Warren J. Blumenfeld on Andrew J. McKevitt’s *Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America*

I sat glued to the TV screen on the morning of April 9, 2024, carrying a full array of emotions, from intense anger to overwhelming sorrow and grief watching the victim impact statements from parents and siblings of four Michigan Oxford High School students gunned down by another student, 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley, on November 30, 2021, with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.

“My daughter’s death destroyed a large portion of my very soul,” lamented Steve St. Juliana, father of Hana St. Juliana. “I will never think back fondly on her high school and college graduations. I will never walk her down the aisle as she begins the journey of starting her own family. I am forever denied the chance to hold her or her future children in my arms,” he added.

St. Juliana gave his victim impact statement along with several other family members during the closing phase of the trial of Crumbley’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, on charges of involuntary manslaughter for failing to intervene to prevent the tragedy. Later that day, the court convicted the Crumbleys to spend up to 15 years in a Michigan prison.

Ethan Crumbley had been previously convicted to a life sentence for taking the young lives of 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana, 16-year-old Tate Myre, 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin, and 17-year-old Justin Shilling.

James Crumbley took his son Ethan to a local gun shop in their neighborhood in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan where James purchased the gun in his own name. On social media, Jennifer Crumbley referred to the gun as Ethan’s “new Christmas present.”

Speaking directly to James and Jennifer Crumbley, “You created all this. You created your son’s life, which then allowed this to be his path. Which should be yours as well. You don’t get to look away. You don’t get to cry. I didn’t get that choice. You failed as parents. The punishment you face will never be enough,” Madisyn’s mom, Nicole Beausoleil, said.

“I believe your actions cannot even be confined into the word ‘failure.’ Your mistakes created our everlasting nightmare,” Hana’s sister, Reina St. Juliana, said. “Our 10-year-old little brother had to learn how to write a eulogy for his sister before he even learned how to write essays,” she continued.

Craig Shilling, father of Justin Shilling, read his victim impact statement at Oakland County Circuit Court in Pontiac, Michigan. He said that Jennifer and James Crumbley deserve the full sentence.

After over two years since the murders, Craig Shilling said that the distress from that day is still fresh. “I just can’t get over the fact that this tragedy was completely avoidable,” he said. He talked about the obvious signs that were completely overlooked and “the bulk of the responsibility to address those signs lie on the parents, and they failed — across the board failed.”

Yes, James and Jennifer Crumbley are responsible for the needless murders committed by their failure to intervene by taking preventative actions before their son took the lives of four innocent classmates. And, yes, of course, Nathan Crumbley, himself, must be held accountable for his actions. Critical questions, nonetheless, need to be addressed.

Why is firearms violence primarily a United States problem, compared to all of our peer nations?  While the U.S. comprises less than 5% of the global population, why does it possess nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned firearms?

Do U.S. residents really need the approximately 400 million firearms, equaling an average of 1.2 per capita, which is double the rate of the next highest country: Yemen? Is there any doubt why firearms are the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the United States?

Many people, including several if not most of our politicians, talk about “American exceptionalism,” how we are “a shining city on a hill,” and “beacon of light” to the world. If that were true, why then are we losing tens of thousands of our people each year to gun violence and to gun-induced suicides.

Residents of that “shining city on a hill” had to flee long ago over fears of being the targets of violence. That “beacon of light” has long been extinguished by high velocity bullets fired through the air. And, yes, we are indeed “exceptional” with a gun culture that is unsurpassed anywhere in the world except in active war zones.

How Did We Get Here?

The Chinese around 850 of the Common Era invented a powdery mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate that when ignited with a spark, created an explosion. Though they discovered it quite accidentally when attempting to invent an elixir for immortality, they quickly utilized it for defensive and offensive advantages in wars against internal and cross-border enemies (Kelly, 2004).

First used to stuff tubes in which the Chinese tied a fuse and lighted to propel as a hand-held rocket aimed at their adversaries, gun power transformed the “art” and scale of killing the likes of which the world had never seen. Throughout the decades and centuries in countries across the planet, technology created even more and deadlier types of “hand cannons” as they were once called.

Attributed to the Portuguese in the 1400s, the “matchlock mechanism” was added to become the first known mechanically-firing gun. They attached a wick to a clamp that when triggered, sprang into the gun power. The Spanish carried these with them on their invasions into the Americas, and the Pilgrims brought them from England when they arrived in what would become known as North America (Saidel, 2000).

Christopher Columbus took with him matchlocks and other types of hand cannons and breech-loading wrought-iron weapons and arquebuses — an early type of portable firearm supported on a tripod or a forked rest. When he sailed from Haiti, he ordered shots fired through the shipwrecked hull of the Santa Maria to frighten indigenous populations with the power of European firearms (Saidel, 2000).

European inventors in 1509 replaced wicks with friction-wheel mechanisms to create wheellock guns. These generated sparks to ignite the gun power. Later, as would become common in Colonial America, residents used flintlock guns invented around 1630 with flint-ignition mechanisms.

The Long Rifle (“Kentucky Rifle,” “Pennsylvania Rifle”) developed with spiral grooves giving iron balls a spiraling motion, which improved overall stability and accuracy. Combatants used these firearms as major weaponry during the so-called French and Indian War as well as in the American Revolutionary War.

At the end of the 16^th century in Germany and other European countries, firearms technicians came up with a “wheel gun” (revolver) that included a revolving cylinder containing several chambers and at least one barrel for firing. Now shooters no longer had to reload following each shot but could unload up to six bullets at their intended targets. In the U.S., Samuel Colt in 1836 mass produced these multi-shot guns, popularly called “six shooters” (Chase, 2003).

By the 1850s, shot guns (also referred to as scatterguns) became popular. Usually fired from the shoulder, they use a single-fixed shell to fire numerous small spherical pellets called “shot” or a solid projectile called a “slug.” Today, these firearms range from single action to semi- and fully automatic.

The Union forces in 1862 popularized the Gatling gun, developed by Richard Gatling, as a weapon of mass destruction. This rapid-fire gun was the forerunner of the machine gun. And then, the Cartridge Revolver, developed by Colt in 1872, was a .44-caliber rear loading weapon.

And the technology with its capacity to injure, mutilate, dismember, and kill increases with each passing day.

While firearms have always been a significant feature of U.S. culture dating to the colonial period, historian Andrew McKevitt, in his 2023 book Gun Country, provides a compelling reevaluation claiming that the U.S.-American gun culture is unequivocally and relatively recent emerging after World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.

“These ideas were forged in the Cold war, draped in patriotism, anticommunism, and antiglobalism,” writes McKevitt on page 9, “inextricably linked to the consumer capitalism that emerged alongside the Cold War, the economic system that deftly transformed a lethal commodity like war surplus guns into collectible curios advertised in young men’s magazines, cheap European rifles into tools for self-defense and spectacular homicide, and, later, Armalite Rifles into a whole culture, politics, and identity readily available for purchase.”

So, according to McKevitt, the culture of firearms as we know it today began in the post-Second World War economic boom in a context of relaxed federal gun regulations in the United States facilitated by the “new gun capitalists” who mass-marketed imported guns to consumers with increasing incomes at bargain basement prices. “Tens of millions of firearms around the world had little practical use and collected dust in government warehouses,” wrote McKevitt, as a “global demobilization” commenced.

McKevitt primarily singled out Samual Cummings, a small arms importer who began flooding the U.S. market first with thousand of firearms from Finland and Norway, and “the seemingly limitless availability of guns” from other European countries. Cummings was tapping into what he believed was a sure thing, easy money. According to McKevett, “Between frontier mythologies and notions of American masculinity connected to gun ownership, the increase in leisure time and disposable income, and a mass media encouraging consumerism as a way to secure the American way of life in a hostile world, selling guns was a good bet in the 1950s.”

Purchasers of firearms, following World War II as well as now, “tend to be serial gun buyers,” McKevitt revealed, and they often were compelled to buy the expensive allied equipment – “the camouflage gear, the accessories, even the off-road vehicles” that would define the gunman’s identity. By the time lawmakers understood this shift in the vast scope of the ubiquitous gun culture that emerged beneath them like the mighty mountains from extreme tension in the Earth, it was already too late to counter its power.

Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut championed gun control legislation for several years until he authored the 1968 Gun Control Act in which he summoned “the specter of crime to justify spending more than seven years working on gun control in the 1960s.” The bill placed restrictions on the importation of firearms with the intent of making them more difficult to obtain, at least on paper. However, it was designed virtually to fail because of a giant loophole that permitted the importation of gun parts.

The 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the passage of the Act much legislative immediacy, but the argument was undergirded by a perennial and general racism and paranoia by primarily white conservatives.

“Groups like the Minutemen, a right-wing extremist organization arming itself for a forthcoming apocalypse against global communism, sprang up,” according to McKevitt. “In Detroit, racist residents went so far as to establish what were essentially paramilitary groups intent on arming themselves for the purpose of defending their cruel vision of America.”

Superimposed with prominent firearms regulation advocates of the 1970s, McKevitt profiled two Chicago-based organizations led by women: the Civic Disarmament Committee (CDC) and the Committee for Handgun Control (CHC). These groups were the precursor of gun safety organizations such as Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Sandy Hook Promise, Everytown for Gun Safety, March for Our Lives, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Gun Free Kids, Giffords Law Center, and others.

The CDC, which “found inspiration in global movement for disarmament and abolition,” was founded by Laura Fermi, widow of Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi. And the CHC was organized by “a group of suburban housewives who deemed themselves ‘the mothers of today’.”

McKevitt related one member’s criticism to her involvement: “If gun rights proponents were going to dismiss women like her as simple homemakers, then she would use the identity of ‘suburban housewife’ to muster all the authority it could in postwar America.”

Magazine ads appeared for inexpensive firearms for “authentic World War II souvenirs” from Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and other countries of prior war battles. One of these ads touted guns found among the “finest made by the Fascists. Carried by the crack Italian Alpine troops.”

One ad, to attract young men specifically, was published in Punch and Judy Comics, Vol. 3, October 1947 announcing in bold headlines:

* * * * *

Kids! Kids! Kids! ADULTS TOO! WORLD WAR II SOUVENIRS:

 

The Celebrated Italian 7.65 Brevettata

The Famous GERMAN 9MM LUGER

 

Only $1.25 Each

We Pay Postage

 

ORDER AND RECEIVE FREE FOLDER ON OTHER GUN MODELS

Canada Orders Not Accepted

* * * * *

Back in 1970, following the tragic assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy on the heels of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald, with an Italian rifle he purchased from a Chicago mail-order store, historian Richard Hofstadter attempted to answer the question of how the U.S. became the “only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large number of the population.”

He expressed enormous trepidation for the United States “afloat with weapons.” In his 1970 article, Hofstadter wrote:

Senator Joseph Tydings of Maryland, appealing in the summer of 1968 for an effective gun-control law, lamented: “It is just tragic that in all of Western civilization the United States is the one country with an insane gun policy.”

And we all know the definition of insanity on a societal level, but we still somehow expect different results.

McKevitt stated how firearms manufacturers and sellers marketed their products as consumer goods like any other product:

He gives an example in this marketing to men:

“In 2022, Sandy Hook families eventually settled a lawsuit for $73 million with Remington,” he writes, “maker of the Bushmaster AR-15 used in the murders. The group focused on a magazine advertisement for the weapon that read, ‘Consider your man card reissued.’ Bushmaster had sought to ‘tap into anxieties about masculinity,’ in the words of one of the families’ lawyers to provoke fantasies of consumer desire.”

Atop this hierarchy we find the so-called “Alpha” male: the assumed “leader of the pack,” the dominant male, the independent self-sustaining male. Below the Alpha sits the “Beta” male: seen as weaker in courage and independence, as unremarkable, careful to avoid risk and confrontation. Beta males lack the physical presence, charisma, and confidence of the Alpha male. They are seen as the followers. “” males are often loners who do not fit into the Alpha/Beta typology. They may be more introverted, shy, or socially uncomfortable.

Feminist theory teaches us that within a patriarchal society, males are awarded with the powerful outward objectifying and colonizing male gaze: the act of viewing women as sexual objects for the edification of the heterosexual cisgender male.

I understand why many people oppose and resist common sense firearms regulations.

Regulations on firearms challenge the hegemonic promises of a patriarchal system based on notions of Alpha male hypermasculinity with the qualities taken to the extreme of control, domination over others and the environment, competitiveness, autonomy, rugged individualism, strength, toughness, forcefulness, and decisiveness, and, of course, never having to ask for help or assistance.

Concepts of cooperation and community responsibility are pushed to the sidelines and discarded. Ultimately, unless we change from an Individualistic to a more Cooperative society, the United States is destined to fail, not from external threats, but from within.

Forms of Alpha male hypermasculinity require the promotion and use of firearms to keep at bay the intensive psychosocial compulsive fear and dread of penetration from bullets, from male homosexuals’ gaze, from the female gaze since the patriarchy promises males the right to the aggressive outward gaze, the right of objectification and penetration of “others.”

Male dominance is maintained by its relative invisibility (though for many of us, it stands as blatantly obvious), and with this relative invisibility, privilege and power escapes analysis and scrutiny, interrogation and confrontation by many.

It was no mere coincidence or, rather, irony, that the Milton Bradley Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, billing itself as the “Maker of the World’s Best Games,” introduced a toy for pre-teen and early-teen boys in the closing years of World War I: its “Big Dick” machine gun.

This antecedent to the Cold War firearms frenzy and advertising to young males in the United States published in its 1918 print ad circulating in various publicans aimed (no pun intended) at young boys, above a drawing of the product ejecting what appeared as wooden pellets, in large serif bold lettering and as if coming from the loud commands of a military officer: “Ready! Aim! FIRE!” and below: “Big Dick” “American Boys Attention” followed by smaller lettering: “Get at the breech of a Big Dick” Exciting fun; No danger. Shoots thirty-six (36) wooden bullets as fast as you can turn the firing-crank.”

Inside a rectangular box, the makers provide the product’s dimensions: “24 inches long, 9 inches high, 36 shots a minute.” And if this does not convince boys to pester their parents to run to the toy store to purchase the gun, the ad makes one last justification: “Big Dick is modeled after the machine guns used on the European battlefronts and for indoor war play has no equal.”

Coming back to our times, did James Crumbley have anxieties about his son’s masculinity as the reason he gifted Ethan with a semiautomatic handgun with high-capacity magazines? Did Ethan fantasize over guns as his consumer desire?

Who even cares, for these questions are totally irrelevant! What is crucial, or more importantly, critical in the individual bodily and body political sense, is that the firearms culture has long since gotten to the point of undermining the lives of our residents and destroying our reputation worldwide.

There is a major reason why millions of cheap firearms flooded into the United States at the close of World War II: the nations from which these “products” originated passed tough regulations against the selling, purchasing, and owning of guns. The governments of other nations, following fatal incidents such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom passed common sense gun regulations including banning semiautomatic and automatic weapons and requiring licensing and registration.

The United States, on the other hand, continues to see enormous spikes in gun sales while state legislatures and the federal judiciary ease the few remaining firearms regulations.

In summary, then, Andrew C. McKevitt’s Gun Culture, I believe successfully redirects the story of U.S. residents love affair with firearms from the mythology of the rugged masculine individualism of the days from the Wild West to post-World War II racial and political anxieties alongside unfettered “free market” capitalism and somewhat higher degrees of “disposal” income and increasing urban violence to feed and justify these impulses.

So, yes, the Crumbley’s are fully absorbed within U.S. consumer arms race culture. But most of us are co-conspirators in the murders of four beautiful young and gentle souls at Oxford High School and in all the firearms murders. I believe that this became such a high-profile case because virtually all the people involved were/are white, and charging parents was virtually unprecedented.

“Meaningful reform is possible, but it will require confronting mythologies and material reality head on,” writes McKevitt. “We must stop legislating around the problem of plenty and in the service of historical obfuscation. If the gun country of the postwar era could be made, it can be unmade.”

Maybe our recalcitrant pro-firearms legislators, judges, executives, organizations, lobbyists, and manufacturers as well as those who fantasize over their firearms dreams of transformation and empowerment should spend up to 15 years in prison as well.

References

Chase, K. (2003), Firearms: A global history to 1700, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hosstadler, R. (1970, October), America as a gun culture. American Heritage, 21(6).

Kelly, J. (2004), Gunpowder: Alchemy, bombards & pyrotechnics: The history of the explosive that changed the world, New York: Basic Books.

Saidel, B. (2000). Matchlocks, Flintlocks, and Saltpetre: The chronological implications for the use of Matchlock muskets among Ottoman-period Bedouin in the Southern Levant. International Journal of Historical Archaeology. 4(3): 191–216.