Andrew C. McKevitt. Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America. University of North Carolina Press, 2023. 219 pp. Paperback $24.95.
“America is the gun country.”1 The opening sentence of Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America sets the pace for bold, new assessments of the nation’s history with firearms. But though the United States is currently the gun country, historian Andrew McKevitt argues that there was and is nothing inevitable about the kind of gun country the U.S. is today.
Most historians of the gun country have undertaken studies with an emphasis on the Second Amendment and/or historicized tales of American gun exceptionalism. And all too often, argued that the gun country as it is currently constituted, was a foregone—even if at times fraught—conclusion. But McKevitt charts new waters taking readers on a journey through the stratospheric rise of gun volume in the U.S. consumer market during the Cold War, arguing that the substantial numbers of guns now in private hands was not a product of deep history, but of the recent past. Gun Country is truly innovative for its focus on the material reality of firearms, stripping away the rhetorical and symbolic meanings Americans attach to guns and instead focusing on the gun as a product.
Rather than leave postwar America’s consumer culture to the ladies, Gun Country argues that American men also became important market targets of Cold War capitalism. At the end of World War II, gun importers, seeing the potential for major financial gain, worked to bring leftover small arms, the detritus of recently ended military action overseas, onto the U.S. domestic firearms market. The federal government, especially the U.S. State Department, concerned about the potential for communist subversion abroad, sided with the importers. As officials at State testified before Congress, it was “the best part of our foreign relations” to have the guns imported to the U.S. than have those guns “float around” the globe. In a twist of irony, Gun Country shows how, from Eisenhower’s administration onward, the domestic safety of millions of American citizens was sacrificed to “free market” capitalism.2
According to Gun Country, it was precisely that rise in gun commerce and the corresponding rise in violent gun crime – the first met with apprehension by legacy gun makers who put pressure on lawmakers to regulate the flooded market and the second by gun control proponents worried about the rising tide of guns in the hands of criminals on America’s streets – that led to the eventual passage of the 1968 Gun Control Act (GCA).
The GCA’s regulatory provisions (or lack thereof) created two related loopholes large enough to import millions of guns through. First, while it banned the importation of cheap handguns, it did not ban the parts that constituted them. And second, it did not ban the domestic production of similar models of cheap handguns. In practice, gun commerce went on largely as before: domestic manufacturers were capable and happy to fill any gap the GCA created in the market in the early 1970s by importing unassembled firearms and assembling them stateside. More importantly, because the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other pro-gun voices shaped the debate over the bill’s provisions, its outcome was not about stanching the flood of guns into the national market, but about the criminality of the uses or users of the guns themselves. In short, the GCA set up two classes of gun buyers: the law-abiding citizen and the criminal.
As Gun Country convincingly argues, counterposing the rights of “law-abiding citizens” against the unvirtuous actions of the criminal, instead of tackling the sheer volume of guns available to any willing buyer, did next to nothing to stem gun violence. In fact, the GCA sanctioned “the problem of plenty” as it shifted the blame away from the availability of guns themselves to the morality of gun users.
Having skillfully set up the problem of plenty, then, Gun Country expands outward, mapping the many roads not taken on the way to an explanation for the current stalemate. In an excellent chapter on Laura Fermi and the Civic Disarmament Committee (CDC) of Chicago, Gun Country illuminates how the “little old ladies in tennis shoes” attempted to adapt the strategies of the global nuclear peace movement to the growing problem of small arms on the American gun market, and how the pioneering efforts of women like Fermi to tackle gun violence as a problem that was local, national, and global were sublimated by the same political debates that stripped regulatory power out of the GCA.3
The evolution of gun control efforts began in the late 1970s and early 1980s after other organizations came on the scene, including the National Council for the Control of Handguns (NCCH) formed by Mark Borinsky, the man most often posited as the activist who “started the modern gun control movement.”4 Borinsky’s NCCH planned to address gun control at the national level, where the CDC had largely focused its efforts more locally, and he tapped Fermi to join the NCCH as its first board member. It was an astute choice, as Fermi brought her energy and all the knowledge she had amassed about the gun problem, not to mention her personal checkbook, along with her. She also tapped the CDC’s members to build out the NCCH’s membership and mailing list. But while Borinsky relied on Fermi for financial assistance and organizational expertise, his organization’s focus was far less on innovating solutions to the problem of weapons proliferation and far more on the never-ending challenge of raising money to combat the million-plus-member, politically powerful NRA.
Gun Country demonstrates how the window for full scale gun abolition closed after the GCA. But equally importantly, that the perennial problem of funding and staffing and lack of coordination among the growing ranks of organizations within the gun control movement meant that they, collectively, failed to get ahead of the NRA’s ability to set the agenda and terms of the debate. In short, the NCCH entered a political landscape where compromise and moderation seemed all but necessary. And while that might have been the most politically astute position given the volume of guns on the market by the 1980s (not to mention the over 400 million in private hands across the nation today), compromise and moderation have offered no effective solutions to the dual problems of gun accessibility and gun violence in the gun country.
Gun capitalism continues to thrive because regulatory legal structures and the politicians who craft them do not question the legitimacy of the market. By choosing to focus on the legitimacy of gun users and gun uses, the debate over the “who” distracts the American public from the “what:” the material reality of guns as products for purchase on the market. The considerable strengths of Gun Country lie, not only in its argument, but in the impressive volume of primary and secondary source material that McKevitt brought to bear. The one distraction inside this otherwise stellar book is the chapter-length attempt to tackle Cold War myth-making around the Second Amendment. From this historian’s perspective, there is far more to be written about how popular culture, politics, and the upending of social norms from the 1960s through the 1980s opened the way for the NRA and American conservatives to make much of 27 words ratified in 1791.
Most importantly of all, Gun Country points to the need for a wider historical reckoning with firearms: an invitation to historians to consider how guns have, often quietly and sometimes even invisibly, shaped the political, economic, social, and cultural structures of postwar life in the Gun Country.
- Andrew C. McKevitt, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 1.
- McKevitt, Gun Country, 34-35.
- Fermi’s husband was Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize winning physicist whose work on nuclear fission at the University of Chicago was integral to the “atomic age.” Laura became active in the nuclear peace movement after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, and her activism and the organizing skills she learned in that movement were integral to the growth of the Civic Disarmament Committee. As McKevitt rightly pointed out, she was every bit as accomplished as her husband, and brought all of her talents to the nascent gun control movement she helped bring into being. For more, see: McKevitt, Gun Country, 128.
- For more on Borinsky, see McKevitt, Gun Country, 130-131.