The Gunning of America

Business and the Making of American Gun Culture

By: Pamela Haag

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

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 from 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 and marketing techniques to create new markets for their product. Guns have never "sold themselves"; rather, through advertising and innovative distribution campaigns, the gun industry did.

Through the meticulous examination of gun-industry archives, Haag challenges the myth of a primal bond between Americans and their firearms. Over the course of its 150-year history, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company sold over eight million guns. But Oliver Winchester - a shirtmaker in his previous career - had no apparent qualms about a life spent arming America. His daughter-in-law, Sarah Winchester, was a different story. Legend holds that Sarah was haunted by what she considered a vast blood fortune and became convinced that the ghosts of rifle victims were haunting her.

In this provocative and deeply researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America and, in so doing, explodes the clichés that have created and sustained our lethal gun culture.

©2016 Pamela Haag (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Not as complete as one would hope.

The author starts out apolitical and neutral on the history of gun manufacturing in the US . This is really the history of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, not the other companies such as Colt, S&W, one mention of Marlin. The history basically stops in the 1920s and becomes a gun control rant.

The book at points becomes a women's studies course on Sara Winchester and her spiritualism (probably would be "white guilt" also).To much of the book is about Sara Winchester.

This is what you get from a Yale history professor.

Interesting but all over the place

The topic is certainly relevant and interesting. However the book is all over the place. I think the book would have been better served by starting with the epilogue, and sticking to the sales and marketing tactics used by the gun industry with more emphasis on the nra and its tactics. The Sarah Winchester story was dragged out well past being interesting.

Great Read!

I started reading this 2 days before the Uvalde school shooting. It helped diffuse a lot of the anger I had because of the shooting. I was blaming the police and the politicians. It didn't cross my mind to think of the gun businesses that make the guns. Hopefully we can start getting together as a nation and start putting pressure on the gun manufacturers to do something.

Chapter 23 sums up our current gun issues

This book focuses on how capitalists wanted all Americans to think they need to buy a gun. Also gives excellent background on capilatists being gun runners and merchants of death. We did not get to our current gun issues by chance. Study the history.

Very subjective, lots of speculation, many inaccuracies

The author has a clearly very anti-firearm stance, and this is evident throughout the book. There is also a large amount of speculation in the text, particularly around Sarah Winchester. It is evident throughout the book that she has a clearly very subjective anti-firearms stance and the arguments that she uses to back up that stance are largely inconsistent and contradictory. Furthermore, the author insists on calling lever action rifles ‘semi-automatic’ - even after discussing in detail how they operate. The book is hyper-focused around the early history of the Winchester company and Sarah Winchester’s life. Discussion of ‘gun culture’ only covers the last few chapters and, as a result, glosses over the last 100 years of history.

Overall it was an interesting read for the history, but it does not live up to it’s title in any way. The immense amount of basic errors, which could be remedied by a five minute google search, call the rest of the text into question. If you are looking for a book that takes a critical look at this complex topic, you won’t find it in this read.

So much potential…wasted

There is good content in this book. But it has two fundamental problems.

1) The author spends nearly half the book speculating about a character that plays a very minor role in the overall history. There not a lot of substance but just a lot of “she may have” and “perhaps she thought,” etc.

2) the book seems to be written for a mass audience, but the author can’t resist writing as if this were for academia. Convoluted sentences. Unnecessary big words. Tons of extensive quoting from sources she likes.

In short, whoever edited this book failed at their task. I was excited to read a history of the gun industry, Instead I struggled through one of the most poorly written books I have read in a long time.

All that being said, it does contain some interesting insights into the history of the gun business in America. The question is: is the juice worth the squeeze?