By Emile LeBrun and Aline Shaban

The fight against illicit firearms proliferation and misuse in the EU and its neighbors is a multifaceted challenge. This challenge encompasses the diversion of arms from national stocks and actors; trafficking from inside and outside the region; the illicit manufacture or transfer of parts, components, accessories, and ammunition; and the conversion of alarm, signal, acoustic, and air guns.

An equally important dimension is the administration, management, and control of legally held small arms through civilian firearms registries. Ensuring national authorities have visibility and insight into the import, sale, use, export, or destruction of all legally held firearms across their life cycle is essential in preventing civilian firearm movement into the illicit market and subsequent misuse or violence.

Effective and Innovative Practices among European Civilian Firearm Registries—a new report co-published by the Survey and its REGISYNC project partners Arquebus, the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), and Ecorys—provides an assessment of current civilian firearm registry standards and practices, and identifies particularly innovative and effective measures to enhance firearms registries beyond common standards in the EU.

Sofia, Bulgaria: Centre for the Study of Democracy , 2023. 75p.

By Anne-Séverine Fabre, Nicolas Florquin, Aaron Karp, and Matt Schroeder

The Caribbean region suffers from some of the world’s highest rates of violent deaths, with firearms used in the majority of these crimes. Although most homicide victims are men, the Caribbean as a region also faces one of the world’s highest rates of violent deaths among women. While much emphasis has been placed on firearms control at both the political and operational levels, illicit firearms and the dynamics of illicit arms markets in this region have received little research attention. In response, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS) partnered with the Small Arms Survey to carry out a comprehensive evidence-based study of illicit arms trafficking to and within the Caribbean, and the socio-economic costs of firearm-related violence in the region. This Report examines these issues by drawing on data and information collected from 13 of the 15 CARICOM member states and from 22 Caribbean states in total. The study also incorporates the results of original fieldwork undertaken by regional partners, including interviews with prison inmates serving firearm-related sentences, and research in selected hospitals related to gunshot wounds and the associated medical costs and productivity losses for patients..

Geneva, sWIT: Small Arms Survey, 2023. 178p.

By Scott R. Kegler, Thomas R. Simon, Steven A. Sumner,

The rate of firearm homicide in the United States rose sharply from 2019 through 2020, reaching a level not seen in more than 2 decades, with ongoing and widening racial and ethnic disparities (1). During 2020–2021, the rate increased again (2). This report provides provisional firearm homicide data for 2022, stratified by race and ethnicity, presented both annually and by month (or quarter) to document subannual changes.

MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2023;72:1149–1150.

By The Small Arms Survey

The use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in West Africa expanded dramatically over the last decade. IED-building networks have established material and training links across conflict areas in West and Central Africa, and their designs have remained constant and inexpensive throughout the region—helping to increase their use in attacks against domestic and international security forces, UN peacekeepers, and civilians.

Out of Control: The Trafficking of Improvised Explosive Device Components and Commercial Explosives in West Africa—a new report from the Small Arms Survey’s Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in West Africa project—analyses data from more than 2,200 IED-related incidents between March 2013 and September 2022, and stresses the importance of coordinated regional approaches in eliminating illegal IED use in West and Central Africa.

Geneva, SWIT: Small Arms Survey, 2023. 124p.

By Tobias Roemer

The United States has experienced a sharp increase in school and mass shootings in recent years. Previous research has primarily focused on the effects of these events on support for gun regulation and electoral outcomes. This paper focuses on a heretofore understudied consequence of school shootings: counter-mobilization by the pro-gun political right. I provide causal estimates of the impact of school shootings on non-electoral political participation on the right in affected counties by examining donations to the NRA Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF). Using a staggered difference-in-differences setup, my event study indicates that school shootings lead to an approximately 30% increase in donations compared to the pre-treatment baseline, with elevated levels persisting for several years.

Preprint, 2023. 28p.

By Patrick Sharkey and Megan Kang

Background:

The recent rise of gun violence may lead to the perception that the problem of gun mortality in the United States is intractable. This article provides evidence to counter this perception by bringing attention to the period spanning from 1991 to 2016 when most US states implemented more restrictive gun laws. Over this period, the United States experienced a decline in household gun ownership, and gun-related deaths fell sharply.

Methods:

The main analysis examines the conditional association between the change in gun regulations at the state level and the change in gun mortality from 1991 to 2016. We include a range of robustness checks and two instrumental variable analyses to allow for stronger causal inferences.

Results:

We find strong, consistent evidence supporting the hypothesis that restrictive state gun policies reduce overall gun deaths, homicides committed with a gun, and suicides committed with a gun. Each additional restrictive gun regulation a given state passed from 1991 to 2016 was associated with −0.21 (95% confidence interval = −0.33, −0.08) gun deaths per 100,000 residents. Further, we find that specific policies, such as background checks and waiting periods for gun purchases, were associated with lower overall gun death rates, gun homicide rates, and gun suicide rates.

Conclusion:

State regulations passed from 1991 to 2016 were associated with substantial reductions in gun mortality. We estimate that restrictive state gun policies passed in 40 states from 1991 to 2016 averted 4297 gun deaths in 2016 alone, or roughly 11% of the total gun deaths that year.

More Americans were killed by gunfire in 2021 than in any previous year on record.1 This single statistic encompasses several social problems and challenges, including violent crime, the rise of suicides, mass shootings, intimate partner violence, and police shootings. But all of these problems are connected to each other by a common feature: guns.

Epidemiology 34(6):p 786-792, November 2023.

By Terry L. Schell, Samuel Peterson, Brian G. Vegetabile, Adam Scherling, Rosanna Smart, Andrew R. Morral

To understand how rates of firearm ownership may be affected by public policy and how they may affect crime rates or other key outcomes in the United States, researchers need measures of firearm ownership at the state level. As part of the Gun Policy in America initiative, RAND researchers developed annual, state-level estimates of household firearm ownership by combining data from surveys and administrative sources. First, they used a small-area estimation technique to create state-level ownership estimates for each of 51 nationally representative surveys assessing household firearm ownership rates. They then used structural equation modeling to combine these survey-based estimates with administrative data on firearm suicides, hunting licenses, subscriptions to Guns & Ammo magazine, and background checks into the final measure of household firearm ownership. The resulting measure represents the proportion of adults living in a household with a firearm for each state in each year between 1980 and 2016. Other researchers can use these annual, state-level measures to test theories about the relationship between firearm ownership and crime, injury, and public policy.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2020. 78p.

By Connor Brooks

This report is the 18th in a series produced by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It details the number of applications for background checks for firearm transfers and permits received by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and state and local checking agencies. It also describes the types of permits or checks used by each state, the number of denials issued by these agencies, and the reasons for denial.

Highlights

• The FBI and state and local checking agencies received about 16.7 million applications for firearm transfers and permits in 2019 and 25.0 million applications in 2020.

• About 243,000 (1.5%) applications for firearm transfers and permits were denied in 2019, and 398,000 (1.6%) were denied in 2020.

• The FBI received about 12.8 million applications in 2020 and denied 185,000 (1.5%), while state and local checking agencies received more than 12.2 million applications and denied about 212,000 (1.7%).

• In 2020, state checking agencies denied 2.7% of purchase permits, 1.8% of instant checks, 1.2% of exempt carry permits, and 0.2% of other approvals.

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2023. 33p.

By Sherry F. Colb

Most debates over gun rights are either interpretive, about the meaning of the Second Amendment, or empirical, about whether guns enhance or undermine safety. My goal in this essay is to introduce a third factor into the debate: the “imaginary narrative.” When I say “imaginary,” I mean to suggest a narrative that does not reflect typical or common experience. I use the context of guns and domestic violence to illustrate the phenomenon. The pro-gun imaginary narrative, when it comes to domestic violence, involves a victim confronting her abuser. Because she has a firearm, she is able to protect herself from him. But that fantasy does not comport with the reality of intimate partner abuse. I propose here that we acknowledge and interrogate imaginary narratives lest our laws and policies become disconnected from the true needs of our society.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 10p.

By Saul Cornell

A proper understanding of the founding era concept of police is essential to the future of Second Amendment jurisprudence. District of Columbia v. Heller never addresses the police power and its centrality to early American rights theory or antebellum jurisprudence. The omission is striking because Heller does devote considerable attention to antebellum southern cases addressing the issue of public carry, and this body of law was strongly influenced by police power jurisprudence. A genuinely historical treatment of founding era rights theory — including the right to keep and bear arms — provides scant support for Heller’s dismissal of the right of the people to regulate their internal police in the case of firearms. Nor does the antebellum southern case law that Heller highlights as the key to unlocking the meaning of the Second Amendment support such a claim. Reconstruction did not change these basic facts. If one applies Heller’s professed originalist methodology neutrally, and Justice Scalia is correct that rights are entrenched with the scope that they had when constitutionalized, then the right of the people to regulate their own police, including firearms, must be treated with the same originalist reverence. Judges, including originalist judges, must recognize the awesome power of the people: including the right to regulate arms.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 17p.

By Matthew J. Lacombe

The tumultuous year of 2020 may mark an important turning point in the political development of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and, as a result, the broader gun rights movement. This essay explores how the year’s events — and the role of guns and gun rights supporters in them — were in numerous ways a culmination of the NRA’s approach to politics over the course of several prior decades. This approach involves linking guns to a broader, right-wing populist worldview; mobilizing political action among gun rights supporters by portraying that worldview as deeply threatened by government and media elites; and building alliances with like-minded politicians, most notably Donald Trump. The essay then explores how the aftermath of the events of 2020 leaves the NRA in a difficult position. With Trump (the NRA’s close ally) out of office, some within the GOP looking to move on from his approach to politics following the failed January 6 insurrection, and Democrats more supportive of gun control than at any other point in recent history, the NRA may find itself somewhat politically alienated. Moreover, given its current organizational challenges and its position on the right wing of the GOP, the NRA may also struggle to recruit the many Americans who bought guns for the first time in 2020 — a group that could potentially diversify the gun owning community and renegotiate the sociopolitical meaning of guns in important ways. Only time will tell the NRA’s future, but what is clear now is that the tumultuous events of 2020 can be traced to the organization’s past and will surely impact both its future and the future of the gun debate.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2011. 8p.

By Darrell A. H. Miller

To an external observer, the moral and historical foundations of the insurrectionary Second Amendment must look bizarre. Instead of building an insurrectionist theory around the one group — enslaved Africans — who, by the framers’ own measure, had the most right to resist tyranny, we have a Second Amendment theory of righteous revolution built on the grievances of slave owners. But the peculiarity does not stop there. It must seem equally odd to outsiders that insurrectionist theory never adequately accounts for the fact that this one group, African Americans — with centuries of moral justification behind them — decided in the middle of the 20th century to reject violent political dynamism in favor of nonviolence. In short, what would Second Amendment insurrectionism look like if it started with the enslaved African and ended with the march across Edmund Pettus Bridge? This essay attempts to reckon with these twin paradoxes and reorient our thinking about the credibility of the insurrectionary Second Amendment.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 11p.

By John J. Donohue

The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has important lessons for much of the widespread, current Second Amendment litigation designed to eradicate beneficial gun safety regulation across the country. First, the value of Washington, DC, laws in constraining the gun carrying of the riotous crowd was evident and likely saved many lives. Second, flirtations with the idea that armed citizens should be ready to fight the federal government were shown to be absurd: there is no circumstance in which private citizens in modern America could promote democracy by using assault weapons to kill government employees to show their disapproval of what they perceive to be “tyrannical” government. Third, the idea that gun owners can be expected to oppose rather than support a tyrant was dealt a fatal blow by the violence at the U.S. Capitol. The time has come to earnestly acknowledge and embrace the wise restraints on firearms that make the American public free and to reject the specious mask of zeal for unlimited gun rights that has become a mainstay of too many American politicians.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 11p.

By Eric Ruben

What is an “arm” under the Second Amendment? The Supreme Court has signaled that arms encompass more than just guns, including less lethal alternatives to guns. But for many Americans, the term signifies guns alone. This essay explores the role of the gun rights movement in equating arms and guns, describes how it reflects neither law nor weapons practices, and contends that it could contribute to unduly expansive gun rights. On the eve of the next big Second Amendment case at the Supreme Court, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett, the time is now to put guns and gun rights into a broader perspective.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 9p.

By Susan P. Liebell

Understanding the persistence of public gun violence and resistance to restrictions on firearms requires unmasking a pernicious armed rebellion narrative that masquerades as the “original intent” of the American framers. Promoted by the National Rifle Association (NRA), constitutional scholars of the Second Amendment, public officials, and the conservative press, the narrative insists that guns uphold freedom and rights, maintain order, and prevent tyranny. Wrapped in symbols of the American Revolution, this narrative has been used to justify the January 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, private-citizen policing during the #BLM protests of 2020, and calls to kidnap or assassinate public officials as tyrants. This article uses John Locke (the 17th-century thinker who inspired American revolutionaries and the Constitution’s writers) to demonstrate how the armed rebellion narrative disrespects “original” understandings and distorts the meaning of the Second Amendment. First, Locke, the founders, and the original understanding of the Constitution do not justify radical individual gun rights, private-citizen policing, or subversion of the government by individual citizens. Our foundational documents insist on redress through institutions like courts and legislatures and create high bars for armed insurrection (based on the views of the majority rather than small groups of individuals). The armed rebellion narrative replaces a collective decision with the views of the individual. Second, this dangerous and distorted lens should not be used to justify false equivalences between #BLM (a mass call for social change with some violence) and January 6 (an armed insurrection with violence at its core). Locke’s ideas about individuals, the public, and the social contract — claimed by both violent insurrectionists and #BLM protesters — clarify the big lie that perpetuates our gun-saturated politics.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 8p.

By Bertrall Ross

On January 6, 2021, men and women, some of them armed, stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to undo a fair and legitimate presidential election. For the insurrectionists, the election results meant something more than one candidate winning and another one losing. It represented a tyrannical threat to their racialized conception of American republicanism, one that President Donald Trump promoted and sought to legitimate. For those Americans, guns reemerged as an instrument of self-defense against tyranny, just as guns have throughout U.S. history. Yet those individuals’ actions — ones that they understood as resisting tyranny — in fact threatened to destabilize American democracy through violence.

The racialized conception of American republicanism has historically served as psychological ballast for many poor and working-class Americans, including many of those involved in the insurrection. Underlying that conception is an extreme economic inequality that has left many of the insurrectionists marginalized and alienated — and that itself represents the real tyranny that threatens all poor and working-class people’s ability to participate fully in democratic processes.

This essay explores the economic inequality that lies at the foundational core of American republicanism. It then argues that violent threats to the stability and sustainability of the American republic will persist until we confront economic inequality. Otherwise, extreme economic inequality will lead to a future in which the marginalized increasingly resort to guns and violence, and the government is forced to turn to repression to ensure the republic’s survival.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 8p.

By Aziz Z. Huq

This essay identifies and explores the intellectual roots of the Second Amendment as they have been imagined and deployed not just by the U.S. Supreme Court but also by contemporary insurrectionary movements of the right. The Court has recognized but sidelined a political understanding of the Second Amendment in its two main encounters with the amendment’s operative clause. That understanding, however, was on ample display during the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection, where it was featured on banners and performed through the actual possession and threat to use arms. The idea of the armed citizen as a cornerstone of the republic can be traced back to the work of the Florentine scholar-diplomat Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. This essay shows that across his three main book-length works, Machiavelli developed a concept of citizenship that was closely tied to the political, and potentially insurrectionary, possession and use of arms. “Good laws” and “good arms” on his account could not be separated. This vision of a politically active populace, one seemingly at odds with its elites and leaders, can be traced forward to the January 6 insurrection. But it also has a left-of-center genealogy that today yields various forms of radically democratizing proposals for institutional reform. The intellectual past, in short, is not just still alive but surprisingly fertile.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 10p.

By Mary B. McCord

The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, culminated a year of increasing private militia engagement with the public — sometimes in forcible opposition to government policies or, in the case of January 6, in an attempt to “stop the steal,” and sometimes in supposed augmentation of law enforcement’s role to provide protection for persons and property against what the militias deemed “violent anarchists.” These groups, often dressed in military uniforms, armed with semi-automatic assault rifles, and bearing a full accoutrement of military gear, pose a threat to public safety, stifle the constitutional rights of others, and undermine our democracy.

Why have such private paramilitary organizations gone largely unchallenged? The answer lies in part in the widespread mythology that they are protected by the Second Amendment, a mythology promoted by those who attempt to rewrite history to support an insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment. But this view is not supported by history, the text of the Second Amendment, or its interpretation by the Supreme Court. Far from enabling private militias to be a check on a tyrannical government, as modern private militia members would have us believe, the founders intended the militia — all able-bodied men available to be called forth by the governor in defense of the state — to be subordinate to and governed by the state. Indeed, as this essay explains, private militias are not authorized under federal or state law, are not protected by the Second Amendment, and are unlawful in every state.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. 2021. 10p.

By Jennifer Carlson

The summer of 2020 was a summer of mass unrest. Protesting the thousand-plus, disproportionately Black and Indigenous lives taken every year by police violence, millions of Americans mobilized for racial justice and police accountability under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Their message was not new — the Black Lives Matter movement was founded years earlier in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin — but its urgency felt renewed amid egregious cases of anti-Black racism, police violence, growing political polarization, and white supremacist extremism. The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Dion Johnson, and Breonna Taylor — a handful among thousands — yet again spotlighted police complicity with and perpetuation of anti-Black violence, invigorating months of protests and calls for police accountability, police demilitarization, police defunding, and even police abolition. The demands themselves differed in substance; some focused on closing down police departments altogether, while others emphasized the fiscal necessity of redirecting public funding from police to other agencies.1 But the gist of these calls was unanimous: they insist that to transform rather than merely reform the institutions within American society that perpetuate anti-Black racism, police must be decentered as the go-to institution for solving not just problems of crime but social problems more generally. Anti-Black racism within policing is one slice of the entrenched tendency in 20th- and 21st-century America to treat a wide panoply of social problems as problems of crime and bloat the criminal justice system as the catchall state apparatus to address those problems — a dynamic that legal scholar Jonathan Simon describes as “governing through crime.”2 The protests, the demands, and the community organizing of 2020 may have been immediately focused on the criminal justice system, but because that system has so thoroughly penetrated vast realms of American society as a core vector of anti-Black racism, the message carried by the protesters reached far and wide — including gun politics. Often buttressing the well-worn terms of the gun debate, those in favor of increased gun regulations declared that “police violence is gun violence,” while others promoted gun ownership as a way to put the message to “defund the police” into practice. But the challenge that the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests have posed to American gun politics goes far beyond rehashing the usual sides of the gun debate in the key of anti-Black police violence. Rather, this challenge invites those invested in the gun debate to consider their own complicity with the criminal justice system and how, by decentering crime and criminalization within the gun debate, that debate might be transformed. In short, the summer 2020 protests challenge us to imagine anti-racist gun politics.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 10p.

By Public Safety Canada

Overall crime rates in Canada have been decreasing over the past several decades. Despite this, there has been a marked increase in recent crime trends involving gun and gang violence (GGV). For example, between 2013 and 2020, Canada experienced a 91% increase in firearm-related homicides. At Canada’s borders, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has reported an overall increase in firearms seizures over the last five years. GGV-related issues are complex, cross-jurisdictional and multi-sectoral. Given the nature of gang violence and the knowledge that organized crime groups are involved in a variety of criminal activities and illegal commodities, interventions must be comprehensive and include activities across the spectrum of prevention, intervention, and enforcement. While provinces and territories (PTs) are responsible for the administration of justice, including policing, in their jurisdictions, there is also a federal role for supporting a multi-faceted coordinated approach to address GGV. To respond to these increased crime trends, the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada was mandated to work with provincial, territorial and municipal counterparts to develop a strategy for the federal government to best support communities and law enforcement in their ongoing efforts to make it tougher for criminals to secure and use handguns and assault weapons and to reduce GGV in communities across Canada. From this, Budget 2018 committed funding over five years to establish the Initiative to Take Action Against Gun and Gang Violence (ITAAGGV). This horizontal initiative supports Public Safety Canada (PS) (as the lead agency), the CBSA, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) with investments across three themes.

Ottawa: His Majesty the King in Right of Canada, as represented by the Ministers of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, 2023. 40p.