First Freedom Page 26
On January 6, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, who would be assassinated later that year, spoke to a class at University of Buffalo Law School. “I think it is a terrible indictment of the National Rifle Association,” he said, “that they haven’t supported any legislation to try and control the misuse of rifles and pistols in this country.”8 In the March 1968 edition of the NRA magazine American Rifleman, an associate editor, Alan Webber, answered Kennedy’s charge, listing a number of legislative efforts the organization had supported over the years, including the NFA. This piece has often been brought up by critics of the Second Amendment to claim that groups like the NRA had once had a far more pliable conception of the Second Amendment and were open to limiting individual ownership.
The truth is more complicated and, in many ways, explains the modern gun debate. For one, although the NRA had certainly been open to stricter laws concerning machine guns and dealers, the historical evidence suggests that Webber had likely overemphasized the NRA’s support for gun control legislation. More importantly, however, Second Amendment advocates had indeed been forced to change their political tactics and mission by the 1970s. Gun control advocates had dramatically changed theirs.
The National Rifle Association had continued concentrating on its rifle clubs and marksmanship programs through the first half of the 1900s. With a tremendous upswing in hunting, its membership grew and it would become the premier organization for gun owners. In the 1930s, the NRA formed a legislative division to periodically update its members on goings-on in Washington. In the 1950s, the organization began teaming with law enforcement departments in shooting drills and safety lessons. The NRA did not oppose the NFA and argued that those who abused gun ownership should be fully punished. Its president, Karl Frederick, in fact, would testify in front of Congress in the middle of the crime scare of the 1930s, contending, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”9
As far as firearms went, there was precious little on the legislative front in subsequent years. In the end, the NRA did not oppose the Gun Control Act of 1968, a law that established a system to federally license gun dealers and set restrictions on particular categories and classes of firearms. But it did successfully oppose the most invasive elements of the legislation: namely, a mandated federal registry for guns and licensing for all gun carriers. Still, many members, seeing a slippery slope, did not approve. They were soon proved right. New laws were not being enacted to punish rogue gun owners but rather to make it increasingly difficult for anyone in an urban area to own a gun. And in 1971, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms shot and paralyzed longtime NRA member Kenyon Ballew in a Washington suburb—they claimed Ballew was suspected of possessing illegal weapons (none were found)—many co-members saw it as a portent that government agencies would abuse gun control laws to target peaceful Americans.
The NRA would have to make a choice. It could remain solely a hunting, marksmanship, and safety group, or it could embrace the growing activist wing and push back against emerging gun control regulations. By the mid-1970s it seemed as if the organization had made a choice. More than seventy of the most vociferous gun rights advocates in the organization were fired during the early part of the decade. And in 1976 the NRA board decided to move the organization headquarters from Washington to Colorado.
So at the 1977 NRA convention in Cincinnati, there was something of a coup as the politically minded advocates wrested the organization from the traditional wing. Many of today’s gun control advocates like to point to the “Cincinnati revolt” as the moment when radicals took over the movement, undermining true gun owners who weren’t interested in politics. More likely, the shift was merely a reflection of a growing inclination among gun owners at the time. The NRA was best positioned to take the lead on gun issues. If not, there would almost certainly have been another advocacy group—and many would emerge during these years—that would have taken its place. The gun control debate had changed, but not the gun owners. From 1977 to 1983, the NRA would more than double its membership.10
Two things happened as the modern gun control debate evolved in the second half of the twentieth century. The first was a renewed interest in gun ownership. Just as gun restrictionists began attaining political power, many Americans romanticized the guns of the past—and began talking about the ideals that made them important in the first place. In the 1950s, for example, there would be a huge upsurge of interest in sport hunting, target shooting, and competitive shooting. Whereas North American gun culture was born of idealism and necessity, the modern American was far more inclined to want guns for recreation and home defense. But postwar culture would also be infatuated with the Wild West, the Kentucky rifle, and America’s founding—and guns were embedded in all of it.
The bigger gun manufacturers initially failed to capitalize on this opportunity to cash in on the trend, but upstarts filled the market gap. Men like Brooklynite William B. Ruger. Born in 1916, Ruger became interested in firearms at an early age. Plagued by respiratory problems, he was sent to upstate New York, where he developed a passion for mechanical devices, especially guns. “I remember seeing them in store windows and they looked so beautiful, particularly the Savage 99 and the Winchester lever action,” he reminisced. “The mechanics were so artistically designed—they absolutely thrilled me. I associate them with great adventure and great art.”11
Back in Brooklyn, the young man began disassembling these pieces of art and then rebuilding them. He was so obsessed with guns that in his spare time, he toured firearm manufacturing plants in nearby Connecticut and headed to the library and consumed engineering textbooks.
Ruger attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but after two years he got married, had a child, and dropped out. With no real job and few prospects, the inventor began making pistol prototypes and shopping them around. Ruger’s homemade inventions received a lukewarm reception from most of the big gun companies. However, in 1939, on a trip to Washington, he showed some U.S. Army engineers a homemade lever-action hunting rifle that he had converted into a gas-operated semiautomatic. Duly impressed, the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in Springfield sent him a letter offering him a staff position as a designer.12
There, Ruger shined, and for the first time exhibited his independent streak by quitting to invent a light machine gun of his own design. By 1940, Ruger was working on gas-powered military-grade guns for Auto-Ordnance. “When I first learned the principles under which machine guns functioned, I was just fascinated,” he explained. “I was almost like a little kid finding out how a steam engine or internal combustion engine works.” But the war was coming to an end, and so was the immediate need for a light machine gun.
It was getting back to basics that would allow Ruger to compete with traditional gun giants. After the war, Ruger set up a small shop in Southport, Connecticut. Like many postwar gun manufacturers, he struggled at first, turning to the consumer products that were in great demand at the time to keep his company afloat. “One of their first big postwar projects was an automatic changing record player. I went in and made a bid on producing some of the components, and I got a big order from them,” Ruger would recall.13 Yet his virtuosity was in making guns. In the late 1940s, the budding inventor had gotten his hands on a Japanese Nambu pistol that had found its way back from the Pacific theater. Ruger used the semiautomatic pistol—which looked like the more famous German Luger: thin barrel and boxy single-piece frame—as a template for his new sporting pistol design.
While Ruger was excited about the prospects of his project, he still lacked the necessary capital to manufacture. That is, until 1949, when a Yale graduate and new friend of Ruger’s named Alexander Sturm invested a modest $50,000 of his family’s fortune into the newly christened Sturm, Ruger & Co. (Sturm, who had a keen interest in heraldry, would also design the company’s famous G
ermanic eagle, a trademark that fooled many consumers who bought the Luger-like gun into thinking the company was German.)
The duo’s first product—a low-cost .22-caliber recreational rimfire pistol that mirrored the aesthetics of the Nambu—was a massive hit. The “Standard” model, as it was known, would go on to become the bestselling .22 pistol of all time, spurring countless offspring and imitations that sell well to this day. The Standard model was under constant production in basically the same form for the next thirty-three years, but the new corporation expanded the basic Standard archetype into a product line of pistols over time through the introduction of a number of variant models.
Sturm died from viral hepatitis in 1951 at the age of twenty-eight, but the company he helped found saw enormous success in the recreational gun market. Ruger’s considerable success was based on a knack for cost-cutting manufacturing techniques, public relations, and, perhaps most important, an innate feel for the marketplace. Unlike the men who labored under the bureaucratic constraints of government contracts, Ruger was in most ways a spiritual descendant of Colt, not Garand.
This included his consideration of aesthetics and salesmanship. Ruger would later contend that the executives at the big gun companies of the time failed because they had no real interest in the outdoors or hunting. They would take clients out golfing, not shooting, he reminded his sales staff—the CEOs’ understanding of the market hinged on what consumers wanted yesterday, not tomorrow. Unlike many companies in the coming decades, Ruger would shun the new science of market research. “If I really personally like it,” Ruger said in a 1981 interview, “then I can be fairly sure and positive that there will be a lot of other people who feel the same way.”14 They would. Ruger made guns for the outdoorsman, the hunter, and the hobbyist in postwar American life. His gun was priced for the average American sportsman, of whom there would be many millions.
The explosion in hunting and gun sports also led to a string of firearm and hunting magazines. Ruger and his company immediately took full advantage of this growing market, which allowed gun reviewers to disseminate opinions around the country in ways they had never been able to do before. “Firms like Winchester and Remington would loan a gun to a writer so he could write something about it, but they didn’t cultivate any friendship,” Ruger later noted. A piece in American Rifleman, the leading publication about firearms, helped spread Ruger’s reputation. Through Strum, Ruger used innovative manufacturing techniques and promotion, imbuing their guns with an element of nostalgia. Most of the fundamentals of gunmaking had already been invented. And Ruger, who should not have been underestimated as an innovator himself, understood that there was a romanticism that enticed American shooters.
In many ways Ruger reinvigorated the gun market by looking to the past as much as he would the future, reintroducing guns that most other companies believed had run their course. For example, Ruger knew that Colt had discontinued making the famous single-action Army models. He also understood that there was a healthy market out there for the gun, because he wanted one. Ruger began reissuing a number of old models, nearly all of which were successful. The company would diversify and experience the ups and downs of any corporation. By the twenty-first century, Sturm, Ruger & Co was consistently one of the top gunmakers in the world. By this time, all the major firearm manufacturers were following his lead and taking advantage of the insatiable appetite for guns. Few industries, after all, had a historic connection to America’s past like the gunmaker. Although most of the big names would also experience bumpy rides and ownership changes throughout the second half of the 1900s, by the end of the century, most of the names remained the same. Remington (founded in 1816), Smith & Wesson (1852), Colt (1855), and Winchester (1866) still dominated the marketplace. By the start of the twenty-first century there would be rekindled interest in the old guns, and technical advances would spur the industry to hundreds of millions in revenue.
The gun, it turns out, was not a faddish feature of American life. According to Gallup, gun ownership per household in 1961 was at 49 percent. In 1993 it was at 51 percent and in 2013 it was at 45 percent—despite the fact that there had been a big shift from rural to urban areas.15 Some believe this is due to the big dip in hunting among Americans.16 Only around 15 percent of adults lived in households in which they or their spouses were hunters. It is the lowest percentage of hunters since the highest level of 31.6 percent recorded by pollsters in 1977.
The number of guns manufactured each year in the United States, however, grew from 2.9 million in 2001 to nearly 5.5 million in 2010 to nearly 10.9 million in 2013. Around this time there was also an explosion of imported firearms. From 2001 through 2007, handgun imports nearly doubled, from 711,000 to nearly 1.4 million. By 2009, nearly 2.2 million handguns were imported into the United States. Guns from Glock, SIG Sauer, and others became wildly popular. In 2016 there would be a record 5.5 million handguns imported into the United States.17
Another dynamic emerged with the surge of gun ownership: crime rates fell. They fell a lot. From their peak in the early 1990s, violent crime rates, including murder, rape, and aggravated assault, would all decline. By 2014, homicide rates of 4.5 people per 100,000 were the lowest since 1963, when it was 4.6 people per 100,000. There would be a slight uptick in crime the next two years, but by the mid-2000s there was ample evidence that crime rates had far more to do with social trends and economics than they did with the level of gun ownership.
Gun control legislation had the opposite of its intended effect. In 1994 the National Institute of Justice found that 44 million people, or around 35 percent of households, owned 192 million firearms. Seventy-four percent of those who admitted to owning guns said they owned more than one firearm. Around the same time, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that approximately 242 million firearms were either in the marketplace or owned by civilians in the United States. The breakdown of ownership was around 72 million handguns, 76 million rifles, and 64 million shotguns. By 2000 the ATF put the number at approximately 259 million: 92 million handguns, 92 million rifles, and 75 million shotguns. By 2007, the number of firearms had increased to approximately 294 million: 106 million handguns, 105 million rifles, and 83 million shotguns. By 2009, the estimated total number of firearms available to civilians in the United States had increased to 310 million: 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.18
With all these guns, the originalist understanding of the Second Amendment would also regain its popularity. The politics of guns, though, would take a while to catch up.
CONCLUSION
MOLON LABE
“The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”
—The Supreme Court of the United States of America, 2008
Flag raised by Texas settlers at the Battle of Gonzales in October 1835
A wide-ranging, well-funded political, cultural, and legal effort of revisionism has been undertaken to erase much of the history you’ve just read. Few mainstream historians looking back at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries even bother delving into the lives of men like John Hall, John Browning, Christopher Spencer, John Garand, and Eugene Stoner, much less afford them a rightful place among America’s greatest innovators and manufacturers. Books about the Revolutionary era make only perfunctory mention of guns, despite their central role in the story of the nation’s founding, and fewer still acknowledge the role of guns in freeing the slaves or holding back fascism or ridding the world of communism.
Worse, in contemporary America, countless historians have attempted to retroactively dismiss the ubiquitous presence of guns in American life and the role firearms played in the rise of a nation. Countless anti-gun activists have used this revisionist history to dismiss the overwhelming evidence that the founding generation believed that individual Americans had an inherent
right to bear those arms. Countless politicians would lean on this fiction as a rationalization to create laws and regulations that undermined that right on both local and federal levels. Countless journalists have penned prejudiced pieces aiding the efforts of these politicians. And countless judges have latched onto this mythology in an attempt to disarm law-abiding individuals in the name of safety.
All of these forces have fostered a “collective right” theory regarding the Second Amendment that became incontestable truth in legal and political circles for many years. The singular purpose of the Second Amendment, they argued, was to arm militias, not individuals. To argue differently was an antiquated and destructive reading of the past.
As this book argues, history does not back up this contention. The notion of individual ownership of firearms was so unmistakable and so omnipresent in colonial days—and beyond—that Americans saw no more need to debate its existence than they did the right to drink water or breathe the air. Not a single Minuteman was asked to hand his musket over to the Continental Congress after chasing the British back to Boston. If they had been, the Revolution would have been short-lived, indeed. When Americans were asked to surrender their weapons, it was typically in an effort to subjugate blacks, Native Americans, or other minority populations.