Conventional wisdom locates the origins of America’s bizarre gun culture in the experiences of frontiersmen on the fault lines of civilization, and sturdy yeoman farmers who formed the nucleus of all the colonial militias and the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. Out of the trials of the frontier experience and the War for Independence, historian Richard Hofstadter tells us in a much-celebrated 1970 essay, America as a Gun Culture, the idea gradually took hold in the national consciousness that citizens’ unfettered access to guns was a vital counterpoise to the tyrannies that plagued the peoples of the Old World, especially those perpetrated by self-aggrandizing kings and standing armies.

The prominent role firearms played in Euro-Americans’ seizure of the continent from its indigenous inhabitants, especially the iconic flintlock musket, the Winchester repeating rifle, and the Colt 45 caliber revolver, went far in cementing the myth that real Americans have always been prepared to defend their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of… firearms.

The gun culture in America today draws much of its sustenance from this myth-encrusted, flagrantly politically incorrect version of our past, as well as from an eclectic array of gun-toting heroes and anti-heroes, whose willingness to pull the trigger when the going gets tough appears to set them free from the mundanities and petty frustrations that loom so large in contemporary American life.