Gun Country

Gun control is culture change. That’s the first thought I had after reading David Harsanyi’s excellent and meticulously researched new book, First Freedom: A Ride through America’s Enduring History with the Gun. In one volume, he not only charts the development of firearms in American history, but he does the immensely more important task of showing how the firearm has been integral to the development of the American nation and the American culture. 

In other words, from a historical perspective, the phrase “gun culture” is misleading, implying that the Ameri­can use of guns and respect for gun rights represent a niche aspect of our history, that gun culture is distinct or independent from American culture writ large — something that can be read out of the American story without doing damage to the broader narrative. 

Instead, Harsanyi shows how the privately owned firearm was indispensable to the creation of the nation and so deeply embedded in the American lifestyle that if you took Americans not just from the colonial period, not just from the founding generation, but also from more than a century of generations that followed and had them eavesdrop on the modern American gun debate, they’d be utterly mystified.