Gun Politics

Since the time of the Founding Fathers, the questions of whether and how gun ownership can be restricted or regulated have been fiercely contested in American politics. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a Free State; the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Gun-rights organizations tend to focus on the second half of this wording, claiming that it guarantees each citizen the right to own and carry guns. On the other hand, gun control organizations argue that, taken in its entirety, the Amendment gives states the right to maintain a militia, and that the practical equivalent of a militia in the modern world is the National Guard (formed in 1903).

Certainly, the Second Amendment was written at a time when individual states were concerned about the possibility of the federal government taking too much power into its own hands. Those who favor gun control interpret the Second Amendment as providing states with the necessary protection to ensure that they would not be subject to a tyrannical federal government; those opposed to gun control view the amendment as guaranteeing gun rights to “the people” as individuals, and argue that the essential purpose of the Bill of Rights (of which the Second Amendment is a part) is to protect individual freedoms. The Supreme Court has never yet overturned any gun control legislation on the basis that the Second Amendment protects individuals rather than states, though it has done so on other constitutional grounds.

Gun regulation remains highly contentious politically as well as legally—abortion and gun control are perhaps the two issues that arouse the greatest intensity in American politics. Supporters of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in particular tend to be “single issue” voters—voters for whom a single political issue is all-important. If any organization can galvanize its supporters to use a single issue as the litmus test for whether they will support and vote for a given politician, then legislators collectively will find it difficult to ignore that issue. While such a group is by no means guaranteed any policy success, the intensity with which its supporters hold and articulate their views ensures that the group will be taken seriously by policymakers. If the group also can raise substantial amounts of money and use that in the electoral process, its influence will be magnified even more. The NRA has both committed members and a large war chest. By contrast, the gun control organizations [Page 659]tend to be less well-resourced, and their members tend on the whole to be less committed in the sense that gun control is one of the key issues they are interested in but so are others such as the environment, abortion, and civil rights.