How America Got Its Guns

A History of the Gun Violence Crisis

William Briggs

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780826358141
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

In the United States more than thirty thousand deaths each year can be attributed to firearms. This book on the history of guns in America examines the Second Amendment and the laws and court cases it has spawned. The author's thorough and objective account shows the complexities of the issue, which are so often reduced to bumper-sticker slogans, and suggests ways in which gun violence in this country can be reduced.

Briggs profiles not only protagonists in the national gun debate but also ordinary people, showing the ways guns have become part of the lives of many Americans. Among them are gays and lesbians, women, competitive trapshooters, people in the gun-rights and gun-control trenches, the NRA's first female president, and the most successful gunsmith in American history.

Balanced and painstakingly unbiased, Briggs's account provides the background needed to follow gun politics in America and to understand the gun culture in which we are likely to live for the foreseeable future.

1 | GUNS IN AMERICA

Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.

—HUBERT HUMPHREY, Democratic vice president (1965–1969)

For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation.

—BARACK OBAMA, Democratic president (2009–2017)

IT HAPPENED AGAIN, like demonic clockwork. Shortly after midnight on July 20, 2012, a twenty-four-year-old former neuroscience graduate student, dressed in black, wearing a gas mask and body armor, slipped into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. He detonated a tear gas canister and began spraying the audience, first with a shotgun and then with an AR-15 semi­automatic rifle—both legally obtained. By the time he calmly surrendered to police, twelve people were dead and fifty-eight people had been wounded. Later that day, police discovered six thousand rounds of ammunition in the man’s booby-trapped apartment. As with other mass shootings in this country, the incongruous reaction was shock but not surprise.

Just as predictable as a recurrence of such tragedies were the reactions from all directions. Within hours of the shooting, CNN’s Piers Morgan—a British citizen accustomed to strict gun laws and negligible gun homicide rates—unleashed a Twitter torrent. One tweet was prescient: “More Americans will buy guns after this to defend themselves, and so the dangerous spiral descends. When/how does it stop?”¹ Indeed, the state of Colorado approved 43 percent more background checks in the weekend after the Aurora shootings than in the previous weekend.²

Gun rights advocates wasted no time firing back. Erich Pratt of Gun Owners of America, a no-compromise gun rights organization, claimed that the Aurora shootings provided further evidence of the failure of gun control laws. He observed that the Aurora theater was a gun-free zone and that “the victims were disarmed by law or regulation…. They were made mandatory victims by restrictions which never stop the bad guys from getting or using guns.”³ If just one person in the theater had been armed, so he implied, the carnage could have been stopped.

Gun regulation supporters piled on. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, cofounder of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, suggested that police officers across the country should take a stand and say, “We’re going to go on strike. We’re not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.”⁴ Never mind that a police strike might only exacerbate gun violence.

Three days after the shootings, the National Rifle Association (NRA) sent a fund-raising letter, not mentioning the Aurora tragedy, to its 4.3 million members, claiming that the re-election of President Obama would result in the “confiscation of our firearms.”⁵ Obama, in the heat of an election campaign, used the Aurora tragedy to affirm his support for Americans’ Second Amendment rights. He then cautiously added that “the majority of gun owners would agree that we should do everything possible to prevent criminals and fugitives from purchasing weapons…. These steps shouldn’t be controversial. They should be common sense.”⁶

Conservative blogger Stacy Washington weighed in during an NRA interview, saying that “the key is not to limit lawful ownership and carrying of firearms. And please don’t even talk to me about assault weapons, because I’ve heard it all; it’s ridiculous. If the military has assault weapons, private citizens should be able to own them.”⁷

PBS’s Bill Moyers excoriated the NRA, calling it “the enabler of death—paranoid, delusional and as venomous as a scorpion. With the weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians, the National Rifle Association has turned the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a cruel hoax, a cruel and deadly hoax.”⁸

Reciting a familiar theme that one madman does not represent all gun owners, Dave Workman, senior editor at TheGunMag.com, reminded readers that “what this incident … proves undeniably is that laws cracking down on law-abiding gun owners will not prevent such crimes. To suggest otherwise is both dishonest and delusional.”⁹

A few tireless and outnumbered lawmakers proposed new laws. Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) (a widow of the Long Island Rail Road shooting in 1993) introduced legislation to ban the sale of large quantities of ammunition through the mail or Internet. “It’s time to close the loophole that’s allowing killers—deranged, insane—and even terrorists to buy ammunition online…. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand how wrong this is.”¹⁰ Their bills never became law.

Supreme Court justices are rare sightings on Sunday-morning talk shows. However, Justice Antonin Scalia, aligned with the majority in two landmark cases that overturned handgun bans in Washington, DC, and Chicago, reminded listeners on Fox News that “like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”¹¹

The Aurora tragedy and the consequent outrage have become a part of life in an armed America. Whether or not you own a gun, you likely live within range of someone’s gun. In the next year, one in thirty people will be a victim of gun violence or know one. Over thirty-two thousand people die each year because of gun violence—in 2014, about 11,400 homicides and 21,300 suicides.¹² Astoundingly, each year between 2011 and 2014, thirty children less than four years of age and eighty children less than fourteen years of age were killed accidentally by guns.¹³ In 2014, an additional eighty-one thousand nonfatal injuries were attributed to firearms, bringing the annual toll of gun violence victims to well over one hundred thousand.¹⁴ One study in 2000 estimated the annual cost of gun violence to be $80 million.¹⁵ However, guns are also used defensively to escape injury, assault, or death somewhere between 80,000 and 2.5 million times per year.¹⁶ Among the many social issues that torment Americans—as contentious as abortion, the death penalty, immigration, or same-sex marriage—gun rights is certainly among the most combustible and divisive. There are several reasons why.

A Few Gun Numbers

Data on gun ownership are obtained primarily from surveys, so they should be digested with care. Nevertheless, polls lead to the inescapable conclusion that gun owners make up a significant and diverse cross-section of American society. In a 2014 Gallup poll, 42 percent of adult American respondents (48 percent of male respondents and 38 percent of female respondents) reported a gun in their household or on their property, a decrease from about 51 percent in 1993, but now part of a rising trend. According to the same poll, 30 percent of adult respondents reported personally owning a gun in 2011.¹⁷

Questions about stricter gun laws appear regularly in public opinion surveys. Despite shocking mass killings during the last twenty years—events that might have caused a public rethinking of gun ownership—support for stricter gun laws has not increased in the past decade. One typical poll taken in 2014 showed that 54 percent of respondents (26 percent of Republican respondents and 83 percent of Democratic respondents) favored stricter laws regulating the sale of guns, with 42 percent opposed to stricter gun laws.¹⁸ In another 2014 poll, 26 percent of adults favored a ban on handguns, down from 38 percent in 1999.¹⁹ And 63 percent of adults polled in 2014 believed that a gun in the home makes the home safer, up from 35 percent in 2000.²⁰ Generally, acceptance of current gun laws or assent to more lenient gun laws has increased in all categories (gender, politics, geography). As part of that trend, Americans tend to believe that existing laws should be better enforced before new laws are passed.²¹

Other measures also suggest a thriving gun culture. Gun sales, applications for permits, new federally approved firearm dealers are all on the rise. In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election and in the aftermath of Obama’s victory, gun sales took a sharp turn upward.²² Retailers reported that guns, ammunition, and accessories were flying out the doors. In the month prior to the election, FBI criminal background checks, which are required for the legal purchase of guns from licensed dealers, increased 10 percent over the previous month and 20 percent over the same month of the previous year.²³

A 2016 poll showed that 58 percent of those surveyed had a (very or mostly) favorable opinion of the NRA (up slightly since 1993, although there have been ups and downs along the way).²⁴ In a 2013 poll, 48 percent of responding gun owners said that protection was the first reason for owning a gun, up from 26 percent in 1999.²⁵ Another 2013 poll found that 60 percent of gun owners cited protection as one reason for owning a gun.²⁶ Neither of these two polls detected another reason for gun ownership: fear of government tyranny. That reason was expressed in a 2013 poll, in which 29 percent of responding gun owners (44 percent of Republicans, 27 percent of Independents, and 18 percent of Democrats) said that an armed revolution might be necessary in the next few years in order to protect our liberties.²⁷

The total number of guns in America continues to rise and stands somewhere between 270 and 310 million—approaching one gun per person or, on average, six guns per gun-owning adult.²⁸ A recent study revealed that 3 percent of adult Americans own roughly 50 percent of the guns.²⁹ The total gun figure is slippery for several reasons: there is no national gun registration system; sales data are difficult to find and proxies, such as background checks, may be unreliable; and guns are bought, sold, traded, and destroyed in many legal and illegal ways. However, it would require enormous sophistry to deny the obvious conclusion: the United States leads the world in personal gun ownership.³⁰

The Gun Tapestry

To understand the complexity of the gun debate in America, it is essential to appreciate the diversity of gun owners. Gun ownership varies significantly by state: Wyoming leads the list with roughly 60 percent of adults owning guns and Hawaii is at the other end at about 7 percent. Ownership is almost twice as high among whites as nonwhites, and it is nearly twice as high among Republicans as Democrats. The gun ownership rate among men is higher than for women, and the total guns owned by men appreciably outnumber the total guns owned by women.³¹

When you think of gun owners, imagine a California housewife who participates in trapshooting events and carries a handgun for protection. Picture legions of antique gun enthusiasts who belong to their state collector associations. There are athletes training for international marksmanship competitions, some of which have Olympic status. Consider the men and women who participate in highly competitive practical shooting events. And then there are the weekend plinkers and the buddies who get together for an annual shoot on the farm. The image of gun owners as—pick your stereotype—stockpiling survivalists or raging ranchers is simply wrong. Of course, stereotyping goes both directions: former NRA president Charlton Heston once summoned all those who “prefer the America where you can pray without feeling naïve, love without being kinky, sing without profanity, be white without feeling guilty, own a gun without shame” to join the culture war.³²

In terms of politics, race, education, and economics, gun owners do not cut a clean, homogeneous swath through our society. They form threads woven throughout the American tapestry. To understand guns in America, one must appreciate the number and diversity of gun owners and the extent to which guns have seeped—deeply and broadly—into the culture. This state of affairs only makes the gun debate more complex.

History

Guns have always been a part of American history. From the arming of patriots and the mustering of militia during the Revolutionary War, to the disarming of slaves and freedmen in the nineteenth century, to the street wars of Prohibition, to the assassination of four presidents (and the attempted assassination of thirteen other presidents), to the current drumbeat of mass shootings, to recent gang wars in Chicago, guns were there. Those nearly four centuries of history complicate the gun debate, because both sides use it, selectively and often erroneously, to support their positions.

Guns were an essential part of colonial life, particularly near the frontiers. Several New England colonies had laws requiring all households to be armed and colonial marksmen distinguished themselves in battles before, during, and after the Revolutionary War.³³ However, the lore of gun-toting sheriffs battling armed outlaws in order to civilize America’s Wild West frontier may be a bit exaggerated. According to gun-book author and constitutional scholar Adam Winkler,³⁴ towns such as Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood had gun control in the form of “blanket ordinances against the carrying of arms by anyone.”³⁵ In fact, crime and homicide rates in these towns were remarkably low.

Author Erik Larson attributes the lore of guns on the frontier to calculated myth-making over the last century by “Hollywood directors, TV producers, nineteenth-century reporters, dime novelists, and the frontier heroes themselves.” These creative opportunists, driven more by profits than historical accuracy, were simply rising to a challenge: “how to rationalize the sheer excitement of the westward expansion, with its attendant gold and land fevers, and the mundane, harsh reality of ordinary frontier life.”³⁶

The temptation to oversimplify history afflicts both sides of the gun debate. For example, fluctuations in the homicide rate over the last two hundred years cannot be explained simply by the availability of guns or the strength of gun control laws or the political climate of the time—despite correlations in the data. There are too many interlocking variables, and the relationships among them are convoluted. Randolph Roth summarizes the difficulties clearly:

Except for a brief period in the 1950s, America’s homicide rate has been stuck between 6 and 9 per 100,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 | Guns in America
• 2 | The Advantage of Being Armed
• 3 | Number Games
• 4 | Twenty-Seven Words
• 5 | Guns in American Lives
• 6 | Interpreting the Second Amendment
• 7 | Magic Never Made a Gun
• 8 | The Other Amendment
• 9 | Playing by the Rules
• 10 | Colfax and Cruikshank
• 11 | Enforcement!
• 12 | A Century Passes
• 13 | Carry, Stand, and Defend
• 14 | The Court Speaks
• 15 | Guns and the Mind
• 16 | The Court Speaks Again
• 17 | A Year Passes
• 18 | Reducing Gun Violence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index