GUN COUNTRY

How consumerism and paranoia supercharged American gun culture.

In this revealing book, McKevitt, a history professor, analyzes the roles played by unrestrained capitalism and Cold War anxieties in transforming the nation into a “gun country” after World War II. Examining cultural flashpoints around race, gender, and the ostensible threat of communist infiltration, and of the rise of a market for war surplus weaponry from around the globe, the author provides an original way of understanding a stunning and enduring increase in gun ownership in the U.S. Particularly engaging are McKevitt’s detailed explorations of prominent figures involved in this broader narrative, including a colorful arms dealer named Sam Cummings, who exploited lax regulation to flog cheap guns; disarmament activist Laura Fermi, who cannily generated political resistance to a booming crisis of gun violence; and Lee Harvey Oswald, who, like thousands of Americans in the 1960s, bought inexpensive guns through the mail. Also intriguing is the author’s analysis of how the killing of an unarmed Japanese exchange student in Louisiana—and its galvanizing of international outrage at the nation’s violence—both revealed and intensified what is now a familiar domestic cultural divide about gun rights. Though sections of the book are repetitive and meandering, McKevitt offers a compelling argument about where the extremity of America’s permissiveness toward deadly weaponry originated and how debates on the Second Amendment’s meaning have evolved in response to shifting cultural preoccupations. He also makes a persuasive appeal for how the human costs of mass gun ownership could be mitigated. “Meaningful reform is possible, but it will require confronting mythologies and material reality head on,” writes the author. “We must stop legislating around the problem of plenty and in the service of historical obfuscation. If the gun country of the postwar era could be made, it can be unmade.”

Illuminating, timely commentary on the rise of consumer gun culture.