Firearms and violence in American life—50 years later

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12523
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Franklin E. Zimring
• Published date: 01 November 2020

Received: 9 August 2020 Accepted: 12 August 2020

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133 .12523

THE 2020 STOCKHOLM PRIZE

Firearms and violence in American life—50

years later

Franklin E. Zimring

School of Law, University of California at

Berkeley, Berkeley, California

Correspondence

FranklinE. Zimring, School of Law, Uni-

versityof California, Berkeley, California

96720.

Email:fzimring@law.berkeley.edu

Abstract

This article identifies the two key issues in the Firearms

and Violence Task Force of the National Commission

on the Causes and Prevention of Violence and briefly

describes research and policy findings on these ques-

tions in the half century since the the report was pub-

lished. The key issues were the impact of weapon dan-

gerousness on the death rate from violence assault and

the positive linkage between increases in civilian gun

ownership and increasing use of guns in violence.

KEYWORDS

instrumentality effects, more guns, more gun violence?

Firearms ownership and use have been important parts of American life for centuries, but the

involvement of social scientists in the study of firearms and violence is a much more recent phe-

nomenon. The Presidential Commission on Crime that was appointed in the mid-1960s produced

a comprehensive series of reports in 1967 with no research specific focus on firearms and violence,

continuing a tradition in that respect that was also characteristic of the Wickersham Commission

of 1931. But the 1967 commission reportwas overtaken by two major political assassinations during

the first 6 months of 1968 and public concern about increasing levels of life-threatening violence.

A federal Congress that had passed no major gun regulations since 1938 passed two major gun

control laws in 1968. And President Johnson appointed a new national commission on the causes

and prevention of violence shortly after Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in Los Angeles. The

ink wasn’t dry on the president’s crime commission’s 1967 reports, but there was an urgent need

to investigate the causes and prevention of life-threatening violence.

A task force on firearms and its link to life-threatening violence was a high priority for the new

commission but there was very little published empirical research to read and no scholars with

extensive research on the topic. In short order, the new federal task force needed to organize the

important topics to be investigated, obtain and analyze data on a wide variety of important and

Criminology & Public Policy. 2020;19:1359–1369. © 2020 American Society of Criminology 1359wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp