Gun Country

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336 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 20 halftones, notes, index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7724-8
Published: November 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7496-4
Published: November 2023
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-7497-1
Published: September 2023

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Awards & distinctions

Shortlisted, 2024 Cundill History Prize, McGill University

One of the Washington Post's Notable Nonfiction Books of 2023

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.

About the Author

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.
For more information about Andrew C. McKevitt, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

“Sharp, fascinating, devastating, exhaustively researched and often wryly funny, this indispensable book — one of the best works of nonfiction this year — details how America came to be not just a gun country but the gun country.”—Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post Book World

"Illuminating, timely . . . . an original way of understanding a stunning and enduring increase in gun ownership in the US . . . . McKevitt offers a compelling argument about where the extremity of America’s permissiveness toward deadly weaponry originated and how debates on the Second Amendment’s meaning have evolved in response to shifting cultural preoccupations. He also makes a persuasive appeal for how the human costs of mass gun ownership could be mitigated."—Kirkus Reviews

"By focusing on how guns have been marketed and how the right to buy one has been mythologized, McKevitt provides an illuminating diagnosis of our current political pathology."—Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Andrew McKevitt’s excellent Gun Country. . . insists on an often neglected fact: guns are a commodity."—Geoff Mann, London Review of Books

"Accessible, informative, and should appeal to readers of any background. Its arguments should give conservative Christians who celebrate free market capitalism and the right to firearms reason for pause."—Current Pub

"This is a book that as many people as possible should read—starting with scholars who study guns, scholars who study postwar America, and concerned citizens wondering how we wound up in this mess . . . . a major reinterpretation of a story that other scholars have been telling in recent decades—and, again, a convincing one."—The New Rambler