‘To Wear the Marksmen’s Badge:’ How Social Change and Community Created the American Gun Club, 1870-1914.

Courtney Slavin, Clark University

In the late nineteenth century, Americans fretted over the supposed collapse of the community. The Civil War permanently altered the meaning of citizenship and identity; the railroad restructured the national landscape; and rapid industrialization replaced a producer culture with a new consumerist one. Accordingly, people flocked to bustling urban centers, traded the homestead for tenements and boardinghouses, fieldwork for wage labor, and the homespun for the mass-produced. Popular sentiment then declared, “the city has replaced the village and, with it, destroyed community.” This has not been the case. Rather, modernization and urbanization required Americans to imagine new forms of community, ones which prioritized shared interests and mutuality over physical space. It is within this national restructuring that I place the emergence of a modern American gun culture. The growing interest of sport shooting in this period responded to several cultural changes at once. Recreational gun use offered men a retreat into a premodern past—and preindustrial manhood—with all the conveniences of industrialization. Ammunition came pre-assembled, repeating rifles fired several rounds before needing to reload, and innovations in design dramatically reduced the steps required to fire a weapon. Further, shooting ranges and gun clubs provided gun owners with convenient and dedicated spaces to share this new pastime in the company of others. Across the country, gun enthusiasts bonded over recent purchases, clubs organized hunting trips, and rifle teams competed in nationally sponsored matches. By charting the rise of rifle clubs and ranges, this paper explores how sport shooting constructed a nation-wide network of gun owners, just as traditional notions of community appeared to disintegrate. While the typical gun owner is imagined as a stalwart of American individualism, these clubs suggest a different tradition of US gun culture—one which exists at the intersection of consumerism and community.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 131. Community, Consumption, and Creative Industries