MICHAEL A. BELLESILES
(Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture)
The image of early America where the new nation’s men were all skilled marksmen with a rifle was a myth as this quotation shows. It took much more skill to maintain and use a rifle as opposed to a musket. There were few gun makers in America at the time, and it was very difficult to rifle a steel barrel. As a result, rifles were quite expensive and few could afford them.
The guns of the time were not very accurate, unreliable, heavy, and took a long time to load. The Colonial Indians generally did not give up their traditional weapons but added the gun to their bows, arrows, hatchets, and knives.
Actually, despite thr myth, guns in Erly America were so expensive that only a minority could afford them.
Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is a discredited 2000 book by historian Michael A. Bellesiles about American gun culture, an expansion of a 1996 article he published in the Journal of American History. Bellesiles, then a professor at Emory University, used fabricated research to argue that during the early period of US history, guns were uncommon during peacetime and that a culture of gun ownership did not arise until the mid-nineteenth century.
