At the state level, one of the most highly publicized developments in recent years was the widespread passage of "right to carry" or "shall issue" laws, which made it easier for non-criminals to get permits to carry concealed weapons in public. Critics feared that the increase in authorized gun carrying would result in increased acts of violence involving permit holders, but these fears were not realized; only a handful of permit holders committed unlawful acts of violence with their guns in public places. On the other hand, these laws also probably did not reduce crime rates.

The enactment of "state preemption" laws in most of the states, however, was arguably of greater significance, though it received little publicity. These state laws forbid local governments from passing their own gun controls. Their significance is that, while most political struggles over gun control involve just a single control measure in one jurisdiction, these laws forbade the future enactment of almost any kind of gun control, eliminated many existing local controls, and did so for hundreds of local jurisdictions within each state.

In response to defeats in legislatures, the best known gun control advocacy organization, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, recently shifted much of its efforts to the courts, helping to bring lawsuits against the gun industry. If widely successful, the lawsuits could either bankrupt gun makers and thereby produce a de facto ban on the further manufacture of firearms, or make guns prohibitively expensive and thereby bring about a de facto ban on gun buying, without benefit of new legislation. The suits rest on novel legal theories that manufacturers or distributors were negligent in (a) producing and selling guns lacking certain safety devices (e.g., "personalized gun" technologies intended to prevent anyone but the authorized user from firing the gun), (b) marketing guns to prohibited buyers such as criminals or juveniles, (c) marketing guns based on supposedly false claims that guns can be useful for self-defense, or (d) manufacturing too many guns, in excess of the demand among noncriminals. Municipal governments also brought suits based on a public nuisance theory that manufacturers should be held liable for the costs to city governments of gun violence--the costs of police and courts, medical care of the wounded, and so forth. Although lawsuits against gun manufacturers are occasionally won on more orthodox legal grounds, such as defects (as conventionally understood) in design or manufacture, U.S. courts have not yet accepted any of these new theories.

Bibliography:

1) Bruce-Briggs, Barry. 1976. "The Great American Gun War." The Public Interest 45:37-62.

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

3) Kleck, Gary and E. Britt Patterson. 1993. "The Impact of Gun Control and Gun Ownership Levels on Violence Rates." Journal of Quantitative Criminology 9:249-88.

4) Newton, George D. and Franklin Zimring. 1969. Firearms and Violence in American Life: A Staff Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

5) Vizzard, William J. 2000. Shots in the Dark: The Policy, Politics, and Symbolism of Gun Control. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

6) Wright, James D. and Peter H. Rossi. 1986. Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

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