Please join us for a talk with Dr. Drew McKevitt, Associate Professor at Louisiana Tech University. 

How did the United States become the gun country? The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer answers, but they're of limited use for explaining the extraordinary and unprecedented growth of civilian firearms ownership after 1945. In this lecture, we'll look not at domestic gun tradition and culture but overseas, to the bounty of firearms left over from the Second World War in Europe. Brash young gun capitalists took advantage of that extraordinary new supply, and in the context of the emerging Cold War, shaped the gun country Americans know today, for better or worse.