This book was a necessary response to fraudster Michael Bellesiles' tendentious "Arming America", where Bellesiles deliberately misinterpreted historical data to claim that guns weren't common in early America. Clayton Cramer was one of the historians who uncovered Bellesiles' fraud, and wrote this book to set the record straight.

However, this book isn't just a refutation of Bellesiles. It's also an entertaining slice of early American history in its own right. Just like other books which focus on foods, this book is a "vertical history" (though shorter than many) focusing on guns over a 200-plus year slice of American history. To show that guns were common throughout the period, Cramer covers a wide variety of conflicts, from Indian wars to slave revolts to political conflict within the colonies to interpersonal conflicts between the colonists. This results in a rather broad coverage of social and political history of a period that normally gets glossed over - most school history skips from 1622 (when the Indians bailed out the Plymouth colonists) to 1756 (when the French and Indian Wars started) with just a paragraph or two reciting who established each colony and why. Due to the focus of this book, it doesn't provide broad coverage of the history of that time, but it does a lot more than most. The book also continues into the Revolutionary War, where one gets a better sense of the logistics of the war (for the battle buff, the period is otherwise well-covered, of course) as Cramer tracks down how the Continental Army and its supporting militias armed themselves. The last part of the book tracks guns through the Early Republic period, and doesn't shy away from noticing that much use of the militia away from the frontier was in chasing down escaped and rebelling slaves, but shows that militias, and guns, had far more uses than those.

Given the circumstances surrounding the writing of this book, it's understandable that it refers back to Bellesiles' book (and earlier paper) to specifically contradict the claims made. However, this would be a stronger book if all the material referring to Bellesiles and "Arming America" were tucked away in a foreword or afterword, leaving the history to stand on its own, and allowing those who are interested in the controversy to look it all up in one place without interrupting the narrative flow of this fascinating history. ( )

Clayton Cramer, who should go work on his Ph.D., has written a thickly referenced book about how guns have always been a part of American culture. Marshaling a vast array of evidence, from wills, first-hand accounts, government reports, and even archaeology, Cramer proves that guns were commonly held objects, and that indeed there was a "gun culture," complete with violence, before 1848.

What's the point? Isn't this common knowledge? Well, no. In 1996, a historian (though I shouldn't use that word, as he has fallen from the light), a writer, named Michael A. Bellesiles wrote an article in the Journal of American History that claimed guns were NOT common before the Mexican War. His 2000 book, Arming America continued the theme. According to Bellesiles, hunting, violence, and guns were uncommon in America, and the Second Amendment to the US Constitution thus guarantees no individual right to keep and bear arms. Of course, liberals who hate guns loved the book, and praised it. Problem was, Bellesiles was a hack. He fudged numbers, he ignored quotes, he selected quotes (often out of context) that aided his cause, and, this is the kicker, he supposedly looked at California records that disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake.

Cramer's book points out that this is all bunk. It is sad that this book even had to be written, which is why it is sometimes dull. Cramer has to beat a dead horse because Bellesiles implied that the horse never existed. Your blinders have to be on to come out of this book thinkng that guns were not common in colonial America and the Early Republic. Still, I wish Cramer had spent a chapter at least, instead of a few references here and there, actually refuting, point by point, the inaccuracies of Bellesiles's book, but, all in all, a good effort. A tad dry, though there are some interesting primary sources scattered about. ( )