The reality of Eli's endeavour and achievement seems to be that he was one of the first of a long line of guys who got a lucractive weapons contract from the federal government (awarded in June 1798) but failed to deliver as promised. Consider, it took him 10 years to fulfill his contract for 10,000 muskets, which means his armoury produced on average 1000 pieces a year. The older armouries who employed skilled craftsmen (often immigrants) working from designs could churn out almost 5000 a year. And his guns didn't really have interchangeable parts in any modern sense of the term (his demonstration for the government was rigged and he used parts that had been specially fitted by hand for that purpose).
Really, for mass ownership of weapons you would need either to import them from various sources or have a domestic capacity or a combination of the two. And the guns would have to be cheap, which they demonstrably weren't. This wasn't possible even when Eli Whitney was getting credit for mass producing them. He sold his for around $13 a piece and they went only to the federal government. There might have been an accumulation of heirlooms, but even replacement parts would have to be painstakingly hand made.
I think that perhaps the first rifled musket that US arms manufacturers actually truly mass produced with complete interchangeability were the ones used in the Mexican War (and even then the US imported a lot of Enfield type rifles from the UK right on up through the Civil War). But note how simple the design of a muzzle-loaded rifle fired with percussion caps is--simpler than the flintlock and most definitely simpler than a revolver. True interchaneability in gun manufacturing must have come around the same time they could make sewing machines and typewriters--and notice the ubiquity of the Remington brand.
I suspect there were times when groups other than the federal troops or local constabulary had large numbers of weapons: Texan rebellion against Mexico, Mormons in Utah (who almost got into a shooting war with US troops, and much earlier, the Whiskey Rebellion in W. Pennsylvania. But this is a far cry from so many households having weapons for sport or self-defense.
----------------------- Also see this:
http://www.nps.gov/spar/history.html
By the 1780s the Aresenal was a major ammunition and weapons depot. In 1787 poor farmers from western Massachusetts, led by Daniel Shays, tried to seize the arms at Springfield. This was a key event leading to the Federal Constitution Convention. Those involved in the rebellion planned to use the weapons to force the closure of the State and county courts that were taking their lands for debt. Confronted by the cannons of an organized state militia, they failed in their desperate attempt. Yet the incident led many of the wealthier people, who feared for their property at the hands of an armed rabble, to vote for the new Federal Constitution and support a stronger central government. In 1794 the new Federal government decided to manufacture its own muskets so that the Nation would not be dependent on foreign arms. President Washington selected Springfield as the site for one of the two Federal Armories. Production of weaponry at the Armory began in 1795 when 245 flintlock muskets were produced monthly by 40 workers. Springfield Armory soon became a center for invention and development. In 1819 Thomas Blanchard developed a special lathe (shown at left) for the consistent mass production of rifle stocks. Thomas Blanchard worked at Springfield Armory for 5 years. His fame rests on the lathe that visitors can still see at the museum. The lathe enabled an unskilled workman to quickly and easily turn out identical irregular shapes. The large drum turned two wheels: a friction wheel that followed the contours of the metal rifle pattern, and the cutting wheel that imitated the movements of the friction wheel to make an exact replica of the pattern in wood.In the 1840s the old flintlock gave way to a percussion ignition system that increased the reliability and simplicity of longarms. ------------------------
If they all had guns, why would the Shay rebels try to take an armoury to get them? The same reason years later John Brown would seize the armoury at Harpers Ferry, WV--so he could get guns for his conspirators. In the South they would be especially paranoid about guns because of possible slave rebellions.
C Jannuzi
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