Why did the United States become the British colony where guns had such an outsize role, despite the British inundating other areas?
It’s a complicated story. The British are selling guns quite freely in the 18th century. At some point in the 19th century, in some of the colonies where it has consolidated its power, after it lost the American colonies, there is this increasing concern with, “Wait a minute, maybe we should slow down or police more where these guns are getting to, so that we aren’t inadvertently arming colonial rebels against us.” Then you start to get pretty tight arms control laws in some colonies, like in India, in South Africa, in New Zealand.
They’re very racially based in all of those places, and in many of those places, the laws remain in some form intact today. India today still has some of the tightest gun possession laws in the world, and that’s a legacy of colonial rule. Policing the passage of guns into India through what’s now Afghanistan, that became a big concern in the early 20th century. This is stuff that’s happening after they’ve lost the U.S. colonies, and seen the danger of what happens when you have armed colonial rebellion. That was the lesson of the Revolutionary War, right?
From the American point of view, the lesson of the Revolutionary War is that we better always be prepared to fight tyranny, and so we must never give up our arms. That’s what the interpretation of the Second Amendment is about, right? It’s another post-colonial legacy.
The interesting thing about the U.S. itself is that even though people understood the Second Amendment was about making sure there would be no return of tyrannical rule, like British rule, even then, all the way up to pretty recently, the understanding was that the Second Amendment did really only apply to provision of military guns. It wasn’t about an individual’s private, personal right to own a gun.
Also, structurally, the way that there has been more and more regulation of gun possession everywhere else in the world has made the American civilian market just more and more important to gun manufacturers.