book review, Volume 3 number 4, April 2001 Arming America; The Origins of a National Gun Culture Arming America; The Origins of a National Gun Culture Guns, it would seem, have always been part of the American experiment. Images of the citizen militiaman rushing off to fight the Revolutionary War with his musket in tow, or of the brave pioneer pushing back the frontier at the point of his rifle, loom large in our collective consciousness. But according to Emory University history professor Michael Bellesiles, these notions are quite removed from reality. For his new book, Arming America; The Origins of a National Gun Culture, Bellesiles spent a decade poring over early American probate records, government and military documents, crime statistics, diaries, newspaper reports, and more. He found surprisingly little mention of firearms. As Bellesiles tells it, muskets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were costly and unreliable. They were too heavy to aim, useless in rainy weather, and prone to accidents. In warfare, musket rounds were fired into the air to confuse the enemy prior to a charge by troops armed with bayonets, the favored weapon of the Revolution. Americans of the time were primarily farmers who didn’t hunt. Because less than fifteen percent of white males owned firearms, most recruits for the Revolution arrived unarmed and had to be taught to fire a gun. After the War the government vacillated between efforts to build up citizen militias and a push to develop a standing professional army. As president, George Washington, who had seen first hand the ineptitude of civilian recruits, preferred the latter option. Thomas Jefferson, who idealized the citizen soldier but lacked significant military experience, chose the former. This led to America’s near defeat in the War of 1812 (militia units ran at the first sight of British troops, allowing Washington, D.C. to fall behind them). Even the famed Kentucky Riflemen were a liability in the Battle of New Orleans, a fight they are credited with winning. Bellesiles quotes Andrew Jackson who, in his report on the battle, heaped scorn on the militia. It was army cannon fire which cut the British to ribbons. In the years that followed, gun ownership declined, militias evaporated for lack of public interest, and few guns were manufactured. Crime rates were remarkably low, especially in frontier regions generally viewed as lawless. Slowly though, guns came to be seen as a necessity by upper class males who started hunting and shooting clubs. For the first time the notion of an armed populace acting as a check on the government appeared in the popular press. In the 1850s technological advances improved the reliability of guns while simultaneously reducing their cost. When the Civil War erupted both sides rushed to arm their citizens, and in the North a huge domestic gun industry emerged. After the War, combatants (even Confederates) were allowed to take their guns home, and violent crime rates began to skyrocket. America was an armed society. Bellesiles has provided a massive amount of documentation to back up his assertion that Americans neither owned nor were particularly interested in firearms during the colonial era or the first eighty years of this nation’s existence. He has challenged a core understanding of American history, and for that his book has sparked a great deal of controversy. Gun rights groups hold tight to their views of the past and no amount of contradictory evidence will change their positions. Gun control advocates, meanwhile, may find less here then they hope to. Bellesiles makes it clear that the federal government expended considerable effort in attempting to arm its citizens (or at least, white male Protestants). No one with firmly held convictions on either side of the gun debate will find this book entirely satisfying. Curiously absent is any significant discussion of the origins and writing of the Second Amendment. Bellesiles claims that the Constitution contains deliberately vague language. He then details the new government’s efforts to promote citizen militias as proof that the amendment was designed to provide national, not personal, defense. This is a weak, after-the-fact argument, and it provides a crucial opening for historians who will no doubt challenge this work. There are other omissions, and at least one major editing error (placing Jefferson in the presidency in 1812, nearly four years after leaving office) which should not have gotten past an author of this stature. Also, Bellesiles is overly biased against the South. Still, he has offered a startling new vision of our history, and his arguments will undoubtedly lead to additional, much-needed research into the role of guns in America’s past and its present. [Editor's note: See the update to this review in vol. 4 no. 4.]
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