to require citizens to tell inspectors about what sorts of guns they owned and what conditions they were in. This is hardly surprising - after all, if the guns are there to arm a militia in time of war, then the government needs to know what sorts of arms exist and, therefore, what sorts of arms are needed. Once again, people would complain loudly if the government tried this today.
But none of that should distract from the even more important fact that few people of that period owned any guns in the first place. They wouldn't even take them for free, and the government's stores of weapons left over from the Revolution just rusted in storage. There was no gun in every home. Children didn't all learn to hunt beside their fathers. Indeed, pioneers farmed and trapped much more than they hunted - hunting was too unpredictable.
Books were much more popular and common on the frontier than were guns. Very often, politicians and public commentators complained that the public was too peaceable and not well enough armed to stop a foreign invader. Frivolous shooting of a gun was often treated very harshly and, in some places, carried the death penalty.
Gunsmiths - who usually only repaired rather than made guns - were few in number, even on the Eastern Coast Despite regular hopes to the contrary, state militias were an almost universal failure. Few participated, even fewer were armed, and almost no one provided his own gun, despite legal requirements to do so. The lack of weapons was actually a grave concern among many in government, because it meant that the country would not be able to protect itself if it were invaded by a European power.
The federal government kept trying to supply the militias with guns, and the militias kept losing them or letting them rust and rot. They generally drilled just once a year and were anything but respected. Laws were passed to outlaw public mockery of them, but no law succeeded in making them worthy of respect. Eventually, they simply withered away in many states. This happened in part due to people's disinterest, and in part due to the government's realization during the War of 1812 that the militia was largely useless as a military or defensive force.
Why and how did all of this change? Mostly because of the Civil War - although a few important things began to happen before hand. One was the myth of the eagle-eye frontiersman who always hit his mark - this was begun by writers on the East Coast in the years just prior to the Civil War. Thus was the use of a gun romanticized.
Samuel Colt, also just prior to the Civil War, used fear to help market his surplus of firearms (few gun manufacturers in the United States survived when wars ended - there was simply no business for them). He distributed advertising pamphlets praising the handgun as a household necessity, preying upon people's fears of both Indians and blacks. Thus, people began to believe that the gun was an indispensable tool.
Then came the Civil War itself, marked by an improvement in gun manufacturing technology which made the weapons more accurate, cheaper to create, and more durable (meaning less effort involved in constant care and maintenance). Unlike their forefathers at the end of the Revolution, Civil War soldiers eagerly took home their weapons when offered - thus ensuring that guns became part of a great many households throughout the country.
In addition, the war trained large numbers of young men now in the use of guns, something that wasn't common before. They had grown accustomed to having guns around and to using them against other human beings. No longer would anyone accuse the American population of being too ìpeaceableî to effectively deal with an invasion.
It was at this time, during the late nineteenth century, that America began to develop a romantic fixation on guns and their violent use which Americans today would recognize as belonging to their own culture. To be a "real American," now, you had to have a gun and know how to use it:
The Civil War transformed the gun from a tool into a perceived necessity. The War preserved the Union, unifying the nation around a single icon: the gun.
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