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Gun Control in The United States

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Published: Jul 17, 2018

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How Guns Brought America the Tyranny Its Founders Feared

I n March 2023, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser sent out a distress signal: “Protect Hawaii and our peaceful culture from tyranny of guns.” The Supreme Court’s Bruen decision had made it legal to carry firearms outside the home in all 50 states, and laws were pending to apply the ruling to Hawaii. “So, guns are coming,” warned the authors: to churches, schools, shopping malls and restaurants. Between “this dystopian future” and Hawaii’s peaceful traditions there were few remaining options.

A gun gives its owner “the power to intimidate,” continued the authors. It shrouds ordinary conflict in the possibility of death. “Once the guns come out,” they warned, “an unarmed person will almost always submit to an armed person.” And that is no way to live. This culture of confrontation ran counter to Hawaii’s values of modesty, tenderness, and harmony. But thanks to a 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court, Hawaiians were going to have to live with the fear and anxiety that follows guns wherever they go.

Tyranny is not too strong a word. Guns have begun to define the American experience, from small decisions about where you might travel to the massacres that haunt the news cycle like the visitations of a malevolent deity. Sold as freedom, they have created the very conditions that the liberal state was designed to prevent.

The singular idea behind the emergence of democracy was the protection of life from arbitrary power. What is liberty? wondered John Adams. Freedom from “wanton, cruel power”—from “imprisonments, whipping posts, gibbets, bastenadoes and racks.” Kings shed blood with little emotion, wrote Benjamin Rush, because they believed they governed by divine right. Republican governments spoke a different language. They taught the absurdity of the divine right of kings and asserted the sanctity of all life. This was not achieved through individual force but by collaboration and consent. In a democracy, power is diffused, and layers of restraint are placed between the restless will of the individual and the capacity to harm others. That was the “social contract.”

"What do we lose by this submission to the judgement of our peers?" wondered the statesman and philosopher John Dickinson. “The power of doing injuries to others—and the dread of suffering injuries from them.” What do we gain? “Tranquility of mind.” Freedom, in republican thought, was freedom from fear. It was an almost literal salvation from the “caprice” and cruelty of fellow mortals.

Unlike today’s gun advocates, who think of danger as other types of people, the founders understood tyranny as a universal propensity—a problem larger than monarchy or the more obvious villainies of history. The hard truth was that violence lurks in every heart, and “all men would be tyrants, if they could.” Such was the foundation of American constitutionalism and the elaborate checks and balances that defined it.

Read More: How Magical Thinking Gave Guns Their Power

The problem, explained one of the most influential works of political philosophy, was “egoism” or “self-love,” a force that made “a man the idolater of himself, and the tyrant of others.” For men are proud and vindictive, noted Alexander Hamilton, and such passions assert “a more active and imperious control” over their conduct than reason or justice. To plan for virtue was “to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.”

“If men were angels,” wrote James Madison, “no government would be necessary.” But few are so. When wills collide, “neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.” Indeed religion often made matters worse, flattering people that they are chosen and somehow exempt from the rules of the game. The wise government was one that grasped the natural despotism of the human mind.

Everything in the American system—from bicameral legislatures to nervous protections against “standing armies”—reflected this shrewd and skeptical psychology. Power was dangerous and always looking to expand its franchise. The virtue of a representative, as opposed to a direct, democracy was that it was broken up, shared, and delegated.

This was the principle behind the well-regulated militia named in the Second Amendment. A militia placed “the sword in the hands of the solid interest of the community,” not the burning will of the individual. The militia was to defense what trial by jury was to justice: safety in numbers. It was protection against anarchy, insurrection, and the “hand of private violence.” The notion that, in providing for a militia, the founders were also providing for that hand of violence reveals a profound misunderstanding of their philosophy. Gun laws, as we now know them, enable the very brutalities that the political process was designed to contain.

The goal of a republic, argued Hamilton and Madison, was to substitute “the mild and salutary” influence of the law for “the destructive coercion of the sword.” An appeal to force was an admission of failure, and the pride of the new nation was the sense of overcoming the sanguinary reflexes of the old world.

When Americans claim an absolute right to lethal weapons, and a right to fire them on their own authority, they are closer to the divine right of kings than the civil liberty enshrined in the Constitution. They are closer to what the philosopher John Locke called a state of nature than the “state of peace” in which true freedom is found. “For who could be free,” he wondered, “when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?”

If the original purpose of government was “to restrain the partiality and violence of men,” in Locke’s enduring formula, guns are surely the nemesis. Every ten hours, a woman is shot dead by her current or former partner. A mass shooting, involving four or more victims, occurs every twelve hours. These are not contests. They are one-way affairs, in which the person who wants to kill invariably can.

It is no accident that the jurisprudence of individual gun rights first developed in the slaveholding South, where guns were the white man’s prerogative and considered essential to the management of slaves. If the Civil War served to nationalize gun ownership, racial prejudice has always provided a vital ingredient: the sense that some people are beneath the mercies of the law. There are good people and bad people—“law-abiding citizens” and “criminals”—and the good people must be armed. The kingly entitlement that so troubled Benjamin Rush has resurfaced in republican dress.

As the famed columnist Molly Ivins once observed, there is a telling irony in the speed with which law-abiding gun owners are inclined to threaten their critics. “I’ve been writing in favor of gun control for years,” she reported, “and people always threaten to shoot me in response.” Her correspondence is full of such material. To Ivins, it confirmed how far such people had strayed from the give-and-take of democratic discourse. It was us against them. The holy and the damned. “Christians don’t need gun control,” announced one of the letters. Go after the bad guys, and all will be well.

The tyranny of guns is more than the killing. It is a cast of mind that can be casual about violence because it sees the world in such simple terms. When a law-abiding citizen commits murder, he is no longer a law-abiding citizen, so the concept survives. But this is not how a democracy is supposed to work, least of all America’s. One king is a problem, thought John Adams. A nation of them is a disaster.

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Reducing gun violence: Stanford scholars tackle the issue

After 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered by a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, many Americans are asking, yet again, how to prevent future acts of senseless violence from occurring. What gun laws need to be changed? Why is it so difficult to pass regulations? How can Second Amendment rights be balanced with firearm safety?

Stanford scholars have been studying these issues from a range of perspectives, including law, politics, economics, and medicine. Here are some of their findings.

Update: May 25, 2022: This story was originally published on Feb. 26, 2018, and has been updated to include new content.

Causes, impacts of gun violence

Uncovering the causes of gun violence has been a challenge, in part because research is limited by federal legislation that constrains research funding on the issue. Scholar Nigam Shah at the Stanford School of Medicine has written about how this has affected empirical study. But that has not deterred scholars from examining its impacts. David Studdert, also at the School of Medicine, has studied the devastating consequences of gun violence, particularly the risks it poses to public health.

Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor of medicine and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), has also looked at the long-term impact of gun violence, specifically among American children who experienced a shooting at their school. Rossin-Slater found that they have higher rates of absenteeism, lower high school and college graduation rates, and by their mid-twenties, earn lower incomes.

Below is some of that research.

Californians living with handgun owners more than twice as likely to die by homicide, study finds

Residents who don’t own a handgun but live with someone who does are significantly more likely to die by homicide compared with those in gun-free homes, research shows.

New study of gun violence in schools identifies long-term harms

Research from SIEPR’s Maya Rossin-Slater finds that students exposed to school shootings face “lasting, persistent” adversity in their educational and long-term economic outcomes.

Shirin Sinnar on the Buffalo shooting, hate crimes, and domestic terrorism

In the wake of the Buffalo shooting, Stanford Law School’s Shirin Sinnar discusses the scale of white supremacist violence in the U.S. and the rise of hate crimes.

Disconnect: The gap between gun violence and research in numbers

Gun violence is much discussed but little studied, largely due to federal decisions governing research funding. A new analysis highlights just how big the gap between the violence and our knowledge of it is. The answer? It’s huge.

Supporting students exposed to school shootings

Maya Rossin-Slater talks about her research into the mental health impact of severe school violence.

Panel discusses how shootings affect those unscathed by bullets

A panel of faculty members at the School of Medicine said shootings can affect the mental health of people close to the violence.

California handgun sales spiked after two mass shootings

In the six weeks after the Newtown and San Bernardino mass shootings, handguns sales jumped in California, yet there is little research on why – or on the implications for public health, according to a Stanford researcher.

Mass shootings: Public face of a much larger epidemic

While mass shootings have become the public face of gun violence, they account for less than 1% of the 40,000 firearm deaths each year.

Short-term hospital readmissions for gun injuries cost $86 million a year

A study from Stanford researchers has found that readmissions account for 9.5% of the $911 million spent annually on gun-injury hospitalizations.

Supporting children through loss

Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann talks about how to help young people experiencing grief.

Firearm injuries in children, teens costly for U.S. health care system, Stanford study finds

The average cost of initial hospitalization to treat pediatric gun injuries is about $13,000 per patient and has risen in recent decades, a Stanford Medicine study found.

Investigating psychiatric illnesses of mass shooters

Ira Glick and his collaborators studied the psychiatric state of 35 mass shooters in the United States who survived the incidents, which took place between 1982 and 2019.

The silent cost of school shootings

SIEPR’s Maya Rossin-Slater finds the average rate of antidepressant use among youths under age 20 rose by 21 percent in the local communities where fatal school shootings occurred.

New study analyzes recent gun violence research

Consensus is growing in recent research evaluating the impact of right-to-carry concealed handgun laws, showing that they increase violent crime, despite what older research says.

Handgun ownership associated with much higher suicide risk

Men who own handguns are eight times more likely to die of gun suicides than men who don’t own handguns, and women who own handguns are 35 times more likely than women who don’t.

Advice on how to cope with the threat of school shootings

Victor Carrion offers advice on how families can cope with the stress of school safety.

Reducing gun violence

Many Americans are demanding practical steps to reduce gun crime. One way is to have more stringent gun safety policies, such as legislation requiring guns to be stored safely, more stringent background checks, or as President Biden announced Tuesday, a federal ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Research has shown that states with tighter policies save lives: One study by Stephanie Chao found that states with stricter gun laws have lower rates of gun deaths among children and teenagers, and states with child prevention access laws are linked with fewer gun suicides in this age group.

“If you put more regulations on firearms, it does make a difference,” said Chao, assistant professor of surgery and senior author of the study. “It does end up saving children’s lives.” Her analysis found that states with the strictest laws had a mortality rate of 2.6 per 100,000 and for states with the least strict laws, mortality rate was almost double at 5.0 per 100,000.

John Donohue: One tragic week with two mass shootings and the uniquely American gun problem

In a Q&A, Stanford Law School gun law expert John J. Donohue III discusses mass shootings in the U.S., the challenges facing police when confronting powerful automatic weapons and the prospect of gun safety laws.

Pistol behind lock and chains symbolic of gun control

Lax state gun laws linked to more child gun deaths

States with strict gun laws have lower rates of gun deaths among children and teenagers, and laws to keep guns away from minors are linked with fewer gun suicides in this age group, a Stanford study found.

Improved gun buyer background checks would impede some mass shootings, Stanford expert says

Stanford Law Professor John Donohue says a background check system that was universal and effectively operated could impede gun acquisition by people who commit mass shootings.

How to solve more gun crimes without spending more money

Simple tweaks to how police process bullet casings could dramatically improve their forensic data.

Reducing civilian firepower would boost police and community safety, Stanford expert says

In addition to restricting the firepower a person can amass, Stanford law Professor John J. Donohue advocates efforts to build trust between communities and law enforcement agencies as a way to enhance both police and citizen safety.

Stricter gun laws reduce child and adolescent gun deaths, Stanford study finds

Laws that keep guns away from young people are especially strongly linked to lower rates of gun suicides in youth.

Gun legislation and policy

For nearly three decades, law Professor John Donohue III has studied what can be done to prevent gun violence in the United States. A lawyer and economist, Donohue explores how law and public policy are connected to gun violence, including how gun laws in the U.S. compare to other countries, as well as how legislation varies across the states, to better understand the effect that has on rates of violence.

“The U.S. is by far the world leader in the number of guns in civilian hands,” Donohue explained . “The stricter gun laws of other ‘advanced countries’ have restrained homicidal violence, suicides and gun accidents – even when, in some cases, laws were introduced over massive protests from their armed citizens.”

Here are some of his findings, and other research related to legislating gun safety in the U.S.

Stanford’s John Donohue on guns, mass shootings and the law in the U.S.

On Nov. 30, American students were once again the victims of a school shooting. Stanford law Professor John Donohue discusses the case and gun violence in the U.S.

How U.S. gun control compares to the rest of the world

While deaths from mass shootings are a relatively small part of the overall homicidal violence in America, they are particularly wrenching. The problem is worse in the U.S. than in most other industrialized nations. And it’s getting worse.

4 gun control steps U.S. needs now

John Donohue pens an opinion piece for CNN laying out four steps the United States should take to strengthen gun legislation.

Violent crime increases in right-to-carry states

Stanford Law School Professor John Donohue found that states that adopted right-to-carry concealed handgun laws have experienced a 13 to 15 percent increase in violent crime in the 10 years after enacting those laws.

Another mass shooting: An update on U.S. gun laws

In a Q&A, John Donohue discusses gun safety law and legislative developments.

Stanford GSE holds teach-in on research into gun violence in schools

Education scholars look at the evidence behind policy ideas to address school shootings.

Will Americans ever think differently about guns?

Stanford medicine and law professor David Studdert thinks more public health evidence is needed before cultural attitudes around gun safety and violence will change.

May 26, 2022

The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives

By enacting simple laws that make guns safer and harder to get, we can prevent killings like the ones in Uvalde and Buffalo

By The Editors

Adam Gault/Getty Images

Editor’s Note (5/24/23): One year ago, on May 24, 2022, 19 students and two teachers were fatally shot at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex . This piece by Scientific American's editors presents the case that simple gun laws can prevent future tragedies.

Some editorials simply hurt to write. This is one.

At least 19 elementary school children and two teachers are dead, many more are injured, and a grandmother is fighting for her life in Uvalde, Tex., all because a young man, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, decided to fire in a school.

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By now, you know these facts: This killing spree was the largest school shooting since Sandy Hook. Law enforcement couldn’t immediately subdue the killer. In Texas, it’s alarmingly easy to buy and openly carry a gun . In the immediate hours after the shooting, President Biden demanded reform , again. Legislators demanded reform , again. And progun politicians turned to weathered talking points: arm teachers and build safer schools.

But rather than arm our teachers (who have enough to do without keeping that gun away from students and having to train like law enforcement to confront an armed attacker), rather than spend much-needed school dollars on more metal detectors instead of education, we need to make it harder to buy a gun. Especially the kind of weapons used by this killer and the white supremacist who killed 10 people grocery shopping in Buffalo . And we need to put a lasting stop to the political obstruction of taxpayer-funded research into gun-related injuries and deaths.

The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime . Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis , just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.

In the U.S., we have existing infrastructure that we could easily emulate to make gun use safer: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration . Created by Congress in 1970, this federal agency is tasked, among other things, with helping us drive a car safely. It gathers data on automobile deaths. It’s the agency that monitors and studies seat belt usage . While we track firearm-related deaths, no such safety-driven agency exists for gun use.

During the early 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to explore gun violence as a public health issue. After studies tied having a firearm to increased homicide risk , the National Rifle Association took action , spearheading the infamous Dickey Amendment, diverting gun research dollars and preventing federal funding from being used to promote gun control. For more than 20 years, research on gun violence in this country has been hard to do.

What research we have is clear and grim. For example, in 2017, guns overtook 60 years of cars as the biggest injury-based killer of children and young adults (ages one to 24) in the U.S. By 2020, about eight in every 100,000 people died of car crashes. About 10 in every 100,000 people died of gun injuries.

While cars have become increasingly safer (it’s one of the auto industry’s main talking points in marketing these days), the gun lobby has thwarted nearly all attempts to make it harder to fire a weapon. With federal protection against some lawsuits , the financial incentive of a giant tort payout to make guns safer is virtually nonexistent.

After the Uvalde killings, the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton , said he’d “rather have law-abiding citizens armed and trained so that they can respond when something like this happens.” Sen. Ted Cruz emphasized “armed law enforcement on the campus.” They are two of many conservatives who see more guns as the key to fighting gun crime. They are wrong.

A study comparing gun deaths the U.S. to other high-income countries in Europe and Asia tells us that our homicide rate in teens and young adults is 49 times higher. Our firearm suicide rate is eight times higher. The U.S. has more guns than any of the countries in the comparison.

As we previously reported , in 2015, assaults with a firearm were 6.8 times more common in states that had the most guns, compared to the least. More than a dozen studies have revealed that if you had a gun at home, you were twice as likely to be killed as someone who didn’t. Research from the Harvard School of Public Health tells us that states with higher gun ownership levels have higher rates of homicide . Data even tells us that where gun shops or gun dealers open for business, killings go up . These are but a few of the studies that show the exact opposite of what progun politicians are saying. The science must not be ignored.

Science points to laws that would work to reduce shootings, to lower death. Among the simplest would be better permitting laws with fewer loopholes. When Missouri repealed its permit law, gun-related killings increased by 25 percent . Another would be to ban people who are convicted of violent crime from buying a gun. In California, before the state passed such a law, people convicted of crimes were almost 30 percent more likely to be arrested again for a gun or violent crime than those who, after the law, couldn’t buy a gun.

Such laws, plus red flag laws and those taking guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and people who abuse alcohol, would lower our gun violence rate as a nation. But it would require elected officials to detach themselves from the gun lobby. There are so many issues to consider when voting, but in this midterm election year, we believe that protection from gun violence is one that voters could really advance. Surveys routinely show that gun control measures are extremely popular with the U.S. population.

In the meantime, there is some hope. Congress restored funding for gun-related research in 2019, and there are researchers now looking at ways to reduce gun deaths. But it’s unclear if this change in funding is permanent. And what we’ve lost is 20 years of data on gun injuries, death, safety measures and a score of other things that could make gun ownership in this country safer.

Against all this are families whose lives will never be the same because of gun violence. Who must mourn children and adults lost in domestic violence, accidental killings and mass shootings that are so common, we are still grieving one when the next one occurs.

We need to become the kind of country that looks at guns for what they are: weapons that kill. And treat them with the kind of respect that insists they be harder to get and safer to use.

And then we need to become the kind of country that says the lives of children are more valuable than the right to weapons that have killed them, time and again. Since Columbine. Since Sandy Hook. Since always.

The only newsroom dedicated to covering gun violence.

In guns we trust, guns are as old as america — but so are gun laws.

Gun restrictions were not always so fraught in America. The second episode of “Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust” explains how the National Rifle Association seized on the Second Amendment to change the course of history.

Go beyond the headlines.

Your weekly briefing on gun violence..

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It’s hard to imagine, but for most of American history, guns were not a contentious topic. The Second Amendment wasn’t a matter of much debate or even thought — until the 1920s and ‘30s.

That’s when Tommy guns, the first handheld machine guns, were implicated in some very visible shootings, spurring the federal gun control law. The National Firearms Act taxed and heavily regulated machine guns — and originally included handguns, until the National Rifle Association intervened.

But the NRA of the 1930s wasn’t as hardline as it is today: Then-NRA president Karl Frederick testified before Congress that he didn’t believe in the “promiscuous toting of guns.” And he didn’t even cite the Second Amendment — he cited the need for self-defense in rural areas.

In the first episode of “Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust,” host Garrett Graff explored the legacy of Columbine. In the second episode, he delves into the history of the Second Amendment, and how it became a rallying cry for the nascent gun lobby. He discovers that guns are as old as America — but so are gun laws.

“Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust” is produced by Long Lead and Campside Media in collaboration with The Trace, and distributed by PRX. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Garrett Graff: A note for listeners: On and across this season, there are repeated mentions of guns, gun violence, and their collective toll on our society and our psyche. Please take care while you listen.

Garrett Graff: The state bird of Florida has been the same since 1927 — the northern mockingbird. The bird you’re hearing right now. For seven decades the mockingbird sat peacefully on its Florida throne. But it’s also the state bird of Arkansas, Mississippi , Tennessee, and Texas. So in the 1990s, the Florida Audubon Society started drumming up support for a new candidate: the Florida scrub-jay. The scrub-jay was teetering close to extinction, and the Audubon Society thought a publicity boost could help increase its chances of survival. Plus, the scrub-jay was endemic to Florida — a uniquely Floridian bird to represent a unique state. A high school teacher who had heard about the Audubon Society campaign brought it to his students as a project in civic engagement, and the kids took up the cause with a passion. They wrote letters to their legislators and traveled to other schools in the county. They convinced thousands of fellow students to ask legislators to put forward a bill on the scrub-jay’s behalf. And the legislators did.

Mike Spies: And kids came down to the legislature to testify in support of the new bird and to petition the government to make the change.

Garrett Graff: This is Mike Spies, senior writer for The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering guns in America, and our partner this season.

Mike Spies: They all went through it — it was obviously extremely uncontroversial.

Garrett Graff: State representative Howard Futch sponsored the bill and brought it to committee in April 1999.

Rep. Howard Futch: This bird has really got family values. The young come back to take care of the new ones. The families work closely together for food and everything.

Garrett Graff: The Audubon Society and the students had thought that the bill would pass easily, but they’d underestimated the vengeful streak of one of Florida’s most influential people.

Mike Spies: So then out of nowhere, Marion showed up.

Garrett Graff: NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer. She had no interest in this break with tradition.

Marion Hammer: You see, scrub-jays are lazy and scurrilous. They eat the eggs and nestlings of other birds. To me, that’s robbery and murder, and it’s not good family values.

Garrett Graff: She’s one of the voices you heard on that NRA conference call in episode one. She seemed to have a deep-seated dislike for the Florida scrub-jay.

Mike Spies: She was the only person who spoke out against changing the bird, and said that the bird had a welfare mentality, and was known for, like, stealing the eggs from other birds.

Garrett Graff: Why would Hammer, arbiter of all things guns in the state of Florida, care so much about this bird? Turns out, the scrub-jay may have been collateral damage for an entirely different dispute — a dispute about guns.

Mike Spies: Some minor gun restriction got enshrined into law and she blamed one particular guy for that. And that guy had nothing to do with guns. Yeah, he was a bird person.

Garrett Graff: That guy was Clay Henderson. Clay Henderson: I’m a retired long-time environmental lawyer and advocate.

Garrett Graff: He was president of Florida’s Audubon Society in 1999. And in 1998, he’d been appointed to Florida’s Constitution Revision Commission. Every 20 years, specially appointed state commissioners propose revisions to the Florida Constitution, revisions then put directly to voters during the next general election.

Clay Henderson: Where I was involved was that we had a bundle of environmental initiatives that we wanted to bring forward — you know, environmental bill of rights, independent wildlife commission, things like that. But one of the other issues that was extremely controversial was to allow local governments the ability to impose a waiting period for purchase of handguns.

Garrett Graff: Much to Hammer’s chagrin, the amendment passed — with more than 70 percent of the popular vote. So when her latest enemy began a campaign to change the state bird, she showed up.

Clay Henderson: And she claimed it wasn’t personal, that she just loved mockingbirds. Well, you know, I didn’t quite buy that. (laughs)

Garrett Graff: The mockingbird had found a powerful ally in Marion Hammer. The scrub-jay had the students; the mockingbird had the NRA’s top lobbyist.

Mike Spies: And she won. The measure got defeated. And then it happened, like, multiple times after that. Every time someone brought up the issue, she would come down to the legislature to lobby against it. And every time she — it almost became like an annual tradition.

Garrett Graff: The message was clear: Cross Hammer, and you — along with whatever your personal scrub-jay is — will pay.

Mike Spies: And that’s just a good example. You know, it doesn’t matter how marginal it is. I think for her, in order to be effective, she had to demonstrate that she could push people to do what she wanted, that she was able, even arbitrarily, to demonstrate her power.

Garrett Graff: The campaign for the scrub-jay continues in various forms, but so does Hammer’s vehement opposition: In 2023, more than two decades later, Hammer penned an op-ed for the Tallahassee Democrat, where she described scrub-jays as, quote, “evil little birds” that “can’t even sing.” Mockingbirds, on the other hand, she described as “family protectors” that “chase off intruders who get too close to their nests.” One could extrapolate that Marion Hammer believes, if the opportunity were available to them, mockingbirds are the type of bird that would keep a gun on hand to defend their home and their property. The bio for that op-ed describes Hammer as a mother and a grandmother. But of course, she’s a lot more than that. Clay Henderson: Florida is like the Wild Wild West when it comes to guns, you know, so … Marion Hammer is primarily responsible for that.

Garrett Graff: Mike Spies spent a year reporting on the NRA lobbyist’s unchecked influence for an investigation published by The Trace and The New Yorker in 2018. In it, he documented how she’s the architect of some of the country’s most pervasive and impactful pro-gun laws, from Stand Your Ground to open carry, and a relentless defender of the Second Amendment.

Mike Spies: The sort of notion to be as confrontational and divisive and harsh as possible, as absolutist as possible, I mean that posture is her posture and has also become the movement’s posture.

Garrett Graff: We take the NRA’s approach for granted today; it’s part of the American political furniture: Republicans are pro-gun, Democrats are anti-gun, and the NRA will do whatever it takes to keep guns in the hands of every law-abiding citizen. But the NRA wasn’t always like this. In fact, America wasn’t always like this. There was a time before, a time with plenty of its own serious problems, but when guns were not the intractable issue they’ve become today. Up until the latter decades of the 20th century, guns weren’t front and center in U.S. politics. And from Long Lead, PRX and Campside Media, in collaboration with The Trace, I’m Garrett Graff and this is Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust. Episode two: “Shall Not Be Infringed.”

Garrett Graff: Guns have been a part of our history since the very beginning — we were after all a country founded in armed revolution — but there are a couple moments that stand out. To understand how guns became a third rail in American political life, we have to go back to the 1920s and ‘30s. America’s relationship with guns begins to change, thanks to a groundbreaking new invention.

[ Newsreel : Compared with modern arms, the ancient muskets were as deadly as slings and catapults, though they made more noise. Contrast them for instance with the Thompson submachine gun, or the “Tommy gun,” as it’s called. It’s an automatic weapon capable of delivering a high rate of fire. Let’s see how it works.]

Garrett Graff: The Tommy gun was the first handheld machine gun. It was originally designed for U.S. troops in World War I, but it came too late to be used in the war, and instead was later made available to civilians. In the ‘20s, amid Prohibition, the guns became a key feature of organized crime.

Robert Spitzer: You begin to hear stories about criminals using Tommy guns to commit pretty heinous crimes.

Garrett Graff: Professor Robert Spitzer has been studying the history of gun policy for 40 years, and has written five books on the subject.

Robert Spitzer: And in the space of a year or two, this becomes a major, major news story in the way that mass shootings today grab headlines.

Garrett Graff: The Tommy gun became a favorite among bootleggers, bank robbers, and gangsters. There was Machine Gun Kelly, nicknamed for his love of the Tommy gun — and Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Bugs Moran, and, of course, Al Capone.

[ Clip from The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: Al Capone. He invented the rubout and the ride, introduced the Tommy gun to gangland. He pushed the button for hundreds of underworld executions.]

Garrett Graff: Two Tommy guns were used in the infamous 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre, a gangland execution of seven men, presumably ordered by Capone. And there was another event that especially captured the public’s attention. One morning in 1933, FBI agents were transporting a notorious gangster named Frank Nash from Kansas City back to the prison he’d escaped in Leavenworth. Back then, the FBI didn’t yet have the power to arrest people or even carry firearms, so they were working with local police officers. They had arrived on an overnight train at Union Station, and needed to transfer the prisoner to a waiting police car for the ride back to Leavenworth. Just as they were loading him into the front seat, a man appeared nearby with a Tommy gun. It was an ambush. As legend has it, someone yelled, “Let ’em have it!” and a stream of bullets pierced the police vehicle and racked the front of Union Station. When the smoke cleared, three officers and one agent were dead. Nash was killed, too. The horror of the scene was quickly telegraphed to Washington, to the FBI’s new director, a young man named J. Edgar Hoover, and made newspaper headlines coast-to-coast. Americans were horrified. The key suspect in what would be known as the Kansas City Massacre was a gangster named Pretty Boy Floyd. Decades later, it would be reported that at least three of the four killed were actually shot by friendly fire, likely from agents carrying weapons they weren’t supposed to have. But at the time, it didn’t matter. The gangsters and their shootouts were seen as an affront to common decency and civilized society.

Robert Spitzer: In the space of a few years, at least 32 states enact laws to bar or restrict civilian possession of Tommy guns and similar weapons, and pressure builds on Congress to take action.

Garrett Graff: Because of that pressure, the federal government passed national restrictions on guns for the first time in American history — what would come to be known as the National Firearms Act of 1934. The law wasn’t a ban, but it would impose a tax and registration system on anybody who wanted to buy certain weapons, including machine guns and specially defined categories of rifles and shotguns. The process was akin to getting a driver’s license or registering a car: You had to be fingerprinted and photographed, go through a background check, have your weapon registered, and pay a hefty fee — $200, the equivalent of more than $4,000 today. And the law worked. Machine guns all but disappeared from the American landscape. The gangland shootings became a thing of the past.

Robert Spitzer: The National Firearms Act of 1934 is arguably the most successful gun law enacted in America. And that kind of set a standard for things that the federal government could do to address what seemed to be the growing gun violence problem at the time.

Garrett Graff: But it set another precedent too — it was the first effort by the NRA to employ the power of its letter-writing campaigns. The original version of the law would have restricted handguns, too, which the NRA believed would make it difficult for people in rural areas with limited police to defend themselves. They mobilized their members to write letters arguing against including handguns in the law. And in the end, the legislation did just that. Machine guns would be taxed and registered, handguns would not. That tweak changed the arc of guns in America — over the decades ahead, gun violence in the U.S. becomes primarily a problem of handguns. Despite their caveat, the NRA cooperated on helping to write the law; they were willing to compromise. And what’s more, in 1934, the NRA’s president told the House Ways and Means Committee that he didn’t believe in the “general promiscuous toting of guns.” He said carrying weapons in public should be “sharply restricted and only under licenses.” And when he was asked whether he thought the 1934 law would violate the Second Amendment, he replied: “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” It’s an astounding comment, given how the NRA would evolve in the next half-century and how the Second Amendment would rise from such relative obscurity to a sacred political totem. That’s after the break.

Garrett Graff: These days, many Americans think of the Bill of Rights as something sacrosanct, a series of protections treated almost with the divine reverence of the Ten Commandments, carved into stone by our Founding Fathers. But the truth is much more chaotic. The Bill of Rights emerged out of roughly a hundred distinct amendments proposed by the states as they originally ratified the Constitution. Many of those proposals overlapped or directly contradicted each other. The Founders didn’t agree about which amendments should be included, or even that they needed a Bill of Rights at all. The right to bear arms ends up in the final Bill of Rights, but not for the reasons we think of today.

Robert Spitzer: The Second Amendment today is the fountainhead of gun rights. But the Second Amendment did not mean when it was written the meaning that has been attached to it in recent years.

Garrett Graff: It was proposed because the states were concerned about handing over too much power to the newly formed federal government — especially military power.

Robert Spitzer: The right that is described in the Second Amendment is a right of citizens to maintain firearms in the context of their service in a government-organized and regulated militia.

Garrett Graff: Militias were the primary force that the new states had for their collective defense at the time. Across the young nation, there were a lot of concerns about both who had guns and who didn’t want guns. In the original wide-ranging chaotic debate over the proposed Bill of Rights, there was almost as much attention paid to the right to not bear arms. In the North, groups like the Quakers wanted protections that ensured that they wouldn’t have to serve in the military. And in the South, there was the problem of slavery.

Robert Spitzer: In the southern states, they were frantic about slave rebellions. And their militias were extremely important in suppressing the enslaved population of their states, which was massive. In some states, nearly half the people were enslaved persons.

Garrett Graff: It all ended up with what we now call the Second Amendment, which reads: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. What exactly that means, though, has long been a matter of debate. For most of American history, that right to bear arms coexisted with restrictions on guns.

Robert Spitzer: Gun ownership is as old as the first European settlers who came here in the early 1600s, but so are gun laws.

Garrett Graff: Gun violence was carefully policed for centuries, first in the colonies and then later through city ordinances and state laws. In Boston, the cradle of the revolution, it was illegal to store a loaded firearm at home. Rhode Island required every gun to be registered in a house-to-house survey.

Founder Alexander Hamilton famously died in a duel, shot and killed by Aaron Burr in 1804. Though both men lived in New York, they had decided to duel in New Jersey because of gun laws, as made famous in the musical Hamilton.

[ Clip from Hamilton: (rapping) Everything is legal in New Jersey.]

Garrett Graff: In fact, both states had outlawed dueling, but New Jersey’s punishments at the time were less severe.

Robert Spitzer: In many respects, guns were more heavily regulated in our first 300 years than in the last 30 years.

Garrett Graff: Gun restrictions continued to proliferate in the 1800s, even through a chapter of American history we think of as the golden age of guns — the Wild West.

[ Clip from Gunsmoke: (narration) Around Dodge City and the territory on West, there’s just one way to handle the killers and the spoilers, and that’s with a U.S. Marshall and the smell of … gunsmoke.]

Garrett Graff: Trains robbed at gunpoint, gunfights on horseback, shootouts on Main Street outside the saloon … Countless films and stories have immortalized the idea of the western frontier as a place of lawless gun violence. But that’s more myth than reality. There were lots of guns, but by the same token there were also lots of gun laws. Even in the iconic Dodge City, Kansas — the capital of our Wild West mythology — there was a sign in the middle of the street that read: The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited. The reason for such restrictions was simple: Frontier towns wanted to attract businesses and grow their population, and they used gun restrictions to help prevent random and indiscriminate violence on their streets. After all, it’s hard to attract new saloon owners and schoolteachers, if they’re afraid of getting robbed or shot. Through all that time, there was never a mainstream gun rights movement; Americans accepted local and state gun regulations. And so did the NRA. Its original mission wasn’t to staunchly defend the right to bear arms. It was to improve the marksmanship of American soldiers.

Robert Spitzer: The National Rifle Association was formed in 1871 by two veterans of the Civil War because both had witnessed firsthand the fact that the typical military recruit during the Civil War basically didn’t know one end of a gun from the other.

Garrett Graff: During and after WWII, the debate over guns died down. More than half of the NRA’s members served in the war. And the NRA loaned dozens of its affiliated gun ranges to the government for free for training. NRA leaders helped draft state laws in the 1930s and ‘40s that restricted or prohibited people from carrying concealed handguns in public. But the 1960s would spell the beginning of the end of the NRA’s era of compromise, and it would radicalize a new generation of activists and lobbyists — the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and a series of political assassinations shook the nation.

[ News clip: Here is a flash from the Associated Press, dateline Dallas: Two priests who were with President Kennedy say he is dead of bullet wounds.]

[ Robert F. Kennedy: I have some very sad news, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in … ]

[ News clip: Senator Kennedy has been shot, is that possible? // Oh, my God. Senator Kennedy has been shot.]

Garrett Graff: Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, a wave of riots swept across major cities. Some department stores like Macy’s and Sears even temporarily stopped selling firearms in places like New York and Newark, where protesters might take up arms.

Robert Spitzer: And in the 1960s, new pressure builds for the federal government to enact some new gun laws, which it eventually did in 1968, enacting the Gun Control Act of that year.

Garrett Graff: The Gun Control Act of 1968 set a minimum age for gun purchasers and required serial numbers on all firearms. It also banned gun sales to people who had a history of drug use or who’d been committed involuntarily for mental health treatment. But the years following the GCA, the 1970s, would mark another significant turning point in the history of America’s relationship with firearms and the gun rights movement. The GCA was full of loopholes. It banned the import of many foreign firearms but not the import of gun parts. As a result, domestic gunmakers actually started making more handguns. And so-called Saturday night specials, became a major concern for Americans. These were cheap pistols that you could pick up for a few dollars. They were small, easily concealable and according to the Treasury Department, they were the main reason for rising crime in 1974. There were more than 100 million guns in circulation at the time. And as crime continued to rise, a majority of Americans supported even more gun laws. But there was an ideological shift beginning to take hold in the country — a rethinking of the 2nd Amendment — that it wasn’t just about militias, but that it gave individuals the right to bear arms for self-defense. And a large number of fearful Americans began to arm themselves.

[ News clip: Today ordinary citizens who would not otherwise dream of having a gun are buying one because they are scared out of their wits. Fear is the biggest seller of guns. Studies have shown each urban crime wave has touched off a new round of gun buying. And yet there is a paradox: People buy guns because there are so many other people with guns out there, especially young toughs. And the more we arm ourselves, the more guns there are for lawful and unlawful use.]

Garrett Graff: Once again, even the President was not immune to the violence. In 1975, President Ford was out shaking hands when he saw a woman in a colorful dress in the crowd. Her name was Squeaky Fromme — a devotee of convicted mass murderer Charles Manson.

[ President Gerald Ford: I saw a hand come through the crowd in the first row, but in the hand was a weapon.]

Garrett Graff: Squeaky Fromme pulled the trigger from within two feet of the President, but the gun didn’t go off. She made front-page news across the country and later would be sentenced to life in prison. Then, a little over two weeks after the would-be assassin’s misfire, another woman, a political activist this time, was inspired. She tried to kill the president, too, in hopes of getting attention to her cause — ending the Vietnam War. President Ford survived both assassination attempts uninjured. But he decided to sport a bulletproof vest at public events. This and other high-profile acts of violence prompted another push for firearms legislation; 150 new gun control bills were introduced that year. Gun owners grew fearful of an outright ban on firearms. And amidst all this debate, NRA membership surged to over a million members.

[ News clip: The members of the National Rifle Association and gun owners throughout the country are sick and tired of getting the blame for the criminal element that uses firearms. We are tired of seeing the criminals receive probation. We are tired of seeing the courts let the criminals go and watch the legislature concentrate on lawful people who own firearms, the honest citizen because he owns a gun to defend himself. That’s what the NRA is about.]

Garrett Graff: The NRA had been against banning Saturday night specials, claiming it would disproportionately burden those who couldn’t afford pricier weapons. And they continued to lobby effectively against new regulations. In the end not a single new bill was passed. President Ford himself blocked the handgun ban in D.C. in 1976 and he opposed the registration of firearms. The NRA denounced the D.C. law and praised Ford for affirming the right of Americans to bear arms. But in the late 1970s, some NRA leaders began to show signs that the organization was backing away from political fights and redirecting its focus back to its more traditional values — hunting and marksmanship. Officials had made plans to move the organization’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Colorado Springs and they were going to open a 30,000-acre gun range in New Mexico. Some members were furious, accusing NRA leaders of negotiating on gun control in exchange for financial support for these projects. And a fissure began to form within the NRA that would transform the organization and irrevocably alter its future, as well as the future of the country.

Robert Spitzer: There was a growing sense that the NRA was not being strenuous enough in supporting gun rights and trying to push back more successfully against gun laws or proposed gun laws. And a dissident group within the NRA decided to try and take control of the organization.

Garrett Graff: This dissident group began to organize a coup. They convinced more than 1,000 life members to travel to the annual meeting for a vote that would blindside NRA leadership. It’s known as the “Cincinnati Revolt.”

[ News clip: Only life members can vote at conventions, and at the last convention, they were able to vote out the former leadership, which was suspected of having gone soft on the gun control issue. The vote gave warning to gun control advocates in Congress that the hardliners were back in charge of the NRA.]

Garrett Graff: This swift, hostile takeover would mark a new era for the NRA — the beginnings of the NRA we know today. This new NRA would require a worthy leader, and there was only one man for the job — the man who helped orchestrate the Cincinnati Revolt. His name was Harlon Carter.

[ Harlon Carter: Any national gun law, no matter how innocent in appearance, no matter how simple it might be, presupposes a still further growth in a centralized, computerized, gun control bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.; a monstrous invasion of the rights to privacy of you law-abiding and decent people, who have never committed a crime and concerning whom there is no evidence you ever will.]

Garrett Graff: Under Carter’s leadership, the NRA would recommit to defending and preserving the Second Amendment at all costs. It would not concede or be intimidated after Oklahoma City or Columbine or any of the hundreds of tragedies that would follow. It would become an organization willing to pay the human toll in exchange for the right to bear arms.

Next time on Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust.

Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust is produced by Long Lead and Campside Media in collaboration with The Trace, and distributed by PRX.

This series is hosted and reported by me, Garrett Graff Graff. It was created by myself and executive producer John Patrick Pullen, of Long Lead.

Jennifer Mascia of The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering guns in America, is my co-reporter and a contributing producer for this season.

The show is written by Emily Martinez. Aleah Papes is the associate producer and a contributing writer as well. Matthew Shaer and Emily Martinez also served as executive producers on this season.

Our theme song was composed by Netta Hadari. Sound design by Claire Mullen. Additional engineering by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. Music by Blue Dot Sessions and APM.

This series was recorded by Joe Egan at Egan Media Productions.

Fact-checking by Emily Barone and Sarah Baum. Audience development by Heather Muse. Cover art by Long Lead’s creative director, Sarah Rogers. Special thanks to Lindsey Kilbride, Ashleyanne Krigbaum, and Jennifer Bassett who consulted on the podcast.

Stay up to date on this podcast and learn more about Long Lead’s award-winning journalism by subscribing to our newsletter, at LongLead.com.

If you like Long Shadow , spread the word, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts — it helps others find the show.

Thanks for listening.

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Introducing “In Guns We Trust”: A Podcast About How the U.S. Became So Divided Over Guns

In the coming season of "Long Shadow," Trace staffers help explain how guns became a cultural signifier as our crisis of violence spiraled.

The Armed Era

Columbine shaped a new era in america’s gun debate.

Gun Control Argumentative Essay: The Definitive Guide

What Is Gun Control?

Gun control refers to the regulation and management of firearms within a given jurisdiction. It involves the creation and enforcement of laws, policies, and measures aimed at restricting the possession, use, and distribution of firearms. The objectives of gun control vary, but they often include enhancing public safety, preventing gun-related crimes, reducing the likelihood of mass shootings, and addressing concerns about domestic violence.

Gun control measures can encompass a range of policies, such as background checks for gun buyers, restrictions on the types of firearms and accessories available for civilian use, waiting periods before obtaining a firearm, and limitations on the number of firearms an individual can own. Additionally, some jurisdictions may implement licensing requirements, mandatory firearm registration, and regulations regarding the storage and carrying of firearms.

Debates surrounding gun control often involve discussions about individual rights, constitutional interpretations (such as the Second Amendment in the United States), and the balance between personal freedoms and public safety. Advocates for gun control argue that it is necessary to curb gun violence and prevent tragedies, while opponents may emphasize the importance of individual liberties and the right to bear arms for self-defense.

Overall, gun control is a complex and contentious issue that involves finding a balance between protecting public safety and respecting the rights of individuals to own firearms.

How to Choose a Topic for Argumentative Essay on Gun Control?

Choosing an argumentative essay on gun regulation involves considering various factors to ensure that your topic is relevant and engaging, allowing for a thorough exploration of the issue. Here are some tips to help you choose a compelling argumentative essay topic on gun control:

1. Define Your Position

Consider your stance on the issue. Are you in favor of stricter gun control measures, or do you argue for more permissive policies? Understanding your position will guide your topic selection.

2. Consider Current Events

Look at recent news and developments related to gun control. Timely and relevant topics often generate more interest and provide an opportunity to engage with current debates.

3. Narrow Down the Focus

Gun control is a broad topic. Narrow it down to a specific aspect or angle that interests you. For example, you could focus on the impact of gun control on reducing crime, the effectiveness of background checks, or the constitutional implications.

4. Research Available Data

Ensure that there is enough research material available on your chosen topic. Access to credible sources and data will strengthen your argument and provide evidence to support your claims.

5. Consider the Audience

Consider your target audience and choose a topic that resonates with their interests and concerns. Tailoring your argument to your audience can make your argumentative essay more persuasive.

6. Explore Both Sides

Choose a topic that allows for a balanced discussion. Exploring both sides of the argument demonstrates a thorough understanding of the issue and can make your argumentative essay more nuanced and convincing.

7. Avoid Extreme Positions

While it's important to have a clear stance, avoid overly extreme positions that may alienate readers. Aim for a topic that allows for a reasonable and well-supported argument.

8. Address Local or Global Perspectives

Consider whether you want to focus on gun control at a local, national, or global level. Different regions may have unique challenges and perspectives on the issue.

9. Check Assignment Guidelines

Ensure that your chosen topic aligns with the guidelines and requirements of your assignment. Check for any specific instructions provided by your instructor.

10. Personal Connection

If you have a personal connection or experience related to gun control, it can add depth and authenticity to your argumentative essay. However, be mindful of maintaining a balanced and evidence-based argument.

By carefully considering these factors, you can choose a great argumentative essay topic on gun control that allows for a thorough exploration of the issue and engages your readers.

How to Write a Gun Control Argumentative Essay?

Writing a gun control argumentative essay involves presenting a clear and persuasive argument on the topic. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you structure and write your argumentative essay:

1. Understand the Assignment

Before you start writing, make sure you understand the requirements and guidelines of your assignment. Know the purpose of your argumentative essay and any specific instructions from your instructor.

2. Choose a Strong Thesis Statement

Develop a concise and specific thesis statement that outlines your main argument or position on gun control. This statement should clearly convey your stance on the issue.

3. Research Thoroughly

Gather information from credible sources to support your argument. Look for data, statistics, expert opinions, and case studies related to gun control. Ensure that your research is balanced and addresses both sides of the issue.

4. Outline Your Argumentative Essay

Create a well-organized outline to structure your argumentative essay. Divide it into an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Each section should have a clear purpose and contribute to the overall coherence of your argument.

5. Write a Compelling Introduction

Start your argumentative essay with an engaging introduction that introduces the topic, provides background information, and ends with your thesis statement. Capture the reader's attention and set the tone for your argument.

6. Develop Strong Body Paragraphs

Each body paragraph should focus on a specific point or aspect of your argument. Start each paragraph with a clear topic sentence and provide evidence to support your claims. Use examples, statistics, and quotations to reinforce your points.

7. Address Counterarguments

Acknowledge and address opposing viewpoints. Anticipate counterarguments and refute them with strong evidence and reasoning. Demonstrating awareness of alternative perspectives adds credibility to your argumentative essay.

8. Use Clear and Convincing Language

Write in a clear, concise, and persuasive manner. Avoid vague language and ensure that your arguments are logically presented. Use transition words to create a smooth flow between paragraphs.

9. Provide Real-Life Examples

Support your arguments with real-life examples or case studies. Personal stories, historical events, or current news stories can add depth to your argumentative essay and make your points more relatable.

10. Conclude Effectively

Summarize your main points in the conclusion and restate your thesis. Avoid introducing new information in the conclusion. End with a strong closing statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

11. Revise and Edit

Review your essay for clarity, coherence, and grammar. Check for any inconsistencies or gaps in your argument. Consider seeking feedback from peers or instructors to improve the overall quality of your argumentative essay.

12. Format According to Guidelines

Ensure your argumentative essay follows the required formatting guidelines, including citation style (APA, MLA, etc.). Properly cite all sources used in your research.

By following these steps, you can craft a well-structured and persuasive gun control argumentative essay that effectively communicates your position on the topic.

Gun Control Argumentative Essay Topics

Here’s a list of excellent argumentative essay topics on gun control to use in writing your argumentative paper. If you like any of the topics but have no time to develop them properly in a written form, please consult our argumentative essay writing service .

Stricter laws could help reduce gun violence.
Background checks may prevent crimes involving guns.
The Second Amendment's role in individual rights and public safety is unclear.
Checking mental health might improve gun control efforts.
Countries with fewer guns tend to have lower homicide rates.
Gun lobbyists have a significant impact on making laws.
Arming teachers may not be the best idea for school safety.
Gun shows contribute to unregulated gun sales.
Gun buyback programs aim to make communities safer.
Community policing could be better for public safety than strict gun control.
Access to firearms affects domestic violence rates.
Preventing mass shootings may require more than just gun control.
Gun control may affect racial groups differently.
Concealed carry laws may impact personal protection and public safety.
Smart guns and new technology aim to make firearms safer.
America's love for guns impacts gun control discussions.
Deciding on gun laws raises questions about federal vs. state control.
Gun violence has significant economic costs to society.
Learning from other countries may inform better gun control approaches.
Media plays a role in shaping public perception of gun control issues.

Pro-Gun Control Argumentative Essay Topics

Stricter gun control regulations get all the hype nowadays, given the recent events in the United States. It may be a smart choice to examine pro-gun control topics if you want to draw readers’ attention.

Making background checks universal can help control guns.
Waiting periods before buying guns may prevent impulsive violence.
Strict licensing for guns is necessary for public safety.
Banning high-capacity magazines can reduce the severity of mass shootings.
Smart gun technology enhances safety and limits unauthorized use.
Mental health screening should be a part of gun purchases.
Red flag laws can prevent individuals at risk from accessing guns.
Understanding public opinion is crucial for effective gun control.
Gun control is vital in addressing domestic violence and protecting victims.
Examining the impact of gun-free zones on public safety is important.
Community policing can help collaboratively address gun violence.
Reducing accidental shootings involves looking at gun ownership.
Addressing gun trafficking requires better cooperation between federal and state authorities.
Gun control is crucial for reducing injuries and promoting public health.
Connecting gun control with suicide prevention is essential.
Examining the influence of corporate interests in the firearms industry is important.
Gun control can be a deterrent, learning from international success stories.
Banning assault weapons mitigates the impact of military-style firearms.
Stricter regulations are needed to reduce the economic cost of gun violence.
Promoting responsible gun ownership laws through education enhances safety and awareness.

Anti-Gun Control Argumentative Essay Topics

Always weigh in on the pros and cons of a certain topic. Although it may seem contradictory, anti-gun control topics can allow the classroom to explore an opposing point of view to understand the counterparts better and maybe come up with interesting conclusions on the matter.

Individual rights should prevail over stricter gun control measures.
The Second Amendment protects an inviolable right to resist further regulations.
Background checks are doubted for their efficacy in preventing crimes.
Waiting periods for gun purchases are seen as an infringement on personal freedom.
High-capacity magazines' direct link to mass shootings is challenged.
Pushback against smart gun technology raises concerns and critiques.
Mental health screening is criticized for potential stigmatization and privacy issues.
Red flag laws need to balance safety and individual liberties.
Skepticism surrounds public opinion on the need for more gun control.
Gun-free zones are questioned for their role in attracting criminal activity.
Community policing is favored over strict gun control for addressing root causes.
Accidental shootings raise questions about individual responsibility versus legislation.
Gun trafficking solutions should focus on local rather than federal measures.
Unintended consequences of gun control on law-abiding citizens are highlighted.
Doubts persist about the effectiveness of gun control in improving public health.
Corporate influence on gun control legislation deserves a closer examination.
Skepticism exists about the applicability of international approaches to local contexts.
The impact of an assault weapons ban on personal defense is scrutinized.
The economic consequences of stricter gun control are considered unintended.
Educational initiatives are suggested as an alternative approach to gun safety.

Gun Control Argumentative Essay Example

As we studied what gun control is, why it stirs so much controversy, and what are some great topics to write about, it’s time we analyzed one of the argumentative essay examples regarding gun control. Keep in mind – it’s for your inspirational needs only!

The Gun Control Debate: Constitutional Rights vs. Public and Personal Safety

The issue of gun control has been a contentious topic that has sparked intense debates across the United States. On the one hand, proponents argue for stricter regulations to curb the rising gun violence. On the other hand, opponents emphasize the importance of protecting individual rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. Striking a balance between these two perspectives is essential to ensure public safety without infringing upon constitutionally protected freedoms.

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution states, "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." This amendment has been at the center of the gun control debate, with advocates arguing that it guarantees an individual's right to own firearms for self-defense and protection against tyranny. Any attempt to restrict this right must be carefully examined to avoid violating the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.

The alarming increase in gun violence in recent years has raised concerns about public safety. Mass shootings, homicides, and suicides involving firearms have become all too common, necessitating a reevaluation of existing gun control measures. Stricter regulations on the purchase, possession, and use of firearms are essential to prevent firearms from falling into the wrong hands and to mitigate the devastating consequences of gun-related incidents.

Implementing effective gun control measures requires finding a middle ground that respects individual rights while promoting public safety. Background checks, waiting periods, and mandatory firearm training are potential measures that can help ensure responsible gun ownership. By focusing on these aspects, the government can maintain a balance that protects both individual liberties and the collective safety of the community.

Addressing mental health issues is a crucial aspect of the gun control debate. Many incidents involving firearms are linked to individuals with untreated mental health conditions. By investing in mental health resources and integrating mental health evaluations into the gun purchase process, society can strive to prevent individuals who pose a danger to themselves or others from accessing firearms.

Comparing the gun control policies of other developed nations can provide valuable insights. Countries with stricter gun control measures often experience lower rates of gun violence. Analyzing these models can help the United States identify effective strategies that balance individual rights and public safety.

In conclusion, the gun control debate is a complex and multifaceted issue that requires careful consideration of individual rights and public safety. Striking a balance between the two is crucial to addressing the escalating gun violence while respecting the constitutional rights of citizens. By implementing sensible regulations, focusing on responsible ownership, and addressing mental health concerns, society can work towards a safer future without compromising fundamental freedoms.

Final Remark

Gun control regulation sparks considerable controversy in the United States due to deeply entrenched cultural and political factors. The country has a long-standing tradition of gun ownership dating back to its founding, with the Second Amendment enshrining the right to bear arms in the Constitution. Additionally, the historical significance of firearms in shaping American identity and the perceived importance of self-defense contribute to staunch opposition to any perceived infringement on gun rights.

Moreover, the issue is heavily politicized, with political parties and interest groups taking firm stances on either side of the debate. Given its complexity and relevance to contemporary society, students should explore this topic through argumentative essays to gain a deeper understanding of the multifaceted factors at play, ranging from constitutional interpretation and public policy to social and cultural dynamics.

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If We Can’t Change American Gun Laws, We Should Change American Gun Culture

Focusing on violence prevention might slow gun rights activists’ arms race.

If We Can’t Change American Gun Laws, We Should Change American Culture | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

To advance gun control, writes philosophy professor Firmin DeBrabander, Americans have to look beyond changing laws and toward changing culture, community by community. Courtesy of AP Newsroom .

by Firmin DeBrabander | November 6, 2023

The prospects for gun control laws have never been bleaker. As states and courts fall all over themselves to make guns more available, the civilian arsenal has ballooned to 400 million guns.

Twenty-eight states now have stand-your-ground laws, which allow you to shoot perceived threats out in public, on the street. Twenty-seven states have permitless carry laws, which, as the name suggests, allows you to carry a gun with no permit, and no safety training.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has chosen to elevate expansive gun rights. In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc v Bruen , the court overturned state restrictions, enacted by elected officials, to assert a new—and according to many, outrageous—originalist standard. The conservative justices said we must look to the period between 1791 and 1868 (when the Second and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified, respectively) to determine the constitutionality of gun regulations—a period when there were few such regulations. Following suit, a Texas judge subsequently struck down popular Red Flag Laws, which forbid domestic abusers from accessing firearms, because domestic abuse was not illegal in the salient time period.

Unsurprisingly, gun fatalities have soared by 20 percent since the pre-pandemic period, and 40 percent from a decade ago. The number of mass shootings continues to rise ; there has been more than one a day in 2023.

Americans don’t want any of this. Gun control is actually popular: majorities of Americans, from both parties mind you, favor stronger restrictions, especially universal background checks. But it’s blocked by politics and the courts. The gun lobby has deftly insinuated gun rights into our culture wars, making them a proxy for conservative values. To advance the cause of gun control, we have to look elsewhere than changing the laws. Instead, we should try changing culture.

In fact, there are already successful examples of this in Community Violence Intervention. CVI programs focus on likely perpetrators of violence and aim to interrupt conflicts before they occur. By halting destructive outbursts by those most prone to violence—and by those who they may inspire in turn—CVI stops the contagion of violence. In this way, CVI programs are the best counter to gun rights supporters, who use urban violence to justify loading up on guns and loosening gun laws. If violence were rarer, it could deflate the gun rights cause.

One prominent CVI program was Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, directed by the noted criminologist David Kennedy in the mid-1990s. Kennedy organized “call-ins” with the “less than 1% of the city’s youth…responsible for more than 60% of youth homicide.” At the call-ins, police addressed the gang members, spelling out the harsh penalties that await them if they continue a life of crime, while parole officers, social workers and members of community groups explained how the youths could change their lives. They gave them information about how to get a GED, relocate their homes, and find help for drug addiction or mental health problems. Youth homicides dropped nearly 75% within a year.

Other cities—Indianapolis, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Oakland, Los Angeles—implemented their own versions of the program over the next two decades, and saw success. Yet most all lost steam in the face of recurring challenges. In Boston, Operation Ceasefire lapsed after its directors got promotions and their successors failed to coordinate the complex and broad support needed for the program to succeed.

CVI’s holistic approach requires patience, which makes it politically unappealing and unpopular. After Baltimore implemented its version of Operation Ceasefire in 1999, the newly elected mayor, Martin O’Malley, decided it was too slow. He opted for a version of Broken Windows policing, which operates on the premise that no infraction, no matter how small, should be tolerated, in order to stem a culture of lawlessness that nurtures violent crime. Police targeted loiterers and roughly removed people from high crime neighborhoods after dark. Murders fell, but this approach was not sustainable, as it gravely eroded community trust.

Baltimore’s next mayor after O’Malley, Sheila Dixon, welcomed Safe Streets, which uses another model of CVI called the Cure Violence approach that deploys “violence interrupters” to defuse brewing conflicts between individuals and groups. The interrupters hail from the communities they serve, and are often former gang members. They are paired with, or followed by, outreach workers who connect the youths with social services needed to escape lives of crime.

This model builds on the approach of Operation Ceasefire, but further separates the work of violence deterrence from policing. Violence interrupters strenuously avoid any link to police. They insert themselves amidst warring parties, especially when tensions mount. They visit hospitals after gang members are shot, to learn of plans for vengeance. Much of their work involves “meeting one on one with aggrieved individuals, hosting small group peace-keeping sessions…creating cognitive dissonance by demonstrating contradictory thinking…allowing parties to air their grievances…and buying time to let emotions cool.”

After Dixon was convicted of embezzlement and unceremoniously removed from office, the new leadership reintroduced coercive police measures, which landed the city in riots in 2015 after Freddie Gray died in police custody. But while the city’s murder rate in the city has spiked since 2015, it is markedly lower in neighborhoods where Safe Streets operates .

Police don’t care for CVI models, because they see them as resource-intensive and insufficiently punitive. CVI requires constant attention to a city’s drivers of crime, which can quickly change. Police also dismiss CVI as effective for small and targeted areas, but not for whole cities. Yet violent crime is driven by a few key actors. CVI aims to zero in on them, and nip cycles of violence in the bud.

CVI received a boost from the federal government in President Biden’s vast infrastructure bill. Baltimore was given $50 million to spend in three years on Safe Streets and violence deterrence. This is still a pittance compared to what traditional policing receives. And there is reason to worry that the time line for success is too short.

Politicians and voters are smitten with coercive policing, which reliably blows up in our faces by eroding rule of law. When police behave violently, they send the message that lawlessness is endemic to a community, so much so that it has infected the police, too.

In this way, coercive policing has much in common with the gun rights movement. They share instinctive desires to punish. And they both suggest we can simply crush wrongdoing through force. In our armed society, however, this is hard to do. Even the police increasingly find themselves outgunned .

CVI approaches change our cultural approach to violence, seeing it as something that can be prevented rather than something that necessitates an even greater show of violence in response. As a society, we will not achieve lasting order and respect for law through force—whether it’s delivered by the police or by gun owners. Violence is contagious. It prompts and incites more violence.

In a political moment in which gun control seems politically infeasible, CVI can help stem demand for firearms by those who are responsible for urban violence, and in turn, give gun-rights activists less reason to arm themselves. Still, it’s reasonable to wonder how this approach can be fully effective so long as guns remain frightfully plentiful and gun laws recklessly permissive. Gun control would make the jobs of violence interrupters much easier.

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Persuasive Essay Guide

Persuasive Essay About Gun Control

Read Excellent Examples of Persuasive Essay About Gun Control

Persuasive Essay Examples on Gun Control

Start with these general persuasive essay samples on gun control. They will help you understand what makes a good gun control essay.

Check out these examples:

Persuasive Essay about Gun Control

Persuasive Essay Examples Gun Control

Want persuasive examples on other topics? Check out our persuasive essay examples blog to find samples on a variety of topics.

Persuasive Essay Against Gun Control

Check out these few examples of anti-gun control essays. These will help you understand the arguments of those who are against gun control.

Why Gun Control is Bad

Argumentative Essay Against Gun Control

Check out this short video below on the pros and cons of gun control to find good arguments for both sides.

Persuasive Essay on Pro-Gun Control

Some people believe that stricter gun control laws should be a priority to prevent gun violence. Here are some examples that will introduce you to their arguments in detail.

Why We Need Gun Control Essay

The Pros of Gun Control Essay

Free Persuasive Essay on Gun Control

Argumentative Essay About Gun Control

An argumentative essay about gun control is a paper that looks at both sides of the debate on this important issue. The goal is to make sure that you can support your position with facts, figures, and logical arguments.

Read these argumentative essay examples about gun control to see how it's done!

Steps to Write a Persuasive Essay

Now that you have read some good examples of persuasive essays about gun control, it's time for you to start writing your own paper.

But how exactly do you write a good essay by yourself? Here are some steps you should follow:

Step 1- Research the Topic

Before you start writing your essay, it’s important to do some research on gun control.

Read up on the different arguments and viewpoints on the issue to get a better understanding of what you are discussing. Gather as many facts and evidence as you need.

Make sure to take notes, so you can cite anything you use later.

Step 2- Make an Outline

Having a persuasive essay outline will help you stay organized and on track.

Start by making an outline of the main points you want to discuss in your essay. Then, break it down into subsections with specific facts and arguments.

In short, make sure to create a clear structure for your essay.

Step 3- Take a Stance

After doing your research, decide which side of the debate you agree with. Choose one side of the debate. Decide if you're going to argue for or against gun control. Make sure to choose an opinion that you can defend with logical arguments. Moreover, stay consistent throughout your paper about your stance.

Step 4- Support Your Arguments

When making your arguments, make sure to back them up with evidence. Use data, statistics, and quotes from experts to strengthen your points. In addition, you should use rhetorical strategies such as ethos, pathos, and logos to make your essay more effective.

Step 5- Address the Opposition

Make sure to address any counterarguments that you come across while researching or writing your essay. This will show your readers that you have done your research and considered both sides of the argument.

Step 6- Proofread and Revise

Before submitting your paper, make sure to proofread for any mistakes or typos. Having a second pair of eyes look over your work can help catch any errors that you may have missed.

Take your time to revise and edit your essay. Make sure that each point is clearly laid out and supported with facts, figures, and logic. This is important to make sure that the essay is compelling and error-free!

Persuasive Essay Topics about Gun Control

Wondering which gun topic you should write about? Here are a few persuasive essay topics related to gun control that you can choose.

The Impact of Stricter Gun Control Laws on Reducing Gun Violence
The Role of Background Checks in Preventing Firearms Access for Criminals
Mental Health and Gun Control: Addressing the Connection
Gun Control vs. Second Amendment Rights: Finding a Balance
The Necessity of Banning Assault Weapons for Public Safety
Why Gun Control Won’t End School Shootings
The Influence of Lobbying Groups like the NRA on Gun Control Policies
The International Perspective: Comparing Gun Control Measures in Different Countries
How Can Gun Control Help Suicide Prevention
The Economics of Gun Control: Analyzing the Costs and Benefits of Stricter Regulations

Want persuasive topics on other subjects? Check out our list of 200+ engaging and interesting persuasive essay topics to get topic ideas.

To sum it up for you,

Gun control is an important issue that needs to be discussed in our society. The example essays in this blog have helped to show different arguments for and against gun control. In addition, you got some useful steps on how to write a persuasive essay about this topic.

Whether you are for or against gun control, make sure to conduct thorough research and use evidence when writing your paper.

So keep these steps in mind and start writing your own gun control essay today!

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How the Parkland shooting changed America’s gun debate

It led to stronger gun laws. But it also may have caused a longer-term shift in America’s gun politics.

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Parkland activist David Hogg addresses the March for Our Lives rally on March 24, 2018.

2018 may have been the year when Americans finally started getting really, genuinely fed up with mass shootings.

In February, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, led to a new movement — the March for Our Lives — advocating for stricter gun laws. But its work did not stop with a march and some protests around the country; the movement, along with other work by other gun control advocacy groups, managed to get major legislative and electoral victories throughout the rest of the year.

The victories could endure beyond 2018. Now that Democrats, who ran in part on gun control, have seized control not just of the US House but several state legislatures and governors’ mansions, they will have a chance to implement or at least push for stronger firearm laws.

What happens next depends on how engaged American voters remain on this issue in the years to come. While the aftermath of the Parkland shooting suggests that there may have been a shift in this debate, the permanence of that change is far from guaranteed.

Gun control has long suffered from an intensity gap: Opponents of stricter gun laws are willing to vote based on that one issue, while supporters of gun control usually aren’t. It’s possible that the effects of 2018 will fade away, and the nation will return to its usual combination of initial sorrow and ultimate inaction after mass shootings. But if the trends of 2018 hold and the gap really does narrow, it will mean that the aftermath of the Parkland shooting won’t just help gun control advocates win over the next couple years — it could be a longer-term change for America.

A lot of gun control legislation passed

After mass shootings, it’s easy to look at the aftermath in Congress and despair: How is it that no matter what happens nothing gets done?

But the federal government is not the only one making new gun laws in America. The states are busy doing their own thing as well. And at the state level, a lot happened in 2018.

According to the Giffords Law Center (which supports stricter gun laws), 26 states and Washington, DC, enacted a total of 67 new gun control laws this year — more than triple the number of stricter gun laws enacted in 2017. The 2018 measures include a higher minimum age to buy guns, restrictions for domestic abusers, “red flag” laws that let law enforcement take away guns from people deemed a risk, and new urban gun violence reduction programs.

Some of these passed in states with Republican leaders. In Florida, the GOP-controlled legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Scott approved legislation that raised the minimum age to buy guns and added a waiting period for firearm purchases, among other changes. In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed gun control laws that included expanded background checks and a “red flag” law.

At the same time, there was a decrease in the number of new laws loosening access to guns. So Parkland didn’t just apparently inspire more support for gun control; it also led to less support for new, less-restrictive gun laws.

Maggie Astor and Karl Russell reported for the New York Times that NRA data “shows a similar overall trend this year, with gun control measures passed overtaking pro-gun measures for the first time in at least six years, though to a lesser extent than the Giffords data shows.”

There are limitations to the state-level measures. As long as some states maintain weak gun laws, people can simply cross state lines and obtain firearms in those gun-friendly states. This is a big problem in places with stronger gun laws, including Chicago , Massachusetts , and New York . That’s why stronger federal laws are needed.

Still, the gun control laws are significant measures that are now on the books and, based on the research , will reduce gun deaths, even if federal laws would have a stronger effect. And the big reason for that is the activism surrounding Parkland.

The intensity gap on guns may be closing

Of course, no one believes that what happened in 2018 is anywhere near enough to solve America’s gun violence problem. The bigger question is whether the Parkland movement had a significant effect on longer-term trends, which may over time lead to stronger gun laws.

When it comes to overall support for stronger gun laws, there was a significant spike shortly after Parkland: Based on Gallup’s surveys , support for stricter gun laws in March 2018 hit 67 percent, up from 55 percent in October 2016 and 60 percent in October 2017 (after the Las Vegas mass shooting ). But that support dropped by October this year to 61 percent — still higher than it was previously, but not that far off historical levels.

A chart for Gallup’s surveys on gun laws.

So Parkland may not have led to a big, permanent boost in support for gun control — at least, not levels of support that are historically anomalous.

But if you look at the chart above, it should become pretty clear that there’s almost always been majority support for stricter gun laws. If anything, Gallup’s findings understate levels of support for gun control: When people are asked about specific policies , support climbs to the 70s and 80s.

The problem, then, has never been whether a majority of Americans support gun control. The problem, instead, is what’s known as the intensity gap: Essentially, even though more Americans support gun control laws, those on the side opposing stricter measures have long been more passionate about the issue — more likely to make guns the one issue they vote on, more likely to call their representatives in Congress, and so on.

As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, “The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their ‘control’ position?” Probably not, he suggested, “but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this.”

This is where gun control advocates need to make some movement. And there are signs that there really was some movement following Parkland.

For one, a lot of people turned out to protest during the March for Our Lives earlier this year. It’s notoriously difficult to gauge the effects of these kinds of demonstrations, but it’s notable that the protests around the country numbered in the hundreds of thousands and became one of the biggest youth-led protests in decades .

Americans also seem increasingly fed up with mass shootings. According to a poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, US adults’ second-most common response for the most important event of the year, after the improving economy, was mass shootings. There were similar findings in 2017, which also had a lot of high-profile mass shootings. These tragedies are clearly getting a lot of Americans’ attention.

The other important indicator here is that politicians who backed gun control won big this year in the midterm elections. This was partly a result of a blue wave, since Democrats are simply more likely to support stricter gun laws. (Although some Democrats, particularly in more conservative areas , are still running gun-friendly campaigns.)

But it’s notable that some Democrats ran strongly on guns and won. Alex Yablon and Daniel Nass at the Trace pointed to Jason Crow, who won a House seat in Colorado, as “the poster boy for proudly pro-gun control Democrats in twin late-season articles in the New York Times (‘Bearing F’s From the NRA, Some Democrats Are Campaigning Openly on Guns’) and Washington Post (‘Suburban Democrats Campaign on Gun-Control Policies as NRA Spending Plummets’) summing up the new political dynamic in swing state suburbs.”

Equally important, Republicans who supported gun control also won. That includes Vermont Gov. Scott, who won reelection in a state that, despite its liberal reputation, has long been resistant to gun laws. And it includes Florida Gov. Scott, who beat Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson in the US Senate race.

In the past, NRA criticism may have ended both these candidates. But even though the NRA downgraded both of them in its candidate scorecards, they won their respective elections.

These midterm elections will have longer-term impacts. As Reid Wilson reported for the Hill , newly elected Democrats are planning to push for stricter gun laws at the state and federal levels in the next year.

Beyond 2019, the midterm elections showed that candidates can support stronger gun laws — and even focus a campaign on the issue — and still win elections, even in states that have been resistant to stronger gun laws in the past. This is a shift: Since 1994 , when stricter gun laws were partly blamed for electoral losses, Democrats have often shied away from the issue.

It remains to be seen whether the shift on guns will hold in the coming years. But if it does, it would amount to a significant change in America’s politics — one that can be pinpointed back to Parkland.

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Key facts about Americans and guns

A customer shops for a handgun at a gun store in Florida.

Guns are deeply ingrained in American society and the nation’s political debates.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, and about a third of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun. At the same time, in response to concerns such as rising gun death rates and mass shootings , President Joe Biden has proposed gun policy legislation that would expand on the bipartisan gun safety bill Congress passed last year.

Here are some key findings about Americans’ views of gun ownership, gun policy and other subjects, drawn primarily from a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June 2023 .

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to summarize key facts about Americans and guns. We used data from recent Center surveys to provide insights into Americans’ views on gun policy and how those views have changed over time, as well as to examine the proportion of adults who own guns and their reasons for doing so.

The analysis draws primarily from a survey of 5,115 U.S. adults conducted from June 5 to June 11, 2023. Everyone who took part in the surveys cited is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for the analysis on gun ownership , the questions used for the analysis on gun policy , and the survey’s methodology .

Additional information about the fall 2022 survey of parents and its methodology can be found at the link in the text of this post.

Measuring gun ownership in the United States comes with unique challenges. Unlike many demographic measures, there is not a definitive data source from the government or elsewhere on how many American adults own guns.

The Pew Research Center survey conducted June 5-11, 2023, on the Center’s American Trends Panel, asks about gun ownership using two separate questions to measure personal and household ownership. About a third of adults (32%) say they own a gun, while another 10% say they do not personally own a gun but someone else in their household does. These shares have changed little from surveys conducted in 2021 and 2017 . In each of those surveys, 30% reported they owned a gun.

These numbers are largely consistent with rates of gun ownership reported by Gallup , but somewhat higher than those reported by NORC’s General Social Survey . Those surveys also find only modest changes in recent years.

The FBI maintains data on background checks on individuals attempting to purchase firearms in the United States. The FBI reported a surge in background checks in 2020 and 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic. The number of federal background checks declined in 2022 and through the first half of this year, according to FBI statistics .

About four-in-ten U.S. adults say they live in a household with a gun, including 32% who say they personally own one, according to an August report based on our June survey. These numbers are virtually unchanged since the last time we asked this question in 2021.

There are differences in gun ownership rates by political affiliation, gender, community type and other factors.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more than twice as likely as Democrats and Democratic leaners to say they personally own a gun (45% vs. 20%).
40% of men say they own a gun, compared with 25% of women.
47% of adults living in rural areas report personally owning a firearm, as do smaller shares of those who live in suburbs (30%) or urban areas (20%).
38% of White Americans own a gun, compared with smaller shares of Black (24%), Hispanic (20%) and Asian (10%) Americans.

A bar chart showing that nearly a third of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun.

Personal protection tops the list of reasons gun owners give for owning a firearm. About three-quarters (72%) of gun owners say that protection is a major reason they own a gun. Considerably smaller shares say that a major reason they own a gun is for hunting (32%), for sport shooting (30%), as part of a gun collection (15%) or for their job (7%).

The reasons behind gun ownership have changed only modestly since our 2017 survey of attitudes toward gun ownership and gun policies. At that time, 67% of gun owners cited protection as a major reason they owned a firearm.

A bar chart showing that nearly three-quarters of U.S. gun owners cite protection as a major reason they own a gun.

Gun owners tend to have much more positive feelings about having a gun in the house than non-owners who live with them. For instance, 71% of gun owners say they enjoy owning a gun – but far fewer non-gun owners in gun-owning households (31%) say they enjoy having one in the home. And while 81% of gun owners say owning a gun makes them feel safer, a narrower majority (57%) of non-owners in gun households say the same about having a firearm at home. Non-owners are also more likely than owners to worry about having a gun in the home (27% vs. 12%, respectively).

Feelings about gun ownership also differ by political affiliation, even among those who personally own firearms. Republican gun owners are more likely than Democratic owners to say owning a gun gives them feelings of safety and enjoyment, while Democratic owners are more likely to say they worry about having a gun in the home.

A chart showing the differences in feelings about guns between gun owners and non-owners in gun households.

Non-gun owners are split on whether they see themselves owning a firearm in the future. About half (52%) of Americans who don’t own a gun say they could never see themselves owning one, while nearly as many (47%) could imagine themselves as gun owners in the future.

Among those who currently do not own a gun:

A bar chart that shows non-gun owners are divided on whether they could see themselves owning a gun in the future.

61% of Republicans and 40% of Democrats who don’t own a gun say they would consider owning one in the future.
56% of Black non-owners say they could see themselves owning a gun one day, compared with smaller shares of White (48%), Hispanic (40%) and Asian (38%) non-owners.

Americans are evenly split over whether gun ownership does more to increase or decrease safety. About half (49%) say it does more to increase safety by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves, but an equal share say gun ownership does more to reduce safety by giving too many people access to firearms and increasing misuse.

A bar chart that shows stark differences in views on whether gun ownership does more to increase or decrease safety in the U.S.

Republicans and Democrats differ on this question: 79% of Republicans say that gun ownership does more to increase safety, while a nearly identical share of Democrats (78%) say that it does more to reduce safety.

Urban and rural Americans also have starkly different views. Among adults who live in urban areas, 64% say gun ownership reduces safety, while 34% say it does more to increase safety. Among those who live in rural areas, 65% say gun ownership increases safety, compared with 33% who say it does more to reduce safety. Those living in the suburbs are about evenly split.

Americans increasingly say that gun violence is a major problem. Six-in-ten U.S. adults say gun violence is a very big problem in the country today, up 9 percentage points from spring 2022. In the survey conducted this June, 23% say gun violence is a moderately big problem, and about two-in-ten say it is either a small problem (13%) or not a problem at all (4%).

Looking ahead, 62% of Americans say they expect the level of gun violence to increase over the next five years. This is double the share who expect it to stay the same (31%). Just 7% expect the level of gun violence to decrease.

A line chart that shows a growing share of Americans say gun violence is a 'very big national problem.

A majority of Americans (61%) say it is too easy to legally obtain a gun in this country. Another 30% say the ease of legally obtaining a gun is about right, and 9% say it is too hard to get a gun. Non-gun owners are nearly twice as likely as gun owners to say it is too easy to legally obtain a gun (73% vs. 38%). Meanwhile, gun owners are more than twice as likely as non-owners to say the ease of obtaining a gun is about right (48% vs. 20%).

Partisan and demographic differences also exist on this question. While 86% of Democrats say it is too easy to obtain a gun legally, 34% of Republicans say the same. Most urban (72%) and suburban (63%) dwellers say it’s too easy to legally obtain a gun. Rural residents are more divided: 47% say it is too easy, 41% say it is about right and 11% say it is too hard.

A bar chart showing that about 6 in 10 Americans say it is too easy to legally obtain a gun in this country.

About six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) favor stricter gun laws. Another 26% say that U.S. gun laws are about right, and 15% favor less strict gun laws. The percentage who say these laws should be stricter has fluctuated a bit in recent years. In 2021, 53% favored stricter gun laws, and in 2019, 60% said laws should be stricter.

A bar chart that shows women are more likely than men to favor stricter gun laws in the U.S.

About a third (32%) of parents with K-12 students say they are very or extremely worried about a shooting ever happening at their children’s school, according to a fall 2022 Center survey of parents with at least one child younger than 18. A similar share of K-12 parents (31%) say they are not too or not at all worried about a shooting ever happening at their children’s school, while 37% of parents say they are somewhat worried.

Among all parents with children under 18, including those who are not in school, 63% see improving mental health screening and treatment as a very or extremely effective way to prevent school shootings. This is larger than the shares who say the same about having police officers or armed security in schools (49%), banning assault-style weapons (45%), or having metal detectors in schools (41%). Just 24% of parents say allowing teachers and school administrators to carry guns in school would be a very or extremely effective approach, while half say this would be not too or not at all effective.

A pie chart that showing that 19% of K-12 parents are extremely worried about a shooting happening at their children's school.

There is broad partisan agreement on some gun policy proposals, but most are politically divisive, the June 2023 survey found . Majorities of U.S. adults in both partisan coalitions somewhat or strongly favor two policies that would restrict gun access: preventing those with mental illnesses from purchasing guns (88% of Republicans and 89% of Democrats support this) and increasing the minimum age for buying guns to 21 years old (69% of Republicans, 90% of Democrats). Majorities in both parties also oppose allowing people to carry concealed firearms without a permit (60% of Republicans and 91% of Democrats oppose this).

A dot plot showing bipartisan support for preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns, but wide differences on other policies.

Republicans and Democrats differ on several other proposals. While 85% of Democrats favor banning both assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, majorities of Republicans oppose these proposals (57% and 54%, respectively).

Most Republicans, on the other hand, support allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in K-12 schools (74%) and allowing people to carry concealed guns in more places (71%). These proposals are supported by just 27% and 19% of Democrats, respectively.

Gun ownership is linked with views on gun policies. Americans who own guns are less likely than non-owners to favor restrictions on gun ownership, with a notable exception. Nearly identical majorities of gun owners (87%) and non-owners (89%) favor preventing mentally ill people from buying guns.

A dot plot that shows, within each party, gun owners are more likely than non-owners to favor expanded access to guns.

Within both parties, differences between gun owners and non-owners are evident – but they are especially stark among Republicans. For example, majorities of Republicans who do not own guns support banning high-capacity ammunition magazines and assault-style weapons, compared with about three-in-ten Republican gun owners.

Among Democrats, majorities of both gun owners and non-owners favor these two proposals, though support is greater among non-owners.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published on Jan. 5, 2016 .

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About 1 in 4 U.S. teachers say their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the last school year

Striking findings from 2023, for most u.s. gun owners, protection is the main reason they own a gun, gun violence widely viewed as a major – and growing – national problem, what the data says about gun deaths in the u.s., most popular.

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Firearm Ownership, Defensive Gun Usage, and Support for Gun Control: Does Knowledge Matter?

Nathan e. kruis.

1 Department of Criminal Justice, Penn State Altoona, 3000 Ivyside Park, Cypress Building, Room 101E, Altoona, PA 16601 USA

Richard L. Wentling

2 Department of Administration of Justice, Penn State New Kensington, 3550 7th Street Road, Administrative Building Room: 111, New Kensington, PA 15068 USA

Tyler S. Frye

Nicholas j. rowland.

3 Department of Sociology, Penn State Altoona, 3000 Ivyside Park, Smith Building, Room 128H, Altoona, PA 16601 USA

Associated Data

Recent incidents of gun violence have raised questions about public access to “military-style” firearms and the need for more-restrictive forms of gun control. Proponents of more-restrictive forms of gun regulation argue that such measures will help combat the disproportionately high rates of gun crime in the United States. Opponents believe that such measures infringe upon constitutional rights and hinder law-abiding citizens' abilities to adequately defend themselves. This project explores the characteristics of gun owners living in Pennsylvania and public perceptions of three different categories of gun control. Results indicate that most gun owners have received some form of training and take appropriate safety precautions with their firearms. Further, 1 in 4 gun owners reported using their firearm in self-defense at some point in their life. Regarding gun control, most participants favored strategies intended to keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people, such as required background checks for all types of gun purchases, mental health screenings, and mandatory gun education. However, most participants opposed complete firearm bans. Among those who are the least supportive of such polices are those who are the most knowledgeable about gun crime, gun legislation, and gun functioning. Policy implications are discussed within.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12103-021-09644-7.

Introduction

Gun reform was a key policy issue of the 2020 presidential general election. President Biden and Democratic leaders have advocated for the enactment of “common sense” gun reform efforts, such as assault weapon bans, universal background checks, and increased resources to enforce current gun laws (Lucey, 2021 ). They believe that such reforms will help reduce the disproportionately high rates of gun crime in America. As such, leading Democrats are expected to push to change gun laws in the coming years (Newburger, 2021 ; Phillips, 2021 ). However, while data suggests that many Republicans are generally supportive of gun reform efforts intended to keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people (Cook et al., 2011 ; Oliphant, 2017 ), many Republican leaders view the comprehensive reforms proposed by Democrats as arbitrary, infringing on constitutionally protected rights, and hindering American citizens’ abilities to adequately protect themselves, their families, and their properties. They believe that comprehensive legislation proposed by the Biden administration will only remove guns from the hands of law-abiding citizens and do little to combat gun crime. As such, legislators in many Republican-led jurisdictions have begun passing more-permissive gun policies aimed at limiting the scope of federal (“Democratic” enacted policies) gun control measures at the state level, such as pushing for “Constitutional Carry” laws, “Anti-red flag” legislation and creating “2nd Amendment Sanctuary” cities and states (Balemert, 2021 ; Friend, 2021 ).

The debate is not exclusively political, though. There is also a rift in support for gun control amongst scholars, with some favoring more-restrictive forms of gun control and others favoring less-restrictive forms of gun regulation (Morral et al., 2018 ). The legality and utility of gun regulation has promoted much discussion amongst academics (see Braga et al., 2021 ; Kleck et al., 2016 ; Winkler, 2018 ). Public support for gun control is also mixed and has varied across time, although current estimates suggest that a slight majority favor more-restrictive forms of gun control, but do not favor complete firearm bans (Gallup, 2020 ; Parker et al., 2017 ).

Prior research has attempted to examine correlates of attitudes toward gun polices. Generally, this work has found that those who are the least supportive of more-restrictive forms of gun regulation are those who identify as politically conservative (Kruis et al., 2020 ), whites (Merino, 2018 ), males (O’Brien et al., 2013 ), and gun owners (Merino, 2018 ), as well as those with greater familiarity with firearms (Rosen, 2000 ). A recent article published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice shifted this discussion to the relationship between gun knowledge and support for restrictive forms of gun control (see Kruis et al., 2020 ). In that work, the researchers found an inverse relationship between gun knowledge (i.e., broad “understanding” of gun policies, legislation, and crime) and support for stricter forms of gun control amongst college students. Findings indicated that students who knew more about guns and gun-related matters, reported being less supportive of more-restrictive forms of gun control than students who lacked such knowledge. Unfortunately, methodological limitations (e.g., cross-sectional research design, convenience sampling, student participants, etc.) precluded the authors from drawing firm conclusions about the relationship between gun knowledge and gun functioning. The current project seeks to extend this line of research by exploring the relationship between three types of gun knowledge (i.e., knowledge of gun crime, knowledge of gun legislation, and knowledge of gun functioning) and three different measures of gun control (i.e., general gun control, support for policies that reduce overall gun ownership, support for polices intended to keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people). The current project also extends Kruis et al.’s ( 2020 ) findings related to student gun owners to members of the general public, by exploring the demographic characteristics, training experiences, safety precautions, and defensive gun usage reported by gun owners obtained from a representative sample of Pennsylvania Residents ( N = 522). In achieving these goals, the current study seeks to provide academics and policymakers alike with important information needed to be considered before making gun reforms.

Literature Review

Gun violence.

The United States has disproportionately high rates of gun violence for a developed country (Grinshteyn & Hemenway, 2019 ; Naghavi et al., 2018 ). The U.S. homicide rate is estimated to be about seven times higher than other high-income countries, which researchers suggest is primarily driven by a gun homicide rate that is about 25 times higher (Grinshteyn & Hemenway, 2019 ). In 2019 alone, there were approximately 39,707 firearm-related deaths in the United States, equating to a rate of about 12.1 per 100,000 persons (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2020 )—which is about three times the rate of America’s northern neighbor (i.e., Canada, 4.1 per 100,000; Department of Justice, Government of Canada, n.d.). Among these firearm-related deaths, 23,941 were suicides and 14,414 were homicides (CDC, 2020 ). Guns, particularly handguns, are used to commit many violent crimes and most murders in the United States (National Institute of Justice, 2019 ). In total, guns were used to help commit more than 121,000 violent crimes in 2019 (Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], n.d.). According to data collected for the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), guns were used in more than one in three aggravated assaults and about one in five robbery victimizations reported by Americans in 2019, but fewer than 1 in 100 rape and sexual assault victimizations (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2020 ). In this regard, while guns are used to help commit many crimes, it would be an oversight to ignore that most violent victimizations in the United States do not involve guns (Braga et al., 2021 ). Further, whenever a gun is used during the commission of a violent crime it usually is not fired. In fact, when a gun is used in a crime it is predominately used as an instrument to gain victim compliance. Data suggest that only about one in four victims of nonfatal gun crimes suffer a gunshot wound (Planty & Truman, 2013 ) and overall injury rates for victims of gun crimes tend to be lower than rates for victims of crimes in which other weapons are used (Cook, 1980 ; Cook et al., 2011 ). However, whenever guns are used offenders are more likely to complete the criminal act (Cook et al., 2011 ; Libby & Corzine, 2007 ; Tillyer & Tillyer, 2014 ), and whenever they are fired, victim injuries are more likely to be lethal (Cook, 2018 ; Cook et al., 2011 ).

The Great American Gun Debate

Given high rates of gun crime, many progressives have demanded changes be made to American gun legislation. In a review of the extant literature on firearm instrumentality, Braga et al. ( 2021 ) suggest that there are two sides in the great American gun debate. On the one side of the debate are those who favor more-permissive forms of gun regulation. These advocates tend to conform to the adage endorsed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (Braga et al., 2021 ; Henigan, 2016 ; Shammas, 2019 ). This group believes that more-restrictive gun control will do little to reduce crime or to save lives (Kleck, 1997 ; Kleck et al., 2016 ; Wolfgang, 1958 ). On the other side of the debate are proponents of more-restrictive forms of gun regulation, or those who believe that “guns do kill people” (Braga et al., 2021 , p. 148). These advocates suggest that reducing firearm availability, especially to who they consider to be dangerous or “at risk” individuals (i.e., felons, the “mentally unstable,” 1 etc.) will help reduce violent gun crimes and suicides, and ultimately, save lives. In Braga et al.’s ( 2021 ) synopsis of propositions introduced by the two sides, the researchers argue that the key distinction between proponents and opponents of stricter forms of gun control relates to the instrumentality of weapons. Specifically, they write “The ‘people kill people’ perspective further suggests that gun control is futile in reducing homicides because determined killers will simply find another way. If guns are not available, assailants will substitute knives, blunt instruments, or other means” (p. 148). Similar sentiments are found within the general public as an increasing number of Americans have purchased firearms, specifically during the Covid-19 pandemic, citing self-defense as a primary driver of ownership (Gallup, 2020 ; Schaeffer, 2021 ). However, proponents of more-restrictive means of gun control assume that even if assailants choose to use other means (i.e., knife, blunt instrument) to carry out their attacks, such attacks will be less fatal (Cook, 1991 ; Cook et al., 2011 ; Henigan, 2016 ). Thus, Braga et al. ( 2021 ) argue that the crux of the debate centers on what researchers refer to “firearm instrumentality,” or whether the presence of firearms makes a criminal event more lethal.

While Braga et al. (2021 ) bring attention to an important point of contention within the debate, their brief synopsis of the two sides in the great debate overlooks arguments pertaining to the perceived ability, or inability, of gun legislation being able to effectively reduce firearm availability, particularly to dangerous and “at risk” people. This issue is a focal point in the debate and a common topic that is an important factor for the general public. Indeed, it is almost commonsensical to believe that if there were no guns, then there would be no gun crime; certainly, proponents of both sides know this to be true. The reality though is that there are a lot of guns. In fact, the United States civilian gun ownership rate is the highest in the world, with estimates suggesting that there are more than 350 million guns owned by Americans (Institute of Medicine & National Research Council, 2013 ). These instruments serve both legitimate (i.e., recreation, hunting, self-defense, etc.) and illegitimate purposes (i.e., criminal activities; Cook et al., 2011 ; Kleck et al., 2016 ). Thus, the real questions in the debate are (1) will strict gun control policies be able to effectively keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” individuals who may want to harm themselves or others? and (2) will restrictive gun control measures prevent law abiding citizens from defending their families, their properties, and their lives?

Opponents of restrictive forms of control believe that more-restrictive gun control policies will do little to disrupt illegal gun markets. They believe that such policies will merely take guns away from law abiding citizens who use firearms for legitimate purposes, including recreation, hunting, and self-defense. Current estimates suggest that there are about 15.2 million hunting license holders in the United States (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services, 2020 ) and 9.4 million self-described “gun only” deer hunters (Schmidt, 2020 ). The data suggest that a significant portion of Americans use firearms as a source of legal recreation and food acquisition. Data also suggest that a significant number of Americans use guns for self-defense purposes. A 2017 report published by researchers at Pew Charitable trust estimated that approximately 1 in 6 gun owners had used their weapon to defend themselves, their families, or their possessions at some point in their life (Parker et al., 2017 ). While estimates vary greatly, it is speculated that the prevalence of defensive gun usage in the United States ranges from 60,000 to 2.5 million incidents annually (National Research Council, 2013 ), and whenever guns are used in self-defense, the odds of injury to potential victims is significantly reduced (Cook et al., 2011 ; Kleck & Gertz, 1995 ). As such, critics of more-restrictive gun control “argue that gun control laws could increase crime, by disarming prospective victims, reducing their ability to effectively defend themselves, and possibly reducing any deterrent effect that victim gun possession might have on offenders” (Kleck et al., 2016 , p.489).

Opponents of more restrictive measures of gun control turn to research demonstrating that a majority of gun crimes are committed by offenders who illegally obtained the firearm used in the crime (Cook, 2018 ; Roth, 1994 ). Indeed, research suggests that most gun crimes are committed by individuals who are already, under current regulations, legally disqualified from possessing a firearm due to their age, criminal record, or some other characteristic (Cook, 2018 ). However, proponents of more-restrictive gun control use this same research to cite the reality that most firearms used to commit crime originate from a legal manufacturing or distribution supply chain (Cook, 2018 ). Thus, they believe that reducing the number of guns in such markets will ultimately reduce the number of guns available to be used in crimes (Cook et al., 2011 ).

A recent report published by the RAND Corporation found that members of the scholarly community also tend to conform to this “more-restrictive” or “more-permissive” dichotomy (Morral et al., 2018 ). Indeed, there is great disagreement among researchers about the extent to which crime can be reduced through gun control. While research has produced mixed results, evidence from more methodologically sound work has indicated that higher levels of firearm ownership has little, if any, effect on overall violent crime rates (Cook & Ludwig, 2006 ; Cook & Pollack, 2017 ; Cook et al., 2011 ) or suicides (Kleck, 2019a , 2019b ), and that more-restrictive gun control mechanisms are generally ineffective at reducing crime (Kleck & Patterson, 1993 ; Kleck et al., 2016 ; Kleck, 2019b ). 2 However, some research indicates that there may be an association between rates of community gun ownership and homicide rates (Braga et al., 2021 ), suggesting that firearm availability may increase the lethality of violent crimes—although Kleck ( 2021 ) argues that prior work in this area has produced mixed findings, been tautological, and that the data merely demonstrate a positive relationship between gun ownership and the firearm homicide rates (Kleck, 2021 ). There also is evidence suggesting that polices intended to restrict dangerous and/or “at-risk” individuals (i.e., felons, the mentally ill, and “alcoholics”) from accessing firearms may be associated with reductions in crime, suicides, and violence in the community (Andrés & Hempstead, 2011 ; Braga et al., 2021 ; Braga & Cook, 2018 ; Cook et al., 2011 ; Kleck, 2019b ; Kleck et al., 2016 ; Sen & Panjamapirom, 2012 ; Smith & Spiegler, 2020 ; Wright et al., 1999 ). However, there is more research needed in this area before firm conclusions can be drawn.

Types of Gun Control

Cook et al. ( 2011 ) argue that gun-control measures can be “usefully classified into three categories: those that are intended to reduce overall gun ownership; those that are intended to keep guns away from particularly dangerous people; [and] those that are intended to influence choices about how guns are used and to what effect” (p. 259). Mechanisms that are intended to reduce overall gun ownership are those that attempt to keep guns out of the hands of all citizens—law abiding or non-law abiding. Such policies include firearm bans, limited and restrictive licensing, gun buy-back programs, and policies designed to make firearms and ammunition more expensive, and subsequently, less affordable to the average citizen. Although research on public support for such strategies is limited, data suggest that a slight majority of the general public supports banning the manufacturing, possession, and sale of some types of firearms, such as assault rifles, from public use (Gallup, 2020 ), but few support policies banning other types of firearms, such as handguns, from public use (Brenan, 2020 ). 3 Mechanisms that are intended to keep guns away from dangerous or “at-risk” people refer to strategies aimed at keeping guns away from those who are likely to use them for criminal purposes, or to self-harm, such as felons, the untrained, and the mentally ill (Morrall, 2018 ). Measures within this category of gun control include increased screening and monitoring of buyers and dealers in legal gun markets, creating a national firearms database, and outlawing “straw” (i.e., secondary market) purchases. Generally, the public is more supportive of these types of gun control strategies, especially those aimed at barring gun sales to the mentally ill, and those on “no fly” or on law enforcement “watch lists” (Parker et al., 2017 Schaeffer, 2019 ). The third category of “usefully classified” gun control mechanisms are those intended to influence choices about how guns are used and to what effect. This category includes strategies aimed at increasing firearm design regulation (e.g., manufacturing more “smart guns”) and implementing various forms of “focused deterrence” policing strategies, such as “gun oriented patrol tactics” and “hot spots policing” (Cook et al., 2011 , p. 280) Recent research suggests that many members of the general public may have favorable views of smart guns as a safety and crime reduction tool by indicating that they would be inclined to purchase such weapons if they became readily available (Wallace, 2016 ). Controversial, research also indicates mixed public support for “gun oriented” policing tactics, such as stop, question, and frisk polices (Evans & Williams, 2017 ) which is further complicated by the recent surge in firearm purchases (Schaeffer, 2021 ).

Prior Research Assessing Correlates of Support for Gun Control

Trends in public polling tend to inform the direction of gun policies and the overall sentiment of potential voters toward certain restrictions or measures to be introduced. Much of this data is derived from national surveys which are administered through organizations such as Gallup, RAND, and similar organizations via cross-sectional designs. Wozniak ( 2017 ) notes that public opinion toward gun control has remained relatively consistent although support for more restrictive laws concerning the sales of firearms has declined since the 1990s. The most recent data collected by Gallup ( 2020 ) suggest that approximately 57 percent of Americans believe that the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, which is down more than 20 percentage points since when the organization first started tracking these data in the early 1990s, but up more than 10 percentage points from the start of the 2010s. One aspect that remains relatively high is the support for background checks and limiting access for dangerous or “at-risk” individuals. Barry et al. ( 2019 ) find similar support for the use of universal background checks and limiting access for dangerous or “at-risk” individuals regardless of ownership status to include knowledge and/or safety courses for first-time owners.

Researchers have spent considerable time examining correlates of support for gun control, finding mixed support across demographic groups. Due to this mixed support, an array of proposed gun control measures and policies have faced backlash amid American constituents (see Giffords Law Center for a review of state-specific measures). Generally, though, this work has found that men (Ellison, 1991 ; Kauder, 1993 ; Livingston & Lee, 1992 ; Marciniak & Loftin, 1991 ; Merino, 2018 ; O’Brien et al., 2013 ; Pederson et al., 2015 ; Tyler & Lavrakas, 1983 ), whites (Filindra & Kaplan, 2017 ; McClain, 1983 ; Merino, 2018 ; Secret & Johnson, 1989 ), those who are politically conservative (Filindra & Kaplan, 2017 ; Merino, 2018 ), those who live in rural communities (Brennan et al., 1993 ; Parker et al., 2017 ) and gun owners (Filindra & Kaplan, 2017 ; Merino, 2018 ) are less supportive of more-restrictive forms of gun control than those in reference groups. Additionally, there is evidence suggesting that those who have greater exposure to, and familiarity with firearms (Ellison, 1991 ; Hill et al., 1985 ; Kruis et al., 2020 ; Rosen, 2000 ; Tyler & Lavrakas, 1983 ) favor more-permissive forms of gun control. Recently, Filindra and Kaplan ( 2017 ) found that “drivers of support for gun control” were generally consistent for members of racial minority groups and whites (p. 413). The authors noted that fear, or concern, of crime was generally positively related to support for more-restrictive forms of gun control across racial groups, while political conservativism, being a crime victim, owning a gun, and racial prejudice (i.e., held by Whites and Latinos) were inversely related to support for more-restrictive forms of gun control. Their study, along with earlier work (see Filindra & Kaplan, 2016 ), shed light on a possible relationship between racial resentment and Whites’ and Latinos’ attitudes toward gun control, suggesting that racism, generally, is a correlate of support for less-restrictive forms of gun control among these groups. However, gun ownership among minority and BIPOC communities has continued to rise with the largest increases occurring during the social and civil unrest associated with 2020 (Curcuruto, 2020 ; Parker et al., 2017 ). Crifasi et al. ( 2021 ) extended this line of inquiry and found that minority and BIPOC communities tend to favor less-restrictive gun control measures especially when police or the criminal justice system is involved, but general support for reduced access to firearms remains mixed across group membership.

Other researchers have found that men, generally, are less supportive of more-restrictive forms of gun control (see Ellison, 1991 ; Merino, 2018 ; O’Brien et al., 2013 ; Pederson et al., 2015 ; Tyler & Lavrakas, 1983 ). Some scholars have suggested that guns and pro-gun attitudes serve as a way for men to demonstrate masculinity and to bond with other men. These scholars argue that gun control is perceived as a threat to “male intimacy” and male identity, thus men are more likely to be emersed in gun culture and have favorable views of guns (see Carlson et al., 2018 ). Research has also documented an inverse relationship between educational attainment and support for more-restrictive forms of gun control (Newman & Hartman, 2019 ). Kruis et al. ( 2020 ) recently extended this line of inquiry by examining the relationship between gun knowledge—operationally defined as “one’s understanding of gun legislation, gun policies, and firearm crime”—and support for general gun control using a convenience sample of college students (p. 33). The authors found an inverse relationship between gun knowledge and support for stricter forms of gun control, concluding that students who had greater understanding of gun legislation, gun crime, and gun functioning, were less likely to favor stricter forms of gun control than students with less knowledge in these areas. While informative, this study suffered from a few crucial methodological limitations that preclude the generalizability of the findings. Notably, findings were based on data collected from college students through convenience sampling at three universities. Additionally, the measures of gun control and gun knowledge were broad and prohibited the examination of specific types of gun knowledge and various categories of gun control. Accordingly, the authors called for more work to be done in this area.

Current Study

The goal of the current study was to help contribute to research in this area by exploring public perceptions of various types of gun control mechanisms. In many ways the current study serves as an extension of Kruis et al.’s ( 2020 ) research. Specifically, the methodology employed by Kruis et al. ( 2020 ) were applied to the general public, using a representative sample of Pennsylvania residents ( N = 522) to help answer the following two overarching research questions:

R1: What are the training experiences, safety precautions, and defensive gun use reported by gun owners in Pennsylvania?
R2: What is the relationship between firearm knowledge and support for more-restrictive gun control policies?

Regarding our first research question, we were interested in assessing training experiences, safety precautions, and defensive gun usage reported by Pennsylvania gun owners. We were also interested in comparing demographic characteristics, victimization experiences, gun knowledge, and support for different types of gun control between gun owners and non-owners. Our second research question was concerned with testing the generalizability of Kruis et al.’s ( 2020 ) findings from students to members of the general public. Notably, we were interested in expanding upon Kruis et al.’s measures to better explore the relationship between different types of firearm knowledge (i.e., knowledge of gun crime, knowledge of gun policy, and knowledge of gTillyerun functioning) and various categories of gun control (i.e., general gun control, policies aimed at reducing overall gun ownership, and policies aimed at keeping guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people). We hypothesized that increased firearm knowledge would be inversely related to greater support for gun control.

Data for this project came from a larger study aimed at measuring public attitudes toward a variety of social phenomena, including school security measures, campus carry, and perceptions of the police. Specifically, data came from a 64-question original survey created by the authors and administered via the Qualtrics survey platform. The authors used the marketing research team at Qualtrics to locate and recruit a sample of 500+ English speaking residents of Pennsylvania aged 18 or older. Qualtrics maintains active market research panels of more than six million English speaking, non-institutionalized adults capable of giving consent. Participants join a panel through one of three different methods, including a “double opt-in,” direct recruitment by the marketing research team, or voluntary sign up. In exchange for their voluntary participation in surveys, panelists are compensated with small point-based incentives that can be redeemed in various forms, such as Sky Miles or gift cards.

In the Fall of 2020, Qualtrics sent an invitation link to panelists inviting them to participate in the survey. Interested panelists were first screened to determine eligibility. Efforts were made to ensure the representativeness of the sample in terms of race, age, and biological sex. That is, the marketing team was contracted to ensure that participants were screened in a way such that the final sample would be representative of the Pennsylvania general population in terms of race, age, and biological sex. Then, potential participants were shown an informed consent document specifying the goals of the study, potential risks and benefits, and contact information for the principal investigator and institutional review board. Those who consented were then directed to the online survey where they were presented with 64 Likert scale, text entry, and essay-based questions. In total, 680 panelists clicked on the invitation link and participated in the survey in some capacity. Data quality assurance tests revealed that 522 of these cases were valid and complete responses. Thus, all models specified below were based on the 522 cases with complete and valid data. It is important to note at the onset that our data collection strategy represent a convenience sampling approach. That said, comparisons with population estimates revealed that the data collected were generally representative of the Pennsylvania general population in terms of race and sex at the time of data collection, as well as income and geographical location (i.e., rural or urban). However, the median age of the sample (47) was slightly older than that of the general Pennsylvania population (41).

Support for Gun Control

The goal of this study was to assess residents’ support for various categories of gun control. Three different measures were used to capture participants’ disposition toward stricter forms of gun regulation. First, the 9-item measure used in Kruis et al.’s ( 2020 ) original study was used to capture respondents’ disposition toward broad forms of gun control. Items included: (1) “Strict gun legislation will stop future gun-related incidents/mass shootings,” (2) “Guns should not be used for recreational reasons (i.e., hunting, sporting, etc.),” (3) “Gun laws should differentiate between handguns and other guns,” (4) “Military type guns should be banned from public use,” (5) “Mental health screenings should be required to purchase any firearm,” (6) “I think all types of guns should be banned from public use,” (7) “I believe that the Second Amendment needs to be revised to reflect modern times,” (8) “Second Amendment rights allow more guns to be available to the public than necessary,” and (9) “I believe that current gun legislation is appropriate.” Response categories followed a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly Disagree” (1) to “Strongly Agree” (5). Item #9 was reverse coded and then responses were summed and averaged to create a continuous measure of broad support for gun control with higher numbers indicative of greater support for enhanced firearm regulation (α = 0.832).

To further assess differences in support for distinct types of gun control policies, two measures from Cook et al.’s ( 2011 ) gun control trichotomy were also created and included in analyses. The first measure was intended to capture support for gun control mechanisms aimed at reducing overall firearm ownership. Two items from the survey were used to capture this category of gun control strategies: (1) “Guns should not be used for recreational purposes (i.e., hunting, sporting, etc.)” and (2) “I think all types of guns should be banned from public use.” Responses followed a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly Disagree” (1) to “Strongly Agree” (5). The two items were combined and averaged to create a scale variable with higher scores reflective of greater support for policies intended to reduce overall firearm ownership (α = 0.797). The second specific type of gun control measured was support for policies intended to keep guns away from dangerous and/or “at-risk” individuals, such as criminals, the untrained, and the mentally ill. Three items for the survey were used to measure participants’ support for this category of gun control policies: (1) “I believe that mandatory gun education will lead to fewer gun related deaths in the U.S.,” (2) “There should be required background checks for all guns purchases,” and (3) “Mental health screenings should be required to purchase any firearm.” Responses followed a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly Disagree” (1) to “Strongly Agree” (5). The items were combined and averaged to create a scale variable with higher scores reflective of greater support for policies intended to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous and “at risk” people (α = 0.721).

For the purposes of this project, knowledge referred to a participant’s understanding of gun-related phenomena. To capture knowledge, participants were given a “Knowledge Test.” Three different domains of knowledge were assessed: (1) knowledge of gun crime, (2) knowledge of gun policy, and (3) knowledge of gun functioning. Knowledge of gun crime refers to participants' level of understanding of gun-related crime in the United States. Items used to capture this measure included: (1) “Gun related homicides have increased over the last 30 years throughout the U.S.,” (2) “In the last 10 years, most gun related deaths per year in the U.S. have been from suicides,” (3) “A majority of firearms used in criminal offenses were obtained illegally,” (4) “Military-style weapons (for example, “assault rifles”) are used in the majority of gun-related crimes,” (5) “Most firearm owners never commit a gun crime,” and (6) “Most mass shootings in the United states are done with legally obtained firearms.” Knowledge of gun policy refers to participants’ level of understanding of gun-related purchasing and ownership policies. Items used to capture this measure included: (1) “In the U.S., it is illegal to own a fully automatic firearm without a permit,” (2) “When purchasing a firearm from a retail store, a background check is NOT required,” (3) “When purchasing a firearm online from a retail store, one must go through a licensed firearm dealer to acquire it,” (4) “In the U.S., the legal purchasing age of rifles is lower than that of handguns,” (5) “In the U.S., felons cannot legally own a firearm,” and (6) “In the U.S., authorities can legally confiscate guns solely based on an individual’s mental illness.” Knowledge of gun functioning refers to a participant’s level of understanding of how guns work (i.e., gun-related functioning and operational procedures). Items used to capture this measure included: (1) “The “AR” in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle 4 ”, (2) “A semi-automatic firearm only fires one round of ammunition per single pull of the trigger,” (3) “The “magazine” is the area of the gun that feeds ammunition into the chamber of the gun,” (4) “An individual must manually engage the hammer on a double-action firearm before the weapon can fire a bullet,” (5) “A bolt-action rifle requires the user to manually cycle every round before the rifle can be fired,” and (6) “All firearms must legally have a safety setting to keep the firearm from firing.” Response categories to all questions included “True,” “False,” and “I Don’t” Know.” Correct answers were coded as a “1” and incorrect answers were coded as a “-1.” Participants were not penalized for selecting “I don’t know” (coded as “0”). Individual items were then combined to create an index measure ranging from − 6 to + 6 with greater scores indicating greater knowledge. See Appendix 1 for specific coding. 5

Experiences

Prior work has shown that experiences with firearms and crime can influence dispositions toward firearms (Ciomek et al., 2020 ; Kleck, 2019a ; Kruis et al., 2020 ). As such, five variables were used to capture participants’ experiences with firearms and crime, including (1) exposure to firearms, (2) perceived firearm familiarity, (3) criminal victimization experience, (4) vicarious criminal victimization experience, and (5) vicarious shooting victimization experience. Exposure was captured using Kruis et al.’s ( 2020 ) 10-item firearm exposure scale (α = 0.955), with items including “I regularly use guns for recreational purposes” and “I am around guns frequently.” Perceived familiarity was captured using Kruis et al.’s ( 2020 ) 3-item perceived familiarity scale (α = 0.872), with items including “I am familiar with current gun legislation in the United States” and “I am familiar with current gun legislation in my state of residence.” Participants were also asked to indicate whether they had ever been the victim of a crime (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”), if someone close to them had ever been the victim of a crime (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”), and if they knew someone who had ever been shot with a firearm (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”).

Training, Safety Precautions, and Gun Use

As the first research question for this project was concerned with examining the characteristics of gun owners, participants were asked to indicate whether they owned a firearm (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”). Those who indicated that they owned a gun were then presented with a series of questions intended to capture their experiences with firearm-related training. Specifically, gun owners were asked if they (1) had taken a formal gun safety course, such as a basic hunter safety education course (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”), (2) received informal gun safety training, through a friend or family member (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”), and/or (3) taken a gun self-defense course (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”). Owners were also asked to report whether or not they took various safety precautions with their firearms, such as using a gun safe or gun lock, keeping their guns unloaded, and/or storing ammunition away from their firearm(s) (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”). Additionally, gun owners were also asked to report if they had ever used their gun to defend themselves 6 (1 = “yes” and 0 = “no”).

Demographics

Measures of sex (1 = “male,” 0 = “female”), race (1 = white, 0 = non-white), age (0–max), geographical background (1 = “Urban,” 2 = “Suburban,” and 3 = “Rural”), income (1 = “Less than $10,000” through 12 = “More than $150,000”) and political affiliation (1 = “Republican,” 2 = “Democrat,” and 3 = “Other”) were also captured and included as control variables in the analyses.

Analytic Strategy

Data were analyzed using SPSS version 27. The analysis consisted of 3 main steps. First, all data were cleaned, coded, and preliminary analyses run to assess measures of central tendency and dispersion. Factor analyses (i.e., Principal Component Analysis and Principal Axis Factor Analysis) were used along with reliability estimations to help construct scale variables during the initial data screening process. Support for individual gun control measures were estimated by combining “strongly agree” with “agree” responses and then ranked to help illustrate public support for specific types of gun control strategies. Second, bivariate analyses were conducted to examine differences in mean scores and response categories between gun owners and non-owners. Third, a series of OLS regression models were estimated to explore the relationship between knowledge of gun crime, gun legislation, gun functioning and support for gun control, controlling for relevant “predictors. 7 ” All assumptions of OLS regression were checked prior to constructing the final models reported below. All variables inputted into the regression model had tolerances above 0.1 and Variance Inflation Scores (VIFs) below 10 (Pallant, 2016 ). Normal Quantile–Quantile and Probability-Probability plots indicated the presence of relatively normal distributions, and skewness and kurtosis values for the dependent variables fell within the acceptable range for analyses (− 2.00 and + 2.00, Field, 2016 ).

Descriptive Statistics

Table Table1 1 displays participant demographic information and descriptive statistics. As indicated in Table Table1, 1 , a majority of participants were white (76.4%) and female (50.4%). Participants were fairly evenly distributed in their political affiliation, with about 41 percent identifying as “Democrat,” 37 percent identifying as “Republican,” and 22 percent identifying as “Other.” The mean age of the sample was 49.03 years old. More participants indicated suburban backgrounds (42.1%) than urban (37.2%) and rural (20.7%) backgrounds. In terms of income, the mean score reported was 6.70, suggesting an average household income between $50,000 and $70,000. A little more than a quarter of the sample (27.8%) indicated being a gun owner. Approximately 40 percent of the sample knew a victim of a crime (40.6%) or indicated being the victim of a crime themselves (39.7%). Nearly a third of the sample reported knowing someone who had been shot (32.4%). Regarding gun-related experiences, most participant’s indicated moderate firearm exposure (M = 2.51, SD = 1.25) and a slightly elevated estimate of their perceived familiarity (M = 3.40, SD = 1.00) with current firearm legislation. In terms of actual gun knowledge, participants had more knowledge of gun policy (M = 2.00, SD = 2.16) than gun crime (M = 0.64, SD = 2.08) and gun functioning (M = 0.04, SD = 1.86). In the aggregate, participants expressed moderate support for our general measure of broad gun control policies (M = 3.28, SD = 0.90). However, participants were more supportive of policies intended to keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people (M = 4.10, SD = 0.88) than they were of policies intended to reduce overall ownership (M = 2.48, SD = 1.31).

Participant demographic information and descriptive statistics (N = 522)

Comparing Owners to Non-Owners

Table Table2 2 displays the results from bivariate analyses (i.e., t-tests and chi-square tests) comparing gun owners (N = 145) to non-owners (N = 377). With the exception of age, gun owners were different from non-owners in all other demographic measures assessed. On average, gun owners were more likely to be male, white, and republican (p ≤ 0.001). They were also more likely to have rural backgrounds ( Χ 2 = 6.315, p ≤ 0.05) and reported higher incomes (t = − 3.481, p ≤ 0.01). Results also show that gun owners were different from non-owners in terms of gun-related experiences, gun knowledge, and support for gun control. Specifically, compared to non-owners, gun owners were more likely to report being the victim of a crime ( Χ 2 = 6.235, p ≤ 0.05) and to know someone who has been shot ( Χ 2 = 5.331, p ≤ 0.05). Owners also reported greater gun exposure (t = − 11.810, p ≤ 0.001) and familiarity (t = − 5.330, p ≤ 0.05) than non-owners. Gun owners were found to have greater knowledge of gun crime (t = − 2.831, p ≤ 0.01), gun policy (t = − 5.317, p ≤ 0.001), and gun functioning (t = − 5.116, p ≤ 0.001) than non-owners, and indicated less support for general gun control mechanisms (t = 5.346, p ≤ 0.001), policies that seek to reduce overall gun ownership (t = 3.318, p ≤ 0.05), and policies intended to keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people (t = 1.991, p ≤ 0.05).

Comparing gun owners to non-owners (N = 522)

*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 (two-tailed tests)

Training, Safety, and Defensive Gun Usage

Our first overarching research question was concerned with examining training experiences, safety precautions taken, and defensive gun usage reported by gun owners. Table Table3 3 displays characteristics of the gun owners in our sample. As indicated in Table Table3, 3 , most owners indicated receiving some form of gun training (89.7%). Nearly three-quarters of the gun owners in our sample reported completing a formal safety training course, such as a basic hunter safety education course (72.4%). A little more than 70 percent indicated receiving informal safety training from a friend or family member, and 42.8 percent reported taking a gun self-defense course. Interestingly, 10.3 percent of all the gun owners in our sample noted that they had not received any form of safety training—formal or informal—nor had they taken a gun self-defense class. In terms of safety precautions taken, most gun owners indicated taking one of measures included in the survey (95.9%). Specifically, 62.1 percent indicated using a gun safe for storage purposes, 39.3 percent reported using gun locks, 50.3 percent expressed that they stored ammunition away from firearms, and 54.4 percent indicated that they kept their guns unloaded. Just six of the 145 gun owners in our sample (4.1%) reported that they did not use any of the safety precautions assessed in our survey. Regarding defensive gun usage, more than a quarter of gun owners (26.9%) reported that they had used a firearm to defend themselves at some point in their life.

Characteristics of gun owners (N = 145)

Our second overarching research question was concerned with assessing public support for gun control. Two different analyses were used to answer this research question. First, descriptive statistics were assessed for individual measures of support for gun control and then ranked by level of support. Table Table4 4 displays the findings from these analyses in order of rank. As noted in Table Table4, 4 , the most publicly supported gun control policy was requiring background checks for all types of gun purchases (86.0%), followed by requiring mental health screenings (79.7%), banning military-style weapons from public use (69.7%), mandating gun education (62.5%), and differentiating laws between handguns and other guns (59.4%). Slightly more than half of the sample also felt that the Second Amendment needed revised “to reflect modern times” (52.7%) and believed that strict gun legislation could stop future gun-related incidents and mass shootings (51.3%). However, most participants did not support completely banning firearms from public use (72.6%) 8 or banning guns for recreational purposes, such as hunting and sport shooting (74.1%).

Support for gun control measures by rank (N = 522)

Second, we estimated a series of OLS regression models to examine variables associated with support for gun control. Table Table5 5 displays results from those analyses. Regarding our general measure of gun control, results indicated that the model fit the data well and explained approximately 31 percent of the variance in general support for gun control ( F = 14.901, p = 0.000, R 2 = 0.312). Nine of the independent variables in that model were found to be statistically significantly related to support for general gun control (p ≤ 0.05). Regarding demographic variables, results showed that compared to Republicans, Democrats (b = 0.589, p ≤ 0.001) indicated more support for gun control. Findings also suggest a marginally significant relationship between identifying as having a “Other” political affiliation (b = 0.176, p ≤ 0.010) and greater support for gun control, compared to identifying as a Republican. Further, results showed that compared to those with rural backgrounds, those with urban backgrounds (b = 0.234, p ≤ 0.05) were more supportive of gun control. Income was also statistically significant (b = 0.045, p ≤ 0.001), with findings suggesting that wealthier individuals were more supportive of gun control. Conversely, gun ownership (b = − 0.234, p ≤ 0.01) was found to be negatively associated with support for increased gun control. In terms of experiences, findings indicated that those who had been the victim of a gun crime (b = 0.188, p ≤ 0.05) and those who perceived having greater familiarity with current gun legislation (b = 0.151, p ≤ 0.001) were more supportive of policies associated with increased gun control. Findings also showed that those who indicated greater firearm exposure (b = − 0.119, p ≤ 0.01) held less support for general gun control mechanisms. Two measures of gun knowledge were also statistically significant in that model. Results showed that knowledge of gun crime (b = − 0.080, p p ≤ 0.001) and knowledge of gun functioning (b = − 0.079, p ≤ 0.001) were inversely related to support for general gun control.

Results from OLS regression analyses predicting support for gun control (N = 522)

a reference category is “Republican”, b reference category is “rural”

† p ≤ .10, * p ≤ .05, ** p ≤ .01, *** p ≤ .001 (two-tailed tests)

The model estimating support for gun control policies intended to reduce overall gun ownership was also statistically significant ( F = 14.992, p = 0.000). The predictors in that model explained approximately 31 percent of the variance in the dependent measure ( R 2 = 0.313). Nine of the independent variables in that model were found to be statistically significant (p ≤ 0.05) and two exhibited a marginally significant association (p ≤ 0.10). Regarding demographic variables, results showed that age (b = − 0.017, p ≤ 0.001) and gun ownership (b = − 0.325, p ≤ 0.01) were negatively associated with the dependent measure, whereas being a Democrat (b = 0.441, p < 0.001), income (b = 0.033, p ≤ 0.05), and having an Urban background (b = 0.560, p ≤ 0.001) were significantly and positively associated with the dependent measure. In terms of experiences, findings indicated that those who had been the victim of a crime (b = 0.208, p ≤ 0.10) were more supportive of policies associated with reducing overall gun ownership. Interestingly, findings also showed that those who indicated greater firearm exposure (b = 0.139, p ≤ 0.05) held more support for such policies, which is opposite the direction for this variable noted in the first model. Knowing a crime victim was found to exhibit a negative, albeit marginally, significant relationship (b = − 0.216, p ≤ 0.10) with support for policies intended to reduce overall ownership. All measures of gun knowledge were statistically significantly related to support for policies aimed at reducing overall gun ownership. Results showed that knowledge of gun crime (b = − 0.110, p ≤ 0.001), knowledge of gun policy (b = − 0.059, p ≤ 0.05), and knowledge of gun functioning (b = − 0.068, p ≤ 0.05) were inversely related to support for policies intended to reduce overall gun ownership.

The last column in Table Table5 5 shows results from the OLS modeling estimating support for gun control policies intended to keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people. Results indicated that the model fit the data well and explained approximately 14 percent of the variance in gun control mechanisms aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people (F = 6.059, p = 0.000, R 2 = 0.142). Six of the independent variables in that model were found to be statistically significant. Regarding demographic variables, results showed that being male (b = − 0.163, p < 0.05) and younger (b = .008, p ≤ 0.01) were negatively related to the dependent measure, whereas income (b = 0.033, p ≤ 0.01) was positively associated with support for policies intended to keep guns away from dangerous individuals. In terms of experiences, findings suggested that greater familiarity with current gun legislation (b = 0.235, p ≤ 0.001) was associated with more support for policies intended to keep guns away from dangerous people, whereas greater exposure was associated with less support (b = − 0.182, p ≤ 0.001). Only one measure of gun knowledge was statistically significant in the model. Results showed that knowledge of gun functioning (b = − 0.077, p ≤ 0.01) was inversely related to support for policies intended to keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people. 9

This study was concerned with exploring public perceptions of gun control. Specifically, data collected from a representative sample of 522 Pennsylvania residents were used to (1) explore the training experiences, safety practices, and defensive gun usage reported by gun owners, and (2) to examine the correlates of public support for various types of gun control. There are a few findings from analyses that warrant further discussion.

First, there were several notable findings related to training experiences, safety precautions, and defensive gun usage indicated by the gun owners in our sample. Consistent with previous findings, we found that more than 25 percent of the gun owners in our sample had never taken a formal gun safety course, including a basic hunter safety education course (Parker et al., 2017 ; Kruis et al., 2020 ). To expand upon prior work, we also attempted to assess gun training through cultural transmission by asking participants if they had received informal gun training, such as training through a family member or friend. We found that approximately 70 percent of gun owners in our sample had received informal training through a family member or friend. In all, a majority of our sampled gun owners reported receiving some form of gun safety training (i.e., 90 percent). However, collectively, findings revealed that about 10 percent of the gun owners in our sample had received no formal or informal training. This estimate is concerning, given that firearm training courses tend to focus on teaching novice gun handlers how to safely use, transport, and store their firearms, as well as introduce them to relevant gun laws (Rowhani-Rahbar et al., 2018 ). Ill-trained gun owners may be at a greater risk of using their firearms in an unsafe manner or storing them in ways that permit “unauthorized” persons to access and use their weapons, which can result in more firearm-related injuries.

Unfortunately, due to data limitations (i.e., sample size), we were unable to effectively explore the relationship between gun training and safety precautions taken by gun owners. We did find that more than half of the gun owners in our sample reported using gun safes, kept their firearms unloaded at all times, and/or stored ammunition away from firearms in an attempt to prevent others from accessing and/or using their firearms, which helps to prevent accidental discharges. In fact, just six of the 145 gun owners in our sample (4.1%) reported that they took “no safety” precautions, suggesting that most— “trained” and “untrained” gun owners—took some form of gun safety precaution. Supplementary analyses did reveal that two of the six gun owners who indicated they took none of the listed safety precautions also indicated that they had received no formal or informal gun safety training. These data indicate that there was a higher proportion of non-trained gun owners (13.3%) who suggested taking no safety precaution than there were trained gun owners (3.1%). We do want to caution when interpreting these results for two reasons. First, our measures do not capture the “quality” of training received. Second, as noted above, the number of non-trained gun owners and owners who take no-safety precautions was so small that we were unable to conduct any type of meaningful comparison. As such, we encourage future researchers to explore the relationship between gun training and gun safety more thoroughly. We will note, however, that, in synthesizing prior research in this area, scholars at RAND Corporation ( 2020 ) concluded that child access prevention laws, defined as laws that attempt to influence how guns are stored, are effective at reducing unintentional injuries and deaths, as well as suicides, and may be effective at helping to reduce violent crime. Thus, it appears that there may be a relationship between gun storing patterns and rates of firearm-related injuries. As such, if more owners store their weapons properly, then we may see fewer firearm related injuries, suicides, and violent crime.

Another interesting finding emerging from the data was the proportion of defensive gun usage reported by gun owners in our sample. Nearly 27 percent of gun owners in our sample indicated that they had used their gun to defend themselves at some point in their life. This suggests that more than 1 in 4 gun owners in our sample had used their firearm to defend their life, liberty, or property—which, although a slightly higher estimate, mirrors findings reported by the Pew Research Center in 2017 (i.e., 1 in 6 gun owners; see Parker et al., 2017 ). Other research has found that the prevalence of defensive gun usage in the United States ranges from 60,000 to 2.5 million incidents annually (Institute of Medicine & National Research Council, 2013 ). Collectively, these findings indicate that a significant portion of gun owners use—or at least perceive that they use—their firearm(s) for self-defense purposes. As such, any efforts aimed at reforming gun policies in the United States should consider this “utility,” or using firearms as a tool, prior to implementation. While firearms may currently help contribute to a high number of injuries (CDC, 2020 ) and crimes (National Institute of Justice, 2019 ) committed every year in the United States, it is possible that gun control efforts that take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens could further exacerbate these numbers by removing a viable protection mechanism from individuals who otherwise may be unable to adequately defend themselves. Prior research has been mixed in findings related to this hypothesis with some work suggested that arming potential victims may be associated with reductions in injuries and loss of property (see Cook et al., 2011 ; Cook, 1991 ; Kleck & Gertz, 1995 ; Southwick, 2000 ) and other research questioning such claims (Hemenway, & Solnick, 2015 ). Similarly, and more broadly, prior research on the effects of gun control related to patterns of gun ownership on patterns of violence and crime have produced mixed results, with some research findings indicating little to no effect (Kleck, 2019a ; Kleck et al., 2016 ; Lott, 2013 ) and others suggesting a positive relationship between gun ownership and gun crime (Billings, 2020 ; Ciomek et al., 2020 ). Accordingly, more research is needed before firm conclusions related to defensive gun usage can be drawn. That said, our data show that gun owners in Pennsylvania may use their weapons in self-defense at a fairly high rate.

Second, there were several interesting findings related to participants’ support for various forms of gun control. In the aggregate, the top three supported gun control measures were: (1) required background checks for all types of gun purchases (86.0%), (2) required mental health screenings for gun purchases (79.7%), and (3) banning military type firearms (i.e., AR or AK platforms) from public use (69.7%). Using prior research (see Cook, 2011 and Kruis et al., 2020 ) we also examined “correlates” of support for gun control measured in three different ways: (1) support for general gun control mechanisms, (2) support for policies aimed at reducing overall gun ownership, and (3) support for policies aimed at keeping firearms away from dangerous people. There were several interesting findings that emerge from those analyses. Notably, most participants seemed to favor polices aimed at keeping guns away from dangerous and “at risk” individuals, such as the untrained, the mentally ill, and justice-involved persons. However, most did not support policies aimed at reducing overall gun ownership (i.e., restricting public gun use and use for recreational purposes)—which is consistent with prior research (Parker et al., 2017 ).

These findings are important to consider in relation to the efficacy of such policies. The dominate research suggests that gun control intended to keep guns away from dangerous and “at risk” people may be effective at reducing serious violence (Braga & Cook, 2018 ; Kleck et al., 2016 ; RAND, 2020 ), while gun control strategies aimed at reducing community firearm ownership may have little to no effect on overall violent crime rates (Cook & Ludwig, 2006 ; Cook & Pollack, 2017 ; Kleck, 2019b ).

Similarly, several interesting findings emerged in multivariable modeling. Generally, we found that those who are more supportive of gun control were Democrats, those who had Urban backgrounds, those who had less exposure to firearms, and those with larger annual incomes. We also found a significant relationship between specific types of gun knowledge and support for categories of gun control. Participants who had greater knowledge of gun crime and gun functioning were less supportive of general forms of gun control, and those who had greater knowledge of gun functioning were less supportive of restrictive policies. Consistent with findings reported by Kruis et al. ( 2020 ), we found a general inverse relationship between gun knowledge and support for various types of gun control, with a few caveats. We found that those who were more knowledgeable in the areas of gun crime, gun policy, and gun functioning, did not favor more restrictive gun control measures, particularly those aimed at reducing overall gun ownership. However, excluding knowledge of gun functioning, there was no relationship between gun knowledge and support for policies aimed at keeping firearms away from dangerous people, suggesting that both the “knowledgeable” and “non-knowledgeable” are equally likely to support restricted access for potentially dangerous and “at risk” individuals.

Collectively, this research shows that the same gun control strategies with the most public support—and those supported by those with the most gun “knowledge”—are also those with the most empirical support. Similarly, those with the least public support are those that seem to have the least or, at least, questionable empirical support. As such, policymakers may want to direct gun “reform” efforts toward policies intended to keep guns away from persons who are considered to be dangerous or “at risk,” such as felons, the untrained, and those who are mentally ill. At the same time, policymakers need to consider the effects that such actions will have on legal acquisition and take efforts to strengthen law abiding citizens’ abilities to obtain and use firearms legally. For instance, based on the available scholarly literature, we argue that complete firearm bans will likely have little if any positive effect of crime, and our research shows that such policies are largely unsupported by members of the general public. Related, we also suggest that gun control strategies discussed by Cook and Leitzel ( 1996 ) aimed at increasing the price of firearms and ammunition may only prevent law abiding citizens from obtaining weapons and merely increase black market sales or thefts of weapons, which is how most criminals obtain their firearms (Cook, 2018 ; Roth, 1994 ). Thus, better approaches to gun regulation will prevent dangerous and “at risk” people from obtaining firearms, while also protecting law-abiding citizens abilities to access firearms. Unfortunately, as noted by Braga et al. ( 2021 ) the current research provides us with little guidance on how best to achieve this goal. As such, more scholarly work is needed in this area.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

The most concerning limitation of this study is that it utilized a cross-sectional research design. As such, the temporal relationship between variables remains unknown. Related, data were collected from a sample of Pennsylvania residents and findings are not generalizable beyond those parameters. Additionally, our measures of gun control overlooked an entire category of gun control mechanisms—those that are intended to influence choices about how guns are used and to what effect. Accordingly, we encourage future researchers to use longitudinal research designs, to examine these findings in other populations, and better attempt to capture all categories of gun control mechanisms in instrumentation.

Despite these limitations, this work contributes to the extant literature in several ways. Notably, findings from this study suggest that most gun owners in Pennsylvania have received some form of safety training and take appropriate safety precautions with their firearms. Moreover, findings reveal that many gun owners use guns for self-defense purposes. Regarding gun control, findings reveal that members of the general public tend to be supportive of policies aimed at keeping guns away from dangerous and “at risk” individuals, such as required background checks for all types of gun purchases, mental health screenings, and mandatory gun education. However, members of the general public are not supportive of gun control mechanisms aimed at reducing overall firearm ownership, such as public gun bans. Among those who are the least supportive of such polices are those who are the most knowledgeable about gun crime, gun legislation, and gun functioning.

The long-standing debate of gun rights and ownership tends to center around the concept of “needs” and “wants” in relation to the types of firearms available to the public and the measures used to control the access to these firearms. Much of the empirical literature has produced mixed results when assessing the importance of preventative policies and the associated crimes that can be reduced. This study adds to the growing body of literature seeking more information to adequately inform policymakers regarding gun ownership and public opinions toward restrictive gun laws.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Appendix 1 Knowledge “Answers”

Knowledge of gun crime.

Gun related homicides have increased over the last 30 years throughout the U.S. (False, see Gramlich, 2019 ; Gun Violence Archive, 2021 ; and National Institute of Justice, 2019 ).
In the last 10 years, most gun related deaths per year in the U.S. have been from suicides (True, see Giffords Law Center, 2021a , 2021b , 2021c and Gramlich, 2019 ).
A majority of firearms used in criminal offenses were obtained illegally (True, see Cook, 2017 , Clark, 2018 , and Fabio et al., 2016 ).
Military-style weapons (for example, “assault rifles”) are used in the majority of gun-related crimes (False, see Koper et al., 2018 ).
Most firearm owners never commit a gun crime (True, see Lott, 2016 and Malcom & Swearer, 2018 )
Most mass shootings in the United States are done with legally obtained firearms (True, see Follman et al., 2021 and Statista Research Department, 2021 )

Knowledge of Gun Policy

In the U.S., it is illegal to own a fully automatic firearm without a permit. (True, see Giffords Law Center, n.d.)
When purchasing a firearm from a retail store, a background check is NOT required. (False, see NRA-ILA, n.d. and Yablon, 2020 ).
When purchasing a firearm online from a retail store, one must go through a licensed firearm dealer to acquire it. (True, see NRA-ILA, n.d. and Yablon, 2020 )
In the U.S., the legal purchasing age of rifles is lower than that of handguns. (True, see ATF, 2015 ).
In the U.S., felons cannot legally own a firearm. (True, see Giffords Law Center, 2021 )
In the U.S., authorities can legally confiscate guns solely based on an individual’s mental illness. (True, see Giffords Law Center, 2021 ).

Knowledge of Gun Functioning

The “AR” in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle.” (False, see National Shooting Sports Foundation, n.d.)
A semi-automatic firearm only fires one round of ammunition per single pull of the trigger. (True, see Frontline, n.d.)
The “magazine” is the area of the gun that feeds ammunition into the chamber of the gun. (True, see Wintersteen, 2018 )).
An individual must manually engage the hammer on a double-action firearm before the weapon can fire a bullet. (False, see Gun News Daily, n.d.)
A bolt-action rifle requires the user to manually cycle every round before the rifle can be fired. (True, see Huntingsmart, n.d.)
All firearms must legally have a safety setting to keep the firearm from firing. (False, Giffords Law Center, n.d.)

Declarations

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

1 Research suggests that those who are mentally ill are at a higher odds of committing suicide, especially with a gun, but have relatively low rates of violent crime commission, including firearm violence. In fact, this work suggests that those who are mentally ill are more likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator of a crime. Although, given the extent of under-diagnosis among the mentally ill, the relationship between these variables has been difficult to establish. See Swanson et al. ( 2015 ) and Ramchand and Ayer ( 2021 ).

2 See Kleck ( 2021 ) for a discussion of the quality of research in this area.

3 Research has found that question wording may influence whether people indicate support for a proposed assault weapons ban (Newport, 2019 ). Still, the available data suggest a slight majority of the public supports banning assault weapons.

4 The term “AR” is commonly mistaken to mean “assault rifle” or “automatic rifle” (Palma, 2019 ).

5 At the request of reviewers, we have included informational sources after each question to verify our coding. Efforts were made to include sources with commentary to help readers better understand subject matter. We also tried to incorporate informational sources with a Pennsylvania focus, when available, given that our sample is of Pennsylvania residents.

6 Gun owners were asked, “Have you ever used your gun to defend yourself?”.

7 Here, we refer to “predictor” in the linear manner.

8 As noted in Table Table4, 4 , approximately 27 percent of our sample indicated that they felt all guns should be banned from public use. A reviewer suggested that it would be interesting to explore the relationship between political affiliation and support for public gun bans. Results from chi-square test revealed a statistically significant relationship between political affiliation and support for public gun bans ( Χ 2 = 56.840, p < .001). Specifically, analysis revealed that about 1 in 3 democrats supported such a policy, compared to approximately 1 in 4 Republicans and 1 in 5 individuals who identified as having a “Other” political affiliation.

9 While we are confident that our measures of gun knowledge are valid and reliable measures, at the requests of the reviewers, we also ran a series of supplemental analyses that omitted “questionable” variables within the indices. For instance, we omitted the variables “Gun related homicides have increased over the last 30 years throughout the U.S.” and “A majority of firearms used in criminal offenses were obtained illegally” from knowledge of gun crime. We also omitted “In the U.S., authorities can legally confiscate guns solely based on an individual’s mental illness” from knowledge of gun policy, and “The “AR” in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle” from knowledge of gun functioning. Results were similar to the final models reported in the manuscript and are available upon request.

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Contributor Information

Nathan E. Kruis, Email: ude.usp@231ken .

Richard L. Wentling, Email: ude.usp@gniltnewr .

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Uvalde elementary school shooting

12 stats to help inform the gun control debate.

Britt Cheng

Gun control advocates hold signs during a protest at Discovery Green across from the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center on Friday in Houston, Texas. Eric Thayer/Getty Images hide caption

Gun control advocates hold signs during a protest at Discovery Green across from the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center on Friday in Houston, Texas.

The nationwide gun control debate resurfaced on Tuesday, after an 18-year-old shooter entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 students and two adults in the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history . The mass shooting came just 10 days after another 18-year-old gunman opened fire at a Buffalo, N.Y. grocery store , killing 10 people and injuring three others.

In the aftermath, prominent voices have urged Congress to pass gun control laws and universal background checks, from Sen. Chris Murphy , who represents Connecticut where the Sandy Hook school shooting happened, to NBA coach Steve Kerr to the Pope . Meanwhile, some Republican lawmakers said they won't back laws that limit gun rights.

The evolving narrative of what happened at Uvalde the day of the shooting

The evolving narrative of what happened in the Uvalde shooting

While the push for accountability intensifies as details emerge from what happened in the hour after police officers arrived at the shooting up until they killed the gunman, let's look at these statistics that help inform the gun control debate in the United States.

Number of people killed by guns in the U.S., every day

Number of children who die every day from gun violence in the U.S.

School shootings since Sandy Hook , including 27 school shootings so far this year.

Peak ages for violent offending with firearms

Number of AR-15s and its variations in circulation

Number of people who will die after attempting suicide with a gun

Percentage of mass shooters who are men

Percentage of gun owners who favor preventing the "mentally ill" from purchasing guns

Percentage of gun owners who favor background checks at private sales and gun shows

Percentage of gun deaths that are suicides; 43% are murders

Percentage of murders that involved a firearm

Percentage of people who defended themselves with their guns in violent crimes

Did you know we tell audio stories, too? Listen to our podcasts like No Compromise, our Pulitzer-prize winning investigation into the gun rights debate, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify .

The Politics of Gun Safety Are Changing. I Should Know.

I encourage people who, like me, are impatient for change to look around, because something is happening.

Women hold a sign as they form a human chain on the first anniversary of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, March 27, 2024.

A mass shooting. Children dead. Families and communities grieving. Then the cycle repeats. I get asked over and over again: Why do mass shootings not motivate lawmakers to act? Why does nothing happen?

I understand the frustration. I’m a gun owner and a strong Second Amendment supporter. I’m also a physician and a grandfather. We have reached a public-health crisis where firearms are now the No. 1 killer of kids in America. Shockingly, the rate of firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased 87 percent from 2011 to 2021. Had the problem been this large during my time in the U.S. Senate, where I represented Tennessee for 12 years and served as majority leader for four, it would have unquestionably influenced my vote on key firearm-related legislation. I want to see proven firearm-safety policies enacted that protect our children—which we can achieve while preserving our Second Amendment rights.

Still, I encourage people who, like me, are impatient for change to look around, because something is happening. I am convinced lawmakers are listening.

From the March 2024 issue: To stop a shooter

In 2022, after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Congress came together, Republicans and Democrats, and passed the most comprehensive piece of firearm-safety legislation in nearly 30 years . Known as the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act , the law did a number of things, including establishing an enhanced background-check process for buyers under 21 (which has stopped more than 600 firearm purchases by those who pose a threat to themselves or their community to date), providing funding for states to implement crisis-intervention programs, preventing convicted abusive dating partners from purchasing firearms for five years, creating new federal criminal statutes for firearm trafficking and straw purchasing, and investing in school safety and mental-health-care access. Did it solve all of our problems? No, but it signaled an important shift.

And the shift continues. Last year, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, one of our nation’s strongest Second Amendment governors, introduced an order-of-protection law to temporarily keep guns out of the hands of those exhibiting behavior that makes them a threat to themselves or others. When his proposal in response to last year’s Covenant School shooting failed to pass, he called the legislature back to Nashville for a special session on public safety, where lawmakers considered what types of changes they could support. We saw some incremental progress .

We also continue to see movement in Tennessee’s legislative session, including the advancement of bills that would prohibit firearm purchases by those deemed incompetent to stand trial and that would criminalize threats of mass violence, as well as proposed budget funding by the governor to address a 761,000-plus background-check-record backlog.

Part of this progress is due to the engagement of families frustrated that kids aren’t safe in their own schools, leading to the formation of several grassroots organizations, including one group that I’m a part of, Voices for a Safer Tennessee .

Another thing I’m excited about is access to data. In 2018, a de facto freeze on federal funding for firearm-violence research was overturned (based in part on the interpretation and recommendation of the Republican Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar), and we’re starting to see the results of investing in this field. Before, we had ideas about what might work, but lacked the evidence-based data to confirm them. Now we’re learning that temporary-transfer laws, which temporarily remove firearm access for those who are in danger of harming themselves or others, lead to reductions in state suicide rates. Secure-storage laws, when paired with penalties for noncompliance, reduce firearm deaths, particularly among children. States with universal background checks (including background checks for private sales) have reduced rates of firearm homicide.

Mike Spies: The death of a gun rights warrior

These are all policies that enjoy broad bipartisan support: A national Fox News poll found majority voter support for universal background checks (87 percent) and temporary-transfer laws (80 percent). And a 2023 Vanderbilt University poll of Tennessee registered voters found majority support for secure-storage laws (68 percent) and even discovered that those who identified as NRA supporters backed “red flag” laws to prevent school shootings (68 percent) and gun-related violence (53 percent).

On March 27, we marked one year since the senseless Covenant School shooting in my community of Nashville. Thousands in my state came together to recognize this day by linking arms , creating a three-mile human chain to remember the six precious lives lost and the nearly 1,300 Tennesseans who have died from firearms this past year.

Now lawmakers must hear from the sizable majority of us who want change. If this is an issue that you care about, get engaged. Contact your legislators, vote in every election, and get local conversations started around this issue.

I know the legislative process moves slowly, on the state and federal level. I lived it for 12 years in the Senate. Change doesn’t happen overnight. But those who succeed are those who learn from the losses, celebrate the small wins—no matter how incremental—and stay committed for the long haul.

Local Politics

WA has passed lots of new gun laws. Could they be in legal trouble?

When a Cowlitz County judge ruled last week that Washington’s ban on high- capacity magazines is unconstitutional, he added one line, on Page 43 of his 55-page opinion, that could just be a little-noticed throwaway, or could prove shockingly prescient.

There are, Judge Gary Bashor wrote , “few, if any, historical analogue laws by which a state can justify a modern firearms regulation.”

The high-capacity magazine ban, Bashor wrote, pointing to U.S. Supreme Court precedent, fails because there are no “relevantly similar” laws from around 1791, when the Second Amendment was adopted.

Bashor’s ruling was immediately placed on hold , and the state’s ban on high-capacity magazines remains in effect, while the state Supreme Court considers the issue.

But it raises a question: Washington has passed a suite of new gun laws in the last decade. If each new law needs a “historical analogue” from 1791-era America, could many more gun laws be at risk?

There were no magazines in 1791, much less high-capacity magazines. So there were no bans on high-capacity magazines.

Washington, last year, banned AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles . Such weapons did not exist in 1791 and so, obviously, weren’t banned.

Washington, this year, banned the carrying of guns in zoos, aquariums and public transit facilities . There were no zoos or buses in 1791 America, so there weren’t bans on carrying guns in those places.

At least a half-dozen lawsuits are pending in Washington, challenging the constitutionality of the state’s gun laws.

The debate, of course, is more than theoretical, not just an intriguing thought experiment. Nearly 50,000 Americans a year die from firearms, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Studies have repeatedly found that states with stricter gun laws tend to have less gun violence.

High-capacity magazines were legal to buy and sell in Washington for about 90 minutes last Monday, after Bashor issued his opinion and before the state Supreme Court halted it from taking effect. In that time, Gator’s Custom Guns, the Kelso gun shop at the heart of the litigation, sold hundreds of high-capacity magazines, said Wally Wentz, the store’s owner.

Bashor’s opinion follows the 2022 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case known as Bruen, striking down New York’s law requiring concealed-carry license applicants to demonstrate a special need for self-defense.

In Bruen, the Supreme Court tossed aside the traditional way of evaluating gun laws: weighing the public interest against the individual’s right. Instead, courts now had to determine whether a gun law is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition.” The ruling has led to hundreds of court cases nationwide challenging the constitutionality of both new and longstanding gun laws.

Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Bellevue-based Second Amendment Foundation, thinks a lot of Washington’s gun laws are in jeopardy.

“All because of the 1791-era analogue that anti-gun people can’t find because it doesn’t exist,” Gottlieb said.

Gottlieb’s organization has filed numerous lawsuits seeking to invalidate gun laws in Washington and elsewhere.

How could there be a 1791 analogue regulating something that wasn’t created until years or decades later?

“In 1791 it wasn’t just the Second Amendment, it was also the First Amendment era,” Gottlieb said. “There were no satellite dishes, there was no internet, there were no high-speed printing presses, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t protected by the First Amendment. New technology is still protected by the Bill of Rights.”

Attorney General Bob Ferguson, in court filings, called Bashor’s ruling an “extreme outlier.”

“There is nothing unreasonable about restricting the sale of deadly [high-capacity magazines] when the unrebutted evidence shows they make mass shootings and other horrific crimes more frequent and more deadly, and when the evidence shows they are not used for self-defense,” Ferguson wrote.

Zach Pekelis, a lawyer with Pacifica Law Group who represents Alliance for Gun Responsibility and Oregon Alliance for Gun Safety, said the Cowlitz County judge interpreted Bruen incorrectly.

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“Just because you didn’t see the exact type of regulation in 1791 or 1868 doesn’t mean that the modern law is unconstitutional,” Pekelis said. “Different technologies and different societal concerns have evolved and perhaps even dramatically changed over time and the Constitution is supposed to be adaptive in that way.”

Bruen, Pekelis noted, does not require “a historical twin,” just a “historical analogue.”

For instance, there may not have been historical bans on carrying guns in zoos and on buses, but there were historical bans on carrying guns in “sensitive places” like courthouses, schools and government buildings.

“The key question is whether modern and historical regulations impose a comparable burden,” Pekelis said, “and whether that burden is comparably justified.”

The Supreme Court didn’t specify whether lower courts (and historians) should look to 1791, when the Second Amendment was adopted, or to 1868, when the 14th Amendment, which applies the Second Amendment to the states, was adopted.

“We need not address this issue today,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the 6-3 court .

But lower courts across the country have been puzzled about how to proceed.

Last summer, a federal judge in Mississippi dismissed a case against a man charged with having a gun as a convicted felon, because the law prohibiting possession by a felon is from 1938, not 1791 or 1868, and the government didn’t present a sufficient historical analogue.

But he expressed concern about the situation he found himself in.

“Judges are not historians,” U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves wrote . “Yet the standard articulated in Bruen expects us ‘to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.'”

In the Cowlitz County case, the state, in defending its law, pointed to a litany of historical laws it said were analogous to the modern ban on high-capacity magazines.

But Bashor, a 2011 appointee of former Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire, dismissed them all as either too old, too new or not relevant.

“Most of the laws provided are post-1868 and are not relevant to the analysis,” Bashor wrote.

The state cites a 1771 New Jersey law that prohibited “trap guns,” which could be fired by someone or something triggering a rope or wire.

Bashor knocks that analogy as it “predates the Declaration of Independence and the creation of the Second Amendment.”

He writes that it was a “hunting regulation so its purpose was not firearms regulation.” But Bashor links to the original law , which seems to regulate trap guns for reasons beyond hunting. The law begins: “Whereas a most dangerous Method of setting Guns has too much prevailed in this Province …”

Fifteen states followed New Jersey’s lead in regulating trap guns, but Bashor finds all those laws wanting because they weren’t “near the founding.”

Historical laws regulating gunpowder, which was necessary for firing guns in 1791, “were for the purpose of fire control, not firearms regulation,” Bashor writes, and are not relevant.

The state cites numerous laws regulating Bowie knives, but Bashor dismisses those as regulating weapons, but not firearms.

“Reviewing courts,” a U.S. district judge wrote in 2022 about interpreting Bruen , “must find the goldilocks of historical analogues: not too old, not too new, but just right.”

And just as the ideal porridge temperature is in the eye of the beholder (or mouth of the taster), judges have looked at near-identical laws and at identical history and come to different conclusions.

A federal judge in Oregon looked at that state’s ban on high-capacity magazines and, after a weeklong trial, found reasonable historical analogues to justify the new law .

U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut cited the New Jersey trap gun law approvingly. She cited 19th century Bowie knife laws and finds them “tailored to address the particular features of the weapons that made them most dangerous to public safety.” She looks at gunpowder and finds that it “posed a threat to public safety at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification” and writes that states responded with regulations.

In Bruen, the Supreme Court wrote that “dramatic technological changes” or “unprecedented societal concerns” can give courts more nuance in interpreting modern gun laws.

But Bashor writes that high-capacity magazines are not new technology and that mass shootings do not represent unprecedented societal concerns.

Immergut, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, finds the opposite, writing that from 1776 to 1949 there was no example of a mass shooting resulting in double-digit fatalities (excluding events like race riots and labor riots). She writes that a handgun with a large-capacity magazine can be reloaded in about three seconds, while the typical muzzleloading musket available in 1791 could be reloaded and fired three times per minute.

Both state bans on high-capacity magazines are now on appeal. In Washington, the state is appealing to the state Supreme Court. A hearing on the Cowlitz County case is scheduled for Wednesday.

In Oregon, gun rights groups are appealing to a federal appellate court, while the state pursues an appeal of a state court ruling saying the law could not be enforced.

California’s bans on high-capacity magazines and on AR-15-style rifles are both on appeal, after each was invalidated by the same federal judge.

“You’ve seen this storyline before and I think it’s important not to be too alarmed that a single judge takes a different view,” Pekelis said. “That’s why we have appellate courts, to correct errors.”

The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

24 hours, seven mass shootings — as an election looms, what does a day of gun violence look like for the United States?

A n american flag conceals the face of a bo walking with a gun in a holster on his jeans

It is 1am on March 31, a week ago, when an unknown man opens fire on a group of young women celebrating a birthday in Chicago, Illinois.

WARNING: This story contains content that may be distressing for some readers.

The group are in their teens – among them is 19-year-old Arianna Murphy, who has only been at the party for a few minutes.

She has just graduated top of her class and is about to start nursing school.

A "smart and loving", "very outgoing person", her family says she has a vibrant energy and a signature smile.

She dies at the scene. Four others, all aged between 16 and 20 years old, are also shot and taken to hospital.

The gunman flees.

In the hours to come, nearby residents will go out into the street to scrub the blood from the cement themselves.

It is the first mass shooting of the day. There are six more to come.

Hundreds of children and teens already killed by guns in 2024

There have already been 4,138 deaths linked to gun violence across the United States in 2024, according to independent research organisation the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

Among those killed, 355 were children and teenagers. More than 350 incidents were "unintentional".

GVA defines a "mass shooting" as "a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident".

Bede Harris, an expert in constitutional law at Charles Sturt University, says while every state varies, all "ultimately come up against the problem that … the US Supreme Court has the final say".

The US constitution enshrines gun rights under the Second Amendment — saying a "well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed".

In 2022 the Supreme Court ruled that local governments could regulate, but not eradicate, the core right to bear arms — labelling gun rights as a fundamental right.

"And because the US Supreme Court case law that's been established over the decades is relatively lax, many attempts by states to limit gun ownership fall foul of the US constitution," Dr Harris says.

"I mean in Arizona … you can walk around on the streets with a gun openly strapped to your belt, but you can't do that in New York.

"Even in an ideal world where it was changed, there'd be a severe practical problem of then reining in gun ownership because there's hundreds of millions of firearms in the US."

Illinois, where the first mass shooting of March 31 took place, is a "national leader", ranked third in the country for its gun laws by gun control advocacy group Everytown.

"Illinois is surrounded by states with much weaker laws," the non-profit says in its state report card.

"And an outsized share of likely trafficked guns recovered in Illinois are originally purchased out-of-state — especially in Indiana, just across the border from Chicago."

'The wrong place at the wrong time'

One hour after the first mass shooting in Chicago there will be a second one, this time almost 1,400 kilometres away in Dublin, Georgia.

A car pulls up outside a home on West Avenue, and someone in the car fires multiple shots at a crowd of people.

Miyori Ellington, 23, and Sacred Brown, 24, die from their injuries. Five others are taken to hospital.

At the same time police three states away in Paris, Texas will start getting multiple 911 calls — someone has opened fire during a block party.

Two men nearby have gotten into a fight that escalates into a shooting and injures four people.

Police say there are approximately 80 empty shell casings at the scene, from various calibre weapons.

At 4:20am, local time, 29-year-old Stefon Barnes is buying a bag of chips at a deli in the Bronx, New York.

He's a frequent customer, a familiar face for the workers behind the counter.

Despite the early hour the shop is packed with customers, dancing and singing, when a scuffle breaks out – video shows a man in a ski mask attempting to rifle through another man's pockets.

As the struggle escalates and another man joins in, a gun goes off.

Stefon is shot in the right thigh and taken to hospital in critical condition, where he's later pronounced dead.

"After the surgery, his heart could not handle it," his father, Martin Barnes, will tell the media later.

"He was a good kid. [He] never got into any trouble. … He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Gun ownership rooted in 'culture', 'history', 'tradition'

As Stefon is bleeding out, the day's third mass shooting is unfolding in Jackson, Mississippi.

A 19-year-old is killed and three other people are wounded at 5am at a convenience shop on Highway 80.

The city's police chief will later tell local media the two people they suspect are responsible "don't care" about nearby surveillance cameras.

"It's another situation where young men and individuals do not know how to resolve conflict without introducing guns to the situation," Chief Joseph Wade says.

The incidents of gun violence — each recorded by the GVA — continue throughout the morning.

At 5:30am in Memphis, Tennessee, police respond to a shooting at an apartment building.

At 5:40am in Colorado Springs, officers arrive at a roadside inn and find a man with a life-threatening gunshot wound. The killer has already fled the scene.

At 6am in Kansas City, 59-year-old Leo Dorch is walking down a residential street, carrying a handgun.

Police receive a 911 call for help and try to negotiate with Leo to put the gun down.

He points the weapon in the officers direction. They open fire.

Missouri State Highway Patrol officials later announce he has been pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

Everytown ranks Missouri as 38th in the nation for gun laws, and says it experiences "one of the highest rates of deaths, gun homicide rates, and household firearm ownership".

Kansas City was the scene for a shooting at the Super Bowl victory parade.

The incident, which garnered global attention, saw one person killed and 22 more shot, including 11 children.

University of Melbourne Professor of American Politics, Timothy J Lynch, says for Americans, gun control is more than just an issue with the US government or the legal system.

"I think Australians look at it as a technocratic [government] issue," he says.

"If there's a massacre, how do you stop it? You illegalise guns. We did it after the Tasmanian massacre.

"There just seems to be a logic to it, but we don't have a connection to guns that's rooted in our culture and history and that's a very powerful part of our political identity.

"[In the] US gun rights stand not just for a right to self protection … but the whole concept of one's identity. It's a tradition, it's a lifestyle.

"And getting the government to change that, to change your connection to notions of identity itself and where you sit in the culture is really extraordinarily difficult."

'It was just mass chaos'

Chicago again becomes the scene of a mass shooting at 2:50pm.

Two men climb out of a car and shoot at a group of four on the street.

Johnveir Winn-Mckeever, 16, is taken to hospital in critical condition and later succumbs to a gunshot wound to the head.

Three other people are also injured.

The fifth mass shooting of the day comes just 10 minutes later, at 3pm in Nashville, Tennessee.

A man and a woman arrive at a busy restaurant — police say it's unclear what happens next, but an argument between the man and another patron escalates "within moments".

Shots are fired. Panic breaks out.

"Some people did try to resist the gunman," says police commander Anthony McClain.

"It was just mass chaos … It may have been something as simple as one person invading another person's space."

Allen Beachem, 33 — a volunteer firefighter, military veteran and coach to his children's basketball team — is killed.

It will be days before 46-year-old Anton Rucker is arrested in a different state.

'Everything was beautiful … and the shooting rang out'

There are at least six more gun violence incidents recorded by GVA in the hours before the next mass shooting.

In one incident, a three-year-old at a park in Atlanta, Georgia is grazed by a bullet.

Just hours earlier there had been an Easter egg hunt at the same park, residents tell local media.

"It was crowded, everything was beautiful, people was mingling, and the shooting rang out, and everybody started running," one says.

Georgia has "some of the weakest gun laws in the country", according to Everytown.

"[The] state still has a dangerous Shoot First law that allows a person to kill another in a public area, even when they can safely walk away from the danger," the state's report card reads.

Bruce Wolpe, a non-resident Senior Fellow at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre, says the gun debate is "deadlocked" for Republicans and Democrats.

"We have more guns in the United States than people," he says.

"And when you reach that level of proliferation of guns throughout a country, there's almost nothing that can be done to stop them.

"For Republicans … if you're a supporter of gun rights, you will be more likely to vote than non-supporters of gun rights.

"On the Democratic side, particularly young people … [gun control] has been a driver of political support."

Jackson gets its second mass shooting at 8pm, when five people are injured at Mary C Jones Park.

One of the victims is an eight-year-old boy.

Witnesses say the shooting happens during a private birthday party, when 19-year-old Zykia Winford allegedly pulls a handgun from her purse and opens fire.

Along with the eight-year-old and Ms Winford, a 16-year-old, a 20-year-old and a 43-year-old are taken to hospital.

Does 'extensive suffering' have to be the reality for Americans?

The GVA ultimately records 248 shootings over the Easter holiday weekend — at least 90 people killed and 228 more wounded.

Everytown says the violence across the Easter weekend underscores an "urgent need for action".

Angela Ferrell-Zabala, the executive director of Moms Demand Action, says the weekend brings with it "extensive suffering".

"The fact that celebrating holidays in America is consistently accompanied by overwhelming gun violence is simply unacceptable," she says.

"This does not have to be our reality."

In February, former president and Republican election frontrunner Donald Trump told thousands at an event organised by the National Rifle Association (NRA) he would undo all gun restrictions enacted by the Biden administration.

"Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day," he told the crowd at the NRA's Presidential Forum.

President Joe Biden spoke emphatically on ending gun violence during his State of the Union address just a few weeks later.

"After another school shooting in Iowa [Donald Trump] said we should just 'get over it'. I say we must stop it," he said.

"I'm demanding a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Pass universal background checks."

Asked whether they can foresee a future in which gun control was effectively in place in the US, the experts who spoke to the ABC are in agreement.

"I think there's no likelihood at all that the constitution would ever be changed so as to either remove or limit that right … I just don't see it within the realms of possibility now," Dr Harris says.

Professor Wolpe says: "There will be no change. Zero."

"It will take such an upheaval, say the Democratic party becomes the super-majority party and can overcome these roadblocks [in] the political system."

Professor Lynch agrees, saying gun ownership is deeply embedded in America's national identity.

"To understand where this right comes from and what it stands for, it's in the constitution, it's written down," he says.

"Now getting rid of guns is like getting rid of the right to religious freedom or the right to free speech. [It's] extraordinarily difficult to abrogate those.

"And then … it stands for a notion of American identity. It's a lifestyle choice. It's a tradition and it's very hard to shift those in the minds of people.

"Gun rights, I think, will be around for as long as the American Republic itself is around."

The final mass shooting of March 31 comes at 11pm.

A large group of people are gathered outside a sports bar in St Petersburg, Florida.

Grainy surveillance footage from a nearby home records the sound of gunshots as a verbal argument between a group of men leads to a shoot-out.

Bystanders and cars are caught in the crossfire. Ultimately four people, including a 17-year-old girl, are injured.

"It sounded like a war out here last night," a witness tells local media.

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The Biden administration will require thousands more gun dealers to run background checks on buyers

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on proposed spending on child care and other investments in the “care economy” during a rally at Union Station, Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

FILE - President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Steve Dettelbach speaks during an event at White House in Washington, April 11, 2022. New data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives shows that 68,000 illegally trafficked firearms in the U.S. came through unlicensed dealers who aren’t required to perform background checks over a five year report that was released Thursday, April 4, 2024. Dettelbach, the ATF director, said the guns are harder to investigate because unlicensed dealers aren’t required to keep records of their sales. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands more firearms dealers across the United States will have to run background checks on buyers at gun shows or other places outside brick-and-mortar stores, according to a Biden administration rule that will soon go into effect.

The rule aims to close a loophole that has allowed tens of thousands of guns to be sold every year by unlicensed dealers who do not perform background checks to ensure the potential buyer is not legally prohibited from having a firearm. Gun rights groups are expected to fight it in court.

It’s the administration’s latest effort to combat gun violence . But in a contentious election year, it’s also an effort to show voters — especially younger ones for whom gun violence deeply resonates — that the White House is trying to stop the deaths.

“This is going to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and felons,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “And my administration is going to continue to do everything we possibly can to save lives. Congress needs to finish the job and pass universal background checks legislation now.”

The rule, which was finalized this week, makes clear that anyone who sells firearms predominantly to earn a profit must be federally licensed and conduct background checks, regardless of whether they are selling on the internet, at a gun show or at a brick-and-mortar store, Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters.

The Rev. Dr. Chauncey Brown poses for a portrait at Second Baptist Church, Sunday, April 14, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)

Biden has made curtailing gun violence a major part of his administration and reelection campaign, creating the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden also has urged Congress to ban so-called assault weapons — something Democrats shied from even just a few years ago.

The rule is likely to be challenged in court by gun rights activists who believe the Democratic president is unfairly targeting gun owners. The National Rifle Association said in a statement that it is “already working to use all means available to stop this unlawful rule.”

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group, also has warned of a court challenge if the rule was finalized as written. Lawrence Keane, the foundation’s senior vice president and general counsel, said Thursday that the organization was reviewing the regulation after contending previously that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was overstepping its legal authority.

Biden administration officials said they are confident the rule, which drew more than 380,000 public comments, would withstand lawsuits.

The administration first proposed the rule in August , after the passage of the most sweeping gun violence bill in decades, a bipartisan compromise in response to the massacre of 19 students and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school .

That law expanded the definition of those who are “engaged in the business” of selling firearms, and are required to become licensed by the ATF and therefore run background checks. The rule, which implements the change in the law, will take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register.

There are already roughly 80,000 federally licensed firearms dealers. Administration officials believe the new rule will impact more than 20,000 dealers who have gotten away with selling firearms without a license and performing background checks at places like gun shows and over the internet by claiming they aren’t “engaged in the business” of firearm sales.

“Everybody can see that people are not following the law in significant numbers,” ATF Director Steve Dettelbach said in an interview. “And it’s just wrong for public safety, it’s wrong for fairness when all these licensed dealers are out there following the rules, for people to think that they don’t have to all play by the same set of rules.”

The rule makes clear there are instances when a license is not be needed, such people who occasionally resell firearms to a family member or liquidate their personal collection.

Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who were instrumental in the passage of the gun law, have started an effort to block the rule from going into effect. But that is unlikely to succeed because the president would have the final say.

It comes a week after the ATF released new data that shows more than 68,000 illegally trafficked firearms in the U.S. came through unlicensed dealers who aren’t required to perform background checks over a five-year period. The ATF report also showed that guns trafficked through unlicensed dealers were used in nearly 370 shootings between 2017 and 2021.

Gun control advocates who have long pushed to close the so-called gun show loophole praised the regulation as a big step toward their goal of universal background checks for gun buyers — a Democratic priority that has been blocked by Republicans in Congress.

“Expanding background checks and closing the gun seller loophole is a massive victory for safer communities — and it was made possible thanks to the tireless advocacy of our grassroots movement,” Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action, said in an emailed statement.

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In Capitols and Courthouses, No End to National Divide Over Gun Policy

After the Supreme Court ruled last year that people could carry guns outside their homes, legal challenges and legislative debates have been playing out across the country.

A woman speaks at a podium, with others standing next to her and carrying pictures of children.

By Shaila Dewan

Less than a month after 19 children and two teachers died in the elementary school shooting last year in Uvalde, Texas, the U.S. Senate passed the most significant gun control bill since the long-expired federal ban on assault weapons.

The very same day, June 23, the Supreme Court upended gun policy in jurisdictions with some of the country’s strictest laws, like New York, Washington, D.C. and California, saying for the first time that people have the right to carry guns outside their homes.

In a country already raw with anger over gun policy, the new law from Congress and the sweeping decision by the Supreme Court only intensified the national fight over guns, spurring fresh legal challenges and legislative debates in courts and statehouses across the country.

And in the year since Uvalde — the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn. — both sides of the issue have made gains and endured setbacks as they seek to define the role of guns in American life.

From Colorado to Michigan to New Jersey, proponents of gun regulation have passed laws intended to limit access to firearms or blunt the effects of the Supreme Court case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen.

Opponents have moved swiftly to contest many such restrictions, using Bruen as the basis for one court challenge after another. And in states that were already gun friendly, gun rights groups have worked to further expand access to firearms.

In April, Florida became the largest state besides Texas to do away with permit requirements , joining the broad swath of the country where it has become easier than ever to carry a gun.

Even in the face of such striking changes, gun control supporters say their side is gaining ground. They point to a succession of legislative wins and to polls showing increasing public support for some degree of regulation. A poll released on Wednesday by NPR, PBS and Marist College found that 60 percent of Americans , including 4 in 10 who own guns, think it is more important to control gun violence than to protect gun rights.

In the past week, Minnesota and Michigan became the 20th and 21st states to enact red flag laws designed to keep firearms out of the hands of people who are at risk of harming themselves or others. In New York last August, the state established gun-free zones in sensitive areas like Times Square . And in New Jersey in December, the governor signed into law a long list of places where guns were not permitted.

The court challenges to some of those laws have been swift. In New York, a federal judge blocked parts of the law, but it has remained in effect while the state appeals. And just last week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking many provisions of the New Jersey law . The judge said the state could not forbid guns in many of the settings set forth in the new law, including bars, doctors’ offices and zoos, though private business owners could chose to do so.

This week, New Jersey’s attorney general asked a federal appeals court to put the lower court’s injunction on hold while the state appealed the ruling.

Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, which opposes any restrictions on gun ownership, said the Bruen decision was a bulwark against regulation and would help his organization win a host of lawsuits against gun restrictions.

But he said that even with the Bruen ruling, a monumental victory in the Supreme Court, the fight would be playing out for years in state legislatures and lower courts that now have to interpret the decision. “It often feels like one step forward, two steps back,” he said.

Public opinion has long favored limiting access to guns, with the share of Americans saying that “laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict” rarely dipping below half, according to Gallup. After the Uvalde shooting, the share rose to two-thirds of Americans.

And gun control advocates have learned from their defeats, organizing and building political infrastructure. “I worked in Congress for many years. I was never lobbied by a representative of a gun safety organization,” said Peter Ambler, referring to groups like the one he now directs, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, that support limiting access to firearms. Now, Mr. Ambler said, such organizations have public opinion on their side and clout on Capitol Hill.

Mass shootings have brought days of fiery protests even to statehouses where gun rights have long been sacrosanct, like Austin, Texas, where the families of Uvalde victims waited long hours to testify, and Nashville, where thousands of people clamored for an assault weapons ban, a red flag law and other gun control measures after three adults and three children were fatally shot by an assailant at the Covenant School in March.

Gun regulation advocates say that red flag laws could prevent shootings like the one in Nashville, in which the suspect identified by the police had been in treatment for an emotional disorder and had recently purchased seven guns.

But the legislature took no action, other than expelling two Democratic lawmakers who took the protest to the chamber floor. Now Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, is saying that he will call lawmakers to a special session in August to address public safety. “There is broad agreement that action is needed,” the governor said in a statement.

Even when such modest steps do not yield results, gun regulation advocates see glimmers of progress, as when Republicans on a Texas legislative committee voted to approve a bill to raise the minimum age to buy assault weapons , only to have it blocked from reaching the floor.

“ We’ve seen these fissures emerge among elected Republicans,” Mr. Ambler said. Advocates contrast the political calculus today to another moment when a terrible shooting was met with demands for action: the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown.

A federal bill to expand background checks was defeated, with some Congressional Democrats breaking ranks to vote no. Last summer, it was the other way around: 15 Republican senators broke with their party to vote for the federal gun bill, called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

Some gun control advocates say that efforts to make it easier to carry guns can coexist with measures that keep guns out of the hands of those who intend to do harm.

“Laws that actually use a scalpel to really identify risk, and laws that can prevent that risk from turning into mayhem, is the most important thing to focus on,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire media magnate and former New York City mayor. “This can’t be a referendum on gun ownership. This is a referendum on safety."

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Republicans who broke with their party to vote for the federal gun bill called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Fifteen Republican senators voted for the bill, not 14.

How we handle corrections

Shaila Dewan is a national reporter and editor covering criminal justice issues including prosecution, policing and incarceration. More about Shaila Dewan

Gun Violence in America

Background Checks Expansion: The Biden administration has approved the broadest expansion of federal background checks in decades to regulate a fast-growing shadow market of weapons sold online, at gun shows and through private sellers that contributes to gun violence.

A Grieving Mother’s Hope: Katy Dieckhaus, whose daughter was killed in the 2023 Covent School shooting in Nashville, is pleading for compromise with those who see gun rights as sacred .

A Historic Case: On Feb. 6, an American jury convicted a parent for a mass shooting carried out by their child for the first time. Lisa Miller, a reporter who has been following the case since its beginning, explains what the verdict really means .

Echoing Through School Grounds: In a Rhode Island city, gunshots from AR-15-style weapons have become the daily soundtrack for a school within 500 yards of a police shooting range. Parents are terrified, and children have grown accustomed to the threat of violence .

The Emotional Toll: We asked Times readers how the threat of gun violence has affected the way they lead their lives. Here’s what they told us .

Gun Control: U.S. gun laws are at the center of heated exchanges between those in favor and against tougher regulations. Here’s what to know about that debate .

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

Search form, you are here, final rule: definition of “engaged in the business” as a dealer in firearms.

A firearm with a pen laying on an official application to own or manufacture a firearm.

On April 10 , 2024, the Attorney General signed ATF’s final rule, Definition of “Engaged in the Business” as a Dealer in Firearms, amending ATF’s regulations in title 27, Code of Federal Regulations (“CFR”), part 478. The final rule implements the provisions of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (“BSCA,” effective June 25, 2022), which broadened the definition of when a person is considered “engaged in the business” as a dealer in firearms (other than a gunsmith or pawnbroker). The Final Rule clarifies that definition. It will be published in the Federal Register and will be effective 30-days from publication.

This final rule incorporates BSCA’s definitions of “predominantly earn a profit” and “terrorism,” and amends the regulatory definitions of “engaged in the business as a dealer other than a gunsmith or pawnbroker” and “principal objective of livelihood and profit” to ensure each conforms with the BSCA’s statutory changes and can be relied upon by the public.

The final rule clarifies when a person is “engaged in the business” as a dealer in firearms at wholesale or retail by:

clarifying the definition of “dealer,” and defining the terms “purchase,” “sale,” and “something of value” as they apply to dealers;
adding definitions for the term “personal collection (or personal collection of firearms, or personal firearms collection),” and for “responsible person”;
setting forth conduct that is presumed to constitute “engaging in the business” of dealing in firearms, and presumed to demonstrate the intent to “predominantly earn a profit” from the sale or disposition of firearms, absent reliable evidence to the contrary, in civil and administrative proceedings;
clarifying that the intent to “predominantly earn a profit” does not require the person to have received pecuniary gain, and that intent does not have to be shown when a person purchases or sells a firearm for criminal or terrorism purposes;
clarifying the circumstances when a person would not be presumed to engaged in the business of dealing in firearms, including as an auctioneer, or when purchasing firearms for, and selling firearms from, a personal collection;
addressing the procedures former licensees, and responsible persons acting on behalf of such licensees, must follow when they liquidate business inventory upon revocation or other termination of their license; and
clarifying that licensees must follow the verification and recordkeeping procedures in 27 CFR 478.94 and Subpart H , rather than using an ATF Form 4473 when firearms are transferred to other licensees, including transfers by a licensed sole proprietor to that person’s personal collection.

Please note that this is the text of the final rule as signed by the Attorney General, but the official version of the final rule will be as it is published in the Federal Register. The rule will go into effect once it is published in the Federal Register.

Read a copy of the rule.

Related Resources

Overview of Final Rule 2022R-17F Definition of “Engaged in the Business” as a Dealer in Firearms (coming soon)
Final Rule 2022R-17F – Questions & Answers
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking – Definition of “Engaged in the Business”
Notice of Proposed Rule Making – Comments
Press Release: Justice Department Publishes New Rule To Update Definition of "Engaged in the Business" as a Firearms Dealer
Director Dettelbach’s Remarks on the “Engaged in the Business” Final Rule

Background Information

Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, Public Law 117-159 (June 25, 2022)
Gun Control Act of 1968
National Firearms Act
Rules and Regulation
Regulations.atf.gov

Contact Information

For questions regarding the application of the final rule , email the Firearms Industry Programs Branch .
For media inquiries, email ATF Public Affairs or call 202-648-8500 .
For congressional inquiries, email ATF Legislative Affairs or call 202-648-8510 .
For questions regarding the rulemaking process, email the Office of Regulatory Affairs .

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