Among the core Israeli national narratives fractured by the October 7 Hamas terror attacks and the months of war and violence that have followed was the notion that Israel’s ethos on firearms differed from that of the United States.

Both countries were gun-centric democracies, that narrative allowed, but the U.S. was a land of too many guns and too few laws—while Israelis “trust their state, and don’t fear each other.”  A common refrain emphasized that “in Israel it is not a right to bear arms, but a privilege.”

I knew this mentality well: Before October 7, I had spent over a decade collaborating with Israeli public health scholars and safety activists to better understand how a country with many guns saw only a fraction of the types of civilian gun deaths we do in the U.S. Partner shootings, homicides, gun suicides, accidental shootings, and mass shootings remained remarkably low, thanks to a web of public-health based laws and policies that seemed enviable, if politically impossible, in America.

Many Israelis received firearm training as part of mandatory military service, but the government banned assault rifles for private citizens and issued handgun permits only after an extensive vetting process.

Effective gun policy reinforced social cohesion. While Americans carry guns based on individualized notions of self-protection, Israelis considered gun ownership a shared responsibility.

Such cohesion was often articulated as being not-the-U.S. When the National Rifle Association sent high-level donors on tours of Israel to promote U.S. gun laws, Israelis widely dismissed the efforts as “American mishegas.”

Like many national narratives, Israel’s gun scripts were always based partially in myth. Armed settlers in the West Bank recklessly intimidated and harassed Palestinians. A robust criminal contraband arms market flourished in smaller cities; the victims of shootings from these guns were overwhelmingly Arab citizens of Israel.

Still, American researchers like me could view Israel’s gun safety efforts as models of successful public policy. I worked with groups like the Israeli chapter of Physicians for Human Rights and Gun Free Kitchen Tables that championed coalition-based community safety and advocated for disarmament in “civil space in Israel and the territories under its control.”

That calculus shifted on October 7. A catastrophic failure of state protection tapped into epigenetic–level fears about being Jewish, vulnerable, and exposed—and changed the nation’s relationship to firearms in ways that have profound and lasting implications.

Prior to the Hamas attacks, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—a nationalistic arsonist once expelled from army service because of radicalism—repeatedly tried to weaken gun permit regulations and ease carry rights, arguing that Israel should “take the good things from the U.S.” when it came to guns, but his extremist arguments failed to gain traction.

After October 7, however, Ben-Gvir and his allies managed to fast track legislation that generated an unprecedented spike in armed Jewish civilians. “Carry a Gun, It’s a Life-saver: Ben-Gvir and His Wife Boast of Dramatic Expansion in Israelis Carrying Weapons” read a headline in Haaretz on October 22. Within weeks, the Netanyahu government distributed thousands of firearms and issued more than 30,000 new carry licenses. Contentious Knesset oversight committee meetings detailed how dozens of unqualified people—including Ben Gvir’s personal staff appointees—had been granted temporary authority to approve gun license applications.

“They’re handing out guns like candy,” a senior security official told Haaretz. “There’s almost no oversight.”

Rightist politicians invoked the U.S. to support the gun splurge. Simcha Rothman, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, cited Ronald Reagan and the NRA—“Guns don’t kill. People kill”—to promote expanded gun licensing.

U.S.-based gun rights outlets reflexively lauded these developments, which would lead to the distribution of more than 100,000 guns in the West Bank alone.

It’s understandable why gun sales to civilians spike in times of peril. Guns provide real protection in some instances and the promise of protection in others.

As a longtime scholar of American gun politics, however, I’ve learned that gun safety and security are never as straightforward as the NRA’s “good guys” versus “bad guys” binary makes it seem. Armed civilians rarely prevent crimes such as mass shootings. Potential security benefits to arming civilians are often counterbalanced by rising everyday gun-related injuries and death.

Gun ownership can make people wary of governments and regulations. I once interviewed a man from Missouri who told me that he was “anti-gun” for the first 40 years of his life before he grew concerned about the “gang crime” he heard about on FOX News. He started carrying one concealed handgun for “protection,” then two, and then he bought several rifles. The man ultimately switched his political affiliation from Democratic to Republican because he worried that liberals would take his guns.

Gun politics can also be tribalizing, divisive, even antidemocratic. After the death of George Floyd, gun sellers played on fears and conspiracies to foment white anxiety about Black violence while at the same time citing concerns about police brutality to market semiautomatic weapons to Black and Latino populations. Pro-gun courts in the U.S. overturn firearm safety laws put in place by voters.

The Middle East represents a profoundly different context. But as I tracked Israel’s changing gun policies, it appeared that the right-wing Netanyahu government was doing more than adopting U.S. gun laws: It was also adopting a version of the NRA’s divisive playbook. Ben Gvir’s gun policies papered over security lapses, weakened trust in democratic institutions, and exacerbated existing political and social divides.

For instance, Israeli data had shown that shockingly few terror attacks are stopped by civilians with guns. Still, the Netanyahu government relaxed regulations around shooting other people based on American-style stand-your-ground justice, and doubled down even after civilians were shot and killed in “crossfire” shootouts.

Disproportionate numbers of the newly distributed guns ended up in the hands of supporters of Netanyahu’s conservative/religious coalition. Armed Jewish security squads formed in so-called “mixed cities” where both Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens live. Armed violence against Palestinians also escalated in the occupied West Bank—where members of Jewish settler groups had long been allowed to carry weapons, while Palestinians had not.

What does it mean for a nation whose guiding health principles were built on social-democratic solidarity to so rapidly adopt American-style armed individualism?

After October 7, I started asking my former collaborators—leftist Israeli Jewish and Palestinian clinicians, advocates, journalists, organizers, and academics.

“We’ve been attacked,” many told me in the fall, shattered by the violence and the plight of hostages; they understood the desire for firearms. At the same time, no one could believe how many guns flooded in. “People we never imagined are lining up for permits and carrying guns,” one activist said during a group Zoom conversation. Others on the call chimed in. “My husband.” “My grocer.” “My father-in-law.” “Me.”

Being “like the U.S.” when it came to guns emerged as a source of inquietude. One activist lived in a Tel Aviv suburb a block away from a building that was hit by a rocket. Sirens rang in the background when we spoke; still he wondered, “I keep fearing that once peace does come, with all these guns around, how long will it take until we see our first American-style mass shooting?”

An ER doctor told a story about bickering neighbors holding up guns mid-argument. She asked a question that months before would have been unimaginable: “Do you think U.S. gun safety groups might be willing to take up our cause?”

“What violence is being done in our name?” an activist asked as the human catastrophe in Gaza spiraled over subsequent months.

Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir was arming his own controversial security apparatus on the West Bank and promoting racist notions of Jewish “supremacy.”

Lax gun laws increasingly portended existential threats to the socialist underpinnings of Israeli public health, and broader erosions of civil liberties. A leading peace activist detailed ways that the “gun drive is running roughshod over democratic procedures,” and going hand-in-hand with “rising authoritarianism” and “a trajectory of increasingly violent police responses against anti-war protesters.”

Gun safety groups mobilized in opposition.  “I don’t really think Ben-Gvir wants Israelis to feel safe,” a Palestinian Israeli lawyer explained in late December. “He wants settlers and crazies to intimidate others.”

Gun proliferation that began as a response to an external threat had become an enforcer of expansive internal agendas.

Tensions surrounding Israel’s guns became more divisive over time.

Liberal and secular Israelis had long found common cause with U.S. progressives around matters including racism and reparation, gay and trans rights, climate change, health equity, and regional peace. But by January, as seeming allies abroad protested against not just the war in Gaza but the existence of Israel itself, an Israeli Jewish journalist wondered whether disarmament would become more difficult as the country became increasingly isolated. She worried that feeling “under siege, not just by our enemies and Netanyahu but also by the supposedly liberal, modern people in the West who we thought we were part of” would make it harder for Israelis to imagine or “do peace.”

A safety activist told me in mid-March that “anchoring disarmament of the public sphere to peace would mean placing it in the very distant future…so in our messaging to Israeli gun owners, we now tend to speak about an ultimate transition to relative calm.”

However such efforts evolve, it becomes increasingly clear that the decisions Israel makes about gun proliferation today will go a long way toward shaping the future of the nation.

The country can overturn Ben-Gvir’s disastrous gun policies and begin the hard work of countering their polarizing health, social, and political effects.  Such an approach depends on larger upstream commitments to regional stability, and a renewed commitment to what Haaretz calls “the contract between state and citizen” that lies at the core of democracy and public health.

Or Israel can remain a fortress that—similar to the U.S. castle doctrine—arms itself ever more defensively in anticipation of real and speculative threats.

If I’ve learned anything from studying the U.S., an armed and internally divided nation is a nation less able to negotiate, effectively legislate, or meaningfully compromise.

The post What Could American-Style Gun Culture Do to Israel? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Once, I drove through Virginia slush to NRA Headquarters,

the winter air humming
                                 with the emptiness of my plan
which was not more than the hope of doing something

beyond thoughts & prayers, or any one word I might try

to use after seeing a self-defense catalog
with its photo of a young girl sitting cross-legged

against the cinderblock grid of a school wall as she grips
a bulletproof backpack,
                                 raising it up so that it conceals

her body more or less
                                 behind a kid-friendly style,
which means blue with a cascade of emojis. For the last mile,

I stared at strip mall signs—Jenny Craig, Elegant Dancing,
Lead by Example Tae Kwon Do—that made me feel as if

I was lost in someone’s idea of what America should be:

eye-catching, with plenty of parking, & a flailing
inflatable tube man
                            who rises & falls, arms raised, frantic

to explain that a memory foam mattress sells for less guaranteed.

Without an appointment or idea

                                               of what to do next,
I side-stepped the lobby’s Tom Selleck cutout telling me

something about freedom
                                     I forgot to write down & strolled into
the first room of the National Firearms Museum carrying

some vague hope of what? Whatever I’d come here to find,

it wasn’t Annie Oakley’s pistol or a custom 12-gauge
commemorating Princess Di’s wedding or the gold inlaid

half-dozen geese soaring between
                                                  trigger & bolt
of a shotgun belonging to Hermann Göring. A few lines

of wall text described Bulino style, which meant, I learned,
the process of utilizing
                                    thousands or millions of tiny dots

of varying size to create subtly shaded scenes, which ranged
from two coonhounds charging quail sheltered in long tangles

of grass, to a rifle’s photorealistic Rolls Royce careening toward

a woman—topless, lips parted—nestled against a tiger.
And peering into one
                               mounted magnifying glass I saw

a gun engraved with a Tribute to Picasso featuring,
I swear, a miniature Guernica that mimicked each detail

of his horse & bull, the one jagged light & those bodies

we’ve seen so many times—
                                          necks craned back, each month
in a wail—rendered in a way that reduced any trace

of sorrow to mere line & shape. America, I’m done

with prayers
                  & mirrored vitrines, the yellow dots
of emojis wide-eyed on a kid’s armored backpack

& black dots too numerous to count,

                                                    spread across
those maps that track gun violence & for what? Then again,

here I am speaking to you from within the silence of a poem

which is not much more than a form of prayer
we’ve heard too many times that makes

nothing change. By the time
                                         I’d finished wandering through
the other rooms, it was too late to do anything but drive

the same roads back to the hotel while half-listening
to classic rock & chasing after an idea about how we should

step back & see the shape made
                                                 by those black dots scattered

across the US map, although haven’t we done that already—
stepped back, & looked, & long known what we’ve made?

The post Thousands or Millions of Tiny Dots of Varying Size appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Triumphalism is a domineering mentality that took off when the U.S. became a superpower in the mid-20th century. A byproduct of the old American exceptionalism—the belief that the U.S. is unique and even divinely blessed to lead humanity to a brighter future—triumphalism promises that the U.S. will always magically prevail: bloodied and dazed like Rocky Balboa, perhaps, but still knocking out the bad guys in the final round. It can provide a useful survival mechanism, offering promise and comfort in the crazy time of COVID-19, that the U.S. deserves to wag the giant foam finger that says “We’re No. 1!”

But even in its most understandable form, American triumphalism is wishful thinking. To create a more ethical, sustainable, and humane country at home as well as moral credibility abroad, we need to see the consequences of our collective actions with clarity, rather than hiding behind comforting mythologies that keep us from seeing the obvious defects in our plans for Afghanistan, Iraq, or the pandemic. We need to acknowledge our national limitations, not pretend that they don’t exist. Like a narcissist on a dating app, we need to lower our expectations.

This became vivid to me this summer. I live in the sunny boomtown of Austin, Texas, one of the most hyped and happenin’ cities in the world, a financial and cultural juggernaut propelled by high tech, a massive flagship university, and a groovy laidback attitude. One day I was out enjoying a swim at the beautiful Barton Springs, watching hippie yoginis and grad students reading philosophy in the sun, feeling that Austin was still a cool little blueberry in the middle of inflamed red Texas. The next day, at the Texas Capitol just a few miles away, Gov. Greg Abbott signed S.B. 8, a notorious law—referred to as “the heartbeat bill”—that empowers citizen vigilantes to file lawsuits against anyone helping someone get an abortion after six weeks, even in cases of rape or incest, even if their only “crime” was providing a ride to a clinic.

It shook me. Everywhere I looked around Texas in the following weeks, I saw democracy being smothered under a pillow of hate, privilege, and the narrow self-interest of a white conservative minority. Throughout the summer, Gov. Abbott rolled out new voting restrictions targeting the poor, Black, and brown in ways that can only be called Jim Crow Redux. The state adopted a “permitless carry policy” that lets anyone walk around with an unregulated handgun in full view (even police chiefs lobbied against this one, which could make things messy for them during the active shooter incidents that are almost as regular here as Friday night football). And the state began blocking teachers from engaging students in important discussions of white privilege, and other political subjects that offend right wing sensibilities.

Conservatives have been shilling these kinds of exclusionary and retrograde policies for decades, hiding behind the flag—and an imagined, monolithic, triumphalist America—as they chip away at Americans’ actual rights, one by one. It’s a stance that combines with reckless foreign policy and environmental thoughtlessness to convince some Americans that, simply because they are American, they owe nothing to notions of justice, stewardship, fair play, or true individual liberty—and that they never have to question anything. Donald Trump, the purveyor of endless bogus sales pitches (Trump Steaks, Trump Air, Trump Vodka, Trump Magazine, Trump University), is just the latest face of it. Abbott, who papered over the power grid failures that killed 200 Texans in February 2021 with hollow proclamations about energy independence and the Texas can-do spirit, engages in it all the time.

But who do these fictions serve? Even when such dogma is couched in conceit—“Perhaps we’re flawed, but we’re still the greatest country ever!”—its ramifications are clear. We stop noticing when our neighbors lose rights, or when our actions harm foreign friends or the Earth itself. Who wins when we pump up American hubris to the point at which we can’t even see the suffering we cause?

The influential Christian philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr thought a lot about dynamics like the ones playing out in Texas today. A believer in the “ineluctable tragedy” of the human condition and a complex vision of Christianity that has nothing in common with the huckster megachurch “prosperity gospel” of today, Niebuhr argued for a thoughtful politics of humility and moderation, not boastful certainty—in the U.S., or anywhere else. He said that the U.S. “must slough off many illusions which were derived both from the experiences and the ideologies of its childhood innocence,” warning that, “[o]therwise either America will seek escape from responsibilities which involve unavoidable guilt, or it will be plunged into avoidable guilt by too great confidence in its own virtue.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. extended this critique of American victory culture in the 1960s, rejecting U.S. imperialism and capitalism with a fury that has often been whitewashed out of popular memory. A decade later, Jimmy Carter asked Americans to raise their thermostats a few degrees and wear sweaters to save energy. The right wing mocked him as a wimp and a clown: how dare he imagine life with any limits, in God’s special garden of privilege and power?

People who assume America is always the champ (and always should be the champ) cannot understand our real history of oppression, exclusion, and failure to secure a prosperous and secure life for many of our own citizens—let alone for the people in countries where we intervene as a global hegemon, promising to bring freedom to the masses but delivering a much more uncertain outcome.

Recognizing our shortcomings is neither nihilistic nor anti-American. To the contrary: If America has the capacity for collective goodness, and greatness as a country, we must earn it through the hard work of self-honesty, not simply by declaring victory while stumbling forward into the next quagmire at home or abroad. Here in Austin in 2021, that means challenging the obscene war on historical truth, reproductive rights, and racial justice that mythmakers on the right are waging for their own self-interest. As a country it means we must reject the empty promises of MAGA victory culture in favor of real American virtues that rest on evidence, nuance, compassion, and an acceptance of our own limitations.

It is only by making peace with our national failures, limitations, and even decline that America can become more effective on the world stage and at home. But if we don’t change our mindset, we’ll find ourselves falling victim to the next huckster (or the same one!), selling us on how they’re going to make us “great” again without a clue where to even start the process.

The post America Should Lower Its Expectations appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet this country has homegrown examples of effective gun regulation. Hawai‘i is one.

Although it’s best known for tropical weather and natural beauty, the Aloha State has another quality that distinguishes it from other states: the lowest rates of gun violence in America. In 2015, Hawai‘i had a mere 2.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents, compared to 11.8 nationally and an astonishing rate of 19.2 in Alaska. Even Hawai‘i’s urban areas are relatively free of gun violence. Honolulu, the capital of Hawai‘i, has the lowest violent crime rate of any city in America. Its homicide rate is similar to the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas, which is among the country’s most affluent communities.

What is Hawai‘i doing right—and can it be a model for the nation?

The islands’ low unemployment and a local culture that takes living with aloha seriously certainly contribute to the state’s low rates of gun crime. But Hawai‘i is far from being a crime-free paradise. Property crime is relatively high in Honolulu, and the city has about the same number of car thefts per capita as Los Angeles. In other words, there is crime in Hawai‘i, just not much gun-related crime. And this suggests that Hawai‘i’s strict gun laws—rather than its prosperity or unique local culture—are responsible.

Hawai‘i is the only state that requires all firearms to be registered—both rifles and handguns. All police departments are required to run background checks on anyone trying to purchase a gun. The law does not limit the number of guns that may be purchased at one time, but it does require all purchasers of firearms to register for a license. Buyers with a history of mental illness, drug or domestic violence convictions, certain sexual offenders, and anyone with a restraining order are disqualified.

Put this all together, and Hawai‘i is the state with the seventh-strongest gun laws, according to grades from The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. In 2017 Guns & Ammo magazine ranked it as the 47th-worst state for gun owners, in part because it has a de facto ban on concealed carry weapons permits. The result of these regulations is that, by most measures, Hawai‘i has one of the lowest gun ownership rates in the nation. One recent study estimates that about one-quarter of households own guns, compared to a national average of 57 percent and a high of nearly 77 percent in Mississippi.

The scholarly research on firearm policy is complex, but most studies support one conclusion: states with more guns have more gun-related deaths and violence. It is no coincidence that Alaska, which has the highest rate of gun fatalities in the United States, also has one of the highest rates of gun ownership.

And America has lots of guns—nearly one for every man, woman, and child. Mass shootings receive the most media attention, but every year thousands of people fall victim to gun-related violence. According to the Human Development Index, the United States has nearly 30 gun homicides per million people, compared to 5.1 in Canada and just 1.4 in Australia. More guns are associated with higher suicide rates and violence against police, too. Simply having a gun in the house increases the risk that a family member will take his or her own life. Hawai‘i’s low rates of gun ownership almost certainly contribute to the fact that it has the third-lowest suicide rate for men.

Hawai‘i’s experience isn’t the only evidence that comprehensive gun laws make a difference. One major article in Epidemiologic Reviews reviewed 130 studies from 10 different countries and determined that restrictive laws were associated with fewer gun-related homicides and suicides. But looking to other nations for our inspiration is not always a useful exercise. America has a long tradition of gun ownership, and the Second Amendment makes it impossible to enact regulations like those in Japan or the United Kingdom.

Which is why Americans might think more about Hawai‘i. Over the past decade, as other states have made it easier to purchase or carry firearms, Hawai‘i has doubled down on its restrictions. Recent laws prohibit the possession of so-called “bump fire stocks” and require people with significant behavioral or mental disorders to surrender their firearms and ammunition to police. Hawai‘i was also the first state to cooperate with the FBI’s new “Rap Back” system that will notify local police whenever a gun owner has registered anywhere in the United States.

Hawai‘i’s relative isolation suggests just how well strict regulations can work. In many cities and states, it is easy to subvert the law by driving across state lines. This can make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of gun laws. But Hawai‘i’s unique geography make this impossible: All guns must be transported on a plane or arrive in a regulated cargo shipment.

Hawai‘i’s experience suggests that common sense gun regulations, when they cannot easily be subverted, save lives. These laws work even in a place that struggles with other, less serious forms of crime. It is time for Congress to pass national laws that follow Hawai‘i’s lead.

The post Why Hawai‘i Has America’s Lowest Rates of Gun Violence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I don’t become easily flustered at the prospect of violence. I grew up in Black Los Angeles in the ‘body count’ ’70s, and taught in an inner city high school for five years during the rock cocaine epidemic. I became desensitized to prison-like security and sworn officers of the law putting young people in headlocks—and the sound of gunshots in the distance. Then, after leaving for graduate school and receiving my MFA in creative writing and selling my first novel, my life as a publishing novelist afforded me the opportunity to teach at many of the better universities in Southern California.

Still, some of the entitled—and barely conscious—students I have since encountered at these prestigious schools make me nostalgic for the daily grind of the high school classroom. At the college level I usually grade generously because a fiction workshop is subjective by nature. But with one student I couldn’t bring myself to give him an “A”. He wrote smug and mean pieces that left me depressed. I gave him a B+ instead of the A- he coveted. As soon as I submitted grades I received an angry email from him.

“You have 24 hours to change my grade to an A- or else….”

I was alarmed, but less so when I bothered to read a few sentences down to see that he hadn’t threatened to kill me, rather he’d get his parents to sue me. I laughed it off, but then a female student who was in the same fiction workshop emailed me this:

This may seem strange or out of the blue to you, but it has worried me the past few days and I thought I would email you about it. I’m sure you have heard about the tragedy at Virginia Tech that happened yesterday. Today the news released information about the gunman, who was also student. Classmates and teachers of the gunman have talked about how he was a creative writing student who wrote disturbing plays and stories in class about murdering people. His teacher reported him to the school administration, and nothing was done. I don’t know if you remember this, but one of the students in our class wrote a story that was disturbing to say the least. It talked about stalking female students and included graphic details of several murders. I don’t know his name… I don’t really know what I’m asking you to do, but I wanted to possibly trigger your memory about this. The mere thought of something happening on our campus terrifies me, and if this kid is deranged, or “troubled” as the papers have described the VT gunman, the administration should know about it immediately. I may sound paranoid, but I think when something like this happens there’s no reason to take any chances.

She was describing the student trying to intimidate me into changing his grade. I reported him to the administration, but he kept writing vaguely threatening emails to me even when he was told to cease contacting me.

A few years later another student, a guy who seemed pleasant and a little goofy, made a comment before class in the hallway in front of his fellow classmates that his next story would be about killing his classmates. Suddenly half my students were skipping class (before attendance had been great). Again, a female student told me that students were frightened of the goofy guy. The student boycott got the attention of the university higher-ups and he was interviewed after I talked to him. He had no idea of the panic he caused, or that armed undercover campus security officers were in the hallway ready to handle the situation if I called them in.

I teach at UC Santa Barbara now, the school I graduated from. It’s a university that has experienced its share of tragedy. I was on campus on May 23, 2014, the night when Elliot Rodger killed six people in Isla Vista, the college town abutting the university. I had just finished class in the late afternoon and noticed an email to the campus community:

May 23, 2014

To: Campus Community

Re: Campus Wide “Responding to Distressed Students” Training

The offices of Student Mental Health Coordination Services, Student Health, Counseling & Psychological Services, and the UC Police Department invite you to a “Responding to Distressed Students” training on May 28, 9:00 – 11:00 am. The goals of the training are to provide attendees with a context for student mental health, to introduce and review the distressed student protocol and appropriate campus resources for students, offer suggestions on how to refer students, and review potential distressed student scenarios. This interactive training is open to staff and faculty and all are invited and encouraged to attend.

Please join us on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 9:00 – 11:00 am in the Multipurpose Room of the Student Resource Building. Coffee and bagels will be provided.

Unfortunately Elliot Rodger wasn’t a student at UCSB eligible to receive counseling services and coffee and bagels. David Attias, son of film director Daniel Attias was, but he didn’t seek counseling back in 2001 when he ran over five people in Isla Vista. Both young men had families who knew their sons were troubled and desperately tried to intervene to prevent tragedy, but the efforts didn’t work.

About a year ago I brought Elise, my 15-year-old daughter, to sit in on the fiction writing course I teach at UCSB, so that later we could celebrate the birthday of my older daughter Giselle, who was then a Global Studies major at UCSB. Our plans were scuttled when the university was put on alert and locked down. No one could enter or leave the university while the campus police searched for a shooter. Seemingly it was a drug deal that became a dorm robbery that resulted in a massive response including multiple helicopters circling campus. It felt strangely like being a kid in South L.A. when the police were chasing somebody down.

As a kid I feared being killed because there was epidemic of shootings around me. Pootbutts (nerds) like me got shot along with gangbangers: Friends shot friends as well as family members and bystanders. I learned then that having a gun isn’t a magic talisman that keeps bullets from finding you. The tortured logic is that maybe you can avoid being shot because you’ll shoot first, or get a shot off if the shooter misses—and then that baby in the stroller gets a bullet in the brain. I had guns pointed at me four times; once out of anger, twice out of mistaken identity and, the last time, as part of a family dispute. In all of these instances guns were pointed at me suddenly and without opportunity for escape. The last time it happened all I could think to do was stare down the barrel of a shotgun and smile stupidly. The lesson I learned in L.A. was invaluable: When your neighborhood becomes awash in guns, no one is safe and you need to find somewhere sane to live, or spend your life inside of the house, hiding in the bathtub. What I dealt with as kid, fear for my personal safety, I wouldn’t now tolerate for myself, or my family. Sadly professors at these public universities in Texas—with possible gun-wielding students—have to carefully consider what it means to teach in a potentially militarized classroom.

The Texas legislature must believe more guns equal more safety, and that gun ownership is such an unmitigated good that it should be a largely unregulated right shoehorned into all aspects of daily life. The consequences remain to be seen. I can imagine being a professor at the University of Texas and leading a critique of a lousy story of a potentially armed student. Or the joy of explaining his failing grade during office hours behind my bullet proof partition, my own pistol close at hand deep in the heart of Texas.

The post Professor, Get Your Gun appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The last question is one that tends to engage the media, and bleed into the minds of the public.

Motive (from the Latin word motivum, meaning “moving cause”) is what moves a person to commit a certain act. In U.S. criminal law, there is no requirement to prove motive to reach a verdict. However, motive may be shown by the prosecution in order to prove that a defendant had a plausible reason to commit the crime. A defendant’s motive may be either rational (i.e., understandable to the average person) or irrational (i.e., it may be caused by mental illness).

The question of motive can be hard to answer—unless one devotes substantial time and effort, using the correct approach and the right expertise. A model example of this is the A&E investigative documentary Columbine—Understanding Why. At the request of the Littleton, Colorado D.A.’s office, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz and colleagues performed a thorough “psychiatric autopsy” of the two teens responsible for the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School. Through several interviews and painstaking data gathering, Dietz was able to conclude that the two shooters had multiple motives—power, respect, control, and revenge. Dietz noted that the perpetrators also “did it to gain infamy” and to leave a legacy in order to inspire others.

Common rational motives for criminal acts include greed, anger, jealousy, and the other ignoble human motivations. In contrast, an irrational motive typically involves symptoms of psychosis, such as a paranoid delusion that someone is trying kill you. When you believe your situation amounts to “kill or be killed,” you may lash out to stop your misperceived persecutor. But note that this example nevertheless represents a motive—albeit one that might be described as “rationality within irrationality.” While it flows from a psychotic delusion, there is, in fact, a logic to the motive of the actor.

While motive can depend upon a seemingly endless combination of bio-psycho-social factors, even in the most heinous and difficult to fathom crimes, there is motive. The popular myth that the perpetrator of a mass shooting “just snapped” has been debunked.

Prior to Charles Whitman’s 1966 mass shooting from atop the University of Texas tower, many cases of mass murder involved a depressed and angry man who killed his family and then himself. Such cases did not capture much media attention. Why? They were regarded as “family business” and were “too close for comfort,” according to Park Dietz. In contrast, mass shootings beginning in the 1990s have been covered intensely by the media and appear to be a different type of violence, at least in the eyes of the public. Compared to depressed and despairing familicide-suicides, these “modern” cases are likely distant enough from the average person’s experience to capture the public’s attention with morbid fascination over prolonged periods of time.

The news media often heavily influences public perception of mass murders, offering simplified explanations that assume the perpetrator is either “mad” or “bad.” Such simplistic explanations are easier for the media to report and for the public to accept. Psychiatric illness, while present in some mass murderers and mass shooters, is far from the most significant or consistent finding when individual cases are analyzed in great detail. No research has reliably established that most mass murderers and shooters are psychotic or suffering from a serious mental illness. However, many have been found to have been preoccupied with feelings of social persecution and fantasies of revenge for some type of perceived injustice. Studies of mass murderers have found that it is not uncommon for them to leave some type of final communication. Indeed, the study of mass murderers’ final communications has led to a greater understanding of their psychology and motivations.

From a public health perspective, a better understanding of mass murderers’ motives is the only rational way to prevent these tragedies and to dispel harmful myths that could lead to ill-informed crackdowns on those suffering from mental illness. This is not only an ineffective way of solving the problem, it is quite misguided. Only a small fraction of persons with serious mental illness are violent. Even if we were to assume a causal association between serious mental illness and violent crime, the overall contribution of this population to violent crimes in society is only about 3 to 5 percent. Thus, focusing broadly on persons with mental illness as a “risky” population is similar to what we observed after September 11, when anyone of Middle Eastern ancestry was viewed with heightened suspicion. But, concluding that a mass murderer’s motives are “senseless” and therefore unworthy of study is also too broad a determination, one that risks preventing future tragedies.

Comparatively, little study has focused on sociocultural motives. Sociocultural factors may provide critical data for prevention efforts that extend beyond individual factors such as mental illness or efforts to “profile” offenders. The investigation of social and cultural factors seems reasonable, if not obvious, when attention is paid to the words perpetrators leave behind. For example, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter posted online in late 2011: “[You know what I hate] … Culture. I’ve been pissed out of my mind all night thinking about it.” Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista, California, shooter, posted a manuscript online in 2014 stating, “Humanity is a cruel and brutal species.”

P.E. Mullen keenly observed that perpetrators of mass shootings acknowledged being influenced by previous mass murderers who received significant media exposure, which may be one important factor contributing to the breeding of these tragic events in Western society. Extensive and sensationalistic media attention beginning in the 1990s may have further perpetuated what Mullen describes as a “script,” resulting in a perverse glamorization of the act, particularly in the eyes of subsequent perpetrators. The study of individual cases of mass shootings that have occurred since the ‘90s suggest that perpetrators often felt socially rejected and perceived society as continually denouncing them as unnecessary, ineffectual, and pathetic. Instead of bearing the burden of perceived humiliation, they plan a surprise attack to prove their hidden “value.”

By becoming a lone protestor against an “unjust” reality, the perpetrator creates and assumes a victim role in which he can win—even by losing. Western society in particular has had a long-standing fascination with the tragic anti-hero or outlaw, the Bonnies and Clydes of American history. Their short, violent lives have become the stuff of legend. The very public and dramatic nature of mass murder seems to speak to a need for wide recognition. For the perpetrator, such a tragic revenge establishes a connection with spectators who will not soon forget what they have seen. Thus, a further extension of Mullen’s western cultural script may be characterized as the Script of the Tragic Anti-Hero, which details motive in the following “acts:”

1. The perception of a ruined social identity
2. The experience of persecution and social alienation
3. The formulation of plans to reclaim the identity via tragic revenge
4. The need for the tragic revenge to be dramatic in nature
5. The public enactment of tragic revenge
6. The aftermath of media coverage and propagation

Rodger’s final written communication appears to follow this script precisely. His communications reflect a pattern of alienation and malignant envy, culminating in a violent bid for fame and validation: “Humanity has rejected me … Exacting my retribution is my way of proving my true worth to the world.”

As supremely selfish and unacceptable as this is, it represents motive laid bare.

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Yet when it comes to violent crime, especially murder, Americans are at much greater risk of falling victim to someone they know, perhaps someone they know intimately. And these kinds of murderers are less likely to commit their crimes with guns.

A homicide detective once told me, “Familiarity breeds attempt.” The fact is that most victims and their killers are at least passingly familiar with each other. Intimates interact often, and those interactions often lead to disputes and disagreements. Those disputes and disagreements can lead to violence. People who don’t see another way to resolve these disagreements often have a dispute resolution mechanism such as a gun, a knife, or a blunt object handy.

Typically, criminologists categorize victim-offender relationships as strangers (individuals who don’t know each other), acquaintances (individuals who are familiar with each other, have met, or are aware of each other, but are not close), and intimates (family, lovers, and the like). Most victims of property crime (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft) are strangers. But homicide, which is defined by the FBI as “the willful (non-negligent) killing of one human being by another,” is different. This antiseptic definition hides the emotion and will that need to be generated to shoot, stab, choke, or beat an intimate to death. Nineteen percent of all homicides involve intimates.

Motives for violent crime are generally broken into two categories: instrumental and expressive. Instrumental motives are ascribed to events that are designed to produce a material advantage for the offender. Robbery—such as the killing of a store owner for the cash in the till—is the perfect example of this.

Expressive violence is different; it is designed to make a statement or communicate a strong emotion like love, hate, or resentment. Domestic homicides, in which one intimate partner kills another, are the prototypical form of expressive homicide.

Instrumental violence typically occurs between strangers and involves the use of only enough force or violence to “get the job done.” In instances of expressive violence where individuals know each other, emotions run high, and the nature and level of violence is often exaggerated more than is necessary to “get the job done.” In these cases, the violence makes a statement that reflects the large emotional overlap between victims and offenders.

A majority of homicides involve offenders and victims who share a large number of characteristics. The most typical homicide involves a victim and offender who are similar in age, race/ethnicity, gender, and prior involvement in the criminal justice system. They also typically have other background characteristics in common: educational attainment, employment history, and poverty levels. The familiarity that breeds contempt is not an emotional familiarity based on association, but a familiar set of background and experiential characteristics, including involvement in crime, gangs, and urban gun culture.

It is important to note that firearms are involved in about two-thirds of homicides in the U.S. That said, murders between intimates are more likely to involve “hands-on” violence, such as choking, beatings, or violence where the perpetrator physically touches the victim. Guns are more likely to be involved between perpetrators and victims who are strangers, or who know each other only in passing, like rival gang members.

Most homicides also occur within relatively close proximity to the residences of victims and offenders. And most cities have highly concentrated patterns of crime, particularly violent crime and homicide. Criminologists have observed across the past several decades that “crime causes crime,” a hypothesis that works at two levels: the individual and the neighborhood.

When crime is committed at the individual level, individual offenders or victims create motives for their family members or friends to commit “reciprocated” crime. Many homicides are linked through patterns of revenge from a victim’s family or friends who become perpetrators in an effort to obtain justice for their slain family member.

When crime is committed at the neighborhood level—more often perpetrated by strangers and acquaintances—fear is spread within the community, breaking down social structure and impeding the ability of the police to make arrests and solve crime.

There is emerging evidence that the decades’ long “Great Crime Decline” has leveled off, and that homicide rates may be increasing. The initial evidence comes from cities that traditionally had high homicide rates, according to the National Institute of Justice. These cities are characterized by very high levels of concentrated poverty, particularly among minority residents.

Rising homicide rates in these parts of the country are of particular concern because they come at a time when law enforcement resources are stretched thin, thanks to recession cutbacks. The police make an arrest in about two-thirds of homicides. This leaves one-third of homicides unsolved, with offenders free in the community and the needs and desires of families and friends of victims unaddressed. Unsolved homicides often create their own “crime wave” as the families and associates of victims seek to exact justice on their own, putting the police under still more stress.

Recent increases in homicide are troubling. It remains to be seen if such increases signal the onset of a new wave of crime. Understanding the nature and patterns of homicide is key to formulating effective responses. To be successful, such responses must place more responsibility on communities for identifying disputes at an early stage in their development, before they turn fatal.

If the police are the only institution responsible for producing reductions in crime, we are in for a dangerous time.

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Each time I visit the Mystery House I try to envision what this space must have looked like to the “rifle widow” Sarah Winchester, when she first encountered it in 1886—acre after acre of undulating orchards and fields, broken only by an unassuming eight-room cottage.

Legend holds that before the 1906 earthquake—when her estate was as huge and fantastically bizarre as it would ever be with 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, and 2,000 doors, trap doors, and spy holes—not even Sarah could have confidently located those original eight rooms.

Sarah had inherited a vast fortune off of guns. Her father-in-law Oliver Winchester, manufacturer of the famous repeater rifle, died in 1880, and her husband Will, also in the family gun business, died a year later. After she moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, Sarah dedicated a large part of her fortune to ceaseless, enigmatic building. She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922.

An American Penelope, working in wood rather than yarn, Sarah wove and unwove eternally. She built, demolished, and rebuilt. Sarah hastily sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas, or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day. In 1975, workers discovered a new room. It had two chairs, an early 1900s speaker that fit into an old phonograph, and a door latched by a 1910 lock. Sarah had apparently forgotten about it and built over it.

In 1911, the San Jose Mercury News called Sarah’s colossus a “great question mark in a sea of apricot and olive orchards.” Over a century later, the San Francisco Chronicle was still baffled: “the Mansion is an ornately complex answer to a very simple question: Why?”

Mrs. Winchester’s main bedroom.

The answer: Sarah’s building is a ghost story of the American gun. Or so the legend went. A spiritualist in the mid-1800s, when plenty of sane Americans believed they could communicate with the dead, Sarah became terrified that her misfortunes, especially the death of her husband and one-month-old daughter, were cosmic retribution from all the spirits killed by Winchester rifles. A relative said many decades later Sarah fell “under the thrall” of a medium, who told her that she would be haunted by the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims unless she built, non-stop—perhaps at ghosts’ direction, for their pleasure, or perhaps as a way to elude them. Haunted by conscience over her gun blood fortune and seeking either protection or absolution, Sarah lived in almost complete solitude, in a mansion designed to be haunted.

When I heard Sarah’s ghost story from a friend in graduate school, I was enthralled. Eventually, Sarah became the muse for my book on the history of the American gun industry, and culture.

I keenly anticipated my first visit to the Mystery House. I must have been hoping that the house would yield up its secret to me. At first glance I was deflated, for the unusual reason that from the outside, the house wasn’t entirely weird.

But the drama of this house, like the drama of Sarah’s life, was unfolding on the inside. A staircase, one of 40, goes nowhere and ends at a ceiling. Cabinets and doors open onto walls, rooms are boxes within boxes, small rooms are built within big rooms, balconies and windows are inside rather than out, chimneys stop floors short of the ceiling, floors have skylights. A linen closet as big as an apartment sits next to a cupboard less than an inch deep. Doors open onto walls. One room has a normal-sized door next to a small, child-sized one. Another has a secret door identical to one on a corner closet—it could be opened from within the room, but not from without, and the closet drawer didn’t open at all.

Details are designed to confuse. In one room, Sarah laid the parquetry in an unusual pattern: When the light hit the floor a particular way, the dark boards appeared light, and the light boards, dark. Bull’s-eye windows give an upside-down view of the world. Even these basic truths, of up and down, and light and dark, could be subverted.

The house teems with allusions, symbols, and mysterious encryptions. Its ballroom features two meticulously crafted Tiffany art-glass windows. Here, Sarah inscribed her most elegant clues for us. The windows have stained glass panels with lines from Shakespeare. One reads, “These same thoughts people this little world.” It’s from the prison soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Deposed from power and alone in his cell, Richard has an idea to create a world within his prison cell, populated only by his imaginings and ideas.

The Winchester Mystery House, circa 1900-1905.

Is the legend accurate? I found spine-tingling clues on the archival trail that incline me to believe that Sarah really was a spiritualist, but I never found that smoking gun, to borrow a metaphor from Oliver’s empire. I do know that her mansion conveys a restless, brilliant, sane—if obsessive—mind and the convolutions of an uneasy conscience. Perhaps Sarah only dimly perceived the sources of her unease, whether ghostly or profane. But she wove anguish into her creation, just as any artist pours unarticulated impulses into her work. Over repeated visits, I came to think that if a mind were a house, it would probably look like this.

The House is an architectural exteriorization of an anguished but playful inner life. Ideas, memories, fears, and guilt occur to us all day long. They come to consciousness. If they displease or terrify, we brood or fuss over them for a while, then revise them to make them manageable, or we plaster over them and suppress them, or refashion them into another idea. One of the house’s builders recalled, “Sarah simply ordered the error torn out, sealed up, built over or around, or … totally ignored.” The mental and architectural processes of revision, destruction, suppression, and creation were ongoing, and similar.

Perhaps the same mental process happens with a country’s historical narratives about its most contentious and difficult topics—war, conquest, violence, guns. Sarah’s family name was synonymous by the 1900s with a multi-firing rifle, and the Winchester family had made its fortune sending more than 8 million of them into the world. It wasn’t crazy to think that Sarah might have been haunted by that idea, that she might have perpetually remembered it, and just as perpetually tried to forget.

I’ve come to see the house as a clever riddle. Sarah made charitable donations, certainly, and if she had wanted to, she could have become a philanthropist of greater renown. But the fact remains that she chose to convert a vast portion of her rifle fortune into a monstrous, distorted home; so we can now wander through her rooms imagining how one life affects others.

Instead of building a university or a library, Sarah built a counter-legend to the thousands of American gunslinger stories. And in this counter-legend, the ghosts of the gun casualties materialize, and we remember them.

The post Why the Winchester Rifle Heiress Built Herself a Haunted Mansion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That focus on the Sunshine State is even more appropriate than the American public understands. The state of Florida has long played a leading role in the establishment and expansion of the right to bear arms.

As constitutional rights go, the right to bear arms is of relatively recent vintage. In 1991, then-retired Chief Justice Warren Burger characterized the notion that the Second Amendment protects such a right as one of the greatest frauds perpetrated on the American public in his lifetime. In Burger’s view, and in the uniform view of the federal courts for more than 100 years, the Second Amendment protected only the states’ prerogative to have militias. It afforded individuals no personal rights to own or carry firearms.

But In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment did in fact protect such an individual right to bear arms. How did this change happen? And what does it teach us about how constitutional law develops in the United States?

The place to start looking for an answer is not in Washington D.C—but in Florida. And specifically, in the offices of Marion Hammer, a 4’11” grandmother, now in her 70s, who never went to law school but happens to be the most powerful lobbyist in Florida.

Hammer was the first female president of the National Rifle Association. And it is the NRA that is responsible for realizing and protecting the contemporary right to bear arms. Hammer’s strategy in Florida has been key to the NRA’s national success.

Marion Hammer, left, former President of the National Rifleman’s Association, speaks to the House Judiciary committee about the firearms/motor vehicles bill, Tuesday, April 4, 2006, in Tallahassee, Fla.

The NRA itself was primarily a marksmanship, hunting, and sport shooting organization for most of its history. It did not even establish a political arm until 1975, around the same time Hammer became involved in the political fight for gun rights. Both developments were a response to the first major piece of federal gun legislation, the Gun Control Act, passed in 1968 after the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hammer and the NRA saw the Gun Control Act as a threat to their liberty, but understood that the federal courts would not be receptive to a constitutional challenge, given their longstanding rejection of an individual right. All precedent stood against them. Instead, the NRA looked to alternative, more sympathetic forums. It found them in the states, where gun control advocates were not organized, and where politicians responsive to rural constituents were especially receptive to the need for individuals to own guns for self-defense. In no small part because of Hammer’s early and effective advocacy, Florida became the NRA’s go-to state, so much so that it is sometimes called the “Gunshine State.”

In the 1970s, the NRA launched a state-by-state strategy to establish gun rights. Under Hammer’s direction, it started in its most hospitable state, and then exported victories won there to other states. In Florida and other states, NRA lobbyists fought for amendments to state constitutions to recognize an individual right to bear arms. They pressed for laws requiring state and local governments to issue individual licenses for concealed weapons, so long as applicants were not disqualified for specific reasons, such as felony convictions or mental illness. They successfully protected gun manufacturers from liability for injuries caused by illegal use of their weapons. These legislative victories—exported one state at a time—created a new environment. By 2008, when the Supreme Court in Heller took up the question of a federal right to bear arms, the vast majority of states already protected individual gun ownership rights, thereby easing the way to recognition of a federal right.

The NRA worked in other venues as well to buttress its view of the Second Amendment. It supported scholars who argued that the Second Amendment was originally intended to protect an individual right, and in doing so, reversed settled wisdom in the legal academy. Before the NRA got involved, virtually all law review articles advanced the “state militia prerogative” view of the Second Amendment. By the time the Supreme Court took up the question in 2008, the majority of law review articles supported an individual rights view, and several well-known liberal constitutional scholars, including Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and Yale’s Akhil Amar, had given that view credence.

In 2000, after throwing its substantial political muscle behind the election of George W. Bush, the NRA convinced Attorney General John Ashcroft, an NRA member, to reverse the Justice Department’s longstanding position on the Second Amendment. In response to a letter from the NRA, Ashcroft took the position, for the first time in Justice Department history, that the Second Amendment protected an individual right. By 2008, again at the NRA’s urging, Congress had also adopted that view, in two gun rights laws. Thus, by the time the Supreme Court took up the issue in 2008, the NRA had shifted the ground on this question in its favor in the states, the legal academy, the executive branch, and Congress. The Court’s decision was simply the final shoe to drop.

As this account suggests, recognition of an individual right to bear arms was not imposed from the top down by five justices, but developed from the bottom up, through decades of advocacy and debate sponsored by the NRA. And even after receiving the Supreme Court’s imprimatur, the right is more vigorously protected by the NRA than the federal courts. Through its political influence in Washington and the states, the NRA can block laws that would otherwise be sustained by the courts, such as the effort to require universal background checks for private gun purchases after the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. And the NRA has repeatedly succeeded in obtaining gun protections through state law that the Second Amendment does not require, such as the right to carry concealed weapons in public. Marion Hammer and her colleagues at the NRA remain the most significant guardians of the right to bear arms, notwithstanding the right’s formal recognition in our constitutional law.

This story is not unique to the NRA and the Second Amendment. Often, the key actors in constitutional law are not the justices on the Supreme Court, but “we the people,” acting in associations of like-minded citizens, and engaged in advocacy far beyond the federal courts. Similar organizational campaigns transformed federal marriage equality from unthinkable to inevitable, and forced President George W. Bush to curtail many of his most aggressive counterterrorism measures by the time he left office in 2009. As Learned Hand, a legendary federal judge, once said, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it … while it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.” Civil society organizations—on the left and the right, whether they are the ACLU or the NRA—help to ensure that liberty lies in our hearts, and is reflected in our constitutional law.

The post How the NRA Made Florida the “Gunshine State” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Even in the absence of significant new federal legislation, the gun debate has been transformed since Newtown—and Aurora. And Tucson. And Chattanooga. And Fort Hood. And Charleston. And San Bernardino. And … the list goes on, tragically. Together, these mass shootings have brought so much public attention to gun policy and gun violence that the conversation has changed radically.

How? For many years before the Newtown shooting in December 2012, Democrats avoided talking about new restrictions on guns for fear of losing votes, especially in swing states. In 2008 and 2012, for example, candidate Obama downplayed gun control and emphasized his support of the Second Amendment. Now the Democratic presidential contenders are making gun control central planks in their platforms and it’s a litmus test for Obama’s support.

But does this new conversation mean that we are on the verge of meaningful change in America’s approach to guns? There are many signs of hope for advocates of gun control—and also cause for them to be concerned.

Here are the hopeful signs. The gun control movement has been reinvigorated. Although Congress is stalled (on guns, along with quite a lot else), a significant percentage of the population lives in states that have enacted restrictive new gun laws: Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Maryland, California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York among them. While the National Rifle Association has dominated campaign spending on gun issues for decades, there’s a more level playing field now largely due to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s money and former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ Super PAC. Polling shows widespread support, even among gun owners and NRA members, for reforms like universal background checks and banning people on terrorist watch lists from buying guns.

Over the coming years, the NRA faces unprecedented demographic challenges. The country is becoming more diverse, with growing populations of Latinos, Asians, and African-Americans. These ethnic groups report the highest support for gun control among the population. The country also is becoming more urbanized and college-educated, two other demographic characteristics associated with stronger support for gun control. The NRA knows this, and is making a renewed push to appeal to a new audience—as highlighted by their recent hiring of the hip, web-savvy attorney Colion Noir as a spokesperson. So far, however, gun ownership remains disproportionately concentrated among America’s declining demographics: white, rural, non-college educated.

One interesting aspect of the reinvigoration of the gun control movement is its timing—right on the heels of what had appeared to be gun control’s most devastating loss. In 2008, the Supreme Court for the first time struck down a gun control law—Washington D.C.’s ban on handguns—and announced that, as the NRA claimed, the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to bear arms. The decision sparked hundreds of legal challenges to gun control laws. Yet the lower courts have upheld all but a small handful of gun laws and the Supreme Court has shown little interest since Newtown in deciding another Second Amendment case. This term, the justices agreed to hear a case involving a gun law—and specifically directed the advocates not to argue about the Second Amendment.

The reason courts have upheld most gun laws is that America, by and large, does not have very burdensome gun laws. That’s due to the political influence of the NRA, which has led a successful 40-year effort to loosen gun laws.

That brings me to the causes for concern. In the short term, at least, the NRA still has a very strong hold on Congress, thanks to single-issue pro-gun voters. Until gun control candidates can count on support from an equal or greater number of single-issue votes, the NRA will maintain the edge on Election Day.

Gun control also has a public relations problem: Support for the idea of gun control generally is at historic lows (even as support for specific proposals is high). And we should remember that as many states have loosened their gun laws since Newtown as have strengthened them. Many of these laws are minor, but that’s only because the NRA has been so successful that pro-gun advocates are left to push for guns in the few remaining places they aren’t allowed: college campuses, bars, and kindergarten classrooms.

Besides the NRA, gun control advocates are often their own worst enemies. There are important and effective gun reforms worth adopting: universal background checks, better reporting of criminal and mental health data into the federal background check database, stronger enforcement of gun laws, cracking down on rogue gun dealers. Yet advocates also push for predictably ineffective laws like bans on military-style rifles, which, contrary to common belief, are not machine guns and are rarely used in crime. Gun control proponents laugh off the NRA’s claim that the government wants to confiscate guns and then propose to outlaw the most popular rifle in America.

The 2016 election may prove to be a historic moment for the gun debate. With Obama’s gun control litmus test and presidential candidates from both parties staking out strong positions for and against gun control, this issue increasingly looks to become one of the focal points of the campaign. While Americans believe other issues, like the economy and jobs, are more important, it may be easier for the two parties to draw clearer distinctions on gun control than economic policy. With more mass shootings undoubtedly to come, don’t be surprised if the election turns out to be a referendum on guns.

For gun control advocates, there’s a lot at stake. If Democrats lose the White House, in an election they are widely predicted to win, gun control will be blamed and likely become once again the hidden stepchild of the Democratic Party platform. And even if a Democrat is elected president, the GOP will hold onto the House so there will not be any significant new federal legislation.

A Republican president, by contrast, could enact new—and looser—gun laws, like national legislation broadening the right to carry guns in public. Gun control advocates, in other words, have new hope and significant political momentum. But they have much, much more to lose this election than they can hope to gain.

The post America Is No Longer Gun-Shy About Gun Control appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.