It’s not recent NRA propaganda that has made gun owners enthusiastic defenders of their right to bear arms. They’ve been that way for a while.
It’s not recent NRA propaganda that has made gun owners enthusiastic defenders of their right to bear arms. They’ve been that way for a while.
I n a single issue in March of 1961, Guns & Ammo ran ads for a “Sniper Model” Enfield Match rifle, a French 8mm machine gun (“used in two World Wars”), a Mannlicher military pistol, a U.S. .30 M1 carbine, and a police-ordnance Ingram Model 6 submachine gun chambered in .45 ACP (only $49.95!). If you’re surprised that these machine guns and high-powered military rifles were marketed to hunters in the 1960s, you might have unconsciously accepted a flawed but popular narrative about American gun culture.
According to this story, gun owners have only recently become “militarized,” thanks to the machinations of the National Rifle Association and its infamous leader, Wayne LaPierre. That military-style attitude has further resulted in a recalcitrant stance toward gun control and an obsession with armed self-defense.
There are many examples of this fable, but the most recent comes from the New Yorker, in a declaratively titled piece, “What Happened to Gun Culture.” As author Benjamin Wallace-Wells helpfully explains, gun culture has become “one of the most dangerous elements of the right” during LaPierre’s tenure.
“Military” or “militarization” appears nine times in the article, as Wallace-Wells claims that only since the 1990s have manufacturers been allowed to sell “military-grade weapons” and “market them as military weapons.” Ultimately, Wallace-Wells writes, LaPierre’s NRA “brainwashed an entire country” by transforming a political base of hunters into a “new, expanded audience of gun guys” who support a “maximalist defense of guns.” This new gun culture has spawned characters such as Kyle Rittenhouse, the January 6 rioters, and, most horrifically of all, Black Rifle Coffee Company.
As with all stories that attempt to shoehorn the history of a community into a convenient political narrative, this myth is mostly untrue. Even the briefest glance at any pre-1990s outdoor magazine demonstrates that gun owners were interested in “military-style” firearms long before LaPierre took over the NRA. Hunting and fishing outlets have blasted gun control for decades, and gun owners have always valued their rifles, pistols, and shotguns for both recreation and defense.
“It’s a falsehood to think that the NRA is all that important,” Tom Gresham told me. Gresham is the host of Gun Talk, the only syndicated radio show covering firearms and related activities. He’s been an outspoken critic of LaPierre. (“He’s a sad example of leadership. You can quote me on that.”) In our conversation, Gresham characterized gun culture as far larger than any single organization.
“At its height, the NRA represented maybe 5 percent of America’s gun owners,” he said. “It’s part of the media’s need to have a bogeyman, and the NRA has always served that role.”
Militarization?
Among the more popular criticisms of today’s gun culture is the characterization of gun owners as “militarized.” Where previous generations were content with their bolt-action rifles, today’s “gun guys” wield AR-15s and other “military-grade” weapons, as Wallace-Wells puts it. This line of argument has even appeared in lawsuits trying to hold gunmakers responsible for the actions of mass killers.
While it’s true that modern gun ads occasionally depict soldiers, this critique reveals an ignorance both of mid-20th-century gun culture and of what constitutes a “military-style” firearm. In a 1958 issue of Sports Afield, for example, an advertisement showcased a Lee-Enfield rifle chambered in .303 British. To modern eyes, it looks like an innocuous deer rifle: wood stock, bolt action, iron sights. But the Lee-Enfield was the main firearm of British military forces from 1895 until 1957. It doesn’t look like what we today consider a “military-style” firearm, but it was exactly that.
In the same vein, a 1954 issue of Sports Afield informed readers about an “outstanding” display of American military firearms to be housed at a new museum wing of the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park. Sports Afield was one of the most popular magazines among the hunters and anglers who supposedly constituted America’s pre-LaPierre gun culture. And yet, the outlet’s Washington reporter believed that his readers would be interested in a display of military firearms.
Guns & Ammo has been publishing since 1958, which itself contradicts the notion that “gun guys” are anything new. Even in the early 1960s, Guns & Ammo editors were serving up a steady diet of military weapons, military history, and insider military news. In 1961, Guns & Ammo ran a cover story on the German Luger pistol, a famous military sidearm. The headline read, “The Fabulous Luger — a Gun That Won’t Die!” The article was titled “Long Live the Luger.” A 1966 issue of the same magazine featured a cover story titled “How Vietnam is Changing our Shooting Ideas!,” and a 1967 story told readers about “Vietnam’s ‘Biggest’ Little Gun.” The 1966 story, as you might imagine, featured a wealth of military training photos, including many soldiers, and centers on the Army’s new automatic rifle, the M-14.
The machine guns and military rifles advertised in Guns & Ammo and Sports Afield may not look like the “assault weapons” villainized and valorized today, but the military and its weapons were a part of gun culture far longer than Wayne LaPierre has been around.
Gun Rights?
As for gun control, hunters of yesteryear were supposedly willing to support commonsense reforms until the NRA convinced them that universal background checks were a liberal plot to disarm the country. Investigative journalist Frank Smyth argues that the NRA supported gun control from the early 1920s to the early 1970s. That may be true, but as with the “militarization” narrative, a closer look at the broader gun culture reveals faults in the timeline.
Sports Afield, for example, in the 1950s and 1960s published a regular column, “Report from Washington,” covering conservation and environmental bills as well as gun-control legislation. Reporter Michael Hudoba sounded much like today’s “gun guys.”
In a 1967 issue, Hudoba warned gun owners that gun-confiscation legislation should be a “sober warning” to all who have “taken lightly the efforts of antigun protagonists.” In 1969, he called a gun-registration bill “disturbing” and pointed out that recent gun-control policies had not affected violent-crime rates. In another issue from that year, he wondered “how proposed gun registration harassing law-abiding citizen-sportsmen will prevent criminals from getting and owning guns.”
Columnists in Guns & Ammo were even less willing to compromise on gun-control bills. In a 1966 column, the magazine’s editors slammed three senators for proposing a bill that would place “severe restrictions on interstate traffic of mailorder firearms.” A year later, the editors wrote, “We don’t intend to quit, falter, slow down or even slightly turn our heads if we feel that the precious right of owning and using firearms is even remotely threatened — now or any time in the future.”
Some of the mainstream narrative about American gun culture comes from a misperception about what constitutes “compromise.” Gresham told me that the NRA and other gun-rights groups have occasionally agreed to negotiate with the other side when they know that passage of a gun-control bill is inevitable. Gun-rights groups “compromised” not because they supported the legislation but because they wanted to mitigate the worst of its provisions. Only later did historians misconstrue their deal-making as tacit support for the legislation.
In any case, that alleged support certainly didn’t extend broadly to American gun owners.
Self-Defense?
American gun owners have always purchased military firearms, and they’ve opposed gun control since Congress proposed the first broadly restrictive national legislation. But have they always owned firearms for self-defense?
Writing in Discourse, David Yamane argues that they haven’t. In what he calls “Gun Culture 2.0,” Americans in recent decades have shifted their focus from hunting and recreational shooting to self-defense. Of the three mainstream gun-culture narratives, this one contains the most truth.
Read any handgun review published today, and you’ll find a discussion of that firearm’s self-defense capabilities. The outdoor magazines I’ve reviewed from the 1950s and 1960s only occasionally mentioned self-defense in their coverage of handguns, and one author from a 1966 issue of Guns & Ammo argued that those who purchase firearms for self-defense are in the minority. “Some civilians buy guns for the sole purpose of defense, as a ‘weapon’ to use in defense of their home, place of business or while traveling,” wrote J. W. Mathews Jr. “These people are relatively few in number; hardly enough to support the firearms industry we have today.”
Gresham argued, however, that self-defense was still a primary motivation for firearm ownership. “The only change is that people will talk about it now,” he said. “As far back as you can find research, when surveys are done asking why people own guns, self-protection has always been the No. 1 reason.”
Yamane himself acknowledges that Americans have maintained guns for self-defense since the first white settlers landed in Virginia. Pocket pistols have been popular since the 18th century, and Smith & Wesson’s famous “bicycle revolver” indicates a market for the same subcompact pistols on the market today.
A survey of 20th-century outdoor magazines reveals that self-defense was a priority for many gun owners, if not an overwhelming concern. In 1966, Outdoor Life magazine, for example, ran an article featuring a focus group of housewives commenting on firearms, and self-defense was among the reasons cited for firearm ownership. In Guns & Ammo the same year, a piece titled “Hard Hitting Handful” outlined “a police officer’s selection for personal defense.”
The last three decades have witnessed an explosion of concealed-carry and civilian handgun training, which both mark a shift in gun culture toward self-defense. But that was always in the water. Americans have been defending themselves with firearms since the Mayflower. It’s unreasonable to imagine that self-defense concerns are a recent invention.
A ‘New’ Gun Culture
The above isn’t much more than a cursory glance at American gun culture in the mid 20th century. Like any community, American gun owners have not spoken with a single voice, and even today there are sharp divides between the tactically minded and the hard-core hunters.
In fact, gun culture today is more diverse than it’s ever been. As Gresham pointed out, minorities and women constitute the fastest-growing segments of the gun-owning population, and that trend shows no signs of slowing down.
“The demographics of gun owners have changed to be very inclusive,” Gresham said. “It’s not just old white guys. It’s women. It’s minorities. It’s LGTBQ people. That’s gun culture now.”
Between January 2020 and June 2021, about 11.6 million Americans purchased a firearm for the first time, according to Mark Oliva of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. About 40 percent of those first-time buyers were female, and black men and women saw the highest increases in sales.
The mainstream-media types who tell a simple story about American “gun culture” should spend some time getting to know these new gun owners, and then pick up a few old copies of Sports Afield. An afternoon perusing America’s most popular outdoor publications would demonstrate that concern about gun rights, an interest in military arms, and a desire for effective self-defense can’t be blamed on the NRA’s latest marketing campaign.
More likely, these interests and values spring from an organic concern among gun owners to preserve their rights and use their firearms to protect themselves and their loved ones. Some might disagree with their conclusions, but it’s disingenuous to make any one organization or company the scapegoat for a general dislike of American gun owners. It makes more political hay to create a bogeyman of the NRA or Springfield Armory, but it does nothing to address the root causes of gun-related violence in this country.
That root cause, as any old outdoor magazine proves, isn’t “gun culture.” Gun culture has been around for far longer than the suicide epidemic or the explosion of inner-city violence. Those issues are rooted in other factors, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to pretend otherwise.