Book Review

The main reasons for reviewing a scholarly book are to alert an audience to its existence, to outline its argument, and to evaluate its importance. Alas, all of these functions are in this case redundant: given the notorious time lag in academic reviewing, there are few truly literate Americans, and perhaps no social scientists, who have not long since heard of Arming America and formed an opinion. Michael A. Bellesiles, in showing that few white male Americans owned or could use firearms before the 1850s, has attacked the central myth behind the National Rifle Association's interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. He makes it clear from the opening, a hostile description of the contemporary gun culture, that he intends to have an impact on public policy or at least discourse. In fact, his evidence is such that if the subject were open to rational argument it would be over; at the least, Arming America has added new ammunition to the debate, earning widespread applause from well beyond the academy.

1

The central argument, demonstrated through a variety of records, is that at the time, for example, of the American Revolution, perhaps 20 percent of white males owned guns, many and perhaps most of them unused and unusable. As a corollary (and one more familiar to military historians), the vaunted state militia, where it existed at all, was as ineffective in war as it was risible in peace. Historically, "bearing arms" was a collective duty, often evaded, rather than an individual right. The beginnings of a "gun culture" in the last decade or so of the antebellum era was largely the work of the federal government, which in struggling to prepare for future wars provided not only patent incentives but most of the capital and market for firearms.

. . .