Beating Guns

by Shane Claiborne

  In the 1850s, even a mere two hundred rifles per month were hard to sell. Smith & Wesson was making only fifteen guns per month in 1867. Colt leased out his surplus factory space, which was not needed in peacetime. Employment declined in the Winchester company from seventy-two during the war to twenty-five after. Remington called the postwar reality the “great struggle to survive,” and the company had more than $1 million worth of merchandise with nowhere to send it.

  Gun manufacturers were all but dead in the 1870s. Gun companies diversified and began making sewing machines, horse cars, bridges, plows, mowers, reapers, or “anything else that strikes their fancy.” They were, after all, committed more to the dollar than the gun.

  But these were businessmen, and they kept their minds going on how to convince people to buy stuff they did not really need. They came up with plans for bulk orders to try to move product and shift the burden of responsibility to sellers. There was a 20 percent discount for orders of $100 or more, 25 percent for $1,000, 30 percent for over $5,000—pretty innovative strategies for the 1800s. But as profits were cut by bulk orders, there was an ongoing desire to maximize profits through smaller gun buyers or, as Winchester said, “scattering our guns as much as possible.” The more guns scattered, the more gun makers profited.

  The preference became small, steady orders that could counteract the spasms of the war revenue. As Pamela Haag puts it, “The gun industry was on the leading edge of the first wave of economic globalization.” The venture capital needed to create the market in the United States was largely provided by the international market in the late 1800s.

  Men were the most obvious market, and that’s exactly where much of the early marketing turned. Marketers targeted civilians in the South who might need protection from Confederate rebels after the war. They went after farmers who might need to defend themselves from “Indians or other varmint.”35 Civilians had to be convinced that they needed guns. There was a new image of the citizen-defender who would step in when the government did not. “It behooves every loyal citizen to prepare himself . . . with the best weapon of defense.”36 There were rumors of secret rebels who could reignite violence after the Civil War. “Rebels” and “outlaws” and “guerrillas” and “Indians” were all buzzwords in the gun market.

  Gun marketers pounced on the gold rush out West, an opportunist attempt to sell guns to protect all the gold one found. One ad said, “You may sleep soundly and safely, with your hard-earned nuggets by your side.” Even though many of the fears were perceived rather than actual, marketers took advantage of fear, saying things like: “My friend, if you have regard for your life or your scalp, do not fail to get one or more of these invaluable weapons.”37

  Antique gun advertisements [Shane Claiborne]

  Soon there were ambitious attempts to sell to women. There was the “lady’s pistol” of 1859, a gun the size of a pocket comb that could fit in a purse or bag or even be tucked away in a corset. Guns were developed for other niche markets as well. A cane gun came out in 1858, perhaps alluring because of its covert nature but also because of its utility to the elderly or the disabled. Some of these attempts, like in any business, flopped. (Remember “new Coca-Cola”? #BadIdeas.)

  Gun advertisements featuring women [Shane Claiborne]

  There was a transition from focusing on consumers who needed guns but did not want them to creating the consumer who wanted guns but didn’t need them. In the former, the marketing focused on the functions of the gun as a tool (precision, ease, firepower, comfort, etc.); in the latter, none of that mattered as much as the magic of the gun. It became common to see ads that didn’t even have a gun in them or that had guns not drawn to scale. It was more about the romance of having a gun in the wilderness or having a gun ready to protect your family.

  When the market had exhausted all the buyers who needed a gun for its practical value, it began to create buyers who attached an emotional value—or even a spiritual value—to guns. It’s what Pamela Haag calls the gun “mystique.” No longer would the gun be seen as a hammer or a drill or a sewing machine. In Haag’s words, “What was once needed now had to be loved.”38

  In the early 1900s, a very ambitious strategy called the “boy plan” had a goal of specifically reaching over three million boys ages ten to sixteen (their exact target number was 3,363,537, though it’s unclear why they chose such a precise number).39 They were the target market in one of the biggest gun-marketing campaigns in history. Owning a gun was pitched as synonymous with becoming a man. Fathers and mothers who had concerns about their kids owning guns were laughed off, even shamed. To address safety concerns, shooting centers began to proliferate in the country. Even groups like the Junior Rifle Corps helped prepare young boys for gun ownership. Each young man was given a chance to be in the NRA.

  Gun advertisement targeting boys [Shane Claiborne]

  The gun executives were brilliant marketers. Colt is said to have coined the phrase “new and improved.”40 He made one of the first attempts at utilizing prison labor—to make guns and munitions (what could go wrong?).

  While the gun industry did have some critics, one of the most stunning things is how little resistance there was to the proliferation of the tools of death—earning many of these businessmen the title “Merchants of Death.” And as guns grew more and more powerful and precise, they began to change society.

  Army of One

  One of the most interesting social developments is the rise of the heroic individual, the lone ranger, and vigilante justice, which arguably has evolved into some of the armed militias we have today. We moved from an army of many to an army of one. What used to need a brigade of soldiers with a clear division of labor was now able to be carried out by one person. Me versus the world. You can still see the tension, which continues to this day, of the individual “army of one” versus the real defense provided by the federal military and police. You can even see some of this in the Wild West movies of John Wayne and in old films like Rambo and James Bond. More recently, we find the lone hero with a gun in the Jason Bourne series, in the Taken films, and in American Sniper, which is about the life of Chris Kyle, who was said to have killed 255 people as a sniper in the US military and who was later killed by a fellow veteran.

  The vigilante savior with a gun began to emerge as an American icon. But it wasn’t without its critics. Some gun enthusiasts warned of the danger of firepower replacing bravery, even mocking some of the modern guns, by use of which an “infamous coward” could kill someone with a “random ball” from whence no one knew where it was shot. Just as some might say of drone warfare today, the new firepower made bravery less necessary and gave cowardice much more power. Some said it “cheapened war and corroded bravery.”41 A stealth sniper shooting from one hundred yards was much different than the face-to-face combat of musket loaders and cavalry. Without a doubt the “army of one” phenomenon, accompanied by increasingly powerful and accurate technology, has contributed to lone-wolf killers and domestic terrorists. Even now we see individuals armed with hundreds of guns and a few conspiracy theories who call themselves “patriots” but are prepared to fight the US military and kill soldiers should they deem the government too corrupt.

  War moved from being a communal ritual to being an individual one. As guns and the right to own them evolved from being commonly shared to individually owned, there were voices of concern about guns that had such massive and precise firepower readily available to all. Some worried about “egotistical impulses” in a shooter. What would happen if every person in America began to think of themselves as a one-man militia? Rapid-fire guns invited and emboldened individuals. A contemporary example is the lone gunman responsible for the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas. With military-style weapons (and bump stocks to make them more lethal), he fired more than 1,100 rounds into the crowd at a music festival from a hotel window—killing 58 people and injuring 851 others—in a total of ten minutes.

  Everyone, good and bad, had the opportunity to
purchase invincibility and confidence and power by buying a gun.

  Before the rapid-fire guns of the nineteenth century, a skilled shooter could shoot only twice in a minute. In the nineteenth century, that number grew to twenty-five shots per minute. As early as 1864, one man boasted that he could shoot ninety rounds so fast that the gun became too hot to touch. “I spit on it, and it would sizzle,” he said.42 Now, an unskilled shooter can shoot over one hundred rounds in a minute with a legally owned semiautomatic handgun or rifle. If a gun is customized with bump stocks, a person can even shoot multiple bullets per second. Gun barrels are made thicker in part to handle the heat of rapid fire.

  Guns weren’t the only gun product businesses could make money from. In the early twentieth century, folks like Marcellus Hartley saw that the real money was to be made in bullets. After all, most people would probably own only one or two guns in a lifetime, but they would shoot a whole lot of bullets. Hartley founded the United Metallic Cartridge Company and made his fortune off bullets.

  There was a new empowerment, and not everybody was happy. But certainly the gun capitalists were. The “steady stream of lead” that one of the Winchester family members spoke of meant a steady stream of profits.43 The more bullets fired, the more money rolled in. The more that dangerous people bought guns, the more that unarmed good people would think they needed them. For every “outlaw” there would need to be a “hero.”

  There were no obstacles when it came to legislation, no federal regulations to worry about. Gun makers were free to sell and didn’t even need a gun lobby for quite some time. The biggest battle for the first generation of the gun empire was more of a court battle than a legislative one—they were fighting over patents: who owned the guns and the money made from selling them. Things like patent extensions ensured profits, which meant that the gun executives did some major hobnobbing and bribing of those who helped secure patents. Colt’s brother said he must have spent over $60,000 in banquets and presents to secure a much-needed patent—a small investment in the financial security of his product’s future.44

  Eventually cowboys, militiamen, pioneers, renegades, revolutionaries, criminals, and wannabe heroes all bought in. They may not have had the same politics or religion or ethnicity, they may have had nothing else in common, but they learned to love the gun. And if they did not need it before, they could not imagine life without it now.

  From Craft to Commodity

  What was once a craft was becoming a mass-marketed commodity. Blacksmiths who made guns often made all sorts of other stuff too. They made cookware, forks, keys, shovels, razors, ladles, dishes, locks, hinges, horseshoes, wagon wheels, knives, and scissors. Their skills were invaluable to the community, and they were celebrated for their specialized contribution to society.

  Undoubtedly, blacksmiths of old thought of the gun as one more tool they made to help out on the farm. No two guns were alike. It was a craft, an art. During times of war, some of them were conflicted about making guns, as they did not want to contribute to bloodshed. They were making guns for hunting and keeping away coyotes, not for taking human life.

  Earlier, when the Revolutionary War came, a group of blacksmiths in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, refused to make arms for war. (To this day, Lancaster is known for having a high concentration of pacifists, with roots in the historic peace churches like the Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites. William Penn was a Quaker.) When the Lancaster blacksmiths refused to make guns for war, the government threatened to confiscate their tools, calling the war-resisters “enemies of their country.”45

  Whereas each gun had previously been handcrafted, with the gunsmith taking great pride in the merits and uniqueness of each product, the war economy created another need: interchangeable parts. Guns needed to be exchangeable, and ammo needed to be universal to adapt to the battlefield.

  The gun companies moved from crafting guns to mass-producing guns, making them a commodity. Gun production went from a specialized skill to a corporate enterprise, creating tensions that still exist. Many of the folks who profited didn’t know how to make a gun. And the folks actually making the guns weren’t profiting. The person who knew the least about the craft was making all the money selling the product. Capital had triumphed over, and cheapened, craft.

  Blacksmiths felt the collision. It was man versus machine. People became enraptured by mass production—the profits, the ingenuity, the precision of mechanized manufacturing. Praise for the machines grew, with people celebrating how they never tired, cost little, didn’t complain, and didn’t need homes or health care.46 But it came at a cost. The collision of man versus machine was so intense that one gunsmith named Ebenezer Cox marched into the corporate office and killed his boss, Thomas Dunn—with a gun, of course.47

  Cox became a bit of a legend, a folk hero who shot the corporate elite boss who didn’t even know the art of metal. In 1842 gunsmiths walked off the job in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, chartered a boat to Washington, DC, and made a direct appeal to President John Tyler, saying they were reduced to slaves or, in their words, treated like “machines,” not people. But alas, gunsmiths were fighting a losing battle. The gunsmiths no longer made guns—they only made gun parts. Gunmaking was now about mass production.

  One of the remarkable things about the gun capitalists is their moral agnosticism. Rarely did you hear them speak about the dark side of their industry. Even Eli Whitney said little if anything at all about the injustice associated with his line of work—both the cotton gin that became the backbone for slavery in the South and the mass production of guns.

  It’s important to recognize that the gun business is, first and foremost, a business. It always has been, from the very beginning. The gun industrialists did not want people to die; they wanted to sell guns.

  You certainly wonder what those early gun capitalists, if they were alive today, would think of the industry they gave birth to and the tremendous loss of life we see on a daily basis.

  I (Shane) went on a pilgrimage to the gun capital of the world—Hartford, Connecticut. I was speaking at Yale Divinity School, which is built on the site of the Winchester estate. There was something powerful about seeing all this land that had been the heart of the gun economy now a center for theological reflection. It was a swords-to-plowshares story in its own right. Down the street I walked through the old Winchester factory, now turned into condominiums.

  Eli Whitney Museum [Shane Claiborne]

  The gun room at the Eli Whitney Museum, now a nondescript storage space [Shane Claiborne]

  I drove a few miles down the road and found the Eli Whitney Museum and his old house and estate. I went into the building, which was filled with kids doing artwork. An older man with an eye patch stopped me to ask what I wanted. I told him I came to visit the Eli Whitney Museum, and he laughed. “This is it. It’s mostly used for educational activities these days.” I explained to him my interest in Whitney’s gunmaking business, and he assured me I had found the right guy. Chuckling a bit, he told me that he was a Quaker (known for their commitment to nonviolence), and we laughed at the irony.

  “Come with me,” he said, taking me into a back room. “This is the gun room. We don’t use it much.” He moved some clothing racks and chairs so that I could stumble around the room and see some of the cases of guns—undoubtedly some of the oldest guns in the world. I love that they were buried in clutter and art supplies for kids. When I asked where the original armory was, he told me it was “over there where the kids are playing.” Something felt very special about this old space that has much bloodshed tied to it—now transformed into a playground. I don’t know if Eli Whitney is happy about what’s become of his estate, but I sure was.

  four

  The Gun Empire

  Tell me who profits from violence, and I will tell you how to stop it.

  —Henry Ford

  IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, there is an event called the Festival of Faiths. The focus one year was “Pathways to Nonviolence.” That year th
e National Rifle Association had also planned its annual convention in Louisville at the same time. The NRA convention was held at a space near the airport, while the Festival of Faiths was held downtown. The two groups crossed paths only at the airport and at tourist sites. One of the most interesting parts of that weekend was seeing the advertising juxtaposed throughout the city. The Festival of Faiths had reserved advertising space on both sides of Main Street long before the NRA but then had to give up one side at the request of city officials. On one side were banners imagining paths to nonviolence, while the other side was covered in NRA ads for guns and concerts.

  I (Mike) was there with RAWtools to turn guns into garden tools. We had our forge and anvil set up every day, which drew people to check out what our fire and banging was all about. While most of the folks in town for the NRA convention who came up to see what we were doing were very civil and open to conversation, those who weren’t walked off without a word. There were only a few who walked off enraged, shouting things like, “They’re killing our guns!” (The narrative “guns don’t kill people” breaks down when you personify them.)

  Are we better at protecting guns than at protecting people?

  Founded in 1871, the NRA has some five million members. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 325 million people in the United States, and about a third own guns. So the NRA represents less than 5 percent of gun owners. That means at least 90 percent of gun owners—nine out of ten—are not represented by the NRA.

  Without a doubt it is one of the most influential lobbying groups in the country—it has tons of money and tons of power. The NRA is officially a nonprofit and has half a dozen subsidiaries, including the Political Victory Fund, which funds politicians with its $434 million annual budget.