Word: america
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once I was a gun guy. Or at least I tried to be. In 1992 and 1993, while researching a book on the forces that propelled guns into the hands of killers, I immersed myself in America's gun culture. I learned to shoot, haunted gun shows and went so far as to get myself a gun dealer's license just to see how easily such licenses could be obtained. The deeper I ventured into the culture, the more it seemed to me that the nation had bent over backward to ensure a brisk flow of guns to felons, wife...
...America had 198,848 licensed gun dealers. Most were so-called kitchen-table dealers operating out of their homes with virtually no ATF oversight. By the end of last year, the number of licensed gun dealers had fallen...
What effect this had on gun sales is unclear, but there is tantalizing evidence that the disappearance of these dealers contributed to a sharp reduction in handgun sales across America, particularly the cheap handguns sold by Lorcin and its peers in the Ring of Fire...
Those who claim otherwise tend to cite America's enduring love affair with guns, but there never was one. The image of shoot-'em-up America was mainly the invention of gunmaker Samuel Colt, who managed to convince a malleable 19th century public that no household was complete without a firearm--"an armed society is a peaceful society." This ludicrous aphorism, says historian Michael Bellesiles of Emory University, turned 200 years of Western tradition on its ear. Until 1850, fewer than 10% of U.S. citizens had guns. Only 15% of violent deaths between 1800 and 1845 were caused by guns...
...myth of a gun-loving America is merely the product of gun salesmen, dime-store novels, movies and the National Rifle Association (NRA)--which, incidentally, was not opposed to gun control until the 1960s, when gun buying sharply increased--it would seem that creating a gun-free society would be fairly easy. But the culture itself has retarded such progress by creating and embellishing an absurd though appealing connection among guns, personal power, freedom and beauty. The old western novels established a cowboy corollary to the Declaration of Independence by depicting the cowboy as a moral loner who preserves...