Gun control

The Commercial Origins of American Gun Culture

Oliver Winchester started his career in 1848 as a men’s shirt manufacturer. He did well enough that, by 1855, he could afford to invest in a fledgling New Haven firm called the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company—and start to shift over to the gun business, where his name became famous.

To Winchester and other businessmen of the era— Samuel Colt,Eliphalet Remington, Horace Smith , Daniel Wesson—a gun was just another item of industry and commerce. They went into the gun business the same way that their compatriots went into buckles, hammers or corsets.

Americans today are estimated to possess more than 300 million firearms, many of them still bearing the names of these legendary manufacturers. How guns became such an American passion—and the focus of bitter disagreement about crime, violence and American identity—has a great deal to do with how the industry developed over the past century, in ways that might surprise both sides of today’s gun debate.