Digging Ourselves Out of a Giant Gun Hole

With Professor Drew McKevitt

In our latest interview on the election, I spoke to Professor Drew McKevitt about guns. The gun problem feels insurmountable—in just one example, a new report from Everytown found that “the number of gun violence incidents on school grounds in 2024 so far has outpaced the total number of incidents in all of 2023.”

But as Drew recounts, the feeling that gun culture is entrenched and always will be has been carefully cultivated by gun rights advocates over the last fifty years. At the same time, he discusses a sort of original sin of the gun control movement that has limited its effectiveness. Our job, Drew believes, is “to hold the line” for younger generations and help them launch a decades-long initiative of their own.

Drew is a history professor at Louisiana Tech University. He’s the author of two books including, most recently, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America. A condensed, edited transcript of our conversation is below. You can also listen to us on the Skipped History podcast:

J.D. Vance isn’t doing himself any favors

Ben: To kick us off, what did you make of the assassination attempts on Trump?

DM: My first response in both cases was, well, thank God he wasn’t killed. As a human being, I don’t want people harmed by gun violence, even if I dislike them politically. I also think there’s an armed right-wing movement looking for any excuse to take up arms against its political enemies. A successful assassination might’ve been the very best excuse they could have come across.

My second reaction was: “What comes next?” We know what’s happened in the past with assassination attempts.

The two most prominent are Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1981. Kennedy’s assassination led to the biggest post-World War II federal gun control law, the Gun Control Act of 1968, after a five-year arc of debates and legislative proposals. Then there was Reagan, who survived, but his press secretary, James Brady, was paralyzed for life. Brady and his wife Sarah became major advocates for handgun control, pushing for the Brady Bill. It took 12 years to pass in 1993, but it was a direct result of that assassination attempt.

So past assassinations led to gun reform. I don’t see anything like that happening today.

Ben: Speaking of 1968, your book talks about how the early gun control movement had ambitious goals, but also some significant flaws. Can you explain a bit more?

DM: 1968 was a big year, not just because of the Gun Control Act, but because of how various political groups reacted to it.

On the right, conservatives and the emerging gun rights movement saw it as the start of a slippery slope toward totalitarianism, even though the 1968 law was very, very mild. It mainly stopped people from selling guns through the mail and imposed some record-keeping requirements on gun sellers. The NRA even helped draft parts of the law, though they distanced themselves from it later on.

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Learn more from Drew about the loopholes in the 1968 legislation below:

When the Government Kind of Almost Confiscated Guns

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Liberals weren’t satisfied either. The number of guns sold didn’t decrease, and gun violence continued to rise into the early 1970s. This is when we saw the first real grassroots gun control movements. In my book, I write about a group headed by Laura Fermi in Chicago. She wanted to eliminate handguns entirely. Her group’s goal was simple: no more handguns, except for police and military. Fermi was the widow of Enrico Fermi, the physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. 

Ben: They were what you might call an atomic power couple.

DM: Ha, nailed it. 

Gradually, though, leaders of burgeoning gun control groups pivoted to more moderate proposals. In their minds, the abolitionist approach was too far to the left. They thought you’re never going to get rid of the guns. Fermi got really frustrated because, in an attempt to appeal to an imagined middle, the gun control movement shifted from being proactive to being reactive. Instead of advocating for a positive vision of a gun-free society, the movement began to define itself by opposing the NRA.