In the article "Gun Ownership in Early America: A Survey of Manuscript Militia Returns" by Robert Churchill, he discusses how gun ownership in the early 18th and 19th centuries was scarce and, at times, armed militias were the only people who owned weapons. It is for this reason that the government has made gun ownership exceptional. This is different from today, when gun ownership is everywhere. Due to the high concentration of firearms, it is sometimes difficult to count how many are sold in the United States each year. Learning that guns were once almost non-existent is almost hard to believe. In the article, the author talks about Michael Bellesiles, a historian who first wrote about gun ownership in America in 1996. Bellesiles was the first to find that gun ownership from the beginning of the colonial period until the end of the 19th century it was scarce. Until this article, many historians thought weapons were plentiful. Bellesile's article was controversial for them. Most people, myself included, have always assumed that firearms have always been in great abundance. This is what the media and history have always taught, reading this article and finding out that firearms were "scarce" was incredible. America has always been about guns, you see it on TV, in movies, in video games, everywhere you look and see a gun. It makes you wonder what it would have been like to live back then to see what it was like to live in a world with few weapons. You would think that gun violence would be non-existent unlike now when it is everywhere. The author also explains how, from the time of the Revolution until the War of 1812, all state governments required all militia members to provide detailed reports on their military training. These reports were more accurately known… middle of paper… what gun ownership was like in the 18th and 19th centuries. In some ways it was better than today, but on the other hand if we didn't have the weapons we have today, we would have no way to protect ourselves from intruders and those who mean them harm. Gun ownership is a good thing, but it needs to be regulated so that violent crimes like those at Sandy Hook do not occur. It appears that much of what Bellesiles saw as a shortage of weapons was actually the absence of census data that was not taken into account when militia men gathered. If all the census data from those centuries could be found, it would probably show that firearms were more widespread than previously thought. Works Cited Churchill, R. Gun Ownership in Early America: A Survey of Manuscript Militia Returns. 2003.The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, vol. 60, no. 3. March extract 21, 2014.