Two Things I Learned About Gun Control Recently

The recent Uvalde shooting has re-spurred the national conversation on gun control legislation. This debate recurs after a mass shooting like clockwork, having been reliably shot down by Republican Senate filibustering each time. Here’s what the latest circulation of media has illuminated for me:

In a Rolling Stones article by Champe Barton, “Shootings Have Surged — and Gun Companies Have Made Billions”, a disturbing image becomes apparent: children cower in their classrooms while gun manufacturers clink glasses over their first $100 million monthly profit. American gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson executives even boast, “in a year of turmoil, we gained market share”. Why is this the case? Intuitively, mass shootings should scare Americans away from purchasing firearms and gun manufacturers should take losses. Yet, the opposite is true.

Firstly, the fear of stricter gun legislation encourages Americans to purchase a gun before any such legislation can be enacted. This helps explain why “gun sales ballooned in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting, when President Barack Obama pledged to enact stricter gun reforms” (Barton, 2022). Secondly, in the wake of governmental gun-control inaction, Americans respond to gun violence by purchasing firearms in order to protect themselves from the threat of other Americans and even law enforcement. Consequently, Barton writes that we “have seen more first-time gun buyers than ever before”.

Unsurprisingly, more guns in civilian hands mean more mass murders. David Hemenway and Matthew Miller in an empirical study find that “there is a strong and statistically significant association between gun availability and homicide rates”. Effectively, mass shootings spawn more of themselves - and gun manufacturers are the rusty mechanism.

Yet, gun manufacturer profits that follow mass shootings have another eerie life aside from funneling into more gun manufacturing: They pay the lobbying bills for the National Rifle Association (NRA), an interest group committed to protecting gun rights. For example, “in 2010 the NRA received $71 million in donations—many of these donations coming directly from the gun industry” (Allan Jay). It’s no surprise that the NRA has mutated into the formidable lobbying machine it is today.

An Adam Serwer article in The Atlantic called “The One Group That Could Make a Difference on Gun Control” shows us just how political. Serwer explains that “the present politics of guns are partly a consequence of selling firearms not merely as a tool of personal protection, sport, or wildlife maintenance, but as a tool of potential political insurrection against liberal tyranny”. Such is a political identity and interpretation of the 2nd Amendment historically embodied by members of the Republican party.

Jennifer Carlson in her book, Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race, then illustrates the monumental embedding of a deadly weapon into the Republican agenda. She writes that the NRA “doubled down on ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric and reminded cops that gun control was supported by liberals - and liberals were notoriously soft on crime”. Thus, the opposition to gun control is now battled with the wrath of polarization politics.

NRA conviction has always been rooted in the misconception that injecting more guns into American society makes it safer by deterring crime. Yet as Steve Levitt in the Freakonomics Episode: “How to Think About Guns” explains, guns make a poor deterrent against crime because they disrupt the “natural order”. In the natural order of violence with primal weapons such as fists and knives, there are pre-determined winners and losers based on concrete factors such as size, strength, and popularity. Levitt reasons that guns create “uncertainty of the outcome of the fight … and then that actually has the opposite effect of deterrents, because now if anybody can win the fight there can be more fights”.

The punch line of the NRA? Mass shootings will undoubtedly exaggerate the harm of their misconception. Police stood flustered outside the school building in Uvalde because they felt outgunned by a civilian. What are the implications for further arming police officers, teachers, parents of school children?

If we assume the NRA is a non-profit organization that functions as an interest group in the United States government as they claim to be, the situation at hand feels counterintuitive. Indeed, in light of a recent lawsuit that “unearthed ‘inappropriate spending’ [and] ‘self-dealing’” (Anna Massoglia, 2021), the NRA makes more sense as a modern capitalist contraption. The mechanism: guns help churn out more money.