Guns in America

Guns in America

Legislation

In the wake of the assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (4 April 1968) and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (5 June 1968), the United States Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968. For more than thirty years this legislation defined federal gun policy. It banned most interstate sales of firearms, licensed most gun dealers, and barred felons, minors, and the mentally ill from purchasing and owning guns. Culturally, the law represented a brief national revulsion against gun violence. Recent gun-control legislation has been more contentious and less extensive. During the first years of the Clinton administration the Democratic Congress enacted the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (1993), which required a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns and banned certain assault weapons. Since 1994, however, efforts to pass major antigun legislation have slowed. More modest pieces of legislation, such as a proposal for safety locks on guns, stand the best chance of success. Meanwhile, many state laws have begun to favor the rights of gun owners, including the right of any citizen without a criminal record to carry concealed weapons, which is now legal in thirty-one states.

Attitudes

According to a survey conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Associates during August 1999, 74 percent of Americans supported the registration of all handgun owners and 93 percent favored a mandatory waiting period for persons wishing to buy handguns. An additional 68 percent of those interviewed believed that military assault weapons ought to be outlawed, while 51 percent wanted to abolish gun shows at which weapons of all types can be bought and sold with little regulation. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), countered that "the real target is the Second Amendment.… What is being offered is some Utopian society where guns do not exist. I hate to tell people, you're never going to get there." Other advocates of the right to bear arms echoed LaPierre's sentiments. "Guns are for defense, [for] saving your own life," insisted Elizabeth Saunders, president and CEO of American Derringer.

Ownership

By 1998 the percentage of American households in which guns were present had declined slightly from approximately 45 percent to nearly 40 percent. Membership in the NRA had also dropped from 3.5 million in 1995 to 2.8 million, a decrease of 20 percent. At the same time, estimates suggested that Americans still owned more than 235 million guns. University of Chicago economist John R. Lott Jr. concluded in the controversial More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws (1998) that in states enacting more-relaxed right-to-carry laws, murders fell an average of 8 percent, rapes an average of 5 percent, and aggravated assaults an average of 7 percent between 1977 and 1992. The longer such laws remained on the books, the more precipitous the decline in violent crime. After five years the number of murders fell by 15 percent and rapes by 9 percent. In addition, the average death rate from mass shootings in states with right-to-carry laws dropped by 69 percent. By comparison, Lott showed that in the United States as a whole during this same period the number of murders increased by 24 percent, rapes by 71 percent, and aggravated assaults by more than 50 percent. Gun-control lobbyists, criminologists, and other critics charged that Lott's research is spurious, his statistics unreliable, and his conclusion—that permitting citizens to own and carry guns will create a safer society—dangerous.

Guns and Violence

Americans witnessed during the 1990s a rash of mass shootings, many involving teenagers or children. Although juvenile crime declined throughout the decade, the number of youths killed by gunfire increased an alarming 153 percent. Recent statistics suggest that one in twelve high-school students was threatened or injured by a classmate with a gun every year. The growing sense among many Americans that no one was safe from unpredictable gun violence fueled the debate over gun control, a debate likely to continue among congressmen, state legislators, lobbyists, and the general public, and which almost certainly will be a major issue in the presidential election of 2000.

Sources:

"America Under the Gun," Newsweek, 134 (23 August 1999), special issue.

"The Atlanta Massacre," Time, 154 (9 August 1999): 22-39.

Constance Johnson, "Law and Disorder," U.S. News & World Report, 116 (28 March 1994): 35-37.

John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Bruce W. Nelan, "Guns and Poses," Time, 147 (3 June 1996): 42-44.

SCHOOL VIOLENCE

The following list provides a chronology of the major incidents of gun violence involving children and other mass shootings during the decade.

2 February 1996: Barry Loukaitis, 14, killed a teacher and two students and wounded another at Frontier Junior High School in Moses Lake, Washington. He is now serving two life sentences.

1 October 1997: Luke Woodham, 16, stabbed his mother to death and then drove to Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi, where he proceeded to kill two students, including his former girlfriend, and to wound seven others. Woodham was sentenced to life in prison.

1 December 1997: Michael Carneal, 14, killed three students and wounded five others who were attending a prayer meeting at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky.

24 March 1998: Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, killed a teacher and four classmates and wounded ten other persons at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

24 April 1998: Andrew Wurst, 14, killed a teacher at an eighth-grade graduation dance at James W. Parker Middle School in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.

19 May 1998: Jacob Davis killed another student in the parking lot of Lincoln County High School in Fayetteville, Tennessee. Davis claimed the other boy had been dating his former girlfriend.

21 May 1998: Kip Kinkel, 15, killed two students and wounded twenty-two others at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. Kinkel, also charged with murdering his parents the previous day, was sentenced to 112 years in prison.

24 July 1998: Russell-Rusty" Watson, 41, killed a police officer and a federal guard and wounded a female tourist at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Watson was severely wounded by police.

15 April 1999: Sergei Babarin, 74, killed a woman and a security guard and wounded four others at the Mormon Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. Police then shot and killed Babarin as they attempted to apprehend him.

20 April 1999: Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed twelve students and one teacher and wounded twenty-three others before taking their own lives at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

20 May 1999: Anthony "T. J." Solomon, 15, wounded six students at Heritage High School in Conyers, Georgia.

2-4 July 1999: Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, 21, killed two persons and wounded nine others during a rampage through Illinois and Indiana, after which he took his own life. Smiths killing spree was apparently motivated by racial animosity.

29 July 1999: Mark Barton, 44, a disgruntled day-trader, shot and killed nine persons and wounded thirteen others in Atlanta, Georgia, arter bludgeoning to death his wife and two children. Barton then took his own life.

5 August 1999: Alan Eugene Miller, 34, killed at least two, and possibly three, persons in Pelham, Alabama.

10 August 1999: Buford O. Furrow, 37, wounded three children, a teenager, and a sixty-eight-year-old receptionist when he opened fire at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, California. Furrow later shot and killed a postal worker.