The Gunning of America

Business and the Making of American Gun Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID4157786
AuthorsSuzanna Reis, Suzanna Reiss (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume104
Issue2
Pages505-506
Publication date2017-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jax226
OpenAlexW2746894365
LanguageEN
Citations received22

Political battles rage in the United States over gun violence and the legitimacy of government regulation when weighed against the rights and identities of individual gun owners. Dismantling the mythologies animating such debate, Pamela Haag's book reminds us of a fundamental fact: the foundations of widespread gun ownership in the United States have always been a product of the machinations of the commercial gun industry. Haag rewrites the history of American gun ownership with an emphasis on the banalities of trying to produce and sell a commodity whose practical or psychological value was not in fact widely embraced or celebrated until well into the twentieth century. Historically, the cultural politics of gun ownership in America was not driven by popular or government demand but rather by businessmen's efforts to turn a profit. Haag traces the evolution of the gun business from its fledgling emergence in the 1800s through the first decades of the twentieth century. Haag upends the quintessential image of gun ownership as foundational to being American: the rugged (white) male individual conquering the western frontier and protecting home and family from government overreach and individual violent intent. Gun production was based in the Northeast, not the West, where captains of industry struggled to find a reliable domestic market. Not until the 1840s did manufacturers achieve economies of scale by consolidating the gun industry through patent litigation and capitalizing on the markets of war-torn Europe. “American gun culture,” Haag argues, “was very much a non-American, global affair” (p. 41). Domestic private demand was such that “guns sometimes had to be given away before they were bought” to seduce consumers into wanting them (p. 86). Across the nineteenth century, companies lobbied the U.S. government for business, not against regulation. Fickle government demand left the industry almost bankrupt by the Civil War, which saved the industry not because of military contracts (many of which went to European suppliers), but because it helped expand individual gun ownership. Companies then turned to cultivating civilian markets. Advertising campaigns spilled over into dime-novel fantasies and national mythologies. Guns, once objects of limited utilitarian value, became desirable, even essential, embodiments of the character of their users—the courageous lone gunman taming the wild West, prepared for self-defense in rural or urban settings, or exhibiting masculinity at shooting ranges and on recreational hunts. A mass-produced commodity ironically became “an enduring idiom of American individualism” (p. 186

Culture of the United States · Frontier · Government (linguistics · Legitimacy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gun Ownership and Violence Research · Law · Military history and social perspectives

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