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The Best Book Ever Written About Gun Violence.

January 31, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , 2 Comments

              I have read probably every book published on gun violence in the past 20 years, along with having self-published 15 books on gun violence myself as well. And I can say without fear of either exaggeration or correction that What We’ve Become – Living and Dying in a Country of Arms by Jonathan Metzl is far and away the best book on this topic which has been published until now.

              I read a pre-published draft of this book and offered the author some suggestions but believe me when I say that my involvement in this remarkable effort had little, if anything to do with making this book something which everyone should read and should then give the book to a family member, a colleague, or a friend.

              The text opens with a brief description of a shooting which occurred on April 22, 2018, at 3:40 A.M. in a Waffle House located in Murfreesboro, TN. Travis Reinking, a 29-year-old from Illinois, sprayed the all-night, trucker’s restaurant with an AR-15, killing four diners and injuring three others, until he was wrestled to the ground, lost control of the gun, jumped up and fled.

              Two days later, the shooter was arrested and another ‘angry young man’ was convicted of multiple homicides after a five-day trial and will probably spend the rest of his life behind bars.

              One of the reasons that What We’ve Become is such a remarkable book, is that when you read the chapter which covers the actual shooting event at the Waffle House, you begun to feel that you are one of the diners sitting there as the shooter’s gun starts going off.

              One of the biggest problems that we have in the literature about gun violence is that it is overwhelmingly various academic studies which simply cannot convey the terrifying reality of being in an enclosed space when someone starts blasting away with a gun. Yet Metzl manages to convey these stark images in a way which should solidify any doubts in the minds of Gun-control Nation about whether their quest to reduce gun violence is a good and important task. It is, okay?

              The other reason that I find this book to be such a powerful read is that the author paints a portrait of gun violence which is as multi-dimensional as this issue happens to be, which is the reason that we have such difficulty coming to terms with how to respond to gun violence in proper and effective ways.

              Is gun violence caused by mental stress? Is gun violence caused by socio-economic blight? Is gun violence caused by family environments? Is gun violence caused by all three conditions or even more? The author’s background is in sociology and psychiatry, but he evidently has no trouble examining gun violence from those perspectives as well as from other academic points of view.

              Book reviews are supposed to be ‘balanced,’ with the reviewer showing how much he/she knows by coming out with some degree of criticism of the work being reviewed, no matter how slight.

              I’m not going to do that in this review because I don’t need to review a book in order to make my audience remember how brilliant I am when it comes to knowing something about guns.

              What you need to do is read this book to see Jonathan Metzl’s brilliance on full display.

Sorry Folks, But the NRA Ain’t Going Away.

January 28, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , 4 Comments

              Over the past few years, especially since Mike Spies did his great reportage on  the hi-jinks going on in the NRA’s home office, I find myself again and again having to take some of the wind out of Gun-control Nation’s sails regarding whether America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ will find a way to stay afloat.

              And my belief remains unchanged that the NRA will continue to function even if the organization’s current trial in New York on corruption charges ends in a verdict which hits the group smack in the middle of its organizational and financial geezer, okay?

              And by the way, I don’t notice any great departure of the membership since Wayne LaPierre resigned from the leadership position he’s held for the past 33 years. In fact, the news that he’s decided to ‘retire’ was greeted, organizationally-speaking, with a big yawn.

              What has always bothered me about my friends in Gun-control Nation who see the NRA as America’s great bogey man is that I can’t find one of them who has even the slightest idea or experience about what the NRA is or what it does. After all, if you’re actively trying to reduce gun violence, why would you cough up a whole, big $45 to join the organization whose activities you need to at least understand if you’re going to make an assault on 2nd-Amendment ‘rights?’

              I am a member of 5 or 6 other advocacy organizations, including the Wildlife Fund, the National Parks Conservancy, and a couple of other tree-hugging groups. None of these outfits do a smidgen of the care and feeding of their memberships compared to how the NRA deals with its members through emails, monthly magazines, all kinds of product and service discounts, and most of all, through an extensive network of clubs and activities which reach just about every active gun owner in the United States.

              Estimates vary, but every year there must be somewhere between 4,000- and 5,000-gun shows. My state alone, which is not a big gun state, has 5 shows every year. Walk through the entrance into the show, and the first thing you see is a big banner announcing sponsorship from the NRA. There’s usually a booth where an NRA rep sits, talks the talk, and encourages gunnies to join right then and there.

              The organization also has a program known as ‘Friends of the NRA,’ where people can get together, have dinner, listen to some gun nuts shoot the breeze, enter a raffle for a gun and other toys, and just have an evening of fun and good times. Right now, there are 11 such events scheduled this year within easy driving distance of where I live.

              The big deal each year is the annual show, which attracts between 50,000- and 60,000-gun nuts who walk around, eat a hot dog, buy a t-shirt but most of all have an annual get together with the same people they’ve been meeting at the show for the last umpteen years.

              The NRA show reminds me of the way the Shriners have their annual celebration in New Orleans, and I don’t know of any gun-control organization which thinks in these terms, never mind actually holds this kind of event. For all the talk about how the NRA is so dedicated to lobbying for gun ‘rights,’ what the organization really does is find ways for similar-minded folk to get together with other similar-minded folk which creates a sense of belonging and community that transcends anything having to do with guns.

              That all being said, last week I received an email from the NRA which made me sit up and pay attention because it wasn’t just another solicitation to send them some dough, or another reminder about how those goddamn liberals want to take away all your guns. The email was an invitation to apply for admission to a Youth Education Summit that will be held for six days in Washington, D.C. – all expenses paid! The summit is for high school juniors and seniors with the goal being to become active and knowledgeable U.S. citizens by learning about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the federal government, and the importance of being active in civic affairs.

              In other words, the NRA has decided to build a following by training the next generation of advocates who will become community leaders and spread the ‘gun rights’ gospel far and wide, obviously including advocates for gun ownership who will run for public office when an opportunity arises in their nek of the woods.

              And just to how you how serious this is, the application requires a high school transcript showing at least a 3-point GPA and requires the applicant to write and submit an essay about the 2nd Amendment and the importance of Constitutional protections of freedoms and basic rights.

              Incidentally, if you’re 20 years or older, you can apply to be a chaperone at this year’s summit event, which will include visits to various D.C. monuments and the requisite tour of the Capitol with stops at the offices of Congressional friends.

              If any of the gun-control organizations are reaching out like this to recruit and develop the next generation of advocates, they’re keeping it a very good secret, believe me.

              Want to reduce gun violence? Take a page from the NRA playbook and start trying to develop a following by doing something other than sending me the monthly letter or email asking me for cash.

The Department of Justice Explains Uvalde.

January 18, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 7 Comments

              I have just downloaded and quickly parsed through the 575-page report about the May 2022 mass shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX which resulted in the deaths of 19 students, two adults and the shooter.

              The report was conducted and published by the Community Oriented Policing Service of the Department of Justice and was released in conjunction with a press conference featuring the DOJ-COPS staff who out together the report, along with Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose presence in Texas for this photo op/PR exercise shows how busy he is these days.

              Why do I sound just a bit miffed after waiting for more than a year for all the experts to tell us what we need both to know and to do in response to mass shootings like the shooting in Uvalde? Because you can read every goddamn word of this document and you won’t get even the slightest understanding of why Uvalde happened and how to keep Uvalde-type of rampage slaughters from happening again.

              Before I explain the thinking which went into the previous sentence, for reasons of context, let me take you back to another mass school shooting which took place on the morning of December 14, 2012, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

              That morning, a 20-year-old woke up, took a rifle out of the family gun safe and killed his mother with one shot to her head. He then got in his car with a rifle, drove over to the school, proceeded to shoot his way in through the front door and then killed 6 adults and 20 children before killing himself. From the moment the shooter entered the school building until he ended his own life, the entire episode took at most 5 minutes.

              In the Uvalde slaughter, on the other hand, the shooter carried out his assault for over an hour while the cops stood around outside the building trying to figure out how to respond. Members of the Tactical Unit of the U.S. Border Patrol finally breached the location and shot the mass killer dead.

              Before driving to the school in Uvalde, the shooter used an AR-15 assault rifle on his grandmother and shot her in the face, although she survived the attack. The killer than took another assault rifle to the school and carried out his mass assault.

              At Sandy Hook, the shooter shot and killed his mother with a rifle, and then took another rifle to the elementary school where he carried out his mass assault. But – read the next sentence very carefully – the gun which the CT shooter used to kill his mother could not have been used to kill 26 adults and children at the Sandy Hook school.

              In fact, the gun which the Newtown shooter used to kill his sleeping mother wasn’t chambered with ammunition powerful enough to shoot through the security glass which allowed him to gain entrance to the school. Moreover, it was a single-shot, bolt-action rifle which could only deliver a single round every 20 or 30 seconds, as opposed to the AR-15 which the CT shooter discharged more than 90 times in 4 minutes or less.

              In Uvalde, the shooter switched guns between the gun he used to shoot his grandmother and the gun he used to kill 21 and injure 17 more. But that’s because both of his guns were AR-15 assault rifles, and like the Sandy Hook shooter, the Uvalde killer also went into the school with multiple, high-capacity magazines, so that he ended up with ammunition to spare.

              The Uvalde report issued today covers the following topics: (1). Description of the incident; (2). Tactics and equipment; (3). Leadership and command; (4). Post-incident response; (5). Communications; (6). Trauma and Support Services; (7). School Safety and Security; (8). Pre-Incident Planning and Preparation. Know how many times an AR-15 is mentioned? Exactly once, in the very first sentence of the report. That’s it.

              For all the research, and interviews, and studies, and bullshit which together generated 1,347 footnotes in this report, there is not one, fucking reference to the fact that without a bottom-loading, semi-automatic gun chambered for military-style ammunition and additional hi-capacity magazines, no mass shooting could have occurred at all.

              The United States happens to be the only country in the entire world which allows residents to purchase, own and transport semi-automatic guns which load from beneath the gun’s frame and hence can take magazines which hold upwards of 30 rounds, magazines which can be inserted into the gun in 2 seconds or less.

              The gun industry would like you to believe that any and all semi-automatic guns are ‘sporting’ guns, but that’s absolutely not true. Pick up a Glock Model 17 handgun with 20 rounds of 9mm ammunition and you’re not conducting any kind of ‘sporting’ activity at all. Ditto an AR-15 rifle.

              If every, single recommendation made in this DOJ report was implemented in every, single school and other public facility throughout the United States, it would not prevent any loony kid from walking into a gun shop, buying a semi-auto handgun or rifle along with a couple of hundred rounds and extra magazines to spare, and then going into a place where a lot of people are walking around and playing a video shooting game except using a real gun.

              I am writing this column in the café of a Barnes & Noble bookstore. If I went out to my car and came back into the store with the Ruger Mini-14 which I keep in the trunk, I could kill everyone in this store in 4 minutes or less.

              And the only reason it would take me that long is because it’s a multi-level store.

Going to the Post Office? Now You Can Take Your Gun.

January 16, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 2 Comments

              For all the talk about how America has a long tradition of using guns for self-defense, as recently as1985, there was only one state – Vermont – which did not require a government-issued license to carry a concealed weapon outside of the home (CCW) and eight other states which issued CCW licenses without the applicant being required to demonstrate a special need to walk around with a gun.

              There are now 27 states which do not require any kind of special licensing process to carry a gun outside of the home and only 8 states which enforced some kind of reviewing process by the cops before someone could legally carry a concealed weapon outside their residence without being approved for CCW because of some special need to engage in armed, self-defense.

              One of those last states which only issued CCW after an applicant demonstrated that he had a special reason to walk around with a concealed weapon was New York, but the New York statute was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2022, a case (New York State Ridle and Pistol Assoc. vs. Bruen) which forced New York and the other CCW-issuing states to rewrite their CCW laws.

              The permissiveness of the Bruen decision has now been extended to a ruling (U>S>A> versus Ayala) by a Florida federal district judge, Kathryn Mizelle, who has just overturned the conviction of a postal employee who was charged with carrying a concealed gun into a postal facility where guns have been declared verboten under a section of the Federal Code which reads like this: “whoever knowingly possesses or causes to be present a firearm or other dangerous weapon in a Federal facility (other than a Federal court facility), or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 1 year, or both.”

              Following from the Bruen decision, Judge Mizelle could not find any precedent which gives the government the authority to restrict the carrying of guns into government locations other than what are considered ‘sensitive places,’ meaning legislatures, polling places and courthouses. But these specific places, which are cited in the Heller case, cannot be extended to every other federal location without a Constitutional statement to that effect.

              Having reviewed all the relevant statutes and cases involving the carry and use of guns on federal property, the decision by Mizelle concludes as follows: “Whatever the historical record permits with respect to firearms regulation on government property, that legal principle cannot be used to abridge the right to bear arms by regulating it into practical non-existence.”

              In her desire to align herself with a whole side of the legal profession which believes that nothing has changed in the United States since the Constitution was written and approved before the Industrial Revolution, a.k.a., the so-called ‘originalist’ gang, Judge Mizelle makes just as much of an arbitrary judgement about so-called gun ‘rights’ as my late friend Antonin Scalia made when he wrote the majority opinion for Heller in 2008.

              What I am referring to here is the phrase within the 2nd Amendment, “to keep and bear arms,” with specific reference to the word ‘bear.’ The Heller case was based on a statute covering gun ownership applied to residents of Washington, D.C. The statute covered the procedure for allowing D.C. residents to keep a gun in their homes. It said absolutely nothing at all about laws that might or might not have covered walking around the neighborhood or walking into a post office with a gun.

              Therefore, to cite Heller and Bruen as reasons why the government cannot expressly control access to guns inside government facilities flies in the face of reality and a balanced reading of legal texts. The judge gives herself away when she notes, near the end of her opinion, that the federal government currently owns 28% of the land within the United States, thus granting the government unquestioned authority to regulate gun access on all federal property would “amount to a nullification of the Second Amendment right altogether.”

              There is absolutely nothing in this decision which couldn’t be challenged by any liberally minded, gun-control attorney on the basis of both history and facts. But this case, as well as previous gun-control cases like Heller and Bruen all raise what I consider to be a much more important issue which my friends in Gun-control Nation have yet to discuss, let alone conduct even the slightest amount of research to determine a proper stance to take when talking about the violence caused by guns.

              Every year more than 100,000 Americans are killed or seriously injured by someone else who shoots them with a gun. Do we possess one, single study that has ever been published which attempts to figure out how many of those fatal and non-fatal assaults are committed by individuals who have legal access to guns?

              None of the 2nd-Amendment decisions – Heller, McDonald, Bruen, Ayala – have even remotely questioned the basic principle that gun ownership may be a Constitutional ‘right’ but it also must be based on meeting a legal standard for behavior and practical gun sense both in and outside the home.

              Until and unless someone sits down and looks at enough data to determine whether the fatal and non-fatal gun assaults which occur every year involve the behavior of individuals who under current laws should, or should not have legal access to guns, as far as I’m concerned, the wailing on both sides about gun ‘rights’ is mostly useless noise. 

Do ‘Guns’ Commit Gun Violence?

January 11, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , 3 Comments

              So, once again we are presented with the latest attempt to figure out what kinds of gun laws or gun regulations will make any real difference in reducing the awful amount of gun violence which the USA continues to endure, a rate which after dropping slightly for a few years appears to be headed upwards again.

               I am referring to research just published by Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who, along with a colleague, has published a study which finds that between 1991 and 2016, there was what he calls a ‘sharp’ decline in gun deaths. According to Sharkey, “there is strong, consistent evidence supporting the hypothesis that restrictive state gun policies reduce overall gun deaths, homicides committed with a gun, and suicides committed with a gun.”

              Feel free to download the article here.

              The article goes on to claim that over this fifteen-year period, one-third of all states passed one or more laws increasing restrictions and regulations: “background check requirements, concealed carry laws, castle doctrine laws, child access laws, minimum age requirements for purchase, prohibited possessor laws, safety training requirements, laws requiring a waiting period before purchase, and laws that allow or require police officers to seize a firearm at the scene of domestic violence incidents.”

              This articled will add strength to what has become the standard advocacy of the gun-control movement, namely, that by passing more gun-control laws, we will reduce gun violence. These laws are required because the United States has a gun ‘problem, which is based primarily on “higher levels of household gun ownership than any other developed country.”

              I am quoting Sharkey directly because I want it to be understood that I have no issue with his research or the conclusions which flow from that research. My issue with Sharkey and for that matter, with the entire community of researchers looking for ways to reduce the awful count of fatal and non-fatal gun injuries every year, is that their approach reveals that they know nothing about guns.

              How do you come up with a workable hypothesis for how to better manage the use of a product when you don’t know anything about the product? This happens in the gun-control movement and scholarly literature all the time.

              Somewhere out in my storage shed or maybe under one of the beds in my house is a 7mm Magnum Browning Semi-automatic rifle. It holds 5 rounds of very powerful ammunition which can bring down an antelope at 400 yards. I also have a bolt-action Remington 700 rifle chambered in .270 Winchester which will split the head of a deer open at 300 yards.

              Know how many of these guns are lying around in homes, garages, and car trunks in the United States? Probably one hundred million or more. The United States is the only country in the entire world which does not impose hunting restrictions on what is referred to as ‘open land.’ If the landowner doesn’t post a sign on the property saying that access is not allowed, you can pull your car over, take out your trusty rifle, walk 20 yards into the brush and if you’re not violating a specific seasonal rule for a particular type of game, bang away.

              And by the way, not only do we have probably a hundred million guns designed for hunting floating around, but they don’t wear out. So, a Winchester Model 70, which was first put out on the market in 1936, probably sold 30 million units before it was discontinued in the 1980’s and I’ll bet you that most of those guns still function perfectly today.

              If you think we have a lot of hunting rifles down in Grandpa’s cellar, the number of shotguns bought and owned by Americans is greater still. The first autoloader shotgun, Browning’s A-5, was designed by John Browning and hit the stores in 1905. It was manufactured and sold for the next 70 years. I have no idea how many of these guns were made because the gun companies didn’t have to keep track of serial numbers until the federal government got into the gun-control big-time in 1968.

              But when I had a retail gun shop in Massachusetts from 2001 until 2015, guys would trade in Browning A-5 shotguns all the time. Why did the guy bring his old shotgun in and asked me to buy it for fifty or sixty bucks? Because ‘the wife’ needed a new dishwasher or ‘the truck’ needed new tires.

              That’s how essential hunting guns have become in the United States – almost as essential as all those handguns which everyone is now buying for ‘armed, self-defense.’ As if we even know how many of those guns are out there, since the background check requires the dealer to identify the gun which is going to be given to the customer, but the description of the gun doesn’t include whether it’s a new or a used gun.

              But all the gun experts know that the number of background checks each month is a quick and easy way to figure out how many guns are floating around, right?

              Now granted, you can’t commit gun violence without a gun. And obviously, if we want to reduce gun violence, we need to figure out ways to make it more difficult for people to get their hands on guns.

              Except it’s not ‘guns’ which create gun violence. It’s those small, semi-automatic handguns, usually bottom-loading, hi-capacity pistols, which are used by someone who takes a shot at someone else, a type of behavior which accounts for 80 percent of all gun violence every, single year.

              And by the way, w happen to be the only country in the entire world which allows its residents to purchase, own and carry such guns with a minimum of legal duress.

              I am still waiting for the very first gun researcher to stop using the word ‘guns’ as if every, single type of gun represents an equal threat to community safety and public health, and instead take the trouble to actually figure out which guns need to be more strictly controlled or (God forbid) banned because those are the guns that give America a gun-violence problem which no other advanced country endures.

              If the SEC wanted to impose a new rule to better regulate the stock market, would they dare listen to some ‘expert’ who had no Wall Street experience at all? Of course, they wouldn’t.

But when it comes to guns, the lack of industry-specific experience and knowledge happens all the time.

              Sharkey says that between “the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, the rate of gun deaths fell by a meaningful degree,” I can only go back gun-violence numbers published by he CDC to 2001, but that year there were 28,540 gun-violence deaths. In 2016, the number was 37,863.

              That was a ‘meaningful’ decline?

ADDENDUM: Professor Sharkey has sent me a note stating that I am mis-leading the reader by giving (in my final paragraph) data only beginning in 2001 when he specifically shows gun-violence rates in his article beginning in the early 1990’s (p. 787.) He is correct in that respect, and I thank him for his correction.

Want To Make a Million in the Gun Business? Start With Two Million.

January 5, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

              An interesting book on the gun business has just appeared. It’s called Gun Country – Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America, written by a historian, Andrew McKevitt, who teaches at Louisiana Tech University and specializes in American consumer culture which obviously is an important issue when we talk about guns.

              After all, we are the only country in the entire world in which more guns have been bought and owned than the number of people who live in the United States. And even though the Brady Organization didn’t know what they were talking about when they claimed there were more gun dealers than Starbucks, the truth is that you can find a retail gun shop in every second or third town.

              I used to live in Southern New Jersey, the town of Flemington, to be exact, and within 40 miles of where my house was located, there are 50 licensed gun dealers working out of their own, retail shops.

              So, the point is that maybe guns aren’t as frequently found in American homes as television sets, but the gun industry continues to manufacture and pump millions of guns into the commercial market, 7,011,945 in 2019, although probably 500,000 were shipped overseas. Six and one-half million guns in one year is a lot of guns.

              And remember something else. Guns don’t wear out. Until my son swiped it a couple of years ago, I had a Colt 1911 pistol that was manufactured at the Hartford plant in 1922 and it shot just fine. And I also had a box of Reminton ammunition which was a freebie which came with the gun.

              The Remington factory where this ammunition was produced was located in Bridgeport. It’s now rubble. But the ammo worked just fine.

              McKevitt’s book, however, doesn’t deal with this unique element of gun capitalism, namely, the fact that the products have extremely long lives, which is one of the reasons why margins in this industry are so thin, hence the joke about how this is a business in which you can easily lose more than you make.

              In that regard, however, McKevitt focuses primarily on a guy named Sam Cummings, who owned a company called Interarms, which imported guns from Europe into the United States. Cummings started going around to Germany, Italy and other World War II combatants and began buying up their large stocks of used, military rifles which he bought for peanuts, then shipped them to a large warehouse in Alexandria, VA and then sold them in bulk to dealers and distributors in the U.S.A.

              McKevitt’s text, based in part on newly found documentation from Interarms and other sources, explains how Cummings correctly anticipated that the American gun market would expand because several million men came back from World War II and felt comfortable around guns. Because he bought his inventory for next to nothing, he could also enjoy a decent markup but still sell his guns for a reduced price.

              When McKevitt speaks about ‘gun capitalism,’ he’s simply fitting his story about Interarms into the standard model for how a new market or a new product achieves a successful presence in whatever particular exists for the product’s distribution and sale. But McKevitt is also aware that the gun business is much more tightly regulated than any other consumer group, and in this respect he spends much of his text discussing the ideological pushes and pulls between pro-gun advocates versus gun-control advocates which eventually produced the major federal government regulatory system known as GCA68.

              Incidentally, the company founded by Sam Cummings – Interarms – is now located in Texas and sells parts to guns but no guns. This shift in the company’s location and business model occurred after Cummings died in 1998. But what McKevitt does not explain is how the American gun market changed in ways that Cummings did not anticipate and probably would have found himself unable to compete.

              In addition to importing military surplus rifles, Cummings also imported newly manufactured, quality handguns from companies like Walther, Sig-Sauer, and Star. These guns became increasingly popular in the American market primarily because hunting was on the wane and handguns like the Walther PPK carried by James Bond were being featured in movies and on TV.

              But as the U.S. handgun market grew, European manufacturers came over here and set up their own shops. These moves not only cut the costs of shipping guns but also allowed the foreign companies to come into the American market without paying a tariff charge imposed on all imported guns.

              Of the best-selling handguns on the American market today, three of the five companies which dominate the market have corporate headquarters located in Europe, but all now have manufacturing facilities in the United States. The transplant of foreign gun manufacturing to the United States reflects not only the strength of the American retail handgun market due to the relative ease with which consumers can gain access to such guns, but also the degree to which the gun industry has found a willing partner in the media industry, both in terms of movies and video shooting games.

              When Glock decided to enter the U.S. retail market, they sent reps to Southern California to meet with studio executives and give them financial incentives for featuring Glock pistols. They did the same thing to the teams which were producing video shooting games, which has been a multi-billion-dollar industry for at least the last thirty years.

              This connection between the media industry and the gun industry not only helped gun companies bring high-priced, quality gun products into the market, as opposed to the cheap, military-surplus junk that Sam Cummings brought over from the battlefields of Europe, but also provides a steady income to producers of gun movies and shooting video games both in the United States and abroad.

              What makes ‘gun capitalism’ interesting is that while it may have first emerged as a response to the Cold War, which is MCKevitt’s well-argued thesis, it continues to flourish even as the Cold War has come to an end.

              Which tells me that this particular type of consumer industry may prove itself to be adaptable to social and cultural conditions, no matter how they change.