It is no accident that the radicalization of the gun culture coincided with the Civil Rights movement in the early 60s. Traditionalists were well entrenched and it took the radicals another decade to gain control of the NRA but they first started making noise around the time of the 1964 election and the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
The fear was that newly freed “negros” would run wild once the yoke of Jim Crow was removed from them, and that guns were absolutely necessary to cope with this. This racism feeds the gun culture to the present day. It is a given among racists that hordes of zombie like “others” will pour out of the inner city to loot, rape and kill “once the welfare checks stop.”
I have noted many times that a lot of the exurbanites I know have their own mythology about conditions in inner city Dallas. They seem to believe that 20 million people live there, and they will keep coming after your women and your stuff until you have shot all of them. This explains both the fast firing guns and the huge ammo stashes to which these people devote so much effort and expense.