1 of 4
The epigraph to Michael Bellesiles's brilliant new book is taken from one of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, "The Sign of the Broken Sword":
"I am only looking for one word," said Father Brown. "A word that isn't there." … "Right you are," said the big man called Flambeau cheerfully. "Let us be gin at the wrong end. Let's begin with what everybody knows, which isn't true."
What "everybody knows" about Americans and guns is that we have always been a gun-toting people. In the Colonial era, the distinguished historian Daniel Boorstin explains, "the requirements for self-defense and food-gathering had put firearms in the hands of nearly everyone." Similar observations appear again and again in scholarly works and popular histories.
And these statements about America's unique gun culture often go further still, not simply asserting that our forebears packed iron out of practical necessity but insisting that guns answer to something intrinsic to the American psyche, rooted in the fierce spirit of in dependence and the lightly suppressed readiness for violence celebrated in movies like The Patriot.
So, Bellesiles observes, faced with extraordinarily high levels of gun violence—with schoolyard massacres and drive-by shootings and lethal rampages by disgruntled employees—"many if not most Americans seem resigned to, or find comfort in, the notion that this violence is immutable, the product of a deeply imbedded historical experience rooted in the frontier heritage." After all, everybody knows that it has always been this way.
Everybody knows—but as Bellesiles shows in the course of this massively documented, superbly argued narrative, what "everybody knows" is simply not true. Far from being nearly universal in early America, "gun ownership was exceptional in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, even on the frontier."
Much of Arming America is devoted to making the case for that counterintuitive conclusion. By the time Bellesiles is done, the conventional wisdom has been demolished. Along the way he touches on many familiar subjects in American history, from relations between whites and Indians in the Colonial era to the fabled shootouts in Dodge City and Tombstone. Always he challenges preconceptions, offering in their place fresh perspectives.
Arming America will thus be both a blessing and a curse for many readers, for its abundant notes and references will leave them with a formidable list of books that they too now want to read, spurred by Bellesiles's narrative. "It is the nature of the historian to always want to look further," he confesses, "to uncover more buried truths, to allow those who once lived to speak again in their own voices." You believe him when he says, in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, that he worked on it for ten years—and you believe him, too, when he thanks his editor at Knopf for persuading him to stop and publish his findings, else he would still be rooting around in obscure archives. Clearly this is a man who is interested in everything.
The story begins long before the first European colonists came to North America. With a quick overview of "The European Gun Heritage," Bellesiles reminds us just how long it took for the gun to become an efficient weapon. In England as late as the 1700s there were campaigns to bring back the longbow! Whereas guns and powder were expensive, and guns required skilled maintenance that was always in short supply, bows and arrows were cheap (arrows were generally reusable) and did not require the equivalent of gunsmiths to be maintained in working order.
share this page
RSS Feed
