This guide,
written by former CJJ board member David Anderson and published
in mid-1999, has been superseded by a chapter on guns in the CJJ
guide to covering Crime and Justice. See www.justicejournalism.org/crimeguide,
chapter 11.
posted by Ted Gest, November 2007.
THE
STATS:
Gun Ownership
No one
knows with real precision how many guns are privately owned in
America. Federal law prohibits comprehensive government databases.
(More on that below.) Estimates are produced by surveying samples
of the public, then extrapolating for the population as a whole.
A generally respected study published in 1997 and based on a survey
conducted at the end of 1994 estimated 192 million privately owned
firearms in America; other studies calculate higher numbers -
one as high as 235 million privately owned guns. Those counted
by the 1997 study included 65 million handguns, 70 million rifles
and 49 million shotguns. Guns are believed to be present in about
40 percent of American households.The 1997 research confirmed
a huge, relatively recent increase in sales of guns to private
individuals: About 80 percent of all the guns in private hands
had been acquired since 1974. The guns are not evenly dispersed:
only 9.5 million individuals own 105.5 million guns; 34.4 million
people own the rest. These 45 million gun owners constitute about
one quarter of the adult population. Injuries and Deaths Research
confirms that relatively easy public access to firearms augments
the seriousness of intentional and accidental violence. Guns are
second only to automobiles as a cause of death in the United States.
(By 2003, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimate,
more will be killed each year with guns than by cars.) About 34,000
people were shot to death in 1996. Some 14,300 of these shootings
were homicides -- 68 percent of all homicides committed that year.
Suicides accounted for 18,100 ofthe rest, accidents for another
1100. (Circumstances of the others weren't determined.) In 1996,
guns were used in 29 percent of violent crimes. A 1992 study found
that hospitals treated about 99,000 people a year for non-fatal
gunshot wounds, about 20 percent of them accidental. Guns, especially
in the hands of young people, inflated homicide and injury rates
during the crime wave that followed introduction of crack cocaine
into American cities in the mid-1980's. The overall number of
homicides committed by juveniles with guns more than doubled between
1986 and 1993, but the number committed in other ways remained
unchanged from year to year.
Medical Costs
Promoters
of gun control elaborate on such findings by pointing to costs
of crimes involving guns as calculated by researchers. One recent
inquiry by Philip J. Cook and Jens O. Ludwig, considered the largest
and most complete study so far, assessed treatment costs for the
134,445 gunshot cases reported in 1994. They found that cases
requiring hospital treatment averaged $14,600 for emergency care
and $35,400 for lifetime care. They figured an overall cost of
emergency and subsequent care at $2.3 billion per year. Assaults
were responsible for three-quarters of the wounds; accidents and
suicides accounted for the rest. The researchers found that taxpayers
financed 48 percent of the $2.3 billion through Medicaid, Medicare
and other government programs, while victims or their private
insurers paid the rest.
Other Financial
Costs
Urban
policy analysts add the costs of law enforcement and other public
services to emergency medical costs. The city of Philadelphia
claimed a cost for non-medical gun violence expenses of $72.2
million a year. Chicago added 1997 costs for gun-related police
and emergency medical service and for prosecution of gun violations
for a total of $78.1 million. When these analysts consider indirect
costs (lost productivity, pain and suffering, quality of life)
the figure mounts still higher. One 1997 study found a total of
$2.8 million in costs for a single gun fatality, $249,000 for
a non-fatal wound requiring hospital admission, $73,000 for those
requiring only emergency treatment. It put the overall cost of
U.S. gun violence at $126 billion per year. Self Defense Some
researchers offer countervailing calculations about private use
of guns for self-defense. In 1992, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz published
an article based on a survey in which they estimated that civilians
used guns in self-defense from 1 million to 2.5 million times
per year. Using the gun controllers' numbers for costs of gun
injuries, that level of gun use to diminish or prevent them would
easily vindicate private gun ownership as sound public policy.
In 1997, John Lott and David Mustard drew much attention for an
analysis apparently showing that allowing citizens to carry concealed
weapons deters violent crime. They estimated that a nationwide
right-to-carry law adopted in 1992 would have prevented 1,414
homicides, 4,177 rapes and more than 60,000 aggravated assaults.
Other scholars raise questions about the validity of both studies.
The Kleck and Gertz paper was based on a survey of 5,000 people,
of whom 1.33 percent, or 66, said they had used a gun in self-defense
in the past year. Kleck and Gertz concluded that 2.5 million had
done so nationwide by extrapolating the 1.33 percent to the entire
adult population. An extrapolation based on so small a percentage
may easily result in a gross overestimation, the critics noted,
since a tiny error in the 1.33 percent figure could result in
a huge change in the 2.5 million figure. They point to a 1994
poll that asked 1,500 adults if they had ever seen a spacecraft
or had personal contact with an alien from another planet. Some
said they had; extrapolating to the entire population suggested
that 20 million Americans had seen extraterrestrial spacecraft
and more than a million had met aliens. In 1998, Dan Black and
Daniel Nagin reanalyzed the data Lott and Mustard had used for
their 1997 study and found that eliminating Florida from the calculation
erased any impact of concealed weapons laws on murder and rape.
They also used a more general model, based on year-to-year differences,
to analyze the same data and found no effect of concealed carry
laws on any violentcrime.
Gun Control
Public
opinion surveys suggest that Americans favor more gun controls,
but critics note that many of the questions are vague. For example,
a 1996 Gallup Poll reported 61 percent favoring "more strict"
laws on the sale of firearms, but did not specify details. A 1996
survey for the Pew Research Center for People & the Press
found about 54 percent in favor of restricting handgun sales but
49 percent opposed. No specific restriction was cited. Tom Smith,
director of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago's
National Opinion Research Center, recently wrote that the public
strongly supports general regulation of firearms, though it continues
to resist outright bans on gun ownership. Recent NORC surveys
found large popular majorities supporting new technology to "child-proof"
guns, reduce accidental firings and otherwise make guns safer.
Respondents also supported mandatory requirements for safe storage
of guns and universal training of gun owners. "Just as automobiles
are registered, drivers are licensed, and car sales are recorded
and documented," Smith wrote, "Americans - including
most gun owners - believe there should be a set of common-sense
regulations to control firearms."
BACK
TO TOP
THE
LAW:
Gun Control
Federal gun control began with the National Firearms Act of 1934,
inspired by the "gangster" crime wave of the 1920s and
1930s. The law imposed restrictions on sale and manufacture of
machine guns, silencers, sawed-off shotguns and other weapons
popular with criminal gangs. Four years later, the Federal Firearms
Act of 1938 required that gun dealers obtain a federal license.
Changes
in the '60s
In the 1960s, in the wake of the Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy assassinations, Congress passed the more sweeping Gun
Control Act of 1968, which banned gun sales to felons, drug addicts,
mental patients and others. It increased the federal dealers license
fee from $1 to $10 and banned sales to out-of-state residents
or by mail order to individuals.
Changes
in the '70s & '80s
During the Reagan presidency, the political climate for the gun
lobby improved, and it succeeded in Congress with a Firearms Owners'
Protection Act, also known as the McClure-Volkmer Act. A late
amendment banned further sale and manufacture of machine guns,
but for the most part, the 1986 law weakened regulation of the
gun business. It eliminated the ban on interstate sales for rifles
and shotguns, limited federal inspections and prosecutions of
licensed dealers and specifically authorized unregulated sales
of guns from individual private collections.
Changes
in the '90s
The Clinton administration won legislation establishing a five-day
waiting period between purchase and delivery of a handgun so that
police could perform a background check on the buyer (the 1993
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act). The 1994 federal anticrime
law (the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act) imposed
a 10-year moratorium on manufacture of assault weapons listed
by name. The 1996 Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act
barred sales of guns to people convicted of domestic violence.
A 1997 Supreme Court decision struck down a portion of the Brady
Act that required local police to perform background checks, but
it left the waiting period in place, and most jurisdictions continued
the checks voluntarily. Then in November 1998, Congress allowed
the five-day waiting period provision to expire in favor of an
"instant check" system. When a person wants to purchase
a firearm, the dealer places a phone call to the FBI or a designated
state agency to see if the buyer's name appears in databases of
criminal records. Federal law now bans sales of guns to juveniles,
fugitives from justice, felons or those under felony indictment,
drug abusers, mental patients, illegal aliens and those who have
renounced U.S. citizenship. The law also prohibits gun sales to
anyone dishonorably discharged from the armed forces, convicted
of crimes involving domestic violence, or subject to court orders
restraining them from stalking, harassing, or threatening an intimate
partner or child. Gun control laws passed in the 1990s also tightened
up the system for approving federal firearms dealer licenses.
These measures, supplemented by administrative directives, were
inspired by concern that under relatively lax rules, gang members
and interstate traffickers were licensing themselves in order
to ease the purchase of guns for criminal use. (A federal license
exempts the holder from many regulations governing sales of guns
to the unlicensed.) A 1993 law increased the license fee from
$10 to $200, while the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act mandated fingerprints and photographs on license applications.
It also ordered applicants to notify their local police chiefs
or sheriffs that they were going into the gun business. Following
a presidential directive, agents of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms intensified their scrutiny of license applicants,
including face-to-face interviews to discuss their eligibility.
Notable
Exemptions to the Law
In addition to laws imposing conditions on the gun industry and
gun owners, Congress has enacted some surprising exemptions for
them. A provision of the 1986 McClure-Volkmer Act explicitly prohibits
the government from assembling a central database of gun dealer
records. An earlier law bars the Consumer Product Safety Commission,
with jurisdiction over thousands of products, from any regulation
of guns and ammunition. The agency can challenge the safety of
a toy gun, but not a real one. Federal laws are the most prominent
in public debate, but states and localities nationwide also have
enacted many thousands of laws that affect the purchase and use
of firearms. Opponents of more controls argue that laws already
on the books should be better enforced, but there is no general
agreement over what enforcement level is adequate.
Gun Offense
Convictions
Between 1992 and 1996, the number of federal convictions on gun
offenses fell from about 3,800 to about 3,000, but the number
of state convictions increased from 30,243 to 36,370, the U.S.Justice
Department reports. Still, the National Rifle Association argues
that increasing the number of federal cases would have a disproportionate
impact. The NRA touts a program called Operation Exile, in which
federal prosecutors in Richmond, Va., took a hard line on gun
offenses, a move that apparently contributed to a major drop in
the city's homicide totals.
Impact
of Laws
Meanwhile, people on both sides of the gun control debate can
point to unintended outcomes of laws passed to reduce gun violence.
The 1994 assault weapons "ban," for example, grandfathered
existing stocks of the prohibited guns, which continue to be sold.
The Brady Act had some impact. After its passage, at least 14
states enacted new laws prohibiting gun possession by criminals,
substance abusers and others. A recent federal study of the Brady
law counted 312,000 rejections resulting from 12.7 million applications
for handgun purchases, a rejection rate of 2.4 percent, during
the years that the five-day waiting period was in force. It remains
unclear what effect those rejections had on overall rates of gun
crime. Figures for the rate of rejection from the instant check
system that replaced the five-day process in 1998 haven't been
reported, but some fear the new system could be more porous than
the old. Databases of criminal records used to screen buyers are
not fully automated in many states, and they may not include information
about drug abuse or mental illness that could be discovered during
a background check conducted by police.
Gun Show
Dealers
The fee increase and crackdown on licensing of dealers also produced
measurable results: the number of federal gun dealer licensees
fell from 286,531 to 124,286 between 1993 and 1996. But this development,
combined with the 1986 McClure-Volkmer Act's authorization of
sales from individual's private collections, contributed to a
1990s boom in "gun shows"--weekend fairs where unlicensed
people sell guns beyond any official scrutiny. (Licensed dealers
may also participate, doing checks and filing forms when selling
from store inventory, but also making unregulated sales from their
"private collections.") Alarmed by the growth of this
"secondary market," which also includes sales of guns
at flea markets, through classified ads and over the internet,
some states have passed laws requiring background checks and other
limits on all gun transactions, whether between individuals or
licensed dealers and their customers. Legislation before Congress
in the wake of the 1999 school shootings seeks to impose more
regulations on guns sold at shows.
Regulations
Around the World
The United States approach to gun regulation is generally less
restrictive than that of other Western democracies. Gun regulations
were already strict in Britain when a man armed with four handguns
killed 16 students and a teacher at a primary school in Dunblane,
Scotland. In response, Parliament banned all handguns in 1997.
After a man armed with assault weapons massacred 35 people in
Port Arthur, Australia, the government banned all automatic and
semi-automatic weapons as well as pump-action shotguns, purchased
them from their owners and destroyed them.
BACK
TO TOP
THE
INDUSTRY:
A 1994 study
estimated the U.S. private market for handguns, rifles, shotguns
and ammunition (excluding exports and sales to the military) at
$1.7 billion annually. More recent estimates range as high as
$2.5 billion; most people think and write in terms of a "$2
billion firearms industry." The 1994 study found that handguns
accounted for 52 percent of unit sales-- 3.95 million guns valued
at $630 million. Manufacturers shipped 2 million rifles valued
at $337 million and 1.15 million shotguns worth $227 million.
Americans also bought 8.3 billion pieces of ammunition valued
at $527 million. Market Leaders The industry is highly fragmented,
with the largest producer, Remington Arms Co., supplying only
14 percent of the market in 1994; more than half its $245 million
annual sales were of ammunition. Sturm, Ruger & Co. was the
largest domestic supplier of guns, with 10 percent of the market,
followed by Smith & Wesson, with 5 percent. Another 15 firms
had 1994 sales in excess of $11 million. Smaller companies accounted
for the balance of the business.
Surge in
Sales
While gun purchases have surged in the wake of media "crime
wave" reports or events like the Los Angeles riot following
acquittal of police officers accused of beating Rodney King, manufacturers
lament continuing softness in the market. The industry's critics
say that to maintain sales, gun firms rely on appeals to Rambo
fantasy and a see-no-evil attitude toward retailers who willingly
sell guns to people who appear bent on using them for crime. Those
critics point to promotion of assault rifles and pistols, and,
more recently, "pocket rockets" -- easily concealed
small guns that shoot high caliber bullets. Both are likely to
appeal to criminals or people harboring perverse delusions.
Weapon
Bans
Talk of gun control apparently also boosts sales, since the possibility
of confiscating guns remains remote. Instead, laws "banning"
types of guns usually only halt new manufacture while grandfathering
the inventory in existence before the law takes effect. As a result,
manufacturers typically step up production in advance of a ban
in order to supply purchasers eager to acquire the threatened
guns while they are still legal. This happened with assault weapons:
passage of the 1994 law led to a lively market in "pre-ban"
guns, to the consternation of people who had assumed the new law
would cause the guns to disappear. Some gun producers also evade
the letter of gun laws by modifying weapons to escape restriction.
When California and the District of Columbia specifically banned
the TEC-9, notorious as a crime gun, its producer, Navegar Inc.,
added a shoulder sling, changed the name of the gun to the TECDC-9
and continued to sell it in California and the capital. When the
1994 federal assault weapons ban also named the gun, Navegar made
more modifications and renamed the gun the AB-10, for "after
ban." Other producers, however, do worry about ethics and
public image. In 1997, leaders of the bigger gun makers met with
President Clinton and announced that they would voluntarily include
safety locks on guns. In the wake of the 1999 school shootings,
gun makers then represented by the American Shooting Sports Council
(since merged with other trade groups; see below) suggested their
willingness to accept new regulation in response to growing legal
and political pressure.
BACK
TO TOP
THE
LOBBYISTS:
For years,
the National Rifle Association, representing interests of gun
owners, has enjoyed a reputation as one of the most feared lobbies
in Washington and state capitals. It mobilizes members to flood
lawmakers' offices with mail and phone calls supporting or opposing
legislation. It also makes financial contributions to keep friendly
legislators in office and oppose those who offend it. In 1998,
the NRA spent $1.5 million lobbying Congress and contributed more
than $4 million to congressional campaigns. Before the November
elections, the group's Political Victory Fund spent more than
$1.6 million for radio advertising intended to sway 42 close House
and Senate races. Even so, the 127-year-old organization has struggled
recently with declining public support, financial troubles and
infighting between hard-line and moderate factions. The current
membership, estimated at between 2.6 million and 2.8 million,
remains below the 1995 high of 3.5 million. NRA tax returns show
expenses exceeding income for all but two years between 1990 and
1997. Fund-raising appeals that echoed right wing extremists faltered
with growing public alarm over violent militias and the bombing
of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. This apparently strained
the NRA's ability to pay debts incurred to finance a new headquarters
building in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. The financial
problems intensified long simmering arguments between NRA hard-liners
and moderates over public strategy. The NRA's political influence,
once considered invincible, appears to have faltered as well.
Its campaign for state laws allowing law-abiding citizens to carry
concealed handguns stumbled when a Missouri ballot initiative
failed to win voter approval last April despite a substantial
NRA-backed campaign. More NRA-supported concealed-carry measures
were withdrawn after the Colorado school shooting. Should current
attempts at new gun laws fail in Washington, Democrats are likely
to make an issue of the NRA's influence in the 2000 presidential
and congressional elections. Despite all this, the NRA's future
may be brighter than its critics like to think. The recent election
of Charlton Heston as president helped the NRA strengthen its
mainstream image. The group also reports that political and news
media attacks in the wake of the recent school shootings have
produced a backlash, inspiring a general rallying of the membership
and a surge in new applications and donations.
National
Shooting Sports Foundation and the Sporting Arms Ammunition Manufacturers'
Institute
Two industry trade groups, the National Shooting Sports Foundation
and the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute,
remain generally allied with the NRA. While the two groups are
legal separate entities, they share the same address in Newtown,
Conn. The NSSF's 1,900 members include all aspects of the industry,
including makers and marketers of shooting and hunting gear as
well as firearms. SAAMI's 21 members are major U.S. gun and ammunition
manufacturers. The American Shooting Sports Council's board decided
to merge it with the NSSF after the group invoked vituperative
NRA criticism for its willingness to compromise on regulation
after the 1999 school shootings.
The Brady
Center to Prevent Gun Violence
On the other side of the issue, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun
Violence, led by Sarah Brady and formerly called Handgun Control,
Inc., commands the mainstream. The group, with an annual operating
budget of $3 million, can't match the NRA financially. But its
staff has extensive experience lobbying Congress, and its legal
director, Dennis Henigan, has been pursuing litigation of various
sorts against gun makers for years. Increasingly, the organization
has become a countervailing presence in states where the NRA decides
to target lawmakers it considers too favorable to gun control
or to weigh in on a legislative issue.
The Violence
Policy Center
The Violence Policy Center, also based in Washington, describes
itself as a national non-profit educational foundation that "examines
the role of firearms in America, conducts research on firearms
violence and explores new ways to decrease firearm-related death
and injury." With an annual operating budget of $1 million,
it does some lobbying and produces well-researched papers that
promote its point of view. Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst for
the group, recently published a book, Making a Killing: The business
of guns in America, documenting excesses of the gun industry and
failures of gun regulation.
BACK
TO TOP
THE
LAWSUITS:
For years,
legal experts dismissed the usefulness of tort claims based on
gun injuries as a way to rein in an industry that remains relatively
unregulated by government. So long as guns remained legal to buy
and sell, courts weren't moved by arguments that the industry
should bearresponsibility for how people used them. And gunshot
victims found little comfort in traditional product liability:
In most such cases, the guns causing injury weren't defective--they
worked all too well. in the 1990s, however, successful lawsuits
against the tobacco industry raised interest in a similar court-based
assault on guns. Lawyers who had prepared tobacco suits helped
the city of New Orleans with one of the first actions against
gun makers and distributors. Chicago's law
department developed claims based on evidence from a police undercover
operation that found suburban gun shops arming downtown street
gangs. Mayors and municipal lawyers in other jurisdictions got
interested; by the summer of 1999, suits brought by 23 cities
and counties were pending against scores of gun manufacturers,
wholesalers, retailers and their trade organizations.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
joined the trend with a suit filed in July 1999. The suits raise
two kinds of issues. Lawyers for New Orleans, Miami, Atlanta and
Cleveland emphasize "negligent design." The industry
should be held liable, they say, for not making guns less prone
to accidental discharges. They also argue that gun makers have
ignored existing technology that could make guns inoperable by
anyone but an authorized user. Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, St.
Louis, Bridgeport, Conn., and the NAACP charge the industry with
"negligent distribution" -- wholesaling and retailing
guns they know are destined for criminal use. Suits filed by Los
Angeles and San Francisco assert that claim to invoke a California
business practices law sanctioning legal business conduct if it
undercuts established public policy or imposes serious social
costs. As these suits proceed, discovery may produce valuable
-- and damning -- new information about the industry, as happened
in the tobacco litigation. Plaintiffs' lawyers are likely to depose
gun company executives, confronting them with sharp questions
about their awareness of marketing practices. Judges could order
disclosure of manufacturing and marketing data that remains closely
held. Can the suits succeed? Plaintiffs pin hopes on the fact
that the gun industry, an aggregation of relatively small businesses,
simply doesn't have the resources to carry on a protracted legal
war of attrition. The ASSC's willingness to bear the wrath of
the NRA for the sake of a possible settlement demonstrates the
suits' power to throw a scare into gun company executives. Yet
the fragmentation that limits the industry's capacity for a fight
also inhibits chances for a comprehensive settlement. The cities
also find reason for optimism in the intriguing outcome of a lawsuit
filed by an independent attorney, Elisa Barnes, on behalf of gunshot
victims in New York City. Barnes and her colleague Denise Dunleavy
now are representing the NAACP in its suit against gun makers.
In Barnes' first New York suit, Hamilton v. Accu-Tek, the plaintiffs
included families of six people killed with guns and another who
remains permanently disabled with a bullet lodged in his brain.
Barnes argued that the deaths and injury were the inevitable result
of negligent gun distribution. She brought in economists to document
how an oversupply of guns in southern states encourages illegal
gun trafficking to New York. She also sought the testimony of
experts on urban youth violence and the role guns have come to
play in it. The jury wound up finding liability and awarding damages
of $522,000 to the surviving victim disabled by his gun injury.
To some this seemed irrational because the gun that caused his
injury was never recovered. All the police found at the scene
was a casing from a .25 caliber handgun cartridge. But in a final
judgment in the case, U.S. District Court Judge Jack Weinstein
explained the theory that vindicates such a verdict. The "market
share" version of collective liability may be invoked to
compensate plaintiffs where the identity of a specific defendant
can't be determined. If plaintiffs can demonstrate that a number
of defendants irresponsibly marketed a product found to have caused
injury, they can be held liable based on their share of the market
for the product at the time the injury occurred. In the New York
case, the jurors agreed that gun makers had negligently marketed
guns, knowing that they were likely to fall into criminal hands;
they then identified three that were producing .25-caliber handguns
at the time the plaintiff suffered his head wound. The $522,000
damage award was based on their shares of the market. Whether
the precedent will survive on appeal remains to be seen. For now,
however, it resonates with many of the other lawsuits, reinforcing
plaintiff's hopes.
BACK
TO TOP
TEN
TIPS FOR COVERING THE ISSUE OF GUNS:
