Guns in America seem to be the normal way of life. We hold protests every day because the American people feel threatened and want their guns. Many protesters say that if every American pioneer can own a gun, they should too. Many American pioneers did not own guns, according to many historians who have studied the history of firearms in America. When it came to firearms, especially handguns, early Americans had little or no interest in purchasing or having a firearm in their home. This is a major setback from what we see in Western movies and TV shows, for example Cowboys and Indians. Guns were long, and citizen militias often lacked basic shooting skills. Eighteenth-century firearms were bulky, unreliable, expensive, and required a high degree of maintenance and care. As a result, relatively few people bothered to own one. An examination of more than a thousand probate records from New England and Pennsylvania for the period 1765 to 1790 by historian Michael Bellesiles showed that only 14 percent of households owned firearms and that more than half of these firearms were inoperable. People like to use the excuse that all the pioneers in America used guns to hunt, but they didn't actually go hunting. The pioneers depended on Indians or professional hunters. Professional hunters didn't even use guns, they used traps to catch their prey. In the 17th and 18th centuries, settlers obtained meat primarily from domestic animals, such as cows and pigs. In fact, before 1850, at most only a tenth of the country's population individually owned firearms. Those who owned guns tended to live in the South or urban areas. During the first 50 years of its existence, the federal government, opposed to the costs of a standing army, tried to...... middle of paper. .....and no controls, you can order a gun through the mail, but in 1961 Senator Thomas Dodd stopped mail order guns and set an age limit of 18. Unfortunately, he didn't stop mail order gun sales for all guns until President Kennedy's assassination. Although guns have become a major part of our daily lives, people die from them. We hear about deaths on TV but we ignore them because it's not us. We are so immune to the fact that guns are there to kill us, to harm us. A single weapon can wipe out an entire generation in the blink of an eye. We research to find out if there is a cure for a new disease, but we don't handle guns on the streets, which kill more people than any other disease combined. If there were stricter gun controls in the United States, people with mental disabilities would not be walking around with guns. It's either gun control or no guns.