The right to carry a gun, whether for purposes of self-protection or hunting animals, is an emotional issue embedded deep in the cultural consciousness of the United States. By the 1990s, after some eight decades of destruction wrought by the use of guns by organized crime, political assassins, and dangerous psychopaths, many Americans were growing disturbed by their gun heritage, but they remained in a hopeless minority when it came to effecting anti-gun legislation.

The American love of firearms probably originated in a combination of frontier actuality and propaganda coup. When English colonists and Native American cultures collided, the usual result was gunfire from the colonists, who won the Pequot and King Philip's wars and secured their toeholds in North America. When Revolutionaries created an icon of independence, it was the Minute Man, usually portrayed with plow in the background and long rifle in hand. According to Samuel...