



Though a New Yorker by birth, I lived for many years in Boulder, Colorado, a city known for its mountain views, superior body mass indices and affluent stoner chic. Hidden from prying eyes at the end of a dirt road outside of town is a lesser-known attraction: an illegal shooting range. On a typical spring afternoon, a visitor there might see a bunch of late-model cars parked in a grass clearing, and, beyond them, a dozen or so well-groomed twentysomethings standing around chatting and drinking beer. The scene would look posed, cinematic, a little bit like a photo shoot for fashion-forward jeans. Only the sharp, cracking reports coming from around a bend would indicate these sons and daughters of the American West had in fact gathered for the express purpose of pumping bullets into the side of a hill.

Like it or not, America’s struggle with guns is mostly over, and the results are in: Guns won. Below the steady cycle of gun-driven agony and outrage lies our peculiarly dissonant national conversation on the subject—a standoff between opponents lacking even the most minimal common language, whose debate, if that’s the right word, is filled with shopworn tropes hurled by each side at the other that add up to a single, vast, self-canceling din. In the meantime, the firearms—and their side effects—keep coming. A quick but necessary tour of the numbers would read as follows: 36 Americans currently killed by guns each day on average (excluding suicides); more than 100 metro areas in the United States afflicted by mass shootings in 2016; 12 billion bullets manufactured annually; an estimated 200,000 suicides by gun each year around the world; and incredibly, in America, a toddler currently shoots someone about once a week.

Off to one side of this dispiriting blur of statistics, two new books find a way through the violent rhetorical storms surrounding guns by shining a light on their life cycles as objects—of homicide, fetish, and most intriguingly, perhaps, commerce. In The Way of the Gun, British journalist Iain Overton provides a kind of Cook’s tour of guns as they’re traded, coveted, and employed for target practice, murder, and war around the world. In her masterful The Gunning of America, Pamela Haag furnishes a salutary corrective to the perception of the gun’s inevitability in American life by showing its history as a commodity invented and then deliberately marketed and distributed like any other widget or household appliance. Backed by vast research in the company archives of Winchester, Colt, and other manufacturers, her book is a mixture of analysis and close-focus biography of the many sturdy and sometimes strange early Americans who rode to wealth on the back of firearms.

The base signifier regarding the gun in American life is the fantasy of American exceptionalism, a kind of ballistic version of manifest destiny. In this telling, America has a unique relationship to the gun; the country was practically born to the click of firing pin on cartridge; our origins as a nation faced with the subduing of a “savage” wilderness made us necessarily invested in firearms from the start. And the Second Amendment was the plinth upon which our national gun edifice was reared.

The hollow-point bullet, popular with police in the United States, is banned from use in war under international law. From the series “Gun Nation” by Zed Nelson

Against this assumption Haag proposes a simple clarifying action: Follow the money. As she writes in her preface, “We hear a great deal about gun owners, but what do we know of their makers?” Her hope, she explains, is to avoid the “polemical undergrowth” sprung up around gun questions, by providing an alternate commercial chronology of firearms, from the colonial period, when guns were one-offs produced individually in response to requests, all the way to the giant, multilevel, roaring factories of the gun manufacturers Winchester and Colt, who armed the world.