The impact of imported firearms on Southeast Asian states has been a topic of much debate, but is often discussed in relatively general terms. This article uses the archive of the Dutch East India Company to analyse the importation of muskets into late seventeenth century Ayutthaya, which took the form of diplomatic gifting, as well as their intended uses. Muskets are found to have been used mainly for the suppression of internal popular revolts, which was aided by extremely strict gun control aimed at keeping firearms a royal monopoly. The importation of these guns was responsive to immediate need and stopped once revolts became less frequent. The volume of the trade between 1658 and 1709 is found to have been surprisingly low.

This article offers the first scholarly analysis of the shift from revolvers to semi-automatic handguns in Canada to contribute to our knowledge of police militarization. In the 1990s, most Canadian police handed in their venerable service revolvers and received modern semi-automatic pistols. Advocates of new weapons pointed to relatively rare but high-profile shootings of police to show the dangers of law enforcement work and the need to have better firearms. The gun industry encouraged the rearming of police through an aggressive marketing campaign emphasizing that modern police forces required more advanced weapons and the military lineage of their products. The transition to semi-automatic handguns sometimes proved controversial, as human rights advocates believed the new handguns could result in excessive use of force. Despite this concern, most police were rearmed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In COVID’s immediate wake, the 2020 death toll from a different enemy of the public’s health — gun violence — ticked up by 15 percent in the United States from the previous year. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in Caniglia v. Strom that will allow people who have recently threatened suicide — with a gun — to keep unsecured guns in their home unless police take time to obtain a search warrant to remove them.

The Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen undermines the ability of cities and states to regulate firearms safety. Nonetheless, we remain hopeful that firearm violence can decline even after the Bruen decision. Several promising public health approaches have gained broader adoption in recent years. This essay examines the key drivers of community firearm violence and reviews promising strategies to reverse those conditions, including community violence intervention (CVI) programs and place-based and structural interventions.

This work explores the ways that federalism exacerbates gender inequality among women by explaining the adoption of domestic violence laws across different states in the context of policy diffusion. Using an original dataset of domestic violence firearm law (DVFL) enactments across all 50 states in the United States from 1990 to 2017, we analyze the circumstances under which states will adopt these laws. Using a set of political and demographic indicators as independent variables, we find evidence that state and federal factors influence policy adoption. In particular, the number of gun-related homicides, partisan control of the legislature, citizen ideology, federal policy, and election years each influence the likelihood of DVFL enactments. We find support for the effects of vertical policy diffusion on initial enactment of federal laws in this domain, but not for reauthorizations, which raises important questions about the continuous influence of the federal government on state policies.

In the United States, Blacks overwhelmingly bear the brunt of gun violence. While Blacks are more likely to favor gun restrictions than are Whites, the influence of Black gun death on Whites’ attitudes about gun control has not been investigated. We advance a theory to explain White response to Black firearm fatalities: Black gun death is explicitly and implicitly racialized in the public discourse and imagination. The roots of the gun control debate are themselves likewise racialized, and portrayals of Black gun death has the potential to tap latent racial biases among Whites. As a consequence, exposure to routinized Black gun death either fails to move White opinion, or moves Whites to greater support for gun rights. The influence of race on White public opinion is particularly concerning in an era when health officials consider gun death a public health crisis. First, we evaluate this theory with a regression discontinuity (RDD) analysis of the effects of a highly salient gun death of a young Black boy in Chicago on Whites’ opinions about gun control. Relative to White people interviewed before the death, White people interviewed after the death record greater opposition to gun control. Second, we fielded a survey experiment, exposing respondents to the reported gun homicide of either Black or White thirteen-year-old boys. Relative to a control, respondents in the Black death condition are unmoved, whereas respondents in the White death condition report greater levels of support for gun control. Implications are discussed.

The genetic and social causes of individual differences in attitudes to gun control are estimated in a sample of senior male and female twin pairs in the United States. Genetic and environmental parameters were estimated by weighted least squares applied to polychoric correlations for monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins of both sexes. The analysis suggests twin similarity for attitudes to gun control in men is entirely genetic while that in women is purely social. Although the volunteer sample is small, the analysis illustrates how the well-tested concepts and methods of genetic epidemiology may be a fertile resource for deepening our scientific understanding of biological and social pathways that affect individual risk to gun violence.

The recent spate of mass public shootings in the United States raises important questions about how these tragic events might impact mass opinion and public policy. Integrating research on focusing events, contextual effects and perceived threat, this article stipulates that residing near a mass shooting should increase support for gun control by making the threat of gun violence more salient. Drawing upon multiple data sources on mass public shootings paired with large-N survey data, it demonstrates that increased proximity to a mass shooting is associated with heightened public support for stricter gun control. Importantly, the results show that this effect does not vary by partisanship, but does vary as a function of salience-related event factors, such as repetition, magnitude and recency. Critically, the core result is replicated using panel data. Together, these results suggest a process of context-driven policy feedback between existing gun laws, egregious gun violence and demand for policy change.

This article explains why and how some Canadians have asserted a right to possess firearms from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It demonstrates that several late-nineteenth-century politicians asserted a right to arms for self-defence purposes based on the English Bill of Rights. This “right” was forgotten until opponents of gun control dusted it off in the late twentieth century. Firearm owners began to assert such a right based upon the English Bill of Rights, William Blackstone, and the English common law. Their claims remained judicially untested until recent cases finally undermined such arguments.