Re: The reports so far with some editorial....
Indeed, right up to the 1950s, gun ownership in the US was rare (and largely rural). It was the end of WWII, when the arms manufacturers had loads of unsold weapons, that the notion of an armed citizenry began to be pushed. And it just growed and growed...
Err... no. The growth of American gun culture is linked to the period between the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of the 20th century. In particular, that's when the NRA got its start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association There were several reasons why, not least being the large number of veterans of both the Union and Confederate armed forces who took their guns home with them. Arms vendors such as Colt and Winchester and Smith & Wesson did very well for themselves. The number of guns in private hands went down in the early 20th century, but then went back up again, mostly in the South and South West, before the American entry into the First World War. WWI gave it a boost, and so did WWII. (WWII gave it a serious boost.) However, stats show that, for example, the Browning Automatic Rifle was a popular civilian firearm throughout the 1920s and 30s. (Clyde Barrow used BARs. So did the posse which ambushed him and riddled his car, and his body. The Thompson gun may have got the press, but the BAR piled up the bodies.) The BAR would meet every definition of an 'assault rifle' except for the fact that it used full-up rifle rounds, not cut-down ammo like an AK or small-caliber ammo like an AR15.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
