Gun Country
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€23.99
1970s Chicago history
A01=Andrew C. McKevitt
and Firearms history
Author_Andrew C. McKevitt
Brady Campaign
Bureau of Alcohol
Category=JPS
Category=JPV
Category=NHK
Civic Disarmament Committee
Cold War history
Committee for Handgun Control
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gun capitalism
Gun Control Act of 1968
gun imports
history of gun control
history of gun culture
history of gun industry
history of gun rights
history of gun violence
Interarms
Kennedy assassination
Laura Fermi
Lee Harvey Oswald
National Council for the Control of Handguns
National Rifle Association history
NRA history
postwar U.S. history
Samuel Cummings
Saturday night specials
Second Amendment history
Senator Thomas Dodd
small arms control
the Sixties
Tobacco
twentieth-century gun history
Yoshihiro Hattori
Product details
- ISBN 9781469677248
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 07 Nov 2023
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Just as World War II transformed the United States into a global military and economic superpower, so too did it forge the gun country America is today. After 1945, war-ravaged European nations possessed large surpluses of mass-produced weapons, and American entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to buy used munitions for pennies on the dollar and resell them stateside. A booming consumer market made cheap guns accessible to millions of Americans, and rates of gun ownership and violence began to climb. Andrew C. McKevitt tells the history of this gun boom through the dynamics of consumer capitalism and Cold War ideology, the combination of which resulted in a vast number of Americans arming themselves to the teeth and centering their political identity on their guns.
When gun control legislation emerged in the 1960s, many Americans, accustomed to the unregulated postwar bounty of cheap guns and fearful of Soviet invasion, domestic subversion, and urban uprisings, fiercely challenged it. Meanwhile, gun control groups were diverted from their abolitionist roots toward a conciliatory, fundraising-focused strategy that struggled to limit the stockpiling of firearms. Gun Country recasts the story of guns in postwar America as one of Cold War and racial anxieties, unfettered capitalism, and exceptional violence that continues to haunt us to this day.
When gun control legislation emerged in the 1960s, many Americans, accustomed to the unregulated postwar bounty of cheap guns and fearful of Soviet invasion, domestic subversion, and urban uprisings, fiercely challenged it. Meanwhile, gun control groups were diverted from their abolitionist roots toward a conciliatory, fundraising-focused strategy that struggled to limit the stockpiling of firearms. Gun Country recasts the story of guns in postwar America as one of Cold War and racial anxieties, unfettered capitalism, and exceptional violence that continues to haunt us to this day.
Andrew C. McKevitt is John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. He is the author of Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America.
