Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

In the United States today, there are an estimated 450 million guns in civilian hands.

That's 10 times the number than at the end of the Second World War.

But how did that conflict spark a weaponry boom?

And what are the social and economic currents that have led the US to have more guns than people?

Andrew C. McEvitt's book, Gun Country, Explores these questions.

The book has just been shortlisted for the Kundal History Prize,

of which we're a media partner.

And Matt Elton spoke to Andrew to find out more.

Andrew, thank you so much for being with us today.

Your book explores gun culture in America

from a new perspective from that of which I'd personally thought about it previously. And we'll

get into some of that in a minute. Before we do, could you give listeners a sense of the scale

of gun ownership in the United States?

Yeah, well, it's a good question, Matt, and thank you so much for having me here.

In 1945, the United States had something in the neighborhood of 45 million guns in civilian hands.

That's at the end of the Second World War.

And that's as best we can tell, because by law in the United States, governments can't count guns. So we don't actually have ever a precise figure for how many guns there are in the United States.

75, 80 years later, today, there are something like 450 million guns in the United States.

So there are 10 times as many guns in the United States today as there

were at the end of the Second World War. The U.S. population doesn't increase tenfold in the last

75 or 80 years. So what helps explain that incredible exponential growth of firearms in the hands of the American people. That's the question

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