More Guns, More Money: How America Turned Weapons Into a Consumer Commodity

Like all mythological subjects, the gun country has many origin stories. Some of them start in seventeenth-century British law or eighteenth-century colonial North America. Others begin with the nineteenth-century founding and expansion of industrial production. They trace a path through such places as the “Gun Valley” of Massachusetts and Connecticut, where much of the traditional gun industry originated, and track the rise and fall of fortunes belonging to the likes of Samuel Colt or Oliver Winchester. Others still look to the gun violence of the twentieth century in places like Chicago, Detroit, or New York, cities decimated by the “urban crisis” of midcentury America. Rarely does an origin story for the gun country begin 4,000 miles away, in Helsinki, Finland. But that’s where this one for postwar American gun capitalism takes us, to where the Finnish government, like its counterparts throughout Europe in the years after the Second World War, grappled for a solution to a gun problem of its own.

For many European countries, the war had coughed up tools of violence by the millions, leaving them to rust and rot and warp in warehouses and depots across the continent as devastated societies tried to rebuild. For a host of reasons, European nations had little use for those tools of war any longer. Their populations were exhausted and depleted, and material reminders of the years of trauma were hardly in demand. The continent remained shattered, and the “miracle” economic recovery of the 1950s, which would create or rebuild middle-class consumer societies, lay in the future. And even if Europeans had the inclination or money to buy these millions of guns, most countries had laws, or were passing new ones, that limited or prohibited civilian firearms ownership. As Cold War Europe faced the possibility of future wars, the time for yesterday’s weapons had passed.

So what could you do with them? Storage was only a temporary solution—without regular maintenance, the guns would deteriorate in government warehouses, which needed round-the-clock security. You could dispose of them, of course, but that was expensive: the cost of shipping and dumping hundreds of thousands of guns in the middle of the Baltic Sea was enough to bust the budget of a recovering country like Finland. The price of guns, in both lives and national treasure, was already beyond counting. Tens of thousands of Finns died bearing them, fighting off first Soviet invaders and later the Finns’ erstwhile allies, the Nazis. And now these guns were quite literally Finland’s, and Europe’s, trash.

This is where a young American enters the scene. Chubby, boyish, disarming, looking like a scoutmaster or Sunday school teacher, Samuel Cummings—not Uncle Sam but “Arms Dealer Sam”—arrives at the Finnish Ministry of Defense keen to make a deal. He comes bearing not just cash—though he’s got that, in his trademark crocodile briefcase—but something even better: a solution to the problem of old guns. In return for cash and new military hardware, he wants 300,000 of them, mostly Mauser bolt-action rifles. Though increasingly obsolete in an era of automatic rifles, these relics would effectively suit the needs of suburban American men looking to escape to the woods for a weekend. For the low price of less than one US dollar per rifle, Cumming is willing to take the lot of them, along with 70 million rounds of ammunition, guns and bullets manufactured not only in Finland but also in Italy, Germany, Russia, and everywhere else in Europe, before and during the Second World War. Packing and shipping included, of course. What did a war-weary country have to lose?

Sam Cummings had seen firsthand how Europeans treated the refuse from the Nazis’ continental war when he toured France and Germany as a college student in 1948. Small arms and large littered the landscape. “The tanks had that new car smell,” he later said, flashing his characteristically dark humor. “All they needed was a battery recharge to start ’em up and reconquer France.” But the secondhand market for lightly used tanks was tricky, and he opted to start more modestly. Fresh out of the George Washington University and an eighteen-month stint with the Central Intelligence Agency as a Korean War weapons analyst, he set about acquiring small arms for pennies on the dollar—“arsenal-fresh” rifles and sidearms, as he described the guns, “with Hitler’s fingerprints still on them.”

Along with an eye for a bargain, Cummings had an abiding faith in his countrymen’s appetite for firearms. Having grown up fascinated with guns, he knew that there were millions of American men, especially war veterans, who shared his passion—they just needed something a bit more affordable than the pricy hunting rifles then on offer. By the mid-1960s, Cummings would become the world’s most prolific private arms dealer, selling not only artillery and fighter jets to anticommunist dictators and insurgencies but also a quarter million war surplus guns each year to civilians in the United States. Sam Cummings had succeeded in turning Europe’s trash into America’s treasure.

Cummings was the most prominent of a cohort of unorthodox gun capitalists who bucked the traditional industry and remade gun culture. When the Gun Control Act of 1968 arrived belatedly to curtail their importation business—“They passed the law too late!” he would boast—Cummings’s consumer revolution was already a fait accompli. Gun consumers had come to expect easy access to cheap and plentiful firearms, and in the 1960s they began to coalesce around an emerging gun rights ideology to justify it. The entrepreneurs’ records are mostly lost to history, but we can see their handiwork forging gun capitalism through congressional efforts to control or eliminate their commercial activities and in the distinctive advertising they used to train consumers to expect a bounty of guns in postwar America.

As the United States reached the height of its postwar economic boom, and as its consumer society flourished as the most robust and vibrant on earth, the country also experienced a boom of gun consumption. For years the Second World War had absorbed all domestic production and its end unleashed pent-up demand. Men who had guns before the war bought more. Men who only aspired to gun ownership could now afford them. Men who had served in the world wars sought mementos to commemorate those experiences. The gun-curious and mostly white men—and they were overwhelmingly men, with all the gendered expectations this implied—who were taking advantage of the growing highway system to move out to suburbs and nearer to rural hunting spaces bought cheap surplus rifles to test their interest in the hobby. Young men especially saw opportunity in the bounty of limitless cheap guns. Cummings and the new gun capitalists gave them a taste, and they wanted more.

The seemingly limitless availability of guns, and their low cost in a market flooded with them, made guns into another mass-market commodity in a consumer culture in which Americans increasingly felt nothing should be out of their reach. Mixed with decades-old mythologies of the gun in American life, the postwar gun bounty raised a new generation to believe in gun ownership, not just in an abstract constitutional or cultural sense but also in a material one, because unlike for previous generations, the guns were everywhere, affordable, and accessible in America the dumping ground.

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Though no one did more to create the first postwar gun “problem” than Sam Cummings, few Americans knew who he was. For most of his career, from the early 1950s to his death in 1998, Cummings avoided public scrutiny while amassing a fortune and living an austere expatriate life in Monte Carlo—he did not smoke, drink, gamble, or swear; he rode the bus to the airport; and he preferred his wife’s hamburgers to the city’s opulent restaurants. Perhaps his one vice—besides guns—was his dark sense of humor about his life’s work: he signed off on memos with names like Strangelove and Rasputin, and once, in the lead up to the passage of the 1968 Gun Control Act, he sent a US associate a tongue-in-cheek postcard urging resistance to new gun legislation so that he might “continue my luxurious life on the riviera without worry.” “Levity, in the arms trade, is the soul of commerce,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1970. That sense of humor had charmed the New York Daily News in 1965, when it decided that the bright and articulate arms dealer testifying before the Senate did not meet the profile of the “sinister gunrunner who lurks in waterfront ginmills hunting for a chance to peddle a clandestine cargo of weapons, no questions asked.”

When the press found Cummings newsworthy it was because of his singular insight into international arms deals: he knew the players in every country, large and small, who had or who wanted the Cold War world’s hardware stockpiles. On the record or on background, he frequently served as a source for journalists investigating the global arms trade. When Neil Sheehan of the New York Times wrote a series on the subject in 1967, he turned to Cummings. Cummings bragged about his triumphs, like when he negotiated with the Israeli government, “while Mr. Nasser’s tanks were still burning,” to purchase Soviet-made firearms captured during the Six-Day War. Sheehan figured no private citizen was better positioned to give him dirt on US global arms dealings. His investigation uncovered more than $11 billion in arms sales to allies in the previous five years (upward of $100 billion in 2020 dollars), along with some $30 billion in arms giveaways since 1949. Cummings may have been the “world’s leading private seller of arms,” but the United States was the “principal source of arms for the whole world.” Cummings convinced Sheehan he was merely “a midget compared with the Government salesman,” a fortunate middleman who happened to strike while the iron was hot.

Along with occasional stories of the jet-setting boy-wonder arms dealer came rumors of international intrigue that Cummings never bothered to dispel. According to this lore, he had started as a CIA arms analyst during the Korean War (this was true) and founded his company, Interarms, as a CIA front (this was probably not true); he had posed as a Hollywood producer touring Europe in search of guns for film props, buying $100 million worth of German arms and sending them to Nationalist forces in Taiwan; his first job outside government was with the Western Arms Company, a mysterious private gun seller in Los Angeles that also may or may not have been a CIA front; his nascent private intelligence network keyed the CIA into a massive arms shipment from Czechoslovakia to Guatemala in 1954, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the overthrow of the Jacobo Árbenz government; he sold guns to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, then to the insurrectionist Fidel Castro, then to exiles attempting to overthrow Castro. His infrequent appearance in available CIA documents indicates that while he did work for the agency during the Korean War, his official relationship ended there, and while Interarms was “used by CIA to acquire and dispose of weapons, ammunition, etc.,” the agency “had no control of the firm and no proprietary interest,” as a 1967 memo put it. The same memo did mention that Cummings worked as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

As Interarms generated upward of $100 million a year, Cummings, the company’s sole owner, tried to stay grounded, cultivating relationships with journalists who admired his introspection and candor, which won him a reputation as the “undisputed philosopher-king of the arms trade,” as his New York Times obituary put it. In the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Church Committee’s investigations of CIA wrongdoing, Cummings’s stories titillated journalists. He rewarded their interest with apocryphal references and philosophical musings. He was fond of quoting the last lines of his favorite poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Ode to Tranquility,” which concludes with mention of “a wild and dream-like trade of blood and guile, / Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!” “In my profession I see boundless human folly,” he told Sports Illustrated, which dubbed Cummings “The Merchant of Menace” in a 1970 profile. “This 50-year arms race, this constant undeclared war, is the greatest folly in the history of man. The arms business is idiocy, it’s lunacy without bottom, but it will last as long as man, however long that may be. The world will never disarm. So what should I do but laugh?”

For all the notoriety he gained for his mastery of the shadowy international arms scene, Sam Cummings’s greatest impact on American life in the postwar era was much more prosaic: he sold Americans guns, lots of guns, millions of guns, guns that would reach every corner of the country, helping to create a new mass market for firearms and reshape American gun culture. Beginning in the early 1950s, cheap imports opened the gun market to more Americans than ever before. Their seemingly impossibly low prices forced traditional US gunmakers to adapt to a market for cheap guns that they had not anticipated. By 1968, one of every three guns sold annually was an import. The traditional gunmakers had tried to beat Sam Cummings, and they thought they had when the Gun Control Act passed, but he’d already created a monster: cheapness and plenty would define the gun market in the coming decades.

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Excerpted from Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America by Andrew C. McKevitt. Copyright © 2024 by Andrew C. McKevitt. Reprinted by permission of University of North Carolina Press.