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Welcome to Our Generation USA!

 Under the Second Amendment,
Americans have the right to bear arms, but at risk are many citizens who become innocent victims as a result of unchecked-gun violence.
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Second Amendment to the United States ConstitutionPictured Below: Life, Liberty…and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution protects the right to keep and bear arms. It was ratified on December 15, 1791, along with nine other articles of the Bill of Rights. 

In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court affirmed for the first time that the right belongs to individuals, for self-defense in the home, while also including, as dicta, that the right is not unlimited and does not preclude the existence of certain long-standing prohibitions such as those forbidding "the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill" or restrictions on "the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons". 

In McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) the Supreme Court ruled that state and local governments are limited to the same extent as the federal government from infringing upon this right.

The Second Amendment was based partially on the right to keep and bear arms in English common law and was influenced by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Sir William Blackstone described this right as an auxiliary right, supporting the natural rights of self-defense and resistance to oppression, and the civic duty to act in concert in defense of the state. 

Any labels of rights as auxiliary must be viewed in the context of the inherent purpose of a Bill of Rights, which is to empower a group with the ability to achieve a mutually desired outcome, and not to necessarily enumerate or rank the importance of rights. While both James Monroe and John Adams supported the Constitution being ratified, its most influential framer was James Madison.

In Federalist No. 46, Madison wrote how a federal army could be kept in check by state militias, "a standing army ... would be opposed [by] a militia." He argued that state militias "would be able to repel the danger" of a federal army, "It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops."

He contrasted the federal government of the United States to the European kingdoms, which he described as "afraid to trust the people with arms", and assured that "the existence of subordinate governments ... forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition".

By January 1788, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and Connecticut ratified the Constitution without insisting upon amendments. Several amendments were proposed, but were not adopted at the time the Constitution was ratified. For example, the Pennsylvania convention debated fifteen amendments, one of which concerned the right of the people to be armed, another with the militia.

The Massachusetts convention also ratified the Constitution with an attached list of proposed amendments. In the end, the ratification convention was so evenly divided between those for and against the Constitution that the federalists agreed to the Bill of Rights to assure ratification.

In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that, "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendments [sic] means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government."

In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment did not protect weapon types not having a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia".

In the 21st century, the amendment has been subjected to renewed academic inquiry and judicial interest. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision that held the amendment protects an individual's right to keep a gun for self-defense. This was the first time the Court had ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's right to own a gun. 

In McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Supreme Court clarified that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Second Amendment against state and local governments. 

​In Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016), the Supreme Court reiterated its earlier rulings that "the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding" and that its protection is not limited to "only those weapons useful in warfare". The debate between various organizations regarding gun control and gun rights continues.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:







Mass Shootings in the United States, including a List of Mass U.S. Shootings, as well as the more recent Robb Elementary School shooting (Uvalde, TX 5/24/2022)
Pictured below: Photos of some of the children massacred at the Uvalde Texas School Shootings, plunging Community Into Grief (Wall Street Journal)
[Due to the recent mass shooting (5/24/2022) in Uvalde, TX, we start with this tragedy due to the loss of 19 young children (see some above) and two of their teachers.]

​Robb Elementary School shooting, Uvalde, TX:

​On May 24, 2022, 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers and wounded seventeen others at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Earlier that day, the perpetrator had shot his grandmother in the face, severely wounding her. After firing shots outside the school for approximately five minutes, he entered Robb Elementary School armed with an AR-15 style rifle and handgun through a propped open side entrance, left open by a teacher, without encountering armed resistance. 

The perpetrator locked himself inside a classroom, where he killed his victims over the course of an hour, before being killed by a United States Border Patrol tactical team. It was the third-deadliest American school shooting, after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, and the deadliest ever in Texas.

Law enforcement officials were criticized for their long delay in response to the shooting. When police officers arrived at the campus, they waited for approximately 78 minutes before engaging with the suspect. In addition, police cordoned the school grounds during the shooting, resulting in violent conflicts between police and civilians who were attempting to enter the school to assist. 

Afterwards, local and state officials gave conflicting and exaggerated reports of the timeline of police actions.

Following the shooting, wider discussions ensued about American gun culture and violence, gridlock in politics, and law enforcement in the United States as an institution. Some have advocated for a policy to ban assault weapons in the country or to defund the police. Others criticized politicians for their perceived role in continuing to enable mass shootings. 

Republicans have responded by resisting the implementation of gun control measures instead calling for increasing security measures in schools; they also accused their opponents of politicizing the shooting.

Background:

Uvalde, Texas, is a Hispanic-majority city of about 16,000 people in the South Texas region; it is located about 60 miles (97 km) from the United States–Mexico border and about 85 miles (137 km) from San Antonio. In 2022, about 90 percent of Robb Elementary School's 600 students in second through fourth grade were Hispanic, and about 81 percent of the student population came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The city of Uvalde spent 40% of its municipal budget on its police department in the 2019–20 fiscal year. 

Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD), the school district governing Robb Elementary School, had multiple security measures in place at the time of the shooting, including four officers working within the school district and a security staff that patrolled door entrances and parking lots at secondary campuses. The school also uses Social Sentinel, a service that monitors Uvalde-affiliated social media accounts to identify threats made against students or staff in UCISD.

​Shooting:

On May 24, 2022, Salvador Rolando Ramos and his 66-year-old grandmother had an argument at their home in Uvalde about his failure to graduate from high school, during which he shot her in the forehead before taking her truck. She survived and sought help from neighbors while police were called. She was then airlifted to a hospital in San Antonio in critical condition. 

Using his Facebook account, the perpetrator sent three private messages to a 15-year-old girl from Germany whom he met online prior to the shooting: the first to say that he was going to shoot his grandmother, a second to say that he had shot his grandmother, and a third, about 15 minutes before the shooting, to say that he was going to open fire at an elementary school. A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said the posts were "private one-to-one text messages" discovered after the shooting took place.

The perpetrator crashed his grandmother's truck through a barricade and into a concrete ditch outside Robb Elementary School at 11:28 a.m. CDT (UTC–5).[33][40] According to police and security camera footage, he was wearing a plate carrier—a type of tactical vest—without armor inserts, a backpack, and all-black clothing while carrying a handgun, an AR-15 style rifle, and standard capacity magazines.

A witness said he first fired at two people at a nearby funeral home, both of whom escaped uninjured. He then dropped a black bag with ammunition inside and ventured further into the school. Soon after, police reported receiving 9-1-1 calls about a vehicle having crashed near the school and a person armed with a rifle who had been seen heading inside.

The perpetrator walked into the school through its south entrance between 11:30 and 11:40.

​The majority of the shooting occurred inside the building within the first few minutes; the perpetrator was in the building for 40 to 60 minutes while armed police remained outside the classroom and building. Officers arrived four minutes after the perpetrator entered the school and attempted to make entry but retreated after he fired at them. Officers were not successful in establishing negotiations with the perpetrator.

The United States Marshals Service drove nearly 70 miles to the school and arrived at 12:10 p.m. where they helped officers initially confront the shooter, render first aid, and secure the perimeter. 

After the police cordoned the outside of the school, parents pleaded with officers to enter the building. When they did not, parents offered to enter the building themselves.

Officers held back and tackled parents who tried to enter the school, further warning that they would use tasers if the parents did not comply with directions; video clips were uploaded to social media, including one that depicted a parent being pinned to the ground. 

A parent was pepper-sprayed while trying to get to their child, and a father was tackled. Police reportedly used a taser on a parent who approached a bus to get their child. 

A mother of two students at the school was placed in handcuffs by officers for attempting to enter the school. When released from the handcuffs, she jumped the fence and retrieved her children, exiting before police entered. Some police officers were reported to have entered the school early to retrieve their own children while parents were being blocked from entering outside.

After entering the building, the perpetrator walked down two short hallways, entered a classroom that was internally connected to another classroom, and opened fire on the children and two teachers in the room. All of the victims were located in the fourth-grade classroom where he locked the door. 

According to a male student who hid in the adjoining classroom, the perpetrator came in and crouched a bit, saying "it's time to die", before starting shooting. Afterwards, an officer had called out "Yell if you need help!" In response, a girl in the same classroom said "Help", the perpetrator heard the girl, entered the classroom, and shot her. The student said that the officer then barged into the classroom, the perpetrator shot at the officer, and then more officers started shooting. 

The perpetrator fired a total of 116 rounds.

The UCISD police chief estimated that the shooting began at 11:32; according to a Facebook post by the school, the school was locked down at 11:43 in response to gunshots heard in the vicinity. According to a Texas DPS lieutenant, first responding officers had insufficient manpower and were unable to enter the classroom, and they instead evacuated children and teachers by breaking windows around the school. 

The perpetrator stayed in the classroom for around one hour, hiding behind a steel door that officers were unable to open until they obtained a master key from the principal. 

At 12:17 p.m., UCISD sent out a message on Twitter that there was an active shooter at the elementary school. A Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) agent rushed to the scene after receiving a text message from his wife, a teacher there. Prior to this, the officer had been off duty and was about to get a haircut before receiving the news.

The officer immediately set out with a shotgun his barber had lent him and arrived on scene approximately an hour after the first responders arrived. As UCISD officers exchanged fire with the shooter, BORTAC agents joined them in response to a request for assistance; one sustained an injury. According to Governor Greg Abbott, the injured Border Patrol agent fatally shot the perpetrator.

​Victims:

Nineteen students and two teachers were killed in the shooting:

Students:
  • Nevaeh Bravo, 10
  • Jacklyn Jaylen Cazares, 9
  • Makenna Lee Elrod, 10
  • Jose Flores, 10
  • Eliana Garcia, 9
  • Uziyah Garcia, 9
  • Amerie Jo Garza, 10
  • Xavier Javier Lopez, 10
  • Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, 10
  • Tess Marie Mata, 10
  • Miranda Mathis, 11
  • Alithia Ramirez, 10
  • Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez, 10
  • Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, 10
  • Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, 10
  • Layla Salazar, 11
  • Jailah Nicole Silguero, 11
  • Eliahana Cruz Torres, 10
  • Rogelio Torres, 10

Teachers:
  • Irma Garcia, 48
  • Eva Mireles, 44

The children were in the second, third, and fourth grades. The teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles, taught in the same fourth-grade classroom. 

​Uvalde Memorial Hospital's CEO reported that eleven children and three other people were admitted for emergency care following the shooting. Four were released, and two, described only as a male and a female, were dead upon arrival. Several other victims were taken to the University Hospital in San Antonio. Seventeen people were reported injured, including two police officers. Abbott said the two officers were struck by bullets but had no serious injuries.

​Perpetrator:

The 18-year-old perpetrator, Salvador Rolando Ramos, was a resident of Uvalde and a former student at Uvalde High School who was born in North Dakota. Prior to the shooting, he had neither a criminal record nor any documented mental health issues. 

According to his classmates and some of his friends, he had a stutter and a strong lisp, for which he was often bullied; he frequently had fistfights with classmates, occasionally with boxing gloves, which he carried around with him, and he had few friends.

The perpetrator was expected to graduate from high school in 2022, but his frequent absences made his graduation unlikely. He eventually dropped out of school. Social media acquaintances of the perpetrator said he openly abused animals such as cats and would livestream the abuse on Yubo. 

Up until a month before the shooting, he worked at a local Wendy's and had been employed there for at least a year. According to the store's night manager, he went out of his way to keep to himself. One of his coworkers said he was occasionally rude to his female coworkers, to whom he sent inappropriate text messages, and would threaten cooks at his job by asking them, "Do you know who I am?"

​A year before the shooting, the perpetrator started posting pictures to his Instagram account of automatic rifles that were on his wish list. He would drive around at night with a friend and shoot at people with a BB gun and throw eggs at cars.

According to a man who was in a relationship with his mother, the perpetrator moved out of his mother's house and into his grandparents' house two months before the shooting, after an argument broke out between him and his mother over her turning off the Wi-Fi. He posted a video of himself on Instagram aggressively arguing with his mother and referring to her as a "bitch". 

People close to the perpetrator's family described his mother as a drug user. His grandfather said that he did not have a driver's license and did not know how to drive.

The perpetrator legally purchased a semi-automatic rifle from a local gun store on May 17, 2022, a day after his 18th birthday, and he purchased another rifle three days later. He also sent an Instagram message to an acquaintance he met through Yubo, which showed a receipt for an AR-15 style rifle purchased from Georgia-based online retailer Daniel Defense eight days before the shooting.

​He then posted a picture of two rifles on his Instagram account three days before the shooting. On May 18, 2022, he purchased 375 rounds of 5.56 NATO ammunition.

​Investigation:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are assisting local police in the investigation. The perpetrator's guns and magazines were recovered by law enforcement for analysis.

Aftermath:

UCISD asked parents not to pick up their children until all Robb Elementary School students were accounted for. At around 2:00 p.m., parents were notified to pick them up. All district and campus activities were canceled, and the parents of students at other schools were asked to pick up their children due to school bus cancellations. 

The UCISD superintendent announced that night in a letter sent to parents that the school year had concluded for the entire district, including the cancelation of a planned graduation ceremony. The school year had previously been scheduled to end that Thursday. Some parents had to wait late into the night for final confirmation of their child's death, awaiting DNA identification. Multiple survivors from the shooting have expressed their fear of returning to school.

The South Texas Blood and Tissue Center issued an urgent request for blood donations after the shooting, and it sent 15 units of blood to Uvalde via helicopter to be used in area hospitals. Uvalde Memorial Hospital announced on Facebook that they would be holding an emergency blood drive for the victims. 

In the wake of the shooting, Donna Independent School District, which serves Donna, Texas, an area four and a half hours from Uvalde, received a "credible threat of violence". In response, the district cancelled school while it looked to investigate the threat.

CBS pulled the fourth-season finale of FBI that was to air that night; the episode involved a fictional school shooting as a plot point. Netflix posted a trigger warning for the first episode of the fourth season of Stranger Things due to its opening scene containing "graphic violence involving children".

Joe Garcia, the husband of Irma Garcia, one of the teachers killed in the shooting, died two days later of a heart attack. His family said the heart attack was tied to grief after losing his wife.

Responses:

Reactions from politicians:
​
Representatives for President Joe Biden, who was returning to the United States from a trip to Asia, announced that he had been briefed on the shooting and would be making public remarks later that evening after arriving back home. He ordered flags to be flown at half-staff, and spoke to Texas Governor Greg Abbott from Air Force One.

The shooting was condemned by former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) described the attack as an "unbelievably tragic and horrible crime", and she expressed support for red flag laws that help restrict potentially violent individuals from accessing firearms. 

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), a gun rights supporter who opposes expanding gun control regulations, called the shooting "yet another act of evil and mass murder". He offered his prayers to the families and children affected by the shooting, and said that the country has seen "too many of these shootings."

​The day after the shooting, Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) falsely claimed that its perpetrator was a "transsexual leftist illegal alien" in a tweet, which was taken down two hours after it was posted. The claim was based on a rumor started by an anonymous poster on the /pol/ imageboard on 4chan, who posted the Reddit account of a transgender woman and claimed that she was the shooter; photos of the woman were widely shared on social media, including in conservative Facebook groups, where she was also erroneously identified as the shooter and harassed.

​During a press conference regarding the shooting held by Abbott in Uvalde on May 25, Abbott blamed the shooting on "a problem with mental health illness" in the local community; he added that the perpetrator had no known criminal or mental health history. 

Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic candidate in the 2022 Texas gubernatorial election, confronted Abbott during the press conference by telling him, "You said this was not predictable – this was totally predictable, and you choose not to do anything." Don McLaughlin, the Republican mayor of Uvalde since 2014, asked O'Rourke to leave the press conference, saying, "I can't believe you're a sick son of a bitch who would come to a deal like this to make a political issue." 

O'Rourke was then escorted out of the auditorium. In response to a reporter's question on Abbott blaming the shooting on mental health, O'Rourke criticized Abbott for reducing mental health services and expanding gun access to 18-year-olds.

Internationally, the shooting was condemned by various governments and politicians, including by the Government of Mexico, which said it was working with American authorities to identify Mexican victims in the shooting. 

In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and opposition leader Keir Starmer both paid tribute to the victims in the House of Commons. 

The shooting was also denounced by:
The human-rights group Amnesty International said, "Among wealthier, developed countries, the U.S.A. is an outlier when it comes to firearm violence. U.S. governments have allowed gun violence to become a human rights crisis."

Criticism of law enforcement:

The police have faced questions and criticism regarding staging outside the school and not entering for 40 minutes to an hour after the perpetrator had entered the building. 

Akela Lacy of The Intercept wrote an article titled "Cops Didn't Stop the Uvalde Shooting" with the subtitle: "And they might have made it even worse." 

The Daily Beast wrote, "The harrowing video from the scene seems to make the police response all the more baffling." 

Police arrested and handcuffed one mother who drove to the school after hearing about the shooting, which prevented her from trying to save her children. 

At a May 26 press conference, asked whether first responders had erred in waiting for reinforcements, a DPS official said he did not "have enough information to answer that question yet." 

Law enforcement officials have continued to defend their actions following the shooting. Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez defended his officers in a statement May 26, saying, "It is important for our community to know that our officers responded within minutes." 

Former Austin and Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo tweeted, "We don't have all of the particulars right now, but when gunfire is ringing out with, police are trained, expected, and required to engage, engage, engage. This is a moral and ethical obligation."

Officials gave conflicting explanations of the events of the shooting, which were criticized by the media. Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officials initially reported that a school resource officer had engaged the shooter outside the building before he entered; they later confirmed there was no school resource officer on duty. DPS made the correction that he "walked in unobstructed" through an apparently unlocked door.

Vice reported that "Texas law enforcement officials are being strangely opaque about what actually happened during the shooting." They further reiterated the "police timeline ... has a lot of holes." At press conferences it called "chaotic and confusing", The Texas Tribune wrote that officials "refused to answer many questions about the tactics" the officers used. 

On May 26, Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas called for the FBI to investigate the conflicting narratives of law enforcement officials.

On May 27, Abbott stated at a press conference he was "misled" and given "inaccurate" information by law enforcement agencies, stating, "I'm absolutely livid about that." The HuffPost wrote Abbott "stopped short of offering an apology for repeating [the misleading information]". 

At the same press conference, Abbott rejected calls for increased gun control measures. CNN reported Mayor Don McLaughlin, who sat by Abbott at the presser, was "left as dumbfounded as the governor by the changing stories of law enforcement."

The shooting occurred on the day before the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and days after the 2022 Buffalo shooting, leading to widespread discussion over the social function of police as an institution.

A political discussion ensued over whether policy to ban assault weapons and defund the police was possible in 2022's political landscape, leading to larger discussions about the relationship between the police and those in power. 

Many questioned how the police in Uvalde had come to consume nearly half the municipal budget yet still fail to quickly intervene in the shooting despite prior preparation. Police abolitionists argue that increased budgets for police officers do not generally go towards fighting violence and preserving community safety but instead go towards surveilling the public and criminalizing civilians. 

Abolitionists argued that the shooting exposes how many community safety functions of policing are in fact myths.

Gun control discussions:

President Biden delivered a speech on the shooting and asked, "When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?" However, he did not lay out any concrete plans, which disappointed gun control activists. In a speech given on the night of the shooting, Vice President Kamala Harris reacted to the shooting by calling for policy changes to prevent similar shootings. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for the U.S. to pass stricter gun control measures, and he urged Republican members of Congress to resist influence from the National Rifle Association (NRA), a gun-rights lobby that Democrats have long blamed for Republican lawmakers' resistance to supporting gun control.

The NRA-ILA's annual leadership forum on May 27 in Houston drew heavy criticism in light of the recent shooting. Former president Donald Trump, governors Kristi Noem and Greg Abbott, lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, and representative Dan Crenshaw were previously scheduled to give remarks; however, Cornyn and Crenshaw subsequently cancelled their attendances, and Abbott announced that he would instead appear at a news conference in Uvalde and send pre-recorded remarks to the NRA convention. 

The Secret Service forbade the forum's attendees from carrying firearms during Trump's speech. Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of a firearm used in the shooting, decided not to attend.

Top Texas Republican officials, such as Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan of Beaumont, Attorney General Ken Paxton, Representative Tony Gonzales of San Antonio, and Senators Cornyn and Cruz, resisted the possibility of increased gun control measures. 

Abbott said that tougher gun regulations were "not a real solution". Instead of gun control, Republican officials have called for increasing security presence in schools, limiting entryways into schools, and arming teachers and other school officials.

Republicans have also promoted the Luke and Alex Safety Act, which would create a national database of school safety practices. Senator Cruz commented that some politicians would politicize the shooting to push for stricter gun reforms. 

Users on social media accused Cruz of hypocrisy for accepting money from gun interest groups, and for planning to speak at the NRA's annual meeting being held in Houston with Abbott and Cornyn.

Manuel Oliver, a gun control activist and the father of a Stoneman Douglas High School shooting victim, issued a statement expressing his outrage, and said that the families of the victims do not need the thoughts and prayers of politicians; instead, "they need their kids." 

Several families of victims in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting spoke out, with several calling for stricter gun control. Activist Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed during the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, also called for politicians to enact stricter gun control, and expressed support for the families of Robb Elementary School victims. 

Gun manufacturer Daniel Defense was met with social media criticism in the wake of the shooting, including criticism of a since-deleted Twitter post made on May 16 depicting a child holding a Daniel Defense rifle, causing the company to make many of its social media accounts private.

In a press conference during the 2022 NBA playoffs, Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr expressed his outrage at the refusal of American politicians to implement laws on gun control. The social media accounts for New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays began posting facts about gun violence during a game in St. Petersburg, Florida.

See also: ___________________________________________________________________________

Mass shootings in the United States (Wikipedia)

Click here for image below for a breakdown of mass shootings in the USA:
Mass shootings are incidents involving multiple victims of firearm-related violence. The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there is no broadly accepted definition. One definition is an act of public firearm violence—excluding gang killings, domestic violence, or terrorist acts sponsored by an organization—in which a shooter kills at least four victims.

Using this definition, one study found that nearly one-third of the world's public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 (90 of 292 incidents) occurred in the United States. Using a similar definition, The Washington Post records 163 mass shootings in the United States between 1967 and June 2019.

Gun Violence Archive, frequently cited by the press, defines a mass shooting as firearm violence resulting in at least four people being shot at roughly the same time and location, excluding the perpetrator. Using this definition, there have been 2,128 mass shootings since 2013, roughly one per day. ​The United States has had more mass shootings than any other country.

Shooters generally either die by suicide afterwards, or are restrained or killed by law enforcement officers or by both armed, and unarmed, civilians. Mass shootings accounted for under 0.2% of homicides in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016.

Definitions:

There is no fixed definition of a mass shooting in the United States. The Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012, signed into law in January 2013, defines a mass killing as one resulting in at least three victims, excluding the perpetrator. 

In 2015, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), while not defining a mass shooting, does define a public mass shooting—for the purposes of its report entitled "Mass Murder with Firearms"—as "a multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms, within one event, and in one or more locations in close proximity".

The CRS further states that its report "attempts to refine the relatively broad concept of mass shooting... into a narrower formulation: public mass shootings." A broader definition, as used by the Gun Violence Archive, is that of "four or more shot or killed, not including the shooter". The latter definition is often used by the media, press, and non-profit organizations.

Frequency:

Some studies indicate that the rate at which public mass shootings occur has tripled since 2011. Between 1982 and 2011, a mass shooting occurred roughly once every 200 days. However, between 2011 and 2014, that rate has accelerated greatly with at least one mass shooting occurring every 64 days in the United States.

In recent years, the number of public mass shootings has increased substantially, although there has been an approximately 50% decrease in firearm homicides in the nation overall since 1993. The decrease in firearm homicides has been attributed to better policing, a better economy and environmental factors such as the removal of lead from gasoline.

Under the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive:
  • by the end of 2019, there were 417 mass shootings;
  • by the end of 2020, there had been 611;
  • and by the end of 2021, 693.
  • By mid-May 2021 there were 10 mass shootings a week on average;
  • by mid-May 2022, there was a total of 198 mass shootings in the first 19 weeks of the year, which represents 11 mass shootings a week. 
  • Under the stricter definition used by law-enforcement and crime-tracking organizations, there were ten mass shootings in 2019, two in 2020, and six in 2021.

Differing sources:

A comprehensive report by USA Today tracked all mass killings from 2006 through 2017 in which the perpetrator willfully killed 4 or more people.

For mass killings by firearm for instance, it found 271 incidents with a total of 1,358 victims. Mother Jones listed seven mass shootings, defined as indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims killed, in the U.S. for 2015. 

An analysis by Michael Bloomberg's gun violence prevention group, Everytown for Gun Safety, identified 110 mass shootings, defined as shootings in which at least four people were murdered with a firearm, between January 2009 and July 2014; at least 57% were related to domestic or family violence.

Other media outlets have reported that hundreds of mass shootings take place in the United States in a single calendar year, citing a crowd-funded website known as Shooting Tracker which defines a mass shooting as having four or more people injured or killed.

In December 2015, The Washington Post reported that there had been 355 mass shootings in the United States so far that year. In August 2015, The Washington Post reported that the United States was averaging one mass shooting per day. 

An earlier report had indicated that in 2015 alone, there had been 294 mass shootings that killed or injured 1,464 people. Shooting Tracker and Mass Shooting Tracker, the two sites that the media have been citing, have been criticized for using a broader criteria—counting four victims injured as a mass shooting—thus producing much higher figures.

Mass shootings tend to occur in clusters. When one occurs another is likely to follow, according to research by the Violence Project.

Demographics:

According to The New York Times, almost all of the mass shooting perpetrators they have published stories about are male, most commonly white men. However, according to most analyses and studies, the proportion of mass shooters in the United States who are white is slightly less than the overall proportion of white people in the general population of the US. The proportion of male mass shooters is considerably larger than the proportion of males in the general population. 

According to the Associated Press, white men comprise nearly 50 percent of all mass shooters in the US. According to the Center for Inquiry, mass shootings of family members (the most common) are usually carried out by White, middle-aged males.

Felony mass shootings (connected with a previous crime) tend to be committed by young Black or Hispanic males with extensive criminal records, typically against people of the same ethnic group.

Public mass shootings of persons unrelated to the shooter, and for a reason not connected with a previous crime (the rarest but most publicized) are committed by men whose racial distribution closely matches that of the nation as a whole. Other than gender, the demographic profiles of public mass shooters are too varied to draw firm conclusions.

Contributing factors:
See also: 
Several possible factors may work together to create a fertile environment for mass murder in the United States according to a 2017 L.A. Times article. Most commonly suggested include:
  1. Higher accessibility and ownership of guns. The US has the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world with 120.5 firearms per 100 people; the second highest is Yemen with 52.8 firearms per 100 people.
  2. Mental illness and its treatment (or the lack thereof) with psychiatric drugs. This is controversial. Many of the mass shooters in the U.S. suffered from mental illness, but the estimated number of mental illness cases has not increased as significantly as the number of mass shootings.
  3. The desire to seek revenge for a long history of being bullied at school and/or at the workplace. In recent years, perpetrators calling themselves "targeted individuals" have cited adult bullying campaigns as a reason for their deadly violence.
  4. The widespread chronic gap between people's expectations for themselves and their actual achievement, and individualistic culture. Some analysts and commentators place the blame on contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism.
  5. Desire for fame and notoriety. Also, mass shooters learn from one another through "media contagion," that is, "the mass media coverage of them and the proliferation of social media sites that tend to glorify the shooters and downplay the victims."
  6. The copycat phenomenon.
  7. Failure of government background checks due to incomplete databases and/or staff shortages.

A panel of mental health and law enforcement experts has estimated that roughly one-third of acts of mass violence—defined as crimes in which four or more people were killed—since the 1990s were committed by people with a "serious mental illness" (SMI). However, the study emphasized that people with an SMI are responsible for less than 4% of all the violent acts committed in the United States.

Additionally, in February 2021, Psychological Medicine published a survey reviewing 14,785 publicly reported murders in English language news worldwide between 1900 and 2019 compiled in a database by psychiatrists at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The Survey found that of the 1,315 personal-cause mass murders (i.e. driven by personal motivations and not occurring within the context of war, state-sponsored or group-sponsored terrorism, gang activity, or organized crime):
Survey coauthor psychiatrist Paul S. Appelbaum argued that the data from the survey indicated that "difficulty coping with life events seem more useful foci for prevention [of mass shootings] and policy than an emphasis on serious mental illness". 

Psychiatrist Ronald W. Pies has suggested that psychopathology should be understood as a three-gradation continuum of mental, behavioral and emotional disturbance with most mass shooters falling into a middle category of "persistent emotional disturbance". 

In 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a survey of 160 active shooter cases in 40 states and the District of Columbia between 2000 and 2013 (averaging approximately 11 cases annually) that found that:
  • 112 incidents (70%) took place in a business, commercial, or educational environment,
  • 96 incidents (60%) ended before police arrived,
  • in 64 incidents (40%) the shooter committed suicide
  • and 64 also qualified as mass murder,
  • while in only 6 incidents (4%) was the perpetrator female
  • and in only 2 incidents (1%) was there more than one perpetrator.

In 2015, psychiatrists James L. Knoll and George D. Annas noted that the tendency of most media attention following mass shootings on mental health leads to sociocultural factors being comparatively overlooked. 

Instead, Knoll and Annas cite research by social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell on narcissism and social rejection in the personal histories of mass shooters, as well as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's suggestion in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) that further reductions in human violence may be dependent upon reducing human narcissism.

According to a 2021 article in the journal, Injury Epidemiology, from 2014 to 2019, 59.1% of mass shootings were related to domestic violence (DV). The shooter either killed a family member or had a DV history in 68.2% of mass shootings.

Weapons used:

Several types of guns have been used in mass shootings in the United States. A 2014 study conducted by Dr. James Fox of 142 shootings found that:
The study was conducted using the Mother Jones database of mass shootings from 1982 to 2018. High capacity magazines were used in approximately half of mass shootings. Semi-automatic rifles have been used in six of the ten deadliest mass shooting events.

Effects:

Political:

A British Journal of Political Science study first published in 2017 (and in print in 2019) found that increase in proximity to mass public shootings in the U.S. was associated with statistically significant and "substantively meaningful" increases in support for stricter gun control laws. 

The study also found that repeated events, magnitude, and recency of mass shootings play a role, with "proximity to repeated events, more horrific events and more recent events" increasing "the salience of gun violence, and thus ... support for gun control." 

However, the study found that the "most powerful effects" in support or opposition to gun control "are driven by variables related to local culture, with pronounced but expected differences emerging between respondents in rural, conservative and gun-heavy areas and those residing in urban, liberal areas with few firearm stores." 

A separate 2019 replication study, extending the earlier panel analysis, found no evidence that mass shootings caused a "significant or substantively meaningful main effect" on attitudes toward gun control. However, the study did find evidence that mass shootings "have polarizing effects conditional on partisanship": "That is, Democrats who live near a mass shooting event tend to become more supportive of gun control restrictions, while Republican attitudes shift in the opposite direction." The study authors concluded, "To the extent that mass shootings may affect public opinion, the result is polarizing rather than consensus building."

A 2020 study published in the American Political Science Review using data on school shootings from 2006 to 2018 concluded the incidents had "little to no effect on electoral outcomes in the United States", whereas a 2021 study in the same journal, covering a broader time period (1980–2016) found that the vote share of the Democratic Party increased by an average of almost 5 percentage points in counties that had experienced a "rampage-style" school shooting. 

Both studies found no increase in voter turnout.

A 2021 study published in PNAS concluded that "mass shootings have a strong impact on the emotions of individuals, but the impact is politicized, limited to individuals living within the town or city where the incident occurs, and fades within a week of the incident." The study authors suggested that this phenomenon could help explain why mass shootings in the U.S. have not led to meaningful policy reform efforts.

Public health:

A review article first published online in 2015 and then printed in January 2017 in the journal Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, concluded that "mass shootings are associated with a variety of adverse psychological outcomes in survivors and members of affected communities" and that while "the psychological effects of mass shootings on indirectly exposed populations" is less well-understood, "there is evidence that such events lead to at least short-term increases in fears and declines in perceived safety." 

Identified risk factors for adverse psychological outcomes have included, among others, demographics, greater proximity to the attack, acquaintance with victims, and less access to psychosocial resources.

Deadliest mass shootings since 1949:
Main article: List of mass shootings in the United States

See also graph above. These following mass shootings are the deadliest to have occurred in modern U.S. history. Only incidents with ten or more fatalities, excluding those of the perpetrators, are included.

This list starts in 1949, the year in which Howard Unruh committed his shooting, which was the first in modern U.S. history to incur ten or more fatalities.

See also:






​
School Shootings, including a List of School Shootings in the United States Pictured below: ​In the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007, student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on Virginia Tech's campus.
Click here for a List of School Shootings in the United States.

School Shooting:

School shooting is an attack at an educational institution, such as a primary school, secondary school, high school or university, involving the use of firearms. Many school shootings are also categorized as mass shootings due to multiple casualties. 

The phenomenon is most widespread in the United States, which has the highest number of school-related shootings, although school shootings have taken place elsewhere in the world.

According to studies, factors behind school shooting include easy access to firearms, family dysfunction, lack of family supervision, and mental illness among many other psychological issues.

Among the topmost motives of attackers were:
  • bullying/persecution/threatened (75%) and revenge (61%),
  • while 54% reported having numerous reasons.
  • The remaining motives included an attempt to solve a problem (34%),
    • suicide or depression (27%),
    • and seeking attention or recognition (24%).

Especially in the United States, school shootings have sparked a political debate over gun violence, zero tolerance policies, gun rights and gun control.

​Profiling:

The United States Secret Service published the results from a study regarding 37 school shooting incidents, involving 41 individuals in the United States from December 1974 through May 2000. 

In a previous report of 18 school shootings by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), they released a profile that described shooters as middle-class, lonely/alienated, awkward, Caucasian males who had access to guns. 

The most recent report cautioned against the assumption that a perpetrator can be identified by a certain 'type' or profile. The results from the study indicated that perpetrators came from differing backgrounds, making a singular profile difficult when identifying a possible assailant. 

For example, some perpetrators were children of divorce, lived in foster homes, or came from intact nuclear families. The majority of individuals had rarely or never gotten into trouble at school and had a healthy social life. Some, such as Alan Lipman, have warned against the dearth of empirical validity of profiling methods.

Family dynamics:

One assumption into the catalytic causes of school shootings comes from the "non-traditional" household perspective, which focuses on how family structure and family stability are related to child outcomes. 

Broadly speaking, proponents of this hypothesis claim that family structures such as single mothers, same-sex parents, extended family, or co-habitation are more harmful to the development of a child's mental well-being, than heterosexual, married parents (often equated with the idea of a nuclear family).

This perspective is found to back federal efforts such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 and US federal tax incentives.

However, these assumptions on the detrimental effects of "non-traditional" family structures have repeatedly been shown to be false, with the true issues lying within socio-economic realities. 

Longitudinal research has shown the robust, positive effects of higher incomes and higher education levels on child well-being and emotional development, which reflects on the family stability, and not family structure. 

Further, proponents of this hypothesis often cite family statistics for those who commit crimes, but leave out how these compare to other populations, including the general population.

For example, a 2009 survey conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) revealed that substance abuse amongst children raised by single mothers was higher than children raised by their biological parents.

However, the percentage of substance abuse amongst children raised by single-mothers was not only remarkably low (5.4%), but also only 1.2% higher than children raised by both their parents. Those rates reveal to be even smaller when compared to other demographics of the same time period.

According surveys commissioned by to the National Institute on Drug Abuse between 20 and 30% of teenagers used/abused illicit substances, a much higher rate than single-mother households. 

Another example of poorly cited statistics to further this narrative can be found in children who have lost at least one parent. In the U.S., the rate of parental death before age 16 is 8%.

The rate of parental death is disproportionately high for prisoners (30–50%), however, it is also disproportionately high for high-performing scientists (26%) and US presidents (34%).

Harvard's Baker Foundation Professor, Emerita, Dr. Teresa M. Amabile states, "Those kinds of events can crush a child, they can lead to a lot of problems; they can lead to substance abuse, they can lead to various forms of emotional illness. They can also lead to incredible resilience and almost superhuman behaviors, seemingly, if people can come through those experiences intact. I don’t know if we—we being the field in general—have discovered what the keys are, what makes the difference for kids." 

Understanding that socio-economic factors have greater effects on child development and emotional stability have led many to argue that single-parent and other non-traditional households should be afforded equivalent incentives by the state, as are afforded married households, and that focussing on family structure rather than family stability derails efforts to understand the realities of mass-shooters.

Parental supervision:

"Studies have found that within offenders’ families, there is frequently a lack of supervision, low emotional closeness, and intimacy”. In a 2018 publication, Dr. George S. Everly, Jr, of The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health outlined an accumulation of seven, recurring themes that warrant consideration regarding school shooters. 

One factor is that school shooters tended to isolate themselves, and "exhibited an obsessive quality that often led to detailed planning, but ironically they seemed to lack an understanding of the consequences of their behavior and thus may have a history of adverse encounters with law enforcement."

A criticism in the media of past shooters was questioning how so much planning could commence without alerting the parents or guardians to their efforts. However, this has proven to be as difficult of a question to answer as anticipating any of the past school shootings.

Data from the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, covering decades of US school shootings, reveals that 68% of shooters obtained weapons from their home or the home of a relative.

Since 1999, out of 145 US school shootings committed by children/adolescents, 80% of the guns used were taken from their homes or relative's home. The availability of firearms has direct effect on the probability of initiating a school shooting.

This has led many to question whether parents should be held criminally negligent for their children's gun-related crimes. By 2018, a total of four parents were convicted of failing to lock up the guns that were used to shoot up US schools by their children. Such incidents may also lead to nationwide discussion on gun laws.

The FBI offer a guide for helping to identify potential school shooters, The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective. "Student 'Rules the Roost'" "The parents set few or no limits on the child's conduct, and regularly give in to his demands.

The student insists on an inordinate degree of privacy, and parents have little information about his activities, school life, friends, or other relationships. The parents seem intimidated by their child. They may fear he will attack them physically if they confront or frustrate him, or they may be unwilling to face an emotional outburst, or they may be afraid that upsetting the child will spark an emotional crisis.

Traditional family roles are reversed: for example, the child acts as if he were the authority figure, while parents act as if they were the children."

"No Limits or Monitoring of TV and Internet" "Parents do not supervise, limit or monitor the student's television watching or his use of the Internet. The student may have a TV in his own room or is otherwise free without any limits to spend as much time as he likes watching violent or otherwise inappropriate shows.

The student spends a great deal of time watching television rather than in activities with family or friends. Similarly, parents do not monitor computer use or Internet access. The student may know much more about computers than the parents do, and the computer may be considered off limits to the parents while the student is secretive about his computer use, which may involve violent games or Internet research on violence, weapons, or other disturbing subjects."

This last passage includes the archaic notion that violent video games leads to school shootings. The FBI offer three cautions with their guide, 1) No trait or characteristic should be considered in isolation or given more weight than the others, 2) One bad day may not reflect a student's real personality or usual behavior, and 3) Many of these traits and behaviors are seen in adolescents with other, non-violent, issues.

Daniel Schechter, Clinical Psychiatrist, wrote that for a baby to develop into a troubled adolescent who then turns lethally violent, a convergence of multiple interacting factors must occur, that is "every bit as complicated...as it is for a tornado to form on a beautiful spring day in Kansas". Thus, reinforcing the issue that school shooters do not necessarily come from "bad" parents. No more than they could come from attentive, educated, negligent, single, married, abusive, or loving parents.

Younger age:

According to Raine (2002), immaturity is one of many identified factors increasing the likelihood of an individual committing criminal acts of violence and outbursts of aggression. This fact is supported by findings on brain development occurring as individuals age from birth.

According to the Australian-based Raising children network and Centre for Adolescent Health (and other sources): the main change occurring in the developing brain during adolescence is the (so-called) pruning of unused connections in thinking and processing.

While this is occurring within the brain, retained connections are strengthened. Synaptic pruning occurs because the nervous system in humans develops by firstly, the over-producing of parts of the nervous system, axons, neurons, and synapses, to then later in the development of the nervous system, make the superfluous parts redundant, i.e. pruning (or apoptosis, otherwise known as cell death). 

These changes occur in certain parts of the brain firstly; the pre-frontal cortex, the brain location where decision-making occurs, is the concluding area for development.

While the pre-frontal cortex is developing, children and teenagers might possibly rely more on the brain part known as the amygdala; involving thinking that is more emotionally active, including aggression and impulsiveness. As a consequence each individual is more likely to want to make riskier choices, and to do so more frequently:
  • Steinberg (2004) identified the fact of adolescents taking more risks, typically, than adults;
  • Deakin et al. (2004), and Overman et al. (2004) indicate a decline in risk taking from adolescence to adulthood;
  • Steinberg (2005), Figner et al. (2009), and Burnett et al. (2010) identified adolescent age individuals as more likely to take risks than young children and adults.

School bullying:

Dorothy Espelage of the University of Florida observed that 8 percent of bullying victims become "angry, and aggressively so." She added, "They become very angry, they may act out aggressively online. They may not hit back, but they definitely ruminate."

"Bullying is common in schools and seemed to play a role in the lives of many of the school shooters". A typical bullying interaction consists of three parts, the offender/bully, a victim, and one or more bystanders. This formula of three enables the bully to easily create public humiliation for their victim. Students who are bullied tend to develop behavioral problems, depression, less self-control and poorer social skills, and to do worse in school.

Once humiliated, victims never want to be a victim again and try to regain their image by joining groups. Often, they are rejected by their peers and follow through by restoring justice in what they see as an unjust situation. Their plan for restoration many times results in violence as shown by the school shooters. 75% of school shooters had been bullied or left behind evidence of having been victims of bullying.

Notoriety:

Shooting massacres in English-speaking countries often occur close together in time. In the summer of 1966, two major stories broke: Richard Speck murdered eight women on a single night in Chicago, and Charles Whitman shot and killed 15 people from a clocktower at the University of Texas in Austin.

Neither was seeking fame, but with the new television news climate, they received it anyway. Seeing this, 18-year-old Robert Benjamin Smith bought a gun, and on November 12, 1966, he killed four women and a toddler inside the Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa, Arizona. "I wanted to get known, just wanted to get myself a name," explained Smith.

He had hoped to kill nearly ten times as many people, but had arrived at the beauty college campus too early. Upon his arrest, he was without remorse, saying simply, "I wanted people to know who I was." 

Towers, et al. (2015), found a small, but significant temporary increase in the probability of a second school shooting within 2 weeks after a known school shooting, which was only slightly smaller than the probability of repeats after mass killings involving firearms.

However, much more work is needed with greater scope on investigations, to understand whether this is a real phenomenon or not. Some attribute this to copycat behavior, which can be correlated with the level of media exposure. 

In these copycat shootings, oftentimes the perpetrators see a past school shooter as an idol, so they want to carry out an even more destructive, murderous shooting in hopes of gaining recognition or respect. Some mass murderers study media reports of previous killers.

Recent premeditative writings were presented according to court documents and showed Joshua O'Connor wrote that he wanted the "death count to be as high as possible so that the shooting would be infamous". O'Connor was arrested before he was able to carry out his plan. 

Infamy and notoriety, "a desire to be remembered" has been reported as the leading reason for planned shootings by most perpetrators who were taken alive either pre or post shooting.

Injustice collectors:

In a 2015 New Republic essay, Columbine author Dave Cullen describes a subset of school shooters (and other mass murderers) known as "injustice collectors", or people who "never forget, never forgive, [and] never let go" before they strike out.

The essay describes and expands on the work of retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, who has published a peer-reviewed journal article on the subject. It also quotes Gary Noesner, who helped create and lead the FBI's hostage negotiation unit and served as Chief Negotiator for ten years.

Mental illness:

The degree to which mental illness contributes to school shootings has been debated.

Although the vast majority of mentally ill individuals are non-violent, some evidence has suggested that mental illness or mental health symptoms are nearly universal among school shooters.

A 2002 report by the US Secret Service and US Department of Education found evidence that a majority of school shooters displayed evidence of mental health symptoms, often undiagnosed or untreated. 

Criminologists Fox and DeLateur note that mental illness is only part of the issue, however, and mass shooters tend to externalize their problems, blaming others and are unlikely to seek psychiatric help, even if available. 

According to an article written on gun violence and mental illness, the existence of violence as an outlet for the mentally ill is quite prominent in some instances (Swanson et al., 2015).

The article lists from a study that 12% of people with serious mental illness had committed minor or serious violence within the last year, compared to 2% of people without illness committing those same acts. Other scholars have concluded that mass murderers display a common constellation of chronic mental health symptoms, chronic anger or antisocial traits, and a tendency to blame others for problems. 

However, they note that attempting to "profile" school shooters with such a constellation of traits will likely result in many false positives as many individuals with such a profile do not engage in violent behaviors.

McGinty and colleagues conducted a study to find out if people tended to associate the violence of school shootings with mental illness, at the expense of other factors such as the availability of high-capacity magazines. Nearly 2,000 participants read a news piece on a shooting in which the shooter is diagnosed as having a mental illness and who used high-capacity magazines.

One group read an article that presented only the facts of the case. A different group read an article about the same shooting, but in it the author advocated for gun restrictions for people with mental illness.

Another group read about the shooting in an article that suggested the proposal to ban large-capacity magazines, which acted to advocate that shootings could stem from a societal problem rather than an individual problem. The control group did not read anything.

Participants were then all asked to fill in a questionnaire asking about their views on gun control and whether they thought there should be restrictions on high-capacity magazines. 71% of the control group thought that gun restrictions should be applied to people with mental illness, and nearly 80% of participants who read the articles agreed.

Despite the fact that the article exposed the readers to both the mental illness of the shooter, and the fact that the shooter used high-capacity magazines, participants advocated more for gun restrictions on people with mental illness rather than bans on high-capacity magazines.

This suggests that people believe mental illness is the culprit for school shootings in lieu of the accessibility of guns or other environmental factors. The authors expressed concern that proposals to target gun control laws at people with mental illness do not take into account the complex nature of the relationship between serious mental illness and violence, much of which is due to additional factors such as substance abuse.

However, the link is unclear since research has shown that violence in mentally ill people occurs more in interpersonal environments.

It is also mentionable that school size can play a role on the presence of shooter mental health concerns. In a presented study from researchers Baird, Roellke & Zeifman from the Social Science Journal, it is presented that school size and level of attention given to students can precede violent actions, as students who commit mass shootings in larger schools are likely to have transitioned from smaller schools.

This adds important nuance to the idea that larger schools are more prone to mass violence by showing that the stress associated with losing the personal support given in a smaller community is a weight on students.

A 2016 opinion piece published by U.S. News & World Report concluded that 22% of mass murders are committed by people who suffer from a serious mental illness, and 78% do not.

This study also concluded that many people with mental illnesses do not engage in violence against others and that most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness.

Aftereffects:

After experiencing the threat of a school shooting, as well as the changes in the school via countermeasures, students continue to experience the trauma. In several peer‐reviewed articles on mental health consequences of school shootings by Lowe & Galea, it is shown that mass shootings can bring on the onset of PTSD and continued depression.

In the cities that are home to these kind of events, the town can experience continued paranoia and an exaggerated sense of fear. Lowe & Galea continue to say that continued research is necessary to pinpoint the exact mental symptoms that occur in the victims of school shootings.

Violent media theory:

It has long been debated whether there exists a correlation between school shooting perpetrators and the type of media they consume. A popular profile for school shooters is someone who has been exposed to or enjoys playing violent video games. However, this profile is considered by many researchers to be misguided or erroneous. Ferguson (2009) has argued that a third variable of gender explains the illusory correlation between video game use and the type of people who conduct school shootings.

Ferguson explains that the majority of school shooters are young males, who are considerably more aggressive than the rest of the population. A majority of gamers are also young males. Thus, it appears likely that the view that school shooters are often people who play violent video games is more simply explained by the third variable of gender.

The idea of profiling school shooters by the video games they play comes from the belief that playing violent video games increases a person's aggression level, which in turn, can cause people to perpetrate extreme acts of violence, such as a school shooting. There is little to no data supporting this hypothesis (Ferguson, 2009) but it has become a vivid profile used by the media since the Columbine Massacre in 1999.

A summation of past research on video game violence finds that video games have little to no effect on aggression. (Anderson, 2004; Ferguson, 2007 & Spencer, 2009) Again, this supports the idea that although it is a popular opinion to link school shooters to being violent video gamers; this misconception is often attributable to third variables and has not been supported by research on the connection between aggression and gaming.

Taking influences from literature:

One of the infamous books, the 1977 novel Rage by Stephen King (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), was linked to five school shootings and hostage situations that took place between 1988 and 1997; the most recent of these, Heath High School shooting in 1997, was ultimately influential in King's decision to pull the book out of print for good.

Frequency trends:

School shootings are a "modern phenomenon". There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before the Frontier Middle School shooting in Moses Lake, Washington in 1996, "but they were lower profile", according to journalist Malcolm Gladwell in 2015. 

Beginning in the late 1990s, there has been a steep increase in the frequency of school shootings across the globe. In the United States specifically, the most recent trend has been downward following the spikes of the 1990s, yet at the same time they are trending towards a higher likelihood of being premeditated and executed with a strict plan in mind.

A study by Northeastern University found that "four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today".

​On August 27, 2018, NPR reported that a U.S. Education Department report, released earlier in the year, for the 2015–2016 school year said "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting". However, when NPR researched this 'claim', it could confirm only 11 actual incidents.

By Country:
​
United States:
See also: Gun violence in the United States

School shootings are a "uniquely American crisis", according to The Washington Post in 2018. School shootings are considered an "overwhelmingly American" phenomenon due to the availability of firearms in the United States. Kids at U.S. schools have active shooter drills. According to USA Today, in 2019 "about 95% of public schools now have students and teachers practice huddling in silence, hiding from an imaginary gunman."

Between the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, there were 31 school shootings in the United States and 14 in the rest of the world combined. 

Between 2000 and 2010, counting incidents from 37 countries in which someone was injured or killed on school grounds, with two or more victims, and not counting "single homicides, off-campus homicides, killings caused by government actions, militaries, terrorists or militants", the number of such incidents in the United States was one less than in the other 36 countries combined; in the vast majority of the United States incidents, perpetrators used guns.

The United States Federal government tracks school shootings, and as noted above, a U.S. Education Department report, released earlier in the year, for the 2015–2016 school year said "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting". NPR independently evaluated this claim and only confirmed 11 of the 240 cited incidents.

Addressing school shootings in the United States was made more difficult by the passage by United States Congress of the Dickey Amendment in 1996, which mandated that no Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds "may be used to advocate or promote gun control", although this does not mean the CDC has stopped researching gun violence. 

Instead, Congress relies on independent research done by non-partisan organizations for getting data on gun violence in the United States.

Between the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas, more than 214,000 students experienced gun violence at 216 schools, and at least 141 children, educators and other people were killed and another 284 were injured. 38% of the students who experienced school shootings were African American although African American students were 16.6% of the school population. Schools in at least 36 states and the District of Columbia have experienced a shooting.

Many school shootings in the United States result in one non-fatal injury. The type of firearm most commonly used in school shootings in the United States is the handgun. Three school shootings (the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, and the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida), accounted for 43% of the fatalities

The type of firearm used in the most lethal school shootings was the rifle. High-capacity magazines, which allow the perpetrator to fire dozens of rounds without having to reload, were used in the Columbine High School massacre and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

70% of the perpetrators of school shootings were under the age of 18, with the median age of 16. More than 85% of the perpetrators of school shootings obtained their firearms from their own homes or from friends or relatives. 

Targeted school shootings, those occurring for example in the context of a feud, were about three times as common as those that appeared indiscriminate. Most perpetrators of school shootings exhibited no signs of debilitating mental disorder, such as psychosis or schizophrenia, although most mass killers typically have or exhibit signs of depression.

On the other hand, Eric Harris was almost certainly a psychopath as noted by the FBI. 

Between the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado and 2015, "more than 40 people" were "charged with Columbine-style plots;" almost all were white male teenagers and almost all had studied the Columbine attack or cited the Columbine perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as inspiration.

At least 68 schools that experienced a school shooting employed a police officer or security guard; in all but a few, the shooting ended before any intercession. Security guards or resource officers were present during four of the five school shooting incidents with the highest number of dead or injured:
There were 11 firearm-related events that occurred at a school or campus in the first 23 days of 2018. As of May 2018, more people, including students and teachers, were killed in 2018 in schools in the United States than were killed in military service for the United States, including both combat and non-combat military service, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. 

In terms of the year-to-date number of individual deadly school shootings incidents in the United States, early 2018 was much higher than 2017, with 16 in 2018 and four in 2017, through May; the year-to-day through May number of incidents was the highest since 1999. 

As of May 2018, thirteen school shootings took place on K–12 school property in 2018 that resulted in firearm-related injuries or deaths, including 32 killed and 65 injured, according to Education Week. 22 school shootings where someone was hurt or killed occurred in the United States in the first 20 weeks of 2018, according to CNN.

List of school shootings in the United States:
Main articles: 
As of May 2022, the ten deadliest school shootings in the United States since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado in which 13 were killed were the:
Other school shootings occurring in the United States include:
​
Studies of United States school shootings:

During 1996, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) together with the US Department of Education and the United States Department of Justice, published a review of deaths related to schools occurring as a result of violence, including explicitly "unintentional firearm-related death", for the academic years 1992–1993 and 1993–1994. 

A second study (Anderson; Kaufman; Simon 2001), a continuation from the 1996 study, was published December 5, and covered the period 1994–1999.

A United States Secret Service study concluded that schools were placing false hope in physical security, when they should be paying more attention to the pre-attack behaviors of students. Zero-tolerance policies and metal detectors "are unlikely to be helpful," the Secret Service researchers found.

The researchers focused on:
  • questions concerning the reliance on SWAT teams when most attacks are over before police arrive,
  • profiling of students who show warning signs in the absence of a definitive profile,
  • expulsion of students for minor infractions when expulsion is the spark that push some to return to school with a gun,
  • buying software not based on school shooting studies to evaluate threats although killers rarely make direct threats,
  • and reliance on metal detectors and police officers in schools when shooters often make no effort to conceal their weapons.

In May 2002, the Secret Service published a report that examined 37 U.S. school shootings. They had the following findings:
  • Incidents of targeted violence at school were rarely sudden, impulsive acts.
  • Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker's idea or plan to attack.
  • Most attackers did not threaten their targets directly prior to advancing the attack.
  • There is no accurate or useful profile of students who engaged in targeted school violence.
  • Most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help.
  • Most attackers had difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Moreover, many had considered or attempted suicide.
  • Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack.
  • Most attackers had access to and had used weapons prior to the attack.
  • In many cases, other students were involved in some capacity.
  • Despite prompt law enforcement responses, most shooting incidents were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention.

Cultural references:

Film/TV: There have been many representations of American school shootings in films and TV
shows produced by both United States and international production companies. While films Elephant, We Need to Talk about Kevin, Beautiful Boy, and Mass are solely focused on the either the act or the aftermath. Many of the shows such as Criminal Minds, Degrassi: the Next Generation, Law and Order, and One Tree Hill investigate the crime for an episode or use it as a plot point for about half a season.

Music: Californian punk rock group The Offspring has created two songs about school shootings in the United States. In "Come Out and Play" (1994), the focus is on clashing school gangs, lamenting that "[kids] are getting weapons with the greatest of ease", "It goes down the same as a thousand before / No one's getting smarter / No one's learning the score / A never-ending spree of death and violence and hate".

In the 2008 song "Hammerhead", a campus gunman thinks he is a soldier in a warzone.

One of the more provocative songs to come out of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting was "thoughts & prayers" from alternative artist/rapper grandson (born Jordan Benjamin). The song is a critique of politicians sending out their "thoughts and prayers" to the victims of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and other mass shootings, accompanied by what he perceives as a consistent resistance to gun control laws.

The song "Pumped Up Kicks" by the band Foster the People, was inspired by the Columbine High School massacre.

Political impact: School shootings and other mass killings have had a major political impact. Governments have discussed gun-control laws, to increase time for background checks. Also, bulletproof school supplies have been created, including backpacks, desks, bullet-resistant door panels, and classroom whiteboards (or bulletin boards) which reinforce walls or slide across doors to deflect bullets. 

Another organization that has proposed possible solutions to school shootings is the National Rifle Association (NRA), to allow teachers to carry weapons on school grounds as a means of protecting themselves and others. So far, ten states have already introduced legislation to allow weapons on school property with eighteen states already allowing guns to be carried on school grounds, but not without constraints.

Most states also require the gun carriers to receive advance permission from the districts' superintendents or trustees. "In New York State, written permission from the school is required in order to carry a firearm on school grounds."

Due to the political impact, this has spurred some to press for more stringent gun control laws. In the United States, the National Rifle Association is opposed to such laws, and some groups have called for fewer gun control laws, citing cases of armed students ending shootings and halting further loss of life, and claiming that the prohibitions against carrying a gun in schools do not deter the gunmen. 

One such example is the Mercaz HaRav Massacre, where the attacker was stopped by a student, Yitzhak Dadon, who shot him with his personal firearm which he lawfully carried concealed.

At a Virginia law school, there is a disputed claim that three students retrieved pistols from their cars and stopped the attacker without firing a shot. Also, at a Mississippi high school, the vice principal retrieved a firearm from his vehicle and then eventually stopped the attacker as he was driving away from the school. 

In other cases, such as shootings at Columbine and Red Lake High Schools, the presence of an armed police officer did little to nothing to prevent the killings.

The Gun-Free Schools Act was passed in 1994 in response to gun related violence in schools, so many school systems started adopting the Zero-Tolerance Law. The Gun-Free Schools Act required people to be expelled from the school for a year.

By the year of 1997 the Zero-Tolerance for any type of weapon was implemented by more than 90 percent of U.S public schools.

Police response and countermeasures:

Analysis of the Columbine school shooting and other incidents where first responders waited for backup has resulted in changed recommendations regarding what bystanders and first responders should do.

An analysis of 84 mass shooting cases in the US from 2000 to 2010 found that the average response time by police was 3 minutes. In most instances that exceeds the time the shooter is engaged in killing.

While immediate action may be extremely dangerous, it may save lives which would be lost if people involved in the situation remain passive, or a police response is delayed until overwhelming force can be deployed.

It is recommended by the department of homeland security that civilians involved in the incident take active steps to evacuate, hide, or counter the shooter and that individual law enforcement officers present or first arriving at the scene attempt immediately to engage the shooter.

In many instances, immediate action by civilians or law enforcement has saved lives.

​College and university response and countermeasures:

The Massengill Report was an after-action report created in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, which brought national attention to the need for colleges and universities to take concerning behavior and threats seriously. It has led to the creation of hundreds of behavioral intervention teams which help access and co-ordinate institutional responses to behavioral concerns on college and university campuses.

School countermeasures:

Armed classrooms:
Main article: Arming teachers

There has been considerable policy discussion about how to help prevent school and other types of mass shootings. One suggestion that has come up is the idea to allow firearms in the classroom. "Since the issue of arming teachers is a relatively new topic, it has received little empirical study. Therefore, most of the literature does not come from peer-reviewed sources but rather published news reports.

In addition, most of these reports are not objective and clearly appear to support a specific side of the debate." So far, data has been inconclusive as to whether or not arming teachers would have any sort of benefit for schools.

For years, some areas in the US have allowed "armed classrooms" to deter (or truncate) future attacks by changing helpless victims into armed defenders. Advocates of arming teachers claim that it will reduce fatalities in school shootings, but many others disagree.

Many teachers have had their concerns with the idea of armed classrooms. "One teacher stated that although she is pro-gun, she does not feel as though she could maintain gun safety on school grounds (Reuters, 2012).

Teachers expressed the fear that bigger students could overpower them, take the weapon, and then use it against the teacher or other students." Some members of the armed forces have also had concerns with armed classrooms.

Police forces in Texas brought up the potential for teachers to leave a gun where a student could retrieve and use it. "They are further concerned that if every teacher had a gun, there would be an unnecessarily large number of guns in schools (even including elementary schools).

This large number of guns could lead to accidental shootings, especially those involving younger children who do not understand what guns do."

To diminish school shootings there are many preventive measures that can be taken such as:
  • Installing wireless panic alarms to alert law enforcement.
  • Limiting points of entry with security guarding them.
  • Strategically placing telephones for emergencies so police are always reachable at any point in the campus.
  • Employing school psychologists to monitor and provide mental health services for those that need help.
  • Coordinating a response plan between local police and schools in the event of a threat.

In a 2013 research report published by the Center for Homicide Research, they find that many also reject the idea of having armed classrooms due to what is termed the "weapons effect", which is the phenomenon in which simply being in the presence of a weapon can increase feelings of aggression.

"In Berkowitz & LaPage's (1967) examination of this effect, students who were in the presence of a gun reported higher levels of aggressive feelings towards other students and gave more violent evaluations of other students' performance on a simple task in the form of electric shocks. This finding points to possible negative outcomes for students exposed to guns in the classroom (Simons & Turner, 1974; Turner & Simons, 1976)."

In 2008, Harrold Independent School District in Texas became the first public school district in the U.S. to allow teachers with state-issued firearm-carry permits to carry their arms in the classroom; special additional training and ricochet-resistant ammunition were required for participating teachers. 

Students at the University of Utah have been allowed to carry concealed pistols (so long as they possess the appropriate state license) since a State Supreme Court decision in 2006. 

In addition to Utah, Wisconsin and Mississippi each have legislation that allow students, faculty and employees with the proper permit, to carry concealed weapons on their public university's campuses. 

Colorado and Oregon state courts have ruled in favor of Campus Carry laws by denying their universities' proposals to ban guns on campus, ruling that the UC Board of Regents and the Oregon University System did not have the authority to ban weapons on campus. A selective ban was then re-instated, wherein Oregon state universities enacted a ban on guns in school building and sporting events or by anyone contracted with the university in question. 

A commentary in the conservative National Review Online argues that the armed school approach for preventing school attacks, while new in the US, has been used successfully for many years in Israel and Thailand. 

Teachers and school officials in Israel are allowed and encouraged to carry firearms if they have former military experience in the IDF, which almost all do. Statistics on what percentage of teachers are actually armed are unavailable and in Israel, for example, the intent is to counter politically motivated terrorist attacks on high value, soft targets, not personal defense against, or protection from, unbalanced individual students.

The National Rifle Association has explicitly called for placing armed guards in all American schools. However, Steven Strauss, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, offered a preliminary calculation that placing armed guards in every American school might cost as much as $15 billion/year, and perhaps only save 10 lives per year (at a cost of $1.5 billion/life saved).

​Preventive measures:

Because of the increase in guns in the United States, many schools and local communities are taking it into their own hands by providing young students with early gun safety courses to make them aware of the dangers these objects actually are, also to prevent school shootings.

According to Katherine A. Fowler, PhD, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An average 1,297 children die (two children per 100,000) and 5,790 are treated for injuries caused by guns each year, the study reported. Six percent of these deaths were accidental, 38% were suicides, 53% were homicides and the remaining 3% were from legal intervention or undetermined reasons. Guns injured children at a rate of 8 per 100,000 children, but this rate is likely considerably higher because of unreported injuries.

A preventive measure proposed for stopping school shooting has been focused on securing firearms in the home. A shooting in Sparks, Nevada on October 21, 2013, left a teacher and the shooter, a twelve-year-old student, dead with two seriously injured. The handgun used in the shooting had been taken from the shooter's home. 

Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minnesota in 2005, and Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 also involved legal guns taken from the home.

A 2000 study of firearm storage in the United States found that "from the homes with children and firearms, 55% reported to have one or more firearms in an unlocked place". 43% reported keeping guns without a trigger lock in an unlocked place.

In 2005 a study was done on adult firearm storage practices in the United States found that over 1.69 million youth under age 18 are living in homes with loaded and unlocked firearms.

Also, 73% of children under age 10 living in homes with guns reported knowing the location of their parents' firearms.

Most states have Child Access Prevention Laws—laws designed to prevent children from accessing firearms. Each state varies in the degree of the severity of these laws. The toughest laws enforce criminal liability when a minor achieves access to a carelessly stored firearm. The weakest forbid people from directly providing a firearm to a minor.

There is also a wide range of laws that fall in between the two extremes. One example is a law that enforces criminal liability for carelessly stored firearms, but only where the minor uses the firearm and causes death or serious injury. An example of a weaker law is a law that enforces liability only in the event of reckless, knowing or deliberate behavior by the adult.

In 2019, the United States Secret Service released an analysis of targeted school violence, concluding the best practice for prevention was forming a "multidisciplinary threat assessment team, in conjunction with the appropriate policies, tools, and training". An earlier report published in 2018 concluded there was no single profile of a student attacker, and emphasized the importance of the threat assessment process instead.

The threat assessment process described includes gathering information about student behaviors, negative or stressful events, and what resources are available for the student to overcome those challenges.

Countermeasures:

In 2015 Southwestern High School in Shelbyville, Indiana, was portrayed as possibly the "safest school in America". The school has been used as a "Safe School Flagship" of possible countermeasures to an active shooter.
  • All teachers have lanyards with a panic button that alerts police.
  • Classrooms have automatically locking "hardened doors", and windows have "hardened exterior glass" to deflect bullets and physical attack.
  • Cameras, described as "military-grade", that feed video directly to Shelby County Sheriff's Office are mounted throughout the school.
  • Smoke canisters mounted in the roof of corridors can be remotely discharged to slow a shooter's movement.

Other countermeasures include tools like doorjambs, rapidly-deployable tourniquets, and ballistic protection systems like the CoverMe-Seat.

In 2019, Fruitport High School in Michigan became the first school in the U.S. to be rebuilt with concrete barriers in hallways for students to hide from bullets. The BBC also reports the “hallways are curved to prevent a shooter from having a clear line of sight during any potential attack.”

Classrooms have been redesigned so students can hide more easily. Costing $48 million to rebuild, Bob Szymoniak, Fruitport High School's superintendent, believes these alterations will become part of the structure of all U.S. schools. "These are design elements that are naturally part of buildings going into the future."

​The STOP School Violence Act is pending legislation to provide funding grants to schools to be used for implementing security measures.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about School Shootings:
By region: See also:







Gunshot Wound, including a List of Countries by Firearm-related Death Rate Pictured below: Gunshot wounds deadlier than ever as guns get increasingly powerful (CNN 6/14/2016)
List of Countries by Firearm-related Death Rate:

This is a table which is giving information about "firearm-related death rate per 100,000 population per year".
  • Unintentional: Unintentional shooting deaths.
  • Undetermined: Shooting deaths in which the cause remains undecided.
(Note this is a partial list sorted by guns per 100 inhabitants, indicating the United States as the country (by far) with the most firearms p/100 inhabitants!):
Gunshot wound

A gunshot wound (GSW) is physical trauma caused by a projectile from a firearm, air gun or other type of guns. Damage may include bleeding, broken bones, organ damage, infection of the wound, loss of the ability to move part of the body and, in more severe cases, death. 

Damage depends on the part of the body hit, the path the bullet follows through the body, and the type and speed of the bullet. Long-term complications can include lead poisoning and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

​Factors that determine rates of firearm violence vary by country. These factors may include the illegal drug trade, access to firearms, substance misuse including alcohol, mental health problems, firearm laws, and social and economic differences. Where guns are more common, altercations more often end in death.

Before management begins it should be verified the area is safe. This is followed by stopping major bleeding, then assessing and supporting the airway, breathing, and circulation. 

​Firearm laws, particularly background checks and permit to purchase, decrease the risk of death from firearms. Safer firearm storage may decrease the risk of firearm-related deaths in children.

In 2015, about a million gunshot wounds occurred from interpersonal violence. In 2016, firearms resulted in 251,000 deaths globally, up from 209,000 in 1990. Of these deaths:
  • 161,000 (64%) were the result of assault,
  • 67,500 (27%) were the result of suicide,
  • and 23,000 (9%) were accidents. 

In the United States, guns resulted in about 40,000 deaths in 2017. Firearm-related deaths are most common in males between the ages of 20 to 24 years. Economic costs due to gunshot wounds have been estimated at US$140 billion a year in the United States.

​Signs and symptoms:

Trauma from a gunshot wound varies widely based on the bullet, velocity, mass, entry point, trajectory, affected anatomy, and exit point. Gunshot wounds can be particularly devastating compared to other penetrating injuries because the trajectory and fragmentation of bullets can be unpredictable after entry.

Moreover, gunshot wounds typically involve a large degree of nearby tissue disruption and destruction caused by the physical effects of the projectile correlated with the bullet velocity classification.

The immediate damaging effect of a gunshot wound is typically severe bleeding with the potential for hypovolemic shock, a condition characterized by inadequate delivery of oxygen to vital organs. 

In the case of traumatic hypovolemic shock, this failure of adequate oxygen delivery is due to blood loss, as blood is the means of delivering oxygen to the body's constituent parts.

Devastating effects can result when a bullet strikes a vital organ such as the heart, lungs or liver, or damages a component of the central nervous system such as the spinal cord or brain.

Common causes of death following gunshot injury include bleeding, low oxygen caused by pneumothorax, catastrophic injury to the heart and major blood vessels, and damage to the brain or central nervous system.

Non-fatal gunshot wounds frequently have mild to severe long-lasting effects, typically some form of major disfigurement such as amputation because of a severe bone fracture and may cause permanent disability. A sudden blood gush may take effect immediately from a gunshot wound if a bullet directly damages larger blood vessels, especially arteries.

Pathophysiology:

The degree of tissue disruption caused by a projectile is related to the cavitation the projectile creates as it passes through tissue. A bullet with sufficient energy will have a cavitation effect in addition to the penetrating track injury. As the bullet passes through the tissue, initially crushing then lacerating, the space left forms a cavity; this is called the permanent cavity.

Higher-velocity bullets create a pressure wave that forces the tissues away, creating not only a permanent cavity the size of the caliber of the bullet but a temporary cavity or secondary cavity, which is often many times larger than the bullet itself. 

The temporary cavity is the radial stretching of tissue around the bullet's wound track, which momentarily leaves an empty space caused by high pressures surrounding the projectile that accelerate material away from its path. 

The extent of cavitation, in turn, is related to the following characteristics of the projectile:

Kinetic energy:

KE = 1/2mv2 (where m is mass and v is velocity). This helps to explain why wounds produced by projectiles of higher mass and/or higher velocity produce greater tissue disruption than projectiles of lower mass and velocity. The velocity of the bullet is a more important determinant of tissue injury.

Although both mass and velocity contribute to the overall energy of the projectile, the energy is proportional to the mass while proportional to the square of its velocity. As a result, for constant velocity, if the mass is doubled, the energy is doubled; however, if the velocity of the bullet is doubled, the energy increases four times.

The initial velocity of a bullet is largely dependent on the firearm. The US military commonly uses 5.56-mm bullets, which have a relatively low mass as compared with other bullets; however, the speed of these bullets is relatively fast. As a result, they produce a larger amount of kinetic energy, which is transmitted to the tissues of the target. 

The size of the temporary cavity is approximately proportional to the kinetic energy of the bullet and depends on the resistance of the tissue to stress. Muzzle energy, which is based on muzzle velocity, is often used for ease of comparison.

Yaw:

Handgun bullets will generally travel in a relatively straight line or make one turn if a bone is hit. Upon travel through deeper tissue, high-energy rounds may become unstable as they decelerate, and may tumble (pitch and yaw) as the energy of the projectile is absorbed, causing stretching and tearing of the surrounding tissue.

Fragmentation:

Most commonly, bullets do not fragment, and secondary damage from fragments of shattered bone is a more common complication than bullet fragments.

Diagnosis:

Classification:

Gunshot wounds are classified according to the speed of the projectile using the Gustilo open fracture classification:
  • Low-velocity: Less than 1,100 ft/s (340 m/s): Low velocity wounds are typical of small caliber handguns and display wound patterns like Gustilo Anderson Type 1 or 2 wounds.
  • Medium-velocity: Between 1,200 ft/s (340 m/s) and 2,000 ft/s (610 m/s): These are more typical of shotgun blasts or higher caliber handguns like magnums. The risk of infection from these types of wounds can vary depending on the type and pattern of bullets fired as well as the distance from the firearm.
  • High-velocity: Between 2,000 ft/s (610 m/s) and 3,500 ft/s (1,100 m/s): Usually caused by powerful assault or hunting rifles and usually display wound pattern similar to Gustilo Anderson Type 3 wounds. The risk of infection is especially high due to the large area of injury and destroyed tissue.

Bullets from handguns are sometimes less than 1,000 ft/s (300 m/s) but with modern pistol loads, they usually are slightly above 1,000 ft/s (300 m/s), while bullets from most modern rifles exceed 2,500 ft/s (760 m/s).

One recently developed class of firearm projectiles is the hyper-velocity bullet, such cartridges are usually either wildcats made for achieving such high speed or purpose built factory ammunition with the same goal in mind. Examples of hyper velocity cartridges include the .220 Swift, .17 Remington and .17 Mach IV cartridges.

The US military commonly uses 5.56mm bullets, which have a relatively low mass as compared with other bullets (40-62 grains); however, the speed of these bullets is relatively fast (Approximately 2,800 ft/s (850 m/s), placing them in the high velocity category). As a result, they produce a larger amount of kinetic energy, which is transmitted to the tissues of the target. 

However, one must remember that high kinetic energy does not necessarily equate to high stopping power, as incapacitation usually results from remote wounding effects such as bleeding, rather than raw energy transfer.

High energy does indeed result in more tissue disruption, which plays a role in incapacitation, but other factors such as wound size and shot placement play as big of, if not a bigger role in stopping power and thus, effectiveness. Muzzle velocity does not consider the effect of aerodynamic drag on the flight of the bullet for the sake of ease of comparison.

Prevention:

Medical organizations in the United States recommend a criminal background check being held before a person buys a gun and that a person who has convictions for crimes of violence should not be permitted to buy a gun. 

Safe storage of firearms is recommended, as well as better mental health care and removal of guns from those at risk of suicide. In an effort to prevent mass shootings greater regulations on guns that can rapidly fire many bullets is recommended.

Management:

Initial assessment for a gunshot wound is approached in the same way as other acute trauma using the advanced trauma life support (ATLS) protocol. These include:
  • A) Airway - Assess and protect airway and potentially the cervical spine
  • B) Breathing - Maintain adequate ventilation and oxygenation
  • C) Circulation - Assess for and control bleeding to maintain organ perfusion including focused assessment with sonography for trauma (FAST)
  • D) Disability - Perform basic neurological exam including Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS)
  • E) Exposure - Expose entire body and search for any missed injuries, entry points, and exit points while maintaining body temperature

Depending on the extent of injury, management can range from urgent surgical intervention to observation. As such, any history from the scene such as gun type, shots fired, shot direction and distance, blood loss on scene, and pre-hospital vitals signs can be very helpful in directing management.

Unstable people with signs of bleeding that cannot be controlled during the initial evaluation require immediate surgical exploration in the operating room. Otherwise, management protocols are generally dictated by anatomic entry point and anticipated trajectory.

Neck:
​​
A gunshot wound to the neck can be particularly dangerous because of the high number of vital anatomical structures contained within a small space.

The neck contains the,
Gunshots to the neck can thus cause severe bleeding, airway compromise, and nervous system injury.

Initial assessment of a gunshot wound to the neck involves non-probing inspection of whether the injury is a penetrating neck injury (PNI), classified by violation of the platysma muscle: 
  • If the platysma is intact, the wound is considered superficial and only requires local wound care.
  • If the injury is a PNI, surgery should be consulted immediately while the case is being managed. Of note, wounds should not be explored on the field or in the emergency department given the risk of exacerbating the wound.

Due to the advances in diagnostic imaging, management of PNI has been shifting from a "zone-based" approach, which uses anatomical site of injury to guide decisions, to a "no-zone" approach which uses a symptom-based algorithm. The no-zone approach uses a hard signs and imaging system to guide next steps.

Hard signs include airway compromise, unresponsive shock, diminished pulses, uncontrolled bleeding, expanding hematoma, bruits/thrill, air bubbling from wound or extensive subcutaneous air, stridor/hoarseness, neurological deficits. 

If any hard signs are present, immediate surgical exploration and repair is pursued alongside airway and bleeding control. If there are no hard signs, the person receives a multi-detector CT angiography for better diagnosis.

A directed angiography or endoscopy may be warranted in a high-risk trajectory for the gunshot. A positive finding on CT leads to operative exploration. If negative, the person may be observed with local wound care.

Chest:

Important anatomy in the chest include:
Gunshots to the chest can thus cause:
Initial workup as outlined in the Workup section is particularly important with gunshot wounds to the chest because of the high risk for direct injury to the lungs, heart, and major vessels.

Important notes for the initial workup specific for chest injuries are as follows. In people with pericardial tamponade or tension pneumothorax, the chest should be evacuated or decompressed, if possible, prior to attempting tracheal intubation because the positive pressure ventilation can cause hypotention or cardiovascular collapse. 

Those with signs of a tension pneumothorax (asymmetric breathing, unstable blood flow, respiratory distress) should immediately receive a chest tube (> French 36) or needle decompression if chest tube placement is delayed. 

FAST exam should include extended views into the chest to evaluate for hemopericardium, pneumothorax, hemothorax, and peritoneal fluid.

Those with cardiac tamponade, uncontrolled bleeding, or a persistent air leak from a chest tube all require surgery. Cardiac tamponade can be identified on FAST exam. Blood loss warranting surgery is 1–1.5 L of immediate chest tube drainage or ongoing bleeding of 200-300 mL/hr. 

Persistent air leak is suggestive of tracheobronchial injury which will not heal without surgical intervention. Depending on the severity of the person's condition and if cardiac arrest is recent or imminent, the person may require surgical intervention in the emergency department, otherwise known as an emergency department thoracotomy (EDT).

However, not all gunshot to the chest require surgery. Asymptomatic people with a normal chest X-ray can be observed with a repeat exam and imaging after 6 hours to ensure no delayed development of pneumothorax or hemothorax. 

If a person only has a pneumothorax or hemothorax, a chest tube is usually sufficient for management unless there is large volume bleeding or persistent air leak as noted above. Additional imaging after initial chest X-ray and ultrasound can be useful in guiding next steps for stable people.

Common imaging modalities include chest CT, formal echocardiography, angiography, esophagoscopy, esophagography, and bronchoscopy depending on the signs and symptoms.

Abdomen:
​
Important anatomy in the abdomen includes:
Gunshots to the abdomen can thus cause severe bleeding, release of bowel contents, peritonitis, organ rupture, respiratory compromise, and neurological deficits.

The most important initial evaluation of a gunshot wound to the abdomen is whether there is uncontrolled bleeding, inflammation of the peritoneum, or spillage of bowel contents. If any of these are present, the person should be transferred immediately to the operating room for laparotomy. 

If it is difficult to evaluate for those indications because the person is unresponsive or incomprehensible, it is up to the surgeon's discretion whether to pursue laparotomy, exploratory laparoscopy, or alternative investigative tools.

Although all people with abdominal gunshot wounds were taken to the operating room in the past, practice has shifted in recent years with the advances in imaging to non-operative approaches in more stable people. If the person's vital signs are stable without indication for immediate surgery, imaging is done to determine the extent of injury.

Ultrasound (FAST) can help identify intra-abdominal bleeding while X-rays can help determine bullet trajectory and fragmentation. However, the best and preferred mode of imaging is high-resolution multi-detector CT (MDCT) with IV, oral, and sometimes rectal contrast. Severity of injury found on imaging will determine whether the surgeon takes an operative or close observational approach.

Diagnostic peritoneal lavage (DPL) has become largely obsolete with the advances in MDCT, with use limited to centers without access to CT to guide requirement for urgent transfer for operation.

Extremities:
​
The four main components of extremities are bones, vessels, nerves, and soft tissues.

Gunshot wounds can thus cause severe bleeding, fractures, nerve deficits, and soft tissue damage. The Mangled Extremity Severity Score (MESS) is used to classify the severity of injury and evaluates for severity of skeletal and/or soft tissue injury, limb ischemia, shock, and age. Depending on the extent of injury, management can range from superficial wound care to limb amputation.

Vital sign stability and vascular assessment are the most important determinants of management in extremity injuries. As with other traumatic cases, those with uncontrolled bleeding require immediate surgical intervention. 

If surgical intervention is not readily available and direct pressure is insufficient to control bleeding, tourniquets or direct clamping of visible vessels may be used temporarily to slow active bleeding. People with hard signs of vascular injury also require immediate surgical intervention. Hard signs include active bleeding, expanding or pulsatile hematoma, bruit/thrill, absent distal pulses and signs of extremity ischemia.

For stable people without hard signs of vascular injury, an injured extremity index (IEI) should be calculated by comparing the blood pressure in the injured limb compared to an uninjured limb in order to further evaluate for potential vascular injury. 

If the IEI or clinical signs are suggestive of vascular injury, the person may undergo surgery or receive further imaging including CT angiography or conventional arteriography.
In addition to vascular management, people must be evaluated for bone, soft tissue, and nerve injury. Plain films can be used for fractures alongside CTs for soft tissue assessment.

Fractures must be debrided and stabilized, nerves repaired when possible, and soft tissue debrided and covered. This process can often require multiple procedures over time depending on the severity of injury.

Epidemiology:
Further information: List of countries by firearm-related death rate

In 2015, about a million gunshot wounds occurred from interpersonal violence. Firearms, globally in 2016, resulted in 251,000 deaths up from 209,000 in 1990. Of these deaths:
  • 161,000 (64%) were the result of assault,
  • 67,500 (27%) were the result of suicide,
  • and 23,000 were accidents.
  • Firearm related deaths are most common in males between the ages of 20 to 24 years.

The countries with the greatest number of deaths from firearms are Brazil, United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala and South Africa which. collectively,  make up just over half the total. In the United States in 2015 about half of the 44,000 people who died by suicide did so with a gun.

As of 2016, the countries with the highest rates of gun violence per capita were El Salvador, Venezuela, and Guatemala with 40.3, 34.8, and 26.8 violent gun deaths per 100,000 people respectively. The countries with the lowest rates of were Singapore, Japan, and South Korea with 0.03, 0.04, and 0.05 violent gun deaths per 100,000 people respectively.

Canada:

In 2016, about 893 people died due to gunshot wounds in Canada (2.1 per 100,000). About 80% were suicides, 12% were assaults, and 4% percent were an accident.

United States:
Further information: Gun violence in the United States

In 2017, there were 39,773 deaths in the United States as a result gunshot wounds. Of these 60% were suicides, 37% were homicides, 1.4% were by law enforcement, 1.2% were accidents, and 0.9% were from an unknown cause. 

This is up from 37,200 deaths in 2016 due to a gunshot wound (10.6 per 100,000). With respect to those that pertain to interpersonal violence, it had the 31st highest rate in the world with 3.85 deaths per 100,000 people in 2016. 

The majority of all homicides and suicides are firearm-related, and the majority of firearm-related deaths are the result of murder and suicide. When sorted by GDP, however, the United States has a much higher violent gun death rate compared to other developed countries, with over 10 times the number of firearms assault deaths than the next four highest GDP countries combined. 

Gunshot violence is the third most costly cause of injury and the fourth most expensive form of hospitalization in the United States.

History:

Until the 1880s, the standard practice for treating a gunshot wound called for physicians to insert their unsterilized fingers into the wound to probe and locate the path of the bullet. 

Standard surgical theory such as opening abdominal cavities to repair gunshot wounds, germ theory, and Joseph Lister's technique for antiseptic surgery using diluted carbolic acid, had not yet been accepted as standard practice.

For example, sixteen doctors attended to President James A. Garfield after he was shot in 1881, and most probed the wound with their fingers or dirty instruments. Historians agree that massive infection was a significant factor in Garfield's death.

At almost the same time, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, on 13 July 1881, George E. Goodfellow performed the first laparotomy to treat an abdominal gunshot wound.: M-9  Goodfellow pioneered the use of sterile techniques in treating gunshot wounds, washing the person's wound and his hands with lye soap or whisky, and his patient, unlike the President, recovered. He became America's leading authority on gunshot wounds and is credited as the United States' first civilian trauma surgeon.

Mid-nineteenth-century handguns such as the Colt revolvers used during the American Civil War had muzzle velocities of just 230–260 m/s and their powder and ball predecessors had velocities of 167 m/s or less. Unlike today's high-velocity bullets, nineteenth-century balls produced almost little or no cavitation and, being slower moving, they were liable to lodge in unusual locations at odds with their trajectory.

Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 led to the use of radiographs to locate bullets in wounded soldiers.

Survival rates for gunshot wounds improved among US military personnel during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, due in part to helicopter evacuation, along with improvements in resuscitation and battlefield medicine. 

Similar improvements were seen in US trauma practices during the Iraq War. Some military trauma care practices are disseminated by citizen soldiers who return to civilian practice. One such practice is to transfer major trauma cases to an operating theater as soon as possible, to stop internal bleeding.

Within the United States, the survival rate for gunshot wounds has increased, leading to apparent declines in the gun death rate in states that have stable rates of gunshot hospitalizations.

Research:

Research into gunshot wounds in the USA is hampered by lack of funding. Federal-funded research into firearm injury, epidemiology, violence, and prevention is minimal.

See also:

​





Gun culture in the United States Pictured below: Household firearm ownership rate by U.S. state in 2016
See also: 
Gun culture in the United States:

In the United States, gun culture encompasses the behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs about firearms and their usage by civilians. Gun ownership in the United States is the highest in the world, and constitutionally protected by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Firearms are widely used in the United States for self-defense, hunting, and recreational uses, such as target shooting.

Gun politics in the United States tends to be polarized between advocates of gun rights, often conservative, and those who support stricter gun control, often liberal.

The gun culture of the United States can be considered unique among developed countries in terms of the large number of firearms owned by civilians, generally permissive regulations, and high levels of gun violence.

History:

​American attitudes on gun ownership date back to the American Revolutionary War, and also arise from traditions of hunting, militias, and frontier living.

Justifying the unique attitude toward gun ownership in the United States, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 46, in 1788, that: "those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it.

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes.

But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it."

The American hunting/sporting passion comes from a time when the United States was an agrarian, subsistence nation where hunting was a profession for some, an auxiliary source of food for some settlers, and also a deterrence to animal predators.

A connection between shooting skills and survival among rural American men was in many cases a necessity and a 'rite of passage' for those entering manhood. Today, hunting survives as a central sentimental component of a gun culture as a way to control animal populations across the country, regardless of modern trends away from subsistence hunting and rural living.

The militia spirit derives from an early American dependence on arms to protect themselves from foreign armies and hostile Native Americans. Survival depended upon everyone being capable of using a weapon.

Prior to the American Revolution there was neither budget nor manpower nor government desire to maintain a full-time army. Therefore, the armed citizen-soldier carried the responsibility. Service in militia, including providing one's own ammunition and weapons, was mandatory for all men.

Yet, as early as the 1790s, the mandatory universal militia duty gave way to voluntary militia units and a reliance on a regular army. Throughout the 19th century the institution of the civilian militia began to decline.

Closely related to the militia tradition was the frontier tradition with the need for a means of self-protection closely associated with the nineteenth century westward expansion and the American frontier.

In popular literature, frontier adventure was most famously told by James Fenimore Cooper, who is credited by Petri Liukkonen with creating the archetype of an 18th-century frontiersman through such novels as The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1840).

Ownership levels:
​
Americans made up 4 percent of the world's population but owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock of 857 million civilian firearms." U.S civilians own 393 million guns. American civilians own more guns "than those held by civilians in the other top 25 countries combined. American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement.  Americans bought more than 2 million guns in May 2018, more than twice the total number of arms possessed by law enforcement agencies in the United States combined.

In April and May 2018, U.S. civilians bought 4.7 million guns, which is more than all the firearms stockpiled by the United States military. In 2017, Americans bought 25.2 million guns, which is 2.5 million more guns than possessed by every law enforcement agency in the world put together.

Between 2012 and 2017, U.S. civilians bought 135 million guns, 2 million more guns than the combined stockpile of all the world's armed forces

Although historically there have been significant differences in respect to gun ownership between different races and sexes, that gap may be closing. For example, women and ethnic minorities saw the sharpest rise of private gun ownership in the United States in 2020 and the ongoing ownership trends do not indicate any sign of abatement. 

​Also, in 2020 and 2021 a sharp increase in the gun ownership of "gun control" advocates was seen due to the riots and pandemic during that time. Over 2 million firearms were purchased during the pandemic alone.

Popular culture:

​In the late 19th century, cowboy and "Wild West" imagery entered the collective imagination. The first American female superstar, Annie Oakley, was a sharpshooter who toured the country starting in 1885, performing in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.

The cowboy archetype of individualist hero was established largely by Owen Wister in stories and novels, most notably The Virginian (1902), following close on the heels of Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West (1889–1895), a history of the early frontier.

Cowboys were also popularized in turn of the 20th century cinema, notably through such early classics as The Great Train Robbery (1903) and A California Hold Up (1906)—the most commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era.

Gangster films began appearing as early as 1910, but became popular only with the advent of sound in film in the 1930s. The genre was boosted by the events of the prohibition era, such as bootlegging and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, the existence of real-life gangsters (e.g., Al Capone) and the rise of contemporary organized crime and escalation of urban violence.

These movies flaunted the archetypal exploits of "swaggering, cruel, wily, tough, and law-defying bootleggers and urban gangsters."

With the arrival of World War II, Hollywood produced many morale boosting movies, patriotic rallying cries that affirmed a sense of national purpose. The image of the lone cowboy was replaced in these combat films by stories that emphasized group efforts and the value of individual sacrifices for a larger cause, often featuring a group of men from diverse ethnic backgrounds who were thrown together, tested on the battlefield, and molded into a dedicated fighting unit.

Guns frequently accompanied famous heroes and villains in late 20th-century American films, from the outlaws of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972), to the fictitious law and order avengers like Dirty Harry (1971) and RoboCop (1987).

In the 1970s, films portrayed fictitious and exaggerated characters, madmen ostensibly produced by the Vietnam War in films like Taxi Driver (1976) and Apocalypse Now (1979), while other films told stories of fictitious veterans who were supposedly victims of the war and in need of rehabilitation (Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, both 1978). 

Many action films continue to celebrate the gun toting hero in fantastical settings. At the same time, the negative role of the gun in fictionalized modern urban violence has been explored in films like Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Menace 2 Society (1993).

Political and cultural theories:

Gun culture and its effects have been at the center of major debates in the US's public sphere for decades. In his 1970 article "America as a Gun Culture," historian Richard Hofstadter used the phrase "gun culture" to characterize America as having a long-held affection for guns, embracing and celebrating the association of guns and an overall heritage relating to guns. He also noted that the US "is the only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population".

In 1995, political scientist Robert Spitzer said that the modern American gun culture is founded on three factors: the proliferation of firearms since the earliest days of the nation, the connection between personal ownership of weapons and the country's revolutionary and frontier history, and the cultural mythology regarding the gun in the frontier and in modern life. 

In 2008, the US Supreme Court affirmed that considerable freedom for individuals to possess firearms is guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Terms applied to opponents:

The terms that gun rights and gun control advocates use to refer to opponents are part of the larger topic of gun politics.

The term gun nut refers to firearms enthusiasts who are deeply involved with the gun culture. It is regarded as a pejorative stereotype cast upon gun owners by gun control advocates as a means of implying that they are fanatical, exhibit abnormal behavior, or are a threat to the safety of others. Some gun owners embrace the term affectionately.

The term hoplophobia refers to an "irrational aversion to firearms."

Foreign perspective:

The US attitude to guns generally perplexes those in other developed countries, many of which do not understand the unusual permissiveness of American gun laws, and believe that American public should push for harsher gun control measures in the face of mass shootings.

Critics contrast the US reaction to terrorism given how few deaths it causes, with their high death rates from non-terror related gun crime.

See also:

​





National Rifle AssociationPictured below: American companies snub the National Rifle Association (The Economist)
The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is a gun rights advocacy group based in the United States. Founded in 1871 to advance rifle marksmanship, the modern NRA has become a prominent gun rights lobbying organization while continuing to teach firearm safety and competency.

The organization also publishes several magazines and sponsors competitive marksmanship events. According to the NRA, it had nearly 5 million members as of December 2018, though that figure has not been independently confirmed.

The NRA is among the most influential advocacy groups in U.S. politics. The NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) is its lobbying division, which manages its political action committee (PAC), the Political Victory Fund (PVF).

Over its history, the organization has influenced legislation, participated in or initiated lawsuits, and endorsed or opposed various candidates at local, state, and federal levels. Some notable lobbying efforts by the NRA-ILA are the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which lessened restrictions of the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the Dickey Amendment, which blocks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using federal funds to advocate for gun control.

​From the mid-to-late 1970s, the NRA has become increasingly criticized by gun control and gun rights advocacy groups, political commentators, and politicians. The organization has been the focus of intense criticism in the aftermath of high-profile shootings, such as the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, after which they suggested adding armed security guards to schools.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the National Rifle Association:







Gun Violence vs. Gun Shows in the United States Pictured below Houston gun show at the George R. Brown Convention Center
[Your WebHost: "connecting the dots" -- gun shows are basically in the business of selling firearms to attendees. In that role, too many guns end up in the wrong hands, leading at times to mass killings from handguns, even assault weapons!]

Gun Shows in the United States

In the United States, a gun show is an event where promoters generally rent large public venues and then rent tables for display areas for dealers of guns and related items, and charge admission for buyers. The majority of guns for sale at gun shows are modern sporting firearms. Approximately 5,000 gun shows occur annually in the United States.

Venues and attendance:

​Gun shows are typically held in large public facilities such as arenas, fairgrounds, civic centers, and armories. Show promoters charge vendors fees for display tables (from $20 to $145) and booths (from $200 to $400) and charge admission fees (from $5 to $50) for the public.  In addition to guns, ammunition, knives, militaria, books and other items are sold.

In 2005, Michael Bouchard, Assistant Director/Field Operations of ATF, estimated that 5,000 gun shows take place each year in the United States. Most gun shows have 2,500 to 15,000 attendees over a two-day period. The number of tables at a gun show varies from as few as fifty to as many as 2,000. 

At the largest gun shows, over 1,000 firearms are sold over two days. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reported that it found no definite numbers for U.S. gun shows, but said that estimates ranged from 2,000 to 5,200 a year. In 1999, the ATF reported that 4,442 gun shows were advertised in 1998 in Gun Show Calendar.

SHOT Show:

The largest gun show in the United States is the annual SHOT Show. Only trade professionals, such as buyers for retail stores or law enforcement agencies, are allowed entry. It has attracted over 60,000 attendees to its 630,000 square feet of exhibition space in Las Vegas. The show is sponsored by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group of firearms and hunting businesses. It is among the top 25 trade shows in the country.

Restrictions:

Under the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA), firearm dealers with a Federal Firearms License (FFL) were prohibited from doing business at gun shows (they were only permitted to do business at the address listed on their license). That changed with the enactment of the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 (FOPA), which allows FFLs to transfer firearms at gun shows provided they follow the provisions of the GCA and other pertinent federal regulations. In 1999, ATF reported that between 50% and 75% of the vendors at gun shows had FFLs. Only buyers from within the state may purchase handguns.

Gun show loophole:
Main article: Gun show loophole

The "Gun show loophole" is a political term in the United States referring to sales of firearms by private sellers, including those done at gun shows. Under federal law, private-party sellers are not required to perform background checks on buyers. Private sellers are also not required to record the sale or ask for identification.

There are some Federal rules regarding the sales. As of August 2013, 33 states do not require background checks for sales of firearms by private individuals, while 17 states and Washington, D.C., do require background checks for some or all private firearm sales.

This is in contrast to sales by gun stores and other Federal Firearms License holders, who are required by federal law to perform background checks of all buyers, and to record all sales, regardless of venue (i.e. private sales).

Research and studies:

In 2000, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) published "Following the Gun", its analysis of more than 1,530 trafficking investigations over a two-and-a-half-year period and found gun shows to have the second highest number of trafficked guns per investigation, after corrupt FFL dealers.

(Straw purchasers were the most common channel, but averaged a relatively small number of trafficked guns per investigation compared to corrupt FFLs and gun shows.) These investigations involved a total of 84,128 firearms that had been diverted from legal to illegal commerce. All told, the report identified more than 26,000 firearms that had been illegally trafficked through gun shows in 212 separate investigations. The report stated that:

  • A prior review of ATF gun show investigations shows that prohibited persons, such as convicted felons and juveniles, do personally buy firearms at gun shows and gun shows are sources of firearms that are trafficked to such prohibited persons.
  • The gun show review found that firearms were diverted at and through gun shows by straw purchasers, unregulated private sellers, and licensed dealers.
  • Felons were associated with selling or purchasing firearms in 46 percent of the gun show investigations.
  • Firearms that were illegally diverted at or through gun shows were recovered in subsequent crimes, including homicide and robbery, in more than a third of the gun show investigations.

A Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report on "Firearms Use by Offenders" found that only 0.8% of prison inmates reported acquiring firearms used in their crimes "At a gun show", with repeat
offenders less likely than first-time offenders to report acquiring firearms from a retail source, gun show or flea market.

This 2001 study examined data from a 1997 Department of Justice survey of more than 18,000 federal and state prison inmates in 1,409 State prisons and 127 Federal prisons. The remaining 99.2% of inmates reported obtaining firearms from other sources, including:
  1. "From a friend/family member" (36.8%),
  2. "Off the street/from a drug dealer" (20.9%),
  3. "From a fence/black market source" (9.6%),
  4. "From a pawnshop", "From a flea market", "From the victim", or "In a burglary". 9% of inmates replied "Don't Know/Other" to the question of where they acquired a firearm and 4.4% refused to answer. 

The Department of Justice did not attempt to verify the firearms reported in the survey or trace them to determine their chain of possession from original retail sale to the time they were transferred to the inmates surveyed (in cases where inmates were not the original retail purchaser).

Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency room medicine and director of UC Davis' Violence Prevention Research Program, released a study in 2007 which held that gun shows are a venue for illegal activity, including straw purchases and unlicensed sales to prohibited individuals.

In 2011, economists Mark Duggan and Randi Hjalmarsson at the University of Maryland and Brian Jacob from the University of Michigan released a paper which stated that gun shows do not lead to substantial increases in either gun homicides or gun suicides.

ATF criminal investigations at gun shows:

From 2004 to 2006, ATF conducted surveillance and undercover investigations at 195 gun shows (approximately 2% of all shows). Specific targeting of suspected individuals (77%) resulted in 121 individual arrests and 5,345 firearms seizures. Seventy nine of the 121 ATF operation plans were known suspects previously under investigation.

Additionally, ATF Field Offices report that:
  • Between 2002 and 2005, more than 400 guns legally purchased at gun shows from licensed dealers in the city of Richmond, Virginia, were later recovered in connection with criminal activity. Bouchard said, "These figures do not take into account firearms that may have been sold at Richmond area gun shows by unlicensed sellers, as these transactions are more difficult to track." It is noteworthy that the "in connection with criminal activity" category includes stolen guns later recovered from burglaries, but the report does not specify how many guns in the 400 gun figure cited were not guns used in the commission of a crime, but that were rather the fruits of criminal activity.
  • The Department of Justice reports, "after reviewing hundreds of trace reports associated with guns used in crime recovered in the New Orleans area and interviewing known gang members and other criminals, ATF Special Agents identified area gun shows as a source used by local gang members and other criminals to obtain guns."
  • In 2003 and 2004, the San Francisco ATF Field Division conducted six general operations at Reno, Nevada, gun shows to investigate interstate firearms trafficking. During these operations, "agents purchased firearms and identified violations related to "off paper" sales, sales to out-of-state residents, and dealing in firearms without a license." The "ATF seized or purchased 400 firearms before making arrests and executing search warrants, which resulted in the seizure of an additional 600 firearms and the recovery of explosives."
  • ATF's Columbus Field Division conducted its anti-trafficking operations based on intelligence from Cleveland police that "many of the guns recovered in high-crime areas of the city had been purchased at local gun shows." Subsequent gun show sting operations resulted in the seizure of "5 guns, one indictment, and two pending indictments for felony possession of a firearm." The state of Ohio is one of the top ten source states for recovered guns used in crime.
  • The ATF's Phoenix Field Division reported that "many gun shows attracted large numbers of gang members from Mexico and California. They often bought large quantities of assault weapons and smuggled them into Mexico or transported them to California." Garen Wintemute, a professor at the University of California at Davis, calls Arizona and Texas a "gunrunner's paradise".

Regarding the trafficking of firearms from the U.S. into Mexico, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in June 2009 that stated:
  • While it is impossible to know how many firearms are illegally smuggled into Mexico in a given year, about 87 percent of firearms seized by Mexican authorities and traced in the last 5 years originated in the United States, according to data from Department of Justice's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). According to U.S. and Mexican government officials, these firearms have been increasingly more powerful and lethal in recent years. Many of these firearms come from gun shops and gun shows in Southwest border states.

The GAO report has been corroborated through other sources. William Newell, Special Agent in Charge of ATF's Phoenix Field Division, testified before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee in March 2009, stating, "Drug traffickers are able to obtain firearms and ammunition more easily in the U.S., including sources in the secondary market such as gun shows and flea markets.

Depending on State law, the private sale of firearms at those venues often does not require record keeping or background checks prior to the sale." The ATF has also reported that, "Trends indicate the firearms illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are becoming more powerful.

ATF has analyzed firearms seizures in Mexico from FY 2005–07 and identified the following weapons most commonly used by drug traffickers:
However, this is based only on the weapons sent to the ATF to be traced, a small portion of all firearms seized by the Mexican government, and the extent to which they are representative of all seized firearms is disputed.

According to Raul Benitez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, "Mexico's southern border with Guatemala has long been an entry point for such weapons and today could account for 10 to 15 percent coming through." 

William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott have described Mexico as a "virtual arms bazaar", where one can purchase a wide variety of military weapons from international sources: "fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK-47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc manufacturers." 

In addition, they say that Mexican drug cartels have long-established drug- and gun-running ties with Latin American revolutionary movements such as Colombia's FARC. 

Further, China has supplied military arms to Latin America and Chinese-made assault weapons have been recovered in Mexico, according to Amnesty International. 

Finally, the Mexican army has seen rampant desertion rates (150,000 in the last six years) and many soldiers have taken their weapons home with them, including Belgian-made M16s.

It is difficult to legally acquire fully automatic firearms at American gun shows (as opposed to the semiautomatic-only versions of these firearms that are legal on the U.S. civilian market), due to National Firearms Act (NFA).

To legally purchase or transfer a fully automatic firearm, U.S. citizens must:
  • pay a $200 transfer tax,
  • submit a full set of fingerprints on FBI Form FD-258,
  • obtain certification provided by a chief law enforcement officer ("CLEO": the local chief of police, sheriff of the county, head of the State police, or State or local district attorney or prosecutor),
  • and obtain final approval from the BATF on a Form 4 transfer of NFA registration to the new owner. 

All private citizens must wait, typically months, before receiving the tax stamp for the $200 tax paid, authorizing taking possession of the already paid-for fully automatic firearm. Until in receipt of the tax stamp, the Class III dealer retains control of the fully automatic firearm.

In addition, only fully automatic firearms manufactured before the Firearm Owner's Protection Act of 1986 are permitted to be transferred. No fully automatic firearms recovered in Mexico have been traced to the United States.

See also: ___________________________________________________________________________

Gun violence in the United States
​
Gun violence in the United States results in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries annually. Guns were the leading cause of death for children in 2020. In 2018, the most recent year for which data are available as of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics reports 38,390 deaths by firearm, of which 24,432 were by suicide. 

The rate of firearm deaths per 100,000 people rose from 10.3 per 100,000 in 1999 to 12 per 100,000 in 2017, with 109 people dying per day or about 14,542 homicides in total, being 11.9 per 100,000 in 2018. In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicides, and 11,078 firearm-related homicides in the U.S. 

In 2010, 358 murders were reported involving a rifle while 6,009 were reported involving a handgun; another 1,939 were reported with an unspecified type of firearm. In 2011, a total of 478,400 fatal and nonfatal violent crimes were committed with a firearm.

About 1.4 million people have died from firearms in the U.S. between 1968 and 2011. This number includes all deaths resulting from a firearm, including suicides, homicides, and accidents. 

Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related homicide rate is 25 times higher. Although it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, among those 22 nations studied, the U.S. had 82 percent of gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns, with guns being the leading cause of death for children.

The ownership and regulation of guns are among the most widely debated issues in the country.

African American populations in the United States experience high amounts of firearms injury and homicide. Although mass shootings are covered extensively in the media, mass shootings in the United States account for only a small fraction of gun-related deaths. 

Regardless, mass shootings occur on a larger scale and much more frequently than in other developed countries. School shootings are described as a "uniquely American crisis", according to The Washington Post in 2018. Children at U.S. schools have active shooter drills. According to USA Today, in 2019 "about 95% of public schools now have students and teachers practice huddling in silence, hiding from an imaginary gunman."

Legislation at the federal, state, and local levels has attempted to address gun violence through a variety of methods, including restricting firearms purchases by youths and other "at-risk" populations, setting waiting periods for firearm purchases, establishing gun buyback programs, law enforcement and policing strategies, stiff sentencing of gun law violators, education programs for parents and children, and community-outreach programs.

​Gun ownership:
See also: Gun culture in the United States

​The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the U.S., not including weapons owned by the military. Of these, 114 million were handguns, 110 million were rifles, and 86 million were shotguns. In that same year, the Census bureau stated the population of people in the U.S. at 306 million. 

Accurate figures for civilian gun ownership are difficult to determine. While the number of guns in civilian hands has been on the increase, the percentage of Americans and American households who claim to own guns has been in long-term decline, according to the General Social Survey. It found that gun ownership by households has declined steadily from about half, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, down to 32% in 2015. The percentage of individual owners declined from 31% in 1985 to 22% in 2014.

Gun ownership figures are generally estimated via polling, by such organizations as the General Social Survey (GSS), Harris Interactive, and Gallup. There are significant disparities in the results across polls by different organizations, calling into question their reliability. 

In Gallup's 1972 survey, 43% reported having a gun in their home, while GSS's 1973 survey resulted in 49% reporting a gun in the home; in 1993, Gallup's poll results were 51%, while GSS's 1994 poll showed 43%. 

In 2012, Gallup's survey showed 47% of Americans reporting having a gun in their home, while the GSS in 2012 reports 34%.

In 1997, estimates were about 44 million gun owners in the United States. These owners possessed around 192 million firearms, of which an estimated 65 million were handguns. A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (NSPOF), conducted in 1994, indicated that Americans owned 192 million guns: 36% rifles, 34% handguns, 26% shotguns, and 4% other types of long guns. 

Most firearm owners owned multiple firearms, with the NSPOF survey indicating 25% of adults owned firearms. In the U.S., 11% of households reported actively being involved in hunting, with the remaining firearm owners having guns for self-protection and other reasons.

Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, the rate of gun ownership in the home ranged from 45 to 50%. After highly publicized mass murders, it is consistently observed that there are rapid increases in gun purchases and exceptionally large crowds at gun vendors and gun shows, due to fears of increased gun control .

Gun ownership also varied across geographic regions, ranging from 25% rates of ownership in the Northeastern United States to 60% rates of ownership in the East South Central States. 

A Gallup poll (2004) indicated that 49% of men reported gun ownership, compared to 33% of women, and 44% of whites owned a gun, compared to only 24% of nonwhites. More than half of those living in rural areas (56%) owned a gun, compared with 40% of suburbanites and 29% of those in urban areas. More than half (53%) of Republicans owned guns, compared with 36% of political independents and 31% of Democrats. 

One criticism of the GSS survey and other proxy measures of gun ownership, is that they do not provide adequate macro-level detail to allow conclusions on the relationship between overall firearm ownership and gun violence. Gary Kleck compared various survey and proxy measures and found no correlation between overall firearm ownership and gun violence. 

In contrast, studies by David Hemenway and his colleagues, which used GSS data and the fraction of suicides committed with a gun as a proxy for gun ownership rates, found a strong positive association between gun ownership and homicide in the United States.

Similarly, a 2006 study by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, which also used the percent of suicides committed with a gun as a proxy, found that gun prevalence increased homicide rates. This study also found that the elasticity of this effect was between +0.1 and +0.3.

Self-protection:
Main article: Defensive gun use

The effectiveness and safety of guns used for personal defense is debated. Studies place the instances of guns used in personal defense as low as 65,000 times per year, and as high as 2.5 million times per year.

Under President Bill Clinton, the Department of Justice conducted a survey in 1994 that placed the usage rate of guns used in personal defense at 1.5 million times per year, but noted this was likely to be an overestimate. 

A May 2014 Harvard Injury Control Research Center survey about firearms and suicide completed by 150 firearms researchers found that only 8% of firearm researchers agreed that 'In the United States, guns are used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime'.

Between 1987 and 1990, David McDowall et al. found that guns were used in defense during a crime incident 64,615 times annually (258,460 times total over the whole period). This equated to two times out of 1,000 criminal incidents (0.2%) that occurred in this period, including criminal incidents where no guns were involved at all. 

For violent crimes, assault, robbery, and rape, guns were used 0.8% of the time in self-defense. Of the times that guns were used in self-defense, 71% of the crimes were committed by strangers, with the rest of the incidents evenly divided between offenders that were acquaintances or persons well known to the victim. 

In 28% of incidents where a gun was used for self-defense, victims fired the gun at the offender. In 20% of the self-defense incidents, the guns were used by police officers. 

During this same period, 1987 to 1990, there were 11,580 gun homicides per year (46,319 total), and the National Crime Victimization Survey estimated that 2,628,532 nonfatal crimes involving guns occurred.

McDowall's study for the American Journal of Public Health contrasted with a 1995 study by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, which found that 2.45 million crimes were thwarted each year in the U.S. using guns, and in most cases, the potential victim never fired a shot. 

The results of the Kleck studies have been cited many times in scholarly and popular media. The methodology of the Kleck and Gertz study has been criticized by some researchers but also defended by gun-control advocate Marvin Wolfgang.

Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, Lott and Mustard of the Law School at the University of Chicago found that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths.

They claimed that if those states which did not have right-to-carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders; 4,177 rapes; and over 60,000 aggravate assaults would have been avoided yearly. 

On the other hand, regarding the efficacy of laws allowing use of firearms for self-defense like stand your ground laws, a 2018 RAND Corporation review of existing research concluded that "there is moderate evidence that stand-your-ground laws may increase homicide rates and limited evidence that the laws increase firearm homicides in particular."

In 2019, RAND authors published an update, writing "Since publication of RAND's report, at least four additional studies meeting RAND's standards of rigor have reinforced the finding that "stand your ground" laws increase homicides. None of them found that "stand your ground" laws deter violent crime. No rigorous study has yet determined whether "stand your ground" laws promote legitimate acts of self-defense.

Suicides:
See also: Suicide methods § Firearms

​In the U.S., most people who die of suicide use a gun, and most deaths by gun are suicides.
There were 19,392 firearm-related suicides in the U.S. in 2010. In 2017, over half of the nation's 47,173 suicides involved a firearm. 

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that about 60% of all adult firearm deaths are by suicide, 61% more than deaths by homicide. One study found that military veterans used firearms in about 67% of suicides in 2014. Firearms are the most lethal method of suicide, with a lethality rate 2.6 times higher than suffocation (the second-most lethal method).

In the United States, access to firearms is associated with an increased risk of suicide. A 1992 case-control study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed an association between estimated household firearm ownership and suicide rates, finding that individuals living in a home where firearms are present are more likely to successfully commit suicide than those individuals who do not own firearms, by a factor of 3 or 4. 

A 2006 study by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health found a significant association between changes in estimated household gun ownership rates and suicide rates in the United States among men, women, and children. 

A 2007 study by the same research team found that in the United States, estimated household gun ownership rates were strongly associated with overall suicide rates and gun suicide rates, but not with non-gun suicide rates. 

A 2013 study reproduced this finding, even after controlling for different underlying rates of suicidal behavior by states. 

A 2015 study also found a strong association between estimated gun ownership rates in American cities and rates of both overall and gun suicide, but not with non-gun suicide.

Correlation studies comparing different countries do not always find a statistically significant effect. A 2016 cross-sectional study showed a strong association between estimated household gun ownership rates and gun-related suicide rates among men and women in the United States. The same study found a strong association between estimated gun ownership rates and overall suicide rates, but only in men. 

During the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a strong upward trend in adolescent suicides with guns as well as a sharp overall increase in suicides among those age 75 and over.

A 2018 study found that temporary gun seizure laws were associated with a 13.7% reduction in firearm suicides in Connecticut and a 7.5% reduction in firearm suicides in Indiana.

David Hemenway, professor of health policy at Harvard University's School of Public Health, and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, stated differences in overall suicide rates across cities, states and regions in the United States are best explained not by differences in mental health, suicide ideation, or even suicide attempts, but by availability of firearms.

Many suicides are impulsive, and the urge to die fades away. Firearms are a swift, lethal method of suicide with a high case-fatality rate.

There are over twice as many gun-related suicides as gun-related homicides in the United States. Firearms are the most popular method of suicide due to the lethality of the weapon. 90% of all suicides attempted using a firearm result in a fatality, as opposed to less than 3% of suicide attempts involving cutting or drug-use. 

​The risk of someone attempting suicide is also 4.8 times greater if they are exposed to a firearm on a regular basis; for example, in the home.

Homicides:

​Statistics:

Unlike other high-income OECD countries, most homicides in the U.S. are gun homicides. In the U.S. in 2011, 67 percent of homicide victims were killed using a firearm: 66 percent of single-victim homicides and 79 percent of multiple-victim homicides.

In 1993, there were seven gun homicides for every 100,000 people; by 2013, that figure had fallen to 3.6, according to Pew Research.

The FBI further breaks down gun homicides by weapon type. Handguns have been consistently responsible for the majority of fatalities:
  • In 2016, there were 11,004 gun homicides (65% handguns, 6% rifle/shotgun, 30% other/unknown type)
  • In 2014, there were 8,124 gun homicides (68% handguns, 6% rifle/shotgun, 25% other/unknown type).
  • In 2010, there were 8,775 gun homicides (68% handguns, 8% rifle/shotgun, 23% other/unknown type).
  • In 2001, there were 8,890 gun homicides (78% handguns, 10% rifle/shotguns, 12% other/unknown type).

The Centers for Disease Control reports that there were 11,078 gun homicides in the U.S. in 2010. This is higher than the FBI's count. The CDC also stated there were 14,414 (or 4.4 per 100,000 population) homicides by firearm in 2018, and stated that there were a total of 19,141 homicides (5.8 per 100,000 population) in 2019.

History:

In the 19th century, gun violence played a role in civil disorder such as the Haymarket riot. Homicide rates in cities such as Philadelphia were significantly lower in the 19th century than in modern times. 

During the 1980s and early 1990s, homicide rates surged in cities across the United States. Handgun homicides accounted for nearly all of the overall increase in the homicide rate, from 1985 to 1993, while homicide rates involving other weapons declined during that time frame. 

The rising trend in homicide rates during the 1980s and early 1990s was most pronounced among lower income and especially unemployed males. Youths and Hispanic and African American males in the U.S. were the most represented, with the injury and death rates tripling for black males aged 13 through 17 and doubling for black males aged 18 through 24.

The rise in crack cocaine use in cities across the U.S. has been cited as a factor for increased gun violence among youths during this time period. After 1993, however, gun violence in the United States began a period of dramatic decline.

Demographics of risk:

Prevalence of homicide and violent crime is higher in statistical metropolitan areas of the U.S. than it is in non-metropolitan counties; the vast majority of the U.S. population lives in statistical metropolitan areas. In metropolitan areas, the homicide rate in 2013 was 4.7 per 100,000 compared with 3.4 in non-metropolitan counties. 

More narrowly, the rates of murder and non-negligent manslaughter are identical in metropolitan counties and non-metropolitan counties. In U.S. cities with populations greater than 250,000, the mean homicide rate was 12.1 per 100,000. 

According to FBI statistics, the highest per capita rates of gun-related homicides in 2005 were in Washington, D.C. (35.4/100,000), Puerto Rico (19.6/100,000), Louisiana (9.9/100,000), and Maryland (9.9/100,000). In 2017, according to the Associated Press, Baltimore broke a record for homicides.

In 2005, the 17-24 age group was significantly over-represented in violent crime statistics, particularly homicides involving firearms. In 2005, 17–19-year-olds were 4.3% of the overall population of the U.S. but 11.2% of those killed in firearm homicides. This age group also accounted for 10.6% of all homicide offenses. 

The 20-24-year-old age group accounted for 7.1% of the population, but 22.5% of those killed in firearm homicides. The 20-24 age group also accounted for 17.7% of all homicide offenses.

Those under 17 are not overrepresented in homicide statistics. In 2005, 13-16-year-olds accounted for 6% of the overall population of the U.S., but only 3.6% of firearm homicide victims, and 2.7% of overall homicide offenses.

People with a criminal record are more likely to die as homicide victims. Between 1990 and 1994, 75% of all homicide victims age 21 and younger in the city of Boston had a prior criminal record. 

In Philadelphia, the percentage of those killed in gun homicides that had prior criminal records increased from 73% in 1985 to 93% in 1996. In Richmond, Virginia, the risk of gunshot injury is 22 times higher for those males involved with crime. It is significantly more likely that a death will result when either the victim or the attacker has a firearm. The mortality rate for gunshot wounds to the heart is 84%, compared to 30% for people who suffer stab wounds to the heart.

In the United States, states with higher gun ownership rates have higher rates of gun homicides and homicides overall, but not higher rates of non-gun homicides. 

Higher gun availability is positively associated with homicide rates. However, there is evidence, that gun ownership has more of an effect on rates of gun suicide than it does on gun homicide.

Some studies suggest that the concept of guns can prime aggressive thoughts and aggressive reactions. An experiment by Berkowitz and LePage in 1967 examined this "weapons effect."

Ultimately, when study participants were provoked, their reaction was substantially more aggressive when a gun (in contrast with a more benign object like a tennis racket) was visibly present in the room. 

Other similar experiments like those conducted by Carson, Marcus-Newhall and Miller yield similar results. Such results imply that the presence of a gun in an altercation could elicit an aggressive reaction which may result in homicide. However, the demonstration of such reactions in experimental settings does not entail that this would be true in reality.

Comparison to other countries:
​
​​The U.S. is ranked 4th out of 34 developed nations for the highest incidence rate of homicides committed with a firearm, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data.

Mexico, Turkey, Estonia are ranked ahead of the U.S. in incidence of homicides. A U.S. male aged 15–24 is 70 times more likely to be killed with a gun than their counterpart in the eight (G-8) largest industrialized nations in the world (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy, Russia). 

In a broader comparison of 218 countries the U.S. is ranked 111. In 2010, the U.S.' homicide rate is 7 times higher than the average for populous developed countries in the OECD, and its firearm-related homicide rate was 25.2 times higher. 

In 2013, the United States' firearm-related death rate was 10.64 deaths for every 100,000 inhabitants, a figure very close to Mexico's 11.17, although in Mexico firearm deaths are predominantly homicides whereas in the United States they are predominantly suicides. 

(Although Mexico has strict gun laws, the laws restricting carry are often unenforced, and the laws restricting manufacture and sale are often circumvented by trafficking from the United States and other countries.) 

Canada and Switzerland each have much looser gun control regulation than the majority of developed nations, although significantly more than in the United States, and have firearm death rates of 2.22 and 2.91 per 100,000 citizens, respectively.

By comparison Australia, which imposed sweeping gun control laws in response to the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, has a firearm death rate of 0.86 per 100,000, and in the United Kingdom the rate is 0.26.

In the year of 2014, there were a total of 8,124 gun homicides in the U.S. In 2015, there were 33,636 deaths due to firearms in the U.S, with homicides accounting for 13,286 of those, while guns were used to kill about 50 people in the U.K., a country with population one fifth of the size of the U.S. population. 

More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day (about 85) than in the U.K. in a year, if suicides are included. With deaths by firearm reaching almost 40,000 in the U.S. in 2017, their highest level since 1968, almost 109 people died per day. 

A study conducted by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2018, states that the worldwide gun death reach 250,000 Yearly and the United States is among only six countries that make up half of those fatalities.

Mass shootings:
The definition of a mass shooting remains under debate. The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there no broadly accepted definition exists. 

Mother Jones, using their standard of a mass shooting where a lone gunman kills at least four people in a public place for motivations excluding gang violence or robbery, concluded that between 1982 and 2006 there were 40 mass shootings (an average of 1.6 per year). More recently, from 2007 through May 2018, there have been 61 mass shootings (an average of 5.4 per year). More broadly, the frequency of mass shootings steadily declined throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, then increased dramatically.

Studies indicate that the rate at which public mass shootings occur has tripled since 2011. Between 1982 and 2011, a mass shooting occurred roughly once every 200 days. However, between 2011 and 2014 that rate accelerated greatly with at least one mass shooting occurring every 64 days in the United States. 

In "Behind the Bloodshed", a report by USA Today, said that there were mass killings every two weeks and that public mass killings account for 1 in 6 of all mass killings (26 killings annually would thus be equivalent to 26/6, 4 to 5, public killings per year). Mother Jones listed seven mass shootings in the U.S. for 2015. The average for the period 2011–2015 was about 5 a year. 

An analysis by Michael Bloomberg's gun violence prevention group, Everytown for Gun Safety, identified 110 mass shootings, defined as shootings in which at least four people were murdered with a firearm, between January 2009 and July 2014; at least 57% were related to domestic or family violence. This would imply that not more than 43% of 110 shootings in 5.5 years were non-domestic, though not necessarily public or indiscriminate; this equates to 8.6 per year, broadly in line with the other figures.

Other media outlets have reported that hundreds of mass shootings take place in the United States in a single calendar year, citing a crowd-funded website known as Shooting Tracker which defines a mass shooting as having four or more people injured. 

In December 2015, The Washington Post reported that there had been 355 mass shootings in the United States so far that year. In August 2015, The Washington Post reported that the United States was averaging one mass shooting per day. An earlier report had indicated that in 2015 alone, there had been 294 mass shootings that killed or injured 1,464 people. 

Shooting Tracker and Mass Shooting Tracker, the two sites that the media have been citing, have been criticized for using a criterion much more inclusive than that used by the government—they count four victims injured as a mass shooting—thus producing much higher figures.

Handguns figured in the Virginia Tech shooting, the Binghamton shooting, the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, the Oikos University shooting, and the 2011 Tucson shooting, but both a handgun and a rifle were used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The Aurora theater shooting and the Columbine High School massacre were committed by assailants armed with multiple weapons. AR-15 style rifles have been used in a number of the deadliest mass shooting incidents, and have come to be widely characterized as the weapon of choice for perpetrators of mass shootings, despite statistics which show that handguns are the most commonly used weapon type in mass shootings.

The number of public mass shootings has increased substantially over several decades, with a steady increase in gun related deaths. Although mass shootings are covered extensively in the media, they account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths (only 1 percent of all gun deaths between 1980 and 2008). 

Between January 1 and May 18, 2018, 31 students and teachers were killed inside U.S. schools exceeding the number of U.S. military service members who died in combat and noncombat roles during the same period.

Accidental and negligent injuries:

The perpetrators and victims of accidental and negligent gun discharges may be of any age. Accidental injuries are most common in homes where guns are kept for self-defense. The injuries are self-inflicted in half of the cases. 

On January 16, 2013, President Barack Obama issued 23 Executive Orders on Gun Safety, one of which was for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to research causes and possible prevention of gun violence. The five main areas of focus were:
  1. gun violence,
  2. risk factors,
  3. prevention/intervention,
  4. gun safety
  5. and how media and violent video games influence the public.

They also researched the area of accidental firearm deaths. According to this study not only have the number of accidental firearm deaths been on the decline over the past century but they now account for less than 1% of all unintentional deaths, half of which are self-inflicted.

Violent crime:
See also: Gun violence in the United States by state

In the United States, states with higher levels of gun ownership were associated with higher rates of gun assault and gun robbery. However it is unclear if higher crime rates are a result of increased gun ownership or if gun ownership rates increase as a result of increased crime.

​Costs:
  • In 2000, the costs of gun violence in the United States were estimated to be on the order of $100 billion per year, plus the costs associated with the gun violence avoidance and prevention behaviors.
  • In 2010, gun violence cost U.S. taxpayers about $516 million in direct hospital costs.
  • In 2021, gun violence was estimated to cost $280 billion annually.

U.S. presidential assassinations and attempts​:
Main article: List of United States presidential assassination attempts and plots

At least eleven assassination attempts with firearms have been made on U.S. presidents (over one-fifth of all presidents); four sitting presidents have been killed, three with handguns and one with a rifle:
Andrew Jackson, Harry S. Truman, and Gerald Ford (the latter twice) survived unharmed from assassination attempts involving firearms.

Ronald Reagan was critically wounded in the March 30, 1981 assassination attempt by John Hinckley, Jr. with a .22-caliber revolver. He is the only U.S. president to survive being shot while in office. 

Former president Theodore Roosevelt was shot and wounded right before delivering a speech during his 1912 presidential campaign. Despite bleeding from his chest, Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital until he delivered the speech. 

On February 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara attempted to assassinate president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was giving a speech from his car in Miami, Florida, with a .32-caliber pistol. 

Roosevelt was unharmed, but Chicago mayor Anton Cermak died in the attempt, and several other bystanders received non-fatal injuries.

Response to these events has resulted in federal legislation to regulate the public possession of firearms. For example, the attempted assassination of Franklin Roosevelt contributed to passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, and the Kennedy assassination (along with others) resulted in the Gun Control Act of 1968.

The GCA is a federal law signed by President Lyndon Johnson that broadly regulates the firearms industry and firearms owners. It primarily focuses on regulating interstate commerce in firearms by largely prohibiting interstate firearms transfers except among licensed manufacturers, dealers, and importers.

Other violent crime:
See also: Assault with a deadly weapon

A quarter of robberies of commercial premises in the U.S. are committed with guns. Fatalities are three times as likely in robberies committed with guns than where other, or no, weapons are used, with similar patterns in cases of family violence.

Criminologist Philip J. Cook hypothesized that if guns were less available, criminals might commit the same crime, but with less-lethal weapons. He finds that the level of gun ownership in the 50 largest U.S. cities correlates with the rate of robberies committed with guns, but not with overall robbery rates. 

Cook also finds that robberies in which the assailant uses a gun are more likely to result in the death of the victim, but less likely to result in injury to the victim. Overall robbery and assault rates in the U.S. are comparable to those in other developed countries, such as Australia and Finland, with much lower levels of gun ownership. 

A 2000 study showed a strong association between the availability of illegal guns and violent crime rates, but not between legal gun availability and violent crime rates.

​Offenders:

Considering mass shootings alone (sometimes defined as at least four people shot dead in a public place), nearly all shooters are male. A database of 101 mass shootings between 1982 and 2018 recorded 98 male shooters, 2 female shooters, and one partnership of a male and female shooter. The race of the shooters included 58 whites, 16 blacks, 8 Asians, 7 Latinos, 3 Native Americans, and 8 unknown/other.

Vectors:

In 2015, Arizona State University researcher Sherry Towers said: "National news media attention is like a 'vector' that reaches people who are vulnerable." She stated that disaffected people can become infected by the attention given other disturbed people who have become mass killers.

Victims:

Guns were the leading cause of death for children and adolescence in 2020. 

African Americans suffer a disproportionate share of firearm homicides. African Americans, who were only 13% of the U.S. population in 2010, were 55% of the victims of gun homicide.

In 2017 African American boys and men aged 15 to 34 years were the most frequent victims of firearm homicide in the United States with a 81 deaths per 100,000 population.

Non-Hispanic whites were 65% of the U.S. population in 2010, but only 25% of the victims. Hispanics were 16% of the population in 2010 and 17% of victims.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 1980 to 2008, 84% of white homicide victims were killed by white offenders and 93% of black homicide victims were killed by black offenders.

Public policy:
Main article: Gun politics in the United States
​
Public policy as related to preventing gun violence is an ongoing political and social debate regarding both the restriction and availability of firearms within the United States.

Policy at the Federal level is/has been governed by:
Gun policy in the U.S. has been revised many times with acts such as the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which loosened provisions for gun sales while banning civilian ownership of machine guns made after 1986.

At the federal, state and local level, gun laws such as handgun bans have been overturned by the Supreme Court in cases such as District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago.

​These cases hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. D.C. v. Heller only addressed the issue on Federal enclaves, while McDonald v. Chicago addressed the issue as relating to the individual states.

Gun control proponents often cite the relatively high number of homicides committed with firearms as reason to support stricter gun control laws. Policies and laws that reduce homicides committed with firearms prevent homicides overall; a decrease in firearm-related homicides is not balanced by an increase in non-firearm homicides. 

Firearm laws are a subject of debate in the U.S., with firearms used for recreational purposes as well as for personal protection. Gun rights advocates cite the use of firearms for self-protection, and to deter violent crime, as reasons why more guns can reduce crime. 

Gun rights advocates also say criminals are the least likely to obey firearms laws, and so limiting access to guns by law-abiding people makes them more vulnerable to armed criminals.

In a survey of 41 studies, half of the studies found a connection between gun ownership and homicide but these were usually the least rigorous studies. Only six studies controlled at least six statistically significant confounding variables, and none of them showed a significant positive effect.

Eleven macro-level studies showed that crime rates increase gun levels (not vice versa). The reason that there is no opposite effect may be that most owners are noncriminals and that they may use guns to prevent violence.

Access to firearms:

The United States Constitution enshrines the right to gun ownership in the Second Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights to ensure the security of a free state through a well regulated Militia. It 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."

The Constitution makes no distinction between the type of firearm in question or state of residency.

Age limits, background checks:

Gun dealers in the U.S. are prohibited from selling handguns to those under the age of 21, and long guns to those under the age of 18. 

In 2017, the National Safety Council released a state ranking on firearms access indicators such as background checks, waiting periods, safe storage, training, and sharing of mental health records with the NICS database to restrict firearm access.

Guns favored by criminals:
​
Assuming access to guns, the top ten guns involved in crime in the United States show a definite tendency to favor handguns over long guns. The top ten guns used in crime, as reported by the ATF in 1993, were:
An earlier 1985 study of 1,800 incarcerated felons showed that criminals preferred revolvers and other non-semi-automatic firearms over semi-automatic firearms. In Pittsburgh a change in preferences towards pistols occurred in the early 1990s, coinciding with the arrival of crack cocaine and the rise of violent youth gangs. 

Background checks in California from 1998 to 2000 resulted in 1% of sales being initially denied. The types of guns most often denied included semiautomatic pistols with short barrels and of medium caliber. 

A 2018 study determined that California's implementation of comprehensive background checks and misdemeanor violation policies was not associated with a net change in the firearm homicide rate over the ensuing 10 years. A 2018 study found no evidence of an association between the repeal of comprehensive background check policies and firearm homicide and suicide rates in Indiana and Tennessee.

Gun possession by juvenile offenders:

Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14. 

There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more. Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts. 

Inner city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun. In Rochester, New York, 22% of young males have carried a firearm illegally, most for only a short time. There is little overlap between legal gun ownership and illegal gun carrying among youths.

Effect of laws on mortality:

A 2011 study indicated that in states where local background checks for gun purchases are completed, the suicide and homicide rates were much lower than states without background  checks.

Firearms market:
​
Gun rights advocates argue that policy aimed at the supply side of the firearms market is based on limited research. One consideration is that 60–70% of firearms sales in the U.S. are transacted through federally licensed firearm dealers, with the remainder taking place in the "secondary market", in which previously owned firearms are transferred by non-dealers.

Access to secondary markets is generally less convenient to purchasers, and involves such risks as the possibility of the gun having been used previously in a crime. Unlicensed private sellers were permitted by law to sell privately owned guns at gun shows or at private locations in 24 states as of 1998. 

Regulations that limit the number of handgun sales in the primary, regulated market to one handgun a month per customer have been shown to be effective at reducing illegal gun trafficking by reducing the supply into the secondary market. 

Taxes on firearm purchases are another means for government to influence the primary market.

Criminals tend to obtain guns through multiple illegal pathways, including large-scale gun traffickers, who tend to provide criminals with relatively few guns. Federally licensed firearm dealers in the primary (new and used gun) market are regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).

Firearm manufacturers are required to mark all firearms manufactured with serial numbers. This allows the ATF to trace guns involved in crimes back to their last Federal Firearms License (FFL) reported change of ownership transaction, although not past the first private sale involving any particular gun.

A report by the ATF released in 1999 found that 0.4% of federally licensed dealers sold half of the guns used criminally in 1996 and 1997. This is sometimes done through "straw purchases." 

State laws, such as those in California, that restrict the number of gun purchases in a month may help stem such "straw purchases." States with gun registration and licensing laws are generally less likely to have guns initially sold there used in crimes. Similarly, crime guns tend to travel from states with weak gun laws to states with strict gun laws. 

An estimated 500,000 guns are stolen each year, becoming available to prohibited users. During the ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative (YCGII), which involved expanded tracing of firearms recovered by law enforcement agencies, only 18% of guns used criminally that were recovered in 1998 were in possession of the original owner.

Guns recovered by police during criminal investigations were often sold by legitimate retail sales outlets to legal owners, and then diverted to criminal use over relatively short times ranging from a few months to a few years, which makes them relatively new compared with firearms in general circulation.

A 2016 survey of prison inmates by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 43% of guns used in crimes were obtained from the black market, 25% from an individual, 10% from a retail source (including 0.8% from a gun show), and 6% from theft.

Federal legislation:
Main article: Gun law in the United States

The first Federal legislation related to firearms was the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified in 1791. For 143 years, this was the only major Federal legislation regarding firearms.

The next Federal firearm legislation was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which created regulations for the sale of firearms, established taxes on their sale, and required registration of some types of firearms such as machine guns.

​​​Following the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was enacted. This Act regulated gun commerce, restricting mail order sales, and allowing shipments only to licensed firearm dealers.

The Act also prohibited sale of firearms to felons, those under indictment, fugitives, illegal aliens, drug users, those dishonorably discharged from the military, and those in mental institutions. 

The law also restricted importation of so-called Saturday night specials and other types of guns, and limited the sale of automatic weapons and semi-automatic weapon conversion kits.

The Firearm Owners Protection Act, also known as the McClure-Volkmer Act, was passed in 1986. It changed some restrictions in the 1968 Act, allowing federally licensed gun dealers and individual unlicensed private sellers to sell at gun shows, while continuing to require licensed gun dealers to require background checks. 

The 1986 Act also restricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from conducting punitively repetitive inspections, reduced the amount of record-keeping required of gun dealers, raised the burden of proof for convicting gun law violators, and changed restrictions on convicted felons from owning firearms. In addition it also banned new machine guns for sale to the public, but grandfathered in any that were already registered.

In the years following the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, people buying guns were required to show identification and sign a statement affirming that they were not in any of the prohibited categories. Many states enacted background check laws that went beyond the federal requirements. 

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act passed by Congress in 1993 imposed a waiting period before the purchase of a handgun, giving time for, but not requiring, a background check to be made. The Brady Act also required the establishment of a national system to provide instant criminal background checks, with checks to be done by firearms dealers. 

The Brady Act only applied to people who bought guns from licensed dealers, whereas felons buy some percentage of their guns from black market sources. Restrictions, such as waiting periods, impose costs and inconveniences on legitimate gun purchasers, such as hunters. 

A 2000 study found that the implementation of the Brady Act was associated with "reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or older but not with reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates."

Federal Assault Weapons Ban:

​The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, enacted in 1994, included the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, and was a response to public fears over mass shootings. This provision prohibited the manufacture and importation of some firearms with certain features such as a folding stock, pistol grip, flash suppressor, and magazines holding more than ten rounds. 

A grandfather clause was included that allowed firearms manufactured before 1994 to remain legal. A short-term evaluation by University of Pennsylvania criminologists Christopher S. Koper and Jeffrey A. Roth did not find any clear impact of this legislation on gun violence. 

Given the short study time period of the evaluation, the National Academy of Sciences advised caution in drawing any conclusions. In September 2004, the assault weapon ban expired, with its sunset clause.

Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban:

The Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban, the Lautenberg Amendment, prohibited anyone previously convicted of a misdemeanor or felony crime of domestic violence from shipment, transport, ownership and use of guns or ammunition. This was ex post facto, in the opinion of Representative Bob Barr. 

This law also prohibited the sale or gift of a firearm or ammunition to such a person. It was passed in 1996, and became effective in 1997. The law does not exempt people who use firearms as part of their duties, such as police officers or military personnel with applicable criminal convictions; they may not carry firearms.

Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act of 2006:

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, police and National Guard units in New Orleans confiscated firearms from private citizens in an attempt to prevent violence.

In reaction, Congress passed the Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act of 2006 in the form of an amendment to Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007.

Section 706 of the Act prohibits federal employees and those receiving federal funds from confiscating legally possessed firearms during a disaster.

2016 White House background check initiative:

On January 5, 2016, President Obama unveiled his new strategy to curb gun violence in America. His proposals focus on new background check requirements that are intended to enhance the effectiveness of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), and greater education and enforcement efforts of existing laws at the state level.

In an interview with Bill Simmons of HBO, President Obama also confirmed that gun control will be the "dominant" issue on his agenda in his last year of presidency.

State legislation:
Main article: Gun laws in the United States (by state)

Right-to-carry:
Main articles: 
​All 50 U.S. states allow for the right to carry firearms. A majority of states either require a shall-issue permit or allow carrying without a permit and a minority require a may-issue permit.

Right-to-carry laws expanded in the 1990s as homicide rates from gun violence in the U.S. increased, largely in response to incidents such as the Luby's shooting of 1991 in Texas which directly resulted in the passage of a carrying concealed weapon, or CCW, law in Texas in 1995. 

As Rorie Sherman, staff reporter for the National Law Journal wrote in an article published on April 18, 1994, "It is a time of unparalleled desperation about crime. But the mood is decidedly 'I'll do it myself' and 'Don't get in my way.'"

The result was laws, or the lack thereof, that permitted persons to carry firearms openly, known as open carry, often without any permit required, in 22 states by 1998. Laws that permitted persons to carry concealed handguns, sometimes termed a concealed handgun license, CHL, or concealed pistol license, CPL in some jurisdictions instead of CCW, existed in 34 states in the U.S. by 2004. 

Since then, the number of states with CCW laws has increased; as of 2014, all 50 states have some form of CCW laws on the books.

Economist John Lott has argued that right-to-carry laws create a perception that more potential crime victims might be carrying firearms, and thus serve as a deterrent against crime. Lott's study has been criticized for not adequately controlling for other factors, including other state laws also enacted, such as Florida's laws requiring background checks and waiting period for handgun buyers. 

When Lott's data was re-analyzed by some researchers, the only statistically significant effect of concealed-carry laws found was an increase in assaults, with similar findings by Jens Ludwig. 

Lott and Mustard's 1997 study has also been criticized by Paul Rubin and Hashem Dezhbakhsh for inappropriately using a dummy variable; Rubin and Dezhbakhsh reported in a 2003 study that right-to-carry laws have much smaller and more inconsistent effects than those reported by Lott and Mustard, and that these effects are usually not crime-reducing.

Since concealed-carry permits are only given to adults, Philip J. Cook suggested that analysis should focus on the relationship with adult and not juvenile gun incident rates. He found no statistically significant effect. A 2004 National Academy of Sciences survey of existing literature found that the data available "are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions" about the impact of right-to-carry laws on rates of violent crime. 

NAS suggested that new analytical approaches and datasets at the county or local level are needed to adequately evaluate the impact of right-to-carry laws. A 2014 study found that Arizona's SB 1108, which allowed adults in the state to concealed carry without a permit and without passing a training course, was associated with an increase in gun-related fatalities. 

A 2018 study by Charles Manski and John V. Pepper found that the apparent effects of RTC laws on crime rates depend significantly on the assumptions made in the analysis. A 2019 study found no statistically significant association between the liberalization of state level firearm carry legislation over the last 30 years and the rates of homicides or other violent crime.

Child Access Prevention (CAP):
Main article: Child access prevention law

Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws, enacted by many states, require parents to store firearms safely, to minimize access by children to guns, while maintaining ease of access by adults. CAP laws hold gun owners liable should a child gain access to a loaded gun that is not properly stored. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that, on average, one child died every three days in accidental incidents in the U.S. from 2000 to 2005. In most states, CAP law violations are considered misdemeanors. Florida's CAP law, enacted in 1989, permits felony prosecution of violators. 

Research indicates that CAP laws are correlated with a reduction in unintentional gun deaths by 23%, and gun suicides among those aged 14 through 17 by 11%. 

A study by Lott did not detect a relationship between CAP laws and accidental gun deaths or suicides among those age 19 and under between 1979 and 1996. However, two studies disputed Lott's findings: 
  • A 2013 study found that CAP laws are correlated with a reduction of non-fatal gun injuries among both children and adults by 30–40%. 
  • In 2016 the American Academy of Pediatrics found that safe gun storage laws were associated with lower overall adolescent suicide rates. 

Research also indicated that CAP laws were most highly correlated with reductions of non-fatal gun injuries in states where violations were considered felonies, whereas in states that considered violations as misdemeanors, the potential impact of CAP laws was not statistically significant.

Local restrictions:

Some local jurisdictions in the U.S. have more restrictive laws, such as Washington, D.C.'s Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, which banned residents from owning handguns, and required permitted firearms be disassembled and locked with a trigger lock.

On March 9, 2007, a U.S. Appeals Court ruled the Washington, D.C. handgun ban unconstitutional. The appeal of that case later led to the Supreme Court's ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller that D.C.'s ban was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.

Despite New York City's strict gun control laws, guns are often trafficked in from other parts of the U.S., particularly the southern states. Results from the ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative indicate that the percentage of imported guns involved in crimes is tied to the stringency of local firearm laws.

Prevention programs:

Violence prevention and educational programs have been established in many schools and communities across the United States. These programs aim to change personal behavior of both children and their parents, encouraging children to stay away from guns, ensure parents store guns safely, and encourage children to solve disputes without resorting to violence.

Programs aimed at altering behavior range from passive (requiring no effort on the part of the individual) to active (supervising children, or placing a trigger lock on a gun). The more effort required of people, the more difficult it is to implement a prevention strategy.

Prevention strategies focused on modifying the situational environment and the firearm itself may be more effective. Empirical evaluation of gun violence prevention programs has been limited. Of the evaluations that have been done, results indicate such programs have minimal effectiveness.

Hotline:

SPEAK UP is a national youth violence prevention initiative created by The Center to Prevent Youth Violence, which provides young people with tools to improve the safety of their schools and communities. The SPEAK UP program is an anonymous, national hot-line for young people to report threats of violence in their communities or at school.

The hot-line is operated in accordance with a protocol developed in collaboration with national education and law enforcement authorities, including the FBI. Trained counselors, with access to translators for 140 languages, collect information from callers and then report the threat to appropriate school and law enforcement officials.

Gun safety parent counseling:

One of the most widely used parent counseling programs is Steps to Prevent Firearm Injury program (STOP), which was developed in 1994 by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence (the latter of which was then known as the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence). 

STOP was superseded by STOP 2 in 1998, which has a broader focus including more communities and health care providers. STOP has been evaluated and found not to have a significant effect on gun ownership or firearm storage practices by inner-city parents.

Marjorie S. Hardy suggests further evaluation of STOP is needed, as this evaluation had a limited sample size and lacked a control group. A 1999 study found no statistically significant effect of STOP on rates of gun ownership or better gun storage.

Children:

Prevention programs geared towards children have also not been greatly successful. Many inherent challenges arise when working with children, including their tendency to perceive themselves as invulnerable to injury, limited ability to apply lessons learned, their innate curiosity, and peer pressure.

The goal of gun safety programs, usually administered by local firearms dealers and shooting clubs, is to teach older children and adolescents how to handle firearms safely. There has been no systematic evaluation of the effect of these programs on children. 

​For adults, no positive effect on gun storage practices has been found as a result of these programs. Also, researchers have found that gun safety programs for children may likely increase a child's interest in obtaining and using guns, which they cannot be expected to use safely all the time, even with training.

One approach taken is gun avoidance, such as when encountering a firearm at a neighbor's home. The Eddie Eagle Gun Safety Program, administered by the National Rifle Association (NRA), is geared towards younger children from pre-kindergarten to sixth grade, and teaches kids that real guns are not toys by emphasizing a "just say no" approach.

The Eddie Eagle program is based on training children in a four-step action to take when they see a firearm: (1) Stop! (2) Don't touch! (3) Leave the area. (4) Go tell an adult.

Materials, such as coloring books and posters, back the lessons up and provide the repetition necessary in any child-education program. ABC News challenged the effectiveness of the "just say no" approach promoted by the NRA's Eddie the Eagle program in an investigative piece by Diane Sawyer in 1999. 

Sawyer's piece was based on an academic study conducted by Dr. Marjorie Hardy. Dr. Hardy's study tracked the behavior of elementary age schoolchildren who spent a day learning the Eddie the Eagle four-step action plan from a uniformed police officer.

The children were then placed into a playroom which contained a hidden gun. When the children found the gun, they did not run away from the gun, but rather, they inevitably played with it, pulled the trigger while looking into the barrel, or aimed the gun at a playmate and pulled the trigger. The study concluded that children's natural curiosity was far more powerful than the parental admonition to "Just say no".

Community programs:

Programs targeted at entire communities, such as community revitalization, after-school programs, and media campaigns, may be more effective in reducing the general level of violence that children are exposed to. 

Community-based programs that have specifically targeted gun violence include Safe Kids/Healthy Neighborhoods Injury Prevention Program in New York City, and Safe Homes and Havens in Chicago. Evaluation of such community-based programs is difficult, due to many confounding factors and the multifaceted nature of such programs.

A Chicago-based program, "BAM" (Becoming a Man) has produced positive results, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and is expanding to Boston in 2017.

March for Our Lives:

The March for Our Lives was a student-led demonstration in support of legislation to prevent gun violence in the United States. It took place in Washington, D.C. on March 24, 2018, with over 880 sibling events throughout the U.S. It was planned by Never Again MSD in collaboration with the nonprofit organization. 

The demonstration followed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, which was described by several media outlets as a possible tipping point for gun control legislation.

Intervention programs:

Sociologist James D. Wright suggests that to convince inner-city youths not to carry guns "requires convincing them that they can survive in their neighborhood without being armed, that they can come and go in peace, that being unarmed will not cause them to be victimized, intimidated, or slain." 

Intervention programs, such as CeaseFire Chicago, Operation Ceasefire in Boston and Project Exile in Richmond, Virginia during the 1990s, have been shown to be effective.

Other intervention strategies, such as gun "buy-back" programs have been demonstrated to be ineffective.

Gun buyback programs:
Main article: Gun buyback program

Gun "buyback" programs are a strategy aimed at influencing the firearms market by taking guns "off the streets". Gun "buyback" programs have been shown to be effective to prevent suicides, but ineffective to prevent homicides with the National Academy of Sciences citing theory underlying these programs as "badly flawed." 

Guns surrendered tend to be those least likely to be involved in crime, such as old, malfunctioning guns with little resale value, muzzleloading or other black-powder guns, antiques chambered for obsolete cartridges that are no longer commercially manufactured or sold, or guns that individuals inherit but have little value in possessing. 

Other limitations of gun buyback programs include the fact that it is relatively easy to obtain gun replacements, often of better guns than were relinquished in the buyback. Also, the number of handguns used in crime (about 7,500 per year) is very small compared to about 70 million handguns in the U.S.. (i.e., 0.011%).

"Gun bounty" programs launched in several Florida cities have shown more promise. These programs involve cash rewards for anonymous tips about illegal weapons that lead to an arrest and a weapons charge.

Since its inception in May 2007, the Miami program has led to 264 arrests and the confiscation of 432 guns owned illegally and $2.2 million in drugs, and has solved several murder and burglary cases.

Operation Ceasefire:
Main article: Operation Ceasefire

In 1995, Operation Ceasefire was established as a strategy for addressing youth gun violence in Boston. Violence was particularly concentrated in poor, inner-city neighborhoods including Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. 

There were 22 youths (under the age of 24) killed in Boston in 1987, with that figure rising to 73 in 1990. Operation Ceasefire entailed a problem-oriented policing approach, and focused on specific places that were crime hot spots—two strategies that when combined have been shown to be quite effective. 

Particular focus was placed on two elements of the gun violence problem, including illicit gun trafficking and gang violence. Within two years of implementing Operation Ceasefire in Boston, the number of youth homicides dropped to ten, with only one handgun-related youth homicide occurring in 1999 and 2000. 

The Operation Ceasefire strategy has since been replicated in other cities, including Los Angeles. Erica Bridgeford, spearheaded a "72-hour ceasefire" in August 2017, but the ceasefire was broken with a homicide. Councilman Brandon Scott, Mayor Catherine Pugh and others talked of community policing models that might work for Baltimore.

Project Exile:
Main article: Project Exile

​Project Exile, conducted in Richmond, Virginia during the 1990s, was a coordinated effort involving federal, state, and local officials that targeted gun violence. The strategy entailed prosecution of gun violations in Federal courts, where sentencing guidelines were tougher.

Project Exile also involved outreach and education efforts through media campaigns, getting the message out about the crackdown. Research analysts offered different opinions as to the program's success in reducing gun crime.

Authors of a 2003 analysis of the program argued that the decline in gun homicide was part of a "general regression to the mean" across U.S. cities with high homicide rates.

 Authors of a 2005 study disagreed, concluding that Richmond's gun homicide rate fell more rapidly than the rates in other large U.S. cities with other influences controlled.

Project Safe Neighborhoods:
Main article: Project Safe Neighborhoods

Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) is a national strategy for reducing gun violence that builds on the strategies implemented in Operation Ceasefire and Project Exile. PSN was established in 2001, with support from the Bush administration, channeled through the United States Attorney's Offices in the United States Department of Justice.

The Federal government has spent over US$1.5 billion since the program's inception on the hiring of prosecutors,  and providing assistance to state and local jurisdictions in support of training and community outreach efforts.

READI Chicago:

In 2016, Chicago saw a 58% increase in homicides. In response to the spike in gun violence, a group of foundations and social service agencies created the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI) Chicago. A Heartland Alliance program, READI Chicago targets those most at risk of being involved in gun violence – either as perpetrator or a victim. 

Individuals are provided with 18 months of transitional jobs, cognitive behavioral therapy and legal and social services. Individuals are also provided with 6 months of support as they transition to full-time employment at the end of the 18 months. 

The University of Chicago Crime Lab is evaluating READI Chicago's impact on gun violence reduction. The evaluation, expected to be completed in Spring 2021, is showing early signs of success. Eddie Bocanegra, senior director of READI Chicago, hopes that the early success of READI Chicago will result in funding from the City of Chicago.

Reporting of crime:

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is used by law enforcement agencies in the United States for collecting and reporting data on crimes. The NIBRS is one of four subsets of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.
The FBI states the UCR Program is retiring the SRS and will transition to a NIBRS-only data collection by January 1, 2021. 

Additionally, the FBI states NIBRS will collect more detailed information, including:
  • incident date and time,
  • whether reported offenses were attempted or completed,
  • expanded victim types,
  • relationships of victims to offenders and offenses,
  • demographic details,
  • location data,
  • property descriptions,
  • drug types and quantities,
  • the offender's suspected use of drugs or alcohol,
  • the involvement of gang activity,
  • and whether a computer was used in the commission of the crime.

Though NIBRS will be collecting more data the reporting if the firearm used was legally or illegally obtained by the suspect will not be identified. Nor will the system have the capability to identify if a legally obtained firearm used in the crime was used by the owner or registered owner, if required to be registered.

Additionally, the information of how an illegally obtained firearm was acquired will be left to speculation. The absence of collecting this information into NIBRS the reported "gun violence" data will remain a gross misinterpretation lending anyone information that can be skewed to their liking/needs and not pinpoint where actual efforts need to be directed to curb the use of firearms in crime.

Research limitations:

In the United States, research into firearms and violent crime is fraught with difficulties, associated with limited data on gun ownership and use, firearms markets, and aggregation of crime data. Research studies into gun violence have primarily taken one of two approaches: case-control studies and social ecology. Gun ownership is usually determined through surveys, proxy variables, and sometimes with production and import figures.

In statistical analysis of homicides and other types of crime which are rare events, these data tend to have poisson distributions, which also presents methodological challenges to researchers. With data aggregation, it is difficult to make inferences about individual behavior. This problem, known as ecological fallacy, is not always handled properly by researchers; this leads some to jump to conclusions that their data do not necessarily support.

In 1996 the NRA lobbied Congressman Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) to include budget provisions that prohibited the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from advocating or promoting gun control and that deleted $2.6 million from the CDC budget, the exact amount the CDC had spent on firearms research the previous year.

The ban was later extended to all research funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). According to an article in Nature, this made gun research more difficult, reduced the number of studies, and discouraged researchers from even talking about gun violence at medical and scientific conferences.

In 2013, after the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, President Barack Obama ordered the CDC to resume funding research on gun violence and prevention, and put $10 million in the 2014 budget request for it. However, the order had no practical effect, as the CDC refused to act without a specific appropriation to cover the research, and Congress repeatedly declined to allocate any funds.

As a result, the CDC has not performed any such studies since 1996.

See also: ​


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Gun Politics in the United States: "Gun-Control Groups Are Growing in Numbers While Hitting a Federal Wall" (Wall Street Journal 5/27/2022) Pictured below: LEFT: Gun-control activists rallied outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington this week: RIGHT: NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., earlier this year
WASHINGTON (Wall Street Journal 5/27/2022) — In the near-decade since a 20-year-old with an assault-style rifle rampaged through a Connecticut elementary school, advocates for tighter gun control have mobilized to counter the influence of the National Rifle Association.

Mass shootings in the past two weeks at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, have sent a surge in donations to gun-control groups as they renew calls for more federal restrictions on gun ownership.

Yet the leaders say they have little to show for their recent efforts in Washington.
“We’ve had very few concrete wins,” said Robin Lloyd, managing director of Giffords, a group advocating for gun safety that sprang from the 2011 shooting in Arizona that targeted then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Gun-control activists say they haven’t succeeded because of the nearly unified opposition of Republican lawmakers, who say more restrictions aren’t the way to reduce violence and may violate the Second Amendment. Their side also remains vastly outspent on lobbying by gun-rights groups, despite funding from the likes of billionaire Michael Bloomberg. And

Democratic politicians acknowledge that pro-gun voters place a higher priority on the issue than voters who favor gun control.

Gun-rights groups and Republicans counter that their opponents are ineffective because the Second Amendment is a bedrock American principle. They criticize groups seeking legislation in the wake of shootings as politicizing the issue.

Activists have logged victories in state capitals, such as in Florida raising the age for rifle purchases to 21 from 18 and imposing a three-day waiting period in the aftermath of a 19-year-old’s shooting spree at a Parkland, Fla., high school. But they say the state-by-state patchwork of varied gun laws is far from ideal.

Americans purchased guns in record numbers in 2020, with dealers estimating 40% of sales going to first-time buyers. Shootings also are on the rise in many U.S. cities, and the number of mass shootings has noticeably increased in recent decades, according to a government-funded study.

Many gun-control advocates try to appeal to gun owners. Giffords has chapters across the country called Gun Owners for Safety. “Patriots of every stripe can agree that the Second Amendment goes hand-in-hand with commonsense measures like universal background checks,” its website says.

Gun-control lobbyists say the best way for the federal government to reduce gun violence is to close loopholes that allow people to purchase guns without a background check and allow the confiscation of guns from people deemed a risk to themselves, known as red-flag laws. They also advocate for banning assault-style weapons and high capacity magazines.
Most Republicans see no role for federal laws restricting guns in ending mass shootings, and any legislation would need some GOP support in a Senate that has been closely divided or under GOP control in recent years.

Republicans have pressed for other approaches that they say would prevent shootings. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) this week called for armed officers on school campuses. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.) said the discussion should center on mental-health care.

A CBS poll this month after the Buffalo shooting and before the one in Uvalde found that 54% of Americans want stricter laws covering the sale of guns, compared with 46% who want to keep gun laws as they are or make them looser. Other polls show some individual measures, such as expanded background checks, have significantly broader support.

Mr. Bloomberg, former New York City mayor and one of the major funders of Everytown for Gun Safety, offered on Thursday to triple match any donation to the organization. Everytown also benefited this week from Instagram fundraising by poet Amanda Gorman and celebrity model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen. Collectively, the two have raised more than $1.1 million.

Pictured below: The political spending of gun-rights groups like the NRA far exceeds that of gun-control groups. The NRA’s headquarters in Fairfax, Va. (PHOTO: JIM LO SCALZO/SHUTTERSTOCK)
Gun Politics in the United States (Wikipedia)

Gun politics is an area of American politics defined by two primary opposing ideologies about civilian gun ownership. People who advocate for gun control support strengthening regulations related to gun ownership; people who advocate for gun rights oppose new regulations or support loosening restrictions related to gun ownership.

These groups often disagree on the interpretation of laws and court cases related to firearms as well as about the effects of firearms regulation on crime and public safety.  It is estimated that U.S. civilians own 393 million firearms, and that 35% to 42% of the households in the country have at least one gun. 

U.S. has by far the highest estimated number of guns per capita in the world, at 120.5 guns for every 100 people.

Debates regarding firearm availability and gun violence in the United States have been characterized by concerns about the right to bear arms, such as found in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the responsibility of the United States government to serve the needs of its citizens and to prevent crime and deaths.

Firearms regulation supporters say that indiscriminate or unrestricted gun rights inhibit the government from fulfilling that responsibility, causing a safety concern. 

Gun rights supporters promote firearms for self-defense – including security against tyranny, as well as hunting and sporting activities. Firearms regulation advocates state that restricting and tracking gun access would result in safer communities, while gun rights advocates state that increased firearm ownership by law-abiding citizens reduces crime and assert that criminals have always had easy access to firearms.

Gun legislation in the United States is augmented by judicial interpretations of the Constitution. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 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." 

In 1791, the United States adopted the Second Amendment, and in 1868 adopted the Fourteenth Amendment. The effect of those two amendments on gun politics was the subject of landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), where the Court affirmed for the first time that the second amendment guarantees an individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia and to use them for traditionally lawful purposes such as self-defense within the home, and in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), where the Court ruled that the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and thereby applies to both state and federal law.

​In so doing, it endorsed the so-called "individual-right" theory of the Second Amendment's meaning and rejected a rival interpretation, the "collective-right" theory, according to which the amendment protects a collective right of states to maintain militias or an individual right to keep and bear arms in connection with service in a militia.

​20th century:

First half of 20th century:

Since the late 19th century, with three key cases from the pre-incorporation era, the U.S. Supreme Court consistently ruled that the Second Amendment (and the Bill of Rights) restricted only Congress, and not the States, in the regulation of guns. Scholars predicted that the Court's incorporation of other rights suggested that they may incorporate the Second, should a suitable case come before them.

National Firearms Act:
Main article: National Firearms Act

The first major federal firearms law passed in the 20th century was the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. It was passed after Prohibition-era gangsterism peaked with the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of 1929. The era was famous for criminal use of firearms such as the Thompson submachine gun (Tommy gun) and sawed-off shotgun. Under the NFA, machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and other weapons fall under the regulation and jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) as described by Title II.

United States v. Miller
Main article: United States v. Miller

In United States v. Miller (1939) the Court did not address incorporation, but whether a sawn-off shotgun "has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia." 

In overturning the indictment against Miller, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas stated that the National Firearms Act of 1934, "offend[ed] the inhibition of the Second Amendment to the Constitution." The federal government then appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

On appeal the federal government did not object to Miller's release since he had died by then, seeking only to have the trial judge's ruling on the unconstitutionality of the federal law overturned. Under these circumstances, neither Miller nor his attorney appeared before the Court to argue the case.

The Court only heard argument from the federal prosecutor. In its ruling, the Court overturned the trial court and upheld the NFA.

Second half of 20th century

​The Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) was passed after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and African-American activists Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. 

The GCA focuses on regulating interstate commerce in firearms by generally prohibiting interstate firearms transfers except among licensed manufacturers, dealers, and importers. It also prohibits selling firearms to certain categories of individuals defined as "prohibited persons."

In 1986, Congress passed the Firearm Owners Protection Act. It was supported by the National Rifle Association because it reversed many of the provisions of the GCA. It also banned ownership of unregistered fully automatic rifles and civilian purchase or sale of any such firearm made from that date forward.

The assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981 led to enactment of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (Brady Law) in 1993 which established the national background check system to prevent certain restricted individuals from owning, purchasing, or transporting firearms. 

In an article supporting passage of such a law, retired chief justice Warren E. Burger wrote:
"Americans also have a right to defend their homes, and we need not challenge that. Nor does anyone seriously question that the Constitution protects the right of hunters to own and keep sporting guns for hunting game any more than anyone would challenge the right to own and keep fishing rods and other equipment for fishing – or to own automobiles.

To 'keep and bear arms' for hunting today is essentially a recreational activity and not an imperative of survival, as it was 200 years ago. 'Saturday night specials' and machine guns are not recreational weapons and surely are as much in need of regulation as motor vehicles."

A Stockton, California, schoolyard shooting in 1989 led to passage of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 (AWB or AWB 1994), which defined and banned the manufacture and transfer of "semiautomatic assault weapons" and "large capacity ammunition feeding devices."

According to journalist Chip Berlet, concerns about gun control laws along with outrage over two high-profile incidents involving the ATF (Ruby Ridge in 1992 and the Waco siege in 1993) mobilized the militia movement of citizens who feared that the federal government would begin to confiscate firearms.

Though gun control is not strictly a partisan issue, there is generally more support for gun control legislation in the Democratic Party than in the Republican Party. The Libertarian Party, whose campaign platforms favor limited government regulation, is outspokenly against gun control.

Advocacy groups:
​
The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded to promote firearm competency in 1871. The NRA supported the NFA and, ultimately, the GCA. After the GCA, more strident groups, such as the Gun Owners of America (GOA), began to advocate for gun rights. 

According to the GOA, it was founded in 1975 when "the radical left introduced legislation to ban all handguns in California." The GOA and other national groups like the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO), and the Second Amendment Sisters (SAS), often take stronger stances than the NRA and criticize its history of support for some firearms legislation, such as GCA. The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) has been an outspoken critic of the NRA for a number of years.

According to the Huffington Post, "NAGR is the much leaner, more pugnacious version of the NRA. Where the NRA has looked to find some common ground with gun reform advocates and at least appear to be reasonable, NAGR has been the unapologetic champion of opening up gun laws even more." These groups believe any compromise leads to greater restrictions.

According to the authors of The Changing Politics of Gun Control (1998), in the late 1970s, the NRA changed its activities to incorporate political advocacy. Despite the impact on the volatility of membership, the politicization of the NRA has been consistent and the NRA-Political Victory Fund ranked as "one of the biggest spenders in congressional elections" as of 1998. 

According to the authors of The Gun Debate (2014), the NRA taking the lead on politics serves the gun industry's profitability. In particular when gun owners respond to fears of gun confiscation with increased purchases and by helping to isolate the industry from the misuse of its products used in shooting incidents.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence began in 1974 as Handgun Control Inc. (HCI). Soon after, it formed a partnership with another fledgling group called the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (NCBH) – later known as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV).

The partnership did not last, as NCBH generally took a tougher stand on gun regulation than HCI. In the wake of the 1980 murder of John Lennon, HCI saw an increase of interest and fundraising and contributed $75,000 to congressional campaigns.

Following the Reagan assassination attempt and the resultant injury of James Brady, Sarah Brady joined the board of HCI in 1985. HCI was renamed in 2001 to Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) restriction:

In 1996, Congress added language to the relevant appropriations bill which required "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control." This language was added to prevent the funding of research by the CDC that gun rights supporters considered politically motivated and intended to bring about further gun control legislation.

In particular, the NRA and other gun rights proponents objected to work supported by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, then run by Mark L. Rosenberg, including research authored by Arthur Kellermann.

21st century:

In October 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on the effectiveness of gun violence prevention strategies that concluded "Evidence was insufficient to determine the effectiveness of any of these laws." 

A similar survey of firearms research by the National Academy of Sciences arrived at nearly identical conclusions in 2004. In September of that year, the Assault Weapons Ban expired due to a sunset provision. Efforts by gun control advocates to renew the ban failed, as did attempts to replace it after it became defunct.

The NRA opposed bans on handguns in Chicago, Washington D.C., and San Francisco while supporting the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 (also known as the School Safety And Law Enforcement Improvement Act), which strengthened requirements for background checks for firearm purchases. 

The GOA took issue with a portion of the bill, which they termed the "Veterans' Disarmament Act."

Besides the GOA, other national gun rights groups continue to take a stronger stance than the NRA. These groups include the Second Amendment Sisters, Second Amendment Foundation, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and the Pink Pistols.

New groups have also arisen, such as the Students for Concealed Carry, which grew largely out of safety-issues resulting from the creation of gun-free zones that were legislatively mandated amidst a response to widely publicized school shootings.

In 2001, in United States v. Emerson, the Fifth Circuit became the first federal appeals court to recognize an individual's right to own guns. In 2007, in Parker v. District of Columbia, the D.C. Circuit became the first federal appeals court to strike down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds.

Smart guns:

Smart guns only fire when in the hands of the owner, a feature gun control advocates say eliminates accidental firings by children, and the risk of hostile persons (such as prisoners, criminal suspects, an opponent in a fight, or an enemy soldier) grabbing the gun and using it against the owner. Gun rights advocates fear mandatory smart gun technology will make it more difficult to fire a gun when needed.

Smith & Wesson reached a settlement in 2000 with the administration of President Bill Clinton, which included a provision for the company to develop a smart gun. A consumer boycott organized by the NRA and NSSF nearly drove the company out of business and forced it to drop its smart gun plans.

The New Jersey Childproof Handgun Law of 2002 requires that 30 months after "personalized handguns are available" anywhere in the United States, only smart guns may be sold in the state. Some gun safety advocates worry that by raising the stakes of introducing the technology, this law contributes to the opposition that has prevented smart guns from being sold anywhere in the United States despite availability in other countries.

In 2014, a Maryland gun dealer dropped plans to sell the first smart gun in the United States after receiving complaints.

District of Columbia v. Heller:
Main article: District of Columbia v. Heller

In June 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court upheld by a 5–4 vote the Parker decision striking down the D.C. gun law. Heller ruled that Americans have an individual right to possess firearms, irrespective of membership in a militia, "for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home." 

However, in delivering the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the operative clause of the amendment, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," codifies an individual right derived from English common law and codified in the English Bill of Rights (1689).

The majority held that the Second Amendment's preamble, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," is consistent with this interpretation when understood in light of the framers' belief that the most effective way to destroy a citizens' militia was to disarm the citizens. The majority also found that United States v. Miller supported an individual-right rather than a collective-right view, contrary to the dominant 20th-century interpretation of that decision.

(In Miller, the Supreme Court unanimously held that a federal law requiring the registration of sawed-off shotguns did not violate the Second Amendment because such weapons did not have a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.")

Finally, the court held that, because the framers understood the right of self-defense to be "the central component" of the right to keep and bear arms, the Second Amendment implicitly protects the right "to use arms in defense of hearth and home."

The four dissenting justices said that the majority had broken established precedent on the Second Amendment, and took the position that the Amendment refers to an individual right, but in the context of militia service.

McDonald v. City of Chicago:
Main article: McDonald v. City of Chicago

In June 2010, a Chicago law that banned handguns was struck down. The 5–4 ruling incorporated the Second Amendment, stating that "The Fourteenth Amendment makes the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms fully applicable to the States."

Advocacy groups, PACs, and lobbying:

One way advocacy groups influence politics is through "outside spending," using political action committees (PACs) and 501(c)(4) organizations. PACs and 501(c)(4)s raise and spend money to affect elections. PACs pool campaign contributions from members and donate those funds to candidates for political office. 

Super PACs, created in 2010, are prohibited from making direct contributions to candidates or parties, but influence races by running ads for or against specific candidates. Both gun control and gun rights advocates use these types of organizations.

The NRA's Political Victory Fund super PAC spent $11.2 million in the 2012 election cycle, and as of April 2014, it had raised $13.7 million for 2014 elections. 

Michael Bloomberg's gun-control super PAC, Independence USA, spent $8.3 million in 2012 and $6.3 million in 2013. Americans for Responsible Solutions, another gun-control super PAC started by retired Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, raised $12 million in 2013, and plans to raise $16 to $20 million by the 2014 elections. The group's treasurer said that the funds would be enough to compete with the NRA "on an even-keel basis."

Another way advocacy groups influence politics is through lobbying; some groups use lobbying firms, while others employ in-house lobbyists. According to OpenSecrets, gun politics groups with the most lobbyists in 2013 were: the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA); Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG); the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF); and the Brady Campaign. 

Gun rights groups spent over $15.1 million lobbying in Washington D.C. in 2013, with the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) spending $6.7 million, and the NRA spending $3.4 million. Gun control groups spent $2.2 million, with MAIG spending $1.7 million, and the Brady Campaign spending $250,000 in the same period.

3D printed firearms:
Main article: 3D printed firearms

In August 2012, an open source group called Defense Distributed launched a project to design and release a blueprint for a handgun that could be downloaded from the Internet and manufactured using a 3D printer. In May 2013, the group made public the STL files for the world's first fully 3D printable gun, the Liberator .380 single shot pistol.

Proposals made by the Obama Administration:

On January 16, 2013, in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and other mass shootings, President Barack Obama announced a plan for reducing gun violence in four parts:
  1. closing background check loopholes;
  2. banning assault weapons and large capacity magazines;
  3. making schools safer;
  4. and increasing access to mental health services.

The plan included proposals for new laws to be passed by Congress, and a series of executive actions not requiring Congressional approval. No new federal gun control legislation was passed as a result of these proposals. 

President Obama later stated in a 2015 interview with the BBC that gun control:
"...has been the one area where I feel that I've been most frustrated and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws.

Even in the face of repeated mass killings. And you know, if you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it's less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it's in the tens of thousands. And for us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing. But it is not something that I intend to stop working on in the remaining 18 months."

2013 United Nations Arms Treaty:
See also: Arms Trade Treaty § Content

The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is a multilateral treaty that regulates the international trade in conventional weapons, which entered into force on December 24, 2014. Work on the treaty commenced in 2006 with negotiations for its content conducted at a global conference under the auspices of the United Nations from July 2–27, 2012, in New York. 

As it was not possible to reach an agreement on a final text at that time, a new meeting for the conference was scheduled for March 18–28, 2013. On April 2, 2013, the UN General Assembly adopted the ATT. The treaty was opened for signing on June 3, 2013, and by August 15, 2015, it had been signed by 130 states and ratified or acceded to by 72. It entered into force on December 24, 2014, after it was ratified and acceded to by 50 states.

On September 25, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry signed the ATT on behalf of the Obama administration. This was a reversal of the position of the Bush administration which had chosen not to participate in the treaty negotiations. Then in October a bipartisan group of 50 senators and 181 representatives released concurrent letters to President Barack Obama pledging their opposition to ratification of the ATT.

The group was led by Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) and Representatives Mike Kelly (R-Pennsylvania) and Collin Peterson (D-Minnesota). Following these two letters, four Democratic senators sent a separate letter to the President stating that "because of unaddressed concerns that this Treaty's obligations could undermine our nation's sovereignty and the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans [they] would oppose the Treaty if it were to come before the U.S. Senate."

The four Senators are Jon Tester (D-Montana), Max Baucus (D-Montana), Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota), and Joe Donnelly (D-Indiana).

Supporters of the treaty claim that the treaty is needed to help protect millions around the globe in danger of human rights abuses. Frank Jannuzi of Amnesty International USA states, "This treaty says that nations must not export arms and ammunition where there is an 'overriding risk' that they will be used to commit serious human rights violations. It will help keep arms out of the hands of the wrong people: those responsible for upwards of 1,500 deaths worldwide every day." 

Secretary Kerry was quoted as saying that his signature would "help deter the transfer of conventional weapons used to carry out the world's worst crimes." As of December 2013, the U.S. has not ratified or acceded to the treaty.

Proposals made by the Trump administration:

Following the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017 and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in February 2018, President Donald Trump and the Department of Justice (DOJ) sought ways to ban bump stocks, devices that can be used to make semi-automatic weapons fire as fully automatic ones as used in both shootings.

Initially, the DOJ believed it had to wait for Congress to pass the appropriate legislation to ban the sale and possession of bump stocks. However, by March 2018, the DOJ introduced proposed revised regulations on gun control that incorporated bump stocks under the definition of machine guns, which would make them banned devices, as Congress had not yet taken any action. 

After a period of public review, the DOJ implemented the proposed ban starting on December 18, 2018, giving owners of bump stocks the option to either destroy them or turn them into authorities within 90 days, after which the ban would be in full effect (on March 26, 2019). 

Pro-gun groups immediately sought to challenge the order, but could not get the Supreme Court to put the ban on hold while the litigation was ongoing. In the following week, the Supreme Court refused to exempt the litigants in the legal challenge from the DOJ's order after this was raised as a separate challenge.

Proposals made by the Biden Administration:

In April 2022, President Joe Biden announced plans to crack down on "ghost guns", claiming that they have become "weapons of choice for many criminals." Biden also urged Congress to pass a ban on assault rifles and other measures

​Public opinion:
Main article: Public opinion on gun control in the United States

​Polls:

Huffington Post reported in September 2013 that 48% of Americans said gun laws should be made more strict, while 16% said they should be made less strict and 29% said there should be no change. 

Similarly, a Gallup poll found that support for stricter gun laws has fallen from 58% after the Newtown shooting, to 49% in September 2013. Both the Huffington Post poll and the Gallup poll were conducted after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. 

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post poll found that 40% of Americans believe stricter gun laws would prevent future mass shootings, while 52% said changing things would not make a difference. 

The same poll also found that 57% of Americans think better mental health care is more likely to prevent future mass shootings than stricter gun laws, while 29% said the opposite. 74% of those who incorrectly believed that the USA has universal background checks supported stricter gun laws, but 89% of those who thought that such checks were not universally required supported stricter laws.

In a 2015 study conducted by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, state gun laws were examined based on various policy approaches, and were scored on grade-based and ranked scales. 

States were rated positively for having passed stricter measures and stronger gun laws. Positive points were also given for states that required background checks on all sales of firearms and that limited bulk firearms purchases, and that prohibited sales of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, and that carried out stricter evaluations of applications for handgun concealed-carry licenses, especially in the context of prohibited domestic-violence offenders.

Meanwhile, points were deducted from states with laws that expanded access to guns, or that allowed concealed carry in public areas (particularly schools and bars) without a permit, or that passed "Stand Your Ground Laws" – which remove the duty to retreat and instead allow people to shoot potential assailants. Eventually, states were graded indicating the overall strengths or weakness of their gun laws.

The ten states with the strongest gun laws ranked from strongest starting with California, then New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Hawaii, New York, Maryland, Illinois, Rhode Island and finally Michigan.

The states with weakest gun laws were ranked as follows: South Dakota, Arizona, Mississippi, Vermont, Louisiana, Montana, Wyoming, Kentucky, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

A comparable study of state laws was also conducted in 2016. Based on these findings, The Law Center concluded that comprehensive gun laws reduce gun violence deaths, whereas weaker guns laws increase gun-related deaths. Furthermore, among different kinds of legislation, universal background checks were the most effective at reducing gun-related deaths.

Gallup poll:

The Gallup organization regularly polls Americans on their views on guns. On December 22, 2012:
  • 44% supported a ban on "semi-automatic guns known as assault weapons."
  • 92% supported background checks on all gun-show gun sales.
  • 62% supported a ban on "high-capacity ammunition magazines that can contain more than 10 rounds."

​On April 25, 2013:
  • 56% supported reinstating and strengthening the assault weapons ban of 1994.
  • 83% supported requiring background checks for all gun purchases.
  • 51% supported limiting the sale of ammunition magazines to those with 10 rounds or less.

On October 6, 2013:
  • 49% felt that gun laws should be more strict.
  • 74% opposed civilian handgun bans.
  • 37% said they had a gun in their home.
  • 27% said they personally owned a gun.
  • 60% of gun owners have guns for personal safety/protection, 36% for hunting, 13% for recreation/sport, 8% for target shooting, 5% as a Second Amendment right.

In January 2014:
  • 40% are satisfied with the current state of gun laws, 55% are dissatisfied
  • 31% want stricter control, 16% want less strict laws

On October 19, 2015:
  • 55% said the law on sales of firearms should be more strict, 33% kept as they are, 11% less strict
    • this was sharply polarised by party, with 77% of Democratic Party supporters wanting stricter laws, against 27% of Republican Party supporters
  • 72% continued to oppose civilian handgun bans.

​On October 16, 2017:
  • 58% of Americans believing that new gun laws would have little or no effect on mass shootings.
  • 60% said the law on sales of firearms should be more strict.
  • 48% "would support a law making it illegal to manufacture, sell or possess" semi-automatic firearms

The following day, a survey was published stating:
  • 96% supported "requiring background checks for all gun purchases"
    • this includes 95% of gun owners and 96% of non-gun owners
  • 75% supported "enacting a 30-day waiting period for all gun sales"
    • this includes 57% of gun owners and 84% of non-gun owners
  • 70% supported "requiring all privately owned guns to be registered with the police"
    • this includes 48% of gun owners and 82% of non-gun owners

National Rifle Association:

A member poll conducted for the NRA between January 13 and 14, 2013 found: 90.7% of members favor "Reforming our mental health laws to help keep firearms out of the hands of people with mental illness." (A majority of 86.4% believe that strengthening laws this way would be more effective at preventing mass murders than banning semi-automatic rifles.)
  • 92.2% of NRA members oppose gun confiscation via mandatory buy-back laws.
  • 88.5% oppose banning semi-automatic firearms, firearms that chamber a new round automatically when discharged.
  • 92.6% oppose a law requiring gun owners to register with the federal government.
  • 92.0% oppose a federal law banning the sale of firearms between private citizens.
  • 82.3% of members are in favor of a program that would place armed security professionals in every school.
  • 72.5% agreed that President Obama's ultimate goal is the confiscation of many firearms that are currently legal.
Place of living of respondents:
  • 35.4% A rural area
  • 26.4% A small town
  • 22.9% A suburban area
  • 14.7% An urban area or city
Regional Break:
  • 36.1% South
  • 24.1% Mid-West
  • 21.5% West
  • 18.3% North-East / Mid-Atlantic

Political arguments:

Rights-based arguments:

Rights-based arguments involve the most fundamental question about gun control: to what degree the government has the authority to regulate guns.

Proponents of gun rights include but are not limited to the following:
​The primary author of the United States Bill of Rights, James Madison, considered them – including a right to keep and bear arms – to be fundamental. In 1788, he wrote: "The political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government, and as they become incorporated with the national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion."

The view that gun ownership is a fundamental right was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). The Court stated: "By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects." The Court observed that the English Bill of Rights of 1689 had listed a right to arms as one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen.

When the Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), it looked to the year 1868, when the amendment was ratified and said that most states had provisions in their constitutions explicitly protecting this right. The Court concluded: "It is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty."

Second Amendment rights:

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted on December 15, 1791, 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."

Prior to District of Columbia v. Heller, in the absence of a clear court ruling, there was a debate about whether or not the Second Amendment included an individual right. In Heller, the Court concluded that there is indeed such a right, but not an unlimited one. 

Although the decision was not unanimous, all justices endorsed an individual right viewpoint but differed on the scope of that right.

Before Heller gun rights advocates argued that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns. They stated that the phrase "the people" in that amendment applies to individuals rather than an organized collective and that the phrase "the people" means the same thing in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 9th, and 10th Amendments.

They also said the Second's placement in the Bill of Rights defines it as an individual right. As part of the Heller decision, the majority endorsed the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual, not unlimited, right to own guns. 

Political scientist Robert Spitzer and Supreme Court law clerk Gregory P. Magarian argued that this final decision by the Supreme Court was a misinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

After the Heller decision there was an increased amount of attention on whether or not the Second Amendment applies to the states. In 2010 in the case of McDonald v. City Chicago, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment's provisions do apply to the states as a result of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Defense of self and state:
​
The eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone (b. 1723), whose writings influenced the drafters of the U.S. Constitution, called self-defense "the primary law of nature" which (he said) man-made law cannot take away. 

Following Blackstone, the American jurist St. George Tucker (b. 1752) wrote that "the right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments, it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible."

In both Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010) the Supreme Court deemed that the right of self-defense is at least partly protected by the United States Constitution. The court left details of that protection to be worked out in future court cases.

The two primary interest groups regarding this issue are the Brady Campaign and the National Rifle Association. They have clashed, for example, regarding stand-your-ground laws which give individuals a legal right to use guns for defending themselves without any duty to retreat from a dangerous situation. 

After the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in Heller, the Brady Campaign indicated that it would seek gun laws "without infringing on the right of law-abiding persons to possess guns for self-defense."

Protection of marginalized people:

Left-wing and far-left advocates for gun rights argue that gun ownership is necessary for protecting marginalized communities, such as African Americans and the working class, from state repression. Far-left advocates also argue that gun control laws mostly benefit white people and harm people of color.

Security against tyranny:

Another fundamental political argument associated with the right to keep and bear arms is that banning or even regulating gun ownership makes government tyranny more likely.

A January 2013 Rasmussen Reports poll indicated that 65 percent of Americans believe the purpose of the Second Amendment is to "ensure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny." A Gallup poll in October 2013 showed that 60 percent of American gun owners mention "personal safety/protection" as a reason for owning them, and 5 percent mention a "Second Amendment right," among other reasons. 

The anti-tyranny argument extends back to the days of colonial America and earlier in Great Britain.

Various gun rights advocates and organizations, such as former governor Mike Huckabee, former Congressman Ron Paul, and Gun Owners of America, say that an armed citizenry is the population's last line of defense against tyranny by their own government. This belief was also familiar at the time the Constitution was written. 

The Declaration of Independence mentions "the Right of the People to alter or to abolish" the government, and Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address reiterated the "revolutionary right" of the people. A right of revolution was not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution; instead, the Constitution was designed to ensure a government deriving its power from the consent of the governed. 

Historian Don Higginbotham wrote that the well-regulated militia protected by the Second Amendment was more likely to put down rebellions than participate in them. Gun rights advocates such as Stephen Halbrook and Wayne LaPierre support the "Nazi gun control" theory.

The theory states that gun regulations enforced by the Third Reich rendered victims of the Holocaust weak, and that more effective resistance to oppression would have been possible if they had been better armed. Other gun laws of authoritarian regimes have also been brought up.

This counterfactual history theory is not supported by mainstream scholarship,  though it is an element of a "security against tyranny" argument in U.S. politics.

American gun rights activist Larry Pratt says that the anti-tyranny argument for gun rights is supported by successful efforts in Guatemala and the Philippines to arm ordinary citizens against communist insurgency in the 1980s. Gun-rights advocacy groups argue that the only way to enforce democracy is through having the means of resistance. 

Militia-movement groups cite the Battle of Athens (Tennessee, 1946) as an example of citizens who "[used] armed force to support the Rule of Law" in what they said was a rigged county election. 

Then-senator John F. Kennedy wrote in 1960 that, "it is extremely unlikely that the fears of governmental tyranny which gave rise to the Second Amendment will ever be a major danger to our nation...."

In 1957, the legal scholar Roscoe Pound expressed a different view. He stated, "A legal right of the citizen to wage war on the government is something that cannot be admitted. ... In the urban industrial society of today, a general right to bear efficient arms so as to be enabled to resist oppression by the government would mean that gangs could exercise an extra-legal rule which would defeat the whole Bill of Rights."

Public policy arguments:

Public policy arguments are based on the idea that the central purpose of government is to establish and maintain order. This is done through public policy, which Blackstone defined as "the due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom, whereby the inhabitants of the State, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighborhood, and good manners, and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations."

Gun violence debate:
​Main article: Gun violence in the United States

The public policy debates about gun violence include discussions about firearms deaths – including homicide, suicide, and unintentional deaths – as well as the impact of gun ownership, criminal and legal, on gun violence outcomes.

After the tragedy of Sandy Hook, the majority of people, including gun owners and non-gun owners, wanted the government to spend more money in order to improve mental health screening and treatment, to deter gun violence in America.

In the United States in 2009 there were 3.0 recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm per 100,000 inhabitants. The U.S. ranks 28 in the world for gun homicides per capita. A U.S. male aged 15–24 is 70 times more likely to be killed with a gun than their counterpart in the eight (G-8) largest industrialized nations in the world (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy, Russia). 

In 2013, there were 33,636 gun-related deaths, in the United States. Meanwhile, in the same year of Japan, there were only 13 deaths that were involved with guns. In incidents concerning gun homicide or accidents, a person in America is about 300 times more likely to die than a Japanese person. 

In 2015, there were 36,252 deaths due to firearms, and some claim as many as 372 mass shootings, in the U.S, while guns were used to kill about 50 people in the U.K. However, using the FBI definition of a "mass shooting" there were only 4 in the U.S. in 2015. 

More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day (about 85) than in the U.K. in a year.

Within the gun politics debate, gun control and gun rights advocates disagree over the role that guns play in crime. Gun control advocates concerned about high levels of gun violence in the United States look to restrictions on gun ownership as a way to stem the violence and say that increased gun ownership leads to higher levels of crime, suicide and other negative outcomes. 

Gun rights groups say that a well-armed civilian populace prevents crime and that making civilian ownership of firearms illegal would increase the crime rate by making civilians vulnerable to criminal activity.

They say that more civilians defend themselves with a gun every year than the law enforcement arrest for violent crimes and burglary and that civilians legally shoot almost as many criminals as law enforcement officers do.

Studies using FBI data and Police Reports of the incidents, have found that there are approximately 1,500 verified instances of firearms used in self-defense annually in the United States. Survey-based research derived from data gathered by the National Crime Victimization (NCV) Survey has generated estimates that, out of roughly 5.5 million violent crime victims in the U.S. annually approximately 1.1 percent, or 55,000 used a firearm in self-defense (175,000 for the 3-year period.) 

When including property crimes, of the 15.5 million victims of property crimes annually found in the survey (46.5 million for 2013–2015), the NCV survey data yielded estimates that around 0.2 percent of property crime victims, or 36,000 annually (109,000 for the 3-year period) used a firearm in self-defense from the loss of property. 

​Researchers working from the most recent NCVS data sets have found approximately 95,000 uses of a firearm in self-defense in the U.S. each year (284,000 for the years 2013–2015). In addition, the United States has a higher rate of firearm ownership than any other nation. The United States' gun homicide rate, while high compared to other developed nations, has been declining since the 1990s.

Gun Control has limited the availability of firearms to many individuals. Some of the limitations include any persons who have been dishonorably discharged from the military, any person that has renounced their United States citizenship, has been declared mentally ill or committed to a mental institution, is a fugitive, is a user or addicted to a controlled substance, and anyone illegally in the country. 

Still, in 2016, according to the Center for Disease Control, there were 19,362 homicides in the United States. Firearms were used in 14,415 or a little over 74% of all homicides. There were also 22,938 suicides that were performed with the assistance of a firearm. In total, in 2016, firearms were involved in the deaths of 38,658 Americans.

According to Rifat Darina Kamal and Charles Burton, in 2016, study data, presented by Priedt (2016), showed that just the homicide rate, by itself, was 18 times greater than the rates of Australia, Sweden, and France. Due to the increase in mass shootings, in the United States, new laws are being passed.

Recently, Colorado became the fifteenth state to pass the "Red Flag" bill which gives judges the authority to remove firearms from those believed to be a high risk of harming others or themselves. This "Red Flag" law has now been proposed in twenty-three states.

Criminal violence:
See also: Crime in the United States and List of countries by intentional homicide rate

There is an open debate regarding a causal connection (or the lack of one) between gun control and its effect on gun violence and other crimes. The numbers of lives saved or lost by gun ownership are debated by criminologists. Research difficulties include the difficulty of accounting accurately for confrontations in which no shots are fired and jurisdictional differences in the definition of "crime."

Such research is also subject to a more fundamental difficulty affecting all research in this field: the effectiveness of the Criminal Law in preventing crime in general or in specific cases is inherently and notoriously difficult to prove and measure, and thus issues in establishing a causal link between gun control or particular gun control policies and violent crime must be understood to be an aspect of a more general empirical difficulty, which pervades the fields of Criminology and Law at large.

​It is not simple, for example, to prove a causal connection between the laws against murder and the prevailing murder rates, either. Consequently, this general background must be appreciated when discussing the causal and empirical issues here.

​A study published in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology in 1997 concluded that the amount of gun-related crime and deaths is affected more by the state of the area in terms of unemployment, alcohol problems and drug problems instead of the laws and regulations. This study analyzed statistics gathered on the amount of gun crime in states with strict and lenient gun policies and determined that the amount of gun crime is related to how to run down economically an area is.

A 2003 CDC study determined "The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes." They go on to state "a finding of insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness should not be interpreted as evidence of ineffectiveness but rather as an indicator that additional research is needed before an intervention can be evaluated for its effectiveness."

In 2009, the Public Health Law Research program, an independent organization, published several evidence briefs summarizing the research assessing the effect of a specific law or policy on public health, that concern the effectiveness of various laws related to gun safety. Among their findings:
  • There is not enough evidence to establish the effectiveness of "shall issue" laws, as distinct from "may issue" laws, as a public health intervention to reduce violent crime.
  • There is insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of waiting period laws as public health interventions aimed at preventing gun-related violence and suicide.
  • Although child access prevention laws may represent a promising intervention for reducing gun-related morbidity and mortality among children, there is currently insufficient evidence to validate their effectiveness as a public health intervention aimed at reducing gun-related harms.
  • There is insufficient evidence to establish the effectiveness of such bans as public health interventions aimed at reducing gun-related harms.
  • There is insufficient evidence to validate the effectiveness of firearm licensing and registration requirements as legal interventions aimed to reduce fire-arm related harms.

Homicide:
​
With 5% of the world's population, U.S. residents own roughly 50% of the world's civilian-owned firearms. In addition, up to 48% of households within America have guns. 

According to the UNODC, 60% of U.S. homicides in 2009 were perpetrated using a firearm.[206] U.S. homicide rates vary widely from state to state. In 2014, the lowest homicide rates were in New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Vermont (each 0.0 per 100,000 people), and the highest were in Louisiana (11.7) and Mississippi (11.4).

Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, and his colleague Marc Gertz, published a study in 1995 estimating that approximately 2.5 million American adults used their gun in self-defense annually. The incidents that Kleck extrapolated based on his questionnaire results generally did not involve the firing of the gun, and he estimates that as many as 1.9 million of those instances involved a handgun. 

These studies have been subject to criticism on a number of methodological and logical grounds and Kleck has responded with a rebuttal. 

Another study from the same period, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), estimated 65,000 DGUs (Defensive gun use) annually. The NCVS survey differed from Kleck's study in that it only interviewed those who reported a threatened, attempted, or completed victimization for one of six crimes: rape, robbery, assault, burglary, non-business larceny, and motor vehicle theft.

The NCVS, however, does not actually directly ask about defensive gun use, so estimates of this set of events are not very meaningful. A National Research Council report said that Kleck's estimates appeared to be exaggerated and that it was almost certain that "some of what respondents designate[d] as their own self-defense would be construed as aggression by others".

In a review of research of the effects of gun rates on crime rates, Kleck determined that of studies addressing homicide rate, half of them found a connection between gun ownership and homicide, but these were usually the least rigorous studies. Only six studies controlled at least six statistically significant confound variables, and none of them showed a significant positive effect.

Eleven macro-level studies showed that crime rates increase gun levels (not vice versa). The reason that there is no opposite effect may be that most owners are noncriminals and that they may use guns to prevent violence.

Commenting on the external validity of Kleck's report, David Hemenway, director of
the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said: "Given the number of victims allegedly being saved with guns, it would seem natural to conclude that owning a gun substantially reduces your chances of being murdered. Yet a careful case-control study of homicide in the home found that a gun in the home was associated with an increased rather than a reduced risk of homicide.

​Virtually all of this risk involved homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance. Kleck however pointed out that most of the firearms used in the Kellermann study were not the same ones kept in the household by the victim. Similarly in 2007 when the Permit-To-Purchase law was repealed in Missouri,2008 saw a 34% increase in the rate of firearm homicides in that year alone, and the figure continues to be higher than the figure pre-2007.

One study found that homicide rates as a whole, especially those as a result of firearms use, are not always significantly lower in many other developed countries. Kleck wrote, "...cross-national comparisons do not provide a sound basis for assessing the impact of gun ownership levels on crime rates." 

One study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that for the year of 1998: "During the one-year study period (1998), 88,649 firearm deaths were reported.

Overall firearm mortality rates are five to six times higher in high-income (HI) and upper-middle-income (UMI) countries in the Americas (12.72) than in Europe (2.17) or Oceania (2.57) and 95 times higher than in Asia (0.13).

The rate of firearm deaths in the United States (14.24 per 100,000) exceeds that of its economic counterparts (1.76) eightfold and that of UMI countries (9.69) by a factor of 1.5.

Suicide and homicide contribute equally to total firearm deaths in the U.S., but most firearm deaths are suicides (71%) in HI countries and homicides (72%) in UMI countries."

Suicide:

Firearms accounted for 51.5% of U.S. suicides in 2013, and suicides account for 63% of all firearm-related deaths. A 2012 review by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that in the United States, the percent of suicide attempts that prove fatal is "strongly related to the availability of household firearms." Prior to this, one book written by criminologist Gary Kleck in the 1990s stated that they found no relationship between gun availability and suicide rates.

Federal and state laws:

The number of federal and state gun laws is unknown. A 2005 American Journal of Preventive Medicine study says 300, and the NRA says 20,000, though the Washington Post fact checker says of that decades-old figure: "This 20,000 figure appears to be an ancient guesstimate that has hardened over the decades into a constantly repeated, never-questioned talking point. It could be lower, or higher, depending on who's counting what."

Federal laws:
Main article: Gun law in the United States

Federal gun laws are enforced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Most federal gun laws were enacted through:
State laws and constitutions:
Main article: Gun laws in the United States by state

​In addition to federal gun laws, all U.S. states and some local jurisdictions have imposed their own firearms restrictions. Each of the fifty states has its own laws regarding guns.

Provisions in State constitutions vary. For example, Hawaii's constitution simply copies the text of the Second Amendment verbatim, while North Carolina and South Carolina begin with the same but continue with an injunction against maintaining standing armies. 

Alaska also begins with the full text of the Second Amendment, but adds that the right "shall not be denied or infringed by the State or a political subdivision of the State". Rhode Island subtracts the first half of the Second Amendment, leaving only, "[t]he right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".

The majority of the remaining states' constitutions differ from the text of the U.S. Constitution primarily in their clarification of exactly to whom the right belongs or by the inclusion of additional, specific protections or restrictions.

Seventeen states refer to the right to keep and bear arms as being an individual right, with Utah and Alaska referring to it explicitly as "[t]he individual right to keep and bear arms", while the other fifteen refer to the right as belonging to "every citizen", "all individuals", "all persons", or another, very similar phrase.

In contrast are four states which make no mention whatever of an individual right or of defense of one's self as a valid basis for the right to arms. Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Tennessee all state that the right is "for the common defense", while Virginia's constitution explicitly indicates that the right is derived from the need for a militia to defend the state.

Most state constitutions enumerate one or more reasons for the keeping of arms. Twenty-four states include self-defense as a valid, protected use of arms; twenty-eight cite defense of the state as a proper purpose. 

Ten states extend the right to defense of home and/or property, five include the defense of family, and six add hunting and recreation. Idaho is uniquely specific in its provision that "[n]o law shall impose licensure, registration, or special taxation on the ownership or possession of firearms or ammunition. Nor shall any law permit the confiscation of firearms, except those actually used in the commission of a felony". 

Fifteen state constitutions include specific restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. Florida's constitution calls for a three-day waiting period for all modern cartridge handgun purchases, with exceptions for handgun purchases by those holding a CCW license, or for anyone who purchases a black-powder handgun. 

Illinois prefaces the right by indicating that it is "[s]ubject ... to the police power". Florida and the remaining thirteen states with specific restrictions all carry a provision to the effect that the state legislature may enact laws regulating the carrying, concealing, and/or wearing of arms. 

Forty states preempt some or all local gun laws, due in part to campaigning by the NRA for such legislation.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Gun Politics in the United States:

History ​​See also: Organizations:

 





Assault weapons legislation in the United StatesPictured below: (NY Times 7/31/2019) When Lawmakers Try to Ban Assault Weapons, Gunmakers Adapt
Assault weapons legislation in the United States refers to bills and laws (active, theoretical, expired, proposed, or failed) that define and restrict or make illegal the manufacture, transfer, and possession of assault weapons.

How these firearms are defined and regulated varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but typically they are semi-automatic rifles (versus assault rifles, which are fully automatic with the capability of being semi-automatic) with a detachable magazine and a pistol grip.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban enacted in 1994 expired in 2004. Attempts to renew this ban have failed, as have attempts to pass a new ban, such as the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 (AWB 2013).

Seven U.S. states have assault weapons bans: three were enacted before the 1994 federal ban and four more passed before the federal ban expired. The majority of states (43) have no assault weapons ban, although  Minnesota has training and background check requirements for purchasers of assault weapons that are stricter than those for ordinary firearms.

On June 4, 2021, a federal judge struck down the 3 decade long ban in California, though it is pending appeal by the California Attorney General. While there are no statewide assault weapon bans in Colorado and Illinois, local bans exist in certain cities or counties in each of these states. In 2018, most Americans who were polled supported a ban on assault weapons.

The 1994 federal and 1989 state ban in California were prompted by the 1989 Cleveland Elementary School shooting in Stockton, California. Existing and proposed weapon legislation come under renewed interest in the wake of mass shootings, most recently after the May 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

In addition to state bans, Washington, D.C. and some U.S. counties and municipalities have assault weapons laws.

​Federal assault weapons bans:

Expired Assault weapons Ban of 1994:
Main article: Federal Assault Weapons Ban

In January 1989, 34 children and a teacher were shot in Stockton California . The gunman used a semi automatic AK-47 firearm; five children perished. President George H.W. Bush banned all imports of semi automatic rifles in March 1989, and made the ban permanent in July 1989. 

The assault weapons ban tried to address public concern about mass shootings while limiting the impact on recreational firearms use.

In November 1993, the ban passed the United States Senate. The author of the ban, Dianne Feinstein D-CA, and other advocates said that it was a weakened version of the original proposal. 

In January 1994, Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, said handguns and assault weapons should be banned. In May of that year former presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan wrote to the United States House of Representatives in support of banning "semi-automatic assault guns."

They cited a 1993 CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll that found 77 percent of Americans supported a ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of such weapons. Rep. Jack Brooks, D-TX, then chair of the House Judiciary Committee, tried to remove the ban from the crime bill but failed.

The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly called the federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB and AWB 1994), was enacted in September 1994. The ban, including a ban on high-capacity magazines, became defunct (expired) in September 2004 per a 10-year sunset provision.

Proposed federal assault weapons bans:

Proposed Assault Weapons Ban of 2015:

The proposed bill H.R.4269, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2015, was introduced on December 16 of 2015 to the 114th United States Congress, sponsored by Representative David N. Cicilline of Rhode Island along with 123 original co-sponsors. It currently has 149 co-sponsors. 

This legislation states that its purpose is "To regulate assault weapons, to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited, and for other purposes."

The proposed legislation targets various firearm accessories, including the barrel shroud (a safety covering for the barrel of the firearm to prevent the operator from burning his or her hands as the barrel becomes heated after the firing of multiple rounds), pistol grip, and certain types of firearm stocks such as telescoping or collapsing stocks. 

Also included are lists of various classes and models of firearms, including: 
The legislation also proscribes high-capacity magazines.

State assault weapon bans:
See also: Gun laws in the United States by state ​
Public opinion:
Further information: Public opinion on gun control in the United States

Shortly after the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, a CBS News poll found that a majority of Americans (57%) supported a ban on assault weapons. 

Gallup noted a similarly high percentage of Americans thought that a ban would be an effective response to terrorism after the 2015 San Bernardino attack (55%), and in 2013 when the question was put in a referendum format ("Would you vote for or against a law that would reinstate and strengthen the ban on assault weapons that was in place from 1994 to 2004?") (56% support). 

But it noted that "Support for stricter gun control laws often rises after high-profile shooting incidents and then often subsides again," and that support for stricter gun controls, although still a majority view, had declined since the early 1990s. By October 2016, support for an assault weapons ban had fallen to a historical low of 36%.

In 2017 68% of American adults supported banning assault weapons, including 48% of gun owners and 77% of non-gun owners, and 38% of Republicans who own guns and 66% of Democrats who own guns, according to a Pew Research Center survey with an error attributable to sampling of +/- 2.8% at the 95% level of confidence.








Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Pictured below: Photo Gallery: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) test fires crime guns at Glendale Police gun rang (LA Times)
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), also referred to as BATFE, is a domestic law enforcement agency within the United States Department of Justice.

Its responsibilities include the investigation and prevention of federal offenses involving the unlawful use, manufacture, and possession of firearms and explosives; acts of arson and bombings; and illegal trafficking and tax evasion of alcohol and tobacco products.

The ATF also regulates via licensing the sale, possession, and transportation of firearms, ammunition, and explosives in interstate commerce. Many of the ATF's activities are carried out in conjunction with task forces made up of state and local law enforcement officers, such as Project Safe Neighborhoods.

The ATF operates a unique fire research laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, where full-scale mock-ups of criminal arson can be reconstructed. The agency is led by Marvin Richardson, Acting Director. Richardson previously served as the Associate Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer, the second highest ranking official at ATF, from October 2019 to June 2021.

​The ATF has 5,101 employees and an annual budget of $1.274 billion (2019)

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the ​Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives:​






​
Gun control after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting Pictured below: STOP SCHOOL SHOOTINGS TODAY
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting:

​The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, United States, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people.

Twenty of the victims were children between six and seven years old, and six were adult staff members. Earlier that day, before driving to the school, Lanza shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

The incident is the deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school in U.S. history, and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting overall. 

The shooting prompted renewed debate about gun control in the United States, including proposals to make the background-check system universal, and for new federal and state gun legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms and magazines which can hold more than ten rounds of ammunition.

A November 2013 report issued by the Connecticut State Attorney's office concluded that Lanza acted alone and planned his actions, but provided no indication why he did so, or why he targeted the school.

A report issued by the Office of the Child Advocate in November 2014 said that Lanza had Asperger syndrome and as a teenager had depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but concluded that they had "neither caused nor led to his murderous acts."

The report went on to say, "his severe and deteriorating internalized mental health problems [...] combined with an atypical preoccupation with violence [...] (and) access to deadly weapons [...] proved a recipe for mass murder."

List of Victims (and their age):
Killed:
  • Perpetrator's mother:
    • Nancy Lanza, 52 (shot at home)
  • School personnel:
    • Rachel D'Avino, 29, behavior therapist
    • Dawn Hochsprung, 47, principal
    • Anne Marie Murphy, 52, special education teacher
    • Lauren Rousseau, 30, teacher
    • Mary Sherlach, 56, school psychologist
    • Victoria Leigh Soto, 27, teacher
  • Students:
    • Charlotte Bacon, 6
    • Daniel Barden, 7
    • Olivia Engel, 6
    • Josephine Gay, 7
    • Dylan Hockley, 6
    • Madeleine Hsu, 6
    • Catherine Hubbard, 6
    • Chase Kowalski, 7
    • Jesse Lewis, 6
    • Ana Márquez-Greene, 6
    • James Mattioli, 6
    • Grace McDonnell, 7
    • Emilie Parker, 6
    • Jack Pinto, 6
    • Noah Pozner, 6
    • Caroline Previdi, 6
    • Jessica Rekos, 6
    • Avielle Richman, 6
    • Benjamin Wheeler, 6
    • Allison Wyatt, 6
  • Perpetrator:
    • Adam Lanza, 20 (suicide)
Wounded:
  • Natalie Hammond, 40, lead teacher
  • Deborah Pisani

Background:

As of November 30, 2012, 456 children were enrolled in kindergarten through fourth grade at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The school's security protocols had recently been upgraded, requiring visitors to be individually admitted after visual and identification review by video monitor. Doors to the school were locked at 9:30 a.m. each day, after morning arrivals.

Newtown is in Fairfield County, Connecticut, about 60 miles (100 km) from New York City. Violent crime had been rare in the town of 28,000 residents; there was only one homicide in the town in the ten years before the school shooting.

Under Connecticut law at the time, the 20-year-old Lanza was old enough to carry a long gun, such as a rifle or shotgun, but too young to own or carry handguns. The guns he used had been purchased legally by his mother.

Events:
​
Murder of Nancy Lanza:

Sometime before 9:30 a.m. EST on Friday, December 14, 2012, Lanza shot and killed his mother Nancy Lanza, aged 52, with a .22-caliber Savage Mark II rifle at their Newtown home. Investigators later found her body clad in pajamas, in her bed, with four gunshot wounds to her head. Lanza then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in his mother's car.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Background to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre: ___________________________________________________________________________

Gun control after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (above), multiple gun laws were proposed in the United States at the federal and state levels. The shooting renewed debate about gun control. The debates focused on requiring background checks on all firearm sales (called universal background checks), and on passing new and expanded assault weapon and high-capacity magazine bans.

Background:

On December 14, 2012, twenty children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. One other adult had been murdered before the shooter went to the school. It was the deadliest primary school shooting, the fourth-deadliest mass shooting by a single person, and one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.

Initial response:
Main article: Reactions to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

Within hours of the shooting, a We the People user started a petition asking the White House to "immediately address the issue of gun control through the introduction of legislation in Congress," and the gun control advocacy group the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence reported that an avalanche of donations caused its website to crash. 

That afternoon, President Barack Obama made a televised statement offering condolences on behalf of the nation to Connecticut governor, Dannel Malloy and saying, "we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics." 

Speaking at a December 16 memorial service in Newtown, Obama said he would "use whatever power this office holds" to prevent similar tragedies. By December 17, the White House petition had more than 150,000 signatures, and one week after the shooting it had almost 200,000, along with those on 30 similar petitions.

A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted days after the shooting showed "mixed results" regarding public opinion on firearm laws. While public support for strengthening gun laws rose 15 percent compared to a similar poll in 2011, there had been "little change in attitudes about some longstanding proposals, including the outlawing of assault rifles."

A law requiring background checks for all gun-show sales was favored by 92 percent of Americans and a law banning the sale and possession of high-capacity magazines (defined by the poll as those capable of holding more than 10 rounds) was supported by 62 percent of Americans. A record-high 74 percent opposed a ban on handguns and 51 percent opposed banning assault weapons.

White House actions:

On December 19, 2012, President Obama announced the formation of an inter-agency gun-violence task force headed by Vice President Joe Biden. The task force held 22 meetings and collected ideas from 229 organizations.

The NRA and congressional Republicans said that violent video games were a large part of the problem, but those did not end up on the final list of recommendations. After meeting with Biden, the NRA issued a statement saying that it was "disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment."

On January 16, 2013, President Obama announced a plan for reducing gun violence in four parts: closing background check loopholes; banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines; making schools safer; and increasing access to mental health services. 

The plan included 23 executive actions, signed immediately by the president, and 12 proposals for Congress.

The executive actions signed by President Obama were:
  • Issuing a presidential memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
  • Addressing unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), that may prevent states from making information available to NICS.
  • Improving incentives for states to share information with NICS.
  • Directing the attorney general to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.
  • Proposing a rule making to give law enforcement authorities the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.
  • Publishing a letter from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.
  • Starting a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.
  • Reviewing safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).
  • Issuing a presidential memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.
  • Releasing a report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and making it widely available to law enforcement authorities.
  • Nominating an ATF director.
  • Providing law enforcement authorities, first responders and school officials with proper training for armed attacks situations.
  • Maximizing enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.
  • Issuing a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to research gun violence.
  • Directing the attorney general to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenging the private sector to develop innovative technologies.
  • Clarify that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.
  • Releasing a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.
  • Providing incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.
  • Developing model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship, and institutions of higher education.
  • Releasing a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.
  • Finalizing regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within insurance exchanges.
  • Committing to finalizing mental health parity regulations.
  • Starting a national dialogue on mental health led by Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.

The White House's proposed congressional actions were these:
  • Requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales, including those by private sellers that currently are exempt.
  • Reinstating and strengthening the federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 (AWB 1994) that expired in 2004.
  • Limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds.
  • Banning the possession of armor-piercing bullets by anyone other than members of the military and law enforcement.
  • Increasing criminal penalties for "straw purchasers" who pass the required background check to buy a gun on behalf of someone else.
  • Acting on a $4 billion administration proposal to help keep 15,000 police officers on the street.
  • Confirming President Obama's nominee for director of the (ATF).
  • Eliminating a restriction that requires the ATF to allow the importation of weapons that are more than 50 years old.
  • Financing programs to train more police officers, first responders and school officials on how to respond to active armed attacks.
  • Provide additional $20 million to help expand the system that tracks violent deaths across the nation from 18 states to 50 states.
  • Providing $30 million in grants to states to help schools develop emergency response plans.
  • Providing financing to expand mental health programs for young people.

The proposals were opposed by the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), and opposition was expected by Republican and some Democratic legislators.

Advocacy groups actions:

On December 21, 2012 – between the formation of Biden's task force and the announcement of Obama's proposals – Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), expressed the gun-rights group's sympathy for the families of Newtown.

LaPierre said that gun-free school zones attract killers, and that "the media demonize lawful gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws, and fill the national media with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action." He said, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," and that debating legislation that won't work would be a waste of time.

He called on Congress "to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation" so that every school in America would be safe when pupils returned to school in January 2013. LaPierre announced that the NRA would develop a National Model School Shield Program for every American school that wants it.

After LaPierre's press conference, the Brady Campaign asked for donations to support its gun control advocacy and asked NRA members "who believe like we do, that we are better than this" to join its campaign. 

On January 8, 2013, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot and injured in a 2011 shooting in Tucson, launched Americans for Responsible Solutions to raise money for gun control efforts to counter the influence of powerful pro-gun groups such as the NRA.

Congressional action:

Proposed assault weapons ban:
Main article: Assault Weapons Ban of 2013

On January 24, 2013, Senator Dianne Feinstein and 24 Democratic cosponsors introduced S. 150, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 (AWB 2013). It was similar to the expired 1994 federal ban, but differed in that it used a one-feature test for a firearm to be considered an assault weapon, rather than the two-feature test of the 1994 ban. 

Gun-control advocates said the stricter test would make the weapons less appealing to gun enthusiasts. In addition, it would have banned:
  • the sale, transfer, importation or manufacture of about 150 named firearms;
  • firearms with "thumbhole stocks" and "bullet buttons";
  • the importation of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines;
  • and large-capacity ammunition feeding devices (defined as those capable of holding more than 10 rounds).

It would have grandfathered in weapons legally owned on the day of enactment and exempted 2,258 specific firearms "used for hunting or sporting purposes," of which only 33 were semiautomatic centerfire rifles.

Feinstein wanted the grandfathered firearms registered under the National Firearms Act, which currently registers machineguns, silencers and short barreled shotguns.

On March 14, 2013, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bill, though it was not expected to clear the full Senate or the House. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to leave the proposed ban out of the broader gun control bill, saying that it was unlikely to win the 60 votes it needed in the 100-member chamber and that it would jeopardize more widely supported proposals. 

On the morning of April 17, 2013, the bill failed on a vote of 40 to 60. It was supported by Democrat Reid and Republican Senator Mark Kirk, but 15 Democrats, one independent, and all the Republicans except Kirk voted against the ban.

Proposed universal background checks:

The Manchin-Toomey Amendment was a bi-partisan piece of legislation that would require background checks on most private party firearm sales, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. The amendment, S.Amdt. 715 to S. 649, was voted on and defeated on April 17, 2013 by a vote of 54–46. It needed 60 votes to pass.

State actions:
See also: 
As of April 3, 2013, only five states had passed stricter gun control laws, while ten states had passed laws that weakened restrictions on firearms:

Connecticut:

In the early morning hours of April 4, 2013, the Connecticut General Assembly passed new restrictions to the state's existing assault weapons ban. Governor Dannel Malloy signed them into law later the same day. The law banned the sale or purchase of magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds of ammunition like those used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and required universal background checks for all firearm purchases.

Gun owners challenged the law, but federal judge Alfred Covello upheld the law, ruling it constitutional and writing, "While the act burdens the plaintiffs' Second Amendment rights, it is substantially related to the important governmental interest of public safety and crime control." Gun owners said they would appeal.

In February 2014, the Hartford Courant reported that Connecticut had processed about 50,000 assault weapons certificates, but that anywhere from 50,000 to 350,000 remained unregistered. "And that means," wrote the Courant's Dan Haar, "as of Jan. 1, Connecticut has very likely created tens of thousands of newly minted criminals — perhaps 100,000 people, almost certainly at least 20,000 — who have broken no other laws." 

Frank Miniter wrote in an April 2014 Forbes op-ed "that more than 300,000 Connecticut residents decided not to register their 'assault weapons,' moved them out of state, or sold them."

New York:

In January 2013, New York became the first U.S. state to act after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act passed in the state Senate 43-18 on January 15 and cleared the New York State Assembly after about five hours of debate on Tuesday, January 16.

It was signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo one hour later. The act expanded the definition of assault weapons banned in New York, created a state database for pistol permits, reduced the maximum number of rounds legally allowed in magazines to seven from ten, and required universal background checks on all gun sales.

A dozen Republican conference members voted for the measure, but its Senate Republican leader did not attend the signing ceremony. The NRA called the assembly's actions "a secretive end run around the legislative and democratic process ... with no committee hearings and no public input," and said the law was "draconian."

In a related move, the state comptroller announced that the state's pension fund would freeze its investments in publicly traded firearm manufacturers. The fund's holdings in Smith & Wesson had been sold in December, after the Connecticut shootings.

Provisions of the SAFE Act have been challenged. On December 31, 2013, a federal court judge struck down the act's limit of seven rounds in magazines capable of holding 10, but upheld its expanded ban on assault weapons. 

As of April 2014 that decision was under appeal, and another challenge, that the bill was improperly fast-tracked, was dismissed by a trial-level judge. The plaintiff said that he will take that decision to the New York Court of Appeals.

Non-compliance with this new law has been reported in New York. Frank Miniter wrote in an April 2014 Forbes op-ed that one million residents own "assault weapons" and "high-capacity magazines" (which he says are political terms). He wrote that many had decided to practice civil disobedience and not register their weapons, a class A misdemeanor with a potential sentence of one year in prison. 

USA Today reported that some owners threatened not to register their weapons, and that some chose to bypass registration by modifying or selling them before the April 15 deadline. State police say they cannot report how many people have registered. By law, they must keep their database of assault weapon owners private.

Maryland:

Late on April 4, 2013, the Maryland General Assembly passed Governor Martin O'Malley's gun control bill, the Firearm Safety Act of 2013. It bans the purchase of 45 types of assault weapons and limits gun magazines to 10 rounds. It requires handgun licensing and fingerprinting for new gun owners, and bans those who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility from buying a gun.

​Further reading:







Right to Keep and Bear Arms in the United StatesPictured below: US Supreme Court Upholds Americans' Rights To Carry Firearms In Public; Biden 'deeply Disappointed'
​The right to keep and bear arms in the United States is a fundamental right protected by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, and by the constitutions of most U.S. states. 

The Second Amendment declares: "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 the United States, which has an English common law tradition, the concept of a right to keep and bear arms was recognized prior to the creation of a written national constitution.

English precedent:
See also: Assize of Arms of 1181

The American understanding of the right to keep and bear arms was influenced by the 1689 English Bill of Rights, an Act of Parliament, which also dealt with personal defence by Protestant English subjects.

The Bill of Rights did not create a new right to have arms but rather rescinded and deplored acts of the deposed King James II, a Roman Catholic, who had forced the disarming of Protestants, while arming and deploying armed Catholics contrary to Law (among other alleged violations of individual rights).

The Bill of Rights provided that Protestants could bear arms for their defense as permitted by law. It also established that the power to regulate the right to bear arms belonged to Parliament, not the monarch.

Sir William Blackstone wrote in the eighteenth century about the right to have arms being auxiliary to the "natural right of resistance and self-preservation", but conceded that the right was subject to their suitability and allowance by law.

The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defense, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the same statute and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.

Reception statutes:

After the 1776 American Revolution, one of the first legislative acts undertaken by each of the newly independent states was to adopt a "reception statute" that gave legal effect to the existing body of English common law to the extent that the legislation or the constitution had not explicitly rejected English law.

For example, The Reception Statute of Virginia (1776): And be it further ordained, That the common law of England, all statutes or acts of Parliament made in aid of the common law prior to the fourth year of the reign of King James the first, and which are of a general nature, not local to that kingdom, together with the several acts of the General Assembly of this colony now in force, so far as the same may consist with several ordinances, declarations, and resolutions of the General Convention, shall be the rule of decision, and shall be considered as in full force, until the same shall be altered by the legislative power of this colony.

The Reception statute of Pennsylvania (1777):

( 1.) Each and every one of the laws or acts of general assembly, that were in force and binding on the inhabitants of the said province on the 14th day of May last, shall be in force and binding on the inhabitants of this state, from and after the 10th day of February next, as fully and effectually, to all intents and purposes, as if the said laws, and each of them, had been made or enacted by this general assembly . . . and the common law and such of the statute laws of England, as have heretofore been in force in the said province, except as hereafter excepted.

(2.) Provided always, that so much of every law or act of general assembly of the province aforesaid, . . . as declares, orders, directs or commands any matter or thing repugnant to, against, or inconsistent with the constitution of this commonwealth, is hereby declared not to be revived, but shall be null and void, and of no force or effect; and so much of the statute laws of England aforesaid relating to felonies, as takes notice of or relates to treason or misprision of treason, or directs the style of the process in any case whatsoever, shall be, and is hereby declared, of no force or effect, anything herein contained to the contrary notwithstanding.

The New York Constitution of 1777 provides that:

[S]uch parts of the common law of England, and of the statute law of England and Great Britain, and of the acts of the legislature of the colony of New York, as together did form the law of the said colony on the 19th day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, shall be and continue the law of this State, subject to such alterations and provisions as the legislature of this State shall, from time to time, make concerning the same.

Over time, as new states were formed from federal territories, the territorial reception statutes became obsolete and were re-enacted as state law. For example, a reception statute enacted by legislation in the state of Washington states:

The common law, so far as it is not inconsistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States, or of the state of Washington nor incompatible with the institutions and condition of society in this state, shall be the rule of decision in all the courts of this state."

Missouri's reception of the common law is codified under Missouri Revised Statutes Section 1.010 (2000). The statute reads:
  • "The common law of England and all statutes and acts of parliament made prior to the fourth year of the reign of James the First, of a general nature,
  • which are local to that kingdom and not repugnant to or inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States, the constitution of this state, or the statute laws in force for the time being, are the rule of action and decision in this state, any custom or usage to the contrary notwithstanding,
  • but no act of the general assembly or law of this state shall be held to be invalid, or limited in its scope or effect by the courts of this state, for the reason that it is in derogation of, or in conflict with, the common law, or with such statutes or acts of parliament; but all acts of the general assembly, or laws, shall be liberally construed, so as to effectuate the true intent and meaning thereof.

Civilian usage meaning:

In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the right to arms preexisted the Constitution and in that case and in Presser v. Illinois (1886) recognized that the Second Amendment protected the right from being infringed by Congress.

​In United States v. Miller (1939), the Court again recognized that the right to arms is individually held and, citing the Tennessee case of Aymette v State, indicated that it protected the right to keep and bear arms that are "part of the ordinary military equipment" or the use of which could "contribute to the common defense."

In its first opportunity to rule specifically on whose right the Second Amendment protects, District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Court ruled that the amendment protects an individual right "to keep and carry arms in case of confrontation," not contingent on service in a militia, while indicating, in dicta, that restrictions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, on the carrying of arms in sensitive locations, and with respect to the conditions on the sale of firearms could pass constitutional muster.

In the 2010 case of McDonald v. Chicago, the Court applied incorporation doctrine to extend the Second Amendment's protections nationwide.

The people's right to have their own arms for their defense is described in the philosophical and political writings of the following: 
Though possessing arms appears to be distinct from "bearing" them, the possession of arms is recognized as necessary for and a logical precursor to the bearing of arms. Don Kates, a civil liberties lawyer, cites historic English usage describing the "right to keep and bear their private arms." Likewise, Sayoko Blodgett-Ford notes a non-military usage of the phrase in a pamphlet widely circulated by the dissenting minority dating from the time of the Pennsylvania ratifying convention for the U.S. Constitution: "[T]he people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed ..."

In commentary written by Judge Garwood in United States v. Emerson, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit concluded in 2001 that: "... there are numerous instances of the phrase 'bear arms' being used to describe a civilian's carrying of arms."

Early constitutional provisions or declarations of rights in at least some ten different states speak of the right of the 'people' [or 'citizen' or 'citizens'] 'to bear arms in defense of themselves [or 'himself'] and the state,' or equivalent words, thus indisputably reflecting that under common usage 'bear arms' was in no sense restricted to bearing arms in military service. See Bliss v. Commonwealth, 13 Am. Dec. 251, 12 Ky. 90 (Ky. 1822).

Similarly, in a released Senate report on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman, U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, states: "They argue that the Second Amendment's words "right of the people" mean "a right of the state" – apparently overlooking the impact of those same words when used in the First and Fourth Amendments.

The "right of the people" to assemble or to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is not contested as an individual guarantee. Still they ignore consistency and claim that the right to "bear arms" relates only to military uses. This not only violates a consistent constitutional reading of "right of the people" but also ignores that the second amendment protects a right to "keep" arms.

"When our ancestors forged a land "conceived in liberty", they did so with musket and rifle. When they reacted to attempts to dissolve their free institutions, and established their identity as a free nation, they did so as a nation of armed freemen. When they sought to record forever a guarantee of their rights, they devoted one full amendment out of ten to nothing but the protection of their right to keep and bear arms against governmental interference.

Under my chairmanship the Subcommittee on the Constitution will concern itself with a proper recognition of, and respect for, this right most valued by free men. (Orrin Hatch)

Likewise, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), No. 07-290, that "[t]he Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home."

​Military service and civilian usage meanings:

Some historians have argued that prior to and through the 18th century, the expression "bear arms" appeared exclusively in military contexts, as opposed to the use of firearms by civilians.

In late-eighteenth-century parlance, bearing arms was a term of art with an obvious military and legal connotation. ... As a review of the Library of Congress's data base of congressional proceedings in the revolutionary and early national periods reveals, the thirty uses of 'bear arms' and 'bearing arms' in bills, statutes, and debates of the Continental, Confederation, and United States' Congresses between 1774 and 1821 invariably occur in a context exclusively focused on the army or the militia.

However, this conclusion is disputed and may be due to selection bias, which arises from the use of a limited selection of government documents that overwhelmingly refer to matters of military service. 

Commenting on this previous research, other historians note: "Searching more comprehensive collections of English language works published before 1820 shows that there are a number of uses that ... have nothing to do with military service ... [and] The common law was in agreement."

Edward Christian's edition of Blackstone's Commentaries that appeared in 1790s described the rights of Englishmen (which every American colonist had been promised) in these terms 'everyone is at liberty to keep or carry a gun, if he does not use it for the [unlawful] destruction of game.' This right was separate from militia duties.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term to bear arms as: "to serve as a soldier, do military service, fight," dating to about 1330.

Garry Wills, author and history professor at Northwestern University, has written of the origin of the term bear arms: "By legal and other channels, the Latin "arma ferre" entered deeply into the European language of war. Bearing arms is such a synonym for waging war that Shakespeare can call a just war " 'justborne arms" and a civil war "self-borne arms."

Even outside the special phrase "bear arms," much of the noun's use echoes Latin phrases: to be under arms (sub armis), the call to arms (ad arma), to follow arms (arma sequi), to take arms (arma capere), to lay down arms (arma pœnere). "Arms" is a profession that one brother chooses the way another choose law or the church.

An issue undergoes the arbitrament of arms."..."One does not bear arms against a rabbit ...".

Garry Wills also cites Greek and Latin etymology: ..."Bear Arms" refers to military service, which is why the plural is used (based on Greek 'hopla pherein' and Latin 'arma ferre') – one does not bear arm, or bear an arm. The word means, etymologically, 'equipment' (from the root ar-* in verbs like 'ararisko', to fit out). It refers to the 'equipage' of war. Thus 'bear arms' can be used of naval as well as artillery warfare, since the "profession of arms" refers to all military callings.

Historically, the right to keep and bear arms, whether considered an individual or a collective or a militia right, did not originate fully formed in the Bill of Rights in 1791; rather, the Second Amendment was the codification of the six-centuries-old responsibility to keep and bear arms for king and country that was inherited from the English Colonists that settled North America, tracing its origin back to the Assize of Arms of 1181 that occurred during the reign of Henry II.

Through being codified in the United States Constitution, the common law right was continued and guaranteed for the People, and statutory law enacted subsequently by Congress cannot extinguish the pre-existing common law right to keep and bear arms.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution refers to a pre-existing right to keep and bear arms: "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.

The right is often presented in the United States as being an unenumerated, pre-existing right, such as provided for by the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution, interpreted by some as providing for unenumerated rights, and therefore implicitly a right to keep and bear arms: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Some have seen the Second Amendment as derivative of a common law right to keep and bear arms; Thomas B. McAffee & Michael J. Quinlan, writing in the North Carolina Law Review said "... Madison did not invent the right to keep and bear arms when he drafted the Second Amendment – the right was pre-existing at both common law and in the early state constitutions."

Akhil Reed Amar similarly notes the basis of Common Law for the first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution, "following John Randolph Tucker's famous oral argument in the 1887 Chicago anarchist case, Spies v. Illinois": Though originally the first ten Amendments were adopted as limitations on Federal power, yet insofar as they secure and recognize fundamental rights – common law rights – of the man, they make them privileges and immunities of the man as citizen of the United States ...

Uviller and Merkel hold that the right to bear arms was not reserved for the state, but rather was an individual and personal right for arms only to the extent needed to maintain a well regulated militia to support the state.

They also hold that a militia recognizable to the framers of the Constitution has ceased to exist in the United States resulting from deliberate Congressional legislation and also societal neglect; nonetheless, "Technically, all males aged seventeen to forty-five are members of the unorganized militia, but that status has no practical legal significance."

A few academic writers published their opinions in several works:

From the text as well as a fair understanding of the contemporary ethic regarding arms and liberty, it seems to us overwhelmingly evident that the principal purpose of the Amendment was to secure a personal, individual entitlement to the possession and use of arms. We cannot, however, (as the individual rights contingent generally does) disregard entirely the first part of the text proclaiming a well regulated militia necessary to the security of a free state.

... we understand the Second Amendment as though it read: "Inasmuch as and so long as a well regulated Militia shall be necessary to the security of a free state and so long as privately held arms shall be essential to the maintenance thereof, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." "..to us, the language of the Amendment cannot support a right to personal weaponry independent of the social value of a regulated organization of armed citizens.

Early commentary in federal courts:
See also: Firearm case law in the United States

In the century following the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the intended meaning and application of the Second Amendment drew less interest than it does in modern times.

The vast majority of regulation was done by states, and the first case law on weapons regulation dealt with state interpretations of the Second Amendment. A notable exception to this general rule was Houston v. Moore, 18 U.S. 1 (1820), where the Supreme Court mentioned the Second Amendment in an aside.

Dred Scott v. Sandford:

In the Nineteenth century considerable attention in public discourse and the courts was directed to the issue of arming of slaves (prior to the Civil War), and later to the right of slaves to belong to militia and the arming of these individuals.

Most famously this is seen in the court arguments of the 1857 court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, whether the slave Dred Scott could be a citizen with rights, including the right to bear arms. This debate about the rights of slaves and former slaves often included the usage of the term 'bear arms' with the meaning of individuals having or not having the right to possess firearms.

In the Dred Scott decision, the opinion of the court stated that if African Americans were considered U.S. citizens, "It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right ... to keep and carry arms wherever they went."

Early commentary in state courts:

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is a federal provision. In 2010, this "fundamental" and "individual" right was "fully incorporated" with the 14th Amendment per the SCOTUS ruling made in McDonald v. City of Chicago, which upheld the prior opinion made in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Each of the fifty states also has its own state constitution. Forty-four states have chosen to explicitly embody a right to bear arms into their state constitutions. Each of the state constitutions, state laws, and state courts addresses the state-based right to bear arms distinctly within its respective jurisdictions. 

The degree and the nature of the protection, prohibition, and regulation at the state level varies from state to state. The District of Columbia, not being a state, falls within the federal jurisdiction.

Approximately thirty-one states have explicitly chosen to include the right to arms for "individual right", "defense of self", "defense of home" or similarly worded reasons.

Approximately thirteen states, as with the U.S. Constitution, did not choose to explicitly include "individual", "self" or "home" wording associated with a right to bear arms for their specific states.

Approximately twenty-eight states have explicitly chosen to include the right to bear arms for "security of a free state", "defense of state", "common defense" or similarly worded reasons, as with the U.S. Constitution. Approximately sixteen states did not choose to include explicitly "free state", "defense of state" or "common defense" wording for their specific state.

Whether the inclusion of these kinds of wording in state constitutions has relevance to the issue of whether implicit "individual" rights exist, or whether such rights (if any) are implicitly protected by the states' constitutions or by the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, remains a matter of dispute.

However, since the SCOTUS has "fully incorporated" the 2nd and 14th Amendments in their 2010 opinion and order in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the right to keep and bear arms is "fully applicable" to the states and limits the states on any and all regulations and restrictions they choose to take, and federal Constitutional rights take precedence over state, local and other laws that regulate to "Right of Lawful Citizens to keep and bear Arms for self-defense, a 'central component' of the 2nd Amendment" (see McDonald v. City of Chicago (SC 2010)).

Regarding the state interpretations of these state and the federal constitutional rights to bear arms, state courts have addressed the meaning of these specific rights in considerable detail.

Two different models have emerged from state jurisprudence: an individual right (defense of self or home) and a collective (defense of the state) right. The states cannot lessen or restrict any Bill of Rights guarantee that has been "fully incorporated" (American jurisprudence) and that the right that is "fully incorporated" also applies to the respective State Constitutions; again, the states can only "add to" these rights but can never "diminish" these rights by state and local laws.

​
Bliss:

Bliss v. Commonwealth (1822, KY) addressed the right to bear arms pursuant to Art. 10, Sec. 23 of the Second Constitution of Kentucky (1799): "That the rights of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned." This was interpreted to include the right to carry a concealed sword in a cane.

This case has been described as about "a statute prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons [that] was violative of the Second Amendment." Others, however, have seen no conflict with the Second Amendment by the Commonwealth of Kentucky's statute under consideration in Bliss since "The Kentucky law was aimed at concealed weapons. No one saw any conflict with the Second Amendment. As a matter of fact, most of the few people who considered the question at all believed amendments to the U.S. Constitution did not apply to state laws."

The Kentucky High Court stated in Bliss, "But it should not be forgotten, that it is not only a part of the right that is secured by the constitution; it is the right entire and complete, as it existed at the adoption of the constitution; and if any portion of that right be impaired, immaterial how small the part may be, and immaterial the order of time at which it be done, it is equally forbidden by the constitution." The "constitution" mentioned in this quote refers to Kentucky's Constitution.

The case prompted outrage in the Kentucky House, all the while recognizing that Section 23 of the Second Constitution of Kentucky (1799) did guarantee individuals the right to bear arms.

The Bliss ruling, to the extent that it dealt with concealed weapons, was overturned by constitutional amendment with Section 26 in Kentucky's Third Constitution (1850) banning the future carrying of concealed weapons, while still asserting that the bearing of arms in defense of themselves and the state was an individual and collective right in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

This recognition has remained to the present day in the Commonwealth of Kentucky's Fourth Constitution, enacted in 1891, in Section 1, Article 7, that guarantees "The right to bear arms in defense of themselves and of the State, subject to the power of the General Assembly to enact laws to prevent persons from carrying concealed weapons."

As noted in the Northern Kentucky Law Review Second Amendment Symposium: Rights in Conflict in the 1980s, vol. 10, no. 1, 1982, p. 155, "The first state court decision resulting from the "right to bear arms" issue was Bliss v. Commonwealth. The court held that "the right of citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State must be preserved entire, ..."

"This holding was unique because it stated that the right to bear arms is absolute and unqualified."

The importance of Bliss is also seen from the defense subsequently given against a murder charge in Kentucky against Mattews Ward, who in 1852 pulled out a concealed pistol and fatally wounded his brother's teacher over an accusation regarding eating chestnuts in class. Ward's defense team consisted of eighteen lawyers, including U.S. Senator John Crittenden, former Governor of Kentucky, and former United States Attorney General.

The defense successfully defended Ward in 1854 through an assertion that "a man has a right to carry arms; I am aware of nothing in the laws of God or man, prohibiting it. The Constitution of Kentucky and our Bill of Rights guarantee it. The Legislature once passed an act forbidding it, but it was decided unconstitutional, and overruled by our highest tribunal, the Court of Appeals."

As noted by Cornell, "Ward's lawyers took advantage of the doctrine advanced in Bliss and wrapped their client's action under the banner of a constitutional right to bear arms. Ward was acquitted."

Aymette:

In Aymette v. State, 21 Tenn. 154, 156 (1840), the Tennessee Supreme Court construed the guarantee in Tennessee's 1834 Constitution that 'the free white men of this State have a right to Keep and bear arms for their common defense.' 

Explaining that the provision was adopted with the same goals as the Federal Constitution's Second Amendment, the court wrote: "The words 'bear arms' ... have reference to their military use, and were not employed to mean wearing them about the person as part of the dress.

As the object for which the right to keep and bear arms is secured, is of general and public nature, to be exercised by the people in a body, for their common defense, so the arms, the right to keep which is secured, are such as are usually employed in civilized warfare, and that constitute the ordinary military equipment."
  1. The act of 1837–38, ch. 137, sec. 2, which prohibits any person from wearing any Bowie knife, or Arkansas toothpick, or other knife or weapon in form, shape or size resembling a Bowie knife or Arkansas toothpick under his clothes, or concealed about his person, does not conflict with the 26th section of the first article of the bill of rights, securing to the free white citizens the right to keep and bear arms for their common defense.
  2. The arms, the right to keep and bear which is secured by the constitution, are such as are usually employed in civilized warfare, and constitute the ordinary military equipment; the legislature have the power to prohibit the keeping or wearing weapons dangerous to the peace and safety of the citizens, and which are not usual in civilized warfare.
  3. The right to keep and bear arms for the common defense, is a great political right. It respects the citizens on the one hand, and the rulers on the other; and although this right must be inviolably preserved, it does not follow that the legislature is prohibited from passing laws regulating the manner in which these arms may be employed.

Nunn:

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in Nunn v. Georgia (Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. (1 Kel.) 243 (1846)) that a state law banning handguns was an unconstitutional violation of the Second Amendment. This was the first gun control measure to be overturned on Second Amendment grounds. 

The Supreme Court in its ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller said Nunn "perfectly captured the way in which the operative clause of the Second Amendment furthers the purpose announced in the prefatory clause."

"The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State".

"Our opinion is, that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right, originally belonging to our forefathers, trampled under foot by Charles I. and his two wicked sons and successors, re-established by the revolution of 1688, conveyed to this land of liberty by the colonists, and finally incorporated conspicuously in our own Magna Charta!"

Buzzard:

In State v. Buzzard (1842, Ark), the Arkansas high court adopted a militia-based, political interpretation, reading of the right to bear arms under state law, and upheld the 21st section of the second article of the Arkansas Constitution that declared, "that the free white men of this State shall have a right to keep and bear arms for their common defense", while rejecting a challenge to a statute prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons.

Buzzard had carried a concealed weapon and stood "indicted by virtue of the authority of the 13th section of an act of the Legislature prohibiting any person wearing a pistol, dirk, large knife or sword-cane concealed as a weapon, unless upon a journey, under the penalties of fine and imprisonment."

Justice Lacy, in a dissenting opinion in Buzzard, summarizing the majority viewpoint to which he disagreed, declared: "That the words "a well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free State", and the words "common defense" clearly show the true intent and meaning of these Constitutions [i.e., Ark. and U.S.] and prove that it is a political and not an individual right, and, of course, that the State, in her legislative capacity, has the right to regulate and control it: This being the case, then the people, neither individually nor collectively, have the right to keep and bear arms."

Joel Prentiss Bishop's influential Commentaries on the Law of Statutory Crimes (1873) took Buzzard's militia-based interpretation, a view that Bishop characterized as the "Arkansas doctrine", as the orthodox view of the right to bear arms in American law.

Political scientist Earl Kruschke has categorized both Bliss and Buzzard as being "cases illustrating the individual view." Professor Eugene Volokh revealed, in the California Political Review, that a statement in a concurring opinion in Buzzard was the only support for a collective right view of the right to keep and bear arms in the 19th century.

Salina v. Blaksley

In 1905, the Kansas Supreme Court in Salina v. Blaksley made the first collective right judicial interpretation. The Kansas high court declared: "That the provision in question applies only to the right to bear arms as a member of the state militia, or some other military organization provided for by law, is also apparent from the second amendment to the federal Constitution, which says: '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.'"

​Modern commentary:

Interpretive models:
Further information: 
Three models of interpreting the right to bear arms in the United States commonly exist. These three models are founded on differing interpretations of the Second Amendment, "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."

The first model, the individual-rights model, holds that a right of individuals is to own and possess firearms, much as the First Amendment protects a right of individuals to engage in free speech. This view was confirmed by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) had previous interpretations by the Court.

Prior to the Supreme Court's ruling in Heller there was a split among the federal courts, with nine of the federal circuit courts of appeal supporting a modified collective rights view, two of the federal circuits supporting an individual rights view, and one federal circuit court having not addressed the question.

The second two models focus on the preamble, or "purpose" clause, of the Amendment – the words "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State." The second model, the collective model, holds that the right to bear arms belongs to the people collectively rather than to individuals, under the belief that the right's only purpose is to enable states to maintain a militia.

The third model, the modified collective model, holds that the right to keep and bear arms exists only for individuals actively serving in the militia, and then only pursuant to such regulations as may be prescribed.

Federal case commentary:

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia in 2008 wrote that the right to bear arms is not unlimited and is subject to reasonable prohibitions and regulations and subsequently federal court rulings have upheld existing gun prohibitions and regulations.

Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, has stated that the individual rights model must yield to reasonable regulation. 

Strossen said "it is no more absolute than freedom of speech or any other right in the Constitution. No right is absolute; the government is always allowed to restrict the right if it can satisfy Constitutional strict scrutiny and show the restriction is narrowly tailored to promote a goal of compelling importance."

In October 2001, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stated:
there are numerous instances of the phrase 'bear arms' being used to describe a civilian's carrying of arms.

Early constitutional provisions or declarations of rights in at least some ten different states speak of the right of the 'people' [or 'citizen' or 'citizens'] "to bear arms in defense of themselves [or 'himself'] and the state,' or equivalent words, thus indisputably reflecting that under common usage 'bear arms' was in no sense restricted to bearing arms in military service."

United States v. Miller:
Main article: United States v. Miller

​In United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), the Supreme Court rejected a Second Amendment challenge to the National Firearms Act prohibiting the interstate transportation of unregistered Title II weapons: Jack Miller and Frank Layton "did unlawfully ... transport in interstate commerce:
  • from ... Claremore
  • ... Oklahoma
  • to ... Siloam Springs ... Arkansas
  • a certain firearm ...
  • a double barrel
  • ... shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches in length
  • ... at the time of so transporting said firearm in interstate commerce ... not having registered said firearm as required by Section 1132d of Title 26,
  • United States Code,
  • ... and not having in their possession a stamp-affixed written order ... as provided by Section 1132C ...

In a unanimous opinion authored by Justice McReynolds, the Supreme Court stated "the objection that the Act usurps police power reserved to the States is plainly untenable." As the Court explained:
  • "In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to any preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.

Gun rights advocates claim that the Court in Miller ruled that the Second Amendment protected the right to keep arms that are part of "ordinary military equipment." 

They also claim that the Court did not consider the question of whether the sawed-off shotgun in the case would be an applicable weapon for personal defense, instead looking solely at the weapon's suitability for the "common defense." 

Law professor Andrew McClurg states, "The only certainty about Miller is that it failed to give either side a clear-cut victory. Most modern scholars recognize this fact"

District of Columbia v. Heller:
Main article: District of Columbia v. Heller:

According to the syllabus prepared by the U.S. Supreme Court Reporter of Decisions, in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

Other legal summaries of the court's findings in this case are similar.

McDonald v. Chicago:
Main article: McDonald v. Chicago

On June 28, 2010, the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 3025 (2010) held that the Second Amendment was fully incorporated within the 14th Amendment.

This means that the court ruled that the Second Amendment limits state and local governments to the same extent that it limits the federal government. It also remanded a case regarding a Chicago handgun prohibition.

Four of the five Justices in the majority voted to do so by way of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, while the fifth Justice, Clarence Thomas, voted to do so through the amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause.

The politics of the right to keep and bear arms:
Main article: Gun politics in the United States

​​The political party that advocates most for gun rights is the Libertarian Party, who believe gun rights is a natural right for everyone. They are followed by the Republican Party, which advocates for gun rights, but support gun control measures, like red flag laws, and prohibition of certain individuals from owning guns.

The Democratic Party advocates for the most gun control measures historically. Interest groups, primarily in the United States, exert political pressure for and against legislation limiting the right to keep and bear arms.

This political debate in America is organized between those who seek stricter regulations and those who believe gun regulations violate the Second Amendment protection of a right to keep and bear arms. 

The largest advocacy group in this regard is the National Rifle Association, and its political wing, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, aside from the Libertarian Party which advocates gun rights for everyone in their political platform.

Several other groups including the Gun Owners of America and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, while smaller in size, are also politically active. Gun control advocacy groups include the Brady Campaign (see below) and Everytown for Gun Safety, which are increasingly gaining political clout and spending power.

There are also socialist gun rights groups, including the Socialist Rifle Association and Redneck Revolt.

See also







Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act Pictured below: ​H.R. 1025 (103rd): Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (Pub.L. 103–159, 107 Stat. 1536, enacted November 30, 1993), often referred to as the Brady Act or the Brady Bill, is an Act of the United States Congress that mandated federal background checks on firearm purchasers in the United States, and imposed a five-day waiting period on purchases, until the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was implemented in 1998.

The act was appended to the end of Section 922 of title 18, United States Code. The intention of the act was to prevent persons with previous serious convictions from purchasing firearms.
The original legislation was introduced into the House of Representatives by Representative Chuck Schumer in March 1991, but was never brought to a vote.

The bill was reintroduced by Rep. Schumer on February 22, 1993, and the final version was passed on November 11, 1993. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 30, 1993, and the law went into effect on February 28, 1994.

​The Act was named after James Brady, who was shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr. during an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981.

Provisions:

The Brady Bill requires that background checks be conducted on individuals before a firearm may be purchased from a federally licensed dealer, manufacturer or importer—unless an exception applies.

If there are no additional state restrictions, a firearm may be transferred to an individual upon approval by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) maintained by the FBI.

In some states, proof of a previous background check can be used to bypass the NICS check. For example, a state-issued concealed carry permit usually includes a background check equivalent to the one required by the Act. Other alternatives to the NICS check include state-issued handgun purchase permits or mandatory state or local background checks.

In Section 922(g) of title 18, United States Code the Brady Bill prohibits certain persons from shipping or transporting any firearm in interstate or foreign commerce, or receiving any firearm which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce, or possessing any firearm in or affecting commerce. These prohibitions apply to any person who:
  1. Has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
  2. Is a fugitive from justice;
  3. Is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance;
  4. Has been adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution;
  5. Is an alien illegally or unlawfully in the United States;
  6. Has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
  7. Having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced U.S. citizenship;
  8. Is subject to a court order that restrains the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of such intimate partner;
  9. Has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, or;
  10. Is under indictment for a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.

Section 922(n) of title 18, United States Code makes it unlawful for any person who is under indictment for a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year to ship or transport any firearm in interstate or foreign commerce, or receive any firearm which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.

After a prospective buyer completes the appropriate form, the holder of a Federal Firearms License (FFL) initiates the background check by phone or computer. Most checks are determined within minutes. If a determination is not obtained within three business days then the transfer may legally be completed.

Firearm transfers by unlicensed private sellers that are "not engaged in the business" of dealing firearms are not subject to the Brady Act, but may be covered under other federal, state, and local restrictions. The Brady Act has since been amended that private transfers of firearms must be conducted through a Federal Firearms Licensee, who, at their discretion may charge a fee for processing the transaction through the NICS system.

The Brady Bill also does not apply to licensed Curios & Relics (C&R) collectors, but only in respect to C&R firearms. The FFL Category 03 Curio & Relic license costs $30 and is valid for three years.

Licensed C&R collectors may also purchase C&R firearms from private individuals or from federal firearms dealers, whether in their home state or in another state, and ship C&R firearms in interstate commerce by common carrier.

Curios or relics are defined in 27 CFR 478.11 as "Firearms which are of special interest to collectors by reason of some quality other than is associated with firearms intended for sporting use or as offensive or defensive weapons." The regulation further states:

To be recognized as curios or relics, firearms must fall within one of the following categories:
(a) Firearms which were manufactured at least 50 years prior to the current date, but not including replicas thereof;

(b) Firearms which are certified by the curator of a municipal, State, or Federal museum which exhibits firearms to be curios or relics of museum interest; or

(c) Any other firearms which derive a substantial part of their monetary value from the fact that they are novel, rare, bizarre, or because of their association with some historical figure, period, or event. Proof of qualification of a particular firearm under this category may be established by evidence of present value and evidence that like firearms are not available except as collector's items, or that the value of like firearms available in ordinary commercial channels is substantially less.

James and Sarah Brady:

​​James Brady was press secretary to President Ronald Reagan when both he and the president, along with Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and District of Columbia police officer Thomas Delehanty, were shot on March 30, 1981, during an assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr., Brady was shot in the head and suffered a serious wound that left him partially paralyzed for life.

John Hinckley Jr. bought the .22 caliber Röhm RG-14 revolver used in the shooting at a Dallas, Texas, pawn shop on October 13, 1980. In a purchase application that he filled out before taking possession of the revolver, he provided a false home address on the form and showed an old Texas driver's license as "proof" that he lived there.

This constituted a felony offense. Additionally, Hinckley had been arrested four days earlier at the Metropolitan Airport in Nashville, Tennessee, when he attempted to board an American Airlines flight for New York with three handguns and some loose ammunition in his carry-on bag. That same day, President Jimmy Carter was in Nashville and scheduled to travel to New York. Finally, Hinckley had been under psychiatric care prior to his gun purchase.

According to Sarah Brady, had a background check been conducted on Hinckley, it could have detected some, or all, of this important criminal and mental health history.

Sarah Brady, James's wife, became active in the gun control movement a few years after the shooting. She joined the Board of Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI) in 1985 and became its chair in 1989.

Two years later, she became Chair of the center to Prevent Handgun Violence, HCI's 501(c)(3) sister organization. In 2001, the organizations were renamed the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in honor of James and Sarah.

​On February 4, 1987, the Brady Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress for the first time. Sarah Brady and HCI made the passage of the Brady bill, as it was commonly called, their top legislative priority. 

In a March 1991 editorial, President Reagan opined that the Brady Act would provide a crucial "enforcement mechanism" to end the "honor system" of the 1968 Gun Control Act and "can't help but stop thousands of illegal handgun purchases."

James and Sarah Brady were guests of honor when President Bill Clinton signed the Brady Act into law on November 30, 1993. President Clinton has stated, "If it hadn't been for them, we would not have passed the Brady Law." 

In December 2000, the Boards of Trustees for HCI and the center to Prevent Handgun Violence voted to honor James and Sarah Brady's hard work and commitment to gun control by renaming the two organizations the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

In 2000, controversy arose when Sarah Brady purchased a .30-06 Springfield rifle in Delaware for her son. Gun rights groups claimed that this action was a straw purchase, intended to avoid the NICS, and may have also violated Delaware firearms purchase laws. No charges were ever filed against Sarah Brady, however.

A firearm purchased as a gift is not considered a straw purchase under U.S. federal law if the recipient may legally possess it. Critics pointed out, however, that private firearm transfers like the one made by Sarah Brady are a common concern of gun control advocates (although exemptions for family members have been allowed in past legislation to regulate such sales).

Opposition by National Rifle Association:

After the Brady Act was originally proposed in 1987, the National Rifle Association (NRA) mobilized to defeat the legislation, spending millions of dollars in the process. While the bill eventually did pass in both chambers of the United States Congress, the NRA was able to win an important concession.

The final version of the legislation provided that, in 1998, the five-day waiting period for handgun sales would be replaced by an instant computerized background check that involved no waiting periods.

The NRA then funded lawsuits in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming that sought to strike down the Brady Act as unconstitutional. These cases wound their way through the courts, eventually leading the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Brady Act in the case of Printz v. United States.

In Printz, the NRA argued that the Brady Act was unconstitutional because its provisions requiring local law enforcement officers to conduct background checks was a violation of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution (Brief Amicus Curiae of the National Rifle Association of America in Support of Petitioners, Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 1997). Based on these grounds, the NRA told the Court "the whole Statute must be voided.
  • "The Brady bill would require the handgun dealer to provide a copy of the prospective purchaser's sworn statement to local law enforcement authorities so that background checks could be made.
  • Based upon the evidence in states that already have handgun purchase waiting periods, this bill—on a nationwide scale—can't help but stop thousands of illegal handgun purchases." 
  • (Above by President Ronald Reagan, March 29, 1991)

​In its 1997 decision in the case, the Supreme Court ruled that the provision of the Brady Act that compelled state and local law enforcement officials to perform the background checks was unconstitutional on 10th amendment grounds. The Court determined that this provision violated both the concept of federalism and that of the unitary executive.

However, the overall Brady statute was upheld and state and local law enforcement officials remained free to conduct background checks if they so chose. The vast majority continued to do so. 

In 1998, background checks for firearm purchases became mostly a federally run activity when NICS came online, although many states continue to mandate state run background checks before a gun dealer may transfer a firearm to a buyer.

Background checks for firearms purchases operate in only one direction because of the Firearm Owners Protection Act. That is, although a firearms dealer may obtain electronic information that an individual is excluded from firearms purchases, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) do not receive electronic information in return to indicate what firearms are being purchased.

Since 1998:

From the inception of the NICS system in 1998 through 2014, more than 202 million Brady background checks have been conducted. During this period approximately 1.2 million attempted firearm purchases were blocked by the Brady background check system, or about 0.6 percent. The most common reason for denials are previous felony convictions.

Prosecution and conviction of violators of the Brady Act, however, is extremely rare. During the first 17 months of the Act, only seven individuals were convicted. In the first year of the Act, 250 cases were referred for prosecution and 217 of them were rejected.

A 2000 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that the implementation of the Brady Act was associated with "reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or older."

While the same study was unable to conclusively demonstrate the Brady Act had an effect on other gun-related deaths, later studies found waiting periods for handguns significantly reduce overall gun deaths. 

Georgetown University professor Jens Ludwig and Duke University professor Philip J. Cook, who conducted the JAMA study, praised the law. However, they also pointed out that it did not regulate a "secondary market" which involved acquiring guns from non-dealers, stating that "Our own view is that the Brady Act was a useful—but modest—first step, reducing the availability of guns to high-risk groups such as teens and convicted felons.

The Brady Act's apparent effect in reducing gun suicides is encouraging, and implies that lives were probably saved as a result of the waiting period that was required during the first four years of the legislation. But effective action to reduce gun crime may require extending the regulatory umbrella to include the secondary market." 

​Despite allegations that firearm-related homicides did not greatly decrease by 2000, nationwide data collected by the U.S. Department of Justice showed otherwise, with firearm related homicides dropping from 17,527 in 1994 to 10,801 in 2000. 

However, other factors played a role as well, as non-gun-related violence declined throughout the period. Researchers continue to debate how much of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to the Brady Act or other gun control legislation.

See also:




​


Campus carry in the United States Pictured below: Color-coded Map of United States covering campus carry laws by state.
In the United States, campus carry refers to the possession of firearms on college or university campuses. Each state has its own discretion on laws concerning campus carry.

As of 2019:
  • 16 states ban the carrying of a concealed weapon on a college campus;
  • 23 states allow individual colleges and universities to make decisions on whether to prohibit or permit the carrying of a concealed weapon on their campuses;
  • 11 states (either because of state legislation or judicial decision) permit the carrying of concealed weapons on public post-secondary college campuses;
  • and one state (Utah) has a specific state law requiring all public colleges and universities to allow the carrying of concealed weapons on their property

​History:

The first state to legalize campus carry on a statewide basis was Utah in 2004. In 2012, in a lawsuit brought by the activist group Students for Concealed Carry, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the 2003 Colorado Concealed Carry Act prohibited public universities in the state from regulating the possession of concealed handguns on campus.

Before the 2012 decision, the University of Colorado System, although not other Colorado public universities had banned firearms possessions on its property, as a non-binding state attorney general's opinion stated that the University of Colorado was not subject to the Concealed Carry Act.

Public opinion:

Campus carry falls under the general gun debate in the United States.

While there are a variety of First Amendment attacks to compulsory campus carry laws that can be made, there is no countervailing Second Amendment right to carry firearms on college campuses.

Even if a court were to recognize such a right, the First Amendment rights to academic freedom and free speech trump this individual right to self-defense because firearms have a chilling effect on freedom of thought and speech, and these rights are more valued than firearms.

Many believe that permitting firearms in a classroom would lead to disruption in the learning processes of students but also diminish the overall safety of students. "Ball State University found that 78% of students from 15 Midwestern colleges and universities would feel unsafe if students, faculty and visitors carried concealed firearms on campus" (Marc Randsford, 2014). 

In a study published in 2012, survey results from two college campuses indicated a majority of faculty, students, and staff (73%) did not want qualified individuals to be able to carry a gun on campus, 70% did not feel safer with more concealed guns on campus, and 72% did not think armed faculty, students, and staff would promote a greater sense of campus safety.

Campus carry by state:

There are three different forms of campus carry laws that states enact: mandatory, institutional, or non-permissive.

Mandatory refers to a law or court decision which requires a publicly funded institution to generally allow firearms on campus, though some locations may be exempted depending on the school policy (e.g. in a secure area, or at a sporting event).

Restricted areas vary by state and individual school; refer to a school's specific policy for details. Some states require the firearm to be concealed (e.g. Texas) while others allow concealed or open carry (e.g. Utah).

Institutional refers to the decision of each institution to determine whether to allow firearms on campus. School firearm policies generally do not have the force of law. The majority of institutions in these states opt to ban guns with a few exceptions (e.g. Liberty University).

Non-permissive refers to the prohibition of firearms on any institutional property by law, with limited exceptions.

Click here for full details for each state, including references to state laws and campus policies 

See also:





​

Concealed Carry in the United States Pictured below: The History of Concealed Weapons Laws in the United States: The Dawn of the Era of Permitless Carry
Concealed carry, or carrying a concealed weapon (CCW), is the practice of carrying a weapon (such as a handgun) in public in a concealed manner, either on one's person or in close proximity. CCW is often practiced as a means of self-defense. Every state in the United States allows for concealed carry of a handgun either permitless or with a permit, although the difficulty in obtaining a permit varies per jurisdiction.

There is conflicting evidence regarding the effect that concealed carry has on crime rates. A comprehensive 2004 literature review by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that there is no link between the existence of laws that allow concealed carry and crime rates.

A 2020 review by the RAND Corporation concluded there was limited evidence that shall-issue concealed carry laws may increase violent crime overall, while there was inconclusive evidence for the effect of shall-issue laws on all individual types of violent crime.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Concealed Carry in the United States:

​





"TERROR ON REPEAT: A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings" (Washington Post 11/16/2023) Pictured below: When a gunman fires an AR-15 ..
Editor’s note: The photos, videos and personal accounts below are extremely disturbing and may be too upsetting for some people.

"​Why we are publishing disturbing content from AR-15 mass shootings"


"In “Terror on repeat,” the latest story in our series examining the role of the AR-15 in American life, The Washington Post is taking the unusual step of publishing photographs and videos taken during the immediate aftermaths of some of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.

Like other news organizations, we cover the effects of these tragedies when they occur. But because journalists generally do not have access to crime scenes and news organizations rarely if ever publish graphic content, most Americans have no way to understand the full scope of an AR-15’s destructive power or the extent of the trauma inflicted on victims, survivors and first responders when a shooter uses this weapon on people.

Drawing on the details of 11 mass killings from the past 11 years, this story is the result of a months-long effort to examine these episodes as a cumulative and relatively recent phenomenon that has upended communities across the country.

The story is largely narrated by those who experienced the shootings firsthand. It reveals the commonalities shared by each tragedy — the sudden transition from normal life to terror, then the onset of chaos, destruction and death, and, finally, the gruesome aftermath of investigation and cleanup.

Our decision to publish this story came after careful and extensive deliberation among the reporters and editors who worked on it, as well as senior leaders in our newsroom.

The goal was to balance two crucial objectives: to advance the public’s understanding of mass killers’ increasing use of this readily available weapon, which was originally designed for war, while being sensitive to victims’ families and communities directly affected by AR-15 shootings.

While many types of firearms, including other semiautomatic rifles, are used to commit violent crimes, the AR-15 has soared in popularity over the past two decades and is now the gun used more than any other in the country’s deadliest mass shootings.

In the end, we decided that there is public value in illuminating the profound and repeated devastation left by tragedies that are often covered as isolated news events but rarely considered as part of a broader pattern of violence.

We filed more than 30 public records requests in jurisdictions that had investigated AR-15 shootings since 2012, the year that included massacres at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., seeking medical examiner records, crime scene photographs, police body-camera footage and other investigative files.

Most of our requests were rejected, with officials citing ongoing investigations or local laws preventing the release of such information. Officials in some communities released documents in response to our requests, including Dayton, Ohio, Aurora and Las Vegas.

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No subscription required to read: ShareOur reporters also gathered court records and other information that had previously been made public, and scoured social media and websites for photos and videos that may have surfaced after AR-15 shootings and that we could authenticate.

They interviewed survivors and first responders willing to share their experiences, searched for official transcripts of witness testimony and compiled relevant interviews conducted in the past by Post journalists — amassing firsthand accounts that are crucial to this story.

The Post separately obtained a collection of evidence from the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., compiled by state and federal police, some of which has not previously been made public. Those files include intensely graphic crime scene photos and videos taken moments after police entered the classrooms where 19 students and two teachers were killed.

Before viewing the graphic content, our reporters and editors participated in training by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, learning best practices for viewing disturbing photos and discussing how publishing them could affect readers.

At the same time, reporters and editors engaged in intensive discussions over the merits of publishing disturbing photographs and videos. We engaged in conversations with advocates, including victims’ families, some of whom see a potential value in publishing content to increase public awareness and others who see such publication as dehumanizing and traumatizing.

Our team grappled with our own standard practices when it comes to publishing graphic content. We seek to be thoughtful about how doing so affects victims of violence and those who care about them, but we also recognize that at times disturbing photos and videos can add to an accurate understanding of events.

We also realize that news outlets are often more comfortable publishing pictures of violence overseas, where some of our readers are less likely to have a direct connection.

For this project, we established one ground rule at the start of our reporting: If we sought to publish any pictures of identifiable bodies, we would seek permission from the families of the victims. Some families indicated they would be open to granting permission, but ultimately we decided that the potential harm to victims’ families outweighed any potential journalistic value of showing recognizable bodies.

We ultimately included nine photos from the Uvalde files showing scenes inside the classrooms taken shortly after bodies were removed. In addition, we show sealed body bags in the school hallway.

The only photograph in this story showing bodies is one taken immediately after the 2017 shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. We felt the scene captured in this photo — a field strewn with the dead and wounded beneath the Las Vegas skyline — illustrates why witnesses often liken AR-15 shootings to American war zones. The perspective of the photograph, in which the victims are seen from a distance, makes it unlikely that individuals could be identified.

As we prepared to publish this story in recent days, we sought to be sensitive to the people most directly affected — providing advance notice to many families of victims, their representatives and community leaders so they could choose to avoid the coverage if they preferred.

We realize this story will be disturbing to readers, but we believe that publishing these images gives the public a new vantage point into the pattern of AR-15 mass killings in the United States. We hope that readers will share their feedback in the comments section at the end of the story."


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​As mass shootings multiplied, the horrific human cost was concealed

States reeling from gun violence made graphic imagery confidential — part of a charged debate over privacy and public awareness

Picture below: ​In 1999, when two students killed 13 people at Columbine High School, it was the deadliest school shooting the country had seen. In the nearly quarter-century since, the terror experienced that day outside Denver has recurred at schools throughout the country. (Gary Caskey/Reuters)
​But as gun violence has grown more common, state lawmakers have increasingly restricted access to government records documenting its destructive impact, such as photos and videos showing mutilated bodies and audio recordings capturing children’s cries.

Some states have crafted new exemptions to public records laws specifically shielding depictions of victims. In Connecticut and Florida, bipartisan majorities curtailed access to government records after school shootings in Newtown in 2012 and Parkland in 2018, respectively. Other states, including Colorado, have wielded existing exemptions, for privacy or law enforcement activity, to withhold similar records.

Lawmakers behind the restrictions point to myriad reasons for cloaking crime scene evidence, above all sensitivity to survivors and the families of victims. There’s also concern about interfering with law enforcement investigations or court proceedings and inspiring copycat killers.

In the balancing act between privacy and public access, the rise of social media has weighed heavily against access, say people involved in the debates, because of the permanence of digital platforms and their possible manipulation by bad actors.

Even when gruesome images may be available, news organizations have often declined to seek or publish them out of deference to families and fear of public backlash. That approach differs from the media’s handling of casualties overseas — a contrast on display in recent weeks, as explicit footage of violence in Israel and Gaza has appeared in news broadcasts and other media.

In the United States, some family members of victims of mass shootings have become outspoken opponents of publishing images that include bodies.

Nelba Márquez-Greene, whose 6-year-old daughter, Ana Grace, was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, said asking families to disclose pictures of slain children puts an unfair burden on people who are already carrying the enormous weight of grief — particularly, she added, when she sees little evidence that such pictures change people’s minds.
“Why is that my job? We don’t ask rape victims to do this,” said Márquez-Greene, who recently took on a new position as activist in residence at the Yale School of Public Health focused on designing programs to help survivors of gun violence. “I wish her pictures alive moved people as much as people think her picture dead would.”

Pictured below: 

​Jimmy Greene kisses his wife, Nelba Márquez-Greene, while holding a portrait of their daughter, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victim Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, at a news conference in Newtown, Conn., in January 2013. Márquez-Greene has become an outspoken opponent of releasing images of victims of mass shootings. (Jessica Hill/AP)
But the recurring nightmare of mass shootings has prompted others to advocate for releasing and publicizing photographs and autopsy information. They argue that withholding such material has deprived the public of an accurate understanding of the destructive force of weapons including the AR-15, a firearm originally designed for combat that’s now the weapon of choice for many mass killers. Concealing records that depict victims also makes off-limits a whole range of other visuals, including scenes of chaos and unrest left by the gunfire.

Patricia Oliver, whose 17-year-old son, Joaquin Oliver, was killed outside his creative writing class at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said mere descriptions of that terror have failed to mobilize enough people or focus the public debate on the astonishing power of the gun used to kill her son. She said more graphic material could help.

Pictured below:

Mariana Rocha and her son Jackson Laparl, 6, visit a portrait of Rocha's cousin Joaquin Oliver, right, this past February. It was part of a display of portraits of the 17 students and staff slain in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
“Sometimes human beings don’t understand with words,” she said. “If what’s necessary is to show people pieces of Joaquin’s skull everywhere, I’m willing to do that.”
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The dilemmas of depicting mass shootings:

For media outlets making sense of the spate of mass shootings since Columbine, impassioned appeals for privacy by some families have carried weight.

When the Denver Post mobilized to cover the 2012 massacre at a midnight showing of the superhero movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” the newspaper elected not to seek wide-ranging public records from the crime scene in suburban Aurora.

Gregory Moore, the editor at the time of the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage, said his staff’s approach was informed by past tragedies: “We were probably overly sensitized to victims and their grief here having gone through Columbine.”

​Pictured below:
​
This July 2012 photo, provided in response to public records requests, shows the Century Aurora 16 movie theater after the attack that month in Aurora, Colo. (Office of the District Attorney for the 18th Judicial District of Colorado)
“It’s part of our DNA not to traumatize victims and families in this community,” he said.
But the “landscape has changed” in the decade since Aurora, Moore said, and he now believes news organization must do more to “help people understand how out of control this situation is and what the devastation is from having these weapons of war on the streets.”

As part of The Washington Post’s reporting on the AR-15’s role in American life, Post journalists sought crime scene photographs, autopsy reports and court records in an effort to understand how the weapon transforms ordinary scenes — such as classrooms, concerts, shopping centers — and how it maims the human body.

In some cases, authorities released imagery from crime scenes, such as photos of guns, gloves and a gas mask; in others, they denied requests for such records. Government agencies that refused to provide documents most often cited exemptions to public records laws that allow them to withhold information related to law enforcement investigations. Agencies also invoked exemptions covering personal privacy.

After Texas authorities refused records requests related to the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Post journalists independently obtained a trove of evidence compiled by state and federal police, including extremely graphic photos and videos taken moments after police entered the classrooms where 19 students and two teachers had been killed.

Pictured below:

Brett Cross and Nikki Cross, guardians of Uvalde shooting victim Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, embrace this past July outside the Texas Capitol as they view footage of children lost to gun violence as part of the Parkland High School Bus Tour. (Austin American-Statesman/AP)
The families of some Uvalde victims have pushed for disclosure of such evidence. Brett Cross, the legal guardian of murdered 10-year-old Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, said the reason is that families like his were left in the dark by law enforcement, whose response to the shooting quickly came under criticism.

Cross said crime scene footage is urgent evidence that belongs to the public. Still, he said, parents are entitled to their qualms. “The world needs to see the terrible things these weapons do, but at the end of the day, these are still our babies,” he said.

Two groups that regularly see gunshot victims up close, law enforcement officers and health-care professionals, aren’t in lockstep about public disclosure. Law enforcement is often against it. But the medical community is of a mixed mind, said Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins who serves as board chair and chief medical officer for the nonprofit group Brady, which advocates for gun control.

Some who tend to the bodies of shooting victims see the potential for what Sakran called “an Emmett Till moment,” referring to the way in which the public funeral for the 14-year-old Black boy lynched in 1955 — and his mother’s insistence on an open casket — created moral outrage that helped propel the civil rights movement.

“My personal belief is that images could be profound and could make a difference in swaying public understanding of the crisis we’re facing and perhaps even lead to demonstrable change,” Sakran said. But no doctor, he added, would force that on a family.

Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has studied the effects of visual imagery on human behavior, said graphic images can change attitudes, but only in particular circumstances. He drew a parallel to the 2015 photo of a Syrian child lying facedown on a Turkish beach, which brought attention to the war in Syria and caused a surge in humanitarian donations.

​“An image, if it catches attention, creates a window of opportunity where people are alert to a problem,” Slovic said. “But if images are repeated over and over again, we become numb to them.”

​After shootings, lawmakers restrict access to public records

In communities that have experienced some of the nation’s most traumatic mass shootings, governments have responded by adopting new restrictions on access to public records.

​Six months after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012, the legislature amended the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act to exempt from disclosure photos and videos “depicting the victim of a homicide” if the records “could reasonably be expected” to infringe on personal privacy.

Pictured below:

​This photo shows damage in a classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School after the Dec. 14, 2012, mass shooting, taken on an unspecified date in Newtown, Conn.
​Momentum for the legislation built after publication of a blog post by Michael Moore, the filmmaker who created the 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” predicting that someone in Newtown would leak crime scene photos to awaken public outrage. Moore wrote that “when the American people see what bullets from an assault rifle fired at close range do to a little child’s body … every sane American will demand action.”

The prediction set off alarm among families of victims — and an aggressive response by lawmakers “who were shocked and appalled by this suggestion that sensitive images would be disseminated,” said Colleen M. Murphy, executive director of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission, a state agency that enforces public records rules.

Murphy, who opposed the changes, was among those tapped for a task force set up by the 2013 legislation to make recommendations about the balance between “victim privacy” and “the public’s right to know.”

At the task force’s request, the General Assembly conducted a 50-state survey of public records laws and found that eight other states had rules specifically restricting the release of crime scene photos: California, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas.

A law in Texas, written by a Democrat and passed around the same time as the Connecticut measure, restricted photos of victims “in a state of dismemberment, decapitation, or similar mutilation or that depicts the deceased person’s genitalia.”

The review also found that 26 states specifically limited the release of autopsy reports and 16 limited the release of 911 tapes.

A Post analysis of state records laws found that all 50 states and D.C. allow police departments to withhold materials they consider part of ongoing investigations. Many also have broad carve-outs for personal privacy.

A year after the Newtown shooting, reports released by the Connecticut State Police included about 1,500 photos taken by a crime scene investigator. Most were redacted in accordance with the new law, obscured by large black rectangles. Those that weren’t redacted showed firearms, door handles and caution tape. None showed humans.

Connecticut State Police completely redacted this Sandy Hook Elementary School crime scene photograph before it was released publicly and also redacted a caption that describes its contents. The portion of the caption that is not redacted shows it is a photograph of a bathroom where bodies of children were found huddled together.

​The full images have never been publicly released, even as conspiracy theorists seized on the shooting with claims that the murders had been faked, turning Newtown into a grim landmark in America’s break with reality.

Some argue that photographic evidence of victims would undercut such claims, while others say that gruesome images would only encourage extremists.

Jeff Covello, the Connecticut State Police sergeant who supervised the Newtown crime scene, brought then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to the scene and showed him the unredacted images. He said he believes only some people should see such visuals.

“Who exactly is on that list is not for me to decide,” he said. “Families should have some say — exactly how much I don’t know.”

Deciding what to conceal in the ‘Sunshine State’

Ever since Fred Guttenberg’s 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018, he has been a gun-control advocate — stumping for political candidates, yelling out in protest during the 2020 State of the Union and petitioning the government to investigate a firearms manufacturer.

He used to think depictions of the damage from powerful rifles could change minds. When he met with Sen. Ted Cruz in the fall of 2019, Guttenberg said, he showed the Texas Republican photos of his daughter’s lifeless body. “It didn’t change a thing,” he said.
Cruz, after the meeting, said it was “productive and respectful.” The senator’s spokesman didn’t respond to a question about Guttenberg’s account.

​Now, Guttenberg opposes disseminating such images. “There’s this notion that what we need to do is convince Americans what this looks like, but Americans are already convinced,” he said, citing surveys that show huge majorities favor new gun laws. “In my mind we don’t need to flood television screens and newspapers with images of bodies like my daughter’s.”

​The same year as Guttenberg’s meeting with Cruz, the Florida legislature amended the state’s Sunshine Law to shield photographs, videos and audio of the “killing of a victim of mass violence” from public release.
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