Gun control

About: Gun control is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1211 publications have been published within this topic receiving 16516 citations. The topic is also known as: firearms control & gun law.

Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide: The Relationship between Firearms, the Uses of Firearms, and Interpersonal Violence

Abstract: well-written study of the history of gun ownership and gun use in America, has many themes, but none is more important for contemporary public policy than the relationship between guns and interpersonal violence. Bellesiles argues that before the 185os, relatively few Americans owned guns or knew how to use, repair, or preserve them. As a result, guns contributed little to the homicide rate, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assumed guns and murder went hand in hand. These patterns changed dramatically, according to Bellesiles, after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War, when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides, which has left America to this day with the highest homicide rate of any industrial democracy. Bellesiles's thesis has been widely embraced by proponents of gun control and condemned by opponents of firearms regulation. Widespread gun ownership is not the only cause, in Bellesiles's opinion, of America's high homicide rate, but it is a crucial factor, so his thesis has landed at the center of a vigorous public debate.1

Gun Law History in the United States and Second Amendment Rights

Abstract: I INTRODUCTION In its important and controversial 2008 decision on the meaning of the Second Amendment, District of Columbia v. Heller, (1) the Supreme Court ruled that average citizens have a constitutional right to possess handguns for personal self-protection in the home. (2) Yet in establishing this right, the Court also made clear that the right was by no means unlimited, and that it was subject to an array of legal restrictions, including: "prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms." (3) The Court also said that certain types of especially powerful weapons might be subject to regulation, (4) along with allowing laws regarding the safe storage of firearms. (5) Further, the Court referred repeatedly to gun laws that had existed earlier in American history as a justification for allowing similar contemporary laws, (6) even though the court, by its own admission, did not undertake its own "exhaustive historical analysis" of past laws. (7) In so ruling, the Court brought to the fore and attached legal import to the history of gun laws. This development, when added to the desire to know our own history better, underscores the value of the study of gun laws in America. In recent years, new and important research and writing has chipped away at old myths to present a more accurate and pertinent sense of our gun past. (8) Researchers and authors including Saul Cornell, Alexander DeConde, Craig Whitney, and Adam Winkler have all published important work making clear that gun laws are by no means a contemporary phenomenon. (9) Yet even now, far too few understand or appreciate the fact that though gun possession is as old as America, so too are gun laws. But there's more: gun laws were not only ubiquitous, numbering in the thousands, but also spanned every conceivable category of regulation, from gun acquisition, sale, possession, transport, and use, including deprivation of use through outright confiscation, to hunting and recreational regulations, to registration and express gun bans. For example, the contemporary raging dispute over the regulation of some semi-automatic weapons that began in late 1980s was actually presaged seven decades earlier, when at least seven states banned such weapons entirely--a fact that seems to have been unknown to modern analysts until now. A vast newly compiled dataset of historical gun laws reveals that the first gun grabbers (as contemporary gun rights advocates like to label gun control proponents) were not Chablis-drinking liberals of the 1960s, but rum-guzzling pioneers dating to the 1600s. This historical examination is especially relevant to the modern gun debate because, at its core, that debate is typically framed as a fierce, zero-sum struggle between supporters of stronger gun laws versus supporters of gun rights (who, of course, largely oppose stronger gun laws--or so it is said). The zero-sum quality of this struggle posits that a victory for one side is a loss for the other, and vice versa. Yet history tells a very different story--that, for the first 300 years of America's existence, gun laws and gun rights went hand-in-hand. It is only in recent decades, as the gun debate has become more politicized and more ideological that this relationship has been reframed as a zero-sum struggle. The plethora of early gun laws herein described establish their prolific existence, but also validate the argument that gun rules and gun rights are by no means at odds. If the Supreme Court was indeed serious in saying that the provenance of gun regulations is relevant to the evaluation of contemporary laws, then this examination advances the Court's stated objective. The common notions that gun laws are largely a function of modern, industrial (or post-industrial) America, that gun laws are incompatible with American history and its practices or values, and that gun laws fundamentally collide with American legal traditions or individual rights, are all patently false. …

Gun laws and school safety.

Abstract: Background This paper examines the associations between state-level gun control and adolescent school safety overall and by student sex, age, and race. Methods We used data on 926 639 adolescents from 45 states in the 1999–2015 Youth Risk Behavior Surveys. Students self-reported on weapon carrying at school, the number of times they experienced weapon threats or injuries at school, the number of school days missed due to feeling unsafe, and weapon carrying at any location. For each state and year, 133 gun laws were combined into an index of gun control strength. Difference-in-differences logistic regression models were used to evaluate the associations of stricter gun laws with binary measures of students’ weapon carrying and perception of school safety, controlling for individual and state characteristics, as well as year and state fixed effects. Results An IQR increase in the index (ie, a 15-point increase corresponding to a strengthening of gun control) was associated with a 0.8-percentage point decrease in the probability of weapon threats at school (p=0.029), a 1.1-percentage point decrease in the probability of missing school due to feeling unsafe (p=0.002) and a 1.9-percentage point decrease in the probability of carrying weapons at any location (p=0.001). Stricter gun laws had a stronger negative association with weapon carrying among males compared with females. Stricter gun laws were also differentially associated with weapon carrying by race/ethnicity. Conclusions The adoption of stricter state gun laws was associated with improvements in school climate and subjective perceptions of safety.

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...