Handgun control became a major wedge issue beginning with the Campaign of 1976 and continuing through the Campaign of 2008. Throughout the period, the Democratic Party and its nominees generally supported restricting access to handguns in an effort to reduce gun violence. In contrast, the Republican Party and its candidates have resisted additional restrictions on handguns on the grounds that the Second Amendment protects the right of citizens to bear arms. Throughout this era, the Republican Party made use of the gun control issue to characterize the Democratic Party as soft on crime, suggesting that gun rights were necessary to protect honest citizens from well-armed criminals.
During the 1920s and early 1930s, an intense wave of gun violence swept the nation as Prohibition led to widespread bootlegging and associated criminal activities. This violence raised a national outcry for the federal government to regulate guns, and in response to this pressure, Congress passed the National Firearms Act of 1934. This act limited the general public’s access to machine guns and short-barreled (or sawed-off) shotguns and rifles. In 1938, Congress passed the Federal Firearms Act, which required all gun dealers to obtain a federal firearms license. Equally important, the law required gun dealers to record the names and addresses of individuals who purchased firearms.
During the 1960s, the United States experienced an unprecedented increase in crime, particularly in major metropolitan areas, and by the end of the decade, many of the nation’s largest cities had experienced race riots as well. Some experts blamed the increase in crime on easy access to guns. Sociologists and criminologists saw other factors at work as well, including rising rates of urban poverty as whites took flight to the suburbs, leaving eroding tax bases and deteriorating neighborhoods in their wake. Exacerbating this new wave of violence were the assassinations of high-profile public figures, most of whom had strong associations with the civil rights movement, including President John F. Kennedy in 1963, civil rights activist Malcolm X in 1965, civil rights activist Martin Luther King in 1968, and Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in 1968. During the Campaign of 1972, Alabama governor and pro-segregation presidential candidate George Wallace was shot while attending a campaign event, and he was permanently paralyzed as a result of his wounds. These shocking acts of gun violence once again put pressure on Congress to make American streets safer.
In the Campaign of 1968, Republican nominee Richard Nixon made restoring law and order the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. The Republican Party platform blamed the increase in crime on failed Democratic policies but at the same time acquiesced to public pressure to deal with the gun issue. Specifically, the platform adopted by Republicans in 1968 supported the “enactment of legislation to control indiscriminate availability of firearms,” while protecting the Second Amendment rights of citizens “to collect, own and use firearms for legitimate purposes.” Significantly, by the Campaign of 1972, President Nixon and the Republican Party called for “laws to control the improper use of handguns.” Similarly, the 1972 Democratic Party platform encouraged a crackdown on illegal “Saturday night specials.” Even though both the 1968 and 1972 Republican Party platforms included planks pledging to protect gun ownership, gun rights were not a major campaign issue in either the Campaign of 1968 or the Campaign of 1972, primarily because both political parties sought to place some limits on handgun ownership.
The Campaign of 1976 marked a major shift in the gun rights position of the Republican Party. Between 1972 and 1976, conservatives assumed a more prominent role in the Republican Party. Backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA), these conservative Republicans expressed their strong opposition to federal handgun registration laws. Despite two failed assassination attempts against President Gerald Ford, the Republican Party platform sought to use gun control as a wedge issue to attract independents and conservative Democratic voters, particularly in the South. The Democratic Party and its nominee Jimmy Carter called for handgun registration and a federal ban on the sale of cheap handguns (“Saturday night specials”), which had previously been subject only to import bans and state-level bans.
During the Campaigns of 1980, 1984, and 1988, major differences continued to emerge between the Democratic and Republican parties on the gun control issue. Shortly after Reagan’s 1981 presidential inauguration, John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan; a Secret Service agent; a Washington, DC, police officer; and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, in a foiled assassination attempt on the president. All four were seriously wounded; Reagan recovered, but Brady was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. Forced to retire, Brady turned his energies to new cause: handgun control. Reagan supported Brady’s efforts, but Congress, under strong pressure from the National Rifle Association, failed to deliver any significant legislation during this time. Instead, the Armed Criminal Act of 1986 increased federal penalties for those already prohibited from owning a firearm, and that same year, Congress banned the sale of “cop killer” bullets.
Brady and his wife, Sarah, formed Handgun Control Inc. to lobby Congress for additional reforms. The Brady Bill, which included a federal background check on gun purchases and imposed a seven-day waiting period (eventually decreased to five days in the final passage), was winding its way through the legislature in the spring of 1991. President George H. W. Bush was reluctant to sign, and Republicans in the House were attempting to block the bill. In an op-ed column in the New York Times, Ronald Reagan openly advocated the provisions of the Brady Bill, noting that he had supported a far lengthier waiting period while governor of California. Reagan also privately encouraged Bush to sign the bill. The legislation eventually passed and was signed by President Clinton in late 1993 (and later expired under a Republican Congress in 2004).
During the Campaign of 1992, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton successfully downplayed support for new gun control measures, which temporarily defused the issue. Yet Clinton proved successful in pushing through Congress the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which included a ten-year ban on the manufacture and sale of automatic weapons to civilians (also known as the assault weapons ban). This legislation was a response to the 1989 school shooting in Stockton, California, in which thirty-four students and a teacher were shot and five children died, and a subsequent California shooting that killed eight. In both instances, semi-automatic weapons were used. Interestingly, Clinton did not pay a heavy political price for his support for the Brady Bill or the assault weapons ban, and he was easily reelected in the Campaign of 1996. Clinton’s good fortune was most likely due, in part, to the NRA’s tin ear. After the Oklahoma City bombing in the spring of 1995, an NRA spokesperson distributed fund-raising literature that was highly critical of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, calling agents “jack-booted thugs” and accusing the agency of Nazi tactics and “murdering law-abiding citizens.” Former president George H. W. Bush publicly resigned his NRA membership in disgust.
In both the Campaign of 2000 and the Campaign of 2004, the Republican Party used the gun control issue to appeal to voters who had previously voted for Clinton in conservative states such as West Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri. Republican nominee George W. Bush warned voters that Democratic nominees Al Gore and John Kerry would impose serious limitations on their gun rights, and the NRA ran numerous issue ads in these states as well. Gore and Kerry both reaffirmed their commitment to gun rights, and each went on a high-profile hunting trip during his campaign. This was a fairly pointless endeavor; by this time, white male voters, particularly those who were rural or who lived in the South, had long abandoned the Democratic Party and were unlikely to be reassured by these attempts to placate them on gun rights. The assault rifle ban expired during the administration of George W. Bush. Supporters of the ban took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with Osama bin Laden’s photo and text that suggested that Bin Laden and his supporters were excited about the impending expiration of the ban.
Gun control remained an issue in the Campaign of 2008, even though neither candidate discussed the issue a great deal. Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin openly touted her experiences in hunting wolves from helicopters in Alaska, sending cues to Republican voters about her candidate’s position on gun rights. Democratic nominee Barack Obama, on the other hand, made no attempt to go on a hunting trip during the campaign. Obama appeared most comfortable in suits and ties and was at ease with his image as an urbanite. Voters drew their own conclusions, and many Republicans became convinced that Obama would engage in a major push to take their guns away if he was elected. These fears were fanned by the NRA; in a direct mail campaign to its members, the group claimed that Obama would introduce sweeping changes to current gun control laws if elected (although PolitiFact debunked most of the items on the NRA’s ten-point list). Shortly after Obama took office, several individuals engaged in shooting sprees that appeared to be related to fears that Obama was coming for their guns.
In 2009, the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s handgun restrictions, at the time among the strictest in the nation. While the court argued that a total ban on handgun ownership was unconstitutional, Justice Scalia suggested that some regulations would be considered permissible, including registration laws, laws meant to keep guns out of the hands of mentally unstable persons or criminals, and laws meant to limit guns in sensitive areas such as schools or government buildings. The NRA went on to challenge gun control laws on the books in numerous other states and municipalities in the wake of this ruling, ushering in a new era of controversy over gun rights that was centered on the states (and to a lesser extent, local governments), rather than on reforms at the federal level.
Unlike the violence of previous decades, mass shootings in more recent years have not led to a social or political consensus about the role of guns in American society. Indeed, the massacre of students at Virginia Tech in April 2007 did not substantially change the dialogue of the 2008 presidential campaign. It was framed as more of a mental health issue than a gun violence issue and attributed to the depravity of a single individual rather than to a systemic failure of government or society, and thus it was not viewed as a problem in need of a solution. It did appear that most Americans shared concerned about guns getting into the hands of the wrong people, a topic about which they were reminded in January 2011 when GOP representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others were gunned down during a campaign event, but opinions have remained divided on how best to accomplish this. Gun rights supporters believe that the solution is to expand legal gun ownership, in part by making it easier to carry a concealed weapon and by allowing guns in more places such as airports, churches, government buildings, and college campuses. Gun control advocates argue that gun show loopholes on criminal background checks need to be closed, that default purchases after incomplete background checks need to be ended, that large ammunition clips should be limited, and that there should be better safeguards to prevent mentally unstable persons from purchasing firearms. In a polarized partisan political environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that Americans’ views about the remedies for gun violence are similarly polarized: either we need easier access to a wider range of firearms or we need less access to a more restricted range of firearms.
Americans’ beliefs about the remedies to gun violence have been challenged in recent years by a rising tide of mass shootings. Mother Jones documented seventy-one mass shootings from 1982 to 2012 and found that most of the shooters obtained their guns legally. In the Campaign of 2012, candidates had to contend with several grisly events. On July 20, 2012, James Holmes shot seventy people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; on August 5, Wade Michael Page, an Army veteran, shot ten people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin; there were four other incidents where five or more people were shot. Perhaps the most distressing incident of 2012 occurred after the conclusion of the 2012 campaign, on December 14, when Adam Lanza shot his mother as well as twenty children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Lanza’s targeting of the schoolchildren was deliberate, in emulation of a 2011 massacre in Norway of seventy-seven people, most of them juveniles, by Anders Breivik.
Facing pressure from President Obama, the public, and the families of the victims of these incidents, the Senate held a series of votes on gun-related measures in April 2014. Each of the proposals needed sixty votes to be taken up by the House. A bipartisan proposal by GOP senator Pat Toomey (PA) and Democratic senator Joe Manchin (WV) to expand federal background checks to include purchases made at gun shows and over the Internet received only fifty-four votes. Republicans Charles Grassley (NE) and Ted Cruz (TX) proposed to remove individuals who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility from the criminal background check database immediately upon their release; this received fifty-two votes in support. A proposal to reinstate the ban on assault rifles received forty, and a ban on large magazine clips received only forty-six votes. A proposed federal ban on straw purchases received fifty-eight votes, as did a proposal to increase the federal penalties for gun traffickers (the latter of which was backed by the NRA). Some of the votes would have loosened restrictions on firearm ownership; most of these failed as well. The Senate rejected a proposal that would have compelled any state with a concealed-carry law, regardless of how strict its requirements were, to accept a concealed-carry permit from any other state; it received fifty-seven votes. A measure to leave the determination of whether a mentally ill veteran should be permitted to own a firearm to a judge (and only a judge) received only fifty-six votes. However, the Senate did vote to pass, by a vote of sixty-seven to thirty, penalties on states for releasing gun data. Voting was partisan across all of the proposals, with Democrats favoring gun control and Republicans favoring gun rights.
Sadly, the mass shootings continue parallel to the 2015/2016 presidential campaign season. Deadly shootings in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff; Oregon’s Umpqua Community College; and the terrorist shooting in San Bernardino, California, among many others, are tragically symptomatic of the crisis of mindless violence in American society. Consequently, the regulation of firearms has again become a topic of debate in the Campaign of 2016, if for no other reason than that Democrats are now predominantly in favor of more regulation of guns (with the curious exception of candidate Bernie Sanders) and Republicans are predominantly opposed to such policies. While not running (or eligible) for reelection, incumbent president Obama has sternly commented with increasing anger and frustration about the routinization of these incessant eruptions of violence. Republican candidates, to a person, have dug in on the protection of Second Amendment, at least as it is construed by those who view any regulation of guns as a threat to liberty. Among the more controversial comments was a remark uttered by GOP candidate Dr. Ben Carson, arguing that imposing restrictions on gun ownership is more tragic than a bullet-ridden body, a comment that he has recently defended. While comments such as these are received with a degree of incredulity to many Americans, there is little risk that assuming such a position will move many likely voters. One’s position on firearms regulations has become a cultural and partisan divide that makes for a safe campaign topic for a party’s base of supporters.
The divide in congressional voting closely resembles the divide in public opinion. According to the Pew Center for People and the Press, in the winter of 2015, for the first time, the survey found support for gun rights as a priority edging support for gun control (52% to 46%). Expanded background checks are favored by 85 percent of the public, and preventing mentally ill persons from purchasing firearms is almost as popular. Fully 67 percent of the public would support a federal database to track firearm purchases. But in other areas, such as an assault rifle ban, the public reflects divisions similar to those in the Senate. Most of the change in public opinion over time has come from changes in Republicans, who have become dramatically more supportive of gun rights and more opposed to gun control than they were in earlier eras. The attitudes of Democrats have been more stable. The outcome is a stark partisan divide, which is also reflected in patterns of gun ownership.
Federal inaction on gun violence has led to pressure for policy reform at the state level. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence notes that in the two years after Sandy Hook, while seventy state laws were passed that weaken gun regulation and sixty-four laws were passed that strengthen it, the net effect has been that eight states substantially strengthened their regulation of firearms and four states substantially weakened it. After Sandy Hook, Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri sought to protect gun rights in their state constitutions with a strict scrutiny clause, setting a very high bar for any municipality that would attempt to regulate firearms within state boundaries. This creates challenges for the states themselves as they seek to maintain existing bans on the possession of firearms by felons, and by people with domestic protection orders against them; such laws may not meet the requirements of strict scrutiny. Connecticut, however, chose to strengthen its background checks to include all gun and ammunition purchases, along with a ban on large-capacity magazines and some kinds of automatic and semi-automatic rifles.
Pennsylvania became a testing ground for a new strategy in pursuing gun rights in the courts. Forty-six states, Pennsylvania among them, bar local governments from passing gun control measures that are stricter than those at the state level. When local governments found the state unresponsive to their requests for new laws to prevent individuals with domestic protection orders from possessing firearms, they enacted policies on their own, knowing that local residents would be unlikely to mount a legal challenge. In response, the state government enacted new legislation in 2014 that permitted any state resident or organization to which they belong, whether they could demonstrate that they had been harmed by the policy or not, to challenge municipal regulations on firearms (for example, local bans on carrying firearms in parks, or requiring that a lost or stolen gun be reported). Successful plaintiffs would receive reimbursement for all of their court costs plus punitive damages, all at taxpayer expense. The NRA (based in Virginia) began to sue cities throughout Pennsylvania (as did Texas-based U.S. Law Shield and Pennsylvania-based Firearms Owners Against Crime), most of whom could not afford to defend their gun ordinances in court. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia could, however, and in June 2015, the NRA lost its suit on the grounds that the law itself was invalid (because it was tacked onto a scrap metal bill, in violation of a single-subject rule). Pennsylvania may yet pass a clean version of this law, and other states may follow its lead. This would shift the political debate about gun rights to the local level, and it would pit wealthy advocacy groups against municipalities that are often strapped for cash.
The rise in gun violence has also influenced political advocacy, with new groups entering the public debate over the role of guns in American society. In 2006, then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and then Boston mayor Thomas Menino formed Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group that advocates for regulations on firearms. The group launched an effort entitled “Everytown for Gun Safety” in the 2014 midterm elections, spending $50 million on ads targeting lawmakers who opposed measures such as nationwide background checks on gun purchases. Moms Against Guns in America, founded by Shannon Watts in 2012 after Sandy Hook, is a grassroots network of gun control activists with a presence in all fifty states. It merged with Mayors Against Illegal Guns in December 2013. At present, these groups constitute the most visible elements of the gun control movement in the United States. Their adversaries are the NRA (which remains the best-funded, most cohesive voice for gun rights) and a plethora of other national and grassroots-level advocacy groups.
At the grassroots level, gun rights advocacy is exemplified by the open-carry movement. In the summer of 2014, Open Carry Texas (OCT), a gun rights group, engaged in armed demonstrations throughout the state in an attempt to normalize the appearance of guns in public places and to protest Texas’s ban on the open carrying of handguns. Members, armed with long guns and assault rifles, marched on towns and neighborhoods and gathered at restaurants and stores as part of their public relations strategy. The gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America publicized photos of the heavily armed members of OCT in restaurants and stores in an attempt to pressure those businesses to ban firearms from their establishments, and to portray the public display of firearms as scary and threatening. They achieved a measure of success: Target, Starbucks, Wendy’s, Chili’s, Applebee’s, Jack in the Box, Sonic, and Chipotle all banned firearms from their stores after photos of armed customers circulated online. The NRA, in an open letter on its Web site, suggested that such demonstrations were “downright scary” and might damage the gun rights cause.
Similar demonstrations by open-carry groups in other states followed, as the open display of firearms became a form of political speech and appeared to extend to causes beyond the Texas open-carry handgun ban. Heavily armed protesters staged two separate demonstrations at a Muslim community center in Phoenix in May 2015. And during the August 2014 violence in Ferguson, Missouri, OCT (whose members are almost all white, and mostly male) announced plans to march through the Fifth Ward, a predominantly black neighborhood, in Houston. The pro-gun group was met by the equally armed New Black Panther Party, which questioned OCT’s motives and suggested that its members were insurgents in the Fifth Ward. Also in Texas, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, formed by African American gun rights activists to protest recent shootings of unarmed people of color by law enforcement, marched on Dallas and started the #BlackOpenCarry movement. The Oath Keepers, a predominantly white gun rights group, demonstrated in Ferguson in the summer of 2015 and at the one-year anniversary protests as well, and it reached out to the #BlackOpenCarry movement to coordinate a protest with black gun rights groups. The Huey P. Newton Gun Club noted, however, that the two groups have very different objectives—the Oath Keepers and other mostly white gun rights groups were concerned about civil liberties, whereas the #BlackOpenCarry movement was primarily concerned about human rights. This distinction reveals the role that race has played in shaping American politics; a history of segregation, Jim Crow, and other forms of discrimination (legal and not) continues to shape the lens through which citizens view the world, and to affect the way citizens are treated by others, thus influencing political priorities. More recently the connection between gun violence and terrorism has significantly complicated the gun control debate.
See also Race Relations Issue; Red Meat Issue
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