Gunsmithing Quotes

Plantng tobacco was a much more lucrative endeavour than fixing guns so many gunsmiths abandned that trade for tobacco farming.

The great cowboy gunslinger was much a myth in that the few that were very good shots became legends. The best shots in America generally were the hunters of small game like Annie Oakley and the military and sportsmen who studied the gun and practiced endlessly. Almost all were in the Midwest and East. In the case of Oakley, she learned to shoot small game for food in rural Ohio. Her first shooting contest was not on the frontier but in the big city of Cincinnati.

The Factory had been established by the State of Virginia in 1775 to make guns. America filled with armed Americans in the Colonial era was a myth. Early America was not a gun culture. Guns were expensive, needed maintenance, took too long to reload, and were not as effective for most purposes as other weapons like hatchets and knives. American Colonial war was mostly hand to hand combat with relatively little shooting. Less than one fourth of the men joining Washington’s army owned guns. Gun factories could not survive for want of customers and gunsmiths went into other occupations. See {613052}. With the rebellion, it was critical to manufacture guns to arm the soldiers who had not their own. But the efforts like this were relatively feeble. The factory director who made not a single gun in over a year was then promoted to Commissary General of Munitions in the Continental Army. He was married to George Washington’s sister. He did however finance much of the munitions he procured with his own personal funds so made up in wealth and patriotism what he lacked in manufacturing skill.

This quotation illustrates the fact that there was, contrary to popular myth, no gun culture in Colonial America. Few Americans could afford guns which cost 2 to 3 months wages of a skilled worker. And there were few guns available as there was not a single gun manufacturer in Colonial America. Gunsmiths would come over from England and find that business was terrible as most Americans did not own guns and they were not part of the culture other than the fact that they were status symbols as they were so costly. The gunsmiths would find that they could do better economically by farming and left their trade. Meanwhile, the legislature, like most in America at the time was concerned that if there were trouble with the Indians there would not be enough guns for defense. The guns then were in frequent need of repairs and there were too few gunsmiths. Thus the law. It didn’t work and so in 1662 they tried tax exemptions for gunsmiths which also didn’t work and they went back to fines.