The guns that won

The base signifier regarding the gun in American life is the fantasy of American exceptionalism, a kind of ballistic version of manifest destiny

Alhough a New Yorker by birth, I lived for many years in Boulder, Colorado, a city known for its mountain views, superior body mass indices and affluent stoner chic. Hidden from prying eyes at the end of a dirt road outside of town is a lesser-known attraction: an illegal shooting range. On a typical spring afternoon, a visitor there might see a bunch of late-model cars parked in a grass clearing, and, beyond them, a dozen or so well-groomed twentysomethings standing around chatting and drinking beer. The scene would look posed, cinematic, a little bit like a photo shoot for fashion-forward jeans. Only the sharp, cracking reports coming from around a bend would indicate these sons and daughters of the American West had in fact gathered for the express purpose of pumping bullets into the side of a hill.
Like it or not, America’s struggle with guns is mostly over, and the results are in: Guns won. Below the steady cycle of gun-driven agony and outrage lies our peculiarly dissonant national conversation on the subject—a standoff between opponents lacking even the most minimal common language, whose debate, if that’s the right word, is filled with shopworn tropes hurled by each side at the other that add up to a single, vast, self-canceling din. In the meantime, the firearms—and their side effects—keep coming. A quick but necessary tour of the numbers would read as follows: 36 Americans currently killed by guns each day on average (excluding suicides); more than 100 metro areas in the United States afflicted by mass shootings in 2016; 12 billion bullets manufactured annually; an estimated 200,000 suicides by gun each year around the world; and incredibly, in America, a toddler currently shoots someone about once a week.
Off to one side of this dispiriting blur of statistics, two new books find a way through the violent rhetorical storms surrounding guns by shining a light on their life cycles as objects—of homicide, fetish, and most intriguingly, perhaps, commerce. In The Way of the Gun, British journalist Iain Overton provides a kind of Cook’s tour of guns as they’re traded, coveted, and employed for target practice, murder, and war around the world. In her masterful The Gunning of America, Pamela Haag furnishes a salutary corrective to the perception of the gun’s inevitability in American life by showing its history as a commodity invented and then deliberately marketed and distributed like any other widget or household appliance. Backed by vast research in the company archives of Winchester, Colt, and other manufacturers, her book is a mixture of analysis and close-focus biography of the many sturdy and sometimes strange early Americans who rode to wealth on the back of firearms.
The base signifier regarding the gun in American life is the fantasy of American exceptionalism, a kind of ballistic version of manifest destiny. In this telling, America has a unique relationship to the gun; the country was practically born to the click of firing pin on cartridge; our origins as a nation faced with the subduing of a “savage” wilderness made us necessarily invested in firearms from the start. And the Second Amendment was the plinth upon which our national gun edifice was reared.
 The hollow-point bullet, popular with police in the United States, is banned from use in war under international law. From the series “Gun Nation” by Zed Nelson
Against this assumption Haag proposes a simple clarifying action: Follow the money. As she writes in her preface, “We hear a great deal about gun owners, but what do we know of their makers?” Her hope, she explains, is to avoid the “polemical undergrowth” sprung up around gun questions, by providing an alternate commercial chronology of firearms, from the colonial period, when guns were one-offs produced individually in response to requests, all the way to the giant, multilevel, roaring factories of the gun manufacturers Winchester and Colt, who armed the world.
“We became a gun culture,” she writes illuminatingly, “not because the gun was symbolically intrinsic to Americans, or special to our identity or because the gun was something exceptional to our culture, but precisely because it was not.” In the early years, guns were seen as simple implements, like garden rakes or axes. Made often by moonlighting blacksmiths, there was no special mystique attached to them, and no laws regulated their sale. One colonial gunmaker, a certain George McGunnigle, advertised he also made “locks, keys, hinges of all sorts, pipe tomahawks, scalping knives … razors, scissors, and pen knives.”
Fittingly, given these workaday origins, the nineteenth-century gun titans usually followed roundabout routes to their eminence. Oliver Winchester had been a shirt salesman and had never even shot a rifle before starting the company that would eventually bear his name. Samuel Colt was originally a public showman hawking the miracle of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and providing “scientific amusement” to audiences by elevating the brains below their derbies and bonnets. Eli Whitney turned to guns only after exhausting the commercial potential of hat pins.  
Depicting a particularly vivid scene at the dawn of mass production, Haag describes Whitney in 1801 arriving at the “muddy unfinished White House with a mysterious black box” to pitch his cause.
The inventor explained confidently to President John Adams and the assembled grandees that he was as easily able to produce 10,000 muskets as one. “Before their astonished eyes, Whitney placed ten of each part of a musket on the table and proceeded to assemble ten rifles out of them.” An oath was heard, and the age of mechanical reproduction clanked to a start.
New Republic

 

All of these early American gun czars were capitalists to the core, inoculated against the real-world effects of their products through a commercialist ethos that concentrated on “contractual obligations” and allowed them to ignore the question of what actually happened at the other end of their thundering gun barrels. A robust export market helped. Among the many surprises offered by the book is its picture of the early dependence of American gun manufacturers on Europe. Convulsed by a cascade of geopolitical crises in the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe offered America commercial sanctuary through an apparently limitless (and remote) venue for its products. “A small knot of New England manufacturers would arm almost the whole world” she writes, but “without the thirsty markets of imperial Europe and other belligerent regimes abroad ... the business would have struggled to stay afloat in the mid-1800s.”

New Republic

What helped ground—and almost bankrupt—the industry on home soil was the Civil War. The war shined a light on the regional loyalties of the gun bosses. (Samuel Colt sold plentifully in the South, causing the New-York Daily Tribune to label him a traitor; Winchester fed the North; the state of Kentucky was carved up between the two.) It also produced the prototype of the schmoozing, favor-dispensing glad-hander who would eventually become the modern lobbyist. It demonstrated the limits for industrial manufacturers of having as a client a wartime government that would insist, even to the point of legislative mandate, on vast quantities of goods and then decamp in peacetime and leave companies stranded with large stocks of those same goods and no market.
For soldiers, most of whom had grown up on older muzzle-loading weaponry, it provided something else entirely: the shock of facing the awesome killing power of a new generation of repeating rifles. Rebel commanders confronting these rifles said the Yankee lines “spit out a continuously living fringe of flame.” Some infantrymen, overcome by the incoming quantity of bullets, “simply pulled their hats over their faces as if to shield from a storm of hail.”
Intriguingly, this era also marks the beginning of the period in which the object of the gun itself was imbued with a moral valence. These new repeating rifles (the main three were the Henry, the Sharps, and the Spencer) were somehow seen as unmanly, even cowardly. By reducing the risk involved in battle, they were thought to cheapen warfare. Haag quotes critics of the day who believed that “‘the Henry rifle would change not only tactics but also the psyche of the shooter. …’ It would corrode bravery and even martial imagination by encouraging stealth sniper shots from behind cover.”
The Henry rifle that acquitted itself so well in the Civil War would become the Winchester in 1866 and from there go on to achieve the erroneous distinction of “the gun that won the West.” The more accurate phrase, Haag proposes, would be “The West that won the gun,” reflecting the truth about how Winchester admen created a mythopoetical West of rugged, masculine values, compliant women, and trigger-happy cowboys and then, in the great American tradition, sold pieces of that myth (the guns themselves) as memberships in a lethal new community
New Republic

The guns that won

The base signifier regarding the gun in American life is the fantasy of American exceptionalism, a kind of ballistic version of manifest destiny

Alhough a New Yorker by birth, I lived for many years in Boulder, Colorado, a city known for its mountain views, superior body mass indices and affluent stoner chic. Hidden from prying eyes at the end of a dirt road outside of town is a lesser-known attraction: an illegal shooting range. On a typical spring afternoon, a visitor there might see a bunch of late-model cars parked in a grass clearing, and, beyond them, a dozen or so well-groomed twentysomethings standing around chatting and drinking beer. The scene would look posed, cinematic, a little bit like a photo shoot for fashion-forward jeans. Only the sharp, cracking reports coming from around a bend would indicate these sons and daughters of the American West had in fact gathered for the express purpose of pumping bullets into the side of a hill. Like it or not, Americas struggle with guns is mostly over, and the results are in: Guns won. Below the steady cycle of gun-driven agony and outrage lies our peculiarly dissonant national conversation on the subjecta standoff between opponents lacking even the most minimal common language, whose debate, if thats the right word, is filled with shopworn tropes hurled by each side at the other that add up to a single, vast, self-canceling din. In the meantime, the firearmsand their side effectskeep coming. A quick but necessary tour of the numbers would read as follows: 36 Americans currently killed by guns each day on average (excluding suicides); more than 100 metro areas in the United States afflicted by mass shootings in 2016; 12 billion bullets manufactured annually; an estimated 200,000 suicides by gun each year around the world; and incredibly, in America, a toddler currently shoots someone about once a week. Off to one side of this dispiriting blur of statistics, two new books find a way through the violent rhetorical storms surrounding guns by shining a light on their life cycles as objectsof homicide, fetish, and most intriguingly, perhaps, commerce. In The Way of the Gun, British journalist Iain Overton provides a kind of Cooks tour of guns as theyre traded, coveted, and employed for target practice, murder, and war around the world. In her masterful The Gunning of America, Pamela Haag furnishes a salutary corrective to the perception of the guns inevitability in American life by showing its history as a commodity invented and then deliberately marketed and distributed like any other widget or household appliance. Backed by vast research in the company archives of Winchester, Colt, and other manufacturers, her book is a mixture of analysis and close-focus biography of the many sturdy and sometimes strange early Americans who rode to wealth on the back of firearms. The base signifier regarding the gun in American life is the fantasy of American exceptionalism, a kind of ballistic version of manifest destiny. In this telling, America has a unique relationship to the gun; the country was practically born to the click of firing pin on cartridge; our origins as a nation faced with the subduing of a savage wilderness made us necessarily invested in firearms from the start. And the Second Amendment was the plinth upon which our national gun edifice was reared. The hollow-point bullet, popular with police in the United States, is banned from use in war under international law. From the series Gun Nation by Zed Nelson Against this assumption Haag proposes a simple clarifying action: Follow the money. As she writes in her preface, We hear a great deal about gun owners, but what do we know of their makers? Her hope, she explains, is to avoid the polemical undergrowth sprung up around gun questions, by providing an alternate commercial chronology of firearms, from the colonial period, when guns were one-offs produced individually in response to requests, all the way to the giant, multilevel, roaring factories of the gun manufacturers Winchester and Colt, who armed the world. We became a gun culture, she writes illuminatingly, not because the gun was symbolically intrinsic to Americans, or special to our identity or because the gun was something exceptional to our culture, but precisely because it was not. In the early years, guns were seen as simple implements, like garden rakes or axes. Made often by moonlighting blacksmiths, there was no special mystique attached to them, and no laws regulated their sale. One colonial gunmaker, a certain George McGunnigle, advertised he also made locks, keys, hinges of all sorts, pipe tomahawks, scalping knives razors, scissors, and pen knives. Fittingly, given these workaday origins, the nineteenth-century gun titans usually followed roundabout routes to their eminence. Oliver Winchester had been a shirt salesman and had never even shot a rifle before starting the company that would eventually bear his name. Samuel Colt was originally a public showman hawking the miracle of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and providing scientific amusement to audiences by elevating the brains below their derbies and bonnets. Eli Whitney turned to guns only after exhausting the commercial potential of hat pins. Depicting a particularly vivid scene at the dawn of mass production, Haag describes Whitney in 1801 arriving at the muddy unfinished White House with a mysterious black box to pitch his cause. The inventor explained confidently to President John Adams and the assembled grandees that he was as easily able to produce 10,000 muskets as one. Before their astonished eyes, Whitney placed ten of each part of a musket on the table and proceeded to assemble ten rifles out of them. An oath was heard, and the age of mechanical reproduction clanked to a start. New Republic All of these early American gun czars were capitalists to the core, inoculated against the real-world effects of their products through a commercialist ethos that concentrated on contractual obligations and allowed them to ignore the question of what actually happened at the other end of their thundering gun barrels. A robust export market helped. Among the many surprises offered by the book is its picture of the early dependence of American gun manufacturers on Europe. Convulsed by a cascade of geopolitical crises in the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe offered America commercial sanctuary through an apparently limitless (and remote) venue for its products. A small knot of New England manufacturers would arm almost the whole world she writes, but without the thirsty markets of imperial Europe and other belligerent regimes abroad ... the business would have struggled to stay afloat in the mid-1800s. New Republic What helped groundand almost bankruptthe industry on home soil was the Civil War. The war shined a light on the regional loyalties of the gun bosses. (Samuel Colt sold plentifully in the South, causing the New-York Daily Tribune to label him a traitor; Winchester fed the North; the state of Kentucky was carved up between the two.) It also produced the prototype of the schmoozing, favor-dispensing glad-hander who would eventually become the modern lobbyist. It demonstrated the limits for industrial manufacturers of having as a client a wartime government that would insist, even to the point of legislative mandate, on vast quantities of goods and then decamp in peacetime and leave companies stranded with large stocks of those same goods and no market. For soldiers, most of whom had grown up on older muzzle-loading weaponry, it provided something else entirely: the shock of facing the awesome killing power of a new generation of repeating rifles. Rebel commanders confronting these rifles said the Yankee lines spit out a continuously living fringe of flame. Some infantrymen, overcome by the incoming quantity of bullets, simply pulled their hats over their faces as if to shield from a storm of hail. Intriguingly, this era also marks the beginning of the period in which the object of the gun itself was imbued with a moral valence. These new repeating rifles (the main three were the Henry, the Sharps, and the Spencer) were somehow seen as unmanly, even cowardly. By reducing the risk involved in battle, they were thought to cheapen warfare. Haag quotes critics of the day who believed that the Henry rifle would change not only tactics but also the psyche of the shooter. It would corrode bravery and even martial imagination by encouraging stealth sniper shots from behind cover. The Henry rifle that acquitted itself so well in the Civil War would become the Winchester in 1866 and from there go on to achieve the erroneous distinction of the gun that won the West. The more accurate phrase, Haag proposes, would be The West that won the gun, reflecting the truth about how Winchester admen created a mythopoetical West of rugged, masculine values, compliant women, and trigger-happy cowboys and then, in the great American tradition, sold pieces of that myth (the guns themselves) as memberships in a lethal new community New Republic