By John Whiteclay Chambers II Washington POST Book WORLD Sunday, October 29, 2000; Page X02
ARMING AMERICA The Origins of a National Gun Culture By Michael A. Bellesiles NY: Knopf, 2000. 603 pp. $30
In "The Patriot," a film about the American Revolution, an outraged farmer, played by Mel Gibson, slings on his three hunting muskets as he joins the fight against the British. The image of farmers and frontiersmen using their firearms for sustenance and defense is an enduring American icon. Today it helps limit restrictions on firearm ownership in a society with nearly as many guns as people and the highest rate of death by firearms of any industrialized nation.
Arming America is a provocative and problematic book in which Michael A. Bellesiles, a historian and director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Emory University, sets out to overturn the popular image of gun ownership in early America. His thesis is that a "gun culture," which he defines as widespread ownership and admiration of guns and the belief that they serve a large social purpose, did not exist until the Civil War era. Bellesiles is convinced that "gun ownership was exceptional in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, even on the frontier, and that guns became a common commodity only with the industrialization of the mid-nineteenth century, with ownership concentrated in urban areas."
Despite his determination to overthrow the traditional image of the gun in early America, and despite the book's extensive research and substantial length, the author's provocative thesis remains unproven. His conclusions frequently overreach the evidence. This is true even concerning his freshest and most interesting source: probate inventories. Examining more than a thousand inventories of estates in 40 counties between 1765 and 1859, he found that nationally up to 1830, guns were listed in only 15 to 17 percent of the inventories (20 percent in the South). Only in the 1850s did it rise to 33 percent (40 percent in the South). Bellesiles concludes from this that only a small percentage of adult white males owned guns, at least until the beginning of mass production of firearms in the late 1840s.
His figures are suggestive, however, not conclusive. Probate inventory records are valuable but not without problems. They are limited to propertied classes; their preservation is haphazard, restricting scientific comparison; and they usually fail to include items previously given or sold to others living outside the household at the time of the decedent's death. We need more detailed and complete local studies that would augment probate inventories with wills, diaries, letters, censuses and the like. The author also overstates both the originality and the conclusions he draws from militia records. These indicate that much of the colonial and state militia showed up for duty without guns (an 1810 census, for example, revealed that only 45 percent of the militia nationally had guns, which Bellesiles emphasizes was 21 percent of adult white males, four percent of the American population). The under-armed state of the militia may be news to the public, but earlier studies by scholars such as John Mahon, Richard Kohn and Jerry Cooper revealed this some time ago. Bellesiles contends that these militia records indicate that gun ownership was not widespread, but his own evidence reveals great variation (for example, only 23 percent of the Virginia militia but 76 percent of the Massachusetts militia were armed in 1810). Nor does the author explore the possibility that many failed to bring their own guns out of fear that these would become worn, broken or lost, or in the belief that the government should provide them with guns for militia duty.
As in his previous books, a generally well-received study of Ethan Allen and the Vermont frontier and a recent anthology emphasizing historical contexts for violence in America, Bellesiles rides his thesis hard. Extensive research is undermined by errors of fact, omission and judgment. His argument that before the 1830s few Americans hunted game with guns, for example, defies belief. Nor do five pages do justice to the debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment (although the book is useful in this regard in showing that state and local governments adopted what they considered reasonable restrictions on the right of gun ownership in the larger interests of society). While he confirms accounts by Merritt Roe Smith and others that mass production of firearms by government arsenals and private arms makers began in the decades before the Civil War, Bellesiles fails to prove the emergence of the modern gun culture in the postwar era. This is consigned to a brief and anecdotal epilogue.
Understandably, this book will provoke controversy. It tackles a major American myth and in an argumentative and exaggerated manner. It is also digressive and repetitive. Unfortunately, Bellesiles takes a rather narrow view of the subject, asking primarily about the extent of ownership and familiarity with firearms. And he has not proven his thesis of limited ownership of guns and general unfamiliarity with them even among white adult males in the colonial and early national periods. Yet he has launched a significant investigation into an important and often neglected topic: the historical basis for Americans' contentious relationship with guns. One hopes that this will lead to further research, not simply into the quantity of firearms but, more important, into their cultural significance. This is not just a matter of numbers. For example, if owners and non-owners of guns saw firearms as instruments conferring status, identity and power, then this perception contributed to a gun culture regardless of the number of guns. Despite this book's tendentious quality, the subject is well worth pursuing.
John Whiteclay Chambers II, professor of history at Rutgers University, is editor-in-chief of "The Oxford Companion to American Military History."
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The Introduction to Bellesiles' book is online free at http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/armingamerica.htm