Debate

Part IV: Public Opinion, Interest Groups, and Gun Laws

EDITOR: Is there a substantial disconnect between public opinion and gun laws? To what extent have interest groups, such as the NRA and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, advanced or thwarted the “popular will” regarding the regulation of guns by Congress or the states? What’s our best evidence for what the “popular will” actually is?

ROBERT SPITZER: “Disconnect” aptly describes the relationship between public opinion and gun laws. Questions on gun control were among the first to be asked with the advent of modern polling in the 1930s, and the results reveal considerable consistency. A 1938 Gallup poll found that 79 percent of respondents favored “firearms control.” Two important long-term traits are evident: overall opinion consistency over time, and variation according to the type of regulation at issue. Short-term fluctuations occur within a relatively high range of support, generally favoring stronger regulations than we have in practice. This is a remarkable degree of consistency in support of stronger laws spanning the last eight decades, a consistency rarely found among the menu of national policy issues.

Opinion polls from the 1980s and 1990s show the greatest support (about 90 percent) for handgun waiting periods. Fully 60–70 percent support the assault weapons ban, and 60–80 percent support handgun registration. Support for a ban on handguns has ranged from a low of 31 percent in 1980 to a high of 52 percent in 1993. Regionally, fluctuations are wider, with the least support for gun measures in the South and rural areas, and greatest support in urban areas and the Northeast.

Unquestionably, the popular will has been thwarted by gun-rights groups. Yet that does not end the debate, because policy questions in a republican form of governance are not normally determined by plebiscite, and interests function legally and legitimately in our political arena. The successes logged by the NRA and its allies underscore the fundamental political axiom that a well-organized and motivated minority may often carry the day politically over a large, but relatively apathetic, majority. On the other hand, gun control measures have been enacted when the public has been sufficiently aroused and attentive because of assassinations or mass shootings.

GREGG CARTER: I agree with Spitzer; there is a serious disconnect between public opinion and our national gun laws. Here are some further examples based upon findings from my 1997 book, The Gun Control Movement. First, although how a survey question is phrased can affect the responses one gets, the various wordings about gun laws result in similar responses. For example, “we should ban all handguns” and “private individuals should not be allowed to possess handguns” yield approximately the same approval rating — 39 percent. Second, across the spectrum of gun control measures, the only one that does not yield an overwhelming majority of support is the total ban of handguns. Third, gun owners are less likely to favor gun laws, but the margins between them and general population are not very large. For example, 81 percent of the general public versus 71 percent of gun owners favor the registration of all handguns. The Brady Law is favored by 87 percent of the general population and 82 percent of gun owners. Fully 64 percent of gun owners, and 69 percent of the general population, favor “one-gun-a-month limits.” Fourth, there is broad support for gun control measures across political parties, ideological views, and race.

Some pro-gun rights scholars have contended that, even though people respond for stricter gun control when asked in a poll, they do not really mean it—that is, the issue isn’t that important to them. However, polling results from the General Social Survey (conducted by NORC) dispute this contention. When asked how they feel about gun measures compared with other public issues, more than 80 percent of Americans responded between “fairly strong” and “extremely strong.”

DEBORAH HOMSHER: I believe that most significant legislative and legal contests concerning gun regulations now take place at the state and city, rather than the national, level. It is true that national advocacy organizations—most obviously, the National Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence—shape the discourse and supply their constituencies throughout the states with information (statistics and personal stories) intended to be used as ammunition in the ongoing debates. Because public discussion about gun control has been conducted as a war, with insults, exaggerations, and caricatures deployed by both sides, often as a means to ignite passionate fundraising campaigns, sincere efforts to determine the “popular will” and to discover which laws, police practices, and/or community responses directly contributed to the marked decrease in urban crime rates in the late 1990s have been largely drowned in noise.

I trust reports of polls that find the majority of Americans have long favored gun control legislation. At the same time, I have interviewed people who find gun control campaigns and gun control advocates to be condescending and intrusive.

Certainly, the polls that Spitzer and Carter have cited must be taken as evidence of the popular will in favor of gun regulation. But the passage of right-to-carry legislation in many states must also be viewed as evidence of pro-gun sentiments. Perhaps we might rephrase the question and ask not what the “popular will” is and whether it’s been thwarted, but what kinds of new information, questions, and options ought to be introduced into the public debates that help forge that popular will.

JAMES JACOBS: Toqueville observed that a remarkable feature and strength of our democracy was the tendency of Americans to band together, form groups, and participate in public life. The NRA and the Brady Campaign both reflect and help to shape public opinion. These organizations also help to shape our laws and public policies on firearms. They do not thwart popular opinion but tend to catalyze, shape, and express it.

“Public opinion” is a slippery concept. People’s views on most public policy issues tend to be shallow and susceptible to manipulation; opinion surveys depend upon the phrasing of the question, as well as the manner and body language of the interviewer. Still, certain generalizations can be made. Americans overwhelming reject the idea of prohibiting all firearms or only handguns. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of Americans support severe punishment for persons who use firearms to commit crimes.

ROBERT SPITZER: Public opinion is not as inscrutable, shallow, or easily manipulated as James Jacobs suggests. Opinion formation is the product of long-term forces, initiated by the political socialization process that affects all of us from the time of childhood. People are not blank slates; as the late political scientist V.O. Key noted many years ago, “Voters are not fools.” People have a reasonable understanding of basic public policy matters, including gun control. Polling results do vary according to question wording, but that does not mean that polls mean nothing. There are well-honed standards and procedures that guide and help to ensure the process of accurate opinion gathering and assessment.

JAMES JACOBS: Our best evidence on public opinion about firearms policy arises from the fact that 45 percent of American households own upwards of 250 million firearms, and that as many Americans engage in hunting and target shooting as in jogging and tennis, and that strong gun control has never been popular nationally. From the severe federal and state criminal sentences prescribed for individuals who use guns in crimes, we can also infer a very strong national consensus. There is probably more disagreement among Americans on such firearms regulation as banning “Saturday Night Specials” and assault weapons. Disagreement, in part, reflects the fact that these terms are essentially political, not technical; there is a great deal of ignorance and confusion about the weapons to which they refer.

ROBERT SPITZER: Jacobs’ estimate that 45 percent of the households in the U.S. have one or more guns is surely not right. In the early 1960s, about half of all households did have one or more guns, but this percentage has been gradually declining since then. Today, only about one-third of all households have guns, although the average number of guns per household has increased.

JOYCE MALCOLM: Rather than a “disconnect” between public opinion and gun laws, there seems to be a disconnect between federal and state legislative action. Even as the federal government enacts statutes that ban certain types of weapons and attempts to further control the purchase of firearms, state governments are approving “shall issue” laws that permit all law-abiding individuals to carry a concealed weapon. At last count, 35 states had passed such laws, two in 2003. These include not only southern and western states, but also Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota.
While the public wants some controls on the ownership and use of guns, polls also show that Americans overwhelmingly believe there is a right for individuals to be armed. Interest groups are not necessarily thwarting the popular will. Rather, there is an unfortunate bias in the national media that overwhelmingly promotes gun control. In so doing, the media fails to provide the balance of views that an informed public needs and deserves.

RICHARD ABORN: The NRA has succeeded in thwarting the popular will on this issue. The more intriguing and difficult question is how. While polls can measure attitudes, they cannot accurately measure the intensity of attitudes. It would be tempting to dismiss the power of the NRA as a function of enormous campaign contributions, but this would be a mistake. The true strength of the NRA lies in its ability to develop at the grass-roots level highly dedicated, zealous supporters, whose only concern in their political life is guns. They show up at town hall meetings; they call in to radio shows; they write letters to the editor; they constantly contact their elected officials; they contribute money; and they vote on one issue guns. In relative terms, their numbers are quite small. Yet in a nation with a low voter turnout, the intensity of NRA supporters is very effective. The single biggest failure of the gun control movement has been our continuing inability to match this grass-roots support.

The NRA zealotry is developed and reinforced by a communications apparatus that has understood the rhetoric that will most appeal to and sustain NRA supporters criminals, not guns, commit crime; the Second Amendment; and the slippery slope to the banning of guns. It is this last argument that is probably the most effective. By arguing consistently, and with great fervor, that the gun control movement is really a gun ban movement, the NRA has effectively enlisted even those gun owners who would otherwise support controls. How? By arguing that we really want to take away all guns, the NRA invests all gun owners with a direct stake in the outcome of the debate, regardless of how reasonable each measure may be. Not only has the gun control movement been ineffective in rebutting this ban argument, but also we have failed to invest a similar stake in those who might be inclined to be supportive. Of course, people support public safety, but by that measure the gun control movement will only be able to succeed during times of high violent crime, while the NRA will continue to mount a sustainable opposition. It is imperative that the gun control movement develop ways to respond to the political strength of the NRA.

SAUL CORNELL: The recent wave of right-to-carry laws can be attributed to a very effective effort of gun rights activists. If these proposals had been put directly on the ballot, I doubt that they would have passed in many states. The scholarly basis for these laws, John Lott and David Mustard’s “more guns, less crime” theory, has been subjected to a number of challenges. In a 2003 Stanford Law Review article, Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III demolish this thesis. There is a large body of new scholarship emerging in the fields of public policy, history, and law that may help us chart a new middle ground in this contentious issue. The new Second Amendment Research Center that I have created here at the John Glenn Institute at Ohio State University is devoted to exploring this middle ground. We need to move beyond the stale rhetorical formulations that have made it difficult to formulate effective policy.

GREGG CARTER: Several contributors correctly note that the discourse on rational policies is at a gridlock, because of the intransigence of both sides of the gun control debate. This was not always the case, however; only a generation ago, the NRA was a voice of reason and moderation in the gun control debate.

After World War II, nine million veterans re-entered civilian life with a new interest in firearms. Tens of thousands of them joined the NRA, giving it a potential to wield power over public policy greater than ever. However, the membership was little interested in gun control issues per se, but rather in hunting and recreational shooting. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA’s stand on gun control was moderate. During congressional testimony over the proposed Gun Control Act of 1968, for example, NRA Executive Vice President Franklin Orth proclaimed, “We do not think that any sane American can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States [John F. Kennedy].” At the same time, the NRA endorsed the banning of “Saturday Night Specials” because “they have no sporting purpose and are frequently poorly made.”

Although some of the NRA’s membership and leadership had always opposed any form of gun regulation, they were in the minority. In the mid-1970s, however, this minority began an all-out—and eventually successful—effort to redefine the meaning and the mission of the organization. Executive committeeman Harlon B. Carter led the revolt. He argued that the NRA’s then-moderate viewpoint on gun control was wrongheaded and needed to be replaced by absolute resistance to all forms of gun regulation. He argued that every gun had a legitimate purpose and that every law-abiding person, no matter what age, should have the right to choose his or her own weapon. The redefinition culminated in 1977 in what historians call the “revolt at Cincinnati.” At that year’s NRA Annual Meeting, Carter and his associates used their knowledge of parliamentary procedure to replace the moderate leadership with themselves. Upon coming to power, they labeled their organization the “new NRA.” It would become the modern gun lobby.

DEBORAH HOMSHER: There are hidden assumptions about race at play in these debates. When pro-gun interest groups passionately contend that their members are all responsible gun owners, they obviously make reference to the “criminals.” When that happens, urban drug dealers, often Hispanic or black, quietly figure in the background as the typical criminals. This generalized background portrait of irresponsible, and potentially dangerous, gun owners is not entirely unfounded. African American males were not only dying by gunfire at a high rate throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Gregg Carter notes; they were also shooting. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the majority of homicides during these years were intra-racial; 94 percent of black homicide victims were killed by blacks. Homicides were most often committed with guns, especially handguns. Significantly, however, both the homicide victimization and offending rates for black men in this age group began to decrease during the later 1990s. Why? What happened? Was it due to widespread incarceration? The economy? The end of the crack epidemic? There are lessons to be learned, but advocacy organizations are not well-equipped to conduct objective studies.

I interviewed African-American women living in Camden, New Jersey, who had witnessed the effects of widespread gun use in their communities. Two of them had sons who had been wounded by gun-fire; one had a son who had been killed; one of these young men was serving time for dealing drugs. The women acknowledged that gun deaths and drug trafficking plagued their neighborhoods, and they wanted to find ways to stop it. The standard prescriptions offered by anti-gun and pro-gun advocacy organizations did not address their problems. The NRA recommended that all the criminals be sent to jail and that the law-abiding citizens consider purchasing guns for self-defense, but plenty of the young men these women knew (and loved) were already in jail, and experience had proven that owning and carrying a gun on the street was as likely to attract bullets as to repel them. Alternately, proposals to decrease gun violence by increasing gun regulation didn’t carry much force in Camden, since a lot of control had already been imposed there. What did these women imagine might help reduce gun crime in their neighborhood? They wanted more interesting things for their kids to do. They wanted a more civil community.

Yes, laws ought to reflect the popular will. But what if the popular will has been divided and made stubborn by interest groups? Then, we should focus on a larger goal: to facilitate more cooperative investigations, negotiations, and discussions to inform the voting populace about effective means to reduce gun crimes and deaths in the United States. To do this, we must be honest and responsible in public debates. We must choose the right questions and focus on them.

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next: Cross-National Perspectives Reprinted from Focus on Law Studies, SPRING 2003, Volume XVIII, Number 2, published by the Division for Public Education of the American Bar Association.

Copyright 2003, American Bar Association Division for Public Education, 541 N. Fairbanks Ct., Chicago, IL 60611.

Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. This or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or downloaded or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.