I grew up with guns. My father had a locked cabinet full of guns: shotguns and a couple pistols. Since he went hunting much of the year during the last years of his employment and well into retirement, he was very familiar with their use. He was a farm boy from the Western Kentucky tobacco country and well-versed in their safe use. They were always locked up in a cabinet—and the locks were very sturdy. Not to protect his family, but to make theft very difficult for burglars. I used my grandmother’s 22 rifle on several occasions while I was in college at Murray State. I went hunting with my dad a few occasions but never carried or used a gun on those trips. My trip was solely for the purpose of spending time with my dad and listening to the howling of his “black and tans” chasing racoons or his beagles chasing rabbits.
Here are some key findings about Americans’ attitudes about gun policy, drawn from recent surveys by Pew Research Center and Gallup (2021).
*Four-in-ten U.S. adults say they live in a household with a gun, including 30% who say they personally own one.
*Personal protection tops the list of reasons why gun owners say they own a firearm.
*Attitudes about gun violence differ widely by race, ethnicity, party and community type.
*Roughly half of Americans (53%) favor stricter gun laws, a decline since 2019.
*Americans are divided over whether restricting legal gun ownership would lead to fewer mass shootings.
Candidly, the basic issue is not primarily gun control, but governance. Dealing with policy has been shown to be a losing issue. Here, finally, is the research on who actually controls policy—or to restate the issue: who actually governs. We aren’t much of a democracy.
Although there are hundreds of studies on the subject of governance, the latest and best work is by Princeton and Northwestern scholars, political scientists and long-term experts on the issues. They work from a huge body of evidence—some quantitative (the statistics), some historical (to make sense out of the statistics), and some actually observational.
The authors of the study reveal that there are “four families” of research: elected politicians, the economic elites (Wall Street and major Hedge Fund directors), interest groups (tending to be millions of ordinary people with differing interests and personal drivers), and biased interest groups with differing targets.
What makes this study highly useful is the existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years, by one of the authors: Martin Gilens. The study is especially interesting to me because it is not focused on gun research, but on a related issue: who controls public policy?
Well, take a guess.
The findings are that (you guessed it), the financial elite control public policy. The authors are continuing work to identify the elites of the nation. Is it the merely affluent, the top 1%, or the top one-tenth of one 1%?
But the key issue from my perspective is that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But the research shows clearly that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
Furthermore the research reveals that the responsiveness of the U.S. political system when the general public wants government action is severely limited. In fact, the research shows that ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots. When push comes to shove, actual (real) influence matters. And the ordinary citizen has little to no power.
Candidly, though I trust the research, I’m also aware that history reveals that resistance and change are always possible. The fact that powerful elites control a given policy is not set in granite. Change happens in a lot of ways. This gun policy may change—over time--because of unexpected interruptions or consequences unrelated to that policy. Women’s freedom and power was changed drastically because of commercial employment needs during WWII. No one could have predicted these changes. In the beginning, World War II was fundamentally a non-domestic issue. Churchill was actually elated when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He had big smiles on his face. He understood that with the Japanese in the war, the U.S. would have to get involved and have to take on Hitler in behalf of England. Change for the good or the evil is often very unpredictable. Gun control remains a possibility--if and when the right circumstances come along forcing or changing the governing powers. So keeping the problem in front of everyone’s nose is highly important, even when there is no resolution in sight.