Guns and the Politics of History

Michael A. Bellesiles. Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. 603pp. Appendix, notes, acknowledgements, and index. $30.00.

The debate over the safety and legality of private gun ownership in the United States has intensified over the last decade. The emergence of a heavily armed militia movement in 1995 and a wave of schoolyard shootings in 1998-1999 have heightened public demands for tighter gun control legislation. During the same period, legal scholars advanced the argument that the right to keep and bear arms recognized in the Second Amendment extends to individuals as well as to the collective military forces of the states. In response, early American historians have stepped forward to challenge the individual rights interpretation. As an outgrowth of research on the role of guns in early American culture, Michael Bellesiles published essays in 1996 and 1998 presenting evidence of gun scarcity and the pervasive state regulation of firearms in early America. He has joined Saul Cornell, Don Higginbotham, and Garry Wills in a number of collective efforts to debunk the "myths" that they believe underpin the individual rights interpretation. Most recently, Bellesiles, Cornell, and Higginbotham signed an amicus curiae brief written by David Yassky and filed in the case United States v. Emerson, a gun control case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. ¹

It is from this context that Arming America springs. The book represents research into colonial laws, militia muster rolls, gun censuses, and thousands of probate inventories. For the research project alone, Bellesiles deserves credit. Bellesiles brings a variety of methodologies to bear on these records. The book is at once an analysis of material culture, a history of the arms industry, a military history, and a survey of the place of guns in Anglo-American law.

From these different strands of analysis the book's central argument unfolds. Bellesiles asserts that guns were peripheral to American culture prior to the Civil War. He argues that gun ownership in England was tightly restricted according to class, and colonial Americans discovered with every war just how few guns they possessed. Furthermore, bladed weapons dominated warfare prior to 1740, and even thereafter the bayonet determined the outcome of most battles. According to Bellesiles, probate inventories and militia records demonstrate that at no time in the eighteenth century did more than 15 percent of Americans own guns. Colonial and state governments kept careful track of those privately owned guns and could confiscate them at any time for any public use under the exercise of their police powers.

As for the eighteenth-century militia, it existed mostly on paper or as a social organization. In war after war, militiamen failed to muster, came out unarmed, and deserted as soon as they could, embezzling government arms in the process. Nevertheless, Americans irrationally continued to cling to the ideal of the universal militia into the nineteenth century, despite ample evidence that the institution had no military value beyond the intimidation of slaves. Though the national government attempted to build a domestic arms industry to provide sufficient arms for the militia, these efforts were in vain. Even with government assistance the militia never had enough guns for even half of its members, and the institution collapsed in the late 1820s.

In a country with few guns, violence was largely regarded as "the prerogative of the state" (p. 67). White Americans rarely assaulted one another and almost never resorted to intra-racial homicide. Furthermore, they rarely took up arms against their own governments. To the extent that these societies were violent, governments succeeded in projecting popular violence against Indians and Africans. In Bellesiles's retelling, it is not the minutemen but the Paxton Boys, who slaughtered several settlements of unarmed Christian Indians in 1764, who represent the typical militia recourse to violence in the service of tyranny.

By 1840, this pattern of gun scarcity and intra-racial peace began...