Teacher and the class sizes are go and so i mean i think i think its san antonio and plano right now theyre talking about closing a number of traditional public schools. And thats a lot to do with Charter School enrollment. And so thank you were waving at me and im just here to ask them how theyre but thanks everyone for those wonderful for me thank now without further adieu tonight, i am very excited to welcome Andrew Mckevitt celebrating the release of country gun capitalism and culture and control and cold war just as World War Two transformed the United States into a Global Military and economic superpower, so too did forge the gun country. America is today after 1945 war ravaged european nations possess large supplies of mass produced weapons and american entrepreneurs seize the opportunity to, buy used munitions for pennies on the dollar and resell them stateside. A booming Consumer Market made cheap guns, accessible to millions of americans and guns ownership and violence began to climb when gun control legislation emerged in the 1960s. Many americans accustomed to the unregulated postwar bounty of cheap guns and fearful soviet invasion, domestic subversion and urban uprisings fiercely challenged it. Meanwhile, Gun Control Groups were diverted. Their abolitionist roots toward a conciliator or a fundraising, focused strategy that struggled to limit the stockpile of firearms. Gun country recast the story of guns in postwar america. One of cold war and racial anxieties. Unfettered capitalism am an exceptional violence continues to haunt us to this day. Andrew mckevitt is john de winters endowed professor of history at Louisiana Tech university. He is the author of consuming japan, a popular and the globalizing of 1980s america. Covert will be joined conversation with matthew dallek. Matthew dallek is a historian and professor at George Washington universitys graduate school of political management. He is author most recently of birchers how the John Birch Society radicalized the american right. Please join me in welcoming to politics and prose. Andrew mcdevitt and matthew dallek. Dreyfus. All right. Okay. Well, thank you to politics and prose for having us. Ill just start by saying that gun country is a is a great book and you know, you in the audience anyone hearing this it is absolutely worth buying and reading and understanding because it will change i think the way you think about change way i thought about the challenge guns in the United States and the problem of guns in the United States. So really honored to be here with with you, drew. And i just want to start by asking if you could talk a little bit about how you book to your grandfather, who, as you say in the dedication, would hate every word of this book and and talk to us a little bit about how you got interested did in writing about guns and what drew you to the topic. Well, thank you, everyone, for coming. Matt, of course. Thank you for for being here. Thank you to politics and prose. Yes. The book is dedicated to my grandfathers nameashe died abor 20 years ago and he have been a he was a self described gun nut. This is a phrase that people who used in a sort of a term of endearment in the 1950s, in the 1960s, and even later for their own gun collecting habits. And he was one of those people. Theres a picture of me as a very child. I couldnt have been even a year old yet. I dont think i was walking. Im laying on a bed and my grandfather loved take photographs. Im laying on a bed and i on my lap a 44 magnum, smith and wesson handgun. This would have been circa 1980, 1981. Its also pictures of him in full confederate dress standing next to me as a two or three year oldhild, also holding a holding a rifle. And jersey in in new jersey, of all places. Thats right. Growing up in new jersey. And so he he to he symbolized the gun country that i wanted to write about. And i wanted to know more about him and and what led him to to collect guns, many of which we had to sell when he died many years ago. The other reason i got into this book is its story on my moving to louisiana in 2012. I was a book at the time about the between the United States and and i was interested especially in how japan manifested in local throughout the United States who i wrote about for instance how a honda factory came to ohio in the early 1980s. I wrote about sushi eaters. I wrote about anime fans, fans of japanese cartoons. And so the truth was i moved to louisiana and i knew nothing about new homes connection to japan. And so it started with something as simple as a Google Search for louisiana and japan. And i came across a case i knew nothing about. It was the 1992 killing of a Japanese Exchange student named yoshi hattori. He knocked on the wrong door looking for a Halloween Party and. The homeowner answered the door, armed with a gun and eventually pulled the trigger and shot and killed yoshi. And to me, this was a story, as it was to Many Americans at the time, but it was also one of some 30,000 gun deaths in the United States in 1992. What made it a truly exceptional story for me . Someone writing about Japan International relations was the reaction in japan, which was to condemn the united as backward. And barbara, what kind of society lets . Someone open the door armed with a handgun and confront an unarmed teenager. And so this led me on a hunt for thinking about this big question of the United States gun violence and gun culture and gun politics in a global context. And i thought at first maybe id write about the 1980s, in the 1990s. But the more i started asking this question about the united and guns in the world, the further it led me back all the way back to the end of the Second World War. And thats how i got this. Great. Well, im glad you wrote it. Obviously. Let me ask you, though, because you weave this really fashion argument into the book that i think just to try to summarize it, that a marketplace for guns has driven this postWorld War Two surge and have this very memorable phrase, gun capitalism m wondering that a fair summary and you know and thinking about it before i read your book i thought, okay, you know, theres the culture around the war of the Second Amendment. Theres the frontier, your mentality, right . The sort of rugged individualism, the manliness. Right. The the machismo attached to firearms. But you say, you know, that really the primary driver i mean, there are others primary is is gun capitalism. Can you talk about that phrase . Talk about this market economy, the sort of broad picture of what youre arguing here . Sure. So so the question is, what makes the gun country. The gun country. Right. And we have answers for that. Weve had answers for it. One of those answers is its the revolutionary era and its the connection between the colonists, their firearms and winning independence. And then in 1791, we the Second Amendment, and then we lots of stories about how america is shaped by the gun in the 19th century, whether its the frontier experience, whether its the repression of slave populations through through militias, especially in the south. We have lots of stories. We have stories of people like samuel colt and oliver winchester. These great first generation of gun capitalists in the middle of the 19th century who have stories to tell about america and the gun. And theyre telling those stories the 19th century and theyre shaping how americans come to see their between firearms and andpeople. And so it got me thinking about this question of. What makes the gun country . Is it the Second Amendment . Is it traditions. Is it something deep in the culture of the American People . And as i went back into the postwar history of the United States, something really struck me and that was the tremendous material expansion of guns after the Second World War. Theres no question that the United States has always been a gun country, if not the gun country for those various reasons we can point to in the 18th and the 19th century. But what happens after 1945 is that the number of guns in the United States explode dramatically. Theres about 45 million, as best we can tell, in 1945. And counting guns in the United States is always mystical art, because by law, were not allowed to count guns in the United States. So best we can tell, there were maybe 45 million guns in the United States in 1945. Fast forward 75, 80 years and there are ten times as many guns 400, 450 million. Again, as best we can tell, there are not ten times as many people. Its about two and a half times as many people. So why did the material reality of guns putting aside traditions and ideas and abstract notions of rights and so forth and freedoms why did the number of guns increase so dramatically in the United States . And to me, the answer was gun capitalism. It was the production or the importation, the the distribution and the marketing ofâ– firearms after the Second World War that makes america a new kind gun country. And that gun capital, too. That changes after the Second World War. If we think about people like colt and winchester are gun capitalists in the sense that theyre telling stories about td states and how guns are related to those traditions. The great gun capitalists after the Second World War, whose names we dont know, but whose they a different kind of story about in the United States. The one i write about a lot in. His name is samuel cummings. I think everybody every american should know who sam cummings is. Sam cummings owned a company, enter arms. He created and owned a Company Called interop arms into arms was by the end of the 1960s. The worlds sorry, the 1950s, and also the 1960s, the Worlds Largest private firearms dealer. It was based just a few miles down the road in alexandria, on the waterfront there you could walk around the waterfront today, around like prince street and and see beautiful town homes that i will never be able to afford. But that were 50, 60, 70 years ago. Huge warehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of firearms. And this was sam cummings doing and what sam cummings did to transform gun capitalism after the Second World War. And he the only one who did it. There were a number of others, but he did it better than anyone else is he found supply of asia millions of firearms left over from the Second World War. And he went over there. In some cases he would walk into a defense in a place like finland or west germany, and hed throw down a suitcase full cash and say, ill buy as many leftover guns as you will. Give me. And in some cases, he walked out with guns for less than a dollar each, and he had a whole network of logistics he set up in europe and the United States to clean those guns up. The term he used was to sport or rise them to get them ready to sell american hunters in american sportsmen. And he imported them to the United States, where he sold them in some cases for than 10 each. And this is at a time where a good hunting rifle from company like winchester or remington might run you 120 or 150, 10 . He sort of laughed it off and said that these were throwaway guns, that you could, after you bagged your first year, you could leave it out there in the woods and then go buy a really expensive rifle. And so hes one who i think more than anyone else creates or transforms gun capitalism after the Second World War into a Market Driven by abundance and plenty acquisition by buy. That was sam cummings story about guns. The guns are out there and because we won the war, we deserve them. So im going to import them and im going to sell them to americans dirt cheap. And i think this where gun capitalism really takes a turn in American History and its a new that becomes about and accumulating. And thats how we get ten times as many guns as there were in 1945. And by the way, sam cummings in iran, this is all legal. I mean, nothing he did was shady in terms of the laws, international laws, u. S. Laws. Right. Could you talk a little. Yeah. So but that same cummings gets this reputation as a kind of merchant of death. Right. That hes dealing arms around the world. There are so many rumors about sam cummings and cummings liked to like that. These rumors were out there because it made him like an International Man of mystery at one point he moves his headquarters. Hes still the business based in alexandria. But then he also opens up warehouses in england and he moves his headquarters to monte. Right. Which just sounds like a Perfect Place for an International Man of mystery to work out of. And so theres always these rumors that involved with the cia in part because right out of college he goes to work for the cia. Hes in arms analyst for the cia during korean war, which essentially means hes looking photographs of north korean and chinese troops trying to identify what firearms using. And shortly after the war, he starts his business, because hes been to europe and hes seen all of the guns laying on battlefields. And so theres always these rumors hes involved in International Intrigue because he is selling at the same time that hes selling millions weapons to americans. Hes selling not just firearms, but major weapons systems. And fighter jets to latin dictators and countries around the world. And so he would always be accused or there would always be the suspicion there that sam cummings is doing something fishy on the black market, that hes selling guns to communist insurgents against the United States because theres profit be made there. But he was so about why he needed to do that, because there is so much money to be made selling guns legally to american is if you can sell millions of rifles to american ones perfectly legally, why would you risk selling 10,000 firearms to some in Central America . It didnt. Good business sense and so he was always very transparent about why he did what he because this is the best market in the world, the largest Consumer Market and the most open Consumer Market for firearms anywhere in the world. And thats what made him rich, even though. Hed occasionally pop up in the press at this kind of International Man of mystery with, cia connections and so forth. He made guns. He made money selling, cheap guns to to americans. Was the government ever concerned that maybe some of these guns that in iran, sam cummings and his type were selling would fall into the hands, lets say, of communists or, you know, of other you know, you think it would follow logically that, hey, weve got this massive amount of guns, its pouring in from all over. Theyre very cheap. What happens . Theres some i mean, there are all these fears about communism, of course, mccarthyism. So i guess why wasnt the government more concerned about that . Or maybe they were they just didnt want to deal with. Yeah, well, the government does become concerned. So the first time that the federal government really has any kind of conversation about gun control after the Second World War happens because of san cummings and other figures like sam cummings and this is in 1957 and 1958 and its not National Security that prompts the conversation. Its gun industry because gunmaker was like remington and winchester. They see whats happening. Theyre going to gun stores and theyre seeing 10 war surplus sitting next to their hundred and 50 cadillacs of guns. And theyre worried that theyre going to lose sales to people like sam cummings. So they go to their congressmen who are located the gun valley states of massachusetts sits and connecticut. One of them is a represent native from connecticut named Albert Albert murano. The other is a senator from massachusetts named john f kennedy. And in 58, they put forward a bill before congress that would ban sam cummings imports because its hurting the gun industry and the gun industrys is. You cant put us out of business because what happens if we go war against the soviets . You need us to keso youve got e stay in business. And so Congress Debates this bill and ultimately shuts it down because course the state Department Steps and the state department, theyre making this consideration. Is it bad for these guns to be out there, the world perhaps falling into the hands of communist . And the state departments conclusion is it is better. And they say this explicitly to congress, it is better for all of these guns out there in the world to come here and be sold to am