GUN COUNTRY Panel Discussion, featuring Andrew McKevitt, Paige Masten, and Andrew Willinger at Flyleaf Books

Come hear a panel discussion on how the United States became the gun capital of the world in the twentieth century, and the repercussions experienced in our Chapel Hill community.

Just as World War II transformed the United States into a global military and economic superpower, so too did it forge the gun country America is today. After 1945, war-ravaged European nations possessed large surpluses of mass-produced weapons, and American entrepreneurs seized 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 rates of gun ownership and violence began to climb. Andrew C. McKevitt tells the history of this gun boom through the dynamics of consumer capitalism and Cold War ideology, the combination of which resulted in a vast number of Americans arming themselves to the teeth and centering their political identity on their guns.

When gun control legislation emerged in the 1960s, many Americans, accustomed to the unregulated postwar bounty of cheap guns and fearful of Soviet invasion, domestic subversion, and urban uprisings, fiercely challenged it. Meanwhile, gun control groups were diverted from their abolitionist roots toward a conciliatory, fundraising-focused strategy that struggled to limit the stockpiling of firearms. Gun Country recasts the story of guns in postwar America as one of Cold War and racial anxieties, unfettered capitalism, and exceptional violence that continues to haunt us to this day.

Andrew C. McKevitt is John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. He is the author of the recently released book, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America.

Paige Masten, a lifelong North Carolinian and UNC alum, is the deputy opinion editor for The Charlotte Observer. She covers stories that impact people in Charlotte and across the state.

Andrew Willinger is the Executive Director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. He writes and comments on Second Amendment decisions and issues related to firearms law. Andrew has been quoted and interviewed by CNN, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among other outlets, and his scholarship is forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review and the Notre Dame Law Review. He also writes regularly for the Center’s blog, Second Thoughts. Andrew graduated from Duke Law School in 2016 and was a staff editor for the Duke Law Journal.