'Campus Carry' arming college students and staff is a lousy idea

In at least six statehouses this year, lawmakers are revisiting a long-running debate over whether guns should be allowed on college campuses, reported Stateline.

Republican lawmakers in Florida, Louisiana, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming have introduced bills that would allow students, staff or visitors with concealed carry permits — and in some cases, without permits — to bring firearms onto public college campuses.

Supporters say the proposals would allow people to defend themselves during emergencies. Opponents argue they could make campuses less safe and increase the risk of accidental or impulsive violence.

The push comes amid another year of intense debate over gun policy in state legislatures, where lawmakers are advancing sharply different measures.

And it comes as college campuses continue to grapple with the threat of gun violence.

On March 12, a gunman opened fire inside a classroom at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, killing one person and injuring two others before ROTC students fought back. One of the students stabbed the gunman, killing him, according to law enforcement officials.

Virginia law currently prohibits firearms on public college and university campuses. The FBI is investigating the attack as a possible act of terrorism.

The Old Dominion University attack was the most recent of 17 deadly shootings on college campuses nationwide since 1966, according to Stateline research.

More than half of the states prohibit firearms on public colleges and universities. In some states, individual institutions may decide whether to allow guns on campus.

At least 14 states currently allow firearms on public college campuses, though some restrict them to people who have a valid carry license.

Legal debates

The U.S. Supreme Court has long suggested that governments can bar guns in certain locations — including schools and government buildings — but it has offered little guidance on how far those gun-free zones can stretch across today’s sprawling college campuses.

“It’s fair to say that states and universities still have broad authority to make decisions about guns on campus, to regulate them or to deregulate them,” Blocher said.

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen said that modern gun laws must align with the country’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

Bruen also limited the extent to which states can restrict who may carry guns in public, which has shifted some legal debates to focus on where guns can be carried.

Courts generally accept that schools fall within the category of “sensitive places,” Blocher said, but the doctrine is still underdeveloped: Judges have said far less about how to treat off-campus housing, remote research sites or other university properties.

“It is the category that we kind of have the least guidance on — what locations are OK to restrict guns in, and why,” he said.

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Trump administration removes surgeon general's warning of gun violence as health emergency--47,000 died from firearms in 2023

 The Trump administration has removed the former surgeon general Vivek Murthy’s advisory on gun violence as a public health issue from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ website. This move was made to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order to protect second amendment rights, a White House official told the Guardian.

The “firearm violence in America” page, where the advisory had been posted, was filled with data and information about the ripple effects of shootings, the prevalence of firearm suicides and the number of American children and adolescents who have been shot and killed. Now, when someone reaches the site they will be met with a “page not found” message.

When it was originally released last summer, Murthy’s advisory was met with praise from violence prevention and research groups, and was lambasted by second amendment law centers and advocacy groups that argued the Biden administration was using public health as a cloak to push forward more gun control.

“This is an extension of the Biden Administration’s war on law-abiding gun owners. America has a crime problem caused by criminals,” the National Rifle Association (NRA) said in a statement posted to X on 25 July 2024.

But Daniel Semenza, a firearm violence researcher with Rutgers University, argues that talking about gun violence through a public health lens is meant to “bring the heat down” about a deeply politicized issue and broaden what prevention can look like.

In 2023, nearly 47,000 people died by firearms, most of them suicides.

“When people read gun violence is a public health problem, they read guns are a public health problem,” Semenza said. “This idea actually removes the politics from the issue and is an engine to get us on the same page. [The removal] feels like an unnecessary and mean-spirited way to politicize something that people have actively been trying to bring people together on.”

The removal of Murthy’s advisory and the rest of the information on the page is one of the thousands of pieces of health information and research removed from federal websites. They include information about vaccines, health risks among youth and gender-based violence, the New York Times reported.

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GOA Conference: 'Trump with halo around his head, a bloodied ear, and a crown of rifle rounds'

On the morning of August 17, Donald Trump appeared on a large screen in the Knoxville Convention Center’s Grand Ballroom as the first-ever Gun Owners Advocacy and Leadership Summit got underway, reported The Trace. “We’re now running against the most radical gun-grabber that has ever been nominated for president of the United States,” Trump warned. “Kamala Harris has supported gun confiscation schemes throughout her career, and she does it constantly. That’s really putting her right up alongside some of the most dangerous dictators anywhere in history.”

Trump then delivered a message repeated often at the two-day event. “The one thing with gun owners, and I don’t know why, maybe they just have a certain way about them, maybe they are rebellious, but they don’t vote. They gotta get out and vote,” he said. “If the gun owners of this country voted, just a small percentage of them, we would have a victory like you’ve never seen.”

Trump’s appeal and the summit itself underscore the increased clout of Gun Owners of America, the group behind the event. Founded in 1976, GOA has always billed itself as a more extreme, no-compromise alternative to the National Rifle Association. It opposes all firearms restriction, wants the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives abolished, and believes its mission is rooted in the Christian Bible. Since 2019, when revelations about misuse of funds began to erode the NRA’s membership, revenue, and status in the gun movement, the GOA and an array of smaller organizations have moved to fill the void, spending more on lobbying and wading deeper into electoral politics. 

Steven Inglima, a member of both groups who had driven to the summit from North Carolina, said that while the NRA remains bigger and more varied in its programs, the GOA is “by far the more important organization” because of its hard line. “Once you start compromising a right, it stops being a right,” said Inglima, 71. “The GOA is on point, far more on point, than the NRA.”

Some speakers made digs at the NRA, including the group’s former spokesperson, Dana Loesch, who drew cheers with a reference to the controversial spending habits of former NRA leadership. “There are organizations that worry about wardrobe and makeup more than lobbying for your rights in Washington, D.C.,” Loesch told an audience. “And if they have any problem with what I just said, they can email me at kiss my A double-snakes dot com.”

The summit was an amalgam of pro-gun absolutism, religiosity, and commerce. (GOA’s senior vice president, Erich Pratt, ended one prayer session by thanking the Lord and Brownell’s, a firearm’s company and the event’s primary sponsor.) Many panelists were so-called gun influencers, social media personalities who get firearms industry cash to produce content geared toward gun enthusiasts. One influencer, Johnny B, kicked the summit off with an event he called “Spicy Friday.” “They hate you and they hate America, but I am not going to tone it down,” Johnny B vowed before showing memes to a chuckling crowd. One meme — “Kamala Harris Hits the Campaign Trail” — depicted a young woman in a skin-tight blue dress soliciting a trucker. Another showed Michelle Obama holding a sign that read, “Black Dudes for Harris.”

On an exhibition floor, firearms and accessory makers displayed a range of goods, from hunting arms, self-defense pistols, and AR-15-style rifles to Second Amendment-themed bourbon, ballistics dummies, and high-powered rifle scopes. Browsers wore T-Shirts emblazoned with statements like “ATF is Gay,” “Taxes are Gay,” and “Guns Don’t Kill People, Feds Do.” One T-shirt for sale identified the wearer as a “Waterboarding Instructor.” Also on display was a 1969 Ford Mustang driven by John Wick, a fictional hitman featured in a series of revenge fantasy films that have served as product placement vehicles for the firearms industry. Nearby, a large poster showed Trump with a halo around his head, a bloodied ear, and a crown of rifle rounds, his torso bare, tattooed, and muscular. “It Was God Alone,” the poster read, a reference to the belief among many attendees that a divine hand had saved the candidate from assassination.

On panels, speakers urged parents to take their children out of public schools, where “the feminist education cult” holds sway and “the male spirit is crushed.” Kids who stay in public school will ultimately reject their parents’ values, an audience was told. Millennials are proof. “They are voting for Kamala,” a speaker said. “They don’t even know what bathroom to use.” 

GOA regional political directors held a discussion on organizing, describing how their real fight was not with Democrats, but with Republicans willing to strike deals. “They’re fine wearing the boots of oppression,” one panelist said, “so long as they get to do the curb-stomping.” 

Sam Paredes, a GOA board member who leads Gun Owners of California, gave a talk highlighting the threat posed by “radical humanists,” whom he denounced as corrupt because they base their ethics on sources not supernatural. “We are fighting evil,” said Paredes, who advocated a combative stance when dealing with opponents. “If you act by nature and respond politely,” read one slide in his presentation, “the liberal will crush you!”  

Behind the sometimes bizarre rants there was a deep political conviction, summarized early in the summit by Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, known as ‘Kane’ in his pro-wrestling days: “Our Constitution contains a fail safe, our Constitution contains what I call a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency clause.’ Our constitution contains the Second Amendment.” 

Jacobs was clear that he does not want that glass broken, but views it as an essential deterrent. “Any petty tyrant that thinks and dreams that they can oppress us has to contend with their worst nightmare,” he said, “millions of everyday people, standing in opposition to them, armed to the teeth.”

Many at the summit saw Harris as a threat to the continued vitality of that deterrent, not least because of her perceived determination to confiscate guns. Rallying gun owners to defeat her in November was the chief talking point of several speakers. (Of course, animus in GOA ranks to Harris predates her rise to Democratic presidential candidate. The group’s longtime attorney, William J. Olson, has supported a conspiracy theory that Harris does not meet the constitution’s citizenship requirement for the presidency.) Speakers claimed that there are 10 million hunters and gun owners in America who are not registered to vote. “If the gun owners of America show up on Election Day, we will wipe them out,” said Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s National Security Council and has promised that Trump will exact revenge on enemies should he regain office.

Harris has a lengthy record of supporting firearms restrictions. In 2019, she expressed support for AR-15-style rifle buybacks, but has recently dropped that position. Harris has said that as president, she will work to pass universal background checks, red flag laws, and a ban on AR-15-style rifles. While no such ban has been worked out in detail, it’s not likely to involve confiscating or buying back rifles already in circulation, but would prohibit their future sale. 

Inglima, the attendee from North Carolina, said that by prohibiting him from purchasing a certain firearm, such a ban would be tantamount to confiscation and a step toward Harris’s real goal of seizing guns. “Do I think that would be the endgame?” he said. “Of course.”

While Inglima’s view was widely held, it was not universal. Thomas Grant had traveled from Michigan for the event. While not a GOA member, he described himself as a gun rights supporter who was made uneasy by the rhetoric and partisanship on display. He said that to gain advantage, both sides in the gun debate tended to argue that they were on the verge of a cataclysmic defeat at the hands of their enemies, when the real picture was more complex. “I’m 35, so I remember that every time there is a Democratic candidate, it’s ‘They are coming for our guns! They are coming for our guns!’ and it did not happen,” Grant said. “Will they try to put in place tougher restrictions? Yes. But actually come in and confiscate guns? No.”

The inaugural summit had moments of buzz and a busy exhibition floor, but also sparse crowds for some events. In response to a request for attendance figures and comment on whether the summit met expectations, GOA spokesperson Luis Valdes provided a written statement that referred to the event by its acronym: “We don’t have exact numbers yet, but I can tell you this. There were more people who understood what “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” means at GOALs than at the DNC convention right now. The people who attended GOALS actually understood what liberty and freedom is, unlike anti-gun Democrats who want to eviscerate one of the clear protections in the Bill of Rights.”

The convention center’s Grand Ballroom has a capacity of 2,640 and there were brief periods when the room appeared two-thirds full. But there were only about 50 people there to hear Pratt, the GOA’s senior vice president, end the event with a prayer. “Lord, we commit it to you — we commit these upcoming elections to you. We thank you that you are sovereign and that no matter what happens, we can rest in the fact that you are sovereign in history,” Pratt said. “Lord, we look forward to next year, to an even bigger and better convention.” 

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Texas judge strikes down Biden restriction on modified semiautomatic guns

A federal judge recently struck down a Biden administration ban on forced reset triggers, devices that allow semiautomatic guns to fire at faster rates, citing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a ban on bump stocks last month, reported the Washington Post.

Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas ruled in favor of guns-rights groups that had sued the U.S. Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2023 challenging the ban.

O’Connor’s ruling took the same approach that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority did in overturning the Trump administration’s ban on bump-stock devices in June by focusing on ATF’s interpretation of laws restricting the possession of machine guns. It stated that although forced reset triggers enable a user to fire weapons at a faster rate than normal triggers, they do not meet the statutory definition of a machine gun because they do not enable guns to fire multiple rounds with a “single function of the trigger.”

Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights, one of the groups that challenged the ban, wrote in a statement that Tuesday’s decision — along with the Supreme Court’s ruling on bump stocks — forces ATF “to return to their Constitutional boundaries.”

Attorneys for the Justice Department and ATF did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

Forced reset triggers are devices that forcibly return the trigger of a firearm to its reset or ready-to-fire position after a bullet is fired, which allows a user to more quickly fire successive shots.

In a 2022 letter to federal firearms licensees, ATF said that certain forced reset triggers, which were being marketed as replacement triggers for AR-style rifles, allowed shooters to “automatically expel more than one shot with a single, continuous pull of the trigger” and were subject to a ban.

The National Association for Gun Rights and Texas Gun Rights, another advocacy group, sued the Justice Department and ATF in August 2023, arguing that the agencies had wrongly characterized forced reset triggers to ban them.

In court filings, ATF said that its testing found that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a forced reset trigger could fire at an average rate of 840 rounds per minute, and that guns with forced reset triggers can be fired with a “single, constant pull of the trigger.”

In his ruling, O’Connor sided with the National Association for Gun Rights and Texas Gun Rights in arguing that forced reset triggers still only fire a single round with “a single function of the trigger.” He likened the characterization to the Supreme Court’s decision on bump stocks. The Supreme Court in June similarly ruled against banning those devices on the argument that they did not alter the semiautomatic action of firearms despite facilitating a much faster rate of fire.

O’Connor’s ruling referenced the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that spurred the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks and a polarizing debate on the legality of devices that increase the rate of fire of semiautomatic weapons.

O’Connor acknowledged the “tragic nature” of the shooting but said that “no matter how terrible the circumstances, there is never a situation that justifies a court altering statutory text that was democratically enacted by those who are politically accountable.”

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NRA concocted plan to conceal luxury expenses by chief executive

At a meeting in June 2009, the treasurer of the National Rifle Association worked out a plan to conceal luxury expenses involving its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Trace and ProPublica. 

The recording was unknown to New York’s attorney general, who is pursuing the NRA and LaPierre over a range of alleged financial misdeeds. It shows, in real time, the NRA’s treasurer enlisting the group’s longtime public relations firm to obfuscate the extravagant costs.

Captured on tape is talk of LaPierre’s desire to avoid public disclosure of his use of private jets as well as concern about persistent spending at the Beverly Hills Hotel by a PR executive and close LaPierre adviser.

During the meeting, which took place in the Alexandria, Virginia, office of PR firm Ackerman McQueen, executives agreed that Ackerman would issue a Platinum American Express card to Tyler Schropp, the new head of the NRA’s nascent advancement division, which was responsible for bringing in high-dollar contributions from wealthy donors. Ackerman would then cover the card’s charges and bill them back to the NRA under nondescript invoices.

“It’s really the limo services and the hotels that I worry about,” William Winkler, Ackerman’s chief financial officer, said. “He’s going to need it for the hotels especially.”

The use of the Ackerman American Express card, according to a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ expert witness on nonprofits, skirted internal controls that existed to ensure proper disclosure and regulatory compliance and to prevent “fraud and abuse” at the nonprofit. As a result, outside of a tiny group of NRA insiders, everyone was in the dark about years of charges by Schropp — who is still the head of the nonprofit’s advancement division — for luxury accommodations, including regular sojourns to the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton. The NRA, in response, said the report was “rife with inadmissible factual narratives, impermissible interpretations and inferences, and improper factual and legal conclusions.”

James’ investigation into the NRA began in 2019, after The Trace, in partnership with The New Yorker, and later with ProPublica, reported on internal accounting documents that indicated a culture of self-dealing at the gun-rights group. In 2020, James sued the NRA and LaPierre, who presided over the organization for three decades, over claims of using nonprofit resources for personal enrichment, luxury travel and bloated contracts for insiders, allegations that the parties deny. The attorney general is seeking financial restitution from the defendants and was until last week petitioning for LaPierre’s removal, which was preempted on Friday when LaPierre announced he would resign at the end of January.

The attorney general’s office was unaware of the audio until it was contacted by The Trace and ProPublica and did not respond to a request for comment.

Ackerman McQueen and Winkler declined to comment. None of the other individuals mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment. The gun-rights group’s attorney, William A. Brewer III, said in an email: “The tape has not been authenticated by the NRA but, if real, we are shocked by its content. The suggested contents would confirm what the NRA has said all along: there were certain ‘insiders’ and vendors who took advantage of the Association. If true, it is an example of a shadowy business arrangement — one that was not brought to the attention of the NRA board.”

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During pandemic guns and ammo flew off shelves 'as much a run on guns as on toilet paper'

In November 2019, just as a novel virus began circulating in Wuhan, China, the United States entered year four of the so-called “Trump Slump,” a sustained decline in domestic firearm sales that began after the 2016 election, precipitating several bankruptcies and much hand-wringing among industry executives, according to The New Republic. The slump wouldn’t last much longer. Amid Covid lockdowns, a looming recession, and an ambient feeling of social collapse, demand for guns skyrocketed. In late March, when the Trump administration announced that it would allow gun stores to remain open as “essential” businesses, guns and ammo flew off shelves, resulting in, as one Los Angeles legislator told The New York Times, “as much a run on guns as on toilet paper.”

Over the course of 2020, more firearms were sold than during any year on record, and the surge continued well into 2022, bucking the usual boom-and-bust cycle that the industry has seen for decades. By year three of the pandemic, nearly one in five U.S. households had purchased a firearm, according to one measure. Many did so for the first time. Gun lovers, ran a Vice headline, were claiming “a huge ‘I told you so’ moment.” 

The Covid buying spree arrived at the tail end of a half-century development in American politics: the steady movement of guns to the red-hot core of the political right. By the end of Obama’s second presidential term, gun possession was a more reliable voting indicator than race, class, gender, and age, and support for gun rights better predicted party affiliation than views on any other single issue. Gun advertisers, stoking the political fires, found themselves “addicted to conspiracy-theory-fueled political partisanship,” as one former gun exec put it in a 2022 Atlantic essay. Over the past decade, and with predictably deadly results, lethal weapons became an unnerving and ubiquitous sight at political protests around the country, as right-wing fantasies of political violence and celebrations of armed vigilantism reached new heights.

Studies of American gun culture have often focused on the top-down influence of large organizations, such as gun manufacturers or the National Rifle Association. But these accounts only tell one part of the story. Sociologist Jennifer Carlson argues that we would learn just as much by examining how gun enthusiasts have constructed a political style from the ground up. During the febrile spring and summer of 2020, Carlson conducted remote interviews with 50 gun sellers in two red states (Arizona and Florida) and two blue ones (California and Michigan). She wanted to know how these dealers experienced the dramatic uptick in firearm sales and consequent expansion of their normal clientele against the backdrop of the pandemic, the summer’s racial justice uprisings, and the presidential election.

The book-length product of these interviews, Merchants of the Right, treats gun sellers as “merchants not just of guns but also of gun culture.” The stores they preside over serve as spaces like “nineteenth-century coffeehouses and salons,” where political conversation and conversion abound (perhaps over a cup of Black Rifle joe). In a year of Black Lives Matter, Covid, and the 2020 election, gun sellers furthered a culture of armored individualism, unhinged conspiracism, and extreme partisanship. The gun-buying surge of 2020, in Carlson’s sobering portrait, is both a culmination of these tendencies and harbinger of a perilous, illiberal future. 

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Washington Monthly: The Myth of the Responsible Gun Owner

Washington Monthly, Alan Berlow, Part I:

We are increasingly numb to mass shootings, the destruction wrought by an alienated man (rarely a woman) who uses a weapon designed for war to kill the innocent at a movie theater or Walmart, synagogue or church, high school or elementary school. These shootings have become so commonplace that the details blur: 16 dead and injured at a Texas outlet mall; 36 at an Alabama birthday party; 14 at a Louisville bank; eight at Nashville Christian school; 21 at a dance hall in California. Just as unsettling, in some ways, are the shootings in recent weeks based on what can only be called a hair-trigger response to a perceived threat. In Kansas City, Missouri, Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old, was going to pick up his younger twin siblings from a playdate when he went to the wrong address and was greeted by 85-year-old Andrew Lester, who shot him in the head. Yarl is Black, and Lester is white. Around the same time, across the country in New York State, Kaylin Gillis was heading to a friend’s house when her boyfriend mistakenly turned into the wrong driveway. Its owner, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan, fired at the car, killing 20-year-old Gillis. (He’s been charged with murder.) In Texas, two high school cheerleaders were shot in a supermarket parking lot after one of them mistakenly entered a car she thought was her own. Police say that 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez, Jr. fired multiple shots. Payton Washington, 18, dressed in her cheerleader outfit, was shot in the back and nearly died. These were not criminals with a history of mental illness but legal gun owners who chose to pull the trigger.  

Are most gun owners reckless and rage-filled? Probably not. But the data show that the gun lobby’s promulgated myth of the responsible gun owner is just that—a myth. An extraordinary number of gun owners are not responsible stewards of firearms and the assumption that they are informs public policy. Last year, in an opinion authored by Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court struck down New York’s 109-year-old gun law, which required gun owners seeking a concealed carry license to demonstrate “proper cause,” a special need for such permission. In its ruling, the 6-3 majority repeatedly referred to the rights of “law-abiding” and “responsible” citizens. Most importantly, more than 230 years after the ratification of the Second Amendment, the Court discovered a right for these “law-abiding, responsible citizens” to carry handguns in public for their self-defense.  

Millions of hunters, sportsmen, collectors, and other ordinary gun owners view the Second Amendment as a right that comes with responsibilities. But there are plenty who are less fastidious.  

In two weeks this spring, the country experienced at least 25 mass shootings. In addition, two seven-year-old Virginia twins and a woman were shot after a dispute over a bicycle. Two Maryland men were shot in a road rage incident after they inadvertently cut off a motorcyclist. In a San Antonio, Texas, road rage incident, a man fired into a car, injuring a six-year-old child. Also in San Antonio, a 21-year-old mother and her 20-year-old husband argued over possessing a handgun when it went off, killing an eight-month-old infant. In Fort Worth, Texas, a 14-year-old girl was shot and killed by her older sister after they found a gun in a closet. In Arlington, Texas, a two-year-old boy fatally shot himself with a gun left lying around his home. In Virginia, a three-year-old boy shot and killed himself with a gun he found in a teenage sibling’s room. In Ohio, a four-year-old boy accidentally shot himself in the abdomen after finding his brother’s .9mm pistol in the back seat of his SUV. A 14-year-old boy playing with a gun on a North Carolina school bus accidentally shot a 16-year-old student in the buttocks. A Tennessee woman shot her one-year-old grandson sitting in her lap when she reached into her purse and accidentally pulled the trigger of her gun. And that’s just a partial list.  

In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, Justice Thomas suggested that 43 states are sorting out the bad guys by requiring background checks, safety training courses, and measures “designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’” 

The Court’s majority made no effort to ascertain whether state laws accomplish that mission, although they were clearly aware that half of the states have “constitutional carry” laws that do nothing to “ensure” that those carrying concealed handguns are law-abiding or responsible. In these 25 states, no background check, mental health check, fingerprinting, permit, or license is required to carry a gun, and in 27 states, no training is necessary to carry one. 

Gun purchases in all states require a federal background check, but only if the seller is a federally licensed dealer. In 35 states, criminals can avoid background checks by purchasing firearms from sites like Armslist.com—a sort of Craigslist for guns—through online auctions, buying from friends, relatives, and other private sellers, or shopping at gun shows. Only 14 states require a permit to purchase a gun.  

These laws—or the lack of them—matter. The young men responsible for the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which left 13 dead, acquired their firearms at a gun show with the help of an older classmate. The gunman who shot 23 people dead at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 purchased his AK-47 and 1000 rounds of ammunition online.  

In states that require a license to carry a concealed handgun, too often, dangerous sorts are still perfectly free to get a permit to pack heat. 

Consider stalking. A reliable predictor of intimate-partner homicides in as many as 75 percent of cases, 30 states nonetheless allow convicted stalkers to keep their guns, and 22 let them carry concealed weapons, according to a database compiled by Everytown for Gun Safety. In 31 states, those convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor may not legally own a firearm, but only 17 require those domestic abusers to turn in their guns.  

Found not guilty by reason of insanity? No problem. Twenty-one states have no law barring gun ownership by someone found not guilty by reason of insanity, and 23 allow gun purchases by someone found incompetent to stand trial. 

And then there’s alcohol, a frequent factor in firearm homicides. A University of California Davis survey of more than 78,000 gun owners over 13 years found that those who legally purchased firearms following a conviction for alcohol-related crimes—primarily DUIs—were nearly three times more likely to commit a violent crime or a crime with a firearm—including murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—as those with no prior criminal convictions.  Nevertheless, only 18 states bar those with multiple DUI convictions from carrying concealed weapons. 

In his concurring opinion in Bruen, Justice Samuel Alito writes: “Our holding decides nothing about who may lawfully possess a firearm.” Instead, it tacitly assumes that states have vetted those allowed to carry.  

The notion that gun owners are overwhelmingly responsible and law-abiding is not confined to the Court, and it has been baked into our culture by the National Rifle Association. So, according to NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, “We know that responsible gun ownership exemplifies what is good and right about America.” The lobby’s magazine, America’s First Freedom, assures us that “Owning and carrying a firearm is a great responsibility, which is just how America’s lawful gun owners take it.”  

Data on American gun owners paint a different picture. It reveals that millions have little or no training. Sizable numbers are ignorant of the law, careless with their weapons, have severe problems with anger and alcohol, and are regularly involved in violent or criminal activity. And where we find some of the most egregious behavior by gun owners—and dealers—there is almost always a NRA policy to encourage it. 

To appreciate why this matters, it helps to understand that the standard measures of gun violence—homicides and suicides—vastly understate the scope of the problem. Imagine if you learned that 1,166 people had been raped, robbed, assaulted, or threatened by someone with a gun today. Well, that’s what happened every day, on average, between 2012 and 2020. That’s more than four million direct victims of gun violence in one decade. And that’s not counting homicides and suicides, which totaled 134,500 and 224,600, respectively, and the more than 192,000 injured in firearm accidents. 

If you add indirect victims of gun violence, the numbers are astronomical. To cite just one example, the 380 school shootings (as of May 1) since the 1999 Columbine massacre have resulted in the deaths of 199 students and school personnel (about eight each year) and another 428 injured (about 17 each year), according to a Washington Post database. But 352,000 children attended those schools when the violence took place and, thus, were victimized by it. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released on April 11, 19 percent of adults said they had a family member who was shot and killed or committed suicide with a gun. An NPR Marist poll released May 24 found 41 percent of those surveyed said they or someone they know had experienced gun violence either as a victim of a shooting or by being threatened with a gun.  

In a nation where as many as 81 million adults own an estimated 434 million firearms (about half of the world’s supply), the assumption that “most” are responsible and law-abiding may be accurate. But that still leaves plenty of room for bad stuff to happen, which it does, every day.  

Alito, for his part, is dismissive of gun violence statistics. “[W]hat does this have to do with the question whether an adult who is licensed to possess a handgun may be prohibited from carrying it outside the home?” he asked last June.

The answer is that courts have traditionally balanced the government’s interest in public safety against Second Amendment rights. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the 2008 Heller case established an individual’s right to keep a handgun in the home for self-defense while allowing many gun regulations to remain on the books, including bans on concealed weapons. 

Bruen is a more radical decision, weirdly concerned with gun regulations during a brief 77-year period of the 18th and 19th centuries. So Bruen’s majority evinced no interest in how the New York law worked in practice. Rather than weigh a gun law’s impact on public safety, Bruen instructs courts to ascertain only if the law is “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”  

That could prove difficult for judges trying to determine if states can ban habitual drunk drivers from owning firearms or if guns can be prohibited on subways and buses, in movie theatres, and baseball stadiums. None of these situations existed in 18th -and 19th-century America. Indeed, the entire population of New York City at the time the Second Amendment was ratified could fit in Yankee Stadium, with 20,000 seats to spare.  

In Bruen’s wake, gun restrictions that have withstood constitutional challenges for decades are being struck down by judges who say they can find no historical analogs. Among them are state laws that ban guns in places of worship, libraries, museums, bars, subways, domestic violence support centers, and summer camps. 

It’s impossible to know how many people carry concealed handguns on any given day. Still, a 2017 PEW survey suggests that more than 15 million may carry all the time and an additional 18 million some of the time—about 10 percent of the population. Concealed carry promoters insist that these “armed citizens” make us safer, and they attest that licensed gun owners are among the most responsible and law-abiding citizens.  

There is, however, a growing body of evidence to suggest that the growth of concealed carry has made us less safe, not more. Here are a few examples:  

A National Bureau of Economic Research study released last June found that right-to-carry laws increased violent gun crimes by 29 percent and gun homicides by 13 percent in the largest U.S. cities, while gun thefts increased by 35 percent. 

During the first eight years after Wisconsin passed its concealed weapon law in 2011, the state experienced a 33-percent rise in gun homicides compared to the previous eight years, a 56-percent increase in aggravated assaults with firearms, and a 63-percent increase in assaults on police officers. 

Records I’ve examined for Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida show that more than 71,000 carry licenses were suspended or revoked during the last five years, largely due to felony and misdemeanor arrests or convictions and domestic violence injunctions. Extrapolating nationally—and assuming a similar lawlessness rate – would amount to more than 900,000 licensed and not-so-responsible gun carriers.  

Earlier this year, the Transportation Security Administration reported that in 2022 it had found 6,542 guns in carry-on bags at 262 U.S. airports, about 18 guns per day. That number surpassed the previous record of 5,972 guns in 2021, which was no surprise to the TSA. Except for 2020, when people stopped flying because of Covid, the numbers have increased yearly since 2009. During the past decade, the TSA confiscated 33,000 of these illegally transported firearms.  

What, if anything, do these numbers tell us about how committed millions of gun-carrying Americans are to responsible gun ownership? Most of those stopped by the TSA offered an Elmer Fudd, “I forgot I was carrying” defense which, even if true, is hardly comforting. “What we see in our checkpoints really reflects what we’re seeing in society,” TSA administrator David Pekoske told the Associated Press. “There are more people carrying firearms nowadays.” The NRA hasn’t weighed in on these particular gun owners but has offered this guidance: “The armed citizen must be conscious of his responsibilities 24/7.”  

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New Jersey's smart gun law that never was very smart

The new smart gun from the firearms technology company Biofire is seemingly everything New Jersey State Senators Loretta Weinberg and Richard Codey envisioned when they authored the state’s Childproof Handgun Law in 2002, reported The Trace. Equipped with facial recognition and fingerprint verification to ensure that only authorized users may handle it, the 9mm handgun became available for pre-order in April. Its “smart” features are designed to reduce accidental shootings by children, suicides, and the use of stolen guns in crimes.

But New Jersey’s law, which was toned down in 2019 but still requires all gun stores in the state to sell smart guns as soon as a viable option hits the market, may still not take effect. That’s partly because Biofire doesn’t want it to.

The company’s CEO, Kai Kloepfer, told The Trace he has no plans to submit his gun to New Jersey’s Personalized Handgun Authorization Commission for review, which might trigger the law’s requirement for gun sellers to stock it. No gun has yet been submitted for review, and the commission has not yet agreed upon technical criteria, but once a model is approved, it will need to be stocked by the state’s more than 300 gun stores.

“There is not a world where Biofire will be applying for inclusion,” Kloepfer said. “We do not support mandates of any kind. We’re looking to build positive long-term relationships with gun stores and forcing these additional administrative burdens doesn’t incentivize them to support our technology; it does the opposite.”

Since its inception, New Jersey’s law has been criticized by gunmakers and smart-gun advocates alike for stifling innovation and deterring would-be entrants to the smart-gun market. The bill originally forced firearms retailers to switch to entirely smart inventories within 30 months of a smart model being offered for sale anywhere in the United States — a measure that threatened to raze the firearms industry in New Jersey. The state Legislature dramatically softened this requirement in 2019, allowing retailers to carry their regular stock so long as they also offer at least one smart gun.

The revised statute now says that a “manufacturer or other entity” may apply for inclusion on the state’s roster of approved smart guns, but does not address whether the commission would be able to add firearms in the absence of an application. When asked about this possibility, a spokesperson for the New Jersey attorney general only repeated the language from the statute: “We cannot otherwise comment on the work PHAC is doing, or will do, to carry out its mandated mission.” Multiple requests for comment from members of the commission went unanswered.

Weinberg, who left the state Senate in 2021, said she was unsure whether the law would allow the commission to add guns to the roster without manufacturer consent, but said that she did not think the bill’s stocking requirement should concern smart-gun makers. “I would assume that [these manufacturers] would be more interested in developing a good product than worrying about whether the store is required to sell it,” she said.

Codey, who still represents Essex and Morris Counties in the state Senate, did not respond to requests for comment.

Weinberg and Codey conceived of their 2002 bill as a way to spur the “research, development, and manufacture” of smart-gun technology, Weinberg told NPR in 2014 — an attempt to address a crisis of accidental shootings, suicides, and homicides that involve lost or stolen guns. According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, almost 700 children are injured or killed in accidental shootings in the United States each year since 2015; roughly 25,000 die each year by firearm suicide. And as The Trace has reported, thousands of stolen guns every year turn up at the scenes of carjackings, sexual assaults, murders, and other crimes. Researchers and violence prevention advocates see smart guns as an effective and uncontroversial way to reduce such shootings.

But rather than facilitating the development of smart-gun technology, Weinberg and Codey’s law wound up thwarting it. The original requirement attracted furious blowback from gun rights organizations and Second Amendment activists, who rallied to block the release of products that would trigger the state’s countdown clock.

Their opposition mired discussion of the technology in hot-blooded political muck. For nearly two decades, no smart guns made it to market in the U.S., and no major firearms manufacturer dared explore the technology. When a German company introduced a model controlled by a radio frequency identification chip in a companion watch, the two U.S. gun stores that announced plans to carry the weapon faced boycotts and death threats. (The gun, the iP1 from the gunmaker Armatix, was also an unmitigated failure: its RFID-controlled safety could be disabled with magnets).

Weinberg recognized the legislation’s shortcomings, and campaigned for years to have it altered. She authored the bill’s partial repeal in 2019, and in the process gave responsibility for working out the details to a new commission — the PHAC.

But nearly four years later, the PHAC has yet to formalize criteria for guns to qualify for inclusion on the state’s roster. Members — including a pediatric emergency care doctor, the inventor of a biometric gun lock, and a lieutenant with the New Jersey State Police — began meeting only in 2022, minutes published to the attorney general’s website show. Meanwhile, questions abound about how the law’s stocking requirement might actually be enforced.

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America's over-confident obsession with guns for 'self-protection'

 Christine Emba writing for the Washington Post:

At the Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly, spirits seemed high. People wandered from booth to booth, and the scent of popcorn filled the air. It could have been mistaken for a state fair or weekend flea market were it not for the rows of weapons and accessories — gun parts, AR build kits and body armor — laid out on every surface. It was easy to overlook the one common emotion underlying the event: fear.

Here were weekend shoppers intently inspecting tools of death: moms testing the heft of handguns and fathers stocking up on ammo. When I asked attendees and sellers what gun ownership meant to them, most replied with the same word: “protection.”previous week had brought three highly publicized shootings. Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager in Kansas City, Mo., was allegedly shot by an 84-year-old White man after he rang the wrong doorbell to pick up his younger siblings; a 65-year-old man in Upstate New York allegedly shot and killed a 20-year-old woman who accidentally pulled into his driveway; and two cheerleaders in Texas were shot after trying to get into the wrong car after a practice.

For all the talk of protection, gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States. Yet over and over, people told me they needed their guns to keep themselves safe.

Safe from what? Most couldn’t answer; they simply had a feeling that the world had become a more dangerous place. How would they use their guns in a crisis? Their confidence in their own abilities seemed inflated.

This manifested in the constant invocation of the word “tactical” — a gun-industry buzzword used to suggest that buyers of weapons, body armor and shooting courses will be able to engage with enemies like trained soldiers. In other words, a fantasy.

Republican leaders, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, have resisted calls for increased gun regulation after shooting deaths, arguing that the root problem is mental illness. But the paranoia that fuels gun-buying has come to seem like a mental health issue in its own right.

“It’s crazy out there,” a woman named Dinah told me, an unloaded rifle slung over one shoulder. “People don’t care anymore, and criminals go for the low-hanging fruit. I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I can’t protect myself.”

A record-high 56 percent of Americans believe that crime has increased in their area, even if reality is more complicated. Republicans in particular have grown sharply more concerned. Many Americans no longer assume that a stranger might be well-meaning, innocent or harmless; rather, the world is seen as an increasingly dangerous place. Incessant media coverage of violent events has encouraged this thinking, the gun-show attendees told me. And poorly understood “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws perpetuate and protect a vigilante mind-set.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of gun ownership for “protection” is the sharp-edged individualism it implies: an every-man-for-himself mind-set. Institutions can’t be trusted, police will be unresponsive, and the government might one day turn on you. Your only obligations are to yourself and your family.

Individual fear becomes a greater priority than collective safety. Increasing the number of guns in the system will almost certainly spell death for others, but at least your gun will keep you safe.

 “You can’t predict who is going to shoot someone,” one ammunition salesman told me. “It’s just the nature of the evil world we live in. So I’ve got to be prepared.”

Today there are about 393 million privately owned firearms in the United States, according to an estimate by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey — in other words, 120 guns for every 100 Americans. That’s the highest rate of any country in the world, and more than double that of the next country on the list.

The gun owners I spoke to were open to some violence-prevention measures. They suggested mandatory training courses, raising age limits for gun-buying or cracking down on dealers who sell to people not legally allowed to buy guns.

But no one was willing to give up their own weapons. They would rather “open the floodgates,” as one shooting instructor put it. If everyone has a gun, the theory goes, everyone will be more careful. If the side effect is a private arms race in a country already flooded with guns, so be it.

Over and over again, I heard the NRA-approved phrase: “An armed society is a polite society.” But guns might be leading us to give up on the concept of society altogether.

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Guns make a trip to the mall a roll of the dice

 Michael Tomasky writes in The New Republic:

The congressman who represents Allen, Texas the scene one of the latest mass shootings, Republican Keith Self, went on CNN after the shooting, and was challenged by the host that some people think “prayers aren’t cutting it.” Self responded, “Well, those are people that don’t believe in an almighty God who is absolutely in control of our lives. I’m a Christian. I believe that He is.”

This is the truth about where we are. The gun industry is bringing to market weapons capable of dispensing more death, in more violent fashion. Republican members of Congress say it’s in God’s hands, not theirs. And malls and schools are war zones. 

There’s only one logical conclusion to be drawn from all this. This is what the America gun manufacturers, the NRA, and right-wing politicians want: a country where we know that any trip to the mall involves a certain rolling of the dice. After all, that’s freedom.

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The war is lost: No conceivable way to get control of guns in this country

"[T]here are 400 million unregistered guns in this country, and 20 million of them are AR-15s. That’s more guns than are possessed by the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, and police departments combined. That’s more than all the guns manufactured by the U.S. in World War II. Any attempt to register this staggering array of weapons, much less take them away, is an impossible task with owners who are largely unwilling to comply."

Brynn Tannehill writes in the New Republic: That’s something that people who support gun control measures need to understand: The war is lost. There is no conceivable way for things to change for the better within the next 20 to 30 years, short of a national divorce. There is no way to change hearts and minds of Republicans or the courts. There is no way to change who is in office in most states. There is no way to replace who sits on the courts quickly or change conservative disdain for stare decisis.

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Are there too many guns in America?

For the foreseeable future, there are simply far too many guns already in civilian hands to imagine a scenario in which those seeking a weapon to hurt themselves or others find it difficult to do so.

There’s no real question that a central reason the United States has so many firearm deaths is that the United States has so many firearms, reported the Washington Post. What question there is, instead, centers on that latter point: How many guns are there in this country?

Knowing that answer concretely wouldn’t have much of an effect on gun deaths in the United States. But that it is perhaps incalculably high — and rising — reinforces the political challenge faced by those hoping to reduce American gun deaths. For the foreseeable future, there are simply far too many guns already in civilian hands to imagine a scenario in which those seeking a weapon to hurt themselves or others find it difficult to do so.

While there are no hard counts of the number of firearms in the country — in part because pro-gun advocacy organizations are wary of having the government know where guns might be found — there are estimates. One, from Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey, figures that there are 120.5 civilian-owned guns for every 100 U.S. residents. That’s nearly twice the ratio as seen in the second-ranked region, the Falkland Islands, and more than twice the ratio seen in Yemen, which comes in third.

A 2012 report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) put concrete figures on its estimates. In 1994, it reported, there were about 192 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States. By 2009, that had jumped to 310 million.

By now, that estimate is more than a decade old. Since then, we’ve seen multiple surges in gun purchasing as reflected in requests made from gun dealers to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Some of those background-check requests are for concealed-carry permits or other non-purchase-related queries. But most are made by gun stores when buyers come in to purchase a weapon.

Since November 2012, the month that the CRS report was published, there have been nearly 291 million background check requests made to the FBI. In the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 there were 78.6 million alone.

From the early 1970s until the early 1990s, the rate of gun ownership in the United States was falling. That was true among both Democrats and Republicans, according to data from the national General Social Survey (GSS). (The figures below include independents who align with a political party.) But since the early 2000s, the overall decline has stalled, with Republicans being slightly more likely to report owning guns and Democrats slightly less likely to. 

How do we reconcile a decline in gun ownership with an increase in owned guns? Simple: Many gun owners now own multiple guns. The GSS asks people to identify what type of guns they own, allowing us to determine the percentage of gun owners who own more than one type. In the first three years for which GSS data are available, about 49 percent of gun owners reported owning a firearm from more than one category (pistol, rifle, shotgun). In the most recent three GSS surveys, that percentage rose to nearly 60 percent.

It has always been more common for residents of rural areas to report owning a gun than for residents of more urban areas. Rural residents are more likely to have a gun for protection or for hunting.

Even here, though, we see the effects of the partisan divide on gun ownership. In the most recent GSS, urban Republicans were about as likely as rural Democrats to report owning a gun.

Partisan politics heavily infects both gun ownership and the response to gun ownership, of course. The National Rifle Association’s effort to argue that the best antidote to gun violence is an armed response has become a central tenet of Republican politics. On Monday, The Washington Post published a lengthy look at how the AR-15 became a central part of the political discussion about gun ownership and how it became a talisman of pro-gun advocacy.

It is estimated that there are 20 million AR-15-style rifles in the United States at this point — a powerful, deadly type of weapon that was restricted as a consumer product two decades ago.

There have been proposals aimed at reducing that figure. As part of his short-lived 2020 presidential candidacy, former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke (D) proposed buying back assault-style weapons like the AR-15. Even if that were fully successful, of course, there would likely still be some 300 million firearms in the United States, according to that 2012 CRS report. Many of the deadliest firearms would be gone, but hundreds of millions of more would remain.

If significantly reducing gun deaths necessarily means significantly reducing firearm ownership, you can see the problem. It’s hard to think of a way that ownership could be reduced significantly, even if the political will to do so suddenly materialized.

There are far more American guns than there are Americans.

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There have already been 6 mass shootings with 4 or more fatalities in 2023

In the first weeks of 2023, the United States has gotten no reprieve from its epidemic of mass shootings, whether in public places or inside private homes, reported The New York Times.

There is no consensus on what constitutes a mass shooting, complicating the efforts of government, nonprofits and news organizations to document the scope of the problem. Different groups define mass shootings differently, depending on circumstances including the number of victims, whether the victims are killed or wounded, and whether the shooting occurs in a public place.

The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence using police reports, news coverage and other public sources, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people were killed or injured.

In 2022, the Gun Violence Archive counted 647 mass shootings. Of those shootings, 21 involved five or more fatalities. The group recorded 690 mass shootings in 2021, with 28 involving four or more fatalities.

As of late January, the Gun Violence Archive has counted 40 mass shootings this year. Six of them involved four or more fatalities.

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With NRA funding J.R.O.T.C. brings gun marksmanship to schools

At a time when many districts are going to great lengths to keep guns out of schools, J.R.O.T.C. has become one of the few programs on campuses that promote weapons training, reported The New York Times.

The N.R.A. has donated more than $5 million in money and equipment since 2015 to support competitive shooting programs at schools, as one of several outside organizations that have provided funding to J.R.O.T.C. programs, according to tax records and other documents. Some of the districts that have received N.R.A. funding, such as the one in Lee County, Fla., include schools that automatically enroll students in J.R.O.T.C. classes in some grades, or otherwise push students to take them, though participation on the marksmanship teams is most often voluntary.

The organization has supported J.R.O.T.C. programs by hosting shooting competitions, highlighting teams in its trade magazine and providing special badges to J.R.O.T.C. shooting competitors.

The programs, which utilize air rifles rather than live-fire weapons, are prevalent in many communities where marksmanship and hunting are popular sporting activities, and parents have credited the instruction with teaching young people to handle guns safely. But schools largely prohibit guns on campus, and the marksmanship teams have at times alarmed teachers and students concerned about school shootings and a rise in gun violence. Some districts have dismantled their J.R.O.T.C. marksmanship programs or had heated debates about how to incorporate them into school life.

In a statement, a spokesman for the N.R.A. said that the group was proud to fund the shooting teams and that the J.R.O.T.C. instructors’ promotion of the N.R.A. was their choice, not a requirement for funding.

“The N.R.A. Foundation proudly supports firearms education and training for a variety of deserving organizations,” said the spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam. “Grant recipients sometimes voluntarily promote our efforts to bring awareness to the importance of firearms training, gun safety and shooting sports. We are proud of these activities and the way they positively impact students, schools and communities across the country.”

In their bids to obtain N.R.A. grants to fund marksmanship training and competition on campus, J.R.O.T.C. instructors have said the funding will expand the number of teenagers trained in the safe use of firearms and advance the Second Amendment, according to school district documents obtained by The New York Times in response to more than 100 records requests. Some instructors have promised to encourage cadets to join the N.R.A. and have volunteered students to participate in N.R.A. fund-raising events.

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