The modern NRA probably wouldn’t exist without serial killers or urban criminals
Today, it’s mass shootings, but in the 70s, it was Ted Bundy
By Meagan Day
If you believe the most strident advocates on both the Left and the Right, more Americans own guns now than ever before. But it turns out that’s probably not true.
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) has been asking Americans the same question since 1973: “Do you happen to have in your home any guns or revolvers?” In 2014, it reported that 32.4% of respondents lived in a household with a gun. Seems high, until you look at the previous data: the peak was 1977, when roughly 53.7% of respondents had a gun in their home.
That number had been steadily rising since the beginning of the survey, which means people who didn’t previously own firearms were actively acquiring them throughout the 1970s. The reason: a nationwide spike in violent crime and the media fixation on serial killers had the populace terrified.
A New York Times article from 1972 illuminates the mindset of the decade’s new gun buyer. “A new pattern of fear [is] emerging in the suburban areas that used to be called havens,” it reads. Crime in New York City was escalating rapidly, and residents of Long Island perceived it as an encroaching threat on their own neighborhoods. Residents of Scarsdale installed more burglary alarms than any other community in the nation, but “there are other means that suburbanites are using to ease their minds, with respect to crime,” the article emphasizes. “The chief means is the purchase of weapons.”
“After a burglar recently stole the generator out of his car, parked in the driveway of his Northport, Long Island home,” the article continues, “one middle-aged resident started sleeping with a .22-caliber rifle by his bedside, a live bullet in the chamber. ‘If they try that again, I’ll shoot them next time,’ said the resident.”
While violent crime didn’t reach its nationwide peak until 1991, with the height of the crack epidemic, the fastest and most dramatic surges occurred in the mid-1970s, rising 17.6% in 1973 alone. Big cities, in particular, were falling into disrepair and chaos, with urban murder and assault on the rise. White flight had emptied them of affluent residents and their money — particularly New York City, which had lost four decades’ worth of population growth and was facing bankruptcy. “Welcome to Fear City,” read a visitors’ pamphlet passed around in 1975. “Stay off the streets after 6pm. Avoid public transportation. Safeguard your handbag.”
In 1975, Time magazine ran a feature called “The Crime Wave” that focused on “the sort of crime that obsesses Americans day and night — I mean street crime, crime that invades our neighborhoods and our homes — murders, robberies, rapes, muggings, holdups, break-ins — the kind of brutal violence that makes us fearful of strangers and afraid to go out at night.”
In his book Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, Philip Jenkins writes, “Violent crime was a national obsession of the late 1970s and early 1980s.” He notes that the fear of violent crime was indeed backed up by alarming data trends. However, he explains, “what gave the issue its resonance was that the mass media had saturated the public with images of violence in its most pernicious and sadistic forms. Since 1977, the news media had offered incessant coverage to spectacular crimes and criminals, giving enormous notoriety to names such as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and the Son of Sam.”
Americans were enthralled and alarmed by two separate trends — the rise in urban violent crime, and the seeming “epidemic” of serial killers. Whereas there had been only 19 documented serial murders in the entirety of the 1960s, there were 119 in the 1970s. The Zodiac Killer rang in the decade, followed by the 1973 arrest of mass murderer Dean Corll in Texas. But the serial killer hysteria didn’t fully kick in until the late 1970s, when Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy became household names. “Bundy and Gacy are so well remembered,” writes Jenkins, “because they provided faces to what was quite suddenly — between 1976 and 1978 — perceived to be a national threat.”
But the Son of Sam—who in the summer of 1977 stalked New York City, shooting people at random—perfectly encapsulated the twin menaces of urban chaos and pathological murder. “Hello from the gutters of New York City,” the killer wrote in a widely-published letter, “which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood.”
Time to get a gun.
The NRA had existed for more than a century, but its membership tripled in the second half of the 70s, as more and more Americans felt guns were necessary for self-defense in an increasingly violent society. In 1975, an attendee at an NRA convention told The New York Times, “Call it paranoia or whatever, but in these times the pistol is the last-ditch defense weapon of a homeowner. I’m not talking about defending ourselves against Commies landing on the beach at Santa Monica, or nonsense like that. I’m talking about the guy coming in my bedroom window at night.” The man, from Beverly Hills, typified the kind of person likely to be buying a gun for the first time that decade.
Whether he was scared of serial killers, urban burglars taking a crime-tour of the suburbs, or both is unclear. What is clear is that fear played a huge part in the 1970s spike in gun ownership — the biggest in modern history. While firearm ownership has waned since then, that surge was the first stirring of a fiercely protective gun culture that has largely defined the debate around the Second Amendment since.
