Showing papers on "Gun control published in 2018"

Gun Control in the Crosshairs: Christian Nationalism and Opposition to Stricter Gun Laws:

Abstract: Despite increasingly frequent mass shootings and a growing dissatisfaction with current gun laws, American opposition to federal gun legislation remains strong. The authors show that opposition to stricter gun control is closely linked to Christian nationalism, a religious cultural framework that mandates a symbiotic relationship between Christianity and civil society. Using data from a national population-based survey, the authors show that Christian nationalism is an exceptionally strong predictor of opposition to the federal government’s enacting stricter gun laws. Of all the variables considered, only general political orientation has more predictive power than Christian nationalism. The authors propose that the gun control debate is complicated by deeply held moral and religious schemas that discussions focused solely on rational public safety calculations do not sufficiently address. For the substantial proportion of American society who are Christian nationalists, gun rights are God given and sacre...

Gun attitudes on campus: United and divided by safety needs.

Abstract: All people share a need for safety. Yet people's pursuit of safety can conflict when it comes to guns, with some people perceiving guns as a means to safety and others perceiving guns as a threat to safety. We examined this conflict on a U.S. college campus that prohibits guns. We distinguished between people (N = 11,390) who (1) own a gun for protection, (2) own a gun exclusively for reasons other than protection (e.g., collecting, sports), and (3) do not own a gun. Protection owners felt less safe on campus and supported allowing guns on campus. They also reported that they and others would feel safer and that gun violence would decrease if they carried a gun on campus. Non-owners and non-protection owners felt the reverse. The findings suggest that protection concerns, rather than gun-ownership per se, account for diverging perceptions and attitudes about guns and gun control.

The burden of firearm violence in the United States: stricter laws result in safer states.

Abstract: The United States ranks number 1 in the list of countries with most privately owned guns with 101 guns for every 100 individuals.1 This has resulted in the loss of 32 lives and the treatment of 140 people every single day for gun related violence.2 These numbers state that there are more lives lost in seven weeks at the hands of firearm related violence than the total number of lives lost in seven years of Iraq War.3 Firearm related deaths disproportionately involve the younger population resulting in premature deaths. Along with the loss of life, gun violence related injuries exert a major burden on the US health system costing up to $2.3 billion annually.4 The overall economic burden associated with gun violence actually exceeds more than $100 billion every year.5 The Second Amendment to the constitution of the United States was passed in 1791 as a part of the Bill of Rights, which protects the rights of individuals to keep and bear firearms. Ever since then, possession of firearms has been a matter of debate due to concerns for public safety. Lawmakers that tried to limit the access of firearms have met with criticism for violating the rights of citizens protected by the Second Amendment. Despite the hue and cry for needing stricter firearm laws, there has been limited legislative progress on this forefront since the Gun Control Act of 1968 following the Kennedy assassination. The shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabriel Gifford in 2011 and the mass shooting of Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 once again surfaced the debate on need for stricter firearm laws. Limited numbers of previous studies have assessed the association between the incidence of firearm related mortality and strictness of firearm laws across the states.6-8 Every two years the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence issues a 100-point scorecard (Brady scorecard) that assigns a numerical value to each state based on the strength of its firearm laws. Brady scorecard was based on policy regulations such as background checks on gun sales; reporting lost or stolen firearms; and prohibiting dangerous people from purchasing weapons.9 The higher the Brady Score for each state, the stricter the firearm laws in that state. We for the first time used the Brady scorecard to assess the level of strictness in firearm laws across different states. The aim of this study was to determine the association between the rigorousness of firearm laws across different states and the rate of firearm related injuries, and mortality. We hypothesized that strict firearm legislations lower the incidence of firearm related hospital admissions and mortality.

“People Will Bury Their Guns before They Surrender Them”: Implementing Domestic Violence Gun Control in Rural, Appalachian versus Urban Communities

Abstract: Though gun violence is a global issue, the risk of firearm death is substantially higher in the United States than in other high-income nations. Guns are deeply rooted within American culture; however, different subcultures exist along the urban-rural divide. Such differences between urban and rural communities related to gun culture have been dubbed “firearm localism.” We investigated firearm localism in a state that has the highest proportion of firearm-related domestic violence homicide and a large rural area representing a subgroup of rural culture: Appalachia. Specifically, key professionals reported issues related to domestic violence gun control in their communities. We conducted phone and in-person surveys with a sample of community professionals (N = 133) working in victim services and the justice system in urban and Appalachian communities. Despite evidence of a strong gun culture in the rural communities, both urban and rural professionals estimated that about two-thirds of their community would support restricting abusers' firearm access. Additionally, rural professionals were more likely to show concern for abusers' Second Amendment rights when discussing unintended negative consequences of gun confiscation; urban professionals were more likely to point out that gun confiscation can provide a false sense of security for victims. Policy implications are discussed.

The effects of state and Federal gun control laws on school shootings

Abstract: School shootings are the highest profile type of murder in the United States. They are also the rarest type of murder. In 2014, there were only 17 firearm murders that were perpetrated in schools a...

Funding for Gun Violence Research Is Key to the Health and Safety of the Nation.

Abstract: An editorial is presented which addresses the authors' views about the potential impact that funding for firearm (gun) violence research might have on the health and safety of America as of 2018, and it mentions how more than 500,000 U.S. civilians were killed by firearms over the past two decades. Mass shootings and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's annual budget are examined, along with the American Dickey Amendment involving gun control and research financing.

Child-Access-Prevention Laws, Youths’ Gun Carrying, and School Shootings

Abstract: Despite public interest in keeping guns out of schools, little is known about the effects of gun control on youths’ gun carrying or school violence. Using data from the Youth Risk Behavior ...

Youth Opinions About Guns and Gun Control in the United States.

Abstract: in the United States Young activists and mass-shooting survivors in the United States have recently been organizing protests and demanding increased gun control measures. Although national polls have tracked adult opinions about gun control policies for decades, little is known about how youth feel about guns and/or gun control. Because the youth perspective is a powerful factor in the public debate, the goal of this study was to characterize youth opinions on guns and gun control.

“Our tears are not enough”: The warrant of the dead in the rhetoric of gun control

Abstract: The warrant of the dead refers to an explicit or implicit claim that the dead place a demand on the living. The living are called on to act and the dead are invoked as justification for that action...

Debating Gun Control in Canada and the United States: Divergent Policy Frames and Political Cultures:

Abstract: The weakness of the antigun lobby in the United States is attributed to the “collective action problem” of trying to mobilize “free riders” behind a public purpose. But the Coalition for Gun Contro...

Online interest regarding violent attacks, gun control, and gun purchase: A causal analysis

Abstract: Background Increased interest about gun ownership and gun control are oftentimes driven by informational shocks in a common factor, namely violent attacks, and the perceived need for higher levels of safety. A causal depiction of the societal interest around violent attacks, gun control and gun purchase, both synchronous and over time, should be a stepping stone for designing future strategies regarding the safety concerns of the U.S. population. Objective Examine the causal relationships between unexpected increases in population interest about violent attacks, gun control, and gun purchase. Methods Relationships among online searches for information about violent attacks, gun control, and gun purchase occurring between 2004 and 2017 in the U.S. are explained through a novel structural vector autoregressive time series model to account for simultaneous causal relationships. Results More than 20% of the stationary variability in each of gun control and gun purchase interest can be explained by the remaining factors. Gun control interest appears to be caused, in part, by violent attacks informational shocks, yet violent attacks, although impactful, have a lesser effect than gun control debate on long-term gun ownership interests. Conclusions The form in which gun control has been introduced in public debate may have further increased gun ownership interest. Reactive gun purchase interest may be an unintended side effect of gun control debate. U.S. policymakers may need to rethink current approaches to promotion of gun control, and whether societal policy debate without policy outcomes could be having unintended effects.

Policy Gridlock versus Policy Shift in Gun Politics: A Comparative Veto Player Analysis of Gun Control Policies in the United States and Canada:

Abstract: Why do major events of gun violence (i.e., mass shootings) lead to incremental change or no federal legislative change at all in the United States while major events of gun violence have resulted i...

Gun Talk Online: Canadian Tools, American Values*

Abstract: Objective The objective of this study is to address the following question: Why has the United States been so reluctant to embrace the type of comprehensive gun control that is in place in every other developed democracy? Method The method used to address this question is a computerized content analysis on nearly 18 million words that were extracted from online political discussions of Canadian and American gun enthusiasts. A comparison of these discussions was guided by three theories on the character and origins of Canadian–American political difference. Results The results demonstrate that the instrumental components of gun ownership are more relevant for Canadian gun enthusiasts, while American gun enthusiasts view their arms as physical manifestations of political values. These values are consistent with a widely perceived American ideology that centers on individual freedom and antipathy toward government. Conclusion This leads to the conclusion that U.S. gun rights groups are naturally advantaged in the gun control debate because their rhetoric finds fertile soil beyond the gun enthusiast segment, and helps explain the intensity of their opposition to gun control.

Sticking to One's Guns: Mass Shootings and the Political Economy of Gun Control in the U.S.

Abstract: Do events that draw public attention towards an issue impact electoral outcomes? I compile data on mass shootings 2000-16 to analyze the impact of mass shootings on political outcomes. Using a Difference-in-Differences strategy, I find that Republicans lose votes in areas with mass shootings after the event. Identification relying on comparing successful and failed mass shootings yields similar results. Mass shootings lead to an increase in the importance of gun policy, while do not change the average preferred gun policy among the electorate. Moreover, these events increase the divide on gun policy among both voters and politicians: Democrats (Republicans) tend to demand even greater (lower) gun control after mass shootings.

Dynamics in Gun Ownership and Crime - Evidence from the Aftermath of Sandy Hook

Abstract: Gun rights activists in the United States frequently argue that the right to bear arms, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment, can help deter crime. Advocates of gun control usually respond that firearm prevalence contributes positively to violent crime rates. In this paper, we provide quasi-experimental evidence that a positive and unexpected gun demand shock led to an increase in murder rates after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the resulting gun control debate in December 2012. In states where purchases were delayed due to mandatory waiting periods and bureaucratic hurdles in issuing a gun permit, firearm sales exhibited weaker increases than in states without any such delays. We show that this finding is hard to reconcile with standard economic theory, but is in line with findings from behavioral economics. States that saw more gun sales then experienced significantly higher murder rates in the months following the demand shock, as murders increased by 6-15% over the course of a year.

The Role of Prior Information in Inference on the Annualized Rates of Mass Shootings in the United States

Abstract: While public debate over gun control in the United States has often hinged on individual public mass shooting incidents, legislative action should be informed by knowledge of the long-term evolutio...

Mass Shootings, Mental Illness, and Gun Control.

Abstract: In the wake of the Stoneman Douglas School shooting, Republican and Democratic leaders-like the American electorate they represent-remain sharply divided in their responses to gun violence. They are united in their condemnation of these mass shootings, but they disagree about whether stricter or looser gun control laws are the answer. Those on the right side of the political aisle suggest that the issue is one of mental illness rather than gun control. Conversely, those who are more liberal or progressive in their political learnings are quick to condemn attempts to reframe the issue of mass shootings as a mental health problem. Both sides are wrong. Mass shootings are indeed partially a mental health problem, albeit one poorly addressed by our current laws and policies. But the solution to mass shootings also needs to consider strategies that may reduce gun violence in general.

Motivational Influences on the American Gun Rights Debate

Abstract: Motivational Influences on the American Gun Rights Debate Mark A. Conley For almost forty years gun ownership and the motivational underpinnings of why guns are valued has received little attention in psychology. The gun rights debate is an unresolved salient item that has been on the national agenda for decades, and national polls provide evidence for a slow and steady voter realignment over this issue. Motivation science tools that explain value creation, regulatory focus and regulatory fit, help to explain the salience and importance of gun rights for millions of Americans. Three field experiments, with replications and extensions, demonstrated motivational fit between the prevention orientation (marked by vigilant concern for threats) and gun ownership. This research remained agnostic regarding the legal and moral components of the gun rights debate. Instead, these experiments demonstrate the malleability of gun value as a function of fundamental motivations. This applied political psychology research made two basic contributions to regulatory fit theory. First, these field experiments found fit effects between motivational inductions and distinct field environments. Also, by incorporating a pure control condition into these regulatory fit experiments, this research pinned down that literal dollar value of motivationally relevant objects is intensified by fit (as opposed to decreased by non-fit).

Keeping and Bearing Arms in Czech

Abstract: Determining the plain or primary meaning of words in legal language is crucial to compliance with and enforcement of laws, but also controversial if the methods used are subjective and unsystematic. Corpus linguistics is a potential remedy. This chapter uses corpus analysis to compare the usage of the Czech noun zbraň (weapon), verbs držet (keep) and nosit (bear), and adjectives bezuhonný (upstanding) and spolehlivý (reliable) in Czech gun law against their usage in wider discourse. The results suggest a marked misalignment between the two usages, with the words taking on connotations at law that would not be self-evident. Although the population of gun owners in the Czech Republic is small, the potential cost of misunderstanding the key terms of gun law has risen with the attempt in 2017 to create a constitutional right to keep and bear arms to assist the state in protecting national security.

The Effects of Cueing and Framing on Youth Attitudes towards Gun Control and Gun Rights

Abstract: I analyze attitudes towards gun control from a recent survey of American high school students. For students who most closely identify as Republicans, cueing them to think about prior school shootings increases their agreement that armed staff in schools will improve safety and arming citizens will reduce risk of mass shootings. For those identifying as Democrats and Independents, providing them with selective information that certain states have loose gun control laws and low rates of gun violence makes them more supportive of gun rights. For Republicans, providing selective information that certain states have loose gun control laws and high rates of gun violence makes them less supportive of gun rights. These results suggest that emotional cues may exacerbate a priori biases, while informational cues may be more likely to change people’s minds about firearm policies.

The Second Amendment and Firearms Regulation: A Venerable Tradition Regulating Liberty While Securing Public Safety.

Abstract: An editorial is presented which addresses the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, firearms regulation in America, and a firearms violence epidemic in the country as of 2018, and it mentions other articles which appear in the same issue of the journal and deal with topics such as gun violence prevention. The history of U.S. gun laws is examined, along with debates about liberty, gun rights, and gun control.

Gun control : An Australian perspective

Abstract: The Report of the National Committee was published in 1990. More than a dozen specific recommendations regarding firearms were made, including uniform legislation, a national gun control strategy, a computerized firearms registry, and a permanent amnesty for the surrender of unauthorized firearms. The criminological evidence on the subject of guns and their role in crime, both preventing and promoting, is extensive. The police carriage of firearms is an important issue in the gun debate. For in the arguments used by gun advocates for greater civilian access to guns, there is an oft-made point that law enforcement deploys guns, ergo guns need to be accepted by the public as an effective tool of crime control. Australia’s gun lobby – long accustomed to stacking firearm consultative committees and holding sway in legislative bodies – lobbied hard against suggested public health measures. It is difficult to imagine, however, that an Australian-style response to gun violence could ever be transplanted into the United States.

Rethinking Political Power in Judicial Review

Abstract: For decades, scholars have argued that the proper judicial response when democratically enacted laws burden politically powerless minority groups is more aggressive judicial review. This political process approach, however, has fallen on deaf ears at the Supreme Court since the 1970s. Justice Scalia was thus accurate (if not politic) when he derided political process theory as an “old saw” of constitutional law. There is a different role that political power may yet play. The key to seeing it is to focus on the other side of the political power spectrum. Courts can be attentive to situations when the groups burdened by a law are politically powerful, not just when they are powerless. Political power’s presence, I want to suggest, can be a good reason for judges to defer to democratically enacted laws, even if one thinks its absence is a bad reason to strike laws down. This Article advances a positive and normative case for an approach to judicial review that is attuned to political power. As a positive matter, it turns out the Supreme Court has employed such an approach in a number of decisions, including in opinions joined by seven of the nine current Justices. And as a normative matter, treating political power as a reason for judicial deference may help unlock the democratic and institutional benefits of leaving contested constitutional questions to the political branches without sacrificing the role of courts in safeguarding individual rights. The Article concludes by applying these insights to five contemporary disputes in constitutional law: the rise of First Amendment Lochnerism, gun control and the Second Amendment, same sex marriage, due process limits on punitive damage awards, and the closely-regulated industries exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement.

When White Supremacists Invade a City

Abstract: In August 2017, hundreds of white supremacists came to Charlottesville, Virginia, ostensibly to protest the city council’s decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. This Essay argues that Charlottesville’s vulnerability in the face of white supremacist invasions is a feature of all cities’ liminal status in American law. Municipal corporations neither enjoy the full power of the state nor the rights accorded individuals and private corporations. Among other limitations, state law restricts Charlottesville’s authority to remove Confederate war memorials or to regulate firearms. So too, our current constitutional doctrine does not easily permit cities to assert First Amendment rights against state-mandated local government speech. Nor can cities readily assert a collective civil or constitutional right to be free from violence and intimidation. The lack of either municipal power or municipal rights means that a city faced with the symbolic and physical “takeover” of its downtown by heavily armed aggressors has limited legal resources with which to respond.

Firearms in the Family

Abstract: This Article considers firearms prohibitions for domestic violence offenders, in light of recent Supreme Court decisions and the larger, national debate about gun control. Unlike other scholarship in the area, it confronts the costs of ratcheting up the scope and enforcement of such firearms bans and argues that the politicization of safety has come at the expense of a sound approach to gun control in the context of intimate-partner abuse. In doing so, it expands scholarly arguments against mandatory, one-size-fits-all criminal justice responses to domestic violence in a direction that other critics have been reluctant to go, perhaps because of a reflexive, cultural distaste for firearms. Both sides in the gun-control debate rely on starkly contrasting, gendered images: the helpless female victim in need of state protection, including strictly enforced gun laws, and the self-defending woman of the National Rifle Association’s “Refuse to be a Victim” campaign. Neither of these images accurately describes the position of many domestic violence victims whose partners have guns, and neither image responds effectively to the heterogeneity of conduct leading to a protection order or a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction that triggers federal and state firearms bans. The emphasis the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun organizations place on a woman’s right to carry a firearm in self-defense ignores the most common homicide risks women face, as well as structural inequalities that contribute to gender violence. Yet, significant problems afflict an uncritically anti-gun approach, too. First, gun-control advocates tend to ignore the reality of intimate-partner abuse—a reality in which some women fight back; some family livelihoods depend on jobs for which firearms are required; not all misdemeanants become murderers; and victims have valid reasons for wanting to keep their partners out of prison. Second, to the extent that proponents of strict gun regulation also exhibit distaste for racialized crime-control policies, they fail to acknowledge that zealously enforced gun laws aimed at preventing domestic violence would put more people—including more men and women from vulnerable communities of color—behind bars. The current framing of the argument for tougher firearms laws for abusers is derived from public health research on domestic violence that makes a reduction in intimate homicide rates its chief goal. Yet, since hundreds of thousands of domestic violence misdemeanants are thought to possess illegal guns, reformers should also consider the potential costs to victims and their families of a move to sweeping and rigorous enforcement. Changes in gun laws and their implementation in the context of intimate-partner abuse ought to cure over- and under-breadth problems; provide greater autonomy to abuse victims and protections for those who resist their batterers; reconsider the lack of an exemption to the misdemeanor ban for firearms required on-duty; and include a better mechanism for restoring gun rights to misdemeanants who have shown the capacity to avoid reoffending.

Australia's 1996 Gun Law Reforms Halted Mass Shootings for 22 Years: A Response to Criticism from Gary Kleck

Abstract: We reply to criticisms made by prominent anti-gun control researcher Gary Kleck of our widely reported 2016 study on the impact of Australia’s historic 1996 gun law reforms on mass shootings and firearm-related deaths. Thirteen mass fatal shootings in 18 years were followed by 22 years with no such incidents, with the probability of this being a chance occurrence calculated at 1:200,000 against. We concentrate on Kleck’s efforts to repudiate our conclusions by redefining mass shootings; his argument that mass shooters do not maximise the lethal potential of their semi-automatic weapons and so could just as well use (legal) single shot firearms; and that when mass shooters move about in their shooting locations, such events are improperly classified as mass shootings, rather than “sprees.”