Pistol, 1964, Felt banner, 82 x 49 inches, Signed, dated and numbered on verso Edition of 20. SOLD | VIEW LARGER IMAGE PROVENANCE More than 30 years ago, TIME ran a cover story, "The Gun in America," with a memorable cover image by Roy Lichtenstein. The image, called The Gun in America, which is based on the the rare series of felt-banner Pistols, became the image that defined the decade, one consumed by gun turmoil. That story in TIME appeared at a moment when the conduct of national affairs had collapsed into something armed and dangerous. It was 1968, just days after the murder of Robert Kennedy, and before him of Martin Luther King, Jr., when the exit wound was becoming a standard problem in American politics. Though the bloodshed of those years emerged out of many causes, one of them was surely the long-standing American romance with guns--the mystique and abundance of firearms, and the ease with which they moved from one hand to another until they fell into the wrong ones. But that sequence of killings also produced a briefly effective national revulsion against gun violence. Before the year was out, Congress would pass the Gun Control Act of 1968, a milestone law that banned most interstate sales, licensed most gun dealers and barred felons, minors and the mentally ill from owning guns. Roy Lichtenstein's pistol image has become synonymous for awareness and activism in one of the nation's most politically fervent times. Source: Time Magazine