Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

by Jonathan M. Metzl

On one side of the emerging gun divide, the modern gun control movement took shape after the high-profile assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. An unlikely coalition of politicians and activists drove what in retrospect would be the crowning achievement of the movement, the Gun Control Act of 1968. Although President Johnson saw the act as far from sufficient: “We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves, the kind of protection that most civilized nations have long ago adopted,” he said at the signing. But the law nonetheless brought new levels of federal oversight to the buying, selling, and tracking of guns, seemingly guaranteeing equity in the market.16