Volume 47, Number 16 · October 19, 2000
In Love with Guns
By Edmund S. Morgan
Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture
by Michael A. Bellesiles
Knopf, 603 pp., $30.00
There is something about guns that inhibits understanding. It is not just that they can put an end to argument. They somehow generate beliefs that are obviously contrary to observable fact. It is a fact that Americans today own more guns per capita than people in other countries. But it is widely imagined, contrary to fact, that they have done so from the beginning, that the people who settled this country did it with a gun ever in hand, to hunt game for food and to protect themselves against the people they dispossessed. In the words of one historian, quoted by Michael Bellesiles in Arming America, 'by the eighteenth century, colonial Americans were the most heavily armed people in the world.' Until recently other historians, myself included, would probably have agreed; and so, surprisingly, would many of the eighteenth-century Americans supposedly so well equipped with guns. It is the purpose of Bellesiles's book to show that the facts are otherwise, that cherished suppositions about guns in early America are demonstrably wrong and were wrong as they came from the mouths of people at the time who should have known better.
Review, 4038 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |