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The Gunning of America
Pamela Haag
Business and the Making of American Gun Culture
Basic Books
April 2016
On Sale: April 19, 2016
528 pages
ISBN: 0465048951
EAN: 9780465048953
Kindle: B0181NKJSA
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was
forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the
Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional
relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed
than the citizens of any other nation. Or so we’re told. In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns
this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues,
developed not because the gun was exceptional, but precisely
because it was not: guns proliferated in America because
throughout most of the nation’s history, they were perceived
as an unexceptional commodity, no different than buttons or
typewriters. Focusing on the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms
Company, one of the most iconic arms manufacturers in
America, Haag challenges many basic assumptions of how and
when America became a gun culture. Under the leadership of
Oliver Winchester and his heirs, the company used
aggressive, sometimes ingenious sales and marketing
techniques to create new markets for their product. Guns
have never “sold themselves”; rather, through advertising
and innovative distribution campaigns, the gun industry did.
Through the meticulous examination of gun industry archives,
Haag challenges the myth of a primal bond between Americans
and their firearms. Over the course of its 150 year history, the Winchester
Repeating Arms Company sold over 8 million guns. But Oliver
Winchester—a shirt-maker in his previous career—had no
apparent qualms about a life spent 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 were haunting her. She channeled much of her
inheritance, and her conflicted conscience, into a monstrous
estate now known as the Winchester Mystery House, where she
sought refuge from this ever-expanding army of phantoms. In this provocative and deeply-researched work of narrative
history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in
America, and in so doing explodes the cliches that have
created and sustained our lethal gun culture.
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