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Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture Hardcover – September 5, 2000
| Michael A. Bellesiles (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Basing his arguments on sound and prodigious research, Bellesiles makes it clear that gun ownership was the exception--even on the frontier--until the age of industrialization. In Colonial America the average citizen had virtually no access to or training in the use of firearms, and the few guns that did exist were kept under strict control. No guns were made in America until after the Revolution, and there were few gunsmiths to keep them in repair.
Bellesiles shows that the U.S. government, almost from its inception, worked to arm its citizens, but it met only public indifference and resistance until the 1850s, when technological advances--such as repeating revolvers with self-contained bullets--contributed to a surge in gun manufacturing. Finally, we see how the soaring gun production engendered by the Civil War, and the decision to allow soldiers to keep their weapons at the end of the conflict, transformed the gun from a seldom-needed tool to a perceived necessity--opposing ideas that are still at the center of the fight for and against gun control today.
Michael A. Bellesiles's research set off a chain of passionate reaction after its publication in the Journal of American History in 1996, and Arming America is certain to be one of the most controversial and widely read books on the subject.
- Print length624 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAlfred A. Knopf/Random House
- Publication dateSeptember 5, 2000
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100375402101
- ISBN-13978-0375402104
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Bellesiles, who is highly knowledgeable about weapons and military history, never comes out against guns. He is more interested in discovering the truth than in taking sides. Nevertheless, his work shatters some time-honored myths and icons--including the usual reading of the Second Amendment--and will be hard to refute. This fascinating, eye-opening account is sure to both inform and inflame the already highly charged debate about guns in America. --Lesly Reed
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
From the Publisher
-- Peter S. Onuf, author of Jefferson's Empire
"NRA zealots beware! This splendidly subversive book will convince any sane reader that America's 'gun culture' owes little to personal self-defense in its pioneer past--or even to putting meat on the table. It was not the challenge of the wild frontier that armed Americans, but instead a relentlessly insistent federal government."
-- Robert R. Dykstra, author of The Cattle Towns
"Arming America is an exciting, timely book. Thinking people who deplore Americans' addiction to gun violence have been waiting a long time for this information. Michael Bellesiles has uncovered dramatic historical truths that shatter the 'Ten Commandments' hokum peddled by the National Rifle Association
and its ersatz Moses."
-- Stewart Udall, author of The Myths of August and The Quiet Crisis
"We can hardly understand the context for the Second Amendment without first reading Arming America. No one previously has given us such an authoritative account of firearms in our history from the colonial period through the Civil War."
-- Don Higginbotham, author of George Washington and the American Military Tradition
"Meticulously, even extravagantly researched, this book is a tour de force. Bellesiles has done what no one before has -- examine the fact behind American gun mythology. This book will transform the modern gun debate by moving it from hysteria to sensible analysis. In every respect, a superb piece of historical work."
-- Robert J. Spitzer, author of The Politics of Gun Control
"This is stunning history, brilliantly argued. It knocks into a cocked hat our most cherished assumptions about guns and gun culture in early America, making us rethink one subject after another. What an eye-opener."
-- Alfred F. Young, Senior Research Fellow, Newberry Library
"At long last a superb book that systematically dismantles one of our most cherished and dangerous national myths. Bellesiles has made a major contribution to a significant public policy debate."
-- Robert C. Ritchie, Director of Research, The Huntington Library
"Arming America is an astonishingly original and innovative book, chock full of fascinating revelations. It ought to raise current controversies about gun control to a more fact-based and rational level. It is certain to endure as a classic work of significant scholarship with inescapable policy implications."
--Michael Kammen, Past President, Organization of American Historians
"This book changes everything. The way we think about guns and violence in America will never be the same. Neither will our notions of manhood, race, the rise of big business, or our national character. Neither will our understanding of the Second Amendment. Michael Bellesiles is the NRA's worst nightmare."
-- Michael Zuckerman, author of Peaceable Kingdoms
"Bellesiles has uncovered one of the most profound ironies in American history. The contemporary debate about the role of guns in American society has actually-- turned history on its head. While many early Americans rallied at their government for doing too little to arm the American people, some in contemporary America now rail at their government for seeking to limit access to weapons.-- No one interested in the controversial problem of guns in American society can afford to ignore this important book."
--Saul Cornell, author of The Other Founders
"Michael Bellesiles' work shifts the terms of the debate about the gun's place in the modern United States. Today we assume that the gun has always been central to American culture. Those who seek to limit its prevalence have largely accepted that they ask us to depart from a tradition of long standing. Bellesiles argues, however, that the centrality of guns is a recent phenomenon, dating form the mid-19th century. His research raises fundamental issues that go to the heart of widely-held but apparently erroneous assumptions about American gun culture."
-- Carla Gardina Pestana, author of Liberty of Conscience and the Growth of Religious Diversity in Early America
"This is a book for scholars and, above all, citizens, a wonderful work that bring historical insight and plain good sense to a critical national debate. With wit, commitment, and an unerring command of his argument, Michael Bellesiles shows us that gun culture has not always been embedded in American culture in the past - and perhaps doesn't have to be in the future. It's a lesson we all need to learn from a book we all need to read."
-- Greg Nobles, author of American Frontiers
From the Inside Flap
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On April 6, 1998, the nation's two leading news magazines 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 three-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 eleven and thirteen, set off the fire alarm at their school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, 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 twenty-two shots, killing eleven-year-old Brittheny Varner, twelve-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 ten other people, mostly children.
The questions asked repeatedly after the Jonesboro tragedy -- as after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, 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 six-year-old boy a shotgun for Christmas? For Christmas!
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 1990s, two million violent crimes and twenty-four thousand 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, four hundred 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 provides 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 FBI 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.
That efforts to solve violence are subject to volatile 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." 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. 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....
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?
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 nineteenth-century historians somehow missed this special relationship of Americans with their guns, and twentieth-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.
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 one example of this widespread gun ownership. 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."
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 ninety pa...
Product details
- Publisher : Alfred A. Knopf/Random House; 1st edition (September 5, 2000)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 624 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375402101
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375402104
- Item Weight : 2.38 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,214,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,766 in Public Affairs & Administration (Books)
- #2,545 in U.S. Colonial Period History
- #30,726 in Sociology (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Michael A. Bellesiles teaches history at Central Connecticut State University. The author of numerous books, including Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, he lives in Connecticut.
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The author, of course, is himself accused of fraud. The diatribes and accusations against the author have been well addressed by the author in the revised edition. They have also been well addressed in Jon Wiener’s Historians in Trouble, published in 2005. By his own admissions, Bellesiles made some mistakes. But you need more than ad hominem attacks against Bellisiles or Wiener to refute this book. If you contend that Wiener is biased in favor of Bellisiles, it is incumbent upon you to show us where Wiener misstates the facts about this book or about the investigation of Bellisiles. If you contend this book is full of “lies,” it is incumbent upon you to show us where exactly those “lies” are. Bellisiles acknowledges that in the first edition he didn’t adequately document how and where he found some probate records. He was careless in the construction of one table – not that the data were wrong, but that he omitted two years from the table, for reasons he explained. The revised edition addresses and corrects such issues, and the thesis of the book is unimpaired. This is not evidence of “lies” or anything close to “fraud.” As Wiener states: “In the end, despite dozens of researchers devoting weeks and months to checking every line in the 125 pages of notes at the end of Arming America, the critics came up with no evidence of intentional deception, no evidence of invented documents. The Emory review committee finding that he was guilty of ‘falsification’ referred only to two years omitted from one table, not to the text where the table was discussed.” And further: “The campaign against Bellesiles sought not to refute his book’s thesis or claims made about its contemporary significance, but instead to discredit it by focusing attention on errors in a tiny portion of the documentation. It’s an old tactic, and an illogical one: the book could be wrong about the origins of our present gun culture even if its footnotes were flawless. But the tactic succeeded.” As Wiener concludes: “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bellesiles’s problem was not just sloppy research and inadequate notekeeping; Bellesiles’s problem was that his book provoked a powerful, vocal, and well-organized constituency that succeeded at putting pressure on his university, his publisher, and the history profession. That constituency was the gun lobby.”
This is a good book, well worth the read. Take the one-star reviews not with a grain of salt, but with pounds of salt.
Great question and this book frames it well. But it doesn't do a very convincing job of answering the question. The problems facing the Founding Fathers regarding a nearly-useless militia and a largely unarmed populace have been well documented in the past fifty years or so. The myth of the minuteman was put to rest long ago. Unfortunately, the majority of this book simply heaps more dirt on the grave without doing much to explain where the myth actually came from.
And that's where the author really misses his mark. It is a eulogy to the myth without sufficient explanation of where the myth was born and raised. It seems as if the author's research was cut off in the middle due to a rush to get into print on this topical and commercially-viable issue.
Ending the book at the Civil War with the modern arms industry still in its infancy does no justice to the commercial propagation of the myth. Neither is the ongoing literary and popular cultural expression of the myth explored much past Appomattox Courthouse. This is a real shame because the book leaves you asking for more.
If you accept the book's premise that the gun culture arose in the late 1800s rather than in the 1700s, then the book piles on the evidence that it did not exist in the 1700s. But how did it come about? Why is it so prevalent? Who made it so? These questions are not simply not answered.
The author's comfort area is clearly with the culture and records of the 1700s as more and more historical inaccuracies creep into the narrative as the books winds up at the Civil War. I think the author must have been rushing at that point because to consider repeating arms to have had any noticeable impact on the outcome of the Civil War is clearly in error. Furthermore, George Custer's men did not carry repeating rifles although their Indian opponents did. The 7th Cavalry has been shown by archaeologists to have been greatly out-gunned at the Little Bighorn. Trivial errors perhaps, but it does make one question the accuracy of the other statements the author makes regarding the prevalence of firearms, their use and function in his comfort era of the 1700s.
I was disappointed in this book and I can only hope that a "Part II" will some day make the work a solid whole.








