Just as World War II transformed the United States into a global military and economic …
Is it possible to break the cycle of gun consumerism and violence? Any substantive effort to do so must acknowledge the deep roots in the postwar era of our contemporary crisis. There’s an irony in saying that: Americans across the political spectrum already believe their gun culture has deep historical roots, buried far down in the soil of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But our guns-everywhere society would not exist without the postwar boom of gun consumerism, just as our fear-everywhere society would not exist without the Cold War and racial anxieties teaching us to fear our neighbors or our government of the people. The postwar world forged the gun country as much as did the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments that typically get all the credit.