Air-Brushing Guns Out of American History, 1770-1848

Clayton Cramer - November 11, 2017

I hope you have read the most important novel of the 20th century, George Orwell’s 1984. You may recall that the main character, Winston, works for a branch of the government whose job is changing history books, and even old newspapers, to make the past match the Party’s ever changing present.

Revising history isn’t always bad. History does change as historians reexamine the evidence. One recent example: it used to be taught that the first slaves in the American colonies were Africans sold from a Dutch ship docked in Virginia. Recent examination of old documents shows that they may not have been slaves once on shore. Within a few decades, at least some of those Africans were free men, plantation owners, and—slave owners.

But revising history to change the present is just as bad as it was in 1984. In 1996, the Journal of American History, which is the journal for American history professors, published an article by then-respected Professor Michael Bellesiles of Emory University in Atlanta. His article claimed that conventional wisdom about guns in early America was all wrong. He said guns were rare; most Americans hated guns; hunting was almost unknown; gun ownership was very tightly regulated; and because there were so few guns, murder (except of blacks and Indians) was very rare. Gun murders were especially rare. To prove his gun scarcity claim, his article contained a graph that he said showed how rarely guns appeared in probate inventories, which recorded what people owned when they died. Even those guns were usually described as broken or rusty. His article’s point was that the NRA’s version of history and gun culture was a modern invention. If guns were rare and hated back then, and tightly regulated, then the Second Amendment could not possibly protect an individual right. In 2000, the prestigious Alfred A. Knopf published a book-length version of Bellesiles’ article titled Arming America. It was awash in positive reviews and glowing comments about “this book changes everything” meaning about gun control. Someone sent me a copy. After reading through the first few chapters, about the Colonial period, I found myself saying, “This sounds wrong.” Then I got to a chapter where Bellesiles wrote that a review of 80 travel accounts from early America found that travelers did not notice that they were surrounded by guns and violence. So I flipped to the endnote where he listed those travel accounts, some of which I had read. I knew his claim was false.

Now I was upset, and I started checking his sources. I found false statements about what books said, that he claimed to have read. I found “quotes” from federal laws which he had rewritten to match what he wanted them to say. I found that I could flip the book open at random, start checking his claims, and seldom get through a page without finding fraud. Soon the prestigious Bancroft Prize he had received for his book was revoked by Columbia University (first time ever) and he was no longer tenured faculty at Emory University. (He tends a bar in Connecticut, at last report.)

I guess I didn’t use a large enough stake through the undead’s corpse, because his claims have risen from the dead. A Yale Ph.D. named Pamela Haag published a book in 2015 titled The Gunning of America, which says directly that she is building on Bellesiles’ work, with no apparent awareness that Bellesiles’ was drummed out of the profession. She claims that there was no civilian market for handguns until 1848. Gun culture was created by Colt and Winchester because they were making guns far faster than they could find customers. With clever marketing they persuaded Americans to buy guns they neither needed nor wanted.

Can great advertising sell stuff that no one wants? Think of Ford’s Edsel in the 1950's. New Coke, I am sure many of you remember. And the IBM PCjr, a cost and feature-reduced version of the PC. At last report, IBM had 300,000 of them that no one would buy.

Haag’s book isn’t quite as fraudulent as Bellesiles', but it has many amazing howlers that show she hasn’t a clue about this subject. She repeatedly calls the Winchester lever-action rifles “semiautomatics,” I think trying to project the current gun controller hatred to the 19th century. She believes that there are people who can talk with the dead. I will have a book out next year about the development of gun culture, gunsmithing and manufacturing that takes down Haag.

The Ministry of Truth lives!

Clayton Cramer teaches history at College of Western Idaho. His ninth book, Lock, Stock, and Barrel, will be published by Praeger Press in 2018.