Gun control has become such a controversial and galvanizing issue that it now seems like a permanent part of the national discourse. While modest gun regulation may be a sensible step toward preventing violence, gun-control opponents often invoke America's centuries-long love affair with firearms as a corollary to the Second Amendment. The claim that guns were a vital component of America since its colonial days is a potent one, bringing to mind images of frontier life filled with patriots defending their land and family from the villains (bears, Indians, Europeans) threatening their way of life. It's such a familiar refrain that few have challenged its veracity. In Arming America, Michael A. Bellesiles takes aim at the myth that guns have always been an integral part of America. His thoroughly researched and often fascinating book begins with the European colonization of North America, when guns were a rare, often unreliable commodity owned mostly by the wealthy. Instead, the weapons of choice were the longbow and sword—simpler, cheaper tools that didn't require nearly as much maintenance as rifles. Local militias fought mainly with conventional arms, and guns almost never proved the deciding factor in conflicts, at least until the popular advent of the peripheral but more effective bayonet. America only began to manufacture its own firearms after the Revolutionary War, and even then their distribution was highly regulated and hardly universal, even once the Constitution affirmed the right to bear arms. But if guns were so burdensome, why did they continue to improve and proliferate? Arming America falls short on this point, which is why Bellesiles' repetitive book is hardly an unqualified success as polemic fuel. It doesn't help that the author frequently complains about common assumptions that lack supporting data, even though he never hesitates to make his own presumptions to support his thesis. Nor does he explain what caused America to become such a self-consciously violent society shortly before the Civil War solidified the country's gun subculture. Ultimately, gun use throughout the last several centuries has little bearing on how today's gun owners feel, no matter what the nation's forefathers did or thought. But Arming America successfully erodes the notion of gun ownership as an inalienable, historically documented right akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.