Gun Country by Andrew C. McKevitt

Author:Andrew C. McKevitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2023-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Carter’s anxiety over the feminization of society was an implicit rejection of both the CHC’s claims to authority as mothers and consumers and the idea that guns could be treated as just another aspect of consumer society, that Americans ought to think about them as dangerous consumer products to be regulated like tricycles or oven cleaners. Self-defense was a sacred, masculine right, not a cheap product to be negotiated and regulated on the consumer market. When Carter told Conyers’s committee that allowing dangerous people access to guns was “a price we pay for freedom,” the CHC countered by turning back to guns as part of a consumer marketplace: “We can’t help but ask what kind of freedom we are buying and at what price.”47 The rejoinder demonstrated the CHC’s and Carter’s clashing visions of gun culture, the CHC framing it as a material one, a part of modern industrial consumer society that should be regulated as any other part; Carter, in contrast, saw it as sacrosanct, a masculine domain to be defended from the feminization of society that threatened to undermine basic values like the nuclear family and male authority.

In May 1975 Carter sat on a stage in Los Angeles to speak on a panel at the invitation of the pro–gun control US Conference of Mayors. He knew he had an unfriendly audience, and he pulled no punches explaining why the gun control advocates sitting before him were fighting a losing cause. He wasn’t there to tell them that Americans were buying so many guns because they were innocent hunters. Instead, gun stores were doing such good business because Americans were preparing for the breakdown of the social order, because they believed the political and legal systems had abandoned them. “I suspect it is fear,” he said. “I suspect it is a lack of confidence in society.” Politicians who harped on guns would “continue in this country to do nothing effective about evil men, to do nothing effective about criminals,” and in the process would “eventually cause every household in America to be armed—lawfully or not—and like it or not.” “We are denied freedom from fear,” he told the audience. “And fear, most often, makes people go out and buy a gun who would never have done so otherwise.” He described urban-dwelling Americans living a “besieged existence” where “marauders possess the streets at night.” Nothing was better for gun sales, he admitted, than nightly news reports of violent crime. “Go out and ask the neighborhood gun dealers in this country and they will tell you that after heinous crimes have been committed . . . there has been an increase in gun sales.”48 He almost dared gun control advocates to pass more laws; they just didn’t seem to get the point that Americans were terrified and would go out and buy guns one way or another. What Americans saw when they turned on the news or opened the newspaper was seemingly more crime and few consequences for it.

Now, explain that

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