Gun Culture Then and Now

I’ve been researching and writing about the history of the international arms trade for about 15 years. Until 2022, I’d never been contacted by any party to a Second Amendment court case. But things changed that summer, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark gun rights decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc., Inc., v. Bruen. The majority decision put history, text and tradition at the center of Second Amendment jurisprudence. Faced with a consequent wave of new challenges attempting to invalidate gun safety laws as unconstitutional, state attorneys general have sought out professional historians with relevant expertise to help them mount an effective defense.

In more than two dozen cases over the past few years, I’ve been asked by attorneys general to respond to historical arguments put forward by plaintiffs and their expert witnesses in the gun-rights movement. The basic claim I’ve seen them making over and over again is one about continuity. They argue (a) that guns and gun problems in the founding era were analogous to guns and gun problems in our own times, (b) that the founders didn’t regulate guns, and therefore (c) that we can’t, either. My response as a historian has been to explain that guns and gun problems were in fact very different in the founding era. Those differences are key to understanding what the founders did or didn’t do about the problem of guns in society.

Before considering the most important differences between firearms then and now, though, there is one very important similarity to consider. Like residents of the United States today, (white) British North Americans owned a lot of guns relative to their contemporaries around the world. To the best of our knowledge, by 1774, on average about half of all white households possessed a firearm. That meant guns were more abundant than bibles in early America. All told, the 13 Colonies probably had enough privately held guns to arm around a third of adult white men. That’s paltry compared to the contemporary United States, where there are far more guns than there are all the men, women and children in the country combined. But British North America was indisputably one of the best-armed societies in the world during the founding era.

Why? British North America was a well-armed society because it was a war-making society. It was preoccupied with three kinds of conflicts: settler colonialism, slavery and warfare with imperial rivals France and Spain. The first two were foundational to the whole enterprise of Colonial America, and they were both perpetual. Without the Europeans’ monopoly on producing firearms, they would not have been able to dispossess Native people of their land or keep a fifth of the population enslaved. Wars against France and Spain periodically convulsed the Colonies as well. Such wars diverted men and weapons from the projects of settler colonialism and slavery, imperiling both. With no significant permanent standing army in British North America, most fighting against Indigenous nations, the enslaved and rival empires fell to white men who either volunteered or were drafted into service, usually with their own weapons.

That basic fact — that early America was a wartime project requiring an armed white male populace — helps explain three of the biggest differences between gun culture today and gun culture in the founding era.

First, while our gun culture is consumerist, theirs was utilitarian. Today, guns are heavily marketed consumer goods. They come in an astonishing variety, with gunmakers aggressively catering to ever more specialized segments of the market. Browse the magazine rack at your local supermarket; chances are it will feature several different publications devoted to the pastime of consuming firearms. A landmark 2015 survey from researchers at Harvard and Northeastern Universities found that the 3% of Americans who own the most guns — for reasons of collecting or prepping for disaster or both — possess roughly half of all privately held firearms in the country. That astonishing fact is even more remarkable when put into a global context. Americans own nearly half of all the world’s privately held firearms. That means around the world, nearly one out every four privately held guns belongs to an American “super-owner” — a group comprising 0.13% of the global population.

Nothing remotely like this existed in the 18th century. Careful surveys of probate records from the time reveal that few households possessed more than one firearm. Vanishingly few possessed more than five. Those that did were almost exclusively large southern slaveholders, who had brutally utilitarian reasons for being heavily armed. Most Colonists saw guns as tools and would have found today’s hypercommercialized and ideologically charged culture of consuming, collecting and stockpiling guns deeply alien. 

Second, where our gun culture is individualist, theirs was collective. Since 2008, the Supreme Court’s position has been that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to armed self-defense. Of course, this is something many Americans feel very strongly about today. Gun-rights groups have put the armed individual at the center of their rhetoric for more than a generation. The firearms industry has been phenomenally successful at marketing fear and the prospect of the armed individual protecting themselves and their families.

Things were different in the founding era. Prior to the widespread availability of breech-loading weapons and metallic cartridges in the mid-19th century, firearms were awkward tools either for perpetrating or resisting crimes of passion. They were notoriously inaccurate at range, liable to misfire and had to be laboriously muzzle-loaded with gunpowder and ball before every shot. Moreover, such guns were seldom kept loaded and at the ready for any extended period because black powder corroded iron barrels so quickly. Partly for these reasons, firearms usually played a relatively small role in murders in North America before the era of the Civil War. What preoccupied white gun owners in early America was not self-defense so much as collective offense — the three kinds of collective war-making that made guns so indispensable and abundant in the 18th century.

Third and finally, while our gun culture is government-phobic, theirs was government-led. Fear of government has been almost as useful for the gun-rights movement and the firearms industry as fear of crime and the promise of self-defense. Every election is framed as an existential contest for the future of gun rights in this country and every proposed regulation, no matter how mild or popular, is a treacherous step down the slippery slope of mass confiscation. The gun-buying public responds to these claims. Sales of certain kinds of guns and accessories surge after mass shootings, in anticipation of regulation (that almost never comes). Presidential elections now have major effects on the civilian firearms market, even though the prospect of serious gun control is tiny regardless of which party is in power.

Here again, things were fundamentally different in early America. British Colonists remained unusually well armed because they remained perpetually at war. They fought those wars collectively, usually in militias. These militias were organized, disciplined, directed and, when necessary, armed by the state. There were in fact hundreds of firearm regulations passed in early America. Most took the form of militia laws, requiring adult male military service and firearm ownership. When militiamen couldn’t afford or acquire their own arms, the state tried to provide them. In fact, the state was so important to arming early America that historians can mostly predict where gun ownership rates were high or low depending on a Colony’s militia laws. In other words, early American gun culture was government-led, rather than government-phobic.

The historian in me thinks these differences are fascinating and worthy of study. As a citizen concerned about gun violence in our communities, though, I think it’s a tragedy that the 18th century has come to have so much power over the present, over whether elected officials are permitted to regulate firearms here and now. But this state of affairs may not outlast the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

In the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms. That fateful decision ignored the gun-culture chasm separating us from the founders. As previous decisions had maintained, and as several of the nation’s most distinguished scholars reminded the court in an amicus brief, the Second Amendment was not drafted to protect armed self-defense. The founders lived in a different world from ours. They weren’t worried about government regulation of privately owned firearms so much as the balance of power between federal and state governments. The newly ratified Constitution had just given the federal government sweeping authority over state militias, provoking significant anxiety within the states. The Second Amendment was the answer to those anxieties.

Americans will have to keep living and dying with the consequences of the court’s misreading of history for the foreseeable future. But by incentivizing states to sponsor new research into firearms history, Bruen will have the ironic effect of bringing the folly of modern Second Amendment jurisprudence into sharper and sharper focus. It isn’t difficult to imagine future justices, as skeptical of precedent as the conservative majority is today, reconsidering the landmark Second Amendment decisions of the Roberts era. Thanks to Bruen, they’ll have a lot of history to work with.