The following is an excerpt from the new book The Gunning of America by Pamela Haag (Basic Books, 2016):

We think of the gun owner and the shooter—either to regulate or to glorify—and not of the people who make the gun. We remember John Wayne, Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, and Al Capone, not the men who patented and manufactured their rifles, pistols, and submachine guns. We might think of the National Rifle Association, Columbine, or Charlton Heston, but not of the Remington brothers gathered around their roll-top desk, or Samuel Colt lobbying with champagne parties on the political frontier at Washington, DC’s, Willard Hotel, or a time-motion man walking through the Winchester factory in the early 1900s, meticulously documenting the “Sum of Movements” required to make a cartridge (“place 8 trays on truck and take to machine=.013 seconds; Polish=0.140 . . . ”). Insofar as the gun business is imagined at all, it tends to be imagined in its pre-Revolutionary craft phase: a gunsmith, at a bench, with an anvil. A National Review reporter in 2013 confessed bewilderment at the Remington plant in Ilion, New York. In his imagination, he had half expected to see a gunsmith.

The gun business, as a business, remains invisible, a secret in the closet of the gun culture. Although guns are bought every day, in locations from Walmart to gun shows, we imagine a gun “owner,” not a gun “consumer”: In America, we don’t buy guns, we have guns. We own them.