National Perspective: Of arms and Americans: key turning points

Commenting on the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the British historian A.J.P. Taylor remarked that "German history reached its turning point and failed to turn." This winter, in the wake of the shootings in Parkland, Florida, and amid Washington discussion of background checks, bump-stock bans and assault-weapon restrictions, the United States may have reached a turning point on gun control.

In truth, there have been several turning points in America's romance with, and debate over, firearms, which began with the earliest days of European settlement. The celebrated 20th-century American historian Richard Hofstadter, no friend of guns in the modern age, nonetheless acknowledged in a landmark 1970 article that early Colonial farmers required guns for hunting and "for the control of wild vermin and predators."