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Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. New York: Knopf, 2000. Pp. 603. $30.00, hardcover.
This is an important book, but also a disillusioning and disorienting one. Michael Bellesiles seeks to dispel the agglomeration of myth, history, pseudotraditions, and legalisms that have encrusted the Second Amendment and jelled in the form of the wacky cult of the gun with which we are presently burdened-to disarm, intellectually at least, what he views as a gunslinger nation. Predictably, his relative degree of success or failure thus far has been interpreted largely in partisan terms-praise that borders on fawning from the academic left, and a chorus of Bronx cheers from the fans of firearms. From my own perspective the book defies easy evaluation. It takes a mighty whack at America's gun culture and gives every appearance of obliterating substantial chunks, yet it not only fails in other respects but reveals a calculated tendentiousness that undermines confidence in the entire enterprise. Complicating analysis still further, Bellesiles, unlike many contemporary American historians, is a good, even gifted, writer capable of weaving a web of solid research, serious misinterpretation, stunning insights, and a pinch of pure balderdash into a case that looks as solid as a two-ton safe. It's not. But it is also quite compelling. Is this history or advocacy journalism with lots of footnotes? I'm not sure.
Bellesiles uses an impressive, though not necessarily definitive, body of evidence to make several key points: gun ownership and general familiarity with firearms during the colonial and early national periods were dramatically lower than previously assumed; until the Civil War, Americans, rather than romanticizing guns, were largely indifferent to them; and that the militia system, intended as an effective substitute for a standing army, was instead a grotesque and unmitigated failure. Cumulatively it amounts to an all-court press on the NRA credo, except that it leaks.
With respect to the first point, Bellesiles employs a variety of statistical data, including over a thousand probate records, to demonstrate that prior to the Civil War gun ownership was never more than around 10 percent of the total population and, contrary to prior assumptions, gun density, at least among white settlers, tended to be lower along the frontier than in...