The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture - Pamela Haag

Americans have always loved guns. That love was forged early on, with its roots in the Revolution and the Second Amendment. Or so we assume.

It is thought that America is the most heavily civilian-armed nation today because of its “exceptional relationship” to guns. But in truth, American gun culture developed not because the gun was exceptional, but precisely because it was not: it was perceived in crucial years as an unexceptional commodity, whose production and sales followed ordinary business trends.

In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag fundamentally revises the history of guns in the United States, by focusing on the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

Delving into the obscure archives of the gun industry and setting western myths aside, Haag challenges basic assumptions of how and when America became a gun culture. She shows how gun industrialists worked their sales savvy over the decades to find and create new markets for their product, debunking the idea that guns just “sell themselves.” She reveals how they survived in the 1800s through international sales, and not the on American frontier. And she demonstrates how the mystique of the American gun that we associate with the colonial era actually deepened in the 1900s.

While Oliver Winchester had no apparent qualms about his life’s work of arming America, his daughter-in-law Sarah Winchester was a different story. Legend holds that Sarah was haunted by what she considered a vast blood fortune, and became convinced that the ghosts of rifle victims had cursed her. She channeled much of her inheritance, and her conflicted conscience, into a monstrous estate now known as the Winchester Mystery House—at its height, the most bizarre private residence in the world.

In this revelatory and exciting narrative, Haag upends our traditional understanding of the American gun culture. In so doing, she explodes the clichés of our stalemated gun politics today.

PRAISE
An abridged history of the American gun culture, told from legend and popular memory, might go like this: We were born a gun culture. Americans have an exceptional, unique, and timeless relationship to guns, starting with the militias of the Revolutionary War, and it developed on its own from there.
Salon.com, April 30, 2016

In her previous book, Marriage Confidential: Love in the Post-Romantic Age, Haag took aim at “semi-happy” marriages and explored how to recast them. In this one, she focuses on combat of a different kind. Haag delves into the history of the gun industry (Winchester, Colt) and explains how over the past 150 years it has shrewdly created a demand for its products. Rather than framing the debate about guns as a Second Amendment question, Haag argues that it is a business — and one in need of strong economic regulation.
Huffington Post, April 26, 2016

In america, guns are often discussed as a storied part of a national identity that grew, over time, from Revolutionary War militias, the Second Amendment and rough life on the frontier. But in her new book, The Gunning of America, Pamela Haag argues that this narrative is not as organic as it appears; rather, it was crafted by gun manufacturers eager to sell more weapons.
Time Magagine, April 25, 2016

There is a tragic inevitability of timeliness when one writes a book about guns,” notes Haag, who started work on her detailed and devastating history after Sandy Hook and finished a draft just after the Navy Yard shooting. But there’s a timelessness as well: the same political hand-wringing follows every mass murder, and the same lack of legislative action. If Americans are ever to do anything about their gun problem, they’ll have to learn from their history—and this book is a bracing eye-opener.
Macleans, April 24, 2016

In this fascinating account, Haag (Marriage Confidential) traces the history of America’s gun-making business, arguing that “the tragedy of American gun violence emerged from the banality of the American gun business.” Oliver Winchester, known as “the rifle king,” who founded one of the first private armories in America in early 19th century, is the focal point of the narrative.
Starred Review in Publishers Weekly, April 19, 2016

The fundraising prowess of the gun rights movement, and the influence it wields over lawmakers, has had a devastating impact: It’s said that there are now almost as many guns in the United States — about 300 million — as there are citizens. Every year, more than 30,000 of us die from gunshot wounds, and in the three years after the December 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and seven adults in Sandy Hook, Conn., school shootings in the U.S. reportedly occurred at a rate of one per week.
San Francisco Chronicle, April 14, 2016

In her remarkable new book, “The Gunning of America,’’ historian Pamela Haag undercuts much of the charged rhetoric about the importance of firearms in the nation’s culture and history with a richly sourced, empirical look at the 19th century origins of the gun business and the men who made it.
The Boston Globe, April 15, 2016

The Revolutionary War and its musket-loading militias. The frontiersmen and the dangers of the plains. The Wild West, with its righteous cowboys and soulless desperadoes. Patriotism and manhood. Personal protection and individual rights.
The Washington Post, April 7, 2016

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…[A] beautifully composed and meticulously researched volume.
The New Republic, April 5, 2016

An examination of the controversial realm of American gun culture through the perspective of gun manufacturers, with an emphasis on the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Historian Haag (Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples, 2011, etc.) deliberately eschews detailed discussions about the Second Amendment, the rights of gun owners, the advocates of gun control, and other cornerstones of our current heated political debate.
Kirkus, February 15, 2016

The Gunning of America provides an exceptional, fresh perspective about the gun culture in America. Pamela Haag thoroughly examines the history of America’s long term relationship with guns while offering an insightful, informative philosophy as to when and how this love affair began.
Wes Moore, Founder and CEO of BridgeEdU

Most explanations of that culture focus on the motives of the buyers, which range from the practical to the pathological. Pamela Haag’s Gunning of America is an original and insightful work of historical investigation, which shows how gun manufacturers created our so-called “gun culture” through the systematic marketing of their product in an unregulated marketplace.
Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation

Pamela Haag has written a very smart book, deeply researched, original, provocative. The compelling narrative makes a powerful argument about the origins of America’s gun culture.
John Mack Faragher, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History, Yale University

Firearms may be instruments of death. But they are also, as Pamela Haag reveals in her thought-provoking reassessment of guns in America life, economic commodities—so much so, that it can be difficult at times to discern where business culture ends and gun culture begins.
Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

The American gun industry generally, and the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in particular, taught the country to love guns. This fascinating and disturbing book is a riveting history of the men and families that made the guns that made America’s gun culture. Haag shows conclusively that this country’s tragic obsession with guns is not part of our political origins, or our constitutional and moral DNA; it is the result of marketing and industrial capitalism. Our gun culture was made, not found; it emerged less from creativity than from cold pursuits of profit. The fortunes made selling guns had nothing to do with the Second Amendment. Good history like this will not be read by the politicians and lobbyists who sustain the gun manufacturers today, but it should be.
David W. Blight, Class of ’54 Professor of American History at Yale, and author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Pamela Haag has accomplished a rare feat. She combines wonderful storytelling with a serious analysis of the firearms business to reveal how the Winchester Repeating Arms Company taught Americans to love guns.
Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University