The Growth of the Firearm Industry

It took Americans about a century and a half to accumulate the roughly 45 million guns in civilian hands at the end of the Second World War. Over the subsequent 80 years, they would add 400 million more. The most important thing to know about the consumer market for guns in the postwar United States, then, is that, like so many other aspects of American life in the era, it emphasized quantity over quality. By the 1960s, the country’s gun problem — and, even more so than today, there was a growing consensus that guns were a problem — was a problem of plenty, driven by the unprecedented prosperity of postwar U.S. society mingling with increasing anxieties about crime and social upheaval.

“Plenty” not only described the availability of guns after 1945; it also described the preponderance of myths about guns in contemporaneous American life. Out of kernels of truth — guns as essential tools in a white settler-colonial society at war with Indigenous people and dependent on hunting wildlife — grew simplistic narratives of white people marching westward, building a nation from scratch through little more than the power of the gun. The first generation of gun capitalists both shaped and reinforced this facile story through marketing — consider Winchester’s Model 1873, the “gun that won the West,” or the clever pitch: “God created men equal. Colonel Colt made them equal.”

The pioneering marketing techniques of industrialists like Colt and Winchester spurred demand, or attempted to, but it was only with U.S. victory in the Second World War and the country’s ascendance to global predominance that the United States could become materially the gun country of entrepreneurs’ — not to mention consumers’ — dreams. The United States claimed half of all global economic production in 1945. Despite the challenges of conversion from wartime to peace, the consumer economy was humming by the 1950s, giving Americans access to an abundance and variety of consumer goods unprecedented in world history, making their middle-class consumer society the envy of the world, even of the rival Soviet Union by 1959, when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev toured the United States and openly admired the bounty of its consumer offerings.

Gun myths started to meet material reality, then, as gun sales grew steadily in the 1950s and 1960s. Raised on legends of the Minutemen and the frontier, many of them having lived through the tempering violence of the Second World War, American men — and it was overwhelmingly men, and they were overwhelmingly white — had money and leisure time like never before in the 1950s. The fields and the forests surrounding growing suburbs beckoned, offering new or expanded recreational opportunities that promised to connect men both to nature and an imagined past in which pioneers had manfully conquered it.

Advertisers connected traditional themes of manliness in the consumer gun market with the new bounty of the postwar era. American men won the war, vanquishing fascism and empire, and among the spoils were the world’s guns, imported by wily entrepreneurs who stalked defense ministries around the world in search of war-used weapons to buy for pennies on the dollar. “From all corners of the globe these superb firearms are brought to your very doorstep,” boasted a 1961 ad from Hunters Lodge, a large national mail-order distributor. Indeed, imports of war surplus weapons, millions of rifles and handguns wielded by the war’s European and Asian powers, helped power the rapid expansion of the consumer gun market in the 1950s and 1960s. For a fraction of the price of a brand-new rifle from a traditional manufacturer like Remington or Winchester, gun-curious men could take home a firearm designed to meet the exacting demands of combat. By one estimate, the United States had imported about 70,000 rifles total between 1918 and 1945; in 1960 alone, private importers brought in more than 400,000. 

Chief among this new generation of gun capitalists was Samuel Cummings, the era’s most infamous and prodigious international arms merchant and also Americans’ chief domestic gun dealer. Better than anyone else, Cummings managed to connect the supply of cheap guns around the world to U.S. consumer demand. Cummings ran a company called Interarms out of a series of warehouses on the Alexandria, Virginia, waterfront, building it into the country’s largest importer and distributor, supplying thousands of retail outlets, from small mom-and-pop shops to department stores like Sears, with inexpensive war surplus rifles. For the weekend hunter and the target shooter, a sophisticated logistics network “sporterized” the millions of guns Cummings acquired, softening the scars of wartime use. In a peak year, Cummings could import upward of a half-million firearms for the U.S. consumer market, and by the time the Gun Control Act of 1968 cut off his most lucrative activities by restricting war surplus imports, he had sold U.S. consumers some five million weapons of war. (Recent revelations from the JFK assassination files point to Interarms’ origins as a CIA front company, raising all sorts of titillating questions about the role of U.S. intelligence in helping to kick-start Americans’ postwar addiction to guns.)

The impact of imports on the domestic industry and the consumer market should not be underestimated. While they were never more than one-third of guns sold in the United States in any given year during this period, traditional gun manufacturers saw Cummings’ guns as an existential threat both to the industry and to national security, or at least portrayed them as such to Congress, which investigated in 1958. National security considerations of a different nature won out, however. In hearings before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, officials with the State Department told members that, despite protests from the gun industry, it was indeed good for U.S. foreign policy to encourage the world’s cheap guns to flood into the United States, rather than allowing them to fall into the hands of communist insurgents elsewhere. Cold War imperatives forced binary thinking on the world’s guns. Cummings, too, wrote to the committee, arguing that his cheap guns weren’t competing for the same dollar as the high-end rifles from the traditional manufacturers. If anything, he was bringing in new buyers who might prefer to dip their toe into the waters of gun ownership before diving in headfirst.

An astute observer of consumer trends, Cummings was on the mark. The gun consumer market was expanding into a truly mass market, widely accessible for the first time to even the working classes, thanks to the imports pushing prices down and drawing in new buyers. Cummings chastised the traditional gunmakers in 1958 for their failure to grasp the opportunities of this expanding market, but they would do so enthusiastically in the 1960s.

Data on gun sales backed up Cummings’ claims. While the sale of long guns for hunting and sport shooting jumped dramatically in the 1950s — rifle sales, for instance, almost doubled from 1954 to 1960 — it would be during the 1960s when the gun industry would take advantage of rocketing demand for handguns. Sales of handguns in the decade leading up to the Gun Control Act of 1968 were 250% higher than in the previous decade, and handgun sales quadrupled from 1962 to 1968 alone. Here, too, imports proved the main catalyst for market growth. In 1958, the United States imported roughly 79,000 handguns; in 1968, it brought in more than 1.2 million, accounting for half of all handgun sales that year. While some of these imported handguns were war surplus, most were newly manufactured in Western Europe, cheap guns made quickly to take advantage of the booming U.S. market. Made from inferior metals, they could be dangerous to fire, and it was not uncommon for the barrels to warp slightly after each round fired.

What Americans knew about the consumer market for guns, even those in the nascent field of gun studies, was mostly a mystery until 1968. In the wake of the spring slayings of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Milton Eisenhower to head the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in an investigation of the origins and nature of violence in American life. The Eisenhower Commission in turn appointed a Firearms Task Force (FTF) to investigate the impact of guns on violence specifically. The Eisenhower Commission’s esteemed research directors included two scholars who had conducted some of the earliest social science research on firearms violence, Marvin Wolfgang and Franklin Zimring, the latter of whom supervised the FTF’s research agenda. (In 1969, the FTF published an essential report for making sense of the postwar gun market, where all of the above data can be found.)

Among the discoveries that surprised the FTF was that no federal commission or agency had ever before set about trying to collect data on guns in America and to make sense of all that data. Drawing data from federal departments like Commerce and Treasury, along with, remarkably, sales data from gun manufacturers — figures the manufacturers shared only after the commission agreed to anonymize them — researchers concluded that the number of guns in civilian hands had doubled since the end of the Second World War. Roughly 90 million firearms sat in Americans’ gun cabinets and closets and night table drawers and glove compartments in 1968, some 45 million more than in 1945. Of those, roughly 25 million were handguns, which the FTF concluded were the most dangerous weapons of interpersonal violence, accounting for three-quarters or more of gun deaths annually.

For many Americans, including the president and those members of the U.S. House and Senate who would pass the Gun Control Act of 1968 in a bipartisan vote, this accumulation itself was a kind of tragedy. How had this happened? How had the country let this happen? Congressional champions of gun control, like Sen. Thomas Dodd, identified cheapness and the problem of plenty as a culprit. The GCA therefore attempted to dam the flood of both war surplus firearms and cheaply manufactured handguns. But there would be no turning back: The postwar consumer market had shown Americans that a world of cheap, widely accessible guns was at their fingertips. Watered down by conservatives and gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association intent on preserving access to that market, the GCA proved inadequate to the task of limiting accumulation, and it contained too many loopholes to prevent determined gun entrepreneurs from finding a way through the weak barriers it erected.

Over the next quarter-century, the civilian gun stockpile would double again, just as it had after the Second World War. And then it would double once more 25 years later. In the 21st century United States, in our contemporary guns-everywhere society, in a country now with 10 times as many firearms as 1945, it is difficult to conjure a time when the vast majority of Americans believed that something had gone wrong in the mechanisms of the consumer gun market. There were too many of them and they were too easy to buy — an observation that, since then, has seemingly become an American virtue rather than a vice.