The combination of weapons and commerce takes center stage in Gun Country, a book which brings a genuinely new perspective to the history of guns in the US—and a convincing one. “Gun culture,” McKevitt writes, is “a robust consumer culture” (64). This consumer culture exploded along with American consumerism in general during the postwar era. Part of this story, then, coincides with the broader history of American consumerism. The 1950s and 1960s saw televisions, automobiles, and washing machines take their place in millions of homes, many in the newly-built suburbs. Guns, though, had their own dynamic: European governments had literal warehouses full of them, “the bounty of Europe’s half-century bacchanal of nation-state violence” (25).
For reasons clear to almost every nation on earth, European governments did not want those weapons to circulate among citizens, so they sat there, collecting dust until a handful of American businessmen saw an opportunity. The US became a “dumping ground” for the world’s weapons. In World War II’s aftermath, at a time when Americans had more money to spend, guns were cheap. The result? There were 45 million guns in the United States in 1945; 25 years later that number had doubled. By the time Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy—using an Italian war-surplus rifle—the US had passed the point where the supply of guns could be brought into line with citizens’ safety. After another 25 years, the number of guns had again doubled, making the United States the first nation with more guns than people. Gun capitalism had reshaped the nation, and there was no turning back.
People tried, of course. Along with giving a history of the sale and purchase of guns, McKevitt traces concerned Americans’ belated reactions. These stories include the efforts of elected officials like Senator Thomas Dodd, and of citizens like Mark Borinsky and Laura Fermi, who tried to lead political movements toward disarmament and a safer society. He also traces the actions of the men—and it’s always men—who stood in their way. Businessmen like Sam Cummings (“no one did more to create the first postwar gun ‘problem’ than Sam Cummings” (21)) and activists like Harlon Carter either blocked or defanged all the earlier efforts to stem the tide of guns and gun sales.
McKevitt’s telling of the story of gun control, gun rights, and gun culture in postwar America, by highlighting supply and consumerism, is a major reinterpretation of a story that other scholars have been telling in recent decades—and, again, a convincing one. The reinterpretation starts with the choice of time frame: this is not a history that traces US gun culture back to the colonial militias, the Second Amendment, or the frontier. Gun culture, like other consumer cultures, began in the aftermath of World War II.