Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture

Christian Century, March 21, 2001 by Walter Wink

Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.

By Michael A. Bellesiles, Knopf, 603 pp., $30.00.

IN NO OTHER industrialized nation in the world are there so many gun deaths as in the United States. In Canada, a country otherwise so similar to the U.S., there were only 68 handgun deaths in 1990 and 128 in '92. In 1994 the U.S. had 15,456 such deaths. More Americans are killed with guns in a typical week than in all of Western Europe in a year. To account for this enormous disparity, the myth was created that gun-toting was an early American tradition.

Michael A. Bellesiles debunks that myth. He argues that "gun ownership was exceptional in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, even on the frontier, and that guns became a common commodity only with the industrialization of the mid-nineteenth century" and the militarization of America during the Civil War.

Before this time, neither state nor national governments had been able adequately to arm either militias or volunteer units with guns. In 1644 there was only one musket for every four men in the Virginia colony--the highest percentage it would attain until the Civil War. Soldiers routinely entered combat armed with swords, pikes or even hoes. Muskets were notoriously unreliable. Because they were made of iron rather than blue steel, they quickly rusted out. There were scarcely any gunsmiths during the entire colonial and postcolonial periods. A broken part meant the loss of a weapon, since parts were not interchangeable.

A musket cost around two month's wages, placing it beyond the reach of most people, and it was very inefficient compared to a bow and arrow. A bow could release 12 arrows in the time it took to reload a musket, and had far greater range and accuracy. Arrows were not only inexpensive, but they could be used repeatedly in practice. Muskets often exploded, could not be fired in the rain without ruining the gunpowder and were so erratic that they were not even aimed. Their chief purpose was to create a cloud of smoke under cover of which a bayonet, sword, ax or pike charge could be mounted. Guns had a range of eight to ten yards, whereas a bow could fire its shafts 200 or 300 yards. One wonders, with Ben Franklin, why the bow and arrow were ever abandoned!

In the vast expanse of time from 1607 to 1775, peace was the norm. Entire generations passed without knowing war. Between 1663 and 1740 there were, on average, only two murders a year in North Carolina. In 46 years, Plymouth Colony had not a single homicide. "The image of the armed settler appears a grand mythology intended to formulate a portrait of Americans as many would like to see them: people not to be trifled with, not willing to put up with ill treatment, and very violent .... One searches in vain through the colonial period for evidence of Americans armed with guns rising in great numbers to defend their liberties, whether in organized militias or unorganized crowds." Because the militias were so averse to fighting, British officials relied primarily on Indian allies to fight hostile tribes for them.

Nor was the use of guns for hunting significant. Hunting is a time-consuming and inefficient way of putting food on the table. People seeking game usually trapped it. Those who joined wagon trains going west who were misled into believing that they could acquire food by hunting would, in nine cases out of ten, starve to death, according to one guide who knew. Hunting was an upper-class leisure activity. The 95 percent of European-Americans who were farmers found it infinitely easier to chop off the head of a chicken or slaughter a hog than to hunt wild game.

"Many historians have blithely declared that the British colonies were, in an oft repeated phrase, 'the most heavily armed society in the world,'" Bellesiles states, an assertion that he crushingly refutes. Carefully itemizing mercantile bills of sale, inventories of militia and volunteer detachments, the evidence that there was a lack of gunsmiths, records of importation of guns from Europe, the incidence of duels (three in the entire South in the 1760s, none fatal), children's books and toys, comments by eyewitnesses about the abysmal shooting ability of settlers (lacking both the weapons and the gunpowder to practice), court records, and a wide variety of other historiographical resources, the author assembles an overwhelming mass of data to show that military prowess was not, in fact, characteristic of early Americans. They were consistently outshot in marksmanship competitions by Britons. Eastern target shooters also outshot men from the west. General Andrew Jackson's overwhelming victory in the Battle of New Orleans was not due to guns, most of which arrived after the battle was over. Only one out of three men in the Kentucky militia had a gun. Jackson's victory was won by cannon fire, into which the British cooperatively marched.

THIS IS NOT TO ARGUE that Americans of every stripe were nonviolent--only that their tools for violence were rarely guns. Their violence was committed with swords, knives, clubs and tools. But all that changed in a single generation. Beginning with the invention of interchangeable parts, and spurred on by the desperate need for weapons to fight the Civil War, guns suddenly became abundant. Many veterans took their weapons home after the war--durable weapons now made of steel.