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Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. By Michael A. Bellesiles. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. ISBN 0-375-40210-1. Notes. Index. Pp. 603. $30.00.
Michael Bellesiles has shattered virtually every assumption that many historians accept and most gun enthusiasts hold dear concerning guns and their role in American history. lie argues that Americans' gun culture emerged only after the creation of a gun industry in the mid-nineteenth century, with the Civil War providing the major impetus for the mass production of dependable firearms. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, gun ownership among Anglo-Americans was exceptional; the overwhelming majority of white males neither owned a gun nor had the slightest notion of what to do with one. Early guns were too rare, too expensive, and too ineffective...