Spiking the gun myth…

Link: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/10/reviews/000910.10willot.html

ARMING AMERICA
The Origins of a National Gun Culture.
By Michael A. Bellesiles.
603 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

For many Americans, the gun is a holy object, the emblem and guarantor of their identity. Without it, they would not be the self-sufficient persons they consider themselves, the very models for all lovers of freedom. To take away this external prop would tear out of them their very essence. This private conviction is verified, in their eyes, by a public fact — that American history, separateness and virtue have always been associated with the gun, if (in fact) they did not take their very essence from it.

Imagine, then, the shock if this star of the show should turn out to be missing through much of our history. It seems impossible; and that was the reaction of Michael A. Bellesiles, a Colonial historian at Emory University, when — while searching through over a thousand probate records from the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania for 1763 to 1790 — he found that only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and over half of those guns were unusable.

What happened to the gun we ”know” was over every mantel, the omnipresent hunting weapon, the symbol of the frontier? Bellesiles looked elsewhere, examined many different kinds of evidence, trying to find where the famous guns were hiding. ”Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” tells us what he learned: that individually owned guns were not really in hiding; they were barely in existence. Before the Civil War, the cutoff point for this study, the average American had little reason to go to the expense and trouble of acquiring, mastering and maintaining a tool of such doubtful utility as a gun.

In the Colonial period, the gun meant the musket, an imported item that cost the equivalent of two months pay for a skilled artisan. Without constant attention its iron rusted, and blacksmiths were ill equipped to repair it (they shoed horses and made plows). The musket was not efficient for self-defense or hunting. It was not accurate beyond a few hundred feet (it had no sight, and soldiers were instructed not to aim, since volleys relied on mass impact). It frequently misfired and was cumbersome to reload, awkward qualities for individual self-defense; by the time you had put ball and powder back in, your foe would be upon you with knife, club or ax. Most murders were committed with knives, and — contrary to the myth of primitive violence — there were few murders outside Indian warfare (in North Carolina, on the average, there was only one murder every two years between 1663 and 1740).

The same factors that made the musket ineffective for self-defense made it practically useless for hunting. Scare the rabbit with one inaccurate shot (which threw out dense smoke), and all game would be gone by the time you got out ball and powder and deployed them properly. Besides, most Americans were farmers, with no time to maintain expensive guns for hunting when domestic animals (chickens and pigs) were the easily available sources of protein. That is why no American factories were created to make guns.

If most individuals did not own guns, where were the weapons for the militia? The state was supposed to supply them, but rarely did. In 1754, there were only enough guns to arm a sixth of the eligible militiamen. ”In 1758 Connnecticut owned 200 firearms and received 1,600 from the Crown, which made 1,800 guns for 5,000 militia,” Bellesiles writes. ”The government set about buying and impressing every gun it could find, offering additional bounties to any volunteer who would bring his own gun. Surprisingly few people were in a position to take advantage of this offer of quick cash. In one company of 85 men, only seven showed up with their own guns. The record indicates that this figure of 8 percent was fairly typical throughout the colonies.”

This chronic shortage led to widespread confiscation and regulation of the rare firearms. Colonies had to take a gun census to know what was available. Owners were commanded to take care of their weapons. Weapons were confiscated for militia use if the owners could not use them. Bellesiles sums up: ”No gun ever belonged unqualifiedly to an individual. It could not be seized in a debt case, could not be sold if that sale left a militia member without a firearm, had to be listed in every probate inventory and returned to the state if state-owned, and could be seized whenever needed by the state for alternative purposes. Guns might be privately owned, but they were state-controlled.”

There was a gun culture in 17th-century America, but not among Europeans. Native Americans anticipated the modern cult of the gun by treating it as a magic instrument, despite the fact that they had perfected their own technology. They could fire arrows rapidly and accurately, and bows were easily maintained, repaired or replaced — all qualities lacking in the gun of the time. Benjamin Franklin, that shrewd judge of the practical, wanted Europeans to acquire facility with the bow, as the better weapon. Spain’s colonial authorities deliberately addicted Indians to the gun — since, as Bernardo de Gálvez said, Native Americans would then ”lose their skill in handling the bow” and would be dependent on Europeans for ball and powder. The South Carolina government adopted the same policy, reasoning that ”we shall be able to ruin them by cutting off the supply of ammunition.”

If the bow was a great weapon at distance, the tomahawk — wielded as medieval warriors used the battle-ax, or as 18th-century soldiers did the bayonet — was a perfect close-range weapon. Indians regularly awaited the first gun volley, then charged with tomahawk while the soldiers were trying to reload their guns, just as British troops charged with the bayonet Americans trying to reload their muskets. This made some Scots Highlanders serving in the French and Indian War adopt the tomahawk themselves. The Indians’ superstition about the gun had, at this stage, some of the deleterious effects we see in the modern cult of it — neglect of common-sense recognition of its limits and evil side effects — though some leaders recognized the danger. The Snake tribe destroyed any guns that came their way, and the Assinoboin prohibited their use in hunting.

The Revolutionary War dispels the idea that Americans were great marksmen. How could they be, when most did not own guns and those who did had little practice? Ammunition was so hard to come by that ”wasting” it in drill was discouraged. Even in the rare situation where a hidden American force could aim at British troops forced to flee past in narrow file, the results were not what one might expect. On the long day of irregular battle following the engagement at Concord in 1775, 3,763 American participants could hit only 273 human targets, killing 65 men. The British on that day, without the advantage of aiming at leisure from hiding, killed 50 Americans.

BOOK EXCERPT
“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 NRA, 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?”
— from the introduction to ‘Arming America’

Bellesiles deflates the myth of the self-reliant and self-armed virtuous yeoman of the Revolutionary militias. Washington hated to see militiamen come into his camp. They destroyed camp discipline, morale and hygiene (disease often kills more than does the enemy in war). Their high desertion rate infected the regulars. To those advocating reliance on them, Washington responded: ”The Idea is chimerical, and that we have so long persisted in it is a reflection on the judgment of a Nation so enlightened as we are, as well as a strong proof of the empire of prejudice over reason.” Militias were ill trained, undisciplined and they could not face the bayonet. (Washington’s regulars had to learn from European drill instructors how to do that). At Lexington, the militia in the town square got off six or seven shots, none of which hit anyone; the British bayonet charge killed the one man who tried to stand and reload. Since Americans had no gun factories, our desperate need for alliance with France came, among other things, from the need for a source of firearms.
Guns desperately sought for military use held no charms of private ownership for the men returning from war to their farms: ”Most veterans turned their back on their guns, walking away from their encampments without their heavy muskets, even when the government offered them for sale at low rates. In the years after the war’s end, these veterans, like most males, showed not the least noticeable enthusiasm for continuing military exercises in the militia, which died a slow, embarrassing death as a national institution.” Thus, when the War of 1812 began, the dormant militias were unarmed. An 1803 census of guns carried out by the War Department found that only 23.7 percent of adult white males had access to guns, which meant that less than half of the militiamen could be armed — in the South, only 29 percent could be.

Individual ownership of guns did not become possible, on any widespread basis, until Samuel Colt began, in the 1840’s, to perfect a previously neglected firearm, the pistol. He created a revolver that could be aimed (he put a sight on it for that purpose). He hoped to replace the sword, previously the symbol of manhood in and out of the military, with a personal gun. But he had not gone into large-scale manufacture by the time the Army asked for 1,000 revolvers in the Mexican War — he had to farm out work to competitors to fill the order. The pistols began to arrive too late to affect the outcome, but Colt — who had initially opposed the conflict as an imperialist adventure — subsequently claimed, in shameless advertising, that his revolvers had been the decisive factor. Actually, his pistols had no signficant military or hunting use. They were ”clearly intended for personal use in violent situations.” The revolver began to displace the knife as the normal instrument of murder.

The invention of the Minié ball, freeing people from ramming a tight-fitting bullet home, came along in time for use in the Civil War. The combination of improved rifles and rapid reloading made the formerly dreaded bayonet charge a suicidal practice, yet Southerners held on to it — partly from lack of guns and ammunition. The first large-scale manufacture of guns was achieved by the North, with its industrial capacity, leaving the South as hard up for arms as earlier American armies had been. This helps explain things like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Bellesiles notes that ”charging is an especially attractive option for those with limited munitions; a bayonet does not need to be reloaded” — even though this meant that a third of the Southern Army was killed, as compared to a sixth of the Northern. The importance of the volley, as opposed to individual heroics, had returned in a new guise.

Only in the Civil War did Americans generally acquire and become familiar with guns. But even so it was not the lone gunman’s revolver but the government’s cavalry rifle that ”tamed” the West, as scholars like Robert Dykstra of the State University of New York at Albany have revealed. The mythology of the gun would be elaborated and drummed into Americans, during the second half of the 19th century, by massive advertising and by popular celebration in dime novels and Wild West shows. This is a story Bellesiles has partly told in earlier articles, and one hopes he will take it up systematically in a successor volume on the gun cult — its late rise, its false premises and promise, its devastating effects. Bellesiles has dispersed the darkness that covered the gun’s early history in America. He provides overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century.
Garry Wills is the author of ”A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government” and ”Papal Sin.”

• This topic was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by nittany ram.