"During My Lifetime, the Love of Guns Has Become a Fetish"

"So that's how we got here. The NRA has won. Yet the group and its compatriots seem no less paranoid or angry, still convinced that tyranny is right around the corner and that federal agents are coming for their guns. The wholesale confiscation of guns was never seriously bruited in the United States. Through the 1980s, even most conservatives considered the fear of confiscation to be screwball paranoia, relegated to self-published tracts like  Behold a Pale Horse, which imagined a 'patriot data bank' kept by the government, 'consist[ing] of information collected about American patriots, men and women who are most likely to resist the destruction of our Constitution and the formation of the totalitarian police state under the New World Order.' Now, however, thanks to the NRA, it's the rare Republican leader who doesn't encourage the confiscation fantasy."

Slate runs an excerpt from Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.

Later it adds another excerpt about Oprah Winfrey.

And adds yet another on the history of right-wing conspiracism since the 1960s.