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First came the guns — the Mausers from Germany, the Carcanos from Italy — and then came the moral pretexts. These days, the American right is forever touting firearms as matters of principle or heralding them as hallmarks of a certain sort of rugged identity. But guns, before fetishists succeeded in converting them into symbols, were simply commodities, as unglamorous as washing machines.

In his crisply written and incisive new book, “<a href="https://amzn.to/3sA3vEB" target=_blank>Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America</a>,” historian Andrew C. McKevitt chronicles the transformation of guns from tangible weapons to ideological ammunition. Sharp, fascinating, devastating, exhaustively researched and often wryly funny, this indispensable book — one of the best works of nonfiction this year — details how America came to be not just a gun country but the gun country, home to “nearly half of all civilian-owned firearms in the world” and “more than twice as many guns per person” as any other nation. It begins with a crucial yet neglected premise: Guns are not abstractions but products.

University of North Carolina Press

If we have “struggled to see guns in the context of consumer capitalism,” McKevitt writes, it is because “they are manly, and consumerism has often been coded as women’s activity.” The traditional picture dictates that “men produce, women consume.” Guns, the implements of a certain kind of bellicose masculinity, have come to seem less like frivolous indulgences and more like the props of protectors and providers. Their champions present them as “magical totems to protect oneself and one’s community from various forms of evil,” as McKevitt potently puts it, while their opponents too often regard them as symptoms of a spiritual sickness. But the more than 400 million guns in America are a material fact, and all too often a bloody one. “Gun Country” treats them accordingly.

Guns began arriving in America in unprecedented quantities after World War II, when “global demobilization” was underway. “Tens of millions of firearms around the world had little practical use and collected dust in government warehouses,” McKevitt writes. A handful of enterprising American entrepreneurs, foremost among them Samuel “Arms Dealer Sam” Cummings, contrived to import a deluge of secondhand weapons from overseas. The Eisenhower administration turned a blind eye to the influx, quietly concluding “that it was better for global gun stockpiles to flow into the United States than into the hands of communist insurgents around the world.” Europe’s used guns, “the production of a half century of continental bloodletting, flooded the U.S. market at rock-bottom prices.”

Supply generated demand; before long, Cummings and his peers had awakened an insatiable appetite. As McKevitt notes, “Gun buyers tend to be serial gun buyers,” if not outright collectors. (Later, they would also be enticed to go in for all the costly associated paraphernalia — “the camouflage gear, the accessories, even the off-road vehicles” — that came to define a gunman’s aesthetic.) By the time policymakers realized that a new legal framework might be in order, it was too late: The weapons were already so ubiquitous that “gun culture” was a fait accompli.

At first, Cummings’s repurposed treasures were marketed as sporting goods, but this pretense soon became implausible as handguns, better suited to interpersonal brutality than to hunting, came to dominate the market. In the 1960s, flailing domestic gun manufacturers hit on a savvy strategy to quash the importers that were edging them out. Feigning concern for public safety, they urged Congress to ban the handguns colloquially known as Saturday Night Specials, which had become a metonym for juvenile delinquency — and which were, conveniently for the domestic gun lobby, almost entirely imports. In doing so, they inaugurated a venerable American tradition: disguising a naked economic interest in guns as high-minded patriotism. Experts, legacy gunmakers and even the National Rifle Association, now notorious for its fundamentalism about firearms of all kinds, rallied to blame the importation racket for the influx of cheap handguns and therefore the surge in crime. The idea was not by any means to hamper the gun industry. On the contrary, it was to direct business back to domestic manufacturers, all while keeping guns in the hands of “upstanding” (read: White) Americans.

The fears these players cited were already national preoccupations. As the Cold War raged (albeit icily) abroad and the civil rights movement rocked society at home, a second — and ultimately more successful — pretense for gun culture emerged: Firearms, gun lobbyists claimed, were a bulwark against the many enemies menacing the American way of life. Communists schemed overseas, but agitators lurking within the country posed a comparable threat — or so it seemed to the many Americans increasingly fixated on crime and, implicitly, increasingly horrified by the rights extended to their Black compatriots.

By the mid-1960s, “crime rates are rising” was a common refrain. The numbers were indeed ticking up, but they provided an incomplete picture. McKevitt notes that rates were climbing in large part because “municipal, state, and federal agencies got better at reporting crime,” not necessarily because more crimes were being committed.

This fact, however, did not prevent both friends and foes of the gun industry from appealing to crime statistics to stoke useful hysteria. Sen. Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, architect of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/27/gun-control-effort-that-almost-stopped-our-addiction-weapons-war/" target=_blank>the pioneering 1968 Gun Control Act</a>, summoned “the specter of crime to justify spending more than seven years working on gun control in the 1960s.” The legislation, which restricted the importation of firearms without making them much harder to access in practice, was doomed from the first by a loophole that allowed for the importation of gun parts. While the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were the most immediate precipitants of the passage of Dodd’s act, the law was also a product of more general racism and paranoia.

These forces led not only to gun control, however weak and ineffectual, but also to a new strain of pro-gun fanaticism. Conservatives were already affronted by what they regarded as pro-communist protests against the Vietnam War, and the urban uprisings that broke out in Washington, Detroit and several other cities after King’s murder terrified White reactionaries. Groups like the Minutemen, a right-wing extremist organization “arming itself for a forthcoming apocalypse against global communism,” sprang up. In Detroit, racist residents went so far as to establish “what were essentially paramilitary groups” intent on arming themselves for the purpose of defending their cruel vision of America.

But if the tense climate of the late ’60s and early ’70s gave rise to unprecedentedly noxious sorts of gunslingers, it also abetted a new wave of anti-gun activists. Previously, the mostly male proponents of gun control had emphasized “control”: Liberal policymakers, awash in the soup of Freudian theory that was in vogue at the time, tended to frame anti-gun legislation as a means of suppressing the “emotions and passions” rumored to roil the subconscious. No one had yet dared to challenge the central conceit of gun capitalism, namely that individual consumers had a right to lethal weapons; instead, Dodd and his allies focused on defining “a virtuous gun user against an imagined unvirtuous one.”

Two women-led anti-gun movements opted for different approaches in the 1970s: the Civic Disarmament Committee (CDC) and the Committee for Handgun Control (CHC), both based in Chicago. The CDC, which “found inspiration in global movements for disarmament and abolition,” was founded by Laura Fermi, widow of Nobel-winning physicist Enrico Fermi; the CHC was established by a group of suburban housewives who deemed themselves “the mothers of today.” While “the CDC did not by and large present gun violence as a gendered problem,” McKevitt writes, the CHC capitalized on guns’ masculine associations. “If gun rights proponents were going to dismiss women like her as simple homemakers,” McKevitt writes of one member’s reasoning, “then she would use the identity of ‘suburban housewife’ to muster all the authority it could in postwar America.” Hence the CHC’s attempt to flip the script by exploiting the right-wing obsession with protecting the home front and the home itself: As sovereigns of the domestic sphere, the “mothers of today” protested, they were qualified to determine just how unsafe guns made the home.

Unsurprisingly, the brave women of the CHC fielded their fair share of misogynistic and racist hate mail. Many of the letters they received “imagined graphic fantasies of Black men raping the women and killing their families because they, or their husbands, had failed to protect themselves with guns,” according to McKevitt.

And unfortunately, the gun reform movement elicited a similar response on a national scale. “The emergence of the gun control movement prompted the hardline turn of the gun rights movement,” McKevitt notes. The current iteration of gun capitalism, with its feverish conspiratorial thinking and its don’t-tread-on-me stridence, first reared its ugly head in response to reform efforts in the late 1970s. The blowback was — and remains — gendered: The men described derisively, if not inaccurately, by CHC members as “gun nuts” understood weaponry as a cure for a “soft-boiled” and feminized society. A new generation of zealots, spearheaded by an increasingly reactionary NRA, worked to retire the sensible idea that guns were “just another aspect of consumer society” and reinvented them as an accoutrements of manhood. Suddenly, “self-defense was a sacred, masculine right.”

The most enduring tactic of this fatally effective wave of gun dogmatism was its dramatic reimagining of the Second Amendment. Drawing on (and at times even amplifying) the extremism of the Minutemen and their ilk, gun die-hards in the ’80s and ’90s dreamed up an ahistoric amendment that is “a product of the consumers’ republic of the twentieth century, not the founder’s republic of the eighteenth,” McKevitt writes. This fanciful doctrine enshrines a right for Americans to bear arms, not just when they join militias to defend the country but when they go about their daily business.

“The sociological question of how societies can prevent gun violence is not any great mystery,” McKevitt writes. “Fewer guns mean fewer gun deaths.” But Americans have allowed themselves to imagine that the gun problem is “rooted in some vague notion of criminality, in a horde of masked bad actors seeking guns for nefarious purposes,” in maladies of the soul, in social deterioration. In doing so, we have capitulated to the worldview of the NRA and other gun extremists, with their insistence on mythologizing what is, at its core, mundane material. Writing of the failure of the 1968 Gun Control Act to reduce violence, McKevitt notes that the problem was not the number of criminals but the number of guns. “There were too many,” he concludes plainly. There are still too many. It is as simple as that.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.

Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America

University of North Carolina Press. 319 pp. $24.95, paperback

Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, 2022

Finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, 2018

Finalist for a National Magazine Award, 2017

Finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, 2016

Dartmouth College, BA in philosophy and German

University of Cambridge, MPhil in history and philosophy of science

Harvard University, ABD, PhD in philosophy

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic at Book World. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from Henry Holt in 2024. 

Becca Rothfeld

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