Book Review: "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America"

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T.REX ARMS

Technology

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Author Andrew McKevitt's book Gun Country posits that America's unique love for guns appeared in the late 20th century, growing out of a love of cheap WWII surplus arms, Cold War commie fear, and 1960s race riots. Is it this simple? And is his description of "gun capitalism" a helpful way to talk about the Citizen Defense Industry?

Transcript

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0:00.0	We talk a lot about gun culture here at T-Rex Arms, and today we're going to be reviewing a book
0:05.7	that says that it emerged from the military surplus sales of World War II-era hardware
0:11.5	and some stuff that happened around that time in the 1950s and 60s.
0:27.0	Welcome back to another T-Rex talk. My name is Isaac Botkin. And today we're going to be reviewing a book by Andrew C. McEvet called Gun Country. And the subtitle is Gun Capitalism, Culture
0:36.6	and Control in Cold War America.
0:39.7	And essentially, the thesis of this book is the current modern gun culture that we have today,
0:45.9	this idea that we should be free to own weapons.
0:49.3	That really comes out of a culture that developed in the 1950s when there was a whole bunch of military
0:55.6	surplus stuff, specifically small arms, being sold to Americans. And it is a pretty scholarly
1:03.9	book in a lot of ways. There's about 40 pages of notes at the end. It is well researched. And I actually enjoyed reading this book in a lot of
1:14.2	different places in a lot of different ways. But I do have a little bit of an argument with the
1:19.2	author on his original sort of presuppositions. He does document a lot of stuff that did happen,
1:24.8	and it did have a big effect. but I think that there's stuff that
1:27.8	happened prior to that that is pretty important. So let's get into some of his ideas. In the
1:37.3	introduction to the book, Professor McEvitt makes the case that war made the gun country. America is, of course, the gun country.
1:46.8	I would not dispute him on that term. The Second World War and Cold War provided the immediate
1:52.6	inspiration for growth and expansion of gun ownership and the justification for it. Now, this is an
1:58.2	area where I'd like to see a little bit more research because I actually believe
2:02.5	that there's a significant amount of firearms ownership in the United States prior to World War II
2:08.5	and the availability of M1, Garand, and various other military surplus rifles that came back over to the
2:15.0	States after the war. There are a whole bunch of things that happen after that.
2:19.8	There are a massive amount of Cold War era things that happen. That he does document later on in
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