CHAPTER ONE Introduction: An American Controversy Anyone having even a passing familiarity with the history of the United States knows the iconic place the gun occupies in American culture. Even before America’s independence, firearms were an integral part of the country. For the many European groups who explored, colonized, and eventually tamed the great North American wilderness with hatchets, plows, and rifles, guns were an essential tool of daily life. Firearms ensured protection against the unpredictable dangers of unfriendly inhabitants and savage animals, and they secured much of the game that supplied the newcomers’ supper tables. As one commentator observed, America was born gripping a rifle in her hands1—and with that rifle, she went on to establish a legacy of unparalleled achievement and accomplishment. The Europeans who came to America brought with them the best small arms available in their homelands and then improved them to meet the peculiar challenges of their new world. Beginning in the 1700s, when immigrant gunsmiths transformed the Old Country’s Jaeger rifle into the quintessentially American Kentucky rifle, through the development in the 1800s of the “guns that won the West”—Samuel Colt’s renowned Peacemaker revolvers and Oliver Winchester’s repeating rifles—and the classic firearms designed by John Browning in the 1900s, spanning hand- guns, rifles, and machine guns,2 firearms have always been a prominent feature of the American landscape. Accepted as indispensable instru- ments in dangerous times and as useful skill-building recreational
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