GUN MYTHS
by Garry Wills
For a number of years now, historian Michael Bellesiles of Emory University has been amassing a great body of evidence that demolishes the myths of the gun's role in American history. I have wondered why no one in the popular press has picked up on this work published in scholarly journals. Now that a news magazine has finally done that, the magazine, it turns out, is not an American one but The Economist, published in London. Its current issue runs a very full and important summary of Bellesiles' findings.
By a sophisticated bit of sleuthing, Bellesiles has put together probate reports on what people owned in the 18th and early 19th centuries, government surveys of gun ownership (something the NRA would go crazy at today), records of the number of guns produced in America and imported from abroad -- all to establish this fact, which runs contrary to romantic notions of the frontiersman's reliance on his weapon: Up until 1850, fewer than 10 percent of Americans owned guns, and half of those were not functioning.
Guns were expensive in early days; they cost the equivalent of the average man's wages for a year. They were inefficient and hard to maintain. Few were made in America. Repairs were not readily executed (mainly by blacksmiths who worked on farm implements). How did people protect themselves then? Not by guns. Only 15 percent of the violent deaths inflicted in the period 1800 to 1845 were brought about by guns -- about the same number as were caused by ax attacks and less than those caused by knives. The leading cause of violent death was being beaten or strangled (twice as many died that way as by shooting or stabbing).
So much for the NRA argument that if guns are taken away, people would just find other means of killing each other. People certainly will kill each other, but the rate would certainly drop. When is the last time you heard of a drive-by strangling, or the case of a school where a dozen children were mowed down with an ax? That is why the murder rate is so low in the countries that do have gun control.
Another myth that Bellesiles demolishes is that of the militias. Most militias did not have guns, or powder, or the training to use what few weapons they had. They were not made up of the whole male citizenry -- how could they have been, when no more than 10 percent of the citizens had guns? Militias were usually mustered for immediate emergencies from the unemployed, the drifting, or those too poor to buy substitutes for their service. One of the few exceptions to this condition was militias in the South that were kept in fighting condition in order to patrol and intimidate the slaves. So far from being a great bastion of freedom, the militias were a support of slavery.
When Bellesiles' findings are put together with Robert Dykstra's study of the cowboy legend (towns such as Tombstone and Dodge City had gun control laws, so that only 1.5 deaths occurred annually during the cattle drives of their most famous years) and with Osha Gray Davidson's history of the NRA (which did not oppose gun control until the 1960s), there is nothing left standing to vindicate the myth that individually owned guns were a source of American freedom and greatness.
COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
Click on banner below to return to the My Politics page:
Get your own Free Home Page