Ebook The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture

Ebook The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture

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

Ebook The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture

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Review

"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."―Boston Globe"[An] inspired new book... Haag's book is strongest when it upends the belief that America has had an uninterrupted love affair with guns."―San Francisco Chronicle"[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."―Carlos Lozada, Washington Post"A revealing new account of the origins of America's gun industry."―New York Review of Books"[A] fascinating account.... Both convincingly argued and eminently readable, Haag's book will intrigue readers on all sides of the gun control debate."―Publishers Weekly, "starred review""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.... [A] beautifully composed and meticulously researched volume."―New Republic"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"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

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About the Author

Pamela Haag holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale University. Her work on a diverse range of topics has appeared in many venues such as American Scholar, NPR, Slate, and the Times (London).

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Product details

Hardcover: 528 pages

Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (April 19, 2016)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0465048951

ISBN-13: 978-0465048953

Product Dimensions:

6.5 x 1.6 x 9.5 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

2.7 out of 5 stars

56 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#184,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This review was published in The Weekly Standard August 1, 2016Pamela Haag calls gun makers “merchants of death.” And America’s love affair with guns, she says, didn’t really start until the late 1800s, when the “merchants of death” convinced Americans that they wanted guns. She describes how gun makers were innovators in advertising, using promotional materials to lure Americans into buying firearms, even deploying skilled marksmen and trick-shot artists to show off the guns.Haag’s story centers around the Winchester family, famous for its rifles, and she focuses on two members of the family: Oliver Winchester, who started the company, and Sarah Winchester, his daughter-in-law, who was supposedly haunted by her family’s “blood fortune” and experienced an “enormous, haunting debt of guilt.”The Gunning of America, however, is an advocacy book, not a history book, and Haag carefully selects her facts and gives readers a biased presentation of history. She tells us, for example, that Winchester gun sales soared from 9,800 in 1875 to 292,400 in 1914. But 1914 makes for a convenient end-year: The First World War had begun in July, and Winchester increased production to provide guns for the British and Canadian armies. (In 1875, the company was only selling two types of rifles.) Total gun sales did increase over that period; but a lot of that came from cheaper guns, many produced in Europe—a fact that doesn’t fit Haag’s story of easily duped buyers.Indeed, little evidence is provided that Sarah Winchester actually disliked guns. Yet if she really hated guns so much, there’s a lot she could have done to prevent their sale. Oliver Winchester died in 1880, Sarah’s husband William died in 1881, and by then, Sarah owned 50 percent of the stock in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Until her death in 1922, over 40 years when gun sales were exploding, Sarah could have done anything she wanted with Winchester Repeating Arms. So if she really hated guns, why didn’t she sell her stock or move the company away from gun manufacturing? Haag fails to note that Sarah Winchester ended up controlling half the company stock; all she tells us is that Sarah owned 7.8 percent of Winchester stock while her father-in-law was still alive.Sarah Winchester did struggle with depression, and Haag attributes this to guilt largely caused by being in the business of making and selling guns. But it is equally possible that Sarah was depressed because she suffered numerous stillbirths and her only child to survive birth would live for just one month. One fact not mentioned by Haag is that, until Sarah’s death at age 82, she kept various items that she had bought for her expected children.Haag also tries to revive two claims made by the disgraced historian Michael A. Bellesiles. In Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000), Bellesiles asserted that probate records showed gun ownership was rare in pre-Civil War America, arguing that “the gun industrialist .'.'. was crucial to the development of the commercial market.” But Professor Bellesiles had falsified his probate data and, as a result, Alfred A. Knopf stopped publishing the book and an investigation commissioned by his university concluded he had committed fraud.Haag also selectively references probate records from the pre-revolutionary era to argue that guns were not commonly owned in early America. According to the numbers she reports, there was an estimated low in Massachusetts of 37 percent of wills mentioning guns to a high of 62 percent in the South. But she ignores other studies that show higher rates, as well as the fact that these records provide only a partial account of gun ownership. She also mentions current gun-ownership rates, claiming that they have been falling in recent decades, according to the General Social Survey and Pew Research Center. But surveys by Gallup, ABC News/Washington Post, and CNN have found no decline. Haag offers no explanation for picking only the two surveys that support her thesis, nor does she mention concerns that these surveys systematically miss gun owners.Let us assume, however, that Haag is correct that gun ownership has recently fallen. Is this because gun makers have lost their marketing prowess? No answer is provided, and her treatment of current gun-control debates is filled with errors. She claims that the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act “prohibits civil liability actions against gun manufacturers, distributors, or dealers for damages caused by their products.” But that is false: Gun makers can be sued if they fail to do background checks or sell to someone who doesn’t pass the check or if any reasonable conclusion can be drawn that the buyer intended to commit a crime.The best history books grapple with opposing evidence and alternative explanations, arguing why one interpretation makes more sense than another. But in The Gunning of America, Pamela Haag simply ignores inconvenient facts.

I gave up on this book after a couple of chapters. There is an important story to be told here. But what this book needed was a competent editor. How many times do I need to be told, in the first couple chapters, that the European countries that now condemn America for its gun culture, were the ones who kept the first American gun producers from going bankrupt, because there was no market for their guns here at home, but there was in Europe because of all the European wars? Four? Five? More? I wanted to shout to the author, " OK! I got that! Can we move on?"There are other instances of the same sort of repetition, the same points stated over and over again. Kind of like I'm doing here, stating the fact that the same facts are repeatedly repeated. It felt like tires spinning in a rut.

This is a meticulously researched book detailing the history of America's gun industry. It nicely puts the origins of the disproportionate presence of guns in today's America in the context of 19th century marketing strategies. What gives the book a drag though is the fact that its protagonists do not have the depth to carry the story through 500+ pages. Colt, Winchester et al. are, when all is said and done, just set of fairly common examples of mid-19th century capitalism. None of them contributed to the design of the products they sold, but their business acumen is admirable. Unfortunately for the book, the one-dimensionality of their personalities makes this book, as another reviewer remarked, quite a slog to get through.

I finished this book about two weeks ago, so this seems like a good time to provide a brief review. I found the book to be engaging and full of things that were new to me; I'm not an authority on guns or the markets for guns. Dr. Haag made extensive use of previously unused archival material, thus providing a fresh look at the gun business, especially from the supply side of the market.. She convinced me that new advertising approaches were essential to ensure that the huge outputs of firms like Winchester and Colt were purchased. These companies realized that in order to escape the war-driven demand for guns, they had to develop consumer demand. The Winchester approach of distributing guns widely was a central element.The tale of two Winchesters is one of Oliver, who founded the company and drove its success, and Sarah, the daughter-in-law who seems to have been traumatized by the death-based wealth she inherited. The intersecting stories of Oliver and Sarah emerged organically over the course of the book. At end, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company developed dramatically and excessively during WWI, and Sarah continually worked on what is now known as the "Winchester Mystery House" (https://www.amazon.com/Winchester-Designed-California-Historical-Landmark/dp/096569920X/). Learning about the house, in itself, was worth reading the book.I'm glad I read the book. It provided a glimpse into the development of gun culture in the U.S., the role played by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and how it seems to have affected one person in particular. No doubt there are flaws in the book--all books have them--but it has many strengths, too.

Interesting read as to the historical background of the 2nd Amendment to the NRA and how the arms industry struggled over the decades to stay in business. This is a historical overview as opposed to a "point of view" favoring one position or another.

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