Armed America by Clayton Cramer ~ Book Review

Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie by Clayton E. Cramer 300 pages, published in 2006 by Nelson Current.  Currently available at Barnes & Noble for $17.99 paperback and $7.49 ebook.

In 1996, a professor of history at Emory University, Michael A. Bellesiles, published a paper in the Journal of American History which upended traditional thought on guns in American history. The paper claimed guns were not common in the colonial period or in the early Republic, at least before the Mexican War. It was marketed by Samuel Colt, and inexpensive firearms after the Civil War pushed inexpensive firearms onto the market. White on White violence was low in the absence of firearms.  Four years later, Bellesiles published a book with the same theme: Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.  From Armed America:

Throughout American History , opined Bellesiles, the militia was ineffective; in the Colonial Period, the government tightly regulated gun ownership and use; guns were very scarce before 1840; there was essentially no civilian market for handguns before 1848; violence between whites was rare; few Americans hunted until the 1830s when members of the upper class sought to imitate their British equivalents. 

Clayton E. Cramer was working on his master’s thesis on concealed weapons regulation in the early Republic when the paper came out. It did not comport with his research, at least in the South. When the Bellesiles book was published, Cramer was mystified. Where were the sources Bellesiles claimed to have found, that reversed the understanding of Cramer and generations of historians before him?  Cramer had read many of the sources Bellesiles used from the early Republic.

Cramer started checking the original sources. Not only did the sources not say what Bellesiles claimed they said, often they said the opposite of what Bellesiles claimed in his book.

Those who wish the population disarmed were overjoyed. The individual right to arms was fiction. In 2001, Bellesiles was awarded the Bancroft Prize (the highest award for an American History Book)!?

It was a pack of lies.

Clayton Cramer became a prominent critic among many others, who pointed out the fraud at the heart of Bellesiles’ “Arming America”. Eventually, Bellesiles resigned his tenured position. Columbia University did the unthinkable: they revoked the Bancroft Prize and asked Bellesiles to return the prize money. 

Armed America is the book Clayton Cramer wrote to show the real history of how common firearms were in colonial America and in the early Republic. It is an academic work but reads with an easy familiarity. There are 35 pages of notes detailing the original sources for the information. The scholarship is extremely well done. The book travels from guns in the colonial era to guns in the hands of the Indian tribes to militias, hunting, and the ubiquity of firearms in the accounts of travelers in the early Republic. Sadly, violence was not rare among Whites.  It was common and commonly remarked upon.

The book is well worth reading as a resource to understand the American love affair with firearms and to show how those who wish a disarmed population are willing to lie, and to fraudulently revise history in an Orwellian fashion to obtain their objective.

About Dean Weingarten:

Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.