2.7: A Genealogy of Gun Violence
Lead scholar-producer: Christopher J. Nygren
I: Introduction [0:00-4:52]
Christopher Nygren: In the late 1580s, Giovanni Stradano, a Flemish artist working in Florence, made designs for an album dedicated to what he titled the “New Inventions of Modern Times,” or the Nova Reperta. The frontispiece for this volume highlights nine inventions that revolutionized society, and thereby helped make it “modern.” Things like the printing press, the mechanical clock, and the saddle with stirrups sit alongside modes of making and knowing, like the magnetic compass, distilling liquids, or cultivating silkworms. Right at the center of the image, in the most prominent place on the central axis, sits a gigantic cannon along with nine cannonballs, two barrels of gunpowder, and all of the tools necessary to charge, load, and fire a cannon. Gunpowder and firearms take a central place within the visual logic of Stradano’s modernity.
Ryan McDermott: Stradano was prescient. Today, guns are an everyday part of life in contemporary society, especially in the United States. No matter how you calculate it (by firearm deaths per 100,000, homicides per capita, or suicide rates), the United States stands as an outlier among high-income countries with regard to gun violence. That isn’t surprising when you consider that the United States now has more guns than people. The Small Arms survey put out in 2017 shows that there are about 120 privately-owned guns for every one hundred people in the US, which is a figure that is double our closest competitor and about three times that of Canada.
Christopher Nygren: Living in the United States, it may seem that gun violence is a particularly modern problem with intractable solutions. It is very likely that when you’re listening to this, there will have recently been a mass shooting in the headlines. There is a litany of names that have now become all too familiar. Sometimes it’s the name of a city, sometimes a school. Columbine; Sandy Hook; El Paso; Parkland; Las Vegas; Aurora; Orlando; Pittsburgh. Every time, we hear the same refrain:
[Montage of “thoughts and prayers”]
Ryan McDermott: Halting these mass shootings might seem politically impossible. Even after twenty students and teachers were shot in a school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, reform didn’t happen.
Sound: Barack Obama, Rose Garden Statement When Newtown happened, I met with these families and I spoke to the community, and I said, something must be different right now. We’re going to have to change. That’s what the whole country said… just like everybody talked about how we needed to do something after Aurora. Everybody talked about we needed change something after Tucson. (16:38-17:14)
Christopher Nygren: We have made very little progress on restricting gun violence since Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden in April 2013. But rather than focus simply on the difficulties of political change, we want to try a different approach.
Ryan McDermott: Welcome to Genealogies of Modernity. I’m your host, Ryan McDermott.
Christopher Nygren: And I’m Christopher Nygren, professor of early modern art and culture at the University of Pittsburgh.
Ryan McDermott: In this episode, we reach back in time to look at the history of gun violence, gun control, and two particular stories that illustrate how previous generations confronted the dangerous potential of firearms.
Christopher Nygren: First, we’ll look at Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then the British Empire in the eighteenth century. In tracking how early modern societies dealt with firearms, we will come to see with clarity how these objects, which began as weapons of war, became ubiquitous in society.
Ryan McDermott: As firearms proliferated, their uses changed. We’ll see how different societies responded to the spread of guns and struggled with the moral issues raised by their technological transformations.
Christopher Nygren: History suggests that guns and gun violence are impossible to eradicate, but not impossible to control, at least to some degree. But history also holds important lessons for our contemporary situation and how we might escape the idea, ascendant in American legal culture, that the dead hand of history must limit our scope of action in the present.
II: Firearms and Gun Control in 14th-16th-century Italy [4:52-17:30]
Christopher Nygren: Catherine Fletcher, Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK, is a specialist of early modern Italian history. She first became interested in firearms in the early 2000s when she was researching a biography of the mixed-race Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’Medici. Alessandro came to power in a period known as the Italian Wars. From about 1494 until 1559, Italy was constantly at war—to simplify things, France and Spain were essentially battling for control of Italy on Italian territory. Battles were constant; death was everywhere, and the struggle was real. As Fletcher points out, these wars were a turning point in the history of firearms. They mark the first time that armies used gunpowder weapons with organized military strategy.
Catherine Fletcher: We see the Spanish troops really beginning to, um, perfect the technique of dominance on the battlefield with pike and shot formations. So this is using a skilled, really quite disciplined unit of men to effectively almost act like a human machine gun.
Spanish troops, it turns out, were really skilled at this maneuvering in tight groups with organized fire. They won several important victories in the early 1500s, and revolutionized the way that armies thought about warfare. Guns became crucial, and that had broad-reaching implications.
Catherine Fletcher: Italy is divided into many states at this time. It’s not one united country as we know it now, the Italian states are starting to realize the implications of this new military technology and start to equip their own citizens with firearms for the purpose of defense of the state should it be invaded, which is quite likely ’cause we’ve got this big foreign army is fighting, uh, within Italy. So we start to get this system where local people are being positively encouraged to drill with firearms, to learn what to do with them, and to have them in their house just in case they need them. So in this military context where we haven’t almost got a very clear line between military competence on one hand and civilians on the other, that’s a, again, it’s a very modern distinction. We get firearms proliferation initially for the defenses of the state.
Ryan McDermott: Invading troops meant that Italians needed to get armed, and to do so quickly. And here’s the first place where we see how the deep history of gun violence and arms control are still with us today: in the geography of gun making.
Christopher Nygren: A region in the north of Italy known as Gardone Val Trompia, not far from Milan, became the premier site of gun manufacturing. It was at the foothills of the mountains, close to deposits of the metals used to produce firearms and shot. The region also had a strong river, which allowed them to establish water wheels to help the forging process.
Catherine Fletcher: Well, what’s amazing is if you go today, right there is the Beretta factory. And we have a continuous record of the existence of the Beretta firm through from 1526 when they are selling arquebus barrels to the Venetian state right up into the present day.
Ryan McDermott: Ok, so the geography of gun manufacture in Italy is more or less unchanged for the last 500 years. But Chris, what sort of things were they producing early on?
Christopher Nygren: Of course, we are not talking about rapid fire machine guns. The history of firearms in Europe began around 1340 or so with cannons, which are large, heavy, and generally require multiple soldiers to operate. So, there was a race to develop small, portable firearms that could be used by a single soldier.
Catherine Fletcher: So first of all, you get to a handgun that can be carried around, but needs to be lit by a lighted match. Doesn’t have a trigger, it doesn’t have a stock. It’s just not, I mean, it’s not a very easy weapon to use.
Christopher Nygren: A key step along this path was the development of the matchlock in the fifteenth century. The name here is descriptive. The gun is essentially shot by touching a lighted fire to the gunpowder charge. Usually this “match” was a smoldering piece of rope that had been soaked in saltpeter, and the soldier had to keep that lit if he hoped to fire his weapon. So, the matchlock has some obvious limitations. If it is raining, or damp, or the soldiers have to cross a river or some other body of water… well, good luck keeping your match lit through that process.
Ryan McDermott: Catherine Fletcher has actually shot one of these, and to fire it she had to hold that wick, that piece of burning rope, just inches from her eyes.
[09:57]
Catherine Fletcher: It’s quite intimidating, and you have to remember to get all the sort of movements right, and to put the little dose of powder in the right place at the right time
Ryan McDermott: On the battlefield, though, that intimidation was directed at the enemy.
Catherine Fletcher: So it’s very, it’s very noisy. There’s lots of smoke. You can imagine with lots of those being fired on a battlefield there’s just, you know, incredible noise. Very hard to see what’s going on. A very, you know, disturbing environment to be in.
Ryan McDermott: Subsequently, weapons were made easier to use. In the sixteenth century, enterprising firearms producers invented the wheellock.
Christopher Nygren: This gun is truly modern insofar as it has a trigger that causes the explosion propelling the bullet. This means that the firing mechanism is entirely self-contained. You no longer need to be carrying a smoldering piece of rope around with you. Just pull the trigger and you get a shot off. Now initially, governing bodies were fairly tolerant of guns, especially in rural locations, where they were viewed as a useful tool in wildlife management. You may remember a few years back when the Twitter character of the day in summer 2019 asked how he was supposed to kill “30-50 feral hogs” quickly without a semi-automatic rifle. Italian governments were dealing with something like that.
Catherine Fletcher: So one of the examples that I’ve got from the 1550s in Bologna is a guy called Vincenzo Vaccaro, which means Vincenzo the cow Heard asking if he could have a gun license for the purpose of hunting.
Ryan McDermott: He was granted that permit, as were many others who could show a similar need.
Catherine Fletcher: But even the professional soldiers at this point, fighting is very seasonal business. You don’t fight during the winter. It’s something that happens from the spring onwards, and then they tend to sort of shut up shop.
Christopher Nygren: So you have trained men running around for months of the year in which war isn’t happening, but they’ve got access to firearms. And by the middle of the sixteenth century, the wars had mostly ended. Thousands of soldiers were effectively unemployed. And this creates a lot of problems with the proliferation of firearms and crimes committed with firearms. Especially because the wheel lock, that modern invention mentioned above, had another side effect: it made firearms much more portable.
Catherine Fletcher: Now that’s perceived as quite problematic because what that means is the gun can be concealed, and we get smaller and smaller guns at the same time. So they go down to perhaps being, I dunno, you know, eight to ten inches long.
Ryan McDermott: By the early sixteenth century, we had what we would recognize now as pistols. Of course, these small guns don’t have an obvious military use. They can’t fire that far or accurately.
Christopher Nygren: They might be useful if you’re part of the cavalry; if you’re trying to control a horse with one hand, you can get off a shot with the other. But that’s really about it. Yet these guns are produced by the thousands because they have other uses off the battlefield. In decades before, every nobleman had to have a fancy sword to demonstrate his elite status. Guns became a similar status marker. Pistols were also employed for self-protection, especially when traveling. Groups of bandits armed themselves and harassed travelers on rural roads, and in response, travelers armed themselves. The mutually reinforcing logic of gun ownership takes off here, and so guns became ubiquitous.
Catherine Fletcher: And so those are the guns that are first targeted for regulation.
Ryan McDermott: Quickly, municipalities began passing various forms of legislation.
Christopher Nygren: Already in 1517, we see serious restrictions on firearms in the territories of the Holy Roman Emperor, especially in what is today Germany. But very quickly Italian states began to follow.
Catherine Fletcher: So the major points of legislation tend to focus on, can they be concealed? On the length of the firearm, which also ties into concealment be, it means you have much stricter regulation for wheellocks and for shorter guns in particular. Meaning that, you know, people can’t easily carry them around. You have to have a long gun that’s very obviously visible over your shoulder. We get rules about, um, dismantling guns before they’re brought into town for repair. We get rules about use of guns in places where they might be particularly dangerous. So you’re not allowed a gun, I mean, in the marketplace, um, you’re not allowed a gun at the fair. You can’t put a guns into church, which is partly about religious concerns, of course, but also it’s a place where you might have a lot of people gathered. So we have all these restrictions trying to prevent too many guns being in places where you’ve got crowds of people, where there’s perhaps a particular threat to the city.
[15:08]
Ryan McDermott: Guns needed to be regulated because they were ubiquitous. Most long guns were used in agricultural settings—for hunting or land management. But the proliferation of shorter guns was an issue of primary concern.
Catherine Fletcher: I think the other thing about later sixteenth-century Italy is that it’s what we would now call a post-conflict society, with all the implications for sort of the psychology of people who’ve been at war all their lives, around violence, around access to these violent technologies, in a sense a normalization of guns because these objects have been around and present in society and carried by armies for decades. So people are used to them and people just sort of take them up quite casually and use them and become very reluctant to give them up.
Ryan McDermott: At this point, the Italian governments are looking to develop some kind of unified approach to controlling guns in a post-conflict society.
Christopher Nygren: Remember, the peninsula is divided into dozens of different polities, and each one has its own approach to gun control. This creates a problem for people traveling between cities or who live in rural areas that are kind of between two regimes. So, in the 1570s, Italian governments came together and hatched an idea: what if we ceded power on this one issue to some authority that is recognized by all parties and would be able to impose restrictions that would apply to the entire Italian peninsula? Does such an authority even exist?
Catherine Fletcher: So by the time we get to the, roughly around the 1570s, 80s, there’s actually a, a proposal that goes round that is, survives in a couple of different places in the documents suggesting that what they need is a multilateral agreement and suggesting that the Pope could, in fact, sponsor an agreement between all of the princes of Italy so that they all have the identical rules to regulate wheel lock guns in particular, and that if they all had the same rules, this would avoid the problem of people from one particular state having them, and then people from the next one feeling vulnerable because the bandits over the border have these guns and they did not.
Christopher Nygren: That idea, though, never came to pass. It was just too complicated.
III: Firearms and Gun Control in 17th-18th-century England [17:30-36:34]
Ryan McDermott: Okay, let’s see, now we are at about 1600?
Christopher Nygren: Right.
Ryan McDermott: So guns have been around for roughly two hundred years. They are common instruments of war, and in post-conflict societies they are also used for other things, especially livestock management, but governments were still struggling to control their proliferation. So what happened next?
Christopher Nygren: Here the details become hard to pin down with certainty, but Colin Rose’s research on violence and murder in early modern Bologna shows a few things. Crucially, firearms were readily available. Over the course of the seventeenth century, firearms were used in more than half of the homicides committed in Bolognese territory. But interestingly, by about 1700 the use of guns was receding in acts of interpersonal violence, and this trend rhymes with research elsewhere.
Ryan McDermott: The 1600 and 1700s were periods of major transformations. Saltwater empires made globalization possible, and firearm technology kept advancing. Italy was fractured; Spain and France both had vast overseas holdings, but the size of their empires made them expensive and difficult to manage; by 1800 both empires were decisively on the decline.
Christopher Nygren: The British, though, were moving ahead with a plan for global domination. Professor Priya Satia of Stanford has documented how the role of firearms in British culture transformed across the 1700s, and in that story we see some interesting trajectories that lead to the present.
Satia has observed in documents that globally there was an exponential increase in the production of firearms, especially in England. This was in large part a response to armed conflict, just like in Italy in the sixteenth century. The 1700s are marked by wars, but wars that are bigger and more lethal than before.
Priya Satia: So there’s, um, a massive growth in the capacity to manufacture firearms on a massive scale. And that’s tracking with the kind of, um, increasing logistical challenges of wars. The wars themselves are getting bigger and bigger. The number of men fighting is, you know, expanding dramatically. And, and what’s amazing is that this is an artisanal industry and they’re able to keep up with that demand.
Ryan McDermott: But that growth in industry didn’t just happen on its own. There was a major restructuring of the British economy that helped it produce enough firearms to dominate the eighteenth century.
[19:59]
Christopher Nygren: Now, in the seventeenth century most of the British firearms were produced in London by a group known as the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers. At first, it was convenient to have the guns made close to the seat of power. But the 1600s were politically tumultuous, and seizing armories and gun factories was just too easy and obvious a step for anyone wishing to stage a coup.
Priya Satia: And so from the new monarchy’s point of view, it’s really important to try and make it more diffuse so that there are multiple sources of firearms, so that if rebels capture one, the government still has another. So they very deliberately start to stoke the creation of a firearms industry in Birmingham. Why Birmingham? Because that is an area that already had rich metalworking traditions like from a couple of centuries earlier.
Ryan McDermott: Gun manufacturing moved to Birmingham in the Midlands, and one family became crucial to the British firearm industry: the Galtons.
Christopher Nygren: By the middle of the 1700s, Samuel Galton, Sr. had established his family business as one of the premier producers of firearms for the British crown. And this was a lucrative business. England was constantly at war and needed hundreds of thousands of the rifles that were known as the Brown Bess to support its overseas adventures. But there is something interesting about this family business.
Priya Satia: It’s fascinating to learn that the biggest gun-making firm in this whole period was owned by a Quaker family. This multi-generational story of Quakers, and the reason that’s so fascinating is, and sort of un-, unexpected, is that if you know anything about Quakers, you’ll know that a core principle of Quaker doctrine is that war is un-Christian, right? And so you’re, Quakers are not supposed to participate in war in any way, or in supporting war in any way.
Christopher Nygren: For most of the eighteenth century, though, the Quakers didn’t really see much of a contradiction here. They saw firearms primarily as a tool for agricultural work: they helped with the abatement of rodents and whatnot.
Ryan McDermott: The Galton family business kept growing and growing, and it was inherited by Samuel Galton, Jr. in the 1770s. Their guns were flowing widely through British society, into the military, but also into the hands of people who didn’t exactly need them for land management.
Christopher Nygren: Now, Galton Jr. was a well-respected member of the British elite. He was a member of the Lunar Society and was eventually also elected a member of the Royal Society. He was well-connected and very wealthy. But in 1795, his fellow Quakers called him before the assembly and challenged his participation in the production of firearms. Producing weapons, his fellow Quakers claimed, was not compatible with their faith, and they threatened to expel him from their community.
Ryan McDermott: Now hold on: his father had established the family business decades earlier, and no one seemed to care. I mean, half that Quakers in England were in some kind of business relationship with the Galtons. Why all of the sudden did this become a problem in 1795?
Christopher Nygren: To answer that question, Satia believes that we need to look at how the role of guns shifted in British society across the 1700s. Recall that in Bologna (and probably Italy more generally), the use of guns in murder cases was declining toward the end of the seventeenth century. Guns weren’t used all that often to kill people, except in war. And that generally accords with what Satia has found in England.
Priya Satia: When you look at data and evidence on how British people were using firearms, is that you, even though the numbers being produced are, are higher and higher, and wars are going on, you don’t see firearms becoming important in interpersonal violence between ordinary British people.
Christopher Nygren: Even as England is undergoing serious social upheavals like the deposition of King James in 1688, we don’t actually see rioters, counterrevolutionaries, or protesters using guns. Around 1700, the use of guns was, in the main, limited to the battlefield and one other site: the defense of private property. Now here, it is important to remember the monumental changes that were happening in early modern culture.
Ryan McDermott: Because of course, land doesn’t naturally belong to anyone, and for much of British history, land had been considered a common good, generally available to the public for things like grazing livestock and growing food staples.
Christopher Nygren: But by the eighteenth century, the Enclosure Movement had transformed the vast majority of public land into private property. Suddenly, land was something that had to be defended, by the people who newly owned it, and firearms were very useful for that purpose.
[24:58]
Priya Satia: There is a certain set of interactions where you do see firearms, and those are conflicts around property. So, you know, as we know, the eighteenth century is the period in which private property is really being consolidated as kind of the soul of British governance and society. It’s the organizing idea and principle. And so there are a new set of crimes. And so the one place where you see guns frequently used is in conflicts around property.
Christopher Nygren: Both property owners and those looking to violate property are now using guns. Land owners keep them ready to hand for when they need to defend their territory, and robbers and highwaymen are now carrying guns, most often obtained illegally.
Ryan McDermott: But for the reasons described above, early modern weapons weren’t terribly reliable.
Christopher Nygren: When we say they were “used” in defense of property, we mean two things: first, they were mostly used to fight off rodents and other pests, so trying to keep the material from being eaten. Second, in the cases when they were used to defend against another human being, guns were mostly brandished but not fired, because there is no guarantee that it wouldn’t blow up in your face and the ability to aim a shot was actually quite low.
Priya Satia: So the idea was to wave this dangerous weapon in the face of someone who’s trespassing on your property. And that alone is supposed to, you know, terrorize them and get them off your property.
Ryan McDermott: By about 1800, guns were being used in different ways, and this was for several reasons.
Christopher Nygren: Remember, this was a period of continuous war. First the wars of succession, then the Seven Years War, then the American Revolution, and then the French Revolution. Constant wars meant that British gunmakers were churning out at full capacity. So, there were more guns in circulation in 1795 than 1700. Statistics recovered by Satia bear this out. in London from 1700 to 1760, only three to eight percent of killing indictments involved deliberate shootings, that is to say about two to five cases per decade.
Ryan McDermott: By about 1800, though, those numbers were rising, especially on account of the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which went from about 1803 to 1815. During those conflicts, the British produced weapons at a new clip and sent vast numbers of soldiers to fight with guns in hand.
Priya Satia: So there’s kind of mass sustained exposure to firearms in a whole new way for those wars. And you start to see new firearms appearing in violence in Britain in new ways that are not related to property; as you know, up until the 1790s, it was either related to property or they, they were not appearing in interpersonal violence among British people. During these last set of wars, they do. You start to see kind of, they’re still not being used in crimes of passion. But they are being used in kind of a new kind of, totally casual violence that has nothing to do with property. And I think that is also starting to shift how people think of firearms. So firearms become scandalous and negative in a new way in the 1790s.
Ryan McDermott: So that’s one reason why the Quaker community turned on Samuel Galton, Jr.: the mass production of firearms over the course of a century meant that they were now widely available for acts of interpersonal violence, and that created a particular kind of scandal.
Christopher Nygren: But there was also a general shift in the way that the Quakers thought about the economy. Now, the Greek root of the word economy—oeconomia—means “household management.” Before professional economists invented measures like GDP and Gini coefficients, to think economically meant to see something holistically: do we have enough wheat to get through the next month? If not, where can we sacrifice something else in order to make up for it? To think economically in that sense means to see everything as connected.
Ryan McDermott: And as we’ve seen, this was a period when war was constant and ubiquitous. So it was really hard to be involved in the British economy in any way and not to be implicated in the economy of war.
Christopher Nygren: And in 1795, this connection to violence pushed the Quakers to a breaking point. Samual Galton Jr. was called forward by his local Quaker community, who offered him an ultimatum: either stop producing weapons of war or face expulsion from this religious community.
Priya Satia: And he said, well, how come this has never been objected to for the ninety-three years that my family has been engaged in this business before? Everything going on around us, whether it’s banking or industry or what have you is, is supporting war, because war was pretty constant, right?
[29:55]
Christopher Nygren: But there was another reason why the Quakers felt they had to take a stance against arms in 1795. And that was the connection between firearms and the slave trade.
The Quakers were the leaders of the abolition movement. In these years, many Quakers began boycotting sugar because it was the product of slavery, and there was, in their minds, no justification for consuming a product that was part of an economy of slavery. The same went for guns. Quakers saw that British agents were providing arms to tribal leaders in Africa in exchange for human beings who were then shipped to the West Indies where they were enslaved on British plantations.
Ryan McDermott: Guns were now perceived differently in 1795 than they had been in 1700. For the Quakers, they were part of an economy predicated on war and slavery, and part of a social system of interpersonal violence.
Priya Satia: I think what happens is that there’s an order of magnitude kind of shift in terms of how long and how many men have exposure to firearms in the next set of wars. And I think that sustained experience of being trained in impersonal killing, like killing that is not motivated by any immediate emotion, but it’s just something you’re doing at a distance on orders. That is something happening on a collective. It’s a collective experience for an entire mass of society, British society. And you see a, a, a lot of the violence, the new kinds of violence that’s not related to property that you see is happening among ex-soldiers.
Ryan McDermott: The Quakers didn’t want to compromise their stance against slavery. They also felt pressured by the increasingly violent role that guns were understood to play in society more broadly. So now we can see why the Quakers were so disgruntled with Samuel Galton, Jr. He is perceived by the members of his community as being complicit in the rise of interpersonal violence and the slave trade because he is producing firearms. So this is what led to Galton being called out by his Quaker community in 1795.
Christopher Nygren: Now, Galton defended himself. And in doing so, he made some interesting arguments. Is he, he asks, any more guilty of sin than, say, a farmer who produces the barley that goes into the production of beer, which will eventually lead to intoxication? Looking at the entire lifecycle of products, does anyone stand outside of it? But he also advances a second argument, which may sound familiar to modern Americans. As Galton says, he controls the production of his guns, but he has no control over how people use the guns once they purchase them. Essentially, Guns Don’t Kill People; People Kill People. Galton printed these arguments in a broadsheet. But in doing so, he also opened up space for rebuttal.
Priya Satia: And I found a copy of it that Morris Birkbeck (who’s, you know, this is the family that formed, that founded Birkbeck College in England) in the margins where he sort of disputed a lot of Galton’s points, and he didn’t buy the argument that guns don’t kill people. He said that that is their only purpose. Mm-hmm. Right? So he was sort of, of this new school emerging at the time that saw, especially among Quakers, that saw firearms in a very negative light and no longer as sort of one of the tools for spreading civilization based on property.
Christopher Nygren: So, what we see here is that Galton’s tribulations in 1795 in some ways presage modern debates about guns. On one side, the National Rifle Association maintains that Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People; on the other side, gun control advocates argue that in a law abiding society, firearms don’t have a lot of purposes other than to inflict harm.
Priya Satia: So there are already people who dispute that idea at the time. It’s a contested idea and it remains contested. And I think what’s happening though is again, this late eighteenth century is—and early nineteenth century—is the period where modern ideas, liberal political, economic ideas are really being consolidated. And the idea that things that are being sold and bought can be morally neutral and anything is just a commodity, right? Whether it’s, whether it’s sugar, whether it’s cotton, whether it’s a firearm, whether it’s, you know, any good is just a good, right? You can understand abstractly as a commodity. This is a new idea, right. And it’s something that becomes urgent for those invested in liberal political economy to kind of really nail down.
Christopher Nygren: But of course, it is impossible to nail down intractable questions of moral agency in a world where all moral agents are becoming connected. As economies become more complex and intertwined, life becomes a balancing of moral calculus. It was not immediately obvious to Britons why it was unethical to consume sugar in 1795, but eventually the abolitionist movement won out. Guns were similarly problematic. They raised questions that were uncomfortable.
[35:13]
Ryan McDermott: Such as, if most of the guns produced went to arm the British military, could someone produce those weapons and claim to be a pacifist? And even if you’re not a pacifist, what if some percentage of those firearms went into private hands and were used to commit crimes rather than wage war? Is the producer responsible for those acts of violence?
Christopher Nygren: The passage of time made those questions acute: by 1795, guns were being used in ways that had not been the case 100 years before. And the Quakers struggled with this. In the summer of 1796 they officially declared Galton Jr. “not in community with” the Society and it “hereby disowns him.” But their ostracization didn’t stick. The Birmingham meeting of Quakers found ways to reconcile themselves enough with the Galton family to allow Galton at certain services—and to accept his donations.
Ryan McDermott: Galton’s interactions with the Quakers are emblematic of the fraught moral terrain surrounding guns: invented as objects of warfare, over the centuries they revealed themselves to have other uses. Violence, whether interpersonal or state-sanctioned, seems never to be far behind. And this made them difficult for many people to accept wholeheartedly, even as it was difficult to completely reject them.
IV: Firearms and Gun Control Today [36:34-51:20]
Christopher Nygren: And over the next few centuries, Britain became increasingly uneasy with its role as one of the primary producers of firearms. Wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that the industry persisted, but not without its struggles. And after the Second World War, the British firearms industry rapidly declined.
Ryan McDermott: By the late twentieth century, firearms were manufactured primarily in five nations: the United States, Russia, France, Germany and China. These days, other countries have to purchase firearms for their police and militaries from these nations. This economic structuring has serious ramifications for gun control in the gun-producing countries. It turns out it’s much easier to regulate guns in the places that don’t make and sell them in great quantities.
Priya Satia: There’s no domestic industry that they need to worry about. Their military and their police can still buy guns from the main manufacturers that are more and more concentrated, uh, you know, in the U.S. and Europe. and as long as those companies are able to sell to the American civilian market, they’re taken care of. So basically gun control everywhere else in the world depends on the US having no gun control.
Ryan McDermott: Gun violence is arguably one of the defining features of modernity. Stradano recognized that in the late 1500s when he made his “New Inventions for Modern Times.” But as we’ve seen, the history of gun violence isn’t a straight line. There are crooked paths and false starts. From the very beginning, controlling the proliferation of firearms has been a concern of more or less every modern state. And as we’ve seen, at certain times and in certain places, governments have had success in controlling the proliferation of gun violence. But not really in the U.S.
Christopher Nygren: In a 2022 Supreme Court Case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen, the justices of the Supreme Court struck down a New York state law that had applied strict permitting requirements to the possession of firearms.
Ryan McDermott: OK, wait, so New York was trying to say that some people can’t go out and get a gun license. Are these like convicted felons? Or, what are the limitations here?
Christopher Nygren: Well, for instance, for most of the last fifty years it has been difficult for convicted felons to purchase firearms; similarly, since 1994, people that are subject to a restraining order for domestic violence have not been allowed to possess firearms. Both of those regulations are now up in the air. The majority opinion striking down the New York regulations wrote that the Constitution presumptively protects the possession of firearms and that “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” And so to take the example that I just cited, because domestic violence laws were mostly passed in the last fifty years or so, they couldn’t possibly be relevant to the Second Amendment, which was ratified in 1791. The justices felt that the government didn’t show adequate support of a tradition of firearms regulation, and struck down the law. In establishing this new standard regarding historical tradition, the Supreme Court has sowed real confusion about the status of gun regulation throughout the country.
[39:56]
Ryan McDermott: I thought that even though gun regulation varies across the states, it’s a pretty settled legal landscape. I mean, I found a website that lays out what kind of guns you can and can’t buy, state-by-state, and what you need to get a license. So what’s the confusion?
Christopher Nygren: By establishing this new standard, the “historical tradition” standard, the Court has actually opened all of the laws that are currently in effect to new scrutiny. Currently, there are several cases pending in state and district courts regarding various limitations on who can and cannot possess firearms. And since most of those laws that limit firearm possession were written in the twentieth century, legal scholars think it is very unlikely that they will survive in the post-Bruen legal landscape. But it seems wise to ask, does the fact that domestic abuse was not illegal for most of American history mean that we can’t limit the ability of domestic abusers to purchase firearms, and potentially use them against a partner, spouse, or an ex? I asked our experts if they agreed with that assessment of the historical record. Here’s what Catherine Fletcher said:
Catherine Fletcher: Well, I would say that the historical tradition coming out of the Italian states, but also more broadly across Europe, identifies very clear places where firearms are allowed, and where they aren’t. And where they are allowed is very definitely in the context of a militia. You might make the case that they are allowed for limited purposes of self-defense while traveling. You might make the case that, it’s very clear, in fact, that concealable weapons are widely banned, that there’s a definite precedent for banning concealed carry in all sorts of contexts, and that there is a definite precedent for banning the most dangerous sorts of firearm currently available and limiting public access to only those firearms where one can see a very straightforward, legitimate use, either in the context of agriculture or in a military context. So that’s my historical precedents from the European laws. I, I’m happy to, to write them up for the Supreme Court.
Christopher Nygren: Priya Satia was even more direct.
Priya Satia: Firearms have always been regulated, even in the American colonies, if you wanna go by English Common Law, of course, they were regulated. I mean, the whole talk we’ve had today was, you know, about all those efforts at disarmament in Britain. Firearm ownership rates were higher in the American colonies, for various reasons. But again, what kind of firearms did people have? They had, you know, not very well functioning guns that they used on their farms and that they used in hunting maybe. And then when there was some kind of military crisis, they were very frustrated that they didn’t have easy access to military grade firearms. And that, again, is, you know, was what the second Amendment was trying to address, is that those would be provided and they wouldn’t have to just use their crappy hunting gun at home in, in a sudden military emergency, that there would be government provision of that stuff.
Christopher Nygren: In fact, several historians have argued that this was the point of the second amendment, to place an affirmative obligation on the government to provide military grade firearms to the citizenry in the event of a war. Now, recent Supreme Court cases have strayed far from this reading, though. Even as justices have declared that history ought to guide Constitutional interpretation, they have put forward views on history that are hotly contested by many academic historians.
Ryan McDermott: If judges are concerned with following the traditions and precedents set by history, perhaps they should consider more directly one of the challenges that all historians face, which is history’s silences.
Christopher Nygren: For instance, does the fact that a certain kind of weapon, say, automatic rifles, weren’t regulated in 1791 mean that the Framers wouldn’t have wanted them regulated at all? Or does it simply testify to the fact that those weapons didn’t exist in 1791? By the logic of the Supreme Court’s “history and tradition” standard, it is logically impossible to regulate newer kinds of weapons because they could not possibly have been regulated before their invention. This is a legal Catch-22 predicated on bad historical thinking.
Ryan McDermott: Historians think about how the past impinges on the present—how the past “haunts” the present in the words of Michael Puett from an earlier episode. Historians generally think about change over time as a process, not in terms of sudden ruptures. They are mostly averse to what we’ve called “modernity talk,” a way of thinking that wants to see the present as radically different from or detached from the past. Through the episodes in this podcast series, we’ve been highlighting some of the shortcomings of that mode of thinking, and we’ve engaged in a genealogical analysis that looks for connections between the past and present, sometimes deeply submerged.
[45:09]
Christopher Nygren: But sometimes there are stark breaks in history. Moments that mark a before and an after. Events like the French Revolution or the harnessing of the atom seem to mark clear dividing lines. With regard to the Supreme Court’s decisions on gun control, historians have been increasingly voicing a concern that the “dead hand of history” is slowly squeezing the life out of contemporary American society. As we’ve noted, many scholars argue that a truly historical reading of the Constitution supports gun control. But is a strictly historical reading even the right way to go here? As we’ve seen, guns played many roles in pre-modern society, but limitations on the technology of early modern guns made it difficult—if not impossible—for a single person to cause a mass casualty event. Now, individuals cause those mass casualty events all the time.
Ryan McDermott: So, could this be a place where a bit of “modernity talk” might actually be a good thing? Rather than search through the tradition of eighteenth-century gun legislation, maybe it is worthwhile to acknowledge a break between the past and the present with regard to gun control and, specifically, technology. Pre-modern weapons were radically different. And maybe that matters more than a strictly linear interpretation of history.
Christopher Nygren: Galton articulated an argument that seems to presage the modern line that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” But we’re now in a place where we can recognize the reasons why that analogy is not as self-evident as it first appears. Even as they linked the movement of the trigger finger with the death of another person, Galton’s guns could kill one person every twenty seconds or so. The violence afforded by his guns was relentless, to be sure, but its pace was slow. And even so, his fellow Quakers felt that producing guns brought him unacceptably close to advocating for interpersonal violence. The sides of the debate haven’t really changed all that much, but the technologies have. In the 1700s, a schoolhouse shooter (and sadly there were indeed schoolhouse shootings) could get off a single round; while he reloaded, others could easily intervene. That’s not the case any longer. If a skilled marksman would struggle to get a Brown Bess to fire three times in a minute, a semi-automatic rifle can fire up to 60 bullets in a minute. Technological differences matter a lot.
Ryan McDermott: One of the things you realize when you begin to take the genealogies of modernity seriously is that history is not clean and neat; it doesn’t offer straightforward principles for action in the present. The historical tradition of gun control, it turns out, is thick and variegated. That means we must take responsibility for deciding how we want to live in the world that exists today; we can’t simply claim that “history” answers that question for us.
Christopher Nygren: Galton and the Quakers offer one path we might follow. They both decided ultimately to basically move on from their moral dispute with the status quo more or less intact. On the other hand, twentieth-century England basically vindicated the original, anti-gun position of the Quakers. In March 1996, a gunman killed sixteen students and one teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. Within a year, the United Kingdom had adopted the Firearm (Amendment) Act of 1997, which essentially banned handguns and subjected shotguns and rifles to a strict regime of licensing and control. And this strictness worked. Between 2016 and 2021, England averaged just under thirty firearm homicides a year. In 2021 alone, The Pew Research Center recorded just under 21,000 gun homicides in the United States.
Ryan McDermott: If the stories told here suggest anything, it is the power of deciding to make a break with the past. The Italian states tried to pass responsibility for regulating firearms onto the Pope; Galton and the majority of Quakers agreed to disagree and just moved ahead. But in the face of unspeakable tragedy, the British Parliament found a way to diminish gun violence. Around the same time, Australia instituted similar controls and also saw a commensurate drop in gun violence. After a 2019 shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, killed fifty-one people, the government there instituted strict controls as well.
Christopher Nygren: While the lessons of the deep history of firearms control may be difficult to discern, the modern situation seems relatively clear: allowing gun violence to proliferate is a choice. Galton and the Quakers saw the dilemma with clarity. But they passively decided to renounce their moral agency and allow the status quo to continue. Modern states that have taken agency into their own hands have seen dramatically different results. So perhaps this is a place where a modernity moment is necessary.