From: Rusty�Bullethole, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
US told its gun culture is based on myth
In the 18th-century heyday of the vaunted independence
militias few people had firearms, a new book says.
Martin Kettle in Washington
Tuesday September 12, 2000
The Guardian
The gut belief of many Americans that gun ownership has
been central to their way of life since colonial days is
a 20th century invention, says a book published in the US
this week.
There are currently estimated to be more than 250m firearms
in private hands and every year 5m new guns are being bought
- overwhelmingly by white men aged between 25 and 34. More
than 16,000 people are shot dead each year on average.
Those who oppose the introduction of tough laws restricting
firearms argue that widespread access to such weapons is part
of America's gun-toting militia history before, during and
after the independence revolution that began in 1775.
Not so, says Michael Bellesiles of Emory university in
Atlanta, Georgia, in a book which, according to a New York
Times review this week, "deflates the myth of the self-reliant
and self-armed virtuous yeoman of the revolutionary militias".
Professor Bellesiles says that the fact that the modern US
contains more gunshops than schools "would have shocked the
toughest resident of the early American frontier".
The National Rifle Association and other pro-gun lobbies
often evoke a picture of the 18th-century pioneer armed and
ready to kill for his supper, armed to defend his property
against marauders and standing shoulder to shoulder with
his equally armed neighbours against oppressive government -
British or American - in defence of a free way of life.
Prof Bellesiles says this image is almost wholly false.
Most Americans in the time of George Washington and the
"founding fathers" who signed the declaration of independence
in 1776 were growers and traders, not hunters, he said.
His book, Arming America: the Origins of a National Gun
Culture, says that only some 14% of households in northern
New England and Pennsylvania had firearms in the years 1765
to 1790 - years typically thought of as the heyday of gun
ownership and use. Over half of the guns recorded in
contemporary surveys were listed as broken or otherwise
defective, the book says.
Perhaps because they were unfamiliar and unpractised with
the firearms of the day, early Americans were not very
skilled with them. Prof Bellesiles points to the encounter
that set off the revolutionary war in earnest in April 1775,
near Concord and the village of Lexington, less than 20 miles
from Boston.
Military accounts speak of British troops withdrawing from
the area through a 15-mile gauntlet of "incessant firing".
Yet. says the book, 3,763 armed Americans hiding behind
walls, trees and farm buildings along this corridor managed
to hit only 273 of the withdrawing British soldiers with
their bullets.
These were the years in which the founders of the US wrote
the second amendment to the constitution, on which the
legal claims of today's gun culture rest. The amendment,
adopted in 1791, states that: "A well regulated militia
being necessary to the security of a free state, the
right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be
infringed."
Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues would have been
shocked, Prof Bellesiles believes, to learn that one
member of the current US supreme court, Justice Antonin
Scalia, considers that citizens have a constitutionally
protected right to own machine guns.
"America's gun culture is an invented tradition," Prof
Bellesiles writes. "It was not present at the nation's
creation, whenever we fix that point."
Individual ownership of guns really became possible, he
argues, only when Samuel Colt began to perfect the
pistol in the 1830s. But the civil war of 1861-65 was,
he says, "the moment when a large proportion of the
country tried to replace elections with gunfire".
� Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000
-----------
If the author is concerned that only 273 soldiers were
hit, he should check out the "hit rates" in Vietnam.
Rusty
--
He's right to some extent, but Thomas Jefferson owned
a lot of guns. The Federalist papers are full of passages
bemoaning the poor state of armament of the ordinary
people. The point is that the Founding Fathers wanted
the people to be armed, unfortunately most of them
weren't. Virginia had a statute _requiring_ people
to own a gun, so it was obviously perceived as a
serious problem.
I have to say I always thought the culture of the gun
toting American started in the "Wild" West, which actually
wasn't all that wild but people certainly were well-armed
by that point, as everyone took their guns home after
the Civil War.
Steve.
Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org
List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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