Hi there. I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

When you think of the Industrial Revolution, what comes to mind?

Steam engines, probably, lone genius inventors, factories and coal mines, perhaps,

and depending on your professional interests and political leanings,

either suffering laborers in sweatshops or the great onward march of civilization.

Did anybody think of guns?

According to my guest today, Stanford historian Priya Sartya, guns are inextricably bound up with

industrialization, and it is our long and

ever-changing relationship with these tools, toys, trade goods, status symbols, and instruments

of war that makes them such a persistent fact of life to this day. Priya's latest book is

Empire of Guns, the Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution.

Welcome to think again.

Thank you.

Happy to be here.

We can really start anywhere in this long and fraught history, but maybe let's start in the present day.

I want to say that growing up in America, for me, guns were a thing that, you know, you basically assumed the military

and the police should have. During the 80s, the issue became more about gun violence in the

inner cities, and now school shootings are essentially a commonplace thing. Starting from there,

where can we go to understand what's happening right now

in American culture? I think your impression is actually reflects an empirical reality. I don't think

the idea of widespread ownership of multiple guns throughout the population was the American

relationship with guns until around

...