Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words With Pamela Haag 20160703

Cspan, created by americas Cable Television companies and brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. And now on booktvs after words program, historian pamela haag provides a history of guns in america. Host were here today with pam a la chicago, author of a new book called the gunning of America Business and the making of american gun culture. Hello, pam a la, how are you . Guest hello, im fine. Host pamela, exactly why did you write book, and when did you decide that we needed a book like this . Entering well, its an interesting story. Today most people who talk about guns love guns or hate guns. But when i started this project, i had never owned a gun or even used one. Nor had i been involved in gun control politics. Instead, i came to this story through a ghost story. When i was in graduate school in new haven, a friend of mine told me the story about Sarah Winchester who was Oliver Winchesters daughterinlaw. Now, Oliver Winchester was known as the rifle king and the manufacturer of the winchester repeater rifle. And according to ledge legend, sarah, his daughterinlaw, believed she was being haunted by the spirits of everyone killed by winchester rifles. She was a spiritualist and believed ghosts were haunting her. I began to pursue leads on sarah, but she was an elusive subject, and i set the project aside to work on another book. Then newtown happened, sandy hook, and after that massacre my mind wandered back to Sarah Winchester. Only this time i thought that maybe i was starting with the wrong end of the story, that maybe the more interesting story here, the more mysterious story wasnt sarahs ghost story, but the story of the gun industry itself. About which i knew nothing. And i wanted to know more. So being trained as an historian, i began to look into it and followed the trail of the money of the gun industry. Host follow the money. Fascinating. Theres i want to read a paragraph to you from your book on page xxi. Quote, writes pam a la chicago pamela haag, the tragedy of gun violence emerged from the banality of the american gun business. The forgotten but ironclad logic that gunned america was the amorality of business, not diabolical intentions of the merchant of death or the add have beentures of the gunslinger. The gun culture developed out of a perpetual quest for new and larger markets that had exceptional social consequences. Even so, the thrust of gun politics is toward the mystification of the gun. American gun culture is explained as a legacy of the Second Amendment, militias, wild west gunslinger, cowboys, the frontier, american individualism, gangs and the ma big significant charisma of violence, video games, manhood and hollywood. It is explained, in short, as the legacy of almost everything but what it always was and still have, a business. Unquote. That seems, to me, to capture a lot of the thrust of this book. And i just wondered if you could talk about how gun culture being propelled by business is underappreciated and underexamined in our culture today. Guest yes host historically. Guest uhhuh. I would say if the reader takes away any message from this book, its that the history of our gun culture has a few elements. One, indeed, is exceptional, and thats the Second Amendment. Thats very unique among nations. But large parts of the history of our gun culture come from very unexceptional things; the gun industry. Guns in this country were not just about the Second Amendment, they were also a commodity that was sold and designed to be sold, produced to be sold and was treated very much like an ordinary, unregulated commodity in key years of its existence. So to really understand why we ended up such a heavily armed nation, its important to understand the unexceptional part of that legacy which is that the gun industry acted like an industry, behaved like an industry, followed the ordinary trends of all other industries in our history and had the same aspirations as any other industry. Once agains began to be produced industrially and in larger numbers, it was only natural that the gun industrialists with every generation had to revisit the question who is going to buy all these guns. Simply sitting back and dealing with pr preexisting demand wouldnt have been enough. I think it strains credulity to believe that the element of our gun culture that had the very most to gain by selling and promoting and celebrating their product is the very most invisible when we think about guns. Instead, much of the political talk today is exclusively about interpreting the Second Amendment. The gun industry has become almost invisible in that history. Host well, if i were Ely Eli Whitney or Oliver Winchester or any of the historical gun manufacturers and i were reading this book, i might be inclined to push back on a word you use which is that you describe this as the product, gun culture, as the product of the amorality of business. Now, my question is if a manufacturer then or today is creating a product that is totally legal and purchased in large numbers by Police Departments and the military to do all kinds of things theyre authorized to do and for citizens to hunt or protect themselves with, how is that a reflection of amorality in business . Guest well, what i i mean by amorality is that the first gun captain lusts, the first gun capitalists, the first gun industrialists werent thinking about their product as a good product or a bad product. Today we live in a an age of more conscious capitalism. Theres a little more talk about Business Ethics and corporate ethics. But for the first generation who really built the gun industry, amoral simply means that they looked at guns more as a product to sell. They didnt trade it with a lot of malignancy or worry about that, or nor did they really celebrate the gun as something more than what it was. They had a very empirical view, and its interesting because, of course, most of the first gun zions started doing other things. You know, oliver moved from making mens shirts into the rifle. Eli whitney, of course, invented the cotton gin, then found himself broke and took up a contract in 1798 to make muskets for the u. S. Government. That was something to do with his machine. So amorality really describes a world of man, a tight knot of men who are responsible for starting this industry who were more interested in the means of making things than the particular thing they made. So they were interested in getting up a machine. They were on the vanguard of american industry, in fact, not just the gun culture. So in some ways, they were surprisingly neutral about their products. Host did any of these men and i believe they were all men the key gun manufacturers of history, did any of them express in the research pg that you did, and you did an amazing amount of research. Guest thanks. Host and i should mention this is a definitive and provocative and fascinating history of the gun business. But did any of these men share any doubts or moral qualms about what they were doing or what they had donesome. Guest well, thats a great question. Theres a lot of ways to tackle that. At first Oliver Winchester very much saw his rifle as a weapon for the romance of war, as he called it. So, and thats not unusual. Many of these gun industrialists and Many Americans, actually, in the 1840s and 850s still very much thought of the gun as an implement for war. They werent thinking about it as much in the commercial or civilian sense. But its important to realize that when guns are being produced by private industry and not for public defense, the logic is very different. Samuel colt was a very ambitious capitalist, and he had very, he was very rapacious about figuring out how to sell his guns. And for him things like war which are, you know, horrible for civilians was more like advertisement. You know, this was something that could promote his rifle. He looked at the cessation of war as a time of great difficulty. In 1838 in the seminole war, his colt revolver was used, but when the war was overred, he complained it had happened so quickly that his market had been destroyed. So the logic of making guns in a private industry was very different than the logic of guns used in war. So they looked at it from a business calculus. Interestingly, Oliver Winchester wrote somewhat frequently about what he called the moral effect of his rifle, how would it affect the person who had that rifle. And he commented on the coolness that it could impart to the gun owner. And he looked at it as a weapon that could multiply the power of one individual and make him equal to a troop or equal to a group of men. Toward the end of his life when he was really developing the u. S. Commercial market in the 1870s, he talked very provocatively about his weapon as perfect for single individuals traveling through a wild country. He was beginning to develop very much the mystique of the rifle as one of selfdefense against violent conditions and circumstances. But in terms of regrets, no, i dont think that they expressed samuel colt sold guns up until the very last minute to the south before the civil war and was called a base trader by all of the new york papers and was certainly excoriated for that. But his comment was make hay while the sun shines. Host i want to get to Sarah Winchester in a second, but before we do, you mentioned advertising. There are two theres a part of your book that totally amazed me. Page 324. Id like you to explain to us what this is. Guest uhhuh. Host quote, picture a redhaired picture a redheaded boy in the front row of the movies. Hes on the edge of his seat, eyes popping out of his head as the end is written across a big game film were the star speakers. Up flashes your ad, boys earning winchester sharpshooter medals. Whats the next thought in that boys mind . Whats he going to save his quarters for . A winchester, of course. Guest right. Host thats continued on page 337. Now, this is an ad. You know your son wants a gun. But you dont know how much he wants it. He cant tell you, its beyond words. [laughter] what is that . [laughter] and who wrote that, and what does it signify in the history of the gun business . Guest great question, and those are very provocative quotes. One of my favorite sources out of the winchester archives are the Confidential Sales bulletins. Those are both from the early 1900s. The first, i believe, is from 1917 and the second quote is from a literary digest ad for guns in 1921. And what these really signify is a huge change in how the gun industry was going about its business at the turn of the century. Big things were happening in america. We were an urban country, we were more modern. Most importantly, this was a postfrontier era. So like any other industry, gun makers needed to figure out, well, how do we create value for this product . They were also swimming in the currents of modern advertisement which are much more interested in emotional appeal and tapping into dmond demands and desires and feelings about products, not just needs. So that first ad is from a massive Winchester Company Marketing Campaign that they shorthanded in the Company Records as the boy plan. And the idea was they were going to sell letters to all their retailers to send to boys, and they had an exact number they wanted to reach, it was 3,573,000 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, and the company felt this was their new niche, their new target audience. And its surprising to us today, but they thought that boys who saw that winchester ad at the end of a saturday matinee movie would be saving up their quarters and going to a local dealer and buying their winchester rifle. The company was aware that some states had age limits on who could buy guns, and they urginged their sales force to urged their sales force to write back to headquarters if they lived in a state that had age restrictions on when you could buy a gun. But they also, as indicated in the second ad, were becoming very emotional. They were really deepening the mystique of the gun. You know, the gun was something that maybe in the 1800s was needed but not loved. But in the 1900s, the gun is something thats loved but maybe not needed. So the Company Started tapping into the emerging language of psychology and subconscious desires, and they started making the gun really more an object of emotional fulfillment, more of a luxury and something that could tap into emotional needs be not practical needs. If not practical needs. Host theres a word weve not yet mentioned, and thats hunting. Now, for the last since america was created, there is a significant portion of the population in rural and western and mountain and plains area ares, of course plains areas, of course, who if they didnt make a living or put food on the table through hunting, they enjoyed it as a sport and still do today. My question is how does that connect to your history, and is that totally separate and apart from the military and crime components of the history that youre telling, the hunting part of it . Guest right. Well, thats a good question. Oliver winchester was so enamored of his rifle being a military weapon that he didnt develop that hunting market until later, really in the 1900s. The larger point you raise is that in the 19th century its somewhat saw a laishes to talk about a gun culture. I think there were eclectic, heterogenous gun cultures, and the gun industry in the 1870s and 1880s was very attuned to these eclectic cultures. And one of them, certainly, was the recreationallist reached through ads in shooting and fishing and magazines like that. At the same time, they recognized what the Winchester Company called the ordinary shooter, their idea of the average shooter and the ordinary shooter was a farm boy, a farmer, farmers boy. They were reached through american agriculturalists or the rural new new yorker. And they were seeking out military markets through the army and navy journal. So really in the 19th century you can see a whole variety of different kind of gun subcultures that coexist. In the 20th century, politically the gun kind of gets unified as one thing, as one object. And it gets unified politically. But more most of our list for most of our history, weve had very eclectic use of guns, and Many Americans look to guns more as toolsment thats a major point in my book. A big transition here from the 1800s to our time is the gun kind of moving from a tool to something thats more of a totem that has much deeper political value, social value, ineffable value, indirect value. Host Sarah Winchester had a house. Tell us about her house, and tell us about her ghosts. Guest yes. So as i said, Sarah Winchester was Oliver Winchesters daughterinlaw. She was born in new haven in 1840 and was celebrated as the belle of new haven. She married Oliver Winchesters only son in 1862 right after antitam, in fact, and she had a series of misfortunes in her life. She lost several or babies several babies to stillbirth. One baby who was born alive died after a month very tragically. And then in 1881 her husband died of a very gruesome case of tuberculosis. Now, legend has it that sarah was a spiritualist and believed that the world of ghosts and the world of the dead overlaid the world of the living. And its a doozy of a ghost story, and as with any ghost story, the ghosts usually have a message for us. And in this case, sarah according to legend went to a medium who told her that she was, indeed, being haunted by the spirits of all of the winchester rifle casualties and that she needed to atone for this by building. Perhaps building a house for them. We dont really know what she was to do. [laughter] but she was never to stop building. She was to build nonstop using her rifle fortune she had inherited to do so. So zaire are moves out sarah moves out to san jose in 1885, some of her sisters had already moved out. On a whim, she buyed a plot of land, it was a modest cottage at the time. And from that point on, she built an extravagant, fabulous house that really made no sense. Its like a riddle. And she did not stop until her death in 1922. Today host how many rooms, how many rooms were there, and what did it look like, and why did she get so carried away with the house . Guest yes. So before the earthquake, San Francisco earthquake in 1906, it had over 200 rooms. The earthquake collapsed part of front of the house. And there are a few explanations for what she was up to. The most profane explanation is that she was just an architectural hobbyist, but she didnt know anything about architecture. So she made a mistake. She would just build a room on top of another room. She built a staircase that led to the ceiling, it led nowhere. She would build very small rooms with very small twofoothigh doors next to huge cabinets that had much bigger doors but that went nowhere. She designed the house very much like a maze. When youre in it, youre disoriented. Youre not sure where youre going. Its easy to lose your way. The ghost story says that she was doing this to try to evade the wicked spirits or atone for the winchester casualties. But in my research, i found one or two enticing clues to suggest that she might have, indeed, believed in ghosts, but i cant say that i have absolutely proved that. Host well, you have a picture in your book of her seance room, is that right . Guest uhhuh. Thats right. This is host and guest uhhuh. Host yeah. Go right ahead. Guest yeah. So thats one of the things that kind of makes me believe the ghost story about Sarah Winchester. In the late 1800s, one of the ruses of mediums is that they would perform, they would perform seances in rooms that had special cabinets built where they could pretend to be a spirit, you know . They could create an illusion for the person sitting there that a spirit was actually materializing before them. And it was also recommended that if somebody wanted to become a better medium, they should spend hours a day sitting in a spirit cabinet, a very small cabinet in a room in the dark meditating and that great materializations would come to them if they went through this ritual and they did it faithfully every single day. And right in the center of sarahs mystery house as its called today is a room known as the seance room. And you can see that theres this worn part on the floor where perhaps she was pacing back and forth when she lived there x. Theres a cabinet can that conforms very much to the kind of cabinet that mediums would have used and spiritualists would have used in the 1800s to meditate and to try to materialize spirits. Host what was the best source of research for you for this book . What archive . Guest well, i researched really from the east coast to the west coast, and i followed down both the sarah story and the Oliver Winchester story and the samuel colt story. The winchester archives are hosed in cody, wyoming, so i spent several weeks going through the Company Records there which were incredibly rich. They include all sorts of confidential correspondence about sales, about marketing, advertising copy, board of directors notes and memos, memoirs from employees, just a trove of interesting information. I also researched the colts Company Records which are in hartford as well as samuel colts personal letters and the Oliver Winchester family letters in new haven. So all of these were very rich sources, but the winchester records are really the backbone Research Wise for the book. And hes my main character. Host what was the impact of hollywood and dime novels and television and movies like the Jimmy Stewart movie winchester 73, i think it was. What was the impact of that kind of pop culture on building a gun love or gun appreciation or gun iconography in america . Guest the impact was huge. And one of the interesting things about the pop culture is just how much it floreses and proliferates in the 1900s and how much of our gun fables and our gun legends are really the 1900s talking about the 1800s. The quantity of production is staggering. There were 35 million western paperbacks published in the 1950s. There were over 1400 western movies released between 1935 and 1960. Of all of the books written about gunslingers and gunmen in one biography, all but 241 of the 2,000 were written in the 1900s, particularly in mid century. So a lot of the mystique of the gun is really a function of the pop culture of mid 20th Century America reflecting back on the gun historically. And a lot of this is taking the seeds of some of the myths that were planted, some of the stories that were planted in the 1880s and 1870s and exaggerating them and developing them. And normally, these stories about gunmen move in the direction of overkill. They tend to exaggerate both the quantity of gun violence and, for lack of a better term, the quality of the gun violence. Why the conflict happened, you know . Its always over honor, it has some nobility to it. Most of the gun violence in reality, of course, is much more impulsive and caused by anger and impulse. But these dime novels kind of planted the seed for the real explosion of the gun mystique really in the mid 20th century. We had, of course, several president s assassinated by gunfire, handguns. Garfield, mckinley, and there were, you know, a number of other attempts made including on franklin roosevelt. My question is did that trigger any National Discussion of socalled gun control, and if not, why did it not yet . I think the big discussion happened really in the mid and late 60s. But what was the impact of those events on the gun business . If any . Guest interestingly, in my work at least i didnt see either an impact or a shift in the Public Discourse after any of those events. Now, Theodore Roosevelt was also shot on his way to a speech, shot in the shoulder, and he just went ahead and delivered his speech. [laughter] went to the hospital later maybe. I dont even know if he did that. But he said, well, its going to take more than that to shut me down. So i, i dont think that for the time period that im looking at, at least to my knowledge, that really did have much of an impact. But, again, i dont think that the gun was by any means as politicized as it is today. That, too, the gun politics are a very recent, recent invention in this story. Host well, gun politics is, of course, a hypercontroversial and provocative and difficult subject. And you do in your epilogue get into it with some ideas you have for, you know, common sense recommendations to reduce gun violence that i want to get into. But before we do, i wondered when you look at the history of the gun business, at what point does the National Rifle association become powerful, and how does it evolve over time . Guest well, thats interesting. It was founded in the, the nra was founded in 1871 largely over alarm at poor marksmanship and also a lack of rifle ranges. And the organization went [inaudible] in 1892 then in 1904 was back and i guess its first lobbying in a sense was for rifle ranges in states because they found most states had very bad rifle ranges or no rifle ranges. So it certainly wasnt a lobbying entity as we would think about it today. And it certainly did not in any way represent the gun industry or gun industry interests. Now, in 1934 the National Firearms legislation is debated, and to me this is a moment the late 1920s, the early 1930s is really a moment when you can begin to see the emergence of a gun politics that we would recognize today. In 1934 the nra president who was an olympic marksman testified that he hadnt even been paid for his visits to washington or his lobbying efforts until two years before. So you can see this is a very germal organization. But during those hearings, the organization for the first time used sort of a direct Mail Campaign to all of its members to urge them to write to their legislators to oppose this first attempt at some federal firearms regulation. So its beginning to become a force in the early 1930s, and it was much, it was much earlier organized than any kind of progun control forces. So so they did have a sort of organizational head start politically over gun control organizations. But even then during these 1934 hearings, i think its important to note that the attorney general really drew a distinction between what he called the hobbyists who are represented by the nra and the gun industry, and he felt that the gun industry was being very cooperative in dealing with the problem of bootleger violence and gun violence. And he actually chided the hobbyists represented by the nra because he felt they were being unreasonable and being more obstinate and stubborn in their position. Although its worth pointing out the nra was in favor of legislation against submachine gun, but they were beginning to develop that slippery slope argument that if we let this legislation go, eventually theyll come after the rifle. So the rifle and the hunter skort of became an sort of became an alibi in this argument, and the oneforall strategy started to get adopted. Host were speaking with pamela haag, the author of the gunning of america. Pamela is a historian with a ph. D. From yale, and my question, pamela, is ill come right out and ask it. What is your position, if any, specifically on the Second Amendment . Does it what does it mean to you . Guest i dont know that i came into this with a Firm Position at all, and i dont think im leaving the research with a Firm Position particularly or specifically about the Second Amendment. I think it is the part of our culture, our gun culture that is, indeed, exceptional. And its protecting the rights of citizens to own arms. Other countries dont have this special protection. Since that is in place, to me it makes more sense to pay at least some attention politically not to the Second Amendment aspect of things or to interpreting that, but to the gunmakers. The gun industry. And to shift the attention a little bit away from the gun owner. And even tactically, it just seems that thats not been an effective approach. And i dont think that theres been nearly enough attention to this other arena. Perhaps the gun industry can be asked to do more. Maybe consumer activism should become more of a focus as we try to deal with a problem of gun violence that everyone cares about regardless of their position on the Second Amendment. So really the thrust of my book is more toward shifting the focus. Lets set aside the issue of the gun owner, look a little more at the gunmaker. Host well, pamela, one of your suggestions at the end of your book is that we consider repealing the 2005 act that exempted gun manufacturers from much liability. My question is, gun manufacturers, of course, are creating a perfectly legal product bought, you know, on a huge scale by the military, police and lawabiding sportsmen and hobbyists. If they create a product that blows up in your hand or injures somebody from a Product Point of view or design flaw, are they not would they not be liable for that . And why should they be liable for any other kind of liability . This is a controversial now between bernie sanders, of course, and hillary clinton. Different positions on this. Can you explain to me why you think we should repeal that 2005 law . Guest right. Well, the gun industry today enjoys unique status that would be the envy of almost any other industry. Its not just the 2005 legislation since 1997 theyve been insulated from any federallyfunded research that might appear to support gun control legislation. So theyre protected from that potential challenge to their market. And since 1972 theyve been exempted from consumer regulatory bodies because they kind of fell under the alcohol, tobacco and firearms umbrella. But that is not actually a consumer organization. So they do enjoy a lot of special, special privileges. I dont think the idea behind repealing that legislation is that a gun company could ever be held universally liable simply for harm. Its that right now americans dont have a day in court by which they can develop a case, a tort case that perhaps a company hasnt done enough, for example, to manage its dealers so that the dealers arent selling inordinately to criminals, or they havent done enough to insure product safety. Its more at least gaining access to the process which right now doesnt exist. Host why would you, why would you hold the manufacturer liable for the behavior of a completely separate, distinct entity like a dealer whos supposed to be following the law in his state or federal law . How would the manufacturer have anything to do with that . Guest well, actually, historically the gun manufacturers and the dealers have had close relationships. In the late 1990s when some of the civil litigation was considered, smith wesson, for example, just voluntarily said, well, we want to devise a code of ethics for our dealers, for dealers who are selling our guns. And it was quite comprehensive. And it was inspired, maybe unfortunately, but the threat of this lawsuit from several cities. But the result of that was a move in a very positive direction where they were modeling themselves after the auto industry, and they were going to say, you know, here are some things that we want our dealers to do. For example, they need to work harder against straw purchasers. So theres evidence that this type of pressure might compel manufacturers to think more closely about how their dealers are doing business. And historically, winchester, the Winchester Company certainly did that. They were always on top of which dealers were pushing more product, which dealers were undercutting their prices. So there is a lot of intimacy between the manufacturer and the dealer which is different than the dealer and the can customer. And the customer. Host i see. I see. I recently asked the National Rifle association yesterday, in fact, because i wanted to understand their point of view. I asked one of their top people what are your recommendations for reducing gun violence. Here are two things they came up with or they responded with, and id like to get your take on them. Number one, arrest, prosecute and punish those who break gun laws. The simple fact that anything illegal anyone can do with a firearm is already illegal under current laws, but these laws are not being enforced. What about that . Guest hmm, i think thats taking me a little beyond my area of expertise with the history of the gun industry. Many general host well, you do in your epilogue you make three or four recommendations. Im just trying to see who, you know, what i mean, you know, you and i have both written books about guns. I think that, like you, i have not figured out precisely what i see solutions for gun violence are. So im interested in looking at the socalled gun control advocates and the National Rifle association and seeing if there are any points they grow on. I found they agree on. I found a point that they agree with you on, pamela. Its Smart Gun Technology. Now, in your epilogue you write that gun control advocates and opponents hate this idea, or you use words similar to that, that they loathe the idea of Smart Gun Technology. Well, i asked the National Rifle association whats your position on this, and their response was if the market wants it, they are not opposed to it. If i think their issue is if theres a law requiring it before the technology is used or maybe ever, before the technology is perfected, that where it could be circumvented or it could be imperfect technology or it could block the Rightful Owner from being able to use the gun. But if the market determined that, for example, if the federal government, pamela, tomorrow said, manufacturers, we want Smart Gun Technology quickly developed for all the guns we buy from you, you know, the millions of rifles and handguns guest right. Host the manufacturers would probably scramble to do that, and the nra would have no opposition to that, and the consumer would benefit. So Smart Gun Technology seems to be something that you agree with the nra on or they agree with you on. Guest yes. Host what is the future, whats the promise of that as a potential remedy, do you think, to violence . Guest that emerged from me out of my reading of the secondary literature as a really compelling, new, interesting point. Much of the problem with guns is straw purchases, secondhand purchases, people who buy guns that then end up in other hands. So it would certainly address that. I think its important to recognize that nothing is singlehandedly going to solve any problem of the enormity of gun violence and a lot of the problem of gun violation, obviously, isnt just where gun violence, obviously, isnt just about guns. But the Smart Gun Technology has been in the pipeline. There have been companies, theres a German Company whos adopted it, even some graduate students at Johns Hopkins with very little money were making great progress in developing some prototypes for Smart Gun Technology. To me, its at least a solution that gets off of the familiar track of trying to predict who might end up, for example, being a mass shooter when they have no red flag, when theres absolutely no way that a gun dealer can be expected to read their minds. At least the technology is a little more of a businessfocused perspective. It could be incentivized, very much as you describe. And its trying Something Different that would cut into all those secondary markets, the straw purchasers which, as i understand it, are a problem. With criminal access. Host yeah. The other idea they mentioned to me, the nra did, was, quote fix our broken Mental Health system. Those mentally ill people with a propensity for violence even when identified, like the colorado theater and navy yard, tucson and fort hood shooters arent being placed into the National Instant check system to insure they are not able to purchase firearms. Plus, i believe some of these mass killers, some other mass killers are passing background checks. It seems as though many states are not feeding the right information into that system and that to fix that system would seem to be as urgent a priority as any other gun control recommendations. What do you think about that as you survey the current landscape . Is this Mental Health issue a a valid one, do you think . Guest well, one of the things that really strikes me and that i think feeds into your question is that 60 of gun deaths are suicides. So its not just the people who are actually committing crimes owing to the Mental Health issues, its that the majority of the over 30,000 gun deaths in this country every year are actually suicide. Its selfdestruction. 38 are homicide, 2 are accident. So thats a very hidden tragedy in the gun control debate. I think thats definitely one of the avenues that could be explored. But, again, a lot of the violence that is every day and ordinary in the cities really isnt propelled by Mental Health issue, per se. So, you know, its a complicated, complicated issue. I mean, the attention on guns tends to emerge out of mass shootings, out of these very dramatic and and disorienting and tragic attacks. But then we also have daytoday gun violation, you know, in my city in baltimore, for example, that has very little to do with that avenue. Host yeah, which would also seem to argue for targeted, very targeted Law Enforcement and prosecution to zero in on those areas. And for any person to be killed by a gun is, of course, a hideous tragedy. I understand, though, that firearmsrelated deaths have been on the decline by about 50 over the last 20 years. I guess the question is how do the pamela haags and the nras and the William Doyles of the world somehow get together on things, as you said, or a basket of things that can get these numbers down way below where they are . Guest uhhuh, thats host and the suicide is interesting. Yeah. Guest i think that suicide host i still think go ahead. Guest suicide really has been inkid bl for almost invisible for almost a hundred years. Even though the attention to gun violence started in the 19 20s, it was very much about urban, gangster, bootlegger violence. Suicide rates were on the rise, but theyve never been integrated into this conversation in a meaningful way, i dont think, you know, on either side. They were being produced in ever greater quantities as the country became more urban. Arguably more of a country where guns wouldnt be needed. Its interesting the turn of the century maybe things could have gone another way. Maybe the guns or the front tier might have just faded as we became more of an urban society, but they didnt. I think at every key moment, the industry had to figure out, like any other industry, not because they were diabolical or never nefarious, who is going to buy all this guns. One the factory was opened the town thought he was crazy. Who is how are you going to sell these guns . Who is going to buy guns in the quantity you can produce them, which was 200 a day. They say, well, youal operate for three or four days and then sit idle. Colt factory went bankrupt, and part of the problem was simply these guns werent needed by the average americans. So theres always been a tango between preexisting desires and the quite natural business of creating new desires. Finding new markets. Building and designing guns that might appeal to those markets, and which were a lot of interesting failures along the way in that regard. Host were guns one of the first global multinational american exports and businesses . Guest yes, to me this is one of the most fascinating findings out of the archives. I had no idea of this when i went into this research. When i thought about gun owners and the gun customer, buffalo bill, john wayne, the usual images. Its fascinating that in the years before and after the civil war, the american gun industry very much survived and stayed alive on its international, nonu. S. Sales, and the scope of that is absolutely breath taking. All of the major manufacturers from colt to winchester, remington, smith weston, were staying alive by selling guns to almost every country but the United States. In winchesters case he had a huge contract for 20,000 rifles to the assaultan sultan of the ottoman empire, smith west one sole to the russian scar. Remington sold 140,000 rifles to the french, which was the largest production ever realized in their armory. They encamped one of their most charming family members, samuel remington, at the royal courts of europe where he sold to swede en, norway, the war forces for the vatican, egypt. Winchester had a large contract in 1866 to mexico. And the list goes on. So, even though today i think the United States is viewed as if it has unique gun pathology, we have some completely deranged relationship to gun and its very worth noting that the countries that are very judgmental toward the american gun problem today were very much the countries that were keeping that business alive in the 19th injure for a good chunk of time. Host really . Guest really. After the civil war, demand here was abysmal, unsurprisingly, and had it not been for these foreinternational contracts its very unlikely these entities could have stayed in business. Winchester certainly not. He needed his contract to the sultan. So the american gun culture is really better and more accurately understood as an international phenomenon. It was a global phenomenon by which america was arming the world. They were clamoring for these new modern weapons, by 1881, according to one account, almost every single rifle, gun, on a breachloading system was of american origin except for one gun. Host thats globally. Guest yes. Yes. This is a very hidden part of the gun history. Host in other words, the French Colonial empire, the bell uncolonial empire, the British Colonial empire, countries who currently are certainly happy to criticize our gun culture, they fueled the multinational gun manufacturers of america guest absolutely. Host a primary. Guest absolutely. The very first gun market in the United States was the u. S. Military because we were relying in the late 1700s on europe but at our industry develop, as we were on the cutting edge and the first arrivers in the industry, the sales at this very key juncture in the 1850s and 1860s and 70s, very much relied on that international commerce. So this was part of a first wave of globalization, and the United States gun industry was very much the leading edge of that. I would be hardpressed to name a country or continent by 1910 that winchester had not armed. They had globetrotting salesmen as early as the 1860s who formed expatriate communities, gun communities, throughout europe. So, even though belgium had started as this gun smith powerhouse it was rapidly superseded by american industry, and to be fair, it is very much the case that although these countries dont have civilian violence the way we do today that imperialism in western europe very much fueled our gun industry at a key moment. Host i see. What does all this well, what is the connection between gun history and Race Relations in the United States . Im thinking about postcivil war events. Guest yeah. I think that a lot of the gun history could be told as a history of race and Race Relations. Gun ownership before the civil war was always higher in the south than it was in other regions of the country. That dates back to colonial days. After the civil war, as it became clear that africanamericans in the south were not going to enjoy the rights or protections that they expected, even some africanamerican leaders, such as ida b. Wells, and e. B. Due boys gap to recommend that the winchester had a place of honor in every black home. This became a way, an equality of last resort. The way that africanamericans could defend themselves in the absence of other protections and the absence of true equality. The gun kind of steps in to fill that role. So, at this point, were on a spiral. The gun might be loved for that reason and embraced for that reason, but over time, the guns tend to get turned inward and get used in more intimate states as in ones own community. So even by the 1930s and 1940s, the homicide rate in southern africanamerican communities was seven or eight times higher than the white homicide rate. So i think the lure of the gun was very strong after the civil war for very good reasons, but then ultimately just led to more guns, more gun violence within communities. Host well, i sometimes think of our gun situation today as a kind of an infinite maze and hall of mirrors and a horror show. Hope anybody interested in guns in america read this book as a starting point, subject of debate and discussion from the person who strongly supports the Second Amendment, the hunter and the so its a great place to start. And i just wondered if theres anything else you would like to add to what we talked about today that might further that discussion. Guest its been a pleasure to have this conversation. I think that i hope people will give the book a chance, and i hope that if they read it, they come away from the book with a much richer understanding how we ended up with so many guns and how the gun developed in our culture and its mystique developed in the 1900s and 1800s, and i hope that they will be a little more skeptical the next time they hear a sentence that begins, americans have always been a nation of cowboys, always loved guns. This is all changed over time, and it can change again. Host well, thank you so much, pamela. We have been spaking with pamela haag, author of the gunning of America Business and the making of the american gun culture. Thank you. Guest thank you. Cspan, created by americas Cable Television companies and brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. This is booktv on cspan 2. Television for serious readers. Heres our primetime lineup tonight, starting at 6 45, Stephen Moore argues for fossil fuels. On after words at 8 00 p. M. , talking about rise of the rocket girls, the women who propelled us from missiles to the mon to mars. At 9 00 p. M. , booktv airs part two of cspans q a interview with former new york city mayoral candidate mark green. The discusses his book. A generational moment moyer on the progressive rise. You can watch part one at 8 00 p. M. On cspan. Then at 10 00, tour of the largest africanamerican history and literature collection in the midwest. And we wrap up ours primetime lineup with the reair of after words. That all happens tonight an cspan2s booktv. Starting now on booktv, were live with author and documentary filmmaker sebastien junger. He will take your questions for the next three hours. Host sebastien younger how didout end up in gillette, wyoming . Guest i graduated college, and i had grope up on the east coast in a suburb of boston and felt like id never really been challenged in my life. I grew up in an affluent environment and decided to set off, like many young people, to set off to see my country, and to hitchhike across it. I put my stuff in a backpack and got some food and was all prepared. Very responsible young man. And i set off and i wound up in gillette, wyoming, a tough mining tonight, back then it was. I was outside of town trying to get a ride for hours on a freezing