Americans today own between 350 million and 450 million guns — more than one gun per person, though only about one American in three owns them. On a per capita basis, no other nation, developed or developing, has more guns. This is also a nation with few gun laws, especially at the national level. American gun mythology would have us believe that both of these trends — lots of guns, few if any gun laws — are also baked into America’s gun history. But that’s not so.

In fact, our history is the opposite. Yes, gun ownership is as old as the country, but so are gun laws. Two corollary facts: First, guns were more or less obtainable early in our history, but this was mostly through imports, not American manufacturing. That proved to be a significant problem for early America, especially during the Revolutionary and early Federalist period of the late 1700s to early 1800s, since Great Britain embargoed arms shipments to the new nation. Early military records and gun censuses consistently report chronic shortages of working arms.

Second, early American Colonies, states and localities enacted literally thousands of gun laws of every imaginable variety. When changing weapons technologies made guns and other weapons more plentiful, reliable, cheaper and more dangerous, governments responded with waves of new gun laws. The federal government did not weigh in on gun regulation until the 20th century, for the obvious reason that policing and criminality were viewed as state, not federal, obligations.

No Colonial “Guns-R-Us”

In modern America, gun and ammunition purchases can be made easily and rapidly from tens of thousands of licensed gun dealers, private sales, gun shows, and through internet sales. No “Guns-R-Us” outlets existed in the 1600s, 1700s or most of the 1800s. In the 18th century and before, the vast majority of firearms available in America were European imports. According to early American historian Brian DeLay, most American gunsmith work consisted of repair work, not the construction of firearms from scratch. Moreover, for the few that did manufacture firearms from start to finish, “It would have taken an early American gunsmith around a week of work to produce a basic, utilitarian long arm from scratch.” Firearms were obtainable for early Americans through purchase or barter, but for no little cost.

As historian Randall Roth reports, homicide rates in the Colonies and early Federalist era were generally low, and when homicides occurred, guns were seldom the weapon of choice because of the time involved loading them, their unreliability and (especially for pistols) their inaccuracy. More specifically, muzzle-loading firearms were problematic as implements for murder: They did not lend themselves to impulsive use unless already loaded, and it was generally unwise to leave them loaded for extended periods because their firing reliability degraded over time. Nearly all firearms at the time were single-shot weapons, meaning that reloading time rendered them all but useless in an interpersonal conflict if a second shot was needed.

Even so, we had lots of gun laws. From the 1600s through the start of the 20th century, old gun laws regulated or restricted weapons access to Indigenous people, African Americans (before the Civil War), indentured servants, vagrants, non-Protestants, those who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the government, felons, foreigners, minors and those under the influence of alcohol. Numerous laws regulated hunting practices, as well as firearms’ carry, use, storage and transport; restricted dangerous or unusual weapons; regulated the manufacture, inspection, storage and sale of firearms; imposed gun licensing; prohibited the discharge of firearms in or near towns, buildings, after dark, on Sundays, in public places, in cemeteries or near roads; or firing that wasted gunpowder. Penalties for violating these laws were generally some combination of fines and imprisonment, and sometimes gun confiscation. Hardly anyone living then, much closer to the drafting of the Second Amendment, saw these laws as inconsistent with its text.

The first gun wave

Societal gun proliferation first emerged after the Civil War, when mass production techniques, improved technology and materials, and escalating marketing campaigns made handguns in particular relatively cheap, prolific, reliable and easy to get. As Lee Kennett and James LaVerne Anderson note, “By the 1880s gunmaking had completed the transition from craft to industry.”

Revolvers were heavily marketed to the civilian population in newspaper and magazine advertisements extolling their virtues. When gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson’s near-monopoly over the manufacture of cartridge revolvers ended with the expiration of its key patent in 1870, numerous other gunmakers entered the market. Soon these other manufacturers were producing abundant, cheap revolvers at low cost to the consumer. As Kennett and Anderson noted, Colt’s initial revolvers sold for $35, but by 1900 the “‘two dollar pistol’ was a fixture in American life.”

Further, as the mail-order business boomed from the 1870s on, companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears began selling revolvers through their catalogs — especially small, cheaper, lighter-weight models that cost less to mail.

When the adverse consequences of the spread of cheap handguns began to be felt, especially in urban areas where they were most popular, states enacted numerous anti-gun carry and other restrictions. By the start of the 1900s, every state in the country had enacted anti-concealed carry weapons laws, and many had enacted gun purchase and carry licensing laws. In addition, three-quarters of the states had enacted laws against the open carrying of weapons. 

The Tommy gun era

New, devastating weapons technologies developed for battlefield use emerged from World War I and came to pose a public safety threat when guns like the Thompson submachine gun, the Browning Automatic Rifle (often known as the “BAR”) and sawed-off shotguns made their way into civilian hands. These initially unregulated weapons did not circulate widely, but had an outsize effect on criminality.

Most notoriously, the Tommy gun — “the gun that made the Twenties roar” — could fire hundreds of rounds in less than a minute. Its popularity among gangsters, coinciding with the rise of Prohibition-fueled gangsterism, prompted calls for reform. From 1925 to the early 1930s, two-thirds of the states criminalized their possession and use. In 1934, Congress enacted the first significant national gun law, the National Firearms Act, which closely regulated these weapons. When the law was challenged on Second Amendment grounds, it was upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court in the 1939 case of U.S. v. Miller. In the ruling, the high court affirmed that the amendment was about government-organized and regulated militias, not personal self-defense.

The Second Great Gun Leap

The next great surge in civilian gun sales came out of the Second World War, when entrepreneurs obtained massive quantities of war-surplus weapons at bargain basement prices. According to Andrew McKevitt, they then stoked U.S. market demand for the guns “with new styles of advertising that pitched dirt-cheap rifles as throwaway toys for the weekend warrior.” Key to that marketing was cultivation of a more militaristic and eventually political appeal, extolling gun buying as a patriotic expression of virtuous citizenship. The National Rifle Association embraced a more radical and political agenda when a dissident faction within the organization took control at its 1977 annual convention. The new leaders pushed more political and extremist messaging that emphasized armed patriotism as a form of political expression to both buttress its membership and boost gun sales. It also shifted in emphasis from guns for hunting/sporting purposes to acquisition of handguns for personal self-defense. Epitomizing this political turn to armed militarism was the aggressive marketing of assault-style rifles like the AR-15. Developed for use during the Vietnam War, gun companies pursued the civilian market when America ended its involvement in that conflict. Civilians initially showed little interest in the weapon (the military version could fire in both fully automatic and semiautomatic modes; the civilian version fires in semiautomatic mode only, meaning that it fires one round with each pull of the trigger), owing to their cost and the fact that they provided no special utility for typical gun purposes.

In the aftermath of highly publicized mass shootings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, public outcry led several states to impose restrictions on assault weapons. In 1994, Congress enacted a limited 10-year ban on 19 types of assault weapons. That, in turn, provoked an angry response from gun owners, the NRA and the gun industry. When the ban lapsed in 2004, assault weapons sales skyrocketed and gun marketing leaned heavily into gun purchasing as a political act. As former gun industry executive Ryan Busse has written, the “tactical lifestyle” came to dominate gun marketing, and the AR-style rifle became a symbol of right-wing hostility to government. The gun industry found this marketing strategy both effective and lucrative, as assault weapons — and their many accessories — were also more profitable than other guns. Aggressive AR marketing even extended to children: A company called “WEE1 Tactical” has sold a smaller, lighter-weight semiautomatic assault rifle specifically for children.

Even in the face of this political and marketing campaign, 10 states (and the District of Columbia) have legislated assault weapons restrictions. In April, Colorado became the 11th state to do so. Despite numerous legal challenges, the laws have mostly been held constitutional to date, even in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court’s more expansive interpretation of gun rights. Despite all this, gun law research has demonstrated the efficacy of gun laws; large majorities of Americans continue to support most gun safety measures, as do most gun owners; even with the Supreme Court’s expanded definition of gun rights, most gun laws continue to pass constitutional muster; and congressional enactment of a new gun law in 2022, passed with bipartisan support, demonstrates that new federal gun measures are not beyond reach. Yet this history demonstrates the enduring power of American gun mythology (stoked by commercial marketing forces), tied to the revolutionary and frontier traditions, which evolved even as the events giving rise to that mythology unfolded.

In the 1962 John Ford Western film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” a newspaper editor is asked to correct a long-standing historical mistake about the killing referenced in the movie title. The editor declined, saying: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”