The Gun Pivot

This is a really interesting piece on the pivot that gun ownership took in the period from 1985-1995.  Gun ownership had been about hunting, until people began to fetishize the "tactical" armaments from movies that came out during the Reagan-Bush years.  No one dreamed of using their own weaponry for self-defense - and perhaps the crime wave of that time period contributed to the perceived need for self-defense. 

My guess is that some combination of racial panic and the real crime wave of that time period was wedded to Reaganesque rhetoric about the failure of government to do anything right to create the mythotype of Americans defending their home with obscene amounts of firepower. 

And those people are overwhelmingly the 3% of the population that own 50% of the guns and dictate to the rest of us what sort of world we live in.