“From the vantage point of business, the gun was a product of non-exceptionalism,” writes Pamela Haag in her new book, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. While it is possible that some Americans still believe in what Haag characterizes as the “powerful cliché in twenty-first-century politics . . . that gun love is timeless, or at least as old as American history,” they are generally not those who have done even cursory browsing in the academic field now known as gun studies (p. xvii). Much has changed in the last forty years, and today one might easily pack a large bookshelf with provocative titles that focus on guns from the perspectives of public health, law, criminal justice, gender, performance studies, and yes, business history, to name but a few.

With The Gunning of America, Haag follows in the footsteps of William Hosley, who has focused on the corporate history and marketing strategies of Samuel Colt, the first entrepreneur to successfully tie American identity to gun ownership. A recent, and very entertaining, example of this genre is Paul M. Barrett's Glock: The Rise of America's Gun (2012), which charts the creation and meteoric rise of this now iconic weapon.

The structure of Haag's book is unusual: part biography, part business history. While she focuses a great deal of her attention on the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—its creation, changing sales strategies, and waxing and waning fortunes—she also devotes a great deal of space to the story of Sarah Winchester, daughter-in-law of company founder Oliver Winchester. Sarah Winchester's legend, Haag writes, “speaks to my lingering question: where did the missing conscience go?”—that is, the pangs that Oliver Winchester does not seem to have felt as he built a massive global arms business, thus enabling large-scale state-sponsored killing (p. xxiii).

At its strongest, The Gunning of America shows an impressive familiarity with Winchester's company records—the patent wars that took place during the firm's rise and the eye-opening ways in which Oliver Winchester managed to negotiate as a private citizen with foreign governments to build an enormous business of supplying weapons to their armies. The globalization of American guns is a story that has not been told in such detail before, and it makes for fascinating reading.

Yet there are some surprising omissions that could have easily been avoided had the author provided a little more historical context: she mentions that Winchester started losing military sales and shifting to civilian markets in the 1880s and 1900s but doesn't link this to the 1883 invention of the Maxim gun—the weapon that proved so effective in suppressing colonial uprisings after it was adopted by many European armies and was then used to such devastating effect in World War I. However, Haag does make some excellent points about how “America's conquest blurred settler into soldier”—and the Model 73, in both design and germinal mystique, suited that hybrid environment. Yet, that said, it would have been useful if Haag had provided a more detailed discussion of the ways that the National Rifle Association (founded after the Civil War to promote effective marksmanship and to make target shooting the first sport open on equal terms to both men and women) as well as the incredible popularity of Buffalo Bill's Wild West contributed to the sales climate for the Winchester. And although she notes the 1876 federal law to ban sales of firearms to hostile Native Americans, she fails to acknowledge the existence of racially discriminatory gun laws going back to the colonial era. All in all, one wishes she had immersed herself more deeply, not just in the fascinating history of one company, but in what that history meant in the context of its time.

When Haag ventures into linking the historical with the contemporary, readers will sometimes wish she had done so with a little more knowledge. In a discussion of Sears Roebuck's marketing policies in 1913, for example, she remarks on how “strange . . . it is to imagine a gun as an added bonus, tossed in for buying a sewing machine or shoes” (p. 240). Has she forgotten the memorable opening scene of Michael Moore's 2002 gun-culture documentary Bowling for Columbine, in which Moore collects his premium of a shotgun for opening a new checking account?

Haag's eye for detail and her taste for scene setting can be both a blessing and a curse. She provides a breathlessly narrated account of the 1888 auction of the Remington works, with wonderful details of the intrigues between competing buyers. But do we really need to know, for instance, in a chapter on the 1858 Volcanic pistol, that “King Farouk, an antique firearms enthusiast and known kleptomaniac, had two Volcanic pistols in his possession when he took the throne in 1936” (p. 57)?

This brings us, finally, to Sarah Winchester, whose sad story runs through this volume—her stillbirths, the early death of her husband, her interest in spiritualism, and the enormous, never-finished mansion she built in San Jose, California, whose incredibly expensive construction (she ran through five million dollars of her fortune) she supervised from 1886 to 1915 and which became one of the most famous white elephants of its time. Yet the book's discussion of Sarah Winchester's life and acts is full of “might have” and “could have”; Haag does not have any real evidence to back her contention that the widow's building of the mansion was actually a political act. “Had she built Winchester University next to Stanford, no one would think a century later about a haunting conscience, accountability, and the long view of cosmic justice” (p. 294). Yet she cites no evidence that Sarah Winchester had embraced any of the more politically progressive aspects of spiritualism, such as pacifism. In fact, “We cannot know for sure that Sarah believed in ghosts” (p. 147).

Despite the many valuable features of this book, it is too easy to get lost wandering through its narrative—a narrative that, like Sarah Winchester's mansion, contains too many beautiful vistas, fascinating features, closed-off rooms, and stairs that lead nowhere.