Despite McWhirter and Elinson’s suggestion, the ‘core issue’ here is more than the question ‘how do we as a society keep this weapon out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have such a gun?’ or the injunction that ‘every gun designer has a responsibility to think about what the hell they’re creating’ (the words of Stoner’s long-time colleague Jim Sullivan, with which the book closes). The problem isn’t just ‘the criminal and the careless and the insane’, as Lyndon Johnson put it when signing the Gun Control Act of 1968. ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,’ the NRA insists. But, more precisely, American men with guns kill people. ‘What the hell’s the matter with us?’ Sullivan said when asked about the AR-15’s legacy in America. ‘There’s something wrong here.’
Guns are central to America’s mythology. In the patriotic version of its history, from an imaginary ‘revolution’ to westward conquest to cops keeping the streets safe, guns are the tools of America’s self-creation. ‘This country was born with a rifle in its hand,’ Philip Sharpe wrote in The Rifle in America (1938). ‘As a matter of fact, the rifle brought about the birth of these United States. The United States and the rifle are inseparable.’ They remain inseparable, and today that rifle is a high-tech, ‘polished lime’ semi-automatic killing machine kept in a suburban garage. That is not what Sharpe had in mind.
Andrew McKevitt’s excellent Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America provides a better account of the situation. McKevitt insists on an often neglected fact: guns are a commodity. Guns in the US, more than anywhere else in the world, are goods circulating in a mass-production, mass-consumption market. A powerful and profitable ‘gun capitalism’ was born at the end of the Second World War, when a glut of cheap surplus guns coincided with rising consumerism, anti-communist hysteria and racialised tension, especially in cities. In this perspective, the problem ultimately isn’t the guns, but the social formation in which they appeared in such numbers.