Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal (Part 2)
II. THE BOOK
A. What Is a Gun Culture?
Arming America claims that we did not have a gun culture before the
Civil War, but that we have had one since then. There is an obvious
conceptual problem with this thesis: What would it mean to have—or not
have—a gun culture? It is hard to judge the truth of this claim without
deciding on what a gun culture is. Bellesiles gives us some hints of what he
means, but he never clearly states his criteria. This is an unfortunate way to
frame the inquiry. Cultural analysis is not an all-or-nothing proposition.
America had one form of gun culture in the late eighteenth century, it had
another form of gun culture in the late nineteenth century, and it has another
form today.
Although Bellesiles never defines what he means by having a gun
culture, he puts great store in owning guns, familiarity with guns, and the
prevalence of guns in popular culture—such as in magazines, television,
and movies. If having a gun culture requires gun-lover magazines and
violent film and television crime stories (or the contemporary equivalent),
then we have a gun culture today, but did not two centuries ago. If, instead,
having a gun culture means growing up in households with guns, learning
how to shoot them, widespread participation in military training where guns
are used, and using guns as a tool (such as for vermin control), then we
definitely had more of a gun culture in the eighteenth century than we do
today.
An analogy to horse-riding might be helpful. If one examines
familiarity with horses and the use of horses, there was obviously much
more of a horse culture in the eighteenth century than there is today. But if
one measures a horse culture by the expressed sheer love of horses, the
romance of the cowboy on horseback, magazines about riding, and the
variety of games and competitions involving horses (racing, rodeos, polo,
off-track betting, newspaper odds, and so on), there is probably more of a
horse culture today—even though very few people ride. I would say that we
had more of a horse culture in early America, but it was different in kind:
Then, horses were more important as tools and as transportation, rather than
as objects of recreation, love, and fetishism.
It would be more accurate to say that we have a different form of gun
culture today than we did in the eighteenth century. It is not even obvious
how useful the concept of a gun culture is. It is more important to
understand the claims that give meaning to Bellesiles’s concept of a gun
culture—how many guns there were, what condition they were in, where
they were stored, who owned them, how much they cost, how accurate they
were, how they were used, and what they meant to their owners.
In perhaps the strongest part of the book, Bellesiles describes the
marketing savvy of Samuel Colt,43 who helped create the romance of the
gun with the advertising campaign for his revolver pistol in the two decades
before the Civil War. In the mid-nineteenth century, guns became mass produced,
much easier to load between shots, and more lethal. Bellesiles
also shows how the outlaws and legends of the American West—the James
Gang, Buffalo Bill, and many others—first learned their craft in the Civil
War and its precursor in Kansas. If Bellesiles had confined his argument to
describing a switch from simpler guns manufactured one at a time to more
sophisticated mass-produced guns, and from a gun culture in which guns
were a tool to one in which guns were an object of romance, then he
probably would have encountered little dispute.
What made the book such a sensation was his description of guns in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. He claimed that
guns were exceptional rather than common, in poor condition even in
private hands, not stored in the home but rather in central armories, too
expensive to be owned outright by most men, and restricted by law to the
Protestant upper and middle classes. None of this is true.
B. How Common Was Gun Ownership?
The most contested portions of Arming America involve the book’s
most surprising claim, that guns were infrequently owned before the mid-
1800s. As I show below, the claim that colonial America did not have a gun
culture is questionable on the evidence of gun ownership alone. Compared
to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it appears that guns are not as
commonly owned today. Whereas individual gun ownership in every
published (and unpublished) study of early probate records that I have
located (except Bellesiles’s) ranges from 40% to 79%; only 32.5% of
households today own a gun.44 This appears to be a much smaller
percentage than in early America—in part because the mean household size
in the late eighteenth century was six people,45 while today it is just under
two people.46 The prevailing estimate of 40% to 79% ownership differs
markedly from Bellesiles’s claim that only about 15% owned guns.47 In the
remainder of this Section, I explain why.
1. The Gun Censuses
Bellesiles bases his claims of low gun ownership primarily on probate
records and counts of guns at militia musters.48 He also discusses censuses
of all guns in private and public hands, but on closer examination, none of
these turns out to be a general census of all guns.
The trend is set in Bellesiles’s first count of guns in an American
community—the 1630 count of all the guns in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony of about 1000 people. Bellesiles’s account is quite specific: “In
1630 the Massachusetts Bay Company reported in their possession: ‘80
bastard musketts, . . . [10] Fowlinge peeces, . . . 10 Full musketts . . . .’
There were thus exactly one hundred firearms for use among seven towns
with a population of about one thousand.” 49 If you go to the pages of the
Records of Massachusetts Bay cited by Bellesiles, however, you find that
this list of guns was something quite different. It was not a list of guns
owned by freemen or the company “in their possession” in America, or
even a list of guns owned by the company in England. Rather, as stated on