Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America

Notes

Notes CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THE GUN CONTROL (PARTICIPATION) PARADOX 1. Mitchell Zuckoff, “Subdued NRA Shifts Gears as Calls for Gun Control Grow,” Boston Globe, 30 April 1999, A1. 2. Sara Kugler, “Gun-Control Group Gains,” Denver Post, 16 July 1999, A7. 3. Robert J. Spitzer has argued that gun politics follows a “cycle of outrage, action, and reaction,” in which an event triggers a public demand for new gun laws, which in turn provokes a backlash by gun rights supporters. See The Politics of Gun Control (New York: Chatham House, 1998), 13. 4. New York Times, 11 March 2001, sec. 4, 1. 5. Washington Post, 7 March 2001, A10. 6. San Francisco Chronicle, 24 March 2001, A1. 7. The figure was 31% in 1999 and 36% in 1993. Interestingly, the fraction is roughly comparable to the fraction of respondents in a 1993 Gallup poll who said they “personally know someone who has been injured or killed by a drunk driver.” Note that the gun question is more restrictive, referring to “close” relatives or friends, as opposed to someone who is merely personally known to the respondent. The Gallup poll on drunk driving is archived at the Roper Center and accessible via the Lexis-Nexis database. 8. There were approximately 202 million adults over eighteen in 1999; 63 million is 31% of 202 million. 9. Hazel Erskine, “The Polls: Gun Control,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1972): 456. 10. It is important to be clear about what is meant by key terms that reappear throughout this book. I use the term “gun control” as a catchall phrase to refer to a constellation of proposals to regulate the importation, manufacture, transfer, and possession of firearms. I am principally concerned with policies that seek to regulate or restrict access to individuals before they have committed any offense, rather than policies that seek either to enforce existing laws or to punish gun violence offenders after the fact. Throughout this book I use the terms “gun control ,” “firearms regulation,” “firearms restrictions,” and “gun laws” interchangeably . On the participation side, I use the term “gun control advocates” or “gun control supporters” to refer to the universe of political actors operating through or on behalf of voluntary associations favoring tighter firearms restrictions. Unless specified, the term “advocates” does not refer to elites (i.e., members of Congress) or to sympathizers within the mass public. The term “gun control groups” refers to organizations that are exclusively devoted to restricting firearms availability, or that have a division that does the same. To describe actors on the other side of the political fence, I use the terms “gun rights supporters,” “gun rights activists,” or “gun rights organizations.” Rather than taking a position that firearms posses- 216 • Notes to Chapter One sion is a right (a question on which there is a great deal of debate), my use of these terms acknowledges the prerogative of political actors to be called what they prefer to be called. Finally, occasionally it is semantically necessary to refer to the collective efforts of gun control groups over a certain period of time; typically, I use the term “campaign” or “push,” rather than “movement.” 11. Sherry L. Murphy, National Vital Statistics Reports 48, no. 11 (24 July 2000): 71; Elizabeth Arias et al., National Vital Statistics Reports 52, no. 3 (18 September 2003): 74. 12. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Crimes Committed with Firearms, 1973–2003 (2003), http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/ guncrime.htm (accessed 24 January 2005). That 5.4 million figure does not include injuries from accidental discharge of a firearm or from attempted suicide. 13. Data are for 1989 to 1998. The rates reached a high of 15 per 100,000 in 1993 and a low of 11 per 100,000 in 1998. Data from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Vital Statistics Reports 48, no. 11 (24 July 2000), table 18, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/ data/nvsr/nvsr48/nvs48_11.pdf (accessed 11 January 2003). 14. The U.S. rate was 13.7 firearms deaths per 100,000 people; the rate for England and Wales was 0.4; for Norway, 3.1; for Australia, 2.9. See Lois A. Fingerhut , Christine S. Cox, and Margaret Warner, “International Comparative Analysis of Injury Mortality: Findings from the ICE on Injury Statistics,” Advance Data, no. 303 (7 October 1998): 15. 15. I define mass shootings to be...