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BRIAN: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh, your 20th Century Guy.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers, 19th Century Guy.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf, the 18th Century Guy.

BRIAN: Today on the show, the history of gun ownership in America. Before the break, we were hearing about the citizen soldiers of the founding era, and how poorly armed they would have been if the government hadn’t provided them with weapons. So maybe we could take a few minutes, guys, and talk about what happened next. So, Peter, what do we learn about guns from the actual Revolution itself?

PETER: Well, you’ve got to get ready for the next war Brian you know about this and that means you’ve got to have guns in place. Collectively, you have to armories. You know, the militia, that’s the citizenry, they’re going to rise up on the occasion. But when they rise up, you’ve got to put arms in their hands, so to speak, so that they can fight the war.

So the idea that somehow you just had to tap into an existing gun culture, where there was universal gun ownership, and just mobilize that, that is nonsense. There wouldn’t be armories. And I think that’s the point we want to underscore. State armories, there wouldn’t be those armories if there were universal gun ownership.

BRIAN: So people don’t get to keep their guns when the government gives it to them? They got to hand them back?

ED: Yeah. And you if you have more local armories, you go to Muster Day for the militia, you get the guns for that day. You march with them, but then you give them back, because they’re complicated machines. They need to be protected.

PETER: They deteriorate. I mean, they have to be maintained in working order. Well armed. Underscore the well part of it.

ED: That’s interesting. Back in the time of the Revolution, in the early National period, they were thinking about what makes a legitimate state in the eyes of the world? Well, you have to be able to protect yourself. And so the National government actually begins what feels kind of like the 20th century model of active subsidy and innovation.

BRIAN: I love that.

ED: At the Harper’s Ferry Armory they say, we need guns that have interchangeable parts, so that we can actually, well, interchange them. So that you can keep these guns operable, and across a wide space. So if these guns that are being produced by the government had to be used in one place or another, we can ship them parts they can fix. So what we think of the American system, Brian, that we think about was the Model-T, is actually developed for armories, to develop guns.

PETER: OK. So in effect, the state primes the pump.

ED: Yes, It really wasn’t until the Civil War began that the pump really begins to turn out lots of guns. Now at the very beginning, people show up with these sort of rusty old flintlocks from home, or whatever, and these people who are going to defend the North or the South in the one battle they think is going to be the Civil War, very quickly they realize, oh gosh, this isn’t going to work. We’re going to have to really have state produced, state subsidized, state standardize guns, if this war is going to continue.

So they use this American system, Brian, to really arm the American people with remarkable speed. Now the Confederacy can’t make guns fast enough, so they buy some of theirs from England, using the American system. But in the North, they’re producing guns at enormous rates, as you can imagine, to allow them to wage war for four years against each other.

BRIAN: So guys, I’m assuming that after the Civil War, those guns are not called back to the armories?

PETER: Think of the oil well on a gusher. It’s out there. Not only that, Brian, not only are the guns just ubiquitous. They’re everywhere across the land. But we have now the capacity to produce, in fact, the need to market the continuing production. This has been a priming the pump of the armaments industry.

BRIAN: The Military industrial complex.

PETER: You get it. It’s getting more and more complex.

BRIAN: So Ed, what’s the consequence of the dissemination of all of these guns? And how do we get to gun control?

ED: Well, you have all kinds of consequences, Brian. The postwar Civil War South is drenched in guns and in violence. I mean, this is when the culture of homicide really takes off in the South. And black men are killing each other. And white men are killing each other.

In the West, the guns are used in the hands of white people who are trying to take land from the American Indians. There also in the hands of the American Indians who are trying to stop that process. But they are also in the hands of criminals, and of young men in the cities of the North who think it would be great to have a gun.

So you find it’s like a tributary, it just floods across the country with lots of different kinds of guns, for lots of different kinds of purposes. So in many ways, what we think of as the gun culture of the country, really happens after the Civil War.