In more than two dozen cases over the past few years, I’ve been asked by attorneys general to respond to historical arguments put forward by plaintiffs and their expert witnesses in the gun-rights movement. The basic claim I’ve seen them making over and over again is one about continuity. They argue (a) that guns and gun problems in the founding era were analogous to guns and gun problems in our own times, (b) that the founders didn’t regulate guns, and therefore (c) that we can’t, either. My response as a historian has been to explain that guns and gun problems were in fact very different in the founding era. Those differences are key to understanding what the founders did or didn’t do about the problem of guns in society.
Before considering the most important differences between firearms then and now, though, there is one very important similarity to consider. Like residents of the United States today, (white) British North Americans owned a lot of guns relative to their contemporaries around the world. To the best of our knowledge, by 1774, on average about half of all white households possessed a firearm. That meant guns were more abundant than bibles in early America. All told, the 13 Colonies probably had enough privately held guns to arm around a third of adult white men. That’s paltry compared to the contemporary United States, where there are far more guns than there are all the men, women and children in the country combined. But British North America was indisputably one of the best-armed societies in the world during the founding era.
Why? British North America was a well-armed society because it was a war-making society. It was preoccupied with three kinds of conflicts: settler colonialism, slavery and warfare with imperial rivals France and Spain. The first two were foundational to the whole enterprise of Colonial America, and they were both perpetual. Without the Europeans’ monopoly on producing firearms, they would not have been able to dispossess Native people of their land or keep a fifth of the population enslaved. Wars against France and Spain periodically convulsed the Colonies as well. Such wars diverted men and weapons from the projects of settler colonialism and slavery, imperiling both. With no significant permanent standing army in British North America, most fighting against Indigenous nations, the enslaved and rival empires fell to white men who either volunteered or were drafted into service, usually with their own weapons.