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 ... In a partly speculative but gripping foray, Haag describes how [Sarah] Winchester most likely felt herself cursed, not only by the immediate deaths of her family but by all the souls dispatched courtesy of her husband’s firearms.
One book will not settle the long-running gun debate, but Haag has powerfully reframed the issue as one rooted in dollars and cents, not the Second Amendment and inalienable rights. In a brief section at the book’s end, she weighs in on contemporary debates, arguing that we should look at guns as a business and put the onus on makers, not owners. She also endorses smart-gun technology and the same kind of consumer regulations that 'apply to almost every other commodity.' Her recommendations are a touch cursory and anticlimactic. Her historical sense, however, is brilliantly on display in these pages.
...a fascinating exploration of the major businesses and families that have manufactured firearms — and manufactured the seductiveness of firearms — in this country over the past 150 years ... The most memorable portions of The Gunning of America feature advertisements aimed at making firearms appealing to all audiences.
Haag’s book is strongest when it upends the belief that America has had an uninterrupted love affair with guns ... The Gunning of America has its flaws. Haag authors some jarring juxtapositions. Discussing Sarah Winchester’s miscarriages and the company that made her wealthy, she writes, 'These rifles, and designs to follow, would proliferate and carry the Winchester name forward intergenerationally, whereas Sarah’s womb had failed in the task, and would fail again.' This isn’t the only instance of awkwardness. But Haag’s book is generally quite readable.
Haag usefully reminds us that modern gun-rights ideology stems from the nineteenth century’s “market revolution”—i.e., the moment when cheap and reliable mass-produced firearms first became available to a national buying public ... Haag may have overstated her case, as she seeks to diminish the [Second] amendment’s legacy as a major influence on a modern gun culture created by determined capitalists. She is certainly correct to stress that the recently canonized Second Amendment is more a reflection of cultural and economic processes than the Founder-authored holy writ that the modern gun cult claims it to be. But to demonstrate that a powerful strain of political rhetoric is of recent vintage is not to argue it away—or to make the mythology of the gun any less compelling for its adherents.
Haag’s book documents how the tragedy of American gun violence — including Newtown — emerged ‘from the banality of American gun business’ ... The Gunning of America details how, starting in the 1840s, manufacturers began to reconceptualize the gun from being an ‘exceptional martial tool,’ used only in wartime by governments, to an ‘unexceptional commercial commodity,’ like a stove or a wagon, to be owned by anyone … The current debate around the Second Amendment, and the notion that owning a gun is an American’s inalienable right, Haag shows, was the result of a concerted effort by gun industrialists to ship as many guns as possible to turn a buck.
The stories from the gun industry’s early attempts to create markets for repeating arms sometimes sound like the stuff of movie fiction: one tale involved a harrowing stagecoach journey out of Mexico in 1866 following a lucrative sale, a trip that couldn’t have been more exciting if Indiana Jones had been involved … Pamela Haag’s history, though, takes an interesting approach as she lays out the backdrop of the early days of the gun in America. Her thread through the stories of multiple manufacturers and their wares, is the Winchester empire, because it contains a unique personality … Pamela Haag’s detailed history of America’s gun culture is as colorful as it is surprising.
