Gun Capitalism & Gun Control in the U.S. after World War II

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. In 1945, the population of the United States was around 140 million people. Those 140 million people owned an estimated 45 million guns, or around one gun for every three people. By 2023, the population of the United States stood at just over 330 million people. And according to historical data from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the number of guns produced and imported for the US market since 1899, exceeds 474 million firearms. Even assuming some of those guns have broken or been destroyed or illegally exported, there are easily more guns than people in the United States today. How and why the number of guns rose so precipitously in the US since World War II is the focus of today's interview. First, though, let's look at the history of gun regulations in the United States, to set the stage for that conversation. Guns were in what is now the United States long before the United States existed as a country. When the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1791, the second amendment read, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." If you'd like to listen to a podcast debating the meaning of that amendment, they're easy to find. I include the amendment here only to note that guns were important enough to be included in a founding document of the country. The second amendment was the last time that the federal government got involved in gun regulation for quite some time, but that doesn't mean that there were no laws regulating guns in the United States. Those laws were passed at the state and local level. Perhaps most notably, after the Civil War, many southern states passed laws called Black Codes, which limited rights for the now free Black population, including which jobs they could hold, what property they could own. Those Black Codes also prohibited Black people from owning guns. In November, 1871, the National Rifle Association of America was chartered in New York state, with the goal of promoting rifle practice. The NRA's first president, Civil War General Ambrose Burnside, had lamented the accuracy of his soldiers, reportedly saying that only one out of 10 soldiers could, "hit the broadside of a barn." It wasn't until the 20th century that the federal government started to regulate firearms, and even then in relatively small ways. In 1927, during Prohibition, Congress passed the Miller Act, which prohibited using the United States mail to ship, "pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person," although exceptions were made for military and police uses. Congress followed that with more substantial legislation in 1934, partially in response to gang violence in the Prohibition Era, such as they saw in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The National Firearms Act required registration and imposed a tax on certain kinds of firearms, specifically, "a shotgun or rifle, having a barrel of less than 18 inches in length, or any other weapon except a pistol or revolver from which a shot is discharged by an explosive, if such weapon is capable of being concealed on the person, or a machine gun." The Federal Firearms Act of 1938 went a step further, requiring anyone making, importing, or selling guns to hold a federal license and to keep customer records. It also prohibited the sale of guns to convicted felons. It would be another three decades before Congress passed additional legislation around firearms. On October 22, 1968, after several high profile assassinations in the United States, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Gun Control Act, which banned the mail order sale of rifles and shotguns and further restricted who could buy guns, prohibiting the sale of firearms to people with substance abuse or mental health problems. The law also stopped the importation of many foreign made firearms leftover from World War II, that had been streaming into the United States. Upon signing the law, Johnson remarked, "This bill, as big as this bill is, still falls short, because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. I asked for the national registration of all guns, and the licensing of those who carry those guns, for the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country, more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, then we just must have licensing. If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country. The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby that has prevailed for the moment, in an election year, but the key to effective crime control remains in my judgment, effective gun control. And those of us who are really concerned about crime just must somehow, someday, make our voices felt." Not everyone agreed with President Johnson. At the annual convention of the NRA, in 1977, an event that became known as the revolt at Cincinnati, Harlon Carter and Neal Knox ousted the Old Guard leadership of the NRA, changing its focus from recreational shooting to protecting gun rights, by increasing funding for the NRA's lobbying arm. The NRA went to work and in 1986, Congress passed the Firearms Owners Protections Act, that repealed many portions of the 1968 Gun Control Act. The Firearms Owners Protections Act was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, the first president ever endorsed by the NRA, and the first to speak at the NRA Annual Convention. In 1994, Congress passed both the Brady Handgun Violence and Prevention Act, which imposed both a five day waiting period and a background check on handgun purchases, and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, importation or possession of certain kinds of assault rifles. That law expired after 10 years and wasn't renewed. It wasn't until 2022 that Congress would again pass any significant gun control legislation with the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which expanded criminal background checks and funded both red flag programs and mental health services. As President Joe Biden said when signing the bill into law,  "Their message to us was to do something. How many times have you heard that? Just do something. For God's sake, just do something. But today we did." Joining me now to help us learn more about guns as consumer products in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, is Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt, the John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University and author of, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America."

Music  13:26  
[music]

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:29  
Hi, Drew, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  14:29  
 Hi, Kelly. Thanks so much for having me.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:33  
 I want to start by asking how you came to write this book about guns and gun capitalism. 

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  11:41  
Well, I never expected to write this book. So I wasn't, you know, I did a history PhD program and I wasn't trained as a gun historian. Very few people are trained as gun historians, right. Often, even other folks who've written about guns, they're social historians, they're political historians first and foremost. And then they find gun history as a kind of topic. And that event that happened for me as well, though it happened many years after I finished my PhD. So I was trained as a historian of US foreign relations. So I was interested in the Cold War and international history, transnational history. And my first book was on US Japan relations in the 1970s and the 1980s, but really, from a kind of cultural perspective. So I was interested in the kind of local manifestations of Japanese popular culture in the United States. So I wrote about like Honda in Ohio, when Honda opens a factory in Ohio in 1982. I wrote about anime, I wrote about sushi, that sort of thing. And so I was never trained as a gun historian. But then I got this job here in Louisiana, in 2012. And I knew almost nothing about Louisiana's connection to this topic I had been working on as a dissertation that eventually became my first book. And so it started with something as simple as like a Google search for Louisiana and Japan, which I'd sort of embarrassingly ignorant and I came across this case of Yoshi Hattori. Yoshi Hattori was a 16 year old Japanese exchange student who was shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1992, in this sort of horrific incident, in which he's out with a friend looking for a Halloween party, they knock on the wrong door, it leads to an encounter in which the homeowner pulls a firearm on Yoshi and shoots and kills him. And this was shocking to me, obviously, for someone who was studying US Japan relations in roughly this time period too. I hadn't heard about this. There had been other kinds of high profile killings of Japanese in the United States. But this is the first time I heard of this case. And what really struck me at the time as someone interested in what I was interested in was the international angle was kind of the the reaction in Japan, how there's outrage over how can a country call itself civilized and do this sort of thing, allow someone to come to the door, answer the door with armed and confronted unarmed child and kill him in the process. And so I was interested in that sort of US Japan angle, but it also got me asking a lot more questions about gun history. And that's in part, because in the aftermath of Yoshi's, killing, there's a his host family in Louisiana, a couple of professors at Louisiana State University, they start a gun control campaign. And it's a really fascinating campaign because they're thinking internationally and transnationally in ways most gun control campaigns hadn't. And so that got me thinking about the gun problem in an international transnational context. And that led me on you know, I originally began with this Yoshi the story, thought maybe I'd write an article or something about it, but it led me on a kind of archival chase back, all the way back to the Second World War, and then to this book here. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:53  
I wonder if you could speak to I mean, coming out of Cold War history and US foreign relations explain some of this, but you very specifically are tracing this back to the start at the end of World War II, the start of the Cold War. And I, you know, I think a lot of people when they think about guns in history think much further back than that. You know, they're thinking about the founding of the country, they're thinking maybe about the 19th century. So could you talk about why why you focus in on this moment in time? And why this is so important to understanding guns in the United States?

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  15:30  
Yeah, it's a really good question, because I, we just don't have those histories. Right. And so you're absolutely right, if you, if you're interested in the history of guns, and you want to read the things that professional scholars have written about the history of guns, you're going to find most of that stuff on the 18th and 19th century, and there's great stuff too, right. And, you know, these these books often come up when you're when I'm having conversations with people about like the second amendment, for instance, right. So there's, there's terrific work on by historians about the second amendment and the 18th century. There's also a lot of less quality work by by scholars in legal studies, and so forth, who are often trying to make certain points about gun rights today, a lot of great stuff on the 19th century. But if you're interested in guns, from a historical perspective, in the 20th century, there's far less work being done, which is sort of fascinating, because that's when gun ownership expands so dramatically, right. And so the thing that that I start the book with, the thing that really got me asking a lot of questions was just the pure numbers, you know, in 1945, as best we can tell, and it's, it's hard to tell, because counting guns is a very imprecise art, especially in the United States, where we're legally not allowed to count guns, at least the government isn't allowed to count guns. 1945, there's probably about 45 million guns in the United States. And that is in a country of I think about 140 million at that point. By, you know, today 2023, we're talking about probably in the neighborhood of 10 times as many guns 400, 450 million guns in the United States today. The US population has not increased tenfold, in the last 75 ish years. It's increased about two and a half times. So, why the discrepancy? Why does gun ownership increase so dramatically in the post war era? Yes, you could argue that the United States has always been quote, unquote, a gun country or the gun country. We have these stories, these mythologies about the role of gun in the 18th century, the role of the gun in the 19th century on the frontier, or with repression of of freed Black populations after the Civil War. But in terms of pure numbers, we really become the gun country in the aftermath of the Second World War. And I wanted to know why that was. And so, you know, I started going through sources in the 19, late 1940s, 1950s, into the 1960s, that tried to explain the increase in in gun ownership over this era. How do we get on this trajectory? Because I don't think historians have ever tried to explain it. We often allude to the consequences of it: rising crime rates in the 1960s, which, of course, have political consequences, the part of the white backlash to the 1960s is part of a reaction to crime in the 1960s, in the 1970s. But nobody's ever tried to explain why there's so many guns, why the 400 million, 450 million. How do we get to that number? And it was it was there that, you know, after I discovered the Yoshi story, and said, like, how far back does this story go? Like, how do I explain Yoshi's killer having that gun in that moment? What leads to that moment? And of course, as a historian, you've, we've got to go back as far as we possibly can. And I think that story really begins after the Second World War.

Kelly  18:48  
It's really revelatory to me to think about guns as a consumer product. You know, guns sort of loom so large in our country's imagination, and I haven't thought about it that much. It's just a product. And when I started to think about it that way, I thought, well, there are things I stockpile. I stockpile -yarn. It's not going to kill anybody, but I've got tons and tons of yarn, you know. And so I think that that helps a little bit to to understand what's going on here. So can you talk a little bit about and you do this so well, in the book talking about, like the marketing of guns and the finding a market for, creating a market for these guns and what's happening in the post war era? 

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  19:32  
Yeah, and that's important to emphasize too, right. Because I think there's there's always there's a sort of assumption implicit assumption that like, the market is always there. Americans will always buy guns, and somebody's always manufacturing the guns, right. But again, like that doesn't explain the incredible increase, right. It would be a much more sort of, I guess, if that were true over time, the level would be it would be sort of level. There wouldn't be just these incredible jumps through the 1960s, 1970s, and of course in the last decade or two. And so for me, you know, this begins in the aftermath of the Second World War. And it begins with a tremendous glut of firearms coming into the United States. And this is where I think the the gun market is really remade. And we have a number of these sort of, I call them brilliant, because I guess in some ways, they are brilliant, but they're also rather insidious people who remake this market in the aftermath of the Second World War, and who figure out ways to mass market 10s of millions of guns to Americans. This is this begins with for me, it begins with gun imports from the Second World War. These are guns that are coming in that had been used on battlefields in Europe and in Asia in some cases, and these guns are sitting in warehouses in Europe, by the 10s of millions. And there's a few sort of wildly American entrepreneurs who figure this out, and who realize that the United States is a country that is growing in terms of prosperity. Its population is booming, people have more leisure time. And so they want to make the connection between 10s of millions of guns sitting in Europe and a potential market in the United States. And because you can't sell these guns in Europe, because these are societies that are recovering from war, that certainly don't want to distribute 10s of millions of guns to their population. These are societies that are increasingly passing gun laws where they can't sell millions of guns to their population, they are eager to hand them off to these American entrepreneurs. So you know, the one I write about the most, who, you know, I think just if we're on a podcast named Unsung History, I think is one of the most unsung characters in not a sort of great celebratory way. But one of these characters who we really need to know more about in 20th century US history is a man named Samuel Cummings. And Sam Cummings creates, he founds a company called Interarms. Interarms would become the world's largest private arms dealer by the end of the 1950s. And it's going to make Samuel Cummings fabulously rich, and Samuel Cummings, he kind of pops up in the media every so often in the press in the 60s and 70s. And usually, when he does, it's because he's like, tied into Cold War intrigue, or he's sold some fighter jets to some Latin American dictator or something like that. So he gets this reputation of being this jet setting, almost kind of boy wonder because he looks like a boy scout. But really what he does to make millions of dollars is he sells cheap used guns to Americans. He's going over to those warehouses in Europe. He's walking into ministries of defense, and he's saying I got a suitcase full of cash here. How many used cheap guns are you willing to give me and there are instances in which he's paying less than $1 per gun. And he has established this tremendous network of basically logistics network to get these guns into his own warehouses, a small army of people to clean them up. The word he uses is "sporterize." He creates the modern sporting rifle, which is a late term that NRA uses later on, and he sells them to Americans and he sells them incredibly cheap. So if you wanted to buy a high quality hunting rifle, say in the mid 1950s, something from a company like Remington or Winchester these kinds of classic names in the field, that might cost you $120, $150, which you know, in today's terms is upwards of 1000 or more dollars. Sam Cummings was selling these rifles taken from the battlefields in Europe, cleaned up by his company and distributed to Americans, in some cases for less than $10. And this creates a tremendous mass market for these guns, expanding gun ownership dramatically. And Sam Cummings knows that too, because the gun companies come after Sam Cummings in the late 1950s. They want their congress people to do something about Sam Cummings. And it also happens to be a guy named John F. Kennedy who tries to do something about Sam Cummings coming from a gun state in Massachusetts. And Cummings' argument to Congress is, "I am good for the industry, because I am expanding the market here. I'm selling cheap guns. You don't you if you're if you're a 17 year old looking for your first car you don't walk into a Cadillac dealership and buying the most expensive thing there you buy sort of a beat up old jalopy and then as you get older as you have more income you scale up and so eventually someone's going to scale up to your $200 rifle after they buy my cheap $10 rifle." And so you know and in part his marketing just it It celebrates this bounty. The the his marketing copy is full of dozens of guns just kind of packed on the page and this is in contrast to you know, a company like Winchester or Remington, which might show one rifle and kind of quaint scene of a father and son out in the field hunting.  And Sam Cummings has no interest in any of this tradition stuff. He is just all about abundance and bounty and plenty. And he wants you to know it that he is he has scoured the world's markets for cheap guns, even this is the ad say this, like I have, you know, I've collected $30 million worth of guns this year and I'm ready to sell them on the cheap. Reminds me of you know, I grew up in the New York New Jersey area, there was a guy named Crazy Eddie, who would come on TV and shout about all the savings and deals he had. And Sam Cummings was sort of a Crazy Eddie of guns of the 1950s. And I think this this transforms the market in the 50s and 60s, and really turns it into something that is far more of a mass popular thing than it was before the Second World War and also helps to explain how we get this incredible trajectory of gun sales and ownership since 1945.

Kelly  25:49  
I want to talk about someone who is unsung and should be more sung in a good way. And that's Laura Fermi. So I live in Hyde Park in Chicago, and this felt like an incredibly Hyde Park kind of story. We've got the the widow of a nuclear physicist who is really the person starting a lot of the modern gun control movement. So can you talk a little bit about about her and about what she is trying to do with this organization that she founds? 

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  26:21  
Yeah, sure. So Laura Fermi, as you say, she is the she's the widow of Enrico Fermi, who is one of the central figures of the Manhattan Project. He right he cracks the atom right there, in Hyde Park on the campus of the University of Chicago. And that's where I did a lot of this research in the University of Chicago libraries, because Laura Fermi's papers are there. And so too, are the papers of the organization she creates, which comes to be called the Civic Disarmament Committee. And so she has she has a fascinating kind of second life after Enrico right. There's, she's she's born in Italy. Enrico is born in Italy, they meet in the 1920s. They marry very young, there are lots of expectations for her in this era, as a woman attached to a brilliant scientist. He wins the Nobel Prize when he's I don't know if he's 30 yet when he wins this big prize, or he had been his 30s. Yeah. And they use that as the opportunity to to escape Europe, and to escape fascism and to come to the United States. And of course, she she sort of lives that life as the homemaker as is the expectation for somebody like her although also shows signs of her own brilliance, publishing a science textbook at one point in the 1930s. But then, after Enrico dies, 1954, she has this kind of second life as an activist. And the gun thing comes later. First, well, first, she's interested in kind of nuclear diplomacy and nuclear peace. She's reporting on international nuclear conferences in the 1950s. She's kind of mixed up with the the anti nuclear movement of the era. Then, you know, a decade before anyone else is paying attention to this, she's involved in environmental movement trying to address pollution in Chicago. And then finally, she comes around in the late 1960s, she starts to pay attention to guns. And this is before we have anything we might call a gun control organization in the United States. The closest thing to it is this sort of policy group in Washington, DC headed up by the former head of the Bureau of Prisons, his name is James Bennett. But otherwise there's there's nothing, there's no organizations we think of today like Brady or Moms Demand, those kinds of organizations, nothing like it exists in the late 1960s when Laura Fermi starts paying attention to this, and so she does what a good activist does. She starts organizing locally, she gets lots of friends who themselves are it's the group is almost exclusively women. There are members who are men who are often married to the women, but that's just sort of they get their put their dues in but when these groups when this group meets every month, it's all it's all women meeting in Laura Fermi's apartment in Hyde Park. And these women, too, are all brilliant themselves. It's just an incredible list of people on here, because, you know, they too have experience in academia, and they're married to the Nobel Prize winners. I mean, you know, this is the University of Chicago, you know, you know what it's like there. And so this is, this is the environment in which Laura Fermi is doing this work. And working with all of these people, many of them too are also refugees from war time, or fascist Europe or interwar Europe. And so, you know, they start locally there. They like start doing surveys with local schools to find out what what kids think of guns. There, you know, this is in the context of rising crime rates in Chicago, which is experiencing rising crime rates, just like every city is in the United States from kind of the mid 1960s through the early 1970s, when when violent crime really peaks in the post war United States. And, you know, her perspective is just fascinating. It's, I think we can call her an abolitionist because her goal is she wants to abolish civilian ownership of handguns, primarily she shall take shotguns and law handguns or rifles as well. But primarily they want to abolish private ownership of handguns, which is, it's just incredibly ambitious to us today even sort of naive, but I don't think it was terribly naive in this political context in which, you know, there's a lot of radical organizing around rights and the other variety of rights issues in the 1960s and the 1970s. And you know, Laura Fermi is kind of fitting into this mold of like, well, the victims rights, like don't people have rights, not to be victimized by firearms and this sort of thing. So she organizes the Civic Disarmament Committee, and this becomes and this is why I think Laura Fermi is so important and we know so little about her, the organization she founds will be sort of a kernel that becomes today's Brady Campaign. Because it is a young man named Mark Borinsky who founds an organization called the NCCH, you read this. So this is just an alphabet soup of acronyms here, the National Coalition for the Control of Handguns, right. And he founds that at the University of Chicago, essentially, with Laura Fermi's backing, learning everything he can from her with Laura Fermi's money, with Laura Fermi's connections, and he goes to Washington to essentially create this lobby in Washington, the first kind of gun control lobby we have in Washington, and it's all because of Laura Fermi. And, you know, eventually she's she's going to die in 1977. And so she doesn't really get to see where this goes. But that organization never would have happened without her. She's the first board member of the organization. She teaches him everything he knows. Again, she's collecting money from all of her friends and connections and networks. And you know, talk about unsung, you will not find Laura Fermi's name anywhere on any Brady Campaign website or any literature. They'll always point to Mark Borinsky or another man, of course, who was sort of central to the the early years of the organization, a guy named Pete Shields. But Fermi appears nowhere. And I think it's a sort of small injustice given, given how important she was. And you know, maybe it's because she was a little too radical in demanding abolition, because shortly after the organization takes off, they they get away from that they realize like, we have to triangulate, if we're going to get any money, if we're going to get any attention. We can't be telling people we want to abolish guns completely, that'll turn off too much of the American population, which has come to expect access to this tremendous pool of consumer goods. 

Kelly  32:36  
In this manner of trying to come to agreements and compromise, we've got the 1968 Gun Control Act. So every time I think I know everything about 1968, there's so much more that I just have no idea about so. So in 1968, Congress actually does something about guns. And you know, it's a big deal that that they're doing something, but you call it like a tipping point. So can you talk a little bit about what how does this legislation come to be? What's in it? And why is it so important moving forward?

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  33:11  
Yeah, you're I mean, everywhere you look in 1968, there's something that is just this is the hinge of the post war United States, right. And here we go, we're thinking about gun history, of course, 1968 is also going to be the hinge. And that's because not just because the Gun Control Act passes, but because we have the murder of Martin Luther King in April, 1968, of Bobby Kennedy in June of 1968. And that will, in fact, spur the the passage of the Gun Control Act, but the Gun Control Act, had been, or versions of it had been floating around Congress for at least five years at this point. In some ways, it goes back to the John F. Kennedy Assassination November, 1963. But there's even in the two years before that there's even Congressional investigations beginning to look into the gun market in the United States. And the main figure here is a Senator from Connecticut, a gun state, named Thomas Dodd. Dodd is elected to Congress in 1960, and he's appointed to the chairmanship of the Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee. So this is the Senate subcommittee that gets a lot of attention in the 1950s because they're investigating comic books that, you know, they're investigating sex and horror and all the drug use in comic books and things like that. In the 1960s, Dodd is going to turn his attention to guns, or turn the committee's attention to guns. Why does he do that? Probably because he's from a gun state. And probably because he has these close relationships with gun manufacturers, which had been in the couple years leading up to 1960, trying to draw attention to people like Sam Cummings, who are bringing all these cheap guns into the United States. And you know, a manufacturer like Colt would say, undercutting American prices and American manufacturers, and of course, they play the national security card they say, "If we go out of business, who's going to make all the guns for you, when the Soviets invade? You need to make sure you you protect us, so that so that we're available for for national security." So Dodd begins investigating already in like 1961. But it's really the Kennedy assassination that kicks off five years worth of investigations, hearings, bills being proposed, being rejected, going before various committees, just hundreds of witnesses. There's a point in 1966 or 67, when Ted Kennedy who's now in, in the Senate, at the beginning of one of these another round of hearings, he says, "Haven't we done this already? Why are we here again? We've heard from hundreds of people on this committee. We keep inviting the same characters back to tell us things that they were saying before Congress three, four years ago." So finally, by 1968, there's some initiative to get that bill through Congress. And that comes from, there's there that comes from politics, that comes from a sense that voters are increasingly looking for what we might call law and order solutions to social and, and, and political problems. And so it is a consequence of, you know, the uprisings in 1967, in Newark and Detroit, in the aftermath of, of King's killing. There's not just this impulse of we need to do something about guns so that murderers can't assassinate our heroes anymore. But also, we need to do something about guns, because guns are contributing to social disorder. And so it's kind of fascinating, we often identify sort of law and order, which comes to be Nixon's term in the 1968 campaign. We often identify that with, identify that with Nixon, and with conservatism, but it's kind of remarkable how many liberals are writing to people like Thomas Dodd, and to Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and saying, "You know, we need gun control to for law and order purposes, right." What law and order comes to mean by the 1970s, for groups like the National Rifle Association is the right to preserve your own law and order with unlimited access to firearms. But there's a real impulse towards control, social control in 1968, that is bipartisan, and leads to the passage of the Gun Control Act, which Lyndon Johnson finally signed into law, its last iteration with really the last scrap of political capital he has in October of 1968.

Kelly  37:39  
So you just mentioned the NRA. I want to talk a little bit about the NRA, because they're also evolving over this time period. And the NRA that people may be familiar with today is not the NRA of the 60s. So what what is happening here to push the NRA to this kind of position where it's currently at, which is, you know, everybody should have all the guns in the world. And the only way to stop the bad guy with the gun is a good guy with a gun. Like how, how do they get there from being what's essentially like a sporting club?

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  38:13  
Right. So this was the thing that fascinated me, too. When I came to this kind of later in the project, I didn't anticipate writing this but you know, we have a kind of traditional narrative about that turn for the NRA and its historians often points in 1977. There's it's the NRA Annual Convention in 1977. Over the previous couple years, the leadership of the organization, which is a kind of Old Guard leadership, they're there while among other things are older, but they tend to be old kind of military officers who've retired and now run this kind of national organization. And what happens in 19 in 1975, 76, is they're making plans to sort of withdraw from political fights. Among other things, they they plan to move the headquarters from Washington DC to Colorado Springs, which some people see as a retreat from intensive political fights. They're also planning a kind of a Disney World for gun owners often they have a huge plot of land and in New Mexico, and it seems increasingly that they're focusing on things like recreation, and hunting, and not enough on to certain people, the individual's right to own a firearm, especially for self defense. Now, we get this turn in 1977, where the old guard is overthrown at the annual convention, and a new hardline group comes in. They're led by a man man named Harlon Carter, who's sort of the figure who reinvents the NRA during this era. But to me, there was no pre history there. Like why is there a group of of NRA members angry in 1975 and 1976? Where does that anger come from? Where does that organizing come from? I've never seen any historian explain it. So I found the records of some of these kind of right wing gun rights groups going back to the 1960s. And they really begin their organizing again in 1968. Because they're watching from 1963 on as Tom Dodd and his committee is holding all these hearings and dragging witnesses before, before Congress to explain why there's too many guns, why they're selling too many guns and so forth. And they see this as a great affront like this is our right as Americans, we are entitled to this bounty, we have laws that protect and constitutional rights that protect our access to the mass market of guns. And so they begin organizing on a local level, again, another sort of alphabet soup of these groups in in the late 1960s. I write a lot about one of them called the National Association for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which which changes its name several times and has these long acronym names. But they begin in Oregon, in Southern Oregon, and they're organizing nationally, by the early 1971,   72, they have 10s of 1000s of members. And they are committed to an absolutist interpretation of the second amendment, which is not something that the NRA talks about in the 1960s. The second amendment never really comes up in these debates from 1963 to 1968, that are going to lead to the Gun Control Act, that because the NRA has buys the line that everyone else buys, which which has been the legal doctrine of the United States going back to the early 19th century, which is that the second amendment is a thing about militias. It has nothing to do with you, as an individual and your right to own guns. There are other things that protect that in American the American legal system. We have state laws, which which can protect that we have common law, which protects that, but the second amendment has nothing to do with it. But these radical groups in the late 1960s, they are all about the second amendment. And it's not just the individual's right to own a gun for self defense. But it's the individual's right to own a gun for community defense, for collective defense, because the country is besieged by communists, by Black radicals, by all kinds of extremist forces that are trying to undo the American system. And so this early intro, or this emerging interpretation of the second amendment, this absolutist interpretation of the second amendment as a guarantee of an individual right, it comes out in that Cold War context. And I think that's that's something that's completely off our radar today, when we sort of talk about the second amendment because an organization like the NRA talks about the second amendment, and they say, "Well, we're just connecting back to 1789, or 1791, when the amendment is ratified, and, and that's, that's our history," when in fact, their history is right wing paranoia about communism in the 1960s and the 1970s. That's where this absolutist interpretation of the second amendment comes from. And that's where those people come from, who are going to be angry about the NRA's seeming retreat from politics in in the mid 1970s. And they're the ones who are going to take over the organization and push it on the radical trajectory that, you know, leads us to today's NRA.

Kelly  43:27  
So we're speaking on the heels of a mass shooting in the United States, that doesn't narrow it down in time, probably very much for listeners. You end your book by saying, I don't normally quote author's words to them, but you say, "If the gun country of the post war era could be made, it can be unmade. Other worlds are possible." Can you talk a little bit about what the history that you've written here, it tells us about what we might need to do in the future to do that to unmake the gun country?

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  43:57  
Yeah, it's a really hard question, because in some ways, writing this history, it was deflating, because when when, you know, when you're focusing on rights, and you're focusing on these kind of abstract notions of how a society should be organized, idealism is easy to sort of easier to grasp on to because this is the kind of society we want to create. And these are the rights we think people should have. We think people should have a right to security, a right to freedom from the fear of being shot, the right to not live in a society full of of deadly weapons. But then when you as I tried to do in the book, you you take a kind of materialist approach to this. That's deflating, you know, it's this 400 million guns, right. And so, on the one hand, like we know how you build a society without gun violence, you get rid of the guns, right? I mean, it is it's just, that's not even a sort of like policy statement. That's just saying if you don't have guns, you can't have lots of people getting shot all the time in your society. But we also know that that is a completely impractical solution for the United States in the 21st century. It was also an impractical solution for the United States 55 years ago. So back in 1968, there in the wake of Bobby Kennedy's killing, Lyndon Johnson appoints a committee to investigate violence across American history, it comes to be called the Eisenhower Commission. It's named after Milton Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower's brother, and it has the fancy name of the the National Commission for the Prevention and Causes of Violence or something to this effect. And one of the things it does is it appoints a task force, which is the first real federal initiative to research and understand guns and gun violence across American history. And they produce a report, it's it comes out in 1969, the commission's report in 1968, comes out in 1969, Richard Nixon just sticks it in a drawer and never bothers to do anything with it. But it also it has this sort of conclusion that like, now is the time to do something. We are at a turning point, again, think about 1968 as a turning point, here we are, in a country of at that point, their best estimate, 90 million guns, maybe 25 million of those guns are hand guns. And we know when it comes to violence, interpersonal violence, handguns are the biggest problem. 70, 80% of gun deaths every year still, as in 1968, are a consequence of handguns. And so what can we do? Their solution, get rid of the guns. It's the only thing we can do. And we know that this would be the most kind of dramatic seizure of private property that any liberal democracy has ever gone through. But we have to suffer through it if we're going to prevent a society in which we have 200 million guns, 400 million guns, because at that point, there's no going back, there is no turning back. This is the moment here in 1968. This is when we have to do it. That was 55 years ago. And so thinking about like, what can we do looking forward from this kind of perspective, considering the kind of material conditions of guns in the United States? I just don't have a good answer. I mean, I admire the many different kinds of gun control initiatives we have whether they be red flag laws, or improved background checks, universal background checks, these sorts of things. But often it feels like it's picking at the margins. And I think what activists would, how they would respond to that, and I think you're totally right, is that well, you got to start somewhere. And I agree that that's a good place to start. But I don't know where where you go from there, particularly in a society that has only increasingly legitimized the ownership of firearms, the carrying of firearms, and the use of them now beyond outside the home, right. And so we, in the 1970s, a lot of the debate was, could you have a gun in your home, could you own any gun you wanted and keep it in your home for self defense? You know, Washington, DC passes this law, whereby nobody's allowed to have a handgun any even on their, their, their own property. And so this was the debate. And now, you know, as of 2022, we have the Bruen decision from the Supreme Court, which effectively says you can carry a gun anywhere you want. There's a few sort of special places where you can't carry a firearm, but by and large, your right to protect, to carry a firearm, anywhere you want for your own self defense is protected by the second amendment, which is just the most warped understanding of of the second amendment that you could imagine. But that's a consequence of a you know, 40 year long campaign by legal organizations and the NRA to, to distort that understanding of the second amendment and historians would would completely disagree with that, but, you know, they won in a legal sense. So, I don't know where we go from here. But I think one thing we can think about is how to, you know, not not target individuals and not target the gun owner in the way we talk about guns but to go after the companies right? I think we can all agree that, you know, it's kind of easy we can all collectively get behind like big capitalism, right? Like sort of criticizing it. And so, you know, the some of this has started we had the, the the settlement of the Remington settled with the the families of Sandy Hook for what was it $73 million as a consequence of their advertising. And this is one of the things that the activists I write about in the 1970s first pointed to. There's in addition to Laura Fermi's group in Chicago in the 1970s, there's also the Committee for Handgun Control, which is a group of of North Shore women living in the suburbs. And they take this kind of consumer angle and first day, they try to get a handgun bullets banned by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. And then after that they have all kinds of ideas about suing gun makers for their advertising, suing gun makers when their guns work like they're intended to do something that that Congress would later eventually banned the possibility of doing. And so, I don't know, it all does feel like it's chipping at the margins. But it also feels like we have to think differently about the problem, and its origins, because we are otherwise locked into a discourse that's been set that was set in stone really in the late 1960s, and that moment around 1968. And in many ways that discourse is is determined by the rhetoric that gun rights organizations use. And I think gun control organizations need their own kind of perspective and get away from this question of rights and the second amendment and focus on maybe the material reality of our daily lives in which you know, 400 million guns. It's just, there was a time when it was inconceivable, and now it is, it's the world we live in. 

Kelly  51:01  
Well, however difficult it may be sometimes to read about, this is an incredibly important history for people to learn. Can you tell people how they can get a copy of the book?

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  51:11  
Yeah, sure. So it's now available from the University of North Carolina Press. You could order it directly from the press or from your favorite bookseller. It should be should be available anywhere.

Kelly  51:24  
Oh, Drew, you thank you so much. This was great conversation. I in my other podcasting world have done a lot of conversations with gun control activists, but understanding this history better was was really great. So thank you so much.

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt  51:38  
Thank you, Kelly. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate this.

Teddy  52:16  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources use for this episode, and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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