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Firearms were found to be a major cause of injury and death among children in the 5- to 18-year-old age group and the leading cause of death in young men in their late teens in South Africa. In the 1990s, the high incidence of firearm deaths and injuries spurred government policy and law reform, culminating in a new Firearms Control Act, which replaced the ineffective and outdated Arms and Ammunition Act. This chapter considers the role research played in this complex process by examining the activities and impact of a research and advocacy project undertaken by an academic policy research organization called the Child Health Policy Institute (CHPI) at the University of Cape Town. The chapter describes the political context within which the project was initiated; outlines the research findings and how they were disseminated and utilized in relation to the law reform process; describes the law reform process and broader advocacy strategy related to it; and reflects on lessons learned.

This chapter provides a brief historical tour of federal firearms regulation and some background on state and local gun controls. It traces the history of federal and state gun control from the 1920s to the present, emphasizing the continuity from the 1938 Federal Firearms Act (FFA) to the 1968 Gun Control Act (GCA) to the 1993 Brady Law. It holds that it is likely that future federal gun control legislation will build upon the foundation that has been established over the past 75 years. Up until now the principal federal policy is that law-abiding adults should be allowed to purchase and possess firearms, at least in their homes, but that dangerous classes of people should be denied access to guns and should be punished for possessing them. Furthermore, both federal and state criminal laws provide very serious punishment for crimes committed with a firearm.

This chapter exposes the holes and weaknesses in the Brady Law. While proponents and supporters hailed the Brady Act as an important step toward reducing violent crime, a close look makes that prediction doubtful. The law`s most glaring weakness is its failure to require background checks of individuals who obtain “used” firearms via sales, gifts, or loans from a person who is not a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL). A closely related problem is the failure to cover gun shows, where people interested in purchasing a firearm without being subjected to a background check can easily find an obliging seller. Moreover, an ineligible purchaser can buy a gun from even a diligent FFL using counterfeit ID or a straw purchaser. In short, the Brady Law projects the image of effective regulation without the reality.

This chapter evaluates the Brady Law's impact on violent crime. First, it examines the logic of inferring gun crime reduction from blocked Federal Firearm License sales. Then, aided by an impressive study by Professors Jens Ludwig and Phil Cook, it assesses whether the decline in violent crime that took place during the 1990s can be attributed to the Brady Law. The Brady Law seeks to regulate only gun sales by FFLs leaving the secondary market unregulated. That fact alone ought to make one skeptical that the law could have much, if any, effect on reducing gun and nongun violent crime.

This chapter frames the discussion of the politics of firearms with an exploration of the gendered nature of domestic violence, firearm fatalities, and the firearms debate, including how women are portrayed and the gender identities of the most prominent voices for “gun rights” and gun control. Given the stark and brutal realities of firearms and family violence, politicians across the ideological spectrum should readily agree that people who violently attack or threaten family members should be subject to practical and measured restrictions on their access to firearms. Unfortunately, safety as related to firearms and family violence has become highly politicized. This chapter identifies measure that states can enact to address the loopholes that allow domestic abusers to acquire firearms even after they have been convicted of felony abuse, often to deadly effect.

The paradigm of the armed and dangerous mass killer in public opinion and legislation is a homicidal-suicidal stranger hunting in public. Yet half of all firearms-related homicides take place in the home, typically among intimates and people known to the slain. Drawing on data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, this chapter shows that even in the context of extraordinary violence by the homicidal-suicidal, the major early red flags and risk factors involve seemingly ordinary smaller-scale assaults and domestic disturbances. Firearms laws prevent individuals convicted of crimes of domestic violence or under court-issued restraining orders from possessing firearms. The problem is that many perpetrators never come to the attention of a court. Based on these findings regarding what current legal screens miss, this chapter discusses how police discretion and scene-of the-assault procedure for “ordinary” domestic violence can help prevent escalation to the feared extraordinary violence of homicidal-suicidal mass killings.

The Sanctions Repertoire operates a way of keeping order in the social field through the use of both positive and negative sanctions. The chapter considers the use of both these including gifting, favours, religion, rumour, and then reviews how these are implemented using different variables. Negative sanctions such as threats, violence and honey traps are used along with increasing use of threats to families, abductions and the use of firearms

This chapter studies republicans’ most important activity in Britain during the war of independence: the acquisition and smuggling of firearms, explosives, ammunition and war material of every sort to Ireland. All aspects of the topic are covered including the main figures concerned, the sources they tapped, the types, quantities and cost of the materiel they acquired, the storage of the weapons, their transport to Ireland and distribution to IRA units in the field. Financial and personnel problems are explored. Disagreeing with Iain Patterson, the author contends that gunrunning in Britain through official and unofficial republican channels played a major role in keeping the IRA in Ireland on its feet.

Suspicious death investigations in the postwar era reveal the profound transformations of the city and of English society in the wake of the Second World War. From 1945 the return of civilians and soldiers, the presence of deserters, the increase in the availability of firearms and the difficulties dealing with postwar austerity and settling back into peacetime family life led to a surge of violence. After the war the numbers of infanticides and deaths from abortion dropped under new social provisions for mothers and families and murders using firearms increased. Diminished police manpower and a mobile population led to an increasing reliance on forensics in suspicious death investigations. The early 1950s saw a reworking of the familiar criminal anxieties about London and a profound uneasiness about the war’s lasting effects on the young. Suspicious deaths and criminal trials of the early 1950s illustrated the intense ambivalence Londoners felt as they sought put the effects of the war behind them even as they continued to struggle with its legacy.