There is an enormous imbalance between European and American scholarship on guns: abundantly discussed in the United States and conspicuously absent from European historiography. Debates about the Second Amendment and its meaning, as well as a strong correlation with today's high levels of violence, have made the US the "gun country" par excellence, monopolizing the current global debate on guns. Equally striking is the infancy of European scholarship on the subject: only recently have major research projects and individual research begun to fill the gap.
This roundtable aims to present some of the most important ongoing research by European scholars working from different perspectives on the social, political, cultural, and material history of firearms. American historiography has much to offer European scholars from a methodological and analytical point of view, with research interests ranging from gun legislation, the arms market, lobbying networks, to the gendered, social, and political dimensions of gun consumption. On the other hand, European scholarship can provide a valuable comparison to counterbalance the significant lack of comparative focus in American scholarship.
The imbalance between the two sets of scholarship reflects two mutually reinforcing exceptionalisms that see the US as a 'gun country' and Europe as a largely disarmed continent. The historical reasons for this divergence have not been thoroughly explored in a comparative way, which is the only way to 'defuse' exceptionalism. Together, the two fellowships could help to defuse notions of mutual exceptionalism and path dependency in the social and political history of arms in the two contexts.
The roundtable will be an opportunity to present the latest research on the history of firearms currently underway in Europe and, through dialogue with Chair Andrew McKevitt and the audience, to bridge the current gap between the two sides of the Atlantic. This will be achieved in two ways: first, the speakers will present research that, while focused on Europe, highlights mutual exchanges, connections, and influences between America and Europe, placing the two continents in a broader transnational or comparative dimension; second, they will highlight methodological borrowings and inspirations that could benefit both scholarships.