The Gunning of America

Boston Globe 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... Against the popularized notion that guns were central to the making of America, Haag offers a powerful counter-narrative... One book will not settle the long-running gun debate, but Haag has powerfully reframed the issue as one rooted in dollars and sense, not the Second Amendment and inalienable rights... Her historical sense...is brilliantly on display in these pages. New Republic 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. Backed by vast research in the company archives of Winchester, Colt, and other manufacturers, her book is a mixture of analysis and close-focus biography of the many sturdy and sometimes strange early Americans who rode to wealth on the back of firearms... [A] beautifully composed and meticulously researched volume. San Francisco Chronicle [An] inspired new book... Haag's book is strongest when it upends the belief that America has had an uninterrupted love affair with guns. Times Literary Supplement (UK) Haag excels in decoding the succession of commercial promotions that helped to produce gun exceptionalism... [B]y tracing the evolution of advertising campaigns, she pinpoints how guns found their way into each corner of everyday life Maclean's, (Canada) [A] detailed and devastating history... Haag deftly deconstructs the idea that guns have always been central to American identity. Adam Winkler, WashingtonPost.com Haag uses the remarkable story of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to illustrate how American gun manufacturers remade America's gun culture. In pursuit of sales, Winchester and other companies marketed their products as tools of empowerment. This effort, launched in the 19th century, transformed a mundane object into a potent symbol of American liberty and kick-started the modern gun rights movement. Carlos Lozada, Washington Post on Twitter This book makes the best case I've read on holding gun manufacturers responsible for gun violence. David W. Blight, Class of '54 Professor of American History at Yale, and author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory The American gun industry taught the country to love guns. This fascinating and disturbing book is a riveting history of the men and families that made the guns that made America's gun culture. Pamela Haag shows conclusively that this country's tragic obsession with guns is not part of our political origins, or our constitutional and moral DNA; it is the result of marketing and industrial capitalism. Our gun culture was made, not found; it emerged less from creativity than from cold pursuits of profit. The fortunes made selling guns had nothing to do with the Second Amendment. Good history like this will not be read by the politicians and lobbyists who sustain the gun manufacturers today, but it should be. John Mack Faragher, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History, Yale 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. Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University 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. Publishers Weekly, Starred Review [A] fascinating account... Both convincingly argued and eminently readable, Haag's book will intrigue readers on all sides of the gun control debate. Bookforum Pamela Haag's careful history aims to debunk the whole myth of gun exceptionalism in America... She reminds us that early American attitudes toward guns were far more prosaic than heroic...[and] that modern age 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's account also challenges the notion that the manufacture of guns in the country has always had to keep pace with robust demand. She convincingly demonstrates that early twentieth-century gun makers set out to create a series of myths around guns and sell them to the public by reimagining them as an indispensable adjunct to American liberty... Haag also unearths another inventive breakthrough engineered by the early twentieth century's mass-merchandisers of the gun: the discovery of a new type of consumer...dubbed the 'gun crank.' Kirkus A refreshingly unusual approach. Carlos Lozada, Washington Post [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... Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders sparred over [the repeal of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act] in March...[They] could do no better than to read The Gunning of America to understand the history behind this argument and, as Haag puts it, to 'ponder the virtue, and the terror, of feeling more conscientiously or spiritually complicit than is required by contract, economy, law, or society.' New York Review of Books A revealing new account of the origins of America's gun industry.