> Recently got round to reading Michael A. Bellesiles' book, "Arming America",
> and having some serious qualms about a fair bit of his evidence, I wondered
> if any non-ideological historians had examined his arguments. I think he
> overstates his case, but all I can find on the internet are attacks from
the
> predictable gun nuts. Well, and "Joyce Lee Malcolm", but I find it hard to
> take her very seriously given her latest book.
This is an issue that I haven't really gotten a handle on yet. My guess is that he probably "overstates his case," but that he is nevertheless "right" on the whole. For those not in the know, Bellesiles argues that firearms were not terribly prevalent in the US until they were cheaply mass produced after the Civil War. Before that, he says, they were expensive, finely crafted items that most people could not afford. Thus, the image that has been painted (for ideological reasons) of an early America in which "everyone" was armed and routinely used weapons is wrong. I am professionally concerned with the study of US history, especially as manifested in material culture. All I can tell you is that in my region of the US, the upper midwest, I find few references to hunting or firearms in pre-1860s primary sources. I rarely see firearms listed in probate inventories. Almost all of the iconographic evidence of firearms--photographs, lithographs, etc.--is from the 1880s and later, not surprising, given the history of technology. Over the past four weeks or so, I have been looking at 1860 Wisconsin census records and the extant letters and diaries of Civil War soldiers from a particular region of the state. I'm not seeing any "gunsmiths" or the like in the census records, and have found only one reference to hunting in the letters and diaries. Most tellingly, there are very few pre-1860s firearms in museum collections in this region--they are vanishingly rare. If firearms were so ubiquitous in the early days of European settlement here, you'd expect to see more surviving material examples.
Anyway, that's my take. I can't claim to have studied the issue systematically--haven't even looked for reviews of Bellesisles in the academic literature. I have a hunch--it's just a hunch--that there may have been regional colonial era "gun cultures" in southern Pennsylvania and perhaps Connecticut, probably owing to a "founder effect." A couple of gunsmiths from Europe settled in these places in the colonial era, and propagated guns among the sparse local populace because that's what they made. The Civil War gave a tremendous boost to manufacturing technology, and taught a lot of people to use guns, so thereafter, guns flooded American society.
Jacob Conrad