Subsequent gun panics followed a similar pattern: authorities and the media would use moralistic language to denounce a small segment of gun commerce as responsible for changing patterns of violent crime, and push for reforms to criminalize an imagined unvirtuous gun user.
The arrival of handguns from Austrian manufacturer Glock, which replaced some metal or wood parts with polymers, led to a panic over “plastic guns” in the mid-1980s. Later that decade, attention shifted to “assault weapons,” and the press especially hyped the AK-47, which was imported in greater numbers from China at the end of the Cold War.
Eventually President Bill Clinton banned their importation after foreign manufacturers modified them to bypass the 1994 assault weapons ban. Domestically, the ban’s emphasis on mostly cosmetic features of firearms encouraged manufacturers to redesign weapons to fit new regulations. Once again, gun capitalism found a way.
Of course, given the United States’ history of racialized criminalization, who the virtuous and unvirtuous were in these discourses was never in doubt. Many states increased penalties for gun crimes in concert with the rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s, which disproportionately harmed people of color. These efforts further punished young Black men in cities caught between the twin forces of deindustrialization and the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
The Federal Assault Weapons Ban was signed into law as part of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which arguably did more to exacerbate the United States’ unparalleled mass incarceration crisis than it did to reduce overall levels of gun violence.
For seven decades, gun panics have shaped gun control politics and policy, resulting in a discussion driven by distinctions between virtuous and unvirtuous gun use. Such a dichotomy obscures the fundamental reality of gun life in America: Gun capitalism has put more than 400 million guns in Americans’ hands.
Despite successive panics, guns remain largely unregulated because we have only narrowly targeted what we perceive to be unvirtuous gun use and users. What regulations we do have merely sanction that confounding commerce. The Oxford suspect’s father, for instance, was just one of nearly 700,000 Americans who tried to buy a gun legally during the week of Black Friday, a data point we know because the FBI vetted and, if precedent is any indication, approved upward of 99 percent of them.
In 1945, there was one gun for every three Americans; today we have more guns than people. Our guns-everywhere culture grew not out of some historical affinity for firearms but in tandem with the postwar boom of consumer capitalism. Cyclical calls for regulating the newest perceived threat to the tenuous status quo of virtuous gun ownership — in this case, the panic over ghost guns — only obscures the broader market dynamics that have armed a population for violence and conflict.
— Andrew C. McKevitt in Gun capitalism — not ‘ghost guns’ or other trends — is to blame for gun violence
