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

Pamela Haag, Bernadette Dunne

eAudio - 2016

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... more