When the Government Kind of Almost Confiscated Guns
And the root issue of our gun problem, with Professor Andrew C. McKevitt
With guns in the news a lot of late — Wayne LaPierre recently announced his resignation from the NRA and, yesterday, the DOJ concluded an investigation that found “unimaginable failure” with police in Uvalde — I spoke with Professor Andrew C. McKevitt of Louisiana Tech.
In Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America, Professor McKevitt traces many of the origins of our gun culture to the years following World War II. Then, one entrepreneur made a lot of money flooding the market with guns, and Congress arrived at arguably its most consequential crossroads in addressing our gun problem.
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes discussion of the birth of the grassroots gun control movement, when the NRA radicalized, gun rights activism on college campuses, whether or not Professor McKevitt can afford a house on the water in Virginia, and more:
Ben: Professor McKevitt, your book locates the origins of the gun culture we’re familiar with today in the 1950s and 1960s. Today I want to explore some of that history.
To begin, let’s talk about Samuel Cummings. Who was he, and how did he convert Europe's trash into America's treasure after World War II?
ACM: Sam Cummings was probably the most important gun capitalist of the 20th century. In U.S. history, he belongs up there in the pantheon of gunmakers, sellers, and marketers like Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester. Cummings’ great claim to fame was establishing Interarms, the world's largest private arms-dealing company in the aftermath of World War II.
A brash entrepreneur, Cummings went to Europe when he was in his 20s and dug through countries’ leftover trash from the war: essentially, millions of rifles, handguns, artillery, and larger weapons systems. He would stroll into a ministry of defense in a country like Finland or Italy and say, I want to buy every gun that you don't need anymore.
The weapons were useless in Europe. Local regulations either prohibited countries from selling the guns to their own populations, or the guns were obsolete as new technology developed. And it was really hard to destroy them. You can't just have a big bonfire for a half million guns.
So here was Cummings offering to buy them (for pennies on the dollar) and saying, I'll get them out of Europe for you. He intended to sell the guns in the only gun market in the world that could absorb them: the United States. Fast forward, and Cummings made millions of dollars selling cheap surplus guns to Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.
Ben: I was astonished to read that in 1966, journalist Carl Bakal estimated that the U.S. had absorbed anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of Europe’s war surplus firearms, thanks to the efforts of gun capitalists like Cummings.
It’s so interesting to me, too, that when these huge amounts of guns came to the U.S. government's attention, the State Department was more or less like: proceed.
ACM: Oh yeah. The fact that millions of war weapons (to use a term often employed today) were flowing into the States first came to Congress’s attention in 1957 and 1958. Unsurprisingly, it was congresspeople from the “Gun Valley” of Massachusetts and Connecticut, where much of the traditional gun industry originated, who said we should do something to limit the flow of outside guns.
Congress held hearings, but the State Department stepped in and said bringing the guns here is U.S. policy. Officials figured it was better for guns to be in the hands of Americans than communist governments or insurgents.
Ben: I guess the multiple choice answer of “(C) none of the above” had yet to be invented.
ACM: Ha, that’s right. It wasn’t until 1968 that Congress really tried to address the issue.
Ben: Can you talk about Senator Thomas Dodd and his leadership of Congress’ efforts?
ACM: Senator Tom Dodd of Connecticut (again, a gun-producing state) was one of the first to ask where are all these guns coming from? How are they getting into the country? A turning point in investigations came on November 22nd, 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used (we can discuss conspiracy theories another time) the same kind of firearm that someone like Cummings was bringing into the country.
It turned out not to be a Cummings-imported gun, but JFK’s assassination sparked a new push for Tom Dodd to pass gun restrictions. It took five more years to push the Gun Control Act of 1968 through. In part because Dodd worked with the NRA to write the legislation, it ended up getting water down.
The act imposed more stringent record-keeping requirements on gun sellers, and importantly for someone like Samuel Cummings — as well as for Tom Dodd and his gun-producing constituents — it cut off the flow of war surplus firearms from Europe (and even Asia in some cases).
It felt like a real victory, but very quickly Tom Dodd and his compatriots learned that they left some loopholes in the legislation, and things were only going to get worse.
Ben: Not to be too judgmental, but the loopholes seem pretty obvious in retrospect.
ACM: Yes. They related to a different part of the gun industry.
While Cummings was building Interarms, weapons manufacturers began popping up in places like West Germany, Italy, and Spain. They were sort of fly-by-night operations using metal leftover from the war to make cheap handguns, knowing that there was an insatiable market for them in the U.S.
These manufacturers quickly discovered that the 1968 law prohibited the importing of guns but never included any provision about gun parts being imported. So they just disassembled the handguns before shipping them.
Ben: It’s kind of like being told you can't eat doughnuts anymore, but you can still eat dough and you can still eat nuts.
ACM: Ha! And that you’ve got to press the oil at home yourself.
Stateside, the law did nothing to stop the manufacturing of cheap guns. Wily entrepreneurs began to assemble the cheap imported parts and sell the weapons themselves.
Ben: In the book, you talk about a government commission, called the Eisenhower Commission, that LBJ formed to study gun violence — which, predictably, continued to rise.
Can you talk about that moment, and the pretty strong recommendations officials made?
ACM: To take a step back for a moment, I think too often we assume that there's always been a lot of guns here, and now we just have more guns than we did before. But after 1945, you can clearly see the rate at which gun ownership increased exponentially more than the population.
This was a trend that the Eisenhower Commission was very much attuned to. LBJ appointed the commission in the immediate aftermath of Bobby Kennedy's killing in June of 1968. One of the commission’s task forces investigated gun violence and gun ownership. Their final report recommended getting rid of all handguns because 80 to 90 percent of all gun deaths were a consequence of them. In other words, a federal task force called for the most extraordinary instance of confiscation ever in a liberal democracy.
Commission members knew it was an audacious ask, but they estimated there were something like 25 million handguns in the States, out of 90 million guns total, and that if the government didn’t address the problem then, it would be too late — gun manufacturers would find ways to flood the market, and decades down the road we’d have to control 100 million or even 200 million handguns. They turned out to be totally right.
The report didn’t come out until 1969 when Richard Nixon was president. He stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. Meanwhile, we now have something in the neighborhood of 150 to 200 million handguns, out of around 450 million guns in total.
Ben: Woof. It’s sobering to think we might be 50 years past a point of no return.
ACM: Yeah, kind of dark to say. Still, I think gun control activists are doing good work today, and that the legislation Joe Biden signed into law in the aftermath of the Uvalde killings was a good step, too.
Ben: Though as you point out, the 2022 bill had limitations.
ACM: Yes — it continued in the vein of the 1968 approach.
While we think of laws like the act in 1968 or even New Deal legislation targeting guns before then as doing something about guns and gun violence, what they're really doing is protecting gun capitalism. The laws establish the guardrails in which legitimate gun capitalism can take place. They protect the rights, if not the convenience of the “law-abiding citizen” — an artificial construct that the NRA created in the 1930s.
So gun capitalism is legitimized through the kind of bill President Biden signed into law in 2022. The bill authorized things like new money for mental health and red flag laws — which are good, but also inherently signal that gun consumerism is perfectly legitimate and can continue so long as we make sure the guardrails are there.
The U.S. is one of the few if not the only country in the world that approaches gun policy in that particular way. I think that until we are ready to confront gun capitalism, we're going to continue in the cycle that we find ourselves in.
Ben: No offense, but I’ll wait to ask if and how we can break the cycle in our next interview because I’m not sure I want to hear your answer right now.
ACM: I’m not sure I want to give one.
Ben: Professor McKevitt, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for being here.
ACM: Of course, Ben. Thank you so much for having me.