MAKING HISTORY TODAY: America Since 1968 - Drew McKevitt on "Gun Country"

Making History Today, produced by the History program at Fitchburg State University, connects the classroom to historians working in their fields. In these conversations, students discuss works assigned in class and develop questions for the authors, which are then posed in these episodes.

This conversation emerges from Prof. Katherine Jewell’s class, America Since 1968, during the 2024 spring semester.

In this episode, Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt, history professor at Louisiana Tech University and author of Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control, published in November 2023, responds to questions and curiosities developed by students in the class, as well as answering a brief lightning round of questions asked directly by history major, Dylan Cosner, class of 2024.

He answers questions about his inspirations and processes of writing his book and explores the United States’ history and deep connection to guns and how they became a regular part of the modern era, discussing the country’s high supply and demand for firearms, the history of laws focused on gun control and safety, and how guns influenced pop culture.

Episode transcript can be found here.

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This episode was edited and sound mixed by Adam Fournier, a member of the Perseverantia staff and a student in the Communications Media department.

Click here to learn more about Perseverantia. Join us for programming updates on Instagram. Or reach out with ideas or suggestions at podcasts@fitchburgstate.edu.

Transcript

[ Classroom Stories theme fades in ]

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
This is Making History Today, production of Perseverantia, and my class on the United States Since 1968, which took place during the spring semester of 2024. All of the questions, introduction, and reflections were written by students in the class and read by me, Professor Katherine Jewell in the History Department at Fitchburg State University.

Andrew C. McKevitt is a history professor at Louisiana Tech University, who wrote Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control, published in November, 2023. He explores the political and social aspects of gun culture in the United States from the end of World War II to the present. McKevitt discusses how an accessible gun market can be explained as a consumer movement that in turn shaped U.S. gun culture. He talks particularly about how this consumer identity targeted masculinity and a sense of the need for protection amid a seeming rise in crime. The line between consumerism and constitutional rights blurred as the introduction of regulations in the late 1960s, particularly the gun control act of 1968 sparked tensions over what to do with the ever growing problem of guns in the United States.

[00:01:30]

Welcome Drew McKevitt.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Hi y'all. Thanks so much for having me.

[ Classroom Stories theme fades out ] 

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
So we're going to jump right in with questions written by my students. So they wanted to start with your opening of the book, which is about the killing of Yoshi Hattori, who is a Japanese exchange student in Louisiana, where you now teach.

Was writing the book inspired by this event, given that your first book was about U.S. Japanese relations or maybe another instance of gun violence in your life that may have drawn you to write in this topic? And then they're kind of wondering also about how your perception of gun control and the history of gun violence changed as you conducted your research.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
There are two, they're related and two really good questions. And so first is that, you know, to answer the question, what inspired me to write the book, there are several layers of that. And the first and most immediate one is the story of Yoshi Hattori from the book, the 16 year old Japanese exchange student shot and killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1992, when he knocked on the wrong door, looking for a Halloween party. I came across that story because of my first book.

My first book is about U.S. Japan relations in the 1970s, 1980s, mostly. And I wrote about that topic through the lens of consumer politics, essentially. I wasn't so much interested in trade disputes and diplomatic disputes and security disputes, which is what people often write about when they write about U.S. Japan relations. I was interested in Americans basically consuming Japanese things.

[00:03:00]

And so. Early in my time here in Louisiana, I was curious about the kind of local connection to this book I was working on, on U.S. Japan relations. Curious about the local connection between that and my new home, which I knew almost nothing about.

So it began with something as simple as a Google search for Japan and Louisiana. And I came across a story I'd never seen before, and it was right in the pocket of the period I was writing about. Early 1990s was the most peak of anti Japanese sentiment in the United States going back to the Second World War.

So I was surprised I'd never heard about this case, and I read a lot more about it. What fascinated me about it, as someone studying U.S. Japan relations, was that there was an international element, that in the wake of Yoshi's killing, there's this reaction in Japan that this is such a barbaric incident.

How can any civilized society allow a person to answer their door armed with a deadly weapon and confront an unarmed child and then shoot and kill them and, as we find out eight months later after the incident, get away with it when the killer is acquitted of manslaughter charges. And so there was that international element that really surprised me there that I hadn't thought about before, a kind of international element to American gun politics and American gun consumerism.

Also in the aftermath of Yoshi's killing and the acquittal of his killer, Yoshi's parents in Japan, as well as his host parents in the United States, they begin this gun control campaign. And so that got me thinking, like, maybe there's something there. And what actually happened was that, that the host parents in Louisiana…

[00:04:30]

…in Baton Rouge, they were two professors at LSU, and they left all of their records, their gun control organizing records there at LSU. So that was my first thought, was let me go down and look at them. And that was my first thought. Maybe there's a book here. When I ended up thinking about this topic, U.S. gun violence in a global context, it pushed me way further back than the 1980s and the 1990s. And I just happened to get a grant that gave me a year essentially to take off to write.

And that's what pushed this all the way back and said, let me write even bigger, broader thinking about U.S. gun violence in a global context. Now, how did my perception of gun control and gun history change over the course of this project? The thing is, 12 years ago when I began this project, I don't think I had any understanding of gun history and gun politics.

You might, Kate, you may have remembered the Michael Belleal's incident from the early 2000s, right? When this well known historian, prize winning historian, essentially gets busted for making stuff up and publishing this prize winning book. And like, that was the only thing I knew about gun history because that was early when I was in graduate school and everybody was talking about it then.

And so, you know, in some respects, it's like, do you really want to write about guns? Because that wasn't a good experience for that guy. But I don't know. I thought I'd take the chance. And I think, I think I was a typical kind of East Coast liberal when I began thinking about guns, which is to say, I recognize that we are a country of guns, but we need much further restrictions. We need to take guns out of the hands of the quote unquote wrong people.

[00:06:00]

And I think over the course of this project, my thinking on that evolved a great deal to the point where I think the problem is not so much keeping guns out of the hands of the wrong people, but figuring out how we keep ourselves safe from a material world we have constructed in which guns are absolutely unavoidable.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
Can you share some of the insights or surprising discoveries that you made through some of these sources? Was there one historian or one source that was more valuable to your research that really surprised you when you encountered it?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
I think the most surprising source I came across, and maybe it's really a better to describe it as an archival collection, although it can be embodied in one source, comes from the Eisenhower Commission.

So this was a appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1968 right in the aftermath of Bobby Kennedy's killing. So Bobby Kennedy is assassinated in June of 1968, and this is only after Martin Luther King was assassinated in, in April of 1968. And so, Lyndon Johnson, he loves to appoint commissions. This is one thing that we had the Warren Commission, we had the Kerner Commission, there were a whole bunch of other commissions.

And so he appoints a commission that is tasked with investigating violence across U.S. history, but they also appoint several task forces. And one of the task forces is tasked with writing about guns and thinking about guns across U.S. history, researching guns across U.S. history. And that was the first time, and this sort of maybe, you know, today it just sort of makes sense to me, but early in the work on this project, I discovered that that was the first time that the federal government had done anything at a kind of systematic level to try to

[00:07:30]

understand guns in American history, guns in American society, their impact on American society, how many guns there are, who buys those guns, what do they do with those guns.

The first time the federal government ever tried to do anything about this, 1968. So all of the records of that task force are at the Lyndon Johnson library in Austin. And I went through that material and I used a lot of that material in the book, but also the published report they produced, I think is a really valuable and underused source for understanding guns in American life, in American history, in the postwar United States.

I think it's called Firearms and Violence in American Life is the the name of the published report, and that's from 1969. Johnson appoints the commission. They published the report. A year later in 1969, Richard Nixon is president and Richard Nixon is not going to act on anything that this commission advises.

But nevertheless, it's a startling report in that one, they tried to figure out exactly how many guns there were in the United States. They tried to count guns. And I think it's a really important thing to do that historians haven't done enough. Just how many guns are we talking about? What is the material reality of guns in the United States?

But their moment, they, as best they could tell, maybe about 90 million guns in the United States. And their recommendation was, this is the moment where we've got to do something different. This has to be a turning point moment. We have these assassinations, we have social violence, we have increasing street crime.

We have to do something about the guns. Their biggest recommendation was do something about handguns, because handguns are more responsible than anything else for violence. And they said you got to get rid of them.

[00:09:00]

And that was a really dramatic recommendation from a federal commission to ban handguns.

Their estimate was 25 million handguns in the country at that point. And they're like, we know this would be practically insane to try to take away 25 million guns, but if you don't, the problem's only going to get worse. I think that Eisenhower commission report points somebody to one source in the history of guns in the United States and in the post war United States.

I would point them to that one.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
How do you relate the normalization of gun ownership to this capitalist culture surrounding guns? What is the relationship between these two developments since the 1950s?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Thinking methodologically, like a historian, like how do we conceptualize and make sense of the past, what are the structures we use to make sense of the past. And for me, I see culture, and especially popular culture and consumer culture, as a product of capitalism.

Capitalism, in many ways, invents our cultural myths around things like guns. And that's not unique to the era I write about. The book is titled Gun Country, but the United States did not become a gun country after 1945, it was undoubtedly a gun country in the 19th century and in the 18th century and maybe even in the 17th century, but it was a different kind of gun country at those moments.

[00:10:30]

The gun culture that we often think about as a product of American heritage and tradition and some sort of colonial or founding legacy, much of that is invented and created by capitalism in the middle of the 19th century. It's figures like Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester and Browning and Remington, all these major names in gun history who invent much of what we think of as gun culture in the middle of the 19th century.

They do that invention through marketing. It's advertising. They are brilliant marketing and advertising pioneers. Some of them are also brilliant tinkerers or inventors, but really their great contribution to gun capitalism is in the invention of gun culture. Nothing like that exists in the 18th century.

That's not to say that guns weren't important to Americans in the 18th century and that they didn't own them. It's just that they didn't conceive of them as cultural objects that connect them to the past that have value to them in the presence beyond their simple material needs of shooting and killing animals or something like that, something that represents a greater connection to an American identity. That is indented in the middle of the 19th century.

And what happens after World War II is, I think, a shift in that relationship between capitalism and gun culture. And that shift is embodied in the consumer boom of the post war era.

[00:12:00]

That gun culture becomes less about those connections to tradition and heritage and more about the Simply consuming, buying as much as you can, because that's what the advertising starts to tell Americans after World War II.

There's a flood of so many cheap, accessible guns after the Second World War, as I write about leftover guns from the Second World War, that are advertised as cheap, and accessible, and available, and no longer is like connection to tradition or anything like that important. The message of gun culture after the Second World War is you are a victor, in the greatest war human beings have ever fought, and this is your bounty.

This is what you deserve for winning that war. So buy, buy, buy as much as you can. The world's bounty of guns is available to you, Americans.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
In terms of these laws of supply and demand, if we're talking about our macroeconomic culture connections, does this consumer demand for guns come more from the supply side, the access to cheap firearms, or more from a new set of demands, particularly about this era of Cold War paranoia, or the sense of the need for protection.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
I would say it's all of the above. Right? And it's hard to parse the two. One thing we know is that after the second World War, there is an increased supply of, in the United States of cheap firearms especially. And I think that's really key. It sounds like a, a derogatory term, like a sort of dismissive, like it's a cheap piece of crap.

[00:13:30]

Some of them were cheap pieces of crap, but some of them were also developed to be used on battlefields in the most difficult conditions that soldiers might face in the first half of the 20th century. And so these are, you know, when it comes to like the mechanics of a gun, these are good guns. And, you know, I mean, that's actually the pitch with some of them.

It's like, get a really good rifle that was designed to kill people on a battlefield. For the fraction of a cost of a new, expensive rifle. There is a new supply of guns after the second World War, millions of them coming in from Europe, not just those war surplus guns, but also what happens by the mid 1950s is that crafty entrepreneurs and importers in the United States, they link up with manufacturers in Europe who are making, quite literally cheap pieces of crap. These are cheap handguns that can sell for 8 or 10 dollars each that are made from pot metal left over after the second World War. So that supply goes up after the second World War. You also have to consider that this is the moment where the United States is the world's undisputed, not just political, diplomatic and strategic and cultural superpower, but also economic superpower, right?

50 percent of all productivity in the world is in the United States in 1945. And there's going to be a generation of American consumers who are going to live in the afterglow of that, who are going to take advantage of that, of the new opportunities for choice and quality of life that consumer society is going to present to them.

[00:15:00]

That's going to demand, right? We now have expendable incomes. We have people with more leisure time, especially out in the suburbs, looking for things to do. We're talking mostly about men here. Some, what, 12, 13, 14 million of them had some experience serving in the military in the second World War. Many of them had combat experience.

They trained with firearms, were comfortable with firearms. And so that is going to increase the demand as well. And so that supply is going to meet that demand. But also what we have going on in the 1950s is a broader kind of cultural and political phenomenon of the Cold War and increasing concerns about communism, not just Soviet communism on the other side of the world, or in Eastern Europe, or Chinese communism in East Asia, but communist subversion at home.

Increasingly among right wing organizations, especially in right wing politics, there is a fear that communists have infiltrated the United States. The John Birch Society is the best example of this. These are people who accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a communist and all the top military commanders in the United States of being communists.

And so now you have a political and cultural phenomenon that leads to increased anxiety and you have a ready supply of weapons there for people who believe that they have to defend themselves. And many of them draw on the second amendment, that provision there in the constitution that for the most part had been forgotten by Americans for 150, 60 years or whatever that they say, is the thing that gives us the right to stockpile firearms in defense of our country.

[00:16:30]

So it's supply meeting demand in a kind of perfect storm of political and cultural paranoia and fear and anxiety.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
So looking ahead to the post 1968 world, I think the students had a lot of questions about the relationship between this gun culture as it's ramping up in these years and broader social and cultural transformation, that post 60s watershed fallout.

 Video games, of course, comes up as a subject of conversation. But I think the way that I would term this question is, how does America's gun culture interact with other cultural and pop culture developments since the 1970s?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Yeah, so, you know, I know that the students tend to think like, their lives, video games, they see things around them, Call of Duty, and sure, you can see gun culture represented in that.

I think there have been a number of important changes in the last couple decades that you see expressed in video games, but you can already point to the 1970s. and see gun culture being represented in popular culture. Take some of the well known films from the era. Dirty Harry is the best example. I think that's 1971.

It's Clint Eastwood. It is a film about a detective named Harry Callahan in San Francisco, which is this iconic hippie, , leftist enclave, and there he's tasked with hunting down basically a serial killer who seems to have no conscience.

[00:18:00]

And Harry Callahan carries the, what he describes as the most powerful handgun ever made, which is a 44 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, the very same gun that Yoshi Hattori's killer will use to shoot and kill him in 1992. And in many ways, Harry Callahan and Dirty Harry are an expression of the broader cultural anxieties coming out of the 1960s on the right among conservatives, even among some, I'd say, moderate liberals who believe that culture has become too permissive among young people, especially that authorities like the Lyndon Johnson administration and various state governments were too permissive when it came to the rioting in streets in the aftermath of police brutality incidents in Detroit and Newark, this is 1967. In the aftermath of King's killing in April 1968, that they were too permissive of anti war protests, of hippies in the streets, and drug use, and rising crime more generally.

They would point to Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s, like the Miranda decision, which gave more rights to people accused of crimes. And they would say things like that made it too lenient on criminals. And Dirty Harry represents that. The idea is like, the system won't punish people. In fact, the bad guy, the killer is arrested at one point and Dirty Harry beats him up and they have to let the killer go because Dirty Harry has violated the killer's rights in beating him up in that arrest.

[00:19:30]

And the idea here is that the system is going to fail. So you need the individual, the armed individual to take matters into his own hands. It's a kind of vigilante. justice and vigilante violence. And this is an expression in a lot of ways of the white anxieties of the 1960s about all of those things they fear outside their doors and all of those people who are also buying guns.

That's a major peak in gun buying in the late 1960s in 67 and 68 especially. This is the biggest peak in gun buying we've seen in the entire post war era. Nothing will match it really until 2020 and 2021. And so popular culture was already expressing those kinds of things in the 1970s. And of course, it escalates in the 1990s, in the 2000s, as Hollywood and video game industry tries to find more and more ways to engage viewers by shocking them with increased levels of violence.

But much of it makes sense to Americans because they live in a country surrounded by guns.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
I can't resist the temptation to point my students direction back to what we've been talking about. And we just reached 1980 in our class. So we've been going through all of the turning inwards in the me decade of the 1970s and the turning away from American institutions that on the part of good guys and bad guys, right?

That this is happening across the board of this distrust.

[00:21:00]

And that our gun culture is very much seeded in that moment for these very particular reasons.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Yeah. And I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, that's part of the gun narrative too, because what happens in 1968 is we get the first big major post war legislation on guns, federal legislation, the gun control act of 1968.

And we're not going to get anything again until 1993. And very quickly after that moment in 1968, everyone realizes the gun control act is a failure. And so in many of the ways that the liberal state is seen as a failure in the 1970s, the New Deal state is seen as a failure in the 1970s, institutions are failing Americans everywhere, law enforcement is failing Americans, the legal system, politicians, gun control is seen as a failure too, at least as it's embodied in that federal gun control act. And that's going to lead in the 1970s to a bunch of political developments, both on the right in an emergent gun rights movement, which sees Dirty Harry as a great hero and a kind of grassroots gun control movement, which sees Dirty Harry is the very worst kind of possible response we could have to this.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
Speaking of political activism, how do you see the NRA building and maintaining its control of the gun lobby throughout its years of political activism? What is Richard Nixon's role in this? And how do you see the power of the NRA built through this era?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Richard Nixon was famously dismissive of the NRA.

You know, Nixon was just a pure opportunist when it came to politics. He played the law and order card because he knew that was what would win him elections.

[00:22:30]

I mean, he, he read the tea leaves as much as anyone that Americans were losing faith in institutions, right? And so he sort of asserted himself as like the strong leader who can stand at the helm as these institutions collapse and nevertheless maintain law and order. You know, what's happening with what we think of as the NRA in that moment in the late 1960s, early 1970s, is that the NRA is mostly on the sidelines.

They play a role in the coming of the Gun Control Act of 1968 in the sense that they help develop it. And they defang it in that it's not going to be terribly effective. It's going to be pretty mild and it's going to be going to have very few restrictions on quote unquote law abiding citizens. And much of that is the influence of the NRA.

What the NRA has really built better than any political lobby in American history is a base that they can draw upon. And that base can give them money, but more importantly, that base can threaten politicians, threaten them with electoral losses. And this goes back to the 1960s, really 1968 is probably the first election in which the power of the quote unquote gun lobby, or at least the grassroots gun lobby of NRA members affects, I mean, not necessarily the outcome of elections. It's hard to say whether or not that the people who lost that the NRA claimed to have defeated lost because of the NRA, but at least politicians start reading the NRA as a political force in 1968, and they come to believe that gun voters are a block that they have to contend with.

[00:24:00]

But the NRA's more aggressive political lobbying doesn't really emerge until the late 1970s.

That's in the aftermath of the failure of the Gun Control Act. the emergence of a more motivated and more prominent grassroots gun control movement. That all generates a lot of activity among the NRA's base that pushes the leadership of the organization to take a more aggressive approach to political lobbying.

So the organization is actually very much torn in the middle of the 1970s. On the one hand, There are those who are of the organization's old guard who want to withdraw a bit from the contentious gun politics of Washington. They don't think it's really going anywhere. They don't think it's the future of the organization.

In fact, what they do is they plan to move the organization's headquarters from DC to Colorado Springs. They're building, they're planning to build this like, NRA Disneyland on this huge plot of land they have in New Mexico. But then the other hand, there are leaders in the organization and especially many grassroots members who are saying the gun controllers are coming for us and they're going to take away all our guns.

And if we don't use this. big prominent organization to prevent that from happening, we're looking at the, the totalitarian world of our nightmares that, you know, they'd often point to like Hitler or Castro or some other villain in their pantheon of bad guys in the 20th century and say, that's, that's the road we're headed to if we don't do something now.

[00:25:30]

I think people often point to the NRA and say, well, the NRA has so much money and that's why they're so effective. And I think that's only partly true. I think the NRA has historically been much more effective at mobilizing a base to put pressure on their politicians than necessarily they've been at distributing money.

I think politicians, when they think about the NRA, they think about I don't want those highly motivated gun voters to vote me out of office rather than I'm trying to line my pockets with NRA money. I just don't think that's been quite the story.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
What kind of changes have you noticed now that we're really in an era of high frequency of mass shootings and a change in the interpretation around the Second Amendment?

How are we going to scale back some of these changes? Students really wanted you to make some predictions, and I told them that historians don't like to do that. But what's the relationship between interpretation of the Second Amendment and this era of mass shootings that we find ourselves in?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
It's thorny and difficult to unpack that, and, and you're right, I don't feel competent enough to make any predictions.

So the, this interpretation of the Second Amendment, and especially in a legal sense, has changed quite dramatically just in our students lifetime. It's not until 2008 and the Heller decision, D. C. versus Heller in the Supreme Court, that we get to A Supreme Court decision that says that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own a firearm and it has nothing to do with a militia or service in the military or anything like that.

[00:27:00]

The Second Amendment protects your right to own a gun to protect yourself. Self defense. And that's reaffirmed in a 2010 decision because initially that was just about federal and D. C. and the 2010 decision makes that for all 50 states on U.S. territories. And then very recently, which I think is an even more important decision and will prove more important, again, I'm making a prediction here, but I think will prove even more important over the coming decades was the Bruin decision in 2022.

This is New York State Pistol and Rifle Association versus Bruin. And what Bruin does is basically it expands that Heller decision to the entire public sphere. And say not only does the Second Amendment guarantee your right to own a firearm to protect yourself in your home, but it also guarantees your right to carry that firearm around to protect yourself out in public.

This is the culmination of several different legal and political campaigns going back 40, 50 years. One of them is the legal campaign to change understandings of the Second Amendment. Most Americans thought of it as a relic of the 18th century in the same way that they think of the Third Amendment as a relic of the 18th century.

It's about the relationship between the people and militias and soldiers and the government, and it's not about your right to own a handgun to defend yourself if anyone tries to break into your house. That legal campaign culminates in the Heller decision.

[00:28:30]

But we also have at the state level, an incredible amount of change just going back in the last few decades.

In fact, I forget which state it was, but we have another state now. that has, and Louisiana is headed on that track as well, permitless concealed carry. The idea that you can carry a handgun concealed in your jacket pocket without any kind of permit. I think there are now 29 states where that is true. And as of just 20, 25 years ago, there was one state.

So that's a dramatic reinvention of our public life and our relationship to guns just in the course of one generation. That is not historical. That is not American tradition. In fact, Louisiana had the very first concealed carry law in 1813 that banned concealed carry. You were not allowed to carry a gun because that was thought of as something that criminals do.

Why are you hiding the gun? You must be up to some kind of trouble. And so, that changing interpretation of the Second Amendment has had very real consequences in our relationship to guns and I think we're trying to predict the future. I think we're just at the very beginning of an era in which guns are going to become increasingly part of our public life in ways they increasingly became part of our private lives in the post war era.

Now they're going to become part of our public lives in ways that I think are going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
The students were really curious about responses that you've received from writing this book, particularly because you're revealing some of the tactics used by the NRA and gun manufacturers to protect their market and their constituency.

[00:30:00]

And so they wanted to know, did this spark any kind of backlash and did you expect backlash as you're doing your research?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
I mean, you expect a little bit of it because, you know, I'm an active tweeter and I have been for many years and I've been tweeting about the research on this book. In fact, when I first started it, you know, really sat down and was writing seriously, five years ago, whatever, I was like tweeting every day about archival findings. There's just a cohort of trolls out there who just want to yell at people. About guns or abortion or gay rights or whatever they're angry about, they want to be out there. And so inevitably you're going to attract those people. But I think what happens is if they spend any time actually looking at the book, they come to realize like, this isn't the guy I really care to yell at.

Because maybe because this guy's just too wishy washy. I'm not, there's a lot of gun books out there and their approach is we need to get rid of the guns. We need fewer guns, we need fewer people carrying guns. And I'm not unsympathetic to that, but I think my approach in saying we need to not just understand changing rights and changing law and abstract ideals about who's entitled to do what in society, but we have to actually talk about changing material conditions in society.

Like how did we get to the point where the number of guns in the United States increases tenfold in just 75 years? How does that happen? I don't think I have a very good conclusion because my conclusion is like, well, that's what you get. Here we are. You know, I don't know where to go from here. 450 million guns, half a billion guns. Good luck.

[00:31:30]

Like, you know, my approach is like, you're not going to take the guns away. It's going to be impossible to take the guns away. So the only thing you can do is keep yourself safe from the guns. That's the only public policy approach right now, which I think, you know, in some ways like the shift in language of gun control has shifted from let's control the guns to gun safety.

Let's keep ourselves safe from guns. That was a strategic approach. Cause nobody wants to, Americans, especially, we don't like the word control. We don't want to feel like we're being controlled, but it's also a strategic retreat in some ways. It's an acknowledgement that you're never going to get rid of the guns.

You can only ever keep yourself safe from the guns. I don't say I want to, the book walks the line between like a liberal and conservative approach, because I think I'm pretty critical of both of them. And I think that, making the conversation a bit more nuanced around how we got to where we are rather than here's all the problems with where we are.

I think that kind of turns off the trolls and they're not all that much interested in engaging.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
I would like to turn things over to one of my students, Dylan, who engaged with your public profile, your public persona, and has some rapid fire questions for you to get to know the author himself, rather than just the scholar.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Okay. So rapid fire. Also, we should point out we're using the term rapid fire to talk about it. Little, little off color there. Okay. All right.

 Prof. Katherine Jewell:
I didn't do that on purpose. I swear.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Fire away, Dylan.

Dylan Cosner (student):
So first question, who is your favorite president of all time?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Oh, I don't know if I have one.

Maybe, maybe a tie between Lincoln and FDR, the great tyrants of American history. I fashioned myself a tyrant.

[00:33:00]

Dylan Cosner (student):
Next question. What is your favorite chapter that you wrote in the book?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Oh, that is a good question. I think it's, I think it's eight. It's the one on the gun rights organizations, just in part because I think that could have been a book on its own.

I'm actually gonna do some more research this summer to expand some of it, to write a chapter for somebody else's book. So yeah, I think that one.

Dylan Cosner (student):
Next question, do you think guns will cause a downfall to America?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
No, I think there's a lot. If you had to make a list of things that would, I don't know, collapse the American empire, I think guns would be pretty low on the list.

There's a lot more things. There's a lot more problems we have. And you know, I think that's part of the reason too, is that I think I disagree with a lot of gun control organizations or gun safety organizations, is that I don't think ultimately guns are the problem. I think other things are the problem.

I think poverty is the problem. I think deindustrialization is the problem, et cetera, et cetera. And though, and gun violence is a consequence of those things.

Dylan Cosner (student):
What is your favorite class that you've ever taught?

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
It might be the gun class. I've been teaching a guns in American history class for five, six, seven years now.

I've done it four or five times. And that's always my favorite class to teach because I always learn so much because my students are very different from me in their background and where they grew up in their relationship to guns. I had a gun loving grandfather who owned a million guns, you know, I was comfortable being around guns when I was young, but it's much more part of the culture here than where I grew up.

And so I learned so much from teaching the gun class. I think that's probably my favorite.

Dylan Cosner (student):
And then last question, how do you feel about Dr. Jewell finishing Baldur's Gate 3 before you?

[00:34:30]

Prof. Drew McKevitt:

[laughter]

 Wait, I don't, is there evidence she did that?

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
I am done. I am done.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Oh, you're done. Yeah. You know, I get distracted very easily.

I have a hard time focusing on everything. So just the fact that I put probably 65, 70 hours into that game without finishing it, because I think you need more than that, it just impressed myself. You get to a point in the game, act three in the game where everything just opens up and it's like, I'm way too easily distracted.

And I kind of fell off the wagon there. Yeah.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
But you did have your Dim Phimberg moment.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
I did. Dim Phimberg, the greatest character in the game.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
And Dylan, do you have any thoughts after listening to the interview?

Dylan Cosner (student):
I do. I actually enjoyed the book. I mean, I'm not really like political, you'd say.

So I like listening to things from many different sides. Like I thought it was very eye opening to what guns and gun culture and all that. So I actually really enjoyed it. Yeah.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Was the book better or the Twitter feed better?

Dylan Cosner (student):
The Twitter feed was very great, but I did enjoy the book.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Well thank you, I appreciate that.

Prof. Katherine Jewell:
Hard to be 240 characters, you know.

[laughter]

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 Thank you again, Drew, for joining us. It was great having you.

Prof. Drew McKevitt:
Yeah. Thanks y'all. Thanks so much for having me. This was fantastic.

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***

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Zoe Crisostomides (student):
This is Zoe Crisostomides, a junior at Fitchburg State University, and I'm an Interdisciplinary Study as well as a Business Major.  And you're listening to Perseverantia, the Fitchburg State Podcast Network.

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