This heritage is widely assumed but rarely examined, even in history books. "The prevalence of firearms and the high value placed on the quick draw made a sure shot the test of manliness," Daniel J. Boorstin, the former librarian of Congress, wrote in "The Americans: The Democratic Experience" (Random House, 1985). "From earliest colonial times, the needs of the wilderness and the threat of Indians had put firearms in the American household. The right to bear arms had been hallowed in the Constitution."

But in a new book due this fall, a historian challenges what he calls a modern myth and argues that gun ownership in the frontier era was far from universal. In "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" (Knopf), Michael A. Bellesiles (pronounced buh-LEEL) contends that only a relative few private citizens actually owned firearms between 1765 and 1850. Fewer still owned guns that worked, he says, and only an elite, typically professional hunters and sportsmen, could reliably aim and fire a weapon.

Perhaps no more than 10 percent of the total American population owned guns at any time before 1850, according to a variety of records cited by Mr. Bellesiles, an associate professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta.