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9780375701986: Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture
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The author of Revolutionary Outlaws traces the evolution of America's gun culture to the mid-nineteenth-century age of industrialization, arguing that the surge in gun manufacturing during the Civil War and the decision to allow soldiers to keep their weapons after the war transformed the gun from seldom-used tool to perceived necessity. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

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L'autore:
Michael A. Bellesiles is Professor of History at Emory University and Director of Emory's Center for the Study of Violence. He is the author of Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier, and of numerous articles and reviews. He lives in Atlanta.
From the Hardcover edition.
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From the Introduction

On April 6, 1998, the nation's two leading news magazines featured cover photographs of a young boy with a gun. The photograph on the cover of Time magazine was of a toddler named Andrew Golden, dressed in camouflage and clutching a high-powered rifle. Newsweek featured a slightly older Andrew Golden, still in camouflage, now clutching a pistol. The two magazines chronicled the brief lives of Golden and Mitchell Johnson, boys growing up in a culture in which parents thought it a good idea to pose their three-year-olds with deadly weapons and said, "Santa gave Drew Golden a shotgun when he was six." These two children were raised with guns, and with God. Mitchell Johnson had just "made a profession of faith and decided to accept Jesus Christ as his savior." He was active in his church and impressed the adults with his piety. But the temptation of a gun can trump a claim of faith in God and all dreams of childhood innocence.

On March 24, 1998, these two boys, aged eleven and thirteen, set off the fire alarm at their school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and then shot at the other children as they filed out of the building. Between them the boys had three rifles and seven pistols. In less than four minutes, they fired twenty-two shots, killing eleven-year-old Brittheny Varner, twelve-year-olds Natalie Brooks, Stephanie Johnson, and Paige Ann Herring, and their young teacher Shannon Wright, who was shielding one of her students. Golden and Johnson wounded ten other people, mostly children.

The questions asked repeatedly after the Jonesboro tragedy -- as after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, and after every similar mass shooting -- seem depressingly familiar: How did we get here? How did the United States reach a point where children shoot and kill? How did we acquire a culture in which Santa Claus gives a six-year-old boy a shotgun for Christmas? For Christmas!

An astoundingly high level of personal violence separates the United States from every other industrial nation. To find comparable levels of interpersonal violence, one must examine nations in the midst of civil wars or social chaos. In the United States of America in the 1990s, two million violent crimes and twenty-four thousand murders occurred on average every year. The weapon of choice in 70 percent of these murders was a gun, and thousands more are killed by firearms every year in accidents and suicides. In a typical week, more Americans are killed with guns than in all of Western Europe in a year. Newspapers regularly carry stories of shootings with peculiar causes, like the case of the Michigan man who shot at a coworker who took a cracker from him at lunch without asking. In no other industrial nation do military surgeons train at an urban hospital to gain battlefield experience, as is the case at the Washington Hospital Center in the nation's capital. It is now thought normal and appropriate for urban elementary schools to install metal detectors to check for firearms. And when a Denver pawnshop advertised a sale of pistols as a "back-to-school" special, four hundred people showed up to buy guns.

The manifestations of America's gun culture are well known: the sincere love and affection with which American society views its weapons are demonstrated daily on television and movie screens. Every form of the media reinforces the notion that the solution to your problems can be held in your hand and provides immediate gratification. Just as there are flight simulators that re-create the experience of flying a plane, so do video games make available to any child in America a killing simulator that will train him or her to shoot without a moment's hesitation. An entire generation, as Dave Grossman has astutely argued, is being conditioned to kill. And since the United States does not register guns, no one knows how many there are or who actually buys them. The FBI estimates that there are 250 million firearms in private hands, with five million new guns purchased every year. The National Sporting Goods Association estimates that men buy 92 percent of all rifles and 94 percent of the shotguns. Most of these men fall into the 25- to 34-year-old age group, earn between $35,000 and $50,000 annually, and do not need to kill animals for their survival.

That efforts to solve violence are subject to volatile contention should not be surprising. Solutions require a knowledge of origins, and that search for historical understanding has politicized the past as well. Many if not most Americans seem resigned to, or find comfort in, the notion that this violence is immutable, the product of a deeply imbedded historical experience rooted in the frontier heritage. Frequent Indian wars and regular gun-battles in the streets of every Western town presumably inured Americans to the necessity of violence. That frontiers elsewhere did not replicate America's violent culture is thought irrelevant. In the imagined past, "the requirements for self-defense and food-gathering had put firearms in the hands of nearly everyone." With guns in their hands and bullets on their belts, the frontiersmen conquered the wilderness with a deep inward faith that, as Richard Slotkin so eloquently put it, regeneration came through violence. In short, we have always been killers. From this Hobbesian heritage of each against all emerged the modern American acceptance of widespread violence. Its fixed character has the political implication that little if anything can be done to alter America's gun culture....
The gun is so central to American identity that the nation's history has been meticulously reconstructed to promote the necessity of a heavily armed American public. In the classic telling, arms ownership has always been near universal, and American liberty was won and maintained by the actions of privately armed citizens. The gun culture has been read from the present into the past. Franklin Orth, executive vice president of the NRA, told a Senate subcommittee in 1968, "There is a very special relationship between a man and his gun -- an atavistic relation with its deep roots in prehistory, when the primitive man's personal weapon, so often his only effective defense and food provider, was nearly as precious to him as his own limbs." What, then, of the man who does not have such a special relationship with his gun? What kind of man is he? And even more frightening, what if we discover that early American men did not have that special bond with their guns?

Historians have joined actively in the mythmaking. Book after book proclaims that Americans all had guns because they had to have them. Frontier settlers especially would have been armed because of the need to hunt, and to defend themselves from one another and from skulking Indians. Yet nineteenth-century historians somehow missed this special relationship of Americans with their guns, and twentieth-century historians often question their own evidence when it contradicts what is assumed to have always existed. Thus, in a wonderful book, William C. Davis refutes the familiar vision of the frontier as the site of repeated Indian attacks and murderous conduct. But he then adds: "Of course, every cabin had at least one rifle, and perhaps an old pistol or two. . . . They put meat on the table, defended the home against intruders, and provided some entertainment to the men. . . . A man was not a man without knowledge of firearms and some skill in their use." The rifle was fundamental, as every frontier father "taught his sons to use it from the age of ten or earlier. . . . They went with him to hunt the deer and bear that filled their dinner plates, and in the worst extremities, when the Indians came prowling or on the warpath, the boys became men all too soon in defending their lives and property."

As supportive evidence, Davis cites a receipt showing how expensive it was to buy lead.

While many historians have accepted this formulation of America's past without too many doubts, a few have claimed originality in discovering the presence of guns. Wesley Frank Craven maintained "a point that too often has been overlooked, or simply taken for granted, and that is that every able free male inhabitant of an English settlement in North America was armed." Yet Craven fails to provide even one example of this widespread gun ownership. For some reason these assertions seem beyond the usual need of historians for supportive evidence, even when the author notes the absence of such evidence. Harold L. Peterson, an outstanding scholar of the history of firearms, wrote, "At no time in American history have weapons been more important than they were from 1620 to 1690. They protected the early colonist from the attack of wild beast or savage, and were the means of providing him with food and clothing and with many of the commodities which he sent back to England." And then comes the odd twist: "Because of this importance of arms, the colonists were forced to purchase the most efficient arms that Europe produced." They produced none themselves, so they had to import them all, and as a consequence, "Americans soon outdistanced the Europeans in superiority of weapons and in skill in using them." This logic, while difficult to follow, is supported in the next sentence with the observation that "the contemporary writers only occasionally refer specifically to the type of arms used," leaving the historian with no choice but "indirect reference."

It often seems that historians lack confidence in their research. Many have noted that Americans did not have very many guns, only to fall back on an insistence that most men must have owned guns. On the basis of extensive research in the source materials, one scholar of gunsmithing, James B. Whisker, observed that there was a "scarcity of firearms" in early America, which became evident "in times of national emergency." After providing ninety pa...

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  • EditoreVintage Books
  • Data di pubblicazione2001
  • ISBN 10 0375701982
  • ISBN 13 9780375701986
  • RilegaturaCopertina flessibile
  • Numero di pagine603
  • Valutazione libreria

Altre edizioni note dello stesso titolo

9780375402104: Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780375402104
Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000
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