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Introduction: An American Controversy 7 firearms for personal security—even if doing so diminishes the overall good of the community. Anti-gun individuals are more likely to have a collectivistic orientation and a greater willingness to rely on the commu- nity’s structural institutions. They are more willing to forgo whatever additional personal security a firearm might provide, if doing so enhances the community’s collective safety. To understand the decision making in both cases, an observer must center less on the gun and more on the per- son’s general societal orientation. Two Opposed Cultures The individualism/collectivism distinction effectively captures two broad cultural orientations relevant for appreciating an array of societal problems in America. On the issue of firearms specifically, other observ- ers have generated a similar cultural dichotomy, categorizing American society into “Bedrock America,” reflecting a more individualistic orienta- tion, and “Cosmopolitan America,”15 having a more collectivistic orienta- tion. Within this separation, the gun is a stand-in for two particular worldviews. For the proponents of Bedrock America, the worldview rep- resented is one of self-sufficiency and individual independence for the proponents of Cosmopolitan America, it is one of violence and conflict. Importantly, the gun itself has not created these worldviews it has merely come to represent them. Much larger social and institutional events cre- ated these orientations. In adopting these two categorizations, this book differs from many other “gun-culture” studies whose main goal is to identify and examine the specific psychological and demographic characteristics of individuals having pro-gun orientations. These studies use “culture” in a more gen- eral way, primarily as a classification variable that gauges an individual’s standing on some type of gun-culture continuum. Those regarded as gun advocates are then treated as a distinctive subgroup within the larger society, and the key objective of the ensuing examination is to uncover the individual-level characteristics (for example, a person’s religiosity, family upbringing, or beliefs about masculinity) that make firearms espe- cially attractive to this subgroup, probing how these characteristics deter- mine gun attitudes and gun control beliefs.16 These studies are important in their own right for understanding the role of guns in American society, but their focus differs from the cultural perspective adopted here. In this narrative, the gun is merely a symbol for a host of values that define Bedrock America, and the book treats Bedrock America itself not as a gun-oriented American subculture but as the