From the issue dated September 29, 2000
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Exploding the Myth of an Armed AmericaBy MICHAEL A. BELLESILESOn April 6, 1998, the nation's two leading newsmagazines featured cover photographs of a young boy with a gun. The photograph on the cover of Time magazine was of a toddler named Andrew Golden, dressed in camouflage and clutching a high-powered rifle. Newsweek featured a slightly older Andrew Golden, still in camouflage, now clutching a pistol. The two magazines chronicled the brief lives of Golden and Mitchell Johnson, boys growing up in a culture in which parents thought it a good idea to pose their 3-year-olds with deadly weapons and said, "Santa gave Drew Golden a shotgun when he was six." These two children were raised with guns, and with God. Mitchell Johnson had just "made a profession of faith and decided to accept Jesus Christ as his savior." He was active in his church and impressed the adults with his piety. But the temptation of a gun can trump a claim of faith in God and all dreams of childhood innocence. On March 24, 1998, these two boys, aged 11 and 13, set off the fire alarm at their school in Jonesboro, Ark., and then shot at the other children as they filed out of the building. Between them the boys had three rifles and seven pistols. In less than four minutes, they fired 22 shots, killing 11-year-old Brittheny Varner, 12-year-olds Natalie Brooks, Stephanie Johnson, and Paige Ann Herring, and their young teacher Shannon Wright, who was shielding one of her students. Golden and Johnson wounded 10 other people, mostly children. The questions asked repeatedly after the Jonesboro tragedy -- as after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999, and after every similar mass shooting -- seem depressingly familiar: How did we get here? How did the United States reach a point where children shoot and kill? How did we acquire a culture in which Santa Claus gives a 6-year-old boy a shotgun for Christmas? For Christmas! The gun is elemental to America and therefore thought to be intrinsic to America's history. But although historians have colluded in the myth that gun culture has been with the republic since its beginnings, the evidence doesn't bear that out. It wasn't until the era of the Civil War that the gun industry, with the government's encouragement, became robust. We need to correct the historical record. But more urgently, we need to confront the fact that there is more than one historical template on which we might model our current gun policies. An astoundingly high level of personal violence separates the United States from every other industrial nation. To find comparable levels of interpersonal violence, one must examine nations in the midst of civil wars or social chaos. In the United States of America in the 1990's, 2 million violent crimes and 24,000 murders occurred on average every year. The weapon of choice in 70 percent of these murders was a gun, and thousands more are killed by firearms every year in accidents and suicides. In a typical week, more Americans are killed with guns than in all of Western Europe in a year. Newspapers regularly carry stories of shootings with peculiar causes, like the case of the Michigan man who shot at a coworker who took a cracker from him at lunch without asking. In no other industrial nation do military surgeons train at an urban hospital to gain battlefield experience, as is the case at the Washington Hospital Center in the nation's capital. It is now thought normal and appropriate for urban elementary schools to install metal detectors to check for firearms. And when a Denver pawnshop advertised a sale of pistols as a "back-to-school" special, 400 people showed up to buy guns. The manifestations of America's gun culture are well-known: The sincere love and affection with which American society views its weapons are demonstrated daily on television and movie screens. Every form of the media reinforces the notion that the solution to your problems can be held in your hand and provide immediate gratification. Just as there are flight simulators that re-create the experience of flying a plane, so do video games make available to any child in America a killing simulator that will train him or her to shoot without a moment's hesitation. An entire generation, as Dave Grossman has astutely argued, is being conditioned to kill. And since the United States does not register guns, no one knows how many there are or who actually buys them. The F.B.I. estimates that there are 250 million firearms in private hands, with five million new guns purchased every year. The National Sporting Goods Association estimates that men buy 92 percent of all rifles and 94 percent of the shotguns. Most of these men fall into the 25- to 34-year-old age group, earn between $35,000 and $50,000 annually, and do not need to kill animals for their survival (On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Dave Grossman, Little Brown & Co., 1996). That efforts to solve violence are subject to violent contention should not be surprising. Solutions require a knowledge of origins, and that search for historical understanding has politicized the past as well. 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. Frequent Indian wars and regular gun battles in the streets of every Western town presumably inured Americans to the necessity of violence. That frontiers elsewhere did not replicate America's violent culture is thought irrelevant. In the imagined past, "the requirements for self-defense and food-gathering had put firearms in the hands of nearly everyone" (The Americans: The Colonial Experience, by Daniel J. Boorstin, Random House, 1958). With guns in their hands and bullets on their belts, the frontiersmen conquered the wilderness with a deep inward faith that, as Richard Slotkin so eloquently put it, regeneration came through violence. In short, we have always been killers (Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, by Richard Slotkin, Wesleyan University Press, 1973). From this Hobbesian heritage of each against all emerged the modern American acceptance of widespread violence. Its fixed character has the political implication that little if anything can be done to alter America's gun culture (Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism, by Richard Maxwell Brown, Oxford University Press, 1977). Such statements are often presented as logically obvious, sociological equivalents of Thomas Jefferson's self-evident truths. Yet an examination of the social practices and cultural customs prevalent in early America suggest that we have it all backwards, that gun ownership was exceptional in the 17th, 18th, and early-19th centuries, even on the frontier, and that guns became a common commodity only with the industrialization of the mid-19th century, with ownership concentrated in urban areas. The gun culture grew with the gun industry. The firearms industry, like so many others, relied on the government not just for capital development but for the support and enhancement of its markets. From its inception, the United States government worked to arm its citizens; it scrambled to find sources of weapons to fulfill the mandate of the Second Amendment. From 1775 until the 1840's the government largely failed in this task, but the industrialization of the arms industry allowed the government to move toward its goal with ever-increasing speed, though in the face of residual public indifference and even resistance. By the end of the 20th century, any American could acquire a private arsenal, consisting of an astonishing array of weapons. The .700 Nitro Express is so powerful that the "recoil from it will actually make your brain bounce off your skull." When fired, the Browning M2 .50-caliber rifle -- a sniper's rifle known to kill at 2,500 yards -- can cause permanent hearing loss to unprotected ears. Navegar, Inc., describes its TEC-DC9, used to deadly effect at Columbine High School, as a "high spirited ... fun gun." The Henry Company proclaims its .22 rifle "[t]he perfect Christmas present." Also available are a wide range of accessories to embellish the gun culture, from lasergrips that place "a high-density red dot where the bullet will strike," to a replica of the derringer that killed Abraham Lincoln, to a bulletproof leather jacket. Supposedly, none of these items conveys any lethal intent. As one advertisement boldly proclaims: "Just for fun. 10 shots in 2 seconds." What could be more fun than that? Obviously, sexy women with guns. The variety of calendars is impressive, including "Guns n' Babes" and the "Hunting & Fishing Lingerie Calendar." As the advertisement for G. Gordon Liddy's "1999 Stacked and Packed Calendar" asks, "Where do you mix lingerie and guns?" The answer says it all, "Only in America!" America's fascination with guns involves more than a peripheral subculture. It is not just a small minority of individuals who idolize and even fetishize firearms. Guns are central to the identity of Americans, to their self-perception as a rugged and violent people, as well as to their perception of others. Most of the world associates the United States with firearms, if not as the world's leading maker of guns, then for such global cultural icons as the cowboy, the gangster, the street thug, and the heroic cop. At every level of American culture, through all the layers of culture from lowbrow to highbrow, firearms abound. The gun is so central to American identity that the nation's history has been meticulously reconstructed to promote the necessity of a heavily armed American public. In the classic telling, arms ownership has always been near universal and American liberty was won and maintained by the actions of privately armed citizens. The gun culture has been read from the present into the past. Franklin Orth, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, told a Senate subcommittee in 1968, "There is a very special relationship between a man and his gun -- an atavistic relation with its deep roots in prehistory, when the primitive man's personal weapon, so often his only effective defense and food provider, was nearly as precious to him as his own limbs." What, then, of the man who does not have such a special relationship with his gun? What kind of man is he? And even more frightening, what if we discover that early American men did not have that special bond with their guns? Historians have joined actively in the mythmaking. Book after book proclaims that Americans all had guns because they had to have them. Frontier settlers especially would have been armed because of the need to hunt, and to defend themselves from one another and from skulking Indians. Yet 19th-century historians somehow missed this special relationship of Americans with their guns, and 20th-century historians often question their own evidence when it contradicts what is assumed to have always existed. Thus, in a wonderful book, William C. Davis refutes the familiar vision of the frontier as the site of repeated Indian attacks and murderous conduct. But he then adds: "Of course, every cabin had at least one rifle, and perhaps an old pistol or two. ... They put meat on the table, defended the home against intruders, and provided some entertainment to the men. ... A man was not a man without knowledge of firearms and some skill in their use. The rifle was fundamental, as every frontier father taught his sons to use it from the age of ten or earlier. ... They went with him to hunt the deer and bear that filled their dinner plates, and in the worst extremities, when the Indians came prowling or on the warpath, the boys became men all too soon in defending their lives and property." As supportive evidence, Davis cites a receipt showing how expensive it was to buy lead (A Way Through the Wilderness: The Natchez Trace and the Civilization of the Southern Frontier, by William C. Davis, Louisiana State University Press, 1996). While many historians have accepted this formulation of America's past without too many doubts, a few have claimed originality in discovering the presence of guns. Wesley Frank Craven maintained "a point that too often has been overlooked, or simply taken for granted, and that is that every able free male inhabitant of an English settlement in North America was armed." Yet Craven fails to provide even an example of this widespread gun ownership (The Colonies in Transition, 1660-1713, by Wesley Frank Craven, Harper & Row, 1967). For some reason these assertions seem beyond the usual need of historians for supportive evidence, even when the author notes the absence of such evidence. Harold L. Peterson, an outstanding scholar of the history of firearms, wrote, "At no time in American history have weapons been more important than they were from 1620 to 1690. They protected the early colonist from the attack of wild beast or savage, and were the means of providing him with food and clothing and with many of the commodities which he sent back to England." And then comes the odd twist: "Because of this importance of arms, the colonists were forced to purchase the most efficient arms that Europe produced." They produced none themselves, so they had to import them all, and as a consequence, "Americans soon outdistanced the Europeans in superiority of weapons and in skill in using them." This logic, while difficult to follow, is supported in the next sentence with the observation that "the contemporary writers only occasionally refer specifically to the type of arms used," leaving the historian with no choice but "indirect reference" ("The Military Equipment of the Plymouth and Bay Colonies, 1620-1690," The New England Quarterly, Vol. 20, 1947). It often seems that historians lack confidence in their research. Many have noted that Americans did not have very many guns only to fall back on an insistence that most men must have owned guns. On the basis of extensive research in the source materials, one scholar of gunsmithing, James B. Whisker, observed that there was a "scarcity of firearms" in early America, which became evident "in times of national emergency." After providing 90 pages of evidence attesting to that scarcity, Whisker concluded, "It is probably [sic] that most urban and nearly every rural household in the United States had at least one gun. ... With the exception of a few religious pacifists, every american [sic] was tied to firearms in some way: they hunted, they sought protection and they enjoyed sport, all with guns" (The Gunsmith's Trade, by James B. Whisker, Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). Elsewhere, Whisker writes about Americans' unfamiliarity with firearms, citing Jeffrey Amherst's shock when he discovered that most colonial militiamen had no idea how to use a gun, and remarking on the "generally unarmed civilians" of Revolutionary America. Defying his own research, Whisker then declared that "Americans, accustomed to firearms since birth, realized the importance of good guns" (The American Colonial Militia, by James B. Whisker, Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). No one could be familiar with a 10-pound, 4½-foot-long flintlock from birth, though it is a favorite image within the myth of American gun ownership. The power of image and myth repeatedly overwhelms reality in discussions of early American firearms. Paul B. Jenkins, a prominent gun expert in the first half of the 20th century, wrote that the Sharps rifle "accompanied every wagon train from the Mississippi to the Rio Grande, ... and taught alike Pawnee, Ute, ... and Blackfoot that ... their Canutelike attempts to check the incoming tide of white men were predestined to be a losing game" ("Old Reliable," The American Rifleman, December, 1931). Harold F. Williamson similarly noted that "the Sharps rifle was one of the most widely used guns in America" during the antebellum period, even though he had previously stated that Sharps invented his gun in 1848 and produced only a few hundred of them prior to 1860 (Winchester: The Gun That Won the West, Combat Forces Press, 1952). A few scholars have observed that powder, ammunition, and guns were rare, and then suggest that these shortages meant that Americans had to be good shots, because they could not waste lead and powder by missing, or practicing. From that arises the notion that Americans are born able to shoot, and also that they used their guns when farming. "Most American citizens entered the nineteenth century with firearms still at their sides. Men and boys carried arms into the farm fields to work" (The Gun in America: The Origins of a National Dilemma, by Lee Kennett and James La Verne Anderson, Greenwood Press, 1975). There is little evidence for this assertion, nor any indication of what good a gun might be when plowing except to hinder the work. One explanation for the perpetuation of this myth of a comprehensively armed America may be a confusion of law for reality. Though John M. Dederer did a fine job demonstrating the many flaws with firearms and the inactivity of the American militia, and even noted "the dire shortage of arms suffered by the Americans throughout the Revolution," he nonetheless concluded that "by the eighteenth century, colonial Americans were the most heavily armed people in the world; not only did colonial law mandate owning and maintaining a firearm, but through the Revolution most colonials still shot for the table" (War in America to 1775: Before Yankee Doodle, by John M. Dederer, New York University Press, 1990). Unfortunately, the evidence for this statement appears to be deductive logic, working backward from the fact that laws existed calling for settlers to arm themselves to an assumption that they had done so. The most likely explanation for a continuing faith in an unchanging American gun culture despite evidence to the contrary is the assumption that what is must have been. It is nearly impossible to believe that the current, advanced civilization of the United States could be so violent unless its more primitive predecessors had been even more enamored of guns. Or as John Milton more cleverly put it: We know no time when we were not as now;How else could a civilized democratic society place guns at the center of its identity with such passionate devotion unless this is an essential quality of its culture? The source must be deep in history, too deep even for evidence to emerge. Early Americans did not talk about their guns because they all had guns. They did not know how to use those guns because, well, just because. And that is the rub: What to do with the evidence of ignorance? Jeff Cooper, the "gunner's guru," wrote in a 1999 Guns & Ammo column, "I discover to my surprise that personal firearms amongst the pioneers were not nearly as common as I had thought. For example, the majority of recruits volunteering for Stonewall Jackson's command in the Civil War showed up not only without shoes, but also without guns. ... We think of the American pioneer as invariably in possession of his ax and his rifle. That was obviously the way it should have been, but sometimes was not." Cooper's comment, "That was obviously the way it should have been," is unusually honest. America's gun culture is an invented tradition. It was not present at the nation's creation, whenever we fix that point. Rather, it developed in a single generation, among those who experienced the onset of the Civil War and that disaster itself. All cultural attributes have a starting point, and a path of development. America's gun culture is unusual only in that one can determine the precise period in which a specific artifact became central to a nation's identity and self-conception. Prior to the 1860's, guns were not perceived as a significant component of America's national identity, essential to its survival. The literature on early American culture repeatedly locates the core values of most Americans in either religious or liberal sensibilities, though this is obviously a sweeping generalization. The prosperity and survival of the United States depended on the grace of God, or civic virtue, or the individual's pursuit of self-interest. The notion that a well-armed public buttressed the American dream would have appeared harebrained to most Americans before the Civil War. But starting in the 1850's, cultural and social standards began a fairly rapid shift that soon placed guns in ever more American hands and at the core of essential cultural values. By the mid-1870's, males in the United States had a fixation with firearms that any modern enthusiast would recognize and salute. An exact historic coincidence of increased productivity of and demand for guns occurred during the Civil War. American arms makers took advantage of the latest technological breakthroughs to mass-produce firearms, reaching levels of production that for the first time matched those in Europe. From that precise historical moment emerged a distinctive American gun culture, by which is meant not only a shared and widespread culture idolizing firearms, but also a fascination distinctive and unlike the popular attitude toward guns in all other cultures with which the United States shared basic values. In a society justly proud of its contributions to human freedom, the gun became the icon of a savage civilization. But it was not always that way. That which was once thought exceptional is now routine. That which was once perceived as subject to communal regulation is now seen as an individual right. There exists a fear of confronting the specifics of these cultural origins, for what has been made can be unmade. Michael A. Bellesiles is a professor of history at Emory University and was founding director of Emory's Center for the Study of Violence. This essay is adapted from the introduction to Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, just published by Alfred A. Knopf. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education