The Pernicious Engine: A Brief History of the Gun

Mar 31, 2023

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In a recent newsletter, I mentioned the Chinese emperor Li Chun, who went mad around 820 A.D. from chugging elixirs of immortality. By coincidence, his demise is related to a historical subject that’s tragically relevant today: guns.

America’s lunatic pace of mass shootings prompts a look back to understand how this ancient tool came to play such a large role in history. As many know, it all started in China.

Among the ingredients that Chinese alchemists thought might vivify a patient was saltpeter. When tossed into a fire, this potassium salt made the flames burst with new life. Could it do the same for a man? Another favored ingredient was sulfur, which burned very easily. When carbon entered the formula, perhaps as dried honey, the experimenters had a dangerous mixture that in one case blew up a laboratory.

Forget the elixir. The alchemist had stumbled onto something far more consequential: three natural ingredients—saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal—powdered and mixed in the proper proportions, formed the first chemical explosive on earth.

Researchers quickly began to seek applications for the wild new substance and found two. The first was for fighting the second for fun: bombs, flamethrowers, and cannon on one hand—firecrackers, whirligigs, and skyrockets on the other.

Although the Chinese used gunpowder for warfare, they did not focus on what would prove to be the critical application: the gun itself. Europeans did. They got hold of the formula, pretended they had invented it themselves, and went to work perfecting the concept. They called their lumbering artillery pieces by pet names, including “Gunnildr,” which got shortened to “Gunna,” and finally the blunt “gun.”

At the core of every gun is a mechanism typified by the cannon. Take a sturdy metal tube sealed at the rear end and open at the front. Insert a load of the magic powder, then a projectile. A small opening allows you to introduce fire into the back end. The powder explodes and the pressure of the hot gas heaves the projectile out the barrel. The earliest bombards and the latest assault rifle work on the same basic principle.

Next came the hand cannon. An attached wooden stick, known as a stock, made the smaller barrel easier to hold. At first, it was ignited by a smoldering match on a lever. Later, a lock—a flint-and-steel device like the igniter on a cigarette lighter—provided the sparks to set it off. Voila, you had the basics of the gun: lock, stock and barrel.

Mechanical firelocks made guns more reliable in the rain and eliminated the telltale smoking match. They also made the weapons easy to conceal and resulted in the first gun control laws. One ordinance issued in Ferrara, Italy, in 1523 outlawed pistols with flint igniters, “with which a homicide can easily be committed.” A similar English law prohibited selling or firing such a pistol within two miles of Queen Elizabeth I.

With improvements came condemnation. The gun was considered a coward’s weapon. A real warrior fought with a sword, he did not skulk in ambush behind a tree. As late as the Revolutionary War, the shooting of an officer, who often did not carry a firearm, was considered an assassination, not the legitimate act of a soldier.

Intimacy with guns’ effects on the human body turned some against them. Ambroise Paré, considered a father of modern surgery, learned his trade on the battlefield. In 1545, he wrote a popular text, “Methods of Treating Gunshot Wounds.” Seeing the damage inflicted, he came to hate guns. “We all of us rightfully curse the author of so pernicious an engine," he wrote. The English playwright Ben Johnson also deprecated the inventor “who from the Divel's-Arse did Guns beget.”

As time went on, refinements in the art of metal working combined with human ingenuity to bring guns to the forms we know today. In the 1840s, Sam Colt perfected the revolver. This and other inventions let guns carry a resupply of ammo for multiple shots without reloading. The effect of more efficient firearms came home to Americans during the Civil War, when improved muskets and cannon brought slaughter on a scale not seen in any previous conflict.

Countering the horror of guns was the myth of the frontier. The flintlock hunting rifle had allowed pioneers to feed themselves. The six-shooter and Winchester repeater had protected them from bad men and Indians. The lawman with a Colt had tamed the uncivilized regions in the West.

Some developed the notion, as crime writer Raymond Chandler put it, that “a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.” That attitude became a national fantasy, fueled in great part by the entertainment industry, which found the shoot-‘em-up a reliable moneymaker.

Rational, evidence-based gun laws could tamp down the egregious number of casualties. Regulations about seatbelt use and car design certainly put a dent in highway deaths. The failure of legislators to act shows a weak understanding of the toll of gun violence and the fear it engenders.

Gun control advocates point to reliable statistics proving that a gun makes a home less safe. The notion that armaments offer security, they insist, is a myth. But in their zeal, they ignore the fact that for the vast majority of gun owners, the myth is reality. They do feel safer, statistics be damned. Not just safer, but more free. They don’t harm anybody. They own, handle and store their guns responsibly.

Maybe some modicum of common ground can be found in understanding that a gun, in the final analysis, is nothing more than a simple tool capable of accelerating a projectile to a high speed. It’s not in itself evil, although it can be used for evil purposes. Nor does it signify masculine prowess or personal power. And it surely doesn’t guarantee freedom. The truth is that freedom and safety are both ultimately rooted in a sense of solidarity and fellow feeling with our neighbors, not in armed defense against them.