Skipped History is a newsletter focused on overlooked and underexamined events, movements, and people that have shaped American history. In this installment, host Ben Tumin speaks to Louisiana Tech history professor Andrew C. McKevitt about one of the origins of America’s gun problem, and how the government almost addressed the issue before it was too late.
As Tumin says, the conversation reveals how “even if our (fraying) government manages to pass any gun legislation, it’ll only be effective if it addresses ‘the problem of plenty’ that Professor McKevitt spotlights.”
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is republished below with permission.
See the full story on Skipped History here.
Ben Tumin: To begin, let’s talk about Samuel Cummings. Who was he, and how did he convert Europe's trash into America's treasure after World War II?
Andrew C. McKevitt: Sam Cummings was probably the most important gun capitalist of the 20th century.
A brash entrepreneur, he went to Europe when he was in his 20s and dug through countries’ leftover trash from World War II: essentially, millions of rifles, handguns, artillery, and larger weapons systems. He would stroll into a ministry of defense in a country like Finland or Italy and say, I want to buy every gun that you don't need anymore.
The weapons were useless in Europe. Local regulations either prohibited countries from selling the guns to their own populations, or the guns were obsolete as new technology developed. And it was really hard to destroy them. You can't just have a big bonfire for a half million guns.
So here was Cummings offering to buy them (for pennies on the dollar) and saying, I'll get them out of Europe for you. He intended to sell the guns in the only gun market in the world that could absorb them: the United States. Fast forward, and Cummings made millions of dollars selling cheap surplus guns to Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.
BT: I was astonished to read that in 1966, journalist Carl Bakal estimated that the U.S. had absorbed anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of Europe’s war surplus firearms, thanks to the efforts of gun capitalists like Cummings.
It’s so interesting to me, too, that when these huge amounts of guns came to the U.S. government's attention, the State Department was more or less like: proceed.
AM: Oh yeah. The fact that millions of war weapons (to use a term often employed today) were flowing into the States first came to Congress’s attention in 1957 and 1958. Congress held hearings, but the State Department stepped in and said bringing the guns here is U.S. policy. Officials figured it was better for guns to be in the hands of Americans than communist governments or insurgents.
BT: I guess the multiple choice answer of “(C) none of the above” had yet to be invented.
AM: Ha, that’s right. It wasn’t until 1968 that Congress really tried to address the influx of guns, passing the Gun Control Act of 1968. The act imposed more stringent record-keeping requirements on gun sellers, and importantly for someone like Samuel Cummings, it cut off the flow of war surplus firearms from Europe (and even Asia in some cases). Still, in part because the NRA watered down the legislation, it had some giant loopholes.
Specifically, gun manufacturers in Europe, who used leftover metal from the war to make cheap handguns, discovered that the 1968 law prohibited the importing of guns — but never included any provision about gun parts being imported. So they just disassembled their handguns before shipping them to the States, where there was an insatiable market.
BT: The loophole is kind of like being told you can't eat doughnuts anymore, but you can still eat dough and you can still eat nuts.
AM: And that you’ve got to press the oil at home yourself.
Meanwhile, stateside, the law did nothing to stop the manufacturing of cheap guns. Wily entrepreneurs began to assemble the cheap imported parts and sell the weapons themselves.
BT: In the book, you talk about a government commission, called the Eisenhower Commission, that LBJ formed to study gun violence — which, predictably, continued to rise.
Can you talk about that moment, and the pretty strong recommendations officials made?
AM: To take a step back for a moment, I think too often we assume that there's always been a lot of guns here, and now we just have more guns than we did before. But after 1945, you can clearly see the rate at which gun ownership increased exponentially more than the population.
This was a trend that the Eisenhower Commission was very much attuned to. One of the commission’s task forces investigated gun violence and gun ownership. Their final report recommended getting rid of all handguns because 80 to 90 percent of all gun deaths were a consequence of them. In other words, a federal task force called for the most extraordinary instance of confiscation ever in a liberal democracy.
Commission members knew it was an audacious ask, but they estimated there were something like 25 million handguns in the States, out of 90 million guns total, and that if the government didn’t address the problem then, it would be too late — gun manufacturers would find ways to flood the market, and decades down the road we’d have to control 100 million or even 200 million handguns. They turned out to be totally right.
The report didn’t come out until 1969 when Richard Nixon was president. He stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. Fast forward, we now have something in the neighborhood of 150 to 200 million handguns, out of around 450 million guns in total.
BT: Woof. It’s sobering to think we might be 50 years past a point of no return.
AM: Yeah, kind of dark to say. Still, I think gun control activists are doing good work today, and that the legislation Joe Biden signed into law in the aftermath of the Uvalde killings was a good step, too.
BT: Though as you point out, the 2022 bill had limitations.
AM: Yes. While we think of laws like the act in 1968 or even New Deal legislation targeting guns before then as doing something about guns and gun violence, what they're really doing is protecting gun capitalism. The laws establish the guardrails in which legitimate gun capitalism can take place. They protect the rights, if not the convenience of the “law-abiding citizen” — an artificial construct that the NRA created in the 1930s.
So gun capitalism is legitimized through the kind of bill President Biden signed into law in 2022. The bill authorized things like new money for mental health and red flag laws — which are good, but also inherently signal that gun consumerism is perfectly legitimate and can continue so long as we make sure the guardrails are there.
The U.S. is one of the few if not the only country in the world that approaches gun policy in that particular way. I think that until we are ready to confront gun capitalism, we're going to continue in the cycle that we find ourselves in.
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