I was in the 10th grade and remember those years well.
Somehow the media blamed it on White Southerners and lack of gun control laws.
The modern confiscation movement began in 1963 and accelerated in 1968. The execrable Lyndon Johnson tried & failed to get national licensing and registration. Then throughout the 1970’s gun owners were demonized as dangerous paranoid kooks on TV & in movies.
Then Ronald Reagan ended the surplus arms embargo in 1983, and during his Presidency it once again became OK to be a hunter, collector, or target shooter.
Then the dam broke with a majority of states allowing CCW.
Now the pendulum is swinging the other way with Red Flag snitch laws in blue states. Confiscation with no due process, one citizen at a time. Registration unneeded when the jackboots are ransacking one’s house.
If LBJ had succeeded, our guns would be rounded up just as cleanly as in Australia, which Hillary Clinton praises so admiringly. By the way, the Australian education system teaches children to be wary & suspicious of anyone known to own a gun.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”