Scholars of gun policy have long grappled with paradoxes. These include the lack of a strong national gun control movement, despite strong public support for regulating firearms (Kristin Goss, Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America, 2006), and the tendency for gun policy organizations to emphasize forms of gun violence such as mass shootings that account for only a small fraction of annual gun fatalities (Melissa K. Merry, Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy, 2020). In The Gun Dilemma, Robert J. Spitzer draws our attention to another puzzle: the widening gap between public support for existing and proposed gun regulations and the conservative counterreaction to gun laws within the federal courts. This gap between opinion and policy is well established (Steven V. Miller, “What Americans Think about Gun Control: Evidence from the General Social Survey, 1972–2016,” Social Science Quarterly 100 [1], 2019), and the nuances of gun policy attitudes have been extensively studied (see Mark R. Joslyn, The Gun Gap: The Influence of Gun Ownership on Political Behavior and Attitudes, 2020). Avoiding these well-worn paths, Spitzer focuses instead on recent judicial efforts to upend, or “throw into gear-grinding reverse” (p. 6), existing gun regulations.
He starts in chapter 1 by offering the reader a brief but useful review of how we arrived at the “gun policy fork in the road,” highlighting originalism, the Federalist Society, and the conservative legal movement’s successful, decades-long campaign to fill judicial ranks with its adherents. After resoundingly rejecting originalism as nonsensical, impractical, and disingenuous—hiding political goals behind a cloak of “neutrality”—Spitzer takes on the originalist challenge by using history as a guide to navigating modern gun policy and politics. At a moment when federal courts are poised to expand gun rights, Spitzer argues, “It is essential that we get our gun past right” (p. 22).
The rest of the book examines a series of emergent gun policy controversies, using a two-part methodology. First, Spitzer systematically reviews federal and state gun laws to trace how gun policy problems were understood and regulated throughout our nation’s history. Second, recognizing that history matters but should not be the sole justification for gun policy decisions, Spitzer explores the contemporary context, drawing from the extensive literature on the relationship between gun regulations (or lack thereof) and their impact on society.
The cases Spitzer highlights—the debates over assault weapons and large-capacity magazines (chapter 2), gun silencers (chapter 3), public arms carrying (chapter 4), and Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions (chapter 5)—touch on issues that have previously received little scholarly attention. Each case also represents an “outer edge” of the contemporary policy debate, a region where gun rights advocates seek to define Second Amendment rights as existing “whenever a human hand comes in contact with a gun—or even a gun accessory” (p. 23).
Spitzer’s thorough analysis reveals that “while gun ownership is as old as the country, so are gun laws” (p. 26). More specifically, as technological changes, such as the invention of the silencer in the early 1900s, created new threats to public safety—for example, the use of silencers to conceal crimes—the federal government and states imposed new restrictions. This finding refutes a widely held belief, perpetuated by gun rights activists and apparent in some federal judicial opinions, that gun regulations are a product of the modern era. Further, as Spitzer notes, some contemporary arguments in favor of expanding gun rights are based on false information and deliberately misleading accounts.
In the case of silencers, for instance, gun rights advocates have falsely claimed that silencers were not associated with crime when Congress enacted the 1934 National Firearms Act. However, the dangers posed by silencers were covered in the national media and reflected in the widespread references to the term “Maxim silencer” in popular culture (p. 61). The notion that silencers are essential for hearing protection—one of the most common arguments in circulation today—represents a deceptive reframing of the issue that not only fails to acknowledge the earlier debate but also makes little sense (given that ear plugs or earmuffs offer inexpensive yet effective hearing protection; p. 65).
By engaging in this deep historical dive, Spitzer offers a more nuanced context for understanding the present moment of political polarization. Although the contemporary debate is framed in zero-sum terms between gun rights and gun control, Spitzer keenly points out that this portrayal is inaccurate—that gun rights and gun laws have long coexisted. He also draws out an underappreciated and frightening facet of the policy debate: the prominent role of blatant fallacies in some conservative judicial opinions. For instance, in striking down California’s 10-round magazine limit in Duncan v. Becerra (2019), federal district court judge Robert Benitez falsely claimed that the oldest statute limiting the size of detachable magazines dated to 1990; in fact, about half the states either regulated or barred multi-shot, ammunition-feeding devices when they became publicly available after World War I.
Although Spitzer does not engage in systematic narrative analysis, his book offers a complement to recent scholarship examining the framing of gun policy. For instance, in Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force, Matthew LaCombe (2021) attributes the NRA’s power to its ability to cultivate (through its program and publications) a shared social identity among gun owners—as “law-abiding citizens.” This strong social identity helps contextualize gun rights activists’ claim that public carrying serves to destigmatize gun ownership and “keep the peace” (p. 74), even though the presence of guns in public is well known to cause fear and intimidation. Likewise, in On Target: Gun Culture, Storytelling, and the NRA, Noah Schwartz (2022) examines how the NRA uses grand historical narratives to influence perceptions about guns and gun owners. Drawing from multiple sources—including magazines, television programs, and museum exhibits—Schwartz shows that the NRA romanticizes America’s gun past to reinforce gun owners’ cultural identity and the association of guns with freedom, innovation, and other values. Considered together, these works underscore the importance of the imagined past in shaping modern perceptions of gun policy.
As in his other work on gun policy (see, especially, The Politics of Gun Control, 2020), Spitzer writes in a way that is engaging and accessible to academics and non-experts alike. This book will surely serve as an indispensable resource for scholars seeking to better understand gun policy history. If there is any fault to be found in this work, it is simply its brevity. Although the cases are fascinating, one cannot help but wonder how Spitzer would approach other gun controversies, such as the debate over red flag laws. Likewise, although Spitzer turns to the most recent consequential Supreme Court decision, NYSRPA v. Bruen (2022), in the concluding chapter (pp. 119–20), a lengthier discussion of the majority opinion and its implications for lower court decisions and for gun policy, more broadly, would have been welcome.
In the end, there is no easy solution to the gun dilemma; if anything, Spitzer’s analysis suggests that future court decisions may increase the divergence between public preferences and actual gun policies. However, by debunking the claims of gun rights activists and uncovering their political strategies, Spitzer’s book can help inform future gun policy advocacy. Further, his method of combining historical analysis and contemporary social science serves as a useful model for future research on other gun policy questions.
