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The high crime rates of the early 1990s and a string of sensational crimes from coast to coast set the stage in 1994 for the most extensive and costly federal anticrime bill ever. Bill Clinton had made crime fighting a top priority, particularly after his health care reform bill had faltered. Congress had taken the initiative, led by Democrats Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware and Representative Charles Schumer of New York. The Democrats came up with a way to put $30 billion for anticrime programs into a ‘trust fund’ created by a reduction in the federal bureaucracy. Soon it seemed that Clinton's 100,000 community police officers, a Republican demand for more prisons, and various other programs to combat violence against women and other crime problems all could be funded. Republicans backed off support of big allocations for crime prevention ideas like ‘midnight basketball’ for teens, and the National Rifle Association fought against a proposed ban on assault‐style weapons. The result was a donnybrook that kept Congress in session through most of the summer. Republicans eventually won a series of concessions on funding, although the assault weapon provision survived and the law was passed. In the process, Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill was seen as so flawed that the crime law played a significant part in the Republicans’ seizing control of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections. Five years later, the crime law's impact on crime rates was uncertain; in fact, crime had begun to fall long before many of its provisions could have had much effect.

Gun control has stirred intense emotions in the war on crime, even though many controls have only a marginal impact on firearms violence. Laws and their enforcement have been influenced most dramatically by assassinations and mass killings rather than by careful study. The first major modern federal gun regulations were approved by Congress in 1968 after the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations. The National Rifle Association (NRA) worked hard to ease what it considered overly aggressive enforcement, finally succeeding with a 1986 law known as McClure‐Volkmer. The NRA offended many law enforcement leaders in the process. The combination of police support and a federal executive branch and Congress, both controlled by Democrats, helped enact two major gun control measures in 1993 and 1994: the Brady Act, which required a waiting period for handgun purchasers to enable checks of potential buyers’ records, and a ban on assault‐style weapons blamed in the deaths of police officers and others. Yet “copycat” assault weapons were manufactured, blunting the law's impact. Congress failed to enact proposed laws that would require trigger locks on handguns or to regulate gun shows, where firearms were sold with minimal regulation. The NRA argued for more enforcement of existing antigun laws, pointing to a federal program in Richmond, VA, called ‘Project Exile’.

Conventional wisdom claims that the Trump 2016 campaign was “disorganized,” but this judgment overlooks bargains with leaders of preexisting federated networks connected to millions of voters in pivotal states. Newly found data about the Fraternal Order of Police, the white police union, show that lodge and membership locations help predict Trump margins beyond other pro-GOP variables. Trump deliberately appealed to white police anger at the Black Lives Matter movement and (in a departure from his typical mass rallies) spoke in front of law-enforcement audiences. Similarly, Trump and his top lieutenants courted Christian right pastors and National Rifle Association leaders willing to disseminate campaign messages and mobilize followers in exchange for Trump’s promise to nominate right-wing Supreme Court justices. Many voters outside of big cities were receptive because they are embedded in evangelical and gun-friendly social networks and believe their lifeways are threatened by outside, liberal forces.

This chapter uses a case study approach to explore the political choice phase of the political communication cycle (PCC) over time. Focusing on interest groups and detailing the long history of these organizations in America, the chapter primarily examines innovations made by four of the largest interest groups in American history: AARP, the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and MoveOn.org. These four interest groups have spanned multiple political communication orders (PCOs) and their overall lack of innovativeness until recent years is tied to the distinct nature of their shared political communication goals. These goals are far narrower than campaigns or social movements and therefore are much less likely to motivate innovative efforts. These trends have started to change in the internet-based era as new organizational and communication strategies have opened up interest groups to greater innovation along the lines of MoveOn.org.

This chapter shows how the Million Mom March helped parents, especially mothers, heal from the loss of a loved one to gun violence. It compares past maternalist movements to this one and shows the uneasy coexistence of feminism and maternalism. It explores how suburban mothers who were mostly white and urban mothers who were mostly black and Hispanic, came to believe that American society was sick, that all mothers were the antidote, and that together they could get gun control adopted and stop gun violence. While demonstrating the possibilities for coalition this chapter argues that the color-blind approach failed against the National Rifle Association, which evoked images negligent mothers, over-indulgent mothers, bad black mothers and criminal black beast rapists to defeat the anti- gun crusaders.

This chapter examines the extent to which conservative women use gendered appeals to fight for gun rights, including portraying guns as an “equalizer” against men who may attack their families. Conservative women also oppose efforts to control access to certain types of weapon and ammunition, calling them paternalistic, arguing instead that women’s right to bear arms is an important feminist principle that allows women to protect themselves and their families.

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.

This chapter examines Justice Antonin Scalia’s highly controversial opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller construing the Second Amendment and holding that the U.S. Constitution establishes an individual right to possess firearms. Scalia held his opinion up as an example of constitutional originalism, and the chapter argues that it was indeed exemplary—but for reasons wholly contrary to those Scalia assumed. Rather than demonstrating the value of originalism, Heller shows that originalism is an inadequate and easily manipulable methodology. The chapter argues that Scalia’s opinion was arbitrary both in the source materials it cited and those it ignored and that it was based not on history but in Scalia’s personal love of guns and hunting. More broadly, the chapter argues that Scalia’s opinion shows that originalism is a rhetoric of constitutional change and that the Court’s decision in the case was the result of the half-century campaign of the National Rifle Association to work through the Republican Party to create an individual right to possess firearms based on the Second Amendment.

This chapter clarifies the logical relationship between the types of information an educator can convey and competence at the types of tasks that people perform. Here is a short summary of the chapter’s main claims: . . . Knowledge of many things does not require recalling “all the facts.” Competence at many tasks does not require knowing “everything.” Trying to give “all the facts” to an audience is usually a sign of inefficiency. Cues and non-declarative memories facilitate competence even when they leave people unable to answer certain fact-based questions about a task. The effectiveness of attempts to increase competence depends on what information is given to whom. For example, when the competence of a group is being measured, not all members of that group must have the same knowledge for the group as a whole to be competent. . . . To improve efficiency, educators should understand what kinds of information are most relevant for increasing knowledge and competence. To reach these conclusions, I rely heavily on two terms: necessity and sufficiency. These terms describe logical relationships between two or more items. Educators who understand these terms can better distinguish information that increases desired competences from information that has no such power. X is a necessary condition for Y if Y can happen only after X happens. For example, suppose that earning at least a million votes is a necessary condition for a candidate to win an election. Two implications follow. First, any candidate who does not earn at least a million votes cannot win the election (which means that there may be no winner). Second, any candidate who earns at least a million votes has the potential to win the election. X is a sufficient condition for Y if X happening means that Y must also happen. Suppose that earning a million votes is sufficient to win the election. Two implications follow. First, any candidate who earns at least a million votes wins the election (which implies that multiple candidates could win). Second, any candidate who does not earn at least a million votes retains the potential to win the election.

Chapter 1 introduces a fairly large and diverse literature on gun culture. Gun culture focuses attention on the distinctive meanings that people attach to guns. For some, guns symbolize power and violence, while for others guns signify protection and freedom. These contrasting meanings are central to understanding the deep political divisions about guns that exist in the United States. This chapter covers three different research approaches to gun culture: ethnographic, historical, and quantitative. After a comprehensive presentation of gun culture and the institutional forces that shape it, the author anticipates a substantial gap between gun owners’ and nonowners’ political choices and attitudes.

This chapter considers the National Rifle Association (NRA) as not merely a lobbying outfit, trade association, or hobbyist group, but as a full-fledged mediasphere. Since the early 2000s, the NRA has aggressively expanded its footprint within the broader right-wing media environment—it publishes four print magazines and a highly integrated array of micro-targeted online print and video content, social media platforms, and original online television programming. Via a content analysis of NRA.org, a site that aggregates and prioritizes content from across the group’s multimedia platforms, this chapter employs critical discourse analysis to illuminate the site’s populist themes and rhetorical styles. It finds that the NRA combines the trappings of news genres and right-wing discourses with populist modes of expression to amplify and reinforce the deep affective ties between gun ownership and conservative political identity.

This chapter examines the process by which people become gun carriers, specifically the NRA courses effectively required to obtain a concealed-pistol license in Michigan. It shows how NRA training attaches a particular set of civic rights, duties, and responsibilities (that is, a model of citizenship) to the lawful carrying of guns. While the organization is often associated with its role as the leader of the gun lobby, this chapter calls attention to the NRA’s service side to show how NRA gun training shapes gun culture from the ground up by presenting and promoting a model for citizenship—the citizen-protector—that centers on the moral capacity to use lethal force to protect both self and others.

The 1999 Columbine high school massacre marked the start of an era of recurrent US mass shootings in settings once considered safe. In the aftermath of each horrific event, gun safety advocates tried to persuade state and national politicians to adopt new regulations but with little success—until recently. This chapter compares the political aftereffects of six major mass shootings to illuminate why the 2018 Parkland high school shooting led to more political change in favor of gun regulations than the previous events. Despite an unfavorable partisan climate, the Parkland shooting spurred teenage activists adept with social media tools to take advantage of the political opportunity structure created by prior grassroots resistance organizing. In response, politicians—especially Democrats—have embraced the gun safety cause as never before.

The introduction to this book defines the gun gap, which refers to differences in political behavior and attitudes between gun owners and nonowners. In addition, the introduction establishes why the gun gap is important for understanding modern mass politics. Election analysts and scholars typically overlook the gun gap, but it is an essential explanation for an impressive range of political behaviors and attitudes, including voter choice and turnout, perceptions of personal and public safety, preferences for gun control policies, and support for the death penalty and other punitive measures. Finally, the introduction outlines the book chapters, discussing key theories and findings.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s findings and their implications for scholarship as well as gun policy. Taking stock of how the everyday politics of armed self-defense intersects with racial inequality and socioeconomic decline, it puts the book’s major findings into conversation with scholarship on policing, political culture, and masculinities. Turning to gun policy, the conclusion then argues against the current terms of the contemporary gun debate, which focuses largely on whether guns and gun-related practices should be legal or illegal. Reframing the debate to focus on broader questions of social insecurity, a more productive—and perhaps even less divisive—conversation would focus on addressing the root causes of contemporary demand for firearms explored in this book.