Will Gun Violence Ever End?

Dad’s first full-time job was as an accountant in the Colt Firearms factory in Hartford, CT where he started working in 1941. My mother, however, decided she didn’t like living in Hartford, so they moved to Washington, D.C. where Dad took a job with the team that mapped the transition from a peacetime to a wartime economy in 1942.

I was born in D.C. in 1944, and we moved back to New York City where both my parents had been raised in 1956.

Many years later I returned to D.C. on business and stayed at the Willard Hotel which was across the street from the old post office on Pennsylvania Avenue which then became Donald Trump’s hotel.

My father’s wartime group had worked in the Post Office building when they were figuring out how to take factories that were making automobiles and tractors and turn them into factories that made tanks and planes, so I made a point of mentioning to him that I had seen where he worked from my hotel across the street, to which he replied, “Yea, the roof leaked.”

Anyway, the point of this story is that the Colt factory in Hartford has now become a national historic park called Coltsville, and is due to open for public tours later this year.

Twenty miles north of Hartford and set alongside the same Connecticut River where the Colt factory sits, is another national historic park which was also a manufacturing center for small arms. This is the Springfield Armory which was founded directly after the Revolution and produced small arms for the government until it was shut down in 1968.

Two of the gunsmiths who worked at the Springfield factory were Samuel Colt and D. B. Wesson. Colt left the Springfield plant and opened his own gun company in 1855. Three years earlier, D. B. Wesson opened his first manufacturing facility in Norwich, CT but then moved to its Springfield plant on Stockbridge Street in 1860 and then went to a larger and more modern factory in East Springfield in 1968.

Most of the buildings that housed the Springfield Armory now provide classroom space for the city’s technical college, the Smith & Wesson structure on Stockbridge Street is a condo development.

The Colt company continues to manufacture small arms in a plant on the outskirts of Hartford, the building being turned into Coltsville housed a number of machine shops and other small industrial operations over the years.

I relate this history because every time we suffer from another mass shooting like the shooting which occurred last week in Georgia, we get the usual hue and cry from both sides of the gun debate which show a complete misunderstanding of how and why America has experienced this so-called ‘love affair’ with guns.

The pro-gun people invariably point to the 2nd Amendment as some kind of ‘proof’ that the history of our country is somehow inextricably bound up with the concept of owning small arms for self-defense. The anti-gun crowd, on the other hand, argues that the Supreme Court was wrong in granting Constitutional protection to private gun ownership because the Framers were only concerned with making sure that a government militia had access to guns.

So, what we end up with are two museums which housed a uniquely American industrial activity whose origins and historical importance is debated with reference to a legal text — Article 2 of the Bill of Rights — which has been defined and interpreted differently in different times and may end up at some point being redefined and reinterpreted again.

That all being said, what I intend to do in the brief space I am allotting myself today, is attempt to provide another explanation for how and why these gun factories in Springfield and Hartford were ever built and why these manufacturing facilities were abandoned even though the production of small arms by both companies and many other gun companies continues to the present day.

It is often remarked that gun manufacturing in Hartford and Springfield was one of the earliest manifestations of modern industrial production, i.e., assembly-line fitting of manufactured, same-size parts into a final, working device. This description is somewhat true, but what was uniquely different about the efforts at Colt, Smith & Wesson and the Springfield Armory was the development of a modern bookkeeping system which grew out of the necessity to keep track of the delivery and price of the various components which would then be assembled together into a gun.

The second unique feature of these early gun-making companies was that they were engaged in industrial production at the same time that the physical area of the United States was still largely frontier, with the wilderness (defined as any habitable space with less than 2 permanent settlers) only being closed after 1895.

Precisely because the transformation of a vast, open space into specific governmental locations known as states was a social, economic and political process, the individuals who transformed a vast wild zone between the Missouri-Mississippi Rivers and the West Coast needed tools that would allow them to develop farms and mines, along with protecting themselves from attacks by the indigenous populations who eventually lost access to most of their traditionally-held lands.

The United States was the only country in the entire Western world which experienced an industrial revolution at the same time that the country saw an area in excess of 1.2 million square miles transformed into habitable and politically organized space, a process which took some 50 years and in certain respects was made easier and more efficient with the civilian ownership of guns.

Both Colt and Smith & Wesson broke into gun manufacturing by supplying the government with small arms, with sizable revenues accruing during the Civil War. But at the same time, once the Civil War ended and the need to maintain wartime military strength disappeared, without a commercial market which could absorb gun and gun-related products, the small-arms industry would have disappeared.

Even though the frontier was closed prior to World War I, there were still large stretches of rural zones, as well as many neighborhoods in urban locations where policing and public safety was an occasional publicly supported activity at best.

Want an example of this situation and what it meant in terms of civilian ownership of guns? Try this one, for instance.

In 1981, a 47-year-old man named Ken McElroy, was shot to death as he sat in his truck on the main street of Skidmore, MO, a shooting which occurred in the middle of the morning and was witnessed by at least 60 local residents in a town where the total population was around 400 people at the time of this event.

McElroy was the town bully, and he was killed by ‘persons unknown’ several weeks after he was allowed to remain free even though he had been arrested and charged with the felonious assault of a beloved town resident who owned the general store.

Over the next decade, there were three separate investigations of this homicide, first by the local police, then by state cops, and then by the FBI. Every, single town resident who witnessed the shooting was interviewed multiple times, but nobody ever gave up the shooter even though ballistics indicated that the assailant was one of the individuals standing in the street.

The point is that eighty years after the U.S. Census declared there was no longer any wilderness zone in the Lower 48, people living in small towns like Skidmore were still willing to take the law into their own hands and maintain community safety with the ownership of a gun.

This selfsame situation exists today in many inner-city, urban neighborhoods where residents often feel like they are living in a frontier zone because the cops showing up in a timely response to a call about some criminal act may or may not take place.

I live in Massachusetts, a state which ranks lowest or next-to-lowest of all 50 states in terms of the rate of violent crime. But my office is in a small, walk-in medical clinic in the city’s South End, which is a terribly depressed, inner-city neighborhood with a violent crime rate which equals the crime rate in countries like Honduras, Papua New Guinea or worse.

You think the residents of Springfield’s South End feel any safer in their neighborhood because they live in a state where the overall rate of violent crime is some twenty times lower than what they endure?

And why shouldn’t such folks want to arm themselves with a gun, particularly when handguns made by companies like Smith & Wesson are all around and can be purchased cheaper than hell because a small S&W revolver will last and work perfectly for 30 or 40 years?

Until and unless we develop some reasonably-priced technologies what will make people feel as secure and safe as they feel when they own a gun, we can expect that events like the shooting in Winter, to quote the jerk running for Vice President on the GOP line, will remain a ‘fact of life.’