America’s unique gun culture
The following is an excerpt from a commentary by Amanda Erickson in the Washington Post:
There are an absolutely insane number of guns in the United States: More than 300 million, more than one per person.
How the United States got here has a lot to do with how we regulate weapons. Our gun control policies are much weaker than those in many other countries. But what makes our gun culture so unique?
To explain that, Jennifer Dawn Carlson, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona, points to data collected by Gallup.
It was in the 1960s and ’70s that Americans began talking about guns and gun rights as a crime issue.
This framing, Carlson explained, turned the issue of gun ownership into a divisive political one, rather than a public health crisis. The battle lines — are guns a way to protect against crime, or the cause of it? — were drawn. And we’re still fighting those fights today.
Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at the UCLA School of Law and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, also sees the 1960s as a key part of the story of America’s exceptional gun culture.
Of course, he notes, the right to bear arms is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Throughout the 1800s, state courts upheld an interpretation of that law that focused on the individual’s right to own weapons. But things really changed in the 1960s.
That’s when the National Rifle Association transformed itself from an organization focused on hunting and training into a political machine. As Winkler explained, that wasn’t inevitable. The NRA’s leaders endorsed the 1968 gun control act.
The NRA is “really an American phenomenon,” Winkler said. As he explained, most other industrialized countries began seriously regulating firearms in the early 20th century. By the time the gun rights movement got started in the United States, there just weren’t a lot of civilian gun owners in other places. So there wasn’t the same sense, in other places, that something could be lost.