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