American Gun

Epilogue

Pick up a rifle, a pistol, a shotgun, and you’re handling a piece of American history. What you hold is not just a finely engineered instrument, but an object that connects you to people who fought for their freedom in the backwoods of Saratoga, New York, died on the rolling hills of Gettysburg, and cornered criminals in the canyons of big cities across the country. Each gun has its own story to tell, its own connection not just to the past, but the American spirit.

Guns are a product of their time. An American long rifle, stock smooth and silky, frame lightweight, barrel long and sleek—the man who made this gun worked in the dim light of a small forge, and chose carefully the wood to use. His fingers went raw as he honed the stock, and the iron from a nearby mine stained his hands and the water he used to cool the parts as he finished.

Take the gun up now, and the smell of black powder and saltpeter sting the air. Raise the rifle to your shoulder and look into the distance. You see not a target but a whole continent of potential, of great things to come, a promising future… but also toil, trial, and hardship. The firearm in your hands is a tool to help you through it.

A Spencer—now here is an intricate machine, a clockwork of a gun finely thought out, each piece doing many different parts of the job as the weapon is aimed and gotten ready to fire. This is a gun of a time when imagination sprang forward, when the brain was a storm of ideas, one leading to another, then more, and others beyond that. This is a machine of pieces in a complicated dance, made to work as one; a machine no stronger than its weakest part. It is a sum far more than the simple addition of stamped metal bits and honed edges. The Spencer and its contemporaries come from a time not just of cleverness, or the birth of great industry. All of those, yes, but the weapons were also born in a time of disruption, of fear, of our better selves wrestling with weakness and temptation. Would we be one nation? Would we be several? What future would we have?

Preserving the Union was just one job the Spencer and the other repeaters, revolvers, and early machine guns were invented to solve. They had other, even bigger questions to help us answer: Would we conquer nature, or be conquered by it? If we could tame the wild, could we tame ourselves? Would we overcome our worst impulses and make a better America, then take a leading place in the world?

And once there, what of it?

The answers were positive, on the whole. But they were not given without great struggle and missteps. There were terrible detours: injustices, unnecessary violence, and criminals who found a way to use for evil what should have been, what were, instruments of progress.

In the end, those same tools helped us endure. They faced down the worst evil of our times. They stopped genocide and the enslavement of a people. The Thompson submachine gun didn’t just redeem its own reputation fighting evil in World War II; it helped all of us redeem man’s potential. After the darkest shadows spread over Europe and Asia, after insanity pushed away common sense and decency, we were able to recover. Weapons did not do it; guns were just helpers, tools as they always are. Men and women did it. But the tools that men and women made, that they carried in their arms and slung on their backs, were a necessary and important part of the struggle.

A gun today is a wonder of high-tech plastic, metal, and compounds too long and complicated to pronounce. Building on the past, gun makers have skimmed away every excess possible, until their products weigh no more than necessary for the job at hand. They pack into a tiny chamber the power of jet engines and rocket ships. They split the world into minute fractions of inches and degrees, measuring what lies before them with the precision and detail of a microscope, finding distinctions where previous generations might have found only blurs. Yet, each gun they produce carries within it the sum of the past. The powder that each cartridge contains can trace its evolution back two, three, four hundred years and more. The machine that molds the cheekpiece has roots in the wooden wheel and the forge that stood at the side of the crooked creek where long rifles were made by hand.

There are always numbers to talk about when discussing about guns. Four billion dollars’ worth of wages directly involved in manufacturing alone; ten billion overall in the industry. Nearly fourteen million hunters in America, who together spend some $38 billion a year on their pursuit. Six million—the number of guns manufactured in the U.S. in a single year.

But numbers mean nothing without people: the woman in the factory at Colt, inspecting the latest example of the gun that won the West; the guy truing a Remington 700 action in his garage workshop for a soldier going overseas; the hunter stalking deer in the Minnesota woods.

You can get a little fancy talking about guns. You can become a bit starry-eyed thinking about history. You can forget the rough spots.

That’s not fair. Real life has been messy, bloody, complicated. Not a straight line.

That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been triumphant, victorious, glorious, and wonderful along the same way. Good has triumphed over evil; we have come to terms with our darker selves. America has won its freedom, preserved it, and extended it to others. Guns are not perfect—no model in our history has come to market fully finished without flaw. Neither have we. Man and gun have improved together, sometimes with ease, more often with great struggle and sacrifice.

Our victories in the past are no guarantee for the future. What has been won can always be lost. But the past can show us the way to the future. It can give us hope: The men and women in this book did it; we can too.

When you pick up a gun, whatever model, think a little on Sergeant Murphy taking aim on the battlefield, then going home to start a new life with his young wife, busting the forest into productive land, raising kids. Think about the policemen braving the insanity that was Baby Face Nelson, taking bullets so that others might live. Think about Zip Koons, nervous and fearful in that barn in rural France, yet always doing his job, and just his job. Think of the SWAT team guy trying to put the hostage taker in his crosshairs so he can’t kill the child he’s dragging by the hair. Think about the soldier on the front line preserving freedom.

Think of yourself, and your connection to history. Ask yourself: What do you owe to the American soul you’re tied to, and how are you going to pay it forward?