“How many have to die before we will give up these dangerous toys?”
—Stephen King
Two men and three women of the Home Defense Unit with guns
In the early morning of January 23, 1911, an unstable Harvard graduate with the theatrical name Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough approached the novelist David Graham Phillips on East Twenty-First Street in Manhattan and proceeded to unload six shots from his .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Goldsborough, who believed the novelist had slandered his sister, then reloaded his gun, put it to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
Goldsborough died instantly, although Phillips lasted into the next day before expiring. The gruesome crime destroyed a number of lives, but none of those affected would change history quite like George Petit le Brun, the man who performed the autopsies on both bodies at the city’s coroner’s office. “I reasoned that the time had come to have legislation passed that would prevent the sale of pistols to irresponsible persons,” he later wrote.1 After two years of imploring local politicians to institute gun control laws, le Brun finally found an ally in Timothy D. Sullivan, the corrupt Tammany Hall operator who was known as “Big Tim” to most New Yorkers.
It is unlikely that Sullivan’s attempt to take guns off the streets of New York was driven first, foremost, or, for that matter, whatsoever by concerns for the public safety. “Cynics,” Sullivan’s biographer Richard F. Welch noted in 2009, “suggested that Big Tim pushed through his law so Tammany could keep their gangster allies under control.” This positioning would hardly be confined to Big Tim, who used the law as a means of disarming gangs that threatened his authority. Restrictionists throughout history have used gun control laws to constrain their political enemies or vulnerable populations. Whatever the case, the result was the nation’s first major gun control legislation, the Sullivan Act.
Since the late 1800s a number of municipalities have attempted to control weapons in areas that featured gambling or drinking. Not one of those laws—or, most often, arbitrarily enforced set of local rules—ever challenged the notion of a law-abiding man owning a firearm. None, certainly, demanded that a man ask permission of the state to own a gun. The Sullivan Act was the first. It required New Yorkers who possessed firearms small enough to be concealed to get a license. People caught owning firearms but no license would face a misdemeanor charge, and carrying them was a felony. In addition to handguns, the law prohibited the possession or carrying of weapons such as brass knuckles, sandbags, blackjacks, bludgeons, and bombs, as well as possessing or carrying a dagger, “dangerous knife,” or razor “with intent to use the same unlawfully.”2 As with almost all gun control laws that followed, criminals would ignore the strictures and, in this case, the Tammany Hall bosses enforced it only when the weapons undermined their political interests. There was no perceptible decline in gang violence or murder in New York in the ensuing decades.
So while gun control was not a wholly new idea by the time the first federal gun control policy, the National Firearms Acts of 1934 and 1938 (NFA), was passed in reaction to the gangsters, bandits, and bootleggers waving around submachine guns, both petrifying and fascinating the population at large.
In the wake of Depression-era criminality, there were calls, mostly from police departments, to do something. Because highly publicized kidnappings, murders, and robberies had sparked a scare among American law enforcement, Roosevelt mounted his “New Deal for Crime.” As all “new deals” would, this one also federalized policy. Reading the debates and quotes of that time makes one imagine it was unlikely many voters understood the precedents the law was setting, or that anyone believed it would be used to challenge the individual right of American citizens to own guns. Even then, the National Rifle Association—still a hobbyist group at the time—protested the initial proposal to create a registry and fingerprint all owners. It did not oppose the idea of guns being taken from criminals.
The law instituted a tax of $200—a large amount during the Depression—on the manufacture or sale of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, and licensing on gun manufacturers and gun dealers. Roosevelt followed this up with the passage of the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1938, which required the licensing of interstate gun dealers, who had to record all their sales. The law prohibited sales to individuals under indictment or convicted of crimes of violence.
There were a number of versions of gun control debated by the Roosevelt administration, but Attorney General Homer Cummings supported the final bill because he believed the taxing power was the best way to ensure the constitutionality of legislation. While even fervent advocates of the NFA never openly made the case that owning a gun was anything but an individual right, Cummings had no compunctions. He admitted that the policy was meant to inhibit law-abiding citizens from owning firearms. “We certainly don’t expect gangsters to come forward to register their weapons and be fingerprinted, and a $200 tax is frankly prohibitive to private citizens,” Cummings contended. It wouldn’t take long after the passage of the NFA for mission creep to begin.
On April 18, 1938, Arkansas and Oklahoma state police pulled over two small-time bank robbers, Jackson “Jack” Miller and Frank Layton. The 240-pound Miller had already spent the majority of his thirty-nine tumultuous years involved in criminality. In 1924, when working as a bouncer, he had killed a court reporter in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, bar. In the mid-1930s he had joined a gang that boasted of having “most of the major bank robberies in the Southwest” under their belts.3 In 1935, Miller flipped on his own gang, helping the authorities put most of them in prison. Yet, by the time state police arrested Miller and his sidekick Layton a few years later, they were in possession of an unregistered short-barreled shotgun in the car and apparently were “making preparation for armed robbery.”4
Miller and Layton were charged with violating the National Firearms Act. If it were up to them, the case would have ended right there, as they both pled guilty. Yet Judge Hiram Ragon, a former congressman, New Deal loyalist, and advocate of the NFA, refused to accept the pleas and assigned them a court-appointed lawyer. The duo demurred. Ragon agreed, throwing out the indictment, claiming the NFA violated the Second Amendment—something he most surely did not believe.5 In the meantime, the two small-time crooks went on the lam. (Miller’s bullet-ridden body would be found by the police in a dry Oklahoma creek later in 1939.)
The case worked its way to the Supreme Court, which many believe is exactly what Ragon had intended. Miller’s lawyers didn’t even file a brief or show up to make oral arguments with the court. And in May 1939 the Supreme Court of the United States issued a terse and muddled nine-page opinion—with very little actual opinion involved—that achieved what Ragon had desired: it affirmed the constitutionality of the NFA. The court found that the Second Amendment did not guarantee an individual the right to keep and bear a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun that was under eighteen inches, which was a weapon commonly used by criminals. “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 the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” the court found, “we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.”
Today’s media and liberals often bring up the Miller case as a way of bolstering the case for a “collective” theory of gun rights. Yet the court had not offered a broad ruling regarding the Second Amendment. It had found that any person “physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense” could own weapons. The case simply decided whether the government could regulate certain kinds of guns. “Miller stands only for the proposition that the Second Amendment right, whatever its nature, extends only to certain types of weapons,” Justice Antonin Scalia found nearly sixty years later. “It is particularly wrongheaded to read Miller for more than what it said, because the case did not even purport to be a thorough examination of the Second Amendment.” Yet this is exactly what lower courts would do for decades. There would be no other consequential Second Amendment cases in front of the Supreme Court until 2008. In the meantime, gun control advocates gained the upper hand.
• • •
The rise of gun control in the second half of the twentieth century would have everything to do with the prevalence of crime, although the prevalence of crime had very little to do with the number of guns Americans owned. In reality, after a short spurt of gangland violence that precipitated the passage of the NFA—much of it, as we’ve noted, hyped by movies and mythology—there was a quick drop in the crime rate. Violent crime rates had begun falling in the mid-1930s, before the passage of the NFA, and remained historically low until the middle of the 1960s. These low crime rates were enjoyed by everyone, including those in urban centers, despite commonly held perceptions. From 1900 to the late 1950s, for instance, New York City had lower homicide rates than the national average.6
With millions of men returning from the war in 1945–46, there was a temporary but modest spike in violence. Yet during the entirety of the 1940s, despite the fact that millions more military men now owned and knew how to use firearms, the number of homicides using a gun remained steady at around 55 percent. Throughout the 1950s, due to the rise of the middle class, suburbanization, and the better quality of life in general, there was a further reduction of violent crime. From 1948 to 1966, the homicide rate in the United States never exceeded 5 murders per 100,000—lower than it had been in any comparable period during the twentieth century.
Unlike the scare of the 1930s, however, the violent crime spike in the mid-1960s was real, pervasive, and enduring. In 1960, 200 people per 100,000 would experience violent crime. By 1990, the number was more than 700 people per 100,000. Homicide went from fewer than 5 people per 100,000 to more than 10 people. According to the National Crime Victim Survey, there were nearly 11 million violent crimes per year in the United States from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. In many areas, an American had a better chance of experiencing a violent crime than of getting into a car accident during these years.7
The fear and anxiety that crime generated would have great consequences for American life and culture, among them the flight of white Americans to the suburbs and the resulting collapse of inner cities. One yearly survey asked Americans: “Is there any area near where you live—that is, within a mile—where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” In 1965, 34 percent of those polled answered in the affirmative. By 1982, that number had risen to 48 percent—and it would not fall back to 34 percent until the year 2000. “To millions of Americans, few things are more pervasive, more frightening, more real today than violent crime and the fear of being assaulted, mugged, robbed, or raped,” one presidential commission on crime in the late 1960s noted. “The fear of being criminalized has touched us all in some way.”
All these tensions led to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal law that overtly attempted to diminish firearm ownership in the United States. Among other things, the law prohibited convicted felons, drug users, and the mentally ill from buying firearms. It raised the age to purchase handguns from a federally licensed dealer to twenty-one. It expanded the licensing requirements of gun dealers and set up more detailed government tracking of guns. On the local level, municipalities would be far stricter and more invasive. It was in the aftermath of this law that the modern debate over gun control was born, with the contours of that debate remaining virtually the same ever since.
The divergence among Americans was simple. Many people—especially those who lived in places that did not have a strong tradition of firearm ownership—saw guns in the hands of criminals and believed laws helped get those guns off the streets. Others saw firearms as a way to defend themselves from the rise in lawbreaking. The anxiety of the latter group would begin to bubble up in cultural depictions of urban conflict, most famously in films like Death Wish and the early Dirty Harry movies, which treated vigilantism as a morally complex issue in a world of rampant criminality and lawlessness.
After the 1968 local gun laws began to take hold, cities began to erect bureaucratic barriers that made it increasingly difficult for law-abiding citizens to purchase firearms. Soon enough a problem emerged. Criminals, it turns out, did not adhere to gun laws. Law-abiding citizens, on the other hand, did. Which created a cycle: the more criminals ignored these laws, the more politicians attempted to inhibit gun ownership for everyone, and the more problematic it would become for the average citizen to purchase and own a firearm. When citizens began pointing out that they had a constitutional right to defend themselves, politicians had to reimagine what the Second Amendment meant. This was when the first pro–gun rights movement was born. A movement that had never been necessary before.
On January 6, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, who would be assassinated later that year, spoke to a class at University of Buffalo Law School. “I think it is a terrible indictment of the National Rifle Association,” he said, “that they haven’t supported any legislation to try and control the misuse of rifles and pistols in this country.”8 In the March 1968 edition of the NRA magazine American Rifleman, an associate editor, Alan Webber, answered Kennedy’s charge, listing a number of legislative efforts the organization had supported over the years, including the NFA. This piece has often been brought up by critics of the Second Amendment to claim that groups like the NRA had once had a far more pliable conception of the Second Amendment and were open to limiting individual ownership.
The truth is more complicated and, in many ways, explains the modern gun debate. For one, although the NRA had certainly been open to stricter laws concerning machine guns and dealers, the historical evidence suggests that Webber had likely overemphasized the NRA’s support for gun control legislation. More importantly, however, Second Amendment advocates had indeed been forced to change their political tactics and mission by the 1970s. Gun control advocates had dramatically changed theirs.
The National Rifle Association had continued concentrating on its rifle clubs and marksmanship programs through the first half of the 1900s. With a tremendous upswing in hunting, its membership grew and it would become the premier organization for gun owners. In the 1930s, the NRA formed a legislative division to periodically update its members on goings-on in Washington. In the 1950s, the organization began teaming with law enforcement departments in shooting drills and safety lessons. The NRA did not oppose the NFA and argued that those who abused gun ownership should be fully punished. Its president, Karl Frederick, in fact, would testify in front of Congress in the middle of the crime scare of the 1930s, contending, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”9
As far as firearms went, there was precious little on the legislative front in subsequent years. In the end, the NRA did not oppose the Gun Control Act of 1968, a law that established a system to federally license gun dealers and set restrictions on particular categories and classes of firearms. But it did successfully oppose the most invasive elements of the legislation: namely, a mandated federal registry for guns and licensing for all gun carriers. Still, many members, seeing a slippery slope, did not approve. They were soon proved right. New laws were not being enacted to punish rogue gun owners but rather to make it increasingly difficult for anyone in an urban area to own a gun. And in 1971, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms shot and paralyzed longtime NRA member Kenyon Ballew in a Washington suburb—they claimed Ballew was suspected of possessing illegal weapons (none were found)—many co-members saw it as a portent that government agencies would abuse gun control laws to target peaceful Americans.
The NRA would have to make a choice. It could remain solely a hunting, marksmanship, and safety group, or it could embrace the growing activist wing and push back against emerging gun control regulations. By the mid-1970s it seemed as if the organization had made a choice. More than seventy of the most vociferous gun rights advocates in the organization were fired during the early part of the decade. And in 1976 the NRA board decided to move the organization headquarters from Washington to Colorado.
So at the 1977 NRA convention in Cincinnati, there was something of a coup as the politically minded advocates wrested the organization from the traditional wing. Many of today’s gun control advocates like to point to the “Cincinnati revolt” as the moment when radicals took over the movement, undermining true gun owners who weren’t interested in politics. More likely, the shift was merely a reflection of a growing inclination among gun owners at the time. The NRA was best positioned to take the lead on gun issues. If not, there would almost certainly have been another advocacy group—and many would emerge during these years—that would have taken its place. The gun control debate had changed, but not the gun owners. From 1977 to 1983, the NRA would more than double its membership.10
Two things happened as the modern gun control debate evolved in the second half of the twentieth century. The first was a renewed interest in gun ownership. Just as gun restrictionists began attaining political power, many Americans romanticized the guns of the past—and began talking about the ideals that made them important in the first place. In the 1950s, for example, there would be a huge upsurge of interest in sport hunting, target shooting, and competitive shooting. Whereas North American gun culture was born of idealism and necessity, the modern American was far more inclined to want guns for recreation and home defense. But postwar culture would also be infatuated with the Wild West, the Kentucky rifle, and America’s founding—and guns were embedded in all of it.
The bigger gun manufacturers initially failed to capitalize on this opportunity to cash in on the trend, but upstarts filled the market gap. Men like Brooklynite William B. Ruger. Born in 1916, Ruger became interested in firearms at an early age. Plagued by respiratory problems, he was sent to upstate New York, where he developed a passion for mechanical devices, especially guns. “I remember seeing them in store windows and they looked so beautiful, particularly the Savage 99 and the Winchester lever action,” he reminisced. “The mechanics were so artistically designed—they absolutely thrilled me. I associate them with great adventure and great art.”11
Back in Brooklyn, the young man began disassembling these pieces of art and then rebuilding them. He was so obsessed with guns that in his spare time, he toured firearm manufacturing plants in nearby Connecticut and headed to the library and consumed engineering textbooks.
Ruger attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but after two years he got married, had a child, and dropped out. With no real job and few prospects, the inventor began making pistol prototypes and shopping them around. Ruger’s homemade inventions received a lukewarm reception from most of the big gun companies. However, in 1939, on a trip to Washington, he showed some U.S. Army engineers a homemade lever-action hunting rifle that he had converted into a gas-operated semiautomatic. Duly impressed, the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in Springfield sent him a letter offering him a staff position as a designer.12
There, Ruger shined, and for the first time exhibited his independent streak by quitting to invent a light machine gun of his own design. By 1940, Ruger was working on gas-powered military-grade guns for Auto-Ordnance. “When I first learned the principles under which machine guns functioned, I was just fascinated,” he explained. “I was almost like a little kid finding out how a steam engine or internal combustion engine works.” But the war was coming to an end, and so was the immediate need for a light machine gun.
It was getting back to basics that would allow Ruger to compete with traditional gun giants. After the war, Ruger set up a small shop in Southport, Connecticut. Like many postwar gun manufacturers, he struggled at first, turning to the consumer products that were in great demand at the time to keep his company afloat. “One of their first big postwar projects was an automatic changing record player. I went in and made a bid on producing some of the components, and I got a big order from them,” Ruger would recall.13 Yet his virtuosity was in making guns. In the late 1940s, the budding inventor had gotten his hands on a Japanese Nambu pistol that had found its way back from the Pacific theater. Ruger used the semiautomatic pistol—which looked like the more famous German Luger: thin barrel and boxy single-piece frame—as a template for his new sporting pistol design.
While Ruger was excited about the prospects of his project, he still lacked the necessary capital to manufacture. That is, until 1949, when a Yale graduate and new friend of Ruger’s named Alexander Sturm invested a modest $50,000 of his family’s fortune into the newly christened Sturm, Ruger & Co. (Sturm, who had a keen interest in heraldry, would also design the company’s famous Germanic eagle, a trademark that fooled many consumers who bought the Luger-like gun into thinking the company was German.)
The duo’s first product—a low-cost .22-caliber recreational rimfire pistol that mirrored the aesthetics of the Nambu—was a massive hit. The “Standard” model, as it was known, would go on to become the bestselling .22 pistol of all time, spurring countless offspring and imitations that sell well to this day. The Standard model was under constant production in basically the same form for the next thirty-three years, but the new corporation expanded the basic Standard archetype into a product line of pistols over time through the introduction of a number of variant models.
Sturm died from viral hepatitis in 1951 at the age of twenty-eight, but the company he helped found saw enormous success in the recreational gun market. Ruger’s considerable success was based on a knack for cost-cutting manufacturing techniques, public relations, and, perhaps most important, an innate feel for the marketplace. Unlike the men who labored under the bureaucratic constraints of government contracts, Ruger was in most ways a spiritual descendant of Colt, not Garand.
This included his consideration of aesthetics and salesmanship. Ruger would later contend that the executives at the big gun companies of the time failed because they had no real interest in the outdoors or hunting. They would take clients out golfing, not shooting, he reminded his sales staff—the CEOs’ understanding of the market hinged on what consumers wanted yesterday, not tomorrow. Unlike many companies in the coming decades, Ruger would shun the new science of market research. “If I really personally like it,” Ruger said in a 1981 interview, “then I can be fairly sure and positive that there will be a lot of other people who feel the same way.”14 They would. Ruger made guns for the outdoorsman, the hunter, and the hobbyist in postwar American life. His gun was priced for the average American sportsman, of whom there would be many millions.
The explosion in hunting and gun sports also led to a string of firearm and hunting magazines. Ruger and his company immediately took full advantage of this growing market, which allowed gun reviewers to disseminate opinions around the country in ways they had never been able to do before. “Firms like Winchester and Remington would loan a gun to a writer so he could write something about it, but they didn’t cultivate any friendship,” Ruger later noted. A piece in American Rifleman, the leading publication about firearms, helped spread Ruger’s reputation. Through Strum, Ruger used innovative manufacturing techniques and promotion, imbuing their guns with an element of nostalgia. Most of the fundamentals of gunmaking had already been invented. And Ruger, who should not have been underestimated as an innovator himself, understood that there was a romanticism that enticed American shooters.
In many ways Ruger reinvigorated the gun market by looking to the past as much as he would the future, reintroducing guns that most other companies believed had run their course. For example, Ruger knew that Colt had discontinued making the famous single-action Army models. He also understood that there was a healthy market out there for the gun, because he wanted one. Ruger began reissuing a number of old models, nearly all of which were successful. The company would diversify and experience the ups and downs of any corporation. By the twenty-first century, Sturm, Ruger & Co was consistently one of the top gunmakers in the world. By this time, all the major firearm manufacturers were following his lead and taking advantage of the insatiable appetite for guns. Few industries, after all, had a historic connection to America’s past like the gunmaker. Although most of the big names would also experience bumpy rides and ownership changes throughout the second half of the 1900s, by the end of the century, most of the names remained the same. Remington (founded in 1816), Smith & Wesson (1852), Colt (1855), and Winchester (1866) still dominated the marketplace. By the start of the twenty-first century there would be rekindled interest in the old guns, and technical advances would spur the industry to hundreds of millions in revenue.
The gun, it turns out, was not a faddish feature of American life. According to Gallup, gun ownership per household in 1961 was at 49 percent. In 1993 it was at 51 percent and in 2013 it was at 45 percent—despite the fact that there had been a big shift from rural to urban areas.15 Some believe this is due to the big dip in hunting among Americans.16 Only around 15 percent of adults lived in households in which they or their spouses were hunters. It is the lowest percentage of hunters since the highest level of 31.6 percent recorded by pollsters in 1977.
The number of guns manufactured each year in the United States, however, grew from 2.9 million in 2001 to nearly 5.5 million in 2010 to nearly 10.9 million in 2013. Around this time there was also an explosion of imported firearms. From 2001 through 2007, handgun imports nearly doubled, from 711,000 to nearly 1.4 million. By 2009, nearly 2.2 million handguns were imported into the United States. Guns from Glock, SIG Sauer, and others became wildly popular. In 2016 there would be a record 5.5 million handguns imported into the United States.17
Another dynamic emerged with the surge of gun ownership: crime rates fell. They fell a lot. From their peak in the early 1990s, violent crime rates, including murder, rape, and aggravated assault, would all decline. By 2014, homicide rates of 4.5 people per 100,000 were the lowest since 1963, when it was 4.6 people per 100,000. There would be a slight uptick in crime the next two years, but by the mid-2000s there was ample evidence that crime rates had far more to do with social trends and economics than they did with the level of gun ownership.
Gun control legislation had the opposite of its intended effect. In 1994 the National Institute of Justice found that 44 million people, or around 35 percent of households, owned 192 million firearms. Seventy-four percent of those who admitted to owning guns said they owned more than one firearm. Around the same time, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that approximately 242 million firearms were either in the marketplace or owned by civilians in the United States. The breakdown of ownership was around 72 million handguns, 76 million rifles, and 64 million shotguns. By 2000 the ATF put the number at approximately 259 million: 92 million handguns, 92 million rifles, and 75 million shotguns. By 2007, the number of firearms had increased to approximately 294 million: 106 million handguns, 105 million rifles, and 83 million shotguns. By 2009, the estimated total number of firearms available to civilians in the United States had increased to 310 million: 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.18
With all these guns, the originalist understanding of the Second Amendment would also regain its popularity. The politics of guns, though, would take a while to catch up.