Of Arms and Men: "Arming America" and Military History

Abstract

N Arming America, Michael A. Bellesiles has undertaken to use the past to reform the present.1 He asks why the United States is the most violent of industrialized nations-why the American people are so tolerant of the guns that kill thousands of their fellow citizens each year. A principal reason, he says, is that Americans believe guns and violence are an immutable (p. 5) part of their heritage, that there is nothing they can do to change a gun culture that was established with the first permanent English settlements in the New World nearly four hundred years ago. Such a perception is, he argues, not only inaccurate (the United States did not develop a culture of guns and violence until after the Civil War) but also obstructive of efforts to curb our violent ways. A large part of Bellesiles's argument rests on his reading of AngloAmerican military history, a reading that minimizes the importance of guns, militia, and warfare during the colonial and early national periods of the United States. According to Bellesiles, firearms were not well suited to American warfare before the Civil War. The smoothbore mus-