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12 America’s Gun Wars Illustrating this issue is the controversy in the pro-gun community surrounding the interpretation of Senator Diane Feinstein’s well-known gun ban quote taken from her 1995 interview on the news program 60 Minutes: “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States, for an outright ban, picking up every one of them—Mr. and Mrs. Amer- ica, turn them all in—I would have done it.” Her stated goal was just the banning and prohibition of rifles she considered assault weapons. How- ever, many pro-gun advocates have interpreted the statement as inadver- tently signaling an unstated goal of collecting and prohibiting all guns. This ambiguity surrounding espoused and actual goals makes it difficult to determine whether a particular gun control dispute is over the espoused goal of a proposed new gun regulation or over the perceived goal believed to underlie it. A sensitivity to likely unstated goals is helpful for under- standing the gun controversy, as assumed intentions appear to strongly affect the attitudes and reactions of Bedrock America.21 Organization and Approach This book explores America’s gun controversy by dividing the time line of the United States into seven temporal intervals, noting the import- ant social and historical developments relevant to each interval’s orienta- tion toward firearms. By tracing the attitudinal shifts that occurred in each period, and by examining the influences creating those shifts, the book attempts to show how the roots of the controversy are more cultural than pragmatic in nature and what this implies for today’s debates about guns and gun restrictions. Specifically, the exploration reviews evolving attitudes toward firearms as found in a reasonable cross section of societal mechanisms involved in cultural and values transmission: legislative and judicial bodies popular media (newspapers, television, magazines, literary digests, etc.) profes- sional and educational associations family and religious organizations and so forth. This examination confers a familiarity with the social forces that shaped the ideas and arguments prominently encountered in this controversial arena. What was the zeitgeist surrounding these ideas and arguments, and what historical events formed Bedrock America’s culture? What events triggered reactions to this traditional culture, creating anti- gun individuals fiercely opposed to the long-held gun values knitted into the country’s cultural fabric and coalescing them into Cosmopolitan America? What events moved the pro-gun adherents of Bedrock America to judge the cultural changes taking place not as societal improvements but as ominous threats to a cherished way of life? What cultural forces