Armed for Freedom

ED: Today on the show, we’re exploring the history of guns in the United States. Who has them, and who wants them. The United States has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world, nearly one privately owned firearm for every man woman or child.

BRIAN: In the past month, the question of how those guns should be regulated has sparked National debate. In the aftermath of the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama promised to make gun violence a central issue of his second term.

Just last week, he unveiled new gun control proposals, including universal background checks. The NRA hit it back hard saying, the way to prevent school shootings is not to restrict gun ownership, but to get more guns in the hands of the right people.

PETER: Americans of all political stripes are wrestling with one big question. Who should and should not have access to guns? So in this hour of BackStory, that’s the question we’ll be pushing back through the centuries.

ED: What did that debate look like in the years after the Civil War, when new kinds of guns were flooding the North and the South? What did it look like 100 years later, when black activists were using terms like, by any means necessary? And yes, what did it look like in the founding generation, to those guys who actually came up with that whole business about the right to bear arms?

BRIAN: It’s pretty hard to talk about gun ownership today, without somebody bringing up the Second Amendment. That’s the one that says that a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. These days, people tend to focus on the last part of a sense, the right to bear arms. But what about the beginning? What was that whole business about the militia?

ED: You may remember from your history books that it was the members of the Massachusetts militia, the Minutemen, who fought the first battle of the American Revolution. And that was prompted by British soldiers trying to take some of their weapons. Well, militias were amateur armies, organized first by the Colonial governments, and then later by the states of the new nation.

The Constitution would later give Congress the power to arm the militia. And the basic idea was, that male citizens over a certain age were required to report for duty, periodically, and to do so with guns in hand.

BRIAN: So how easy would it have been for Colonists to get their hands on a gun? Peter put that question to Kevin Sweeney, a historian at Amherst College, who has researched gun ownership going all the way back to the 1600s.

KEVIN SWEENEY: There are a couple of actual musters, they’re called, from Virginia in 1619, and again in 1624, ’25. In both of those cases, there are more firearms in the colony then there are males over 16.

PETER: Wow!

KEVIN SWEENEY: And it doesn’t mean each one of these males over 16 own one. But there are enough firearms around that in case of an emergency, each one could possess one.

PETER: Right. So the 17th century seems something like a Golden Age of gun ownership and gun use.

KEVIN SWEENEY: Well, in terms of widespread, they seemed to have been widely armed. But not necessarily well armed. I mean by these weapons of the 1600s were not that reliable, they were inclined to misfire or foul. And early on, it’s clear that not many of these colonists were necessarily Daniel Boones in the making.

They probably spent a lot of their time in non-military ways shooting at birds on the ground. Basically, you’d get as close as you could on the ground, and shoot, kind of, scatter-shot at them. Probably not a lot of hunting of particularly animals like deer. They frequently employed Native Americans to do that.

PETER: So, Kevin, let’s move toward, back toward Concord, and Lexington, and the Minutemen. Where are we on the eve of the American Revolution? And in terms of the militias, how well armed are they?

KEVIN SWEENEY: It’s best to maybe just take a slight step back to the 1750s, during what we know as the French and Indian War, because that’s really a turning point in terms of both military organization, and the understanding of what were appropriate types of firearms to have in the possession of militia men at the time.

For years, you’d been able to show up with anything in most militia musters. It didn’t even have to work, as long as it looked like it could. But when you’re sending troops into the field, you want them with appropriate arms. And by this period– and this is true going into the Revolution, as well, 20 years later in the 1770s– they want, increasingly, a military-grade musket.

This would be a much heavier weapon. It was sturdier, rugged. They’re also, not necessarily, a weapon you’d want to own. It’s not a hunting weapon. But increasingly, this is what the governments felt you had to have in the field. So going into the American Revolution, these Colonial governments, the rebelling governments, scrambled to come up with weapons that they felt met those criteria.

PETER: So, Kevin, the important point you’re making, it seems to me, is that all guns are not created equal. And the kind of guns that were important in the French and Indian War, and later the American Revolution, were, as you say, for offensive use. And it was very unlikely that the average family would have such a weapon.

KEVIN SWEENEY: Yes. And, Jefferson, who spend probably the worst year of his life as Governor of Virginia in 1780, trying to defend the state and into ’81, comments on the fact that, yeah, people have firearms and shotguns for controlling vermin, I think he said, or animals and things like that. But they don’t have rugged, military quality weapons you could put a bayonet on.

And this is what you want to have, particularly if you’re taken half seriously while facing professional British forces. So one of the interesting things at the Constitutional Convention, when they’re explaining that clause about the power of Congress to organize, discipline, and arm the militia, Madison says, what you mean by arm?

And initially, Rufus King of Massachusetts says, well, to specify the caliber and characteristics of the weapons. And Madison comes back and he clearly want someone to arm them. And this comes up at the Virginia Ratifying Convention for the Constitution.

They are concerned about the militia being disarmed, but their concern is someone else won’t arm them. It’s not that somebody is going to come around and knock on doors and take away their guns, it’s the state government’s not going to get these guys guns, or sell them guns at affordable levels.

PETER: Yeah, that’s a terrific point. It’s been great talking with you about the history, the complicated history, of guns in early America. Thanks, so much.

KEVIN SWEENEY: I very much enjoyed it. Thank you for the opportunity.

ED: That’s Kevin Sweeney, he’s a Professor of History at Amherst College.

BRIAN: It’s time for short break. When we come back, what the right to bear arms meant for blacks in the 1860s and the 1960s.

PETER: We’ll be back in a minute with more BackStory.