Debate

CONTRIBUTORS

Editor: JOHN PAUL RYAN (johnpryan@mindspring.com) is President of The Education, Public Policy, and Marketing Group, which provides program, editorial, and outreach services to nonprofit organizations. He served as Director of College and University Programs and, later, School Programs for the American Bar Association Division for Public Education from 1984 to 2000. He is the co-author of American Trial Judges (Free Press, 1980), and his articles on courts and the judicial process have appeared in such journals as Law & Society Review, Legal Studies Forum, Policy Studies Journal, and Social Education.

Contributors

RICHARD ABORN (raborn@kamber.com) is Senior Counsel and Director of Public Policy for The Kamber Group, which provides communications and media expertise for clients in politics, government, business, labor, and the arts. He was a prosecutor in the homicide division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, served as general counsel for a security firm, and served as President of Handgun Control, Inc., where he was a principal strategist behind passage of the Brady Law. He has also lectured at the New York University Law School and published law review articles on gun policy.

GREGG LEE CARTER (gcarter@bryant.edu) is Professor of Sociology at Bryant College, where he is Chair of the Department of History and Social Sciences. A former president of the New England Sociological Association, he is the author of The Gun Control Movement (Prentice Hall International, 1997) and editor of Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law (ABC-CLIO, 2002). He is currently at work on Gun Control: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, forthcoming).

SAUL CORNELL (cornell.14@osu.edu) is Professor of History at The Ohio State University and Director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy. He is the author of the prize-winning study The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). He also edited Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect? (Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2000). He is currently at work on a comprehensive history of the right to bear arms, to be published by Oxford University Press.

ROBERT J. COTTROL (bcottrol@main.nlc.gwu.edu) is Professor of Law, History, and Sociology at The George Washington University Law School. He previously taught at Rutgers University and Boston College. A specialist in American legal history, his writings have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, The American Journal of Legal History, and Law & Society Review, among others. He is the editor of Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment (Garland, 1994).

DEBORAH HOMSHER (dlh10@cornell.edu) is Managing Editor of Publications for the Southeast Asian Program of the Asian Studies Department at Cornell University. She is the author of Women and Guns: Politics and the Culture of Firearms in America (M.E. Sharpe, 2001). JAMES B. JACOBS (jacobsj@juris.law.nyu.edu) is the Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts at the New York University Law School. He also serves as Director of the NYU Center for Research in Crime and Justice, where he brings together academics and criminal justice policymakers in research, teaching, and campus colloquia. He is the author of a variety of books on legal and social policy, including Drunk Driving: An American Dilemma (University of Chicago, 1989) and Can Gun Control Work? (Oxford, 2002).

JOYCE LEE MALCOLM (jmalcolm@bentley.edu) is Professor of History at Bentley College, where she specializes in English and constitutional history. She is a senior advisor in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will be a James Madison Fellow at Princeton University in September 2003. She previously taught at Boston University and Northeastern University. She is the author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard, 2002) and To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Harvard, 1996).

ROBERT J. SPITZER (spitzerb@cortland.edu) is Distinguished Service Professor in the political science department of the State University of New York at Cortland, where he specializes in American government, the legislative process, and public policy. He is the author of The Politics of Gun Control (3rd ed., Chatham, 2003) and The Right to Bear Arms (ABC-CLIO, 2001).

ABA & Gun Violence Since 1965, the American Bar Association has sought to address the problem of gun violence and to articulate policy regarding the regulation of firearms in our society. Over the decades, the ABA has addressed the issue in the context of an overall strategy to combat violent crime in our system of justice and, increasingly, as a critical part of public health strategies to reduce violent injuries and death.
In 1994, the ABA Special Committee on Gun Violence was created to coordinate the Association’s efforts to implement policy goals aimed at reducing gun violence. The Committee serves as a source of information on public policy issues and program activities, particularly for lawyers and bar associations.

Its Web site may be found at www.abanet.org/gunviol.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books & Articles

Aborn, Richard. “The Battle over the Brady Bill and the Future of Gun Control Advocacy.” 22 Fordham Urban Law Journal 417 (1995).

Ayres, Ian, and John J. Donohue III. “Shooting Down the ‘More Guns, Less Crime’ Hypothesis.” 55 Stanford Law Review 1193 (2003).

Bellesiles, Michael A. Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Argues that Americans rarely owned or used guns prior to the Civil War, drawing upon legal, probate, military, and business records; fiction and personal letters; hunting magazines; and legislation. Concludes that the “gun-wielding frontiersman” was a myth.

Bogus, Carl T. (ed.). The Second Amendment in Law and History. New York: The New Press, 2001.

Bruce, John M., and Clyde Wilcox (eds.). The Changing Politics of Gun Control. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

Carter, Gregg Lee (ed.). Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2002.

The most comprehensive and balanced reference work on guns and their various roles in the U.S. society. Pro-gun control and gun rights scholars are equally represented.

Carter, Gregg Lee. The Gun Control Movement. New York: Twayne Publishers; London: Prentice Hall International, 1997.

Carter uses historical and sociological data in this book, which is a useful study for social movement analysts and for those concerned with the issues of guns and their control in America.

Cook, Philip J., and Jens Ludwig. Gun Violence: The Real Costs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Two economists show that the total human cost of gun violence in the U.S. (from injuries, deaths, lost work) total $100 billion per year.

Cooley, Thomas M. General Principles of Constitutional Law. 1891. Reprinted by Weisman Publications. 1998.

Cornell, Saul (ed.). Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect? New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

Explores how colonial Americans understood the right to bear arms, providing a view of the controversy over republicanism and liberalism, the tension between states’ rights and individual rights, and the place of rights and revolution in the American constitutional experience.

Cornell, Saul. “Commonplace or Anachronism: The Standard Model, the Second Amendment, and the Problem of History in Contemporary Constitutional Theory.” 16 Constitutional Commentary 221 (1999).

Cottrol, Robert J. “Submission Is Not the Answer: Lethal Violence, Microcultures of Criminal Violence and the Right to Self-Defense.” 69 University of Colorado Law Review 1029 (1998).

Cottrol, Robert J. (ed.). Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment. New York: Garland, 1994.

Cottrol, Robert J., and Raymond T. Diamond. “The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration.” 80 Georgetown Law Journal 309 (1991).

DeConde, Alexander. Gun Violence in America: The Struggle for Control. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001.

A balanced examination of the rise of the gun control movement, showing how the movement gained momentum as an increasingly industrialized and urbanized country expanded westward and as small firearms became more numerous and deadly.

Hemenway, David. Private Guns and Public Health. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2004 (forthcoming). Summarizes the literature on the relationship between guns and injuries; describes the public health approach to reducing firearm-related violence.

Hemenway, David. “The Smoking Barrel: A Review of Joyce Lee Malcolm’s Guns and Violence: The English Experience” Psychology Today, Jan/Feb 2003. http://www.psychologytoday.com/htdocs/prod/ptoarticle/pto-20030409-000001.asp.

Henigan, Dennis A., E. Bruce Nicholson, and David Hemenway. Guns and the Constitution: The Myth of Second Amendment Protection for Firearms in America. Northampton, Massachusetts: Aletheia Press, 1995.

Written for the general reader, this is an examination of the Second Amendment from three well respected and strong proponents of gun control.

Homsher, Deborah. Women and Guns: Politics and the Culture of Firearms in America. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2001. Through interviews with women hunters, women who use guns for self-defense, and women who live in crime-plagued neighborhoods, Homsher explores perspectives not covered in the traditional gun control debate.

Jacobs, James. Can Gun Control Work? New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jacobs explores the nature of gun violence in the U.S., the provisions, weaknesses and impact of the Brady Law, and policy options for reducing gun violence.

Kates, Don B. Jr. “The Second Amendment and the Ideology of Self-Protection.” 9 Constitutional Commentary 87 (1992).

Kleck, Gary. Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997.

Krug, E.G., K.E. Powell, and L.L. Dahlberg. “Firearm-related Deaths in the United States and 35 Other High- and Upper-middle-income Countries.” 27 International Journal of Epidemiology 214 (1998).

Lazare, Daniel. “From Your Constitution Is Killing You.” Harper’s Magazine (October 1999).

Levy, Leonard W. Origins of the Bill of Rights. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999.

See, in particular, Chapter 6: “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms,” pp. 133–149.

Lott, John R., Jr. More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

An updated analysis of his Journal of Legal Studies article, which argues that concealed carry weapons laws reduced the crime rate; Lott also describes the political and academic responses to his study and offers rebuttals.

Lund, Nelson. “A Primer on the Constitutional Right to Keep and Bear Arms.” Virginia Institute of Public Policy. http://www.viriginiainstitute.org/publications/primer_on_const.php.

Malcolm, Joyce. “Disarming History: How an Award-winning Scholar Twisted the Truth about America’s Gun Culture — and Almost Got Away with It” Reason (March 2003). Malcolm, Joyce. Guns and Violence: The English Experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. A study of guns and violence in England from the Middle Ages through the present day.

Malcolm, Joyce. To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996. Schwoerer, Lois G. The Declaration of Rights, 1689. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Spitzer, Robert J. The Politics of Gun Control, 3rd ed. New York: Chatham House, 2003.

A comprehensive analysis of all aspects of the gun control debate, including history, law, politics, policy, and the criminological debate.

Spitzer, Robert J. “The Second Amendment ‘Right to Bear Arms’ and Emerson.” 77 St. John’s Law Review 1 (2003).

Spitzer, Robert J. The Right to Bear Arms. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2001. A wide-ranging analysis of the origins, development, and modern consequences of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.

Spitzer, Robert J. “Lost and Found: Researching the Second Amendment.” 76 Chicago-Kent Law Review 349 (2000). Vizzard, William J. Shots in the Dark: The Policy, Politics, and Symbolism of Gun Control. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Little- field, 2000.

Drawing on Congressional hearings, interviews, research, and personal experience as a special agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Vizzard offers a balanced view of gun control and the U.S. gun landscape.

Volokh, Eugene. “The Commonplace Second Amendment.” 73 New York University Law Review 793 (1998).

Wills, Garry. A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Explores the roots of anti-government sentiments in the U.S., with a special look at the term-limits movement, abortion-clinic bombings, and the National Rifle Association.

Web Sites Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence http://www.bradycampaign.org National Rifle Association http://www.nra.org Firearms Law Center [a comprehensive inventory of state and local firearms policies] http://www.firearmslawcenter.org Jurist: The Legal Education Network [Gun Laws, Gun Control & Gun Rights] http://www.jurist.law.pitt.edu/gunlaw.htm

List of Cases
Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. 393 (1857)
Lewis v. United States 445 U.S. 55 (1980)
Miller v. Texas 153 U.S. 535 (1894)
Presser v. Illinois 116 U.S. 252 (1896)
U.S. v. Cruikshank 92 U.S. 542 (1876)
U.S. v. Miller 307 U.S. 174 (1939)
Aymette v. The State, 2 Humphreys 154 (Tenn.
1840)
Haney v. United States 264 F. 3d 1161. 2002
(10th Cir.)
U.S. v. Emerson 99-10331. November 2,
2001 (5th Cir.)

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 information 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.

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