Gun Ownership in Early America

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In the article “Gun Ownership in Early America: A Survey of Manuscript Militia Returns” by Robert Churchill, he discusses how gun ownership in the early 18th and 19th centuries was scarce and at times the armed militias were the only people who had guns at all. It was because of this that the government made gun ownership exceptional. This is different from today when gun ownership is everywhere. Due to the high concentration of guns sometimes it is hard to count how many are sold in the United States every year. To learn that guns, at one time, were almost non-existent is almost hard to believe. In the article, the author talks about Michael Bellesiles a historian who first wrote on gun ownership in America in 1996. Bellesiles was the first to find that gun ownership in early colonial times through the late 19th century was scarce. Up till this article many historians thought that gun were abundant. Bellesiles article to them was controversial. Most people, myself included, have always thought that guns were always of high abundance. This is what the media and history has always taught, to read this article and find that guns were “scarce” was unbelievable. America has always been about guns, you see it on TV, in movies, video games, everywhere one looks they see a gun. It makes one wonder what it would have been like to live back then to see what it was like to live in a world with few weapons. One would think that gun violence would have been non-existent unlike now when it is everywhere. The author also discusses how during the period of the revolution through the war of 1812, all state governments demanded that all militia members give detailed reports on their military readiness. These reports were know more accurately a... ... middle of paper ... ... what gun ownership in the 18th and 19th centuries was like. In some ways it was better than it is today, but on the other hand if one did not have the weapons we have today, they would have no way of protecting themselves from intruders and those who mean them harm. Gun ownership is a good thing, but it needs to be regulated so violent crimes like Sandy Hook don’t happen. It seems that a lot of what Bellesiles saw as gun scarcity was actually the absence of census data that was not accounted for when the militia men were assembled. If one were able to find all census data from those centuries it would likely show that guns were more prevalent than first thought. Works Cited Churchill, R. Gun Ownership in Early America: A Survey of Manuscript Militia Returns. 2003. The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 60, No. 3. Retrieved March 21, 2014.

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