The Golden Age of US Gun Culture

The first universal gun restriction in the United States, the National Firearms Act, was passed almost 100 years ago. Since then, things have only gone downhill for the Second Amendment,  and America’s freedoms.

With its impetus in curtailing the gangland crime of the Prohibition era, America before the passing of the National Firearms Act had gone 158 years without any form of gun control. Yet, despite there being none of the restrictive laws making up the legislative quagmire around gun rights today, there wasn’t nearly as much violence as we see now. If guns are truly the root of all evil, as many self-proclaimed online Democrats claim, how is it that we’ve survived as a nation with most if not all of the population peacefully owning guns for almost 200 years? Let alone until the early 21st century?

Today, it’s unclear just how many gun laws there are on the books. The answer varies depending on semantics and if you’re aggregating federal, state, and local laws into the same figure. Some estimations, made by leading National Rifle Association (NRA) members, are as high as 20,000. Even those at the Washington Post who dispute the NRA’s claims don’t have a solid answer on how many gun laws there are on the books. Some people label the figure an underestimation, while others believe the real number lies between several hundred and a few thousand. But given how many politicians misunderstand or misconstrue “well-regulated militia” (there were no ‘regulation’ bodies back then), there’s always a risk of more being added to the books.

Either way, it’s a far cry from having zero less than one hundred years ago. Recall it was in 1934 that we saw the first restrictive gun law emerge. Someone who was a young child in 1934 could feasibly still be alive today.

Thanks to the conveniences afforded by modern invention and the successes of our forefathers, life today is leagues different from what it was at the time of the nation’s founding. The early pilgrims needed guns for protection against nature and other humans. Then came the Revolutionary War and its proceeding era of exploration into the unknown: the Wild West. Then came the Civil War. All of this was within the first hundred years of the nation’s founding, an epoch characterised by a constant, tangible concern for protection.

In those days, being a pacifist was hardly an option. It was not like you could easily get help in your hour of need. The first police department wasn’t established until 1844, and there were no detectives until 1857. One could not even call for help since the first telephone wasn’t invented until 1876. Your best bet was to avoid becoming a victim by any means necessary.

Guns, as the obvious tool for one’s immediate safety, were thus respected. It was the responsible thing to teach young children how to use guns and how to behave around them, lest they be left high and dry in the event their parents were killed or incapacitated and unable to come to their aid. This respect for firearms carried over into the end of the 20th century, when gun clubs were the norm, even in liberal urban areas such as New York City. Hard to imagine today when many teen activists march in protest against firearms.

According to academic John Lott Jr, “virtually every public high school [in New York] had a shooting club up until 1969.” Students were expected to leave their homes, board the subway, and walk to school with a rifle bag over their backpacks. Their firearm would then be turned in to the homeroom teacher and picked up when it came to practice. Today we see ‘Gun Free Zones’ hung sheepishly outside school entrances, but there was a time not long ago when schools had guns and people who knew how to use them.

While certainly an ideal picture, it’s not like America left its Garden of Eden with the passing of the National Firearms Act. There was gun violence before, although not nearly on the same scale of mass murder we see today.

One report cites the earliest instance of gun violence in 1764 when four Lenape American Indians murdered all but two children in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse. Then nothing else until the 1800s, when there were 12 instances of gun violence. Many of those instances were revenge crimes (i.e. a student who shoots their schoolteacher for being particularly abusive) or crimes of romantic passion and rejection.

The gun violence statistics change pretty rapidly by the time the 1900s roll around. At the turn of the century, the US population was 75,568,686: an increase of almost 13 million from 1890. In 1930, the population would be almost double that, at 122,775,046.

Where there were massive amounts of people, there was bound to be contention. Under the guise of combating gangster culture during the Prohibition era (a staple of big cities), the National Firearms Act implemented taxes on the production and transfer of automatic firearms, shotguns, and rifles. Because, as we all know, gangsters follow laws.

The NFA also mandated the registration of firearms. Suddenly the federal government knew what kind of firearms were out there, who they belonged to, and the registration date. If you’re a fan of laws and regulations, this seems uncontroversial. But suppose you’re an ardent enjoyer of liberty. In that case, you can see how this could be dangerous should the government decide to turn to violent tyranny, where firearm owners would become public enemy number one. (This, of course, would be the wet dream of certain radicals who wish to emulate their heroes, such as Stalin or Mao.)

You can argue that we might find the root cause of the culture shift in the big cities, but the more precise answer is internal migration. People moved into the big cities where it was significantly riskier to fire a gun and have the bullet not hit your intended target. Acceptance of police departments and outsourcing your safety became the most viable option. From there, it made sense for the city-dwellers to give up their arms (in 1976, Washington D.C. succeeded in outlawing handguns altogether).

As many grew trusting of the government in a time of relative peace and prosperity, the cycle of rights encroachment continued. People allowed themselves to unironically believe things like “the government knows best!” or “they just want to protect us!” With time, they would come to sneer at those who didn’t see sense in giving up their arms, calling them heartless monsters or brain-dead hicks.

Thus we find ourselves today faced with the new “Assault Weapons” Ban of 2022. While “assault weapons” is nothing but a nondescript, inflated word thrown around by opportunistic politicians, it sounds scary enough that the uninformed would get behind it. However, this new ban aims to do the following:

“...regulate assault weapons, to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited, and for other purposes.”

They’re no longer trying to be subtle about it. For now, it’s safe to assume very few (if any) politicians are out for your best interest, and it’s best to vote out all that support measures such as these. 

But as bleak as things seem, hope is not lost.

Many in cities and suburban areas all over the country still acknowledge the importance of guns. In 2018, it was estimated that for every 100 US residents, there were 120.5 guns.

Amid the civil unrest of the spring and summer of 2020, there were three million more gun sales than estimated for the first half of the year. Additionally, traditionally non-gun-owning demographics, such as Asian-Americans, purchased firearms at an unprecedented rate.

With activists insisting that the government is abhorrently ‘-ist’ or ‘-phobic’, should they be vouching for them to take away everyone’s guns? If feminists believe most men are evil rapists, shouldn’t they vouch for every woman to have the ultimate equaliser? Better to have more people in the pro-2A camp.

There is too much violence today at the hands of the government and other civilians for most gun owners to give their firearms up gently. The genie’s out of the bottle in that regard. In fact, some are turning in 3D-printed guns at government buy-backs.

At this point, the government would have to make a grisly example of many Americans to achieve their aims. Even then, many would rather die on their feet than live on their knees. If those who are adamant about zero guns want that, it’s on their conscience.