‘There Are More Guns Than Americans, But Most of Them Are Owned by a Minority’
CounterSpin interview with Robert Spitzer on gun rights and rules

Janine Jackson interviewed author Robert Spitzer about the history of gun regulation for the September 13, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Our guest began a piece for Time Magazine:

Soon after these fearsome weapons began to circulate in society, they developed a notorious reputation. Developed for the battlefield, these guns in civilian hands became the tools of choice in gruesome, highly publicized shootings. Calls for their restriction or banishment escalated, and state legislatures moved to enact new laws.

The kicker is that he’s talking about the 1920s and the tommy gun, the Thompson machine gun.

Today’s opponents of efforts to quell gun violence with regulation often hand-wave toward US history—the Founding Fathers, the Second Amendment—to bolster their case. And that can be persuasive, if it’s unchecked.

Checking it is what Robert Spitzer does. He’s adjunct professor at College of William and Mary School of Law, and professor emeritus of political science at SUNY Cortland. He’s the author of numerous books, including, most recently, The Gun Dilemma, from Oxford University Press. He joins us now by phone from Williamsburg, Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, Robert Spitzer.

Robert Spitzer: Good to speak with you.

JJ: Dispelling myths about the history of guns is important at any time, but it’s crucial right now, as the Supreme Court has explicitly inserted historicity into our ability to make decisions about the place guns have in society. Can I ask you to explain the 2022 Bruen decision, and your reaction to it? What should folks know?

Slate, 10/21/15

RS: The 2022 Supreme Court Bruen decision was extremely important, and for a couple of reasons. The first was that it expanded the definition of Second Amendment rights, saying that average people now have a Second Amendment right to carry guns with them, out in society, for personal self-protection.

The other big point from the Bruen decision was that the Supreme Court recast the basis for judging the constitutionality of modern gun laws, and the new standard is that they have to be grounded in some kind of historical tradition of regulating weapons. So lawyers, historians and others have been scrambling since 2022 to examine old gun laws, to try and see if there are analogs or similar laws that compare to modern firearms laws, to try and justify and support the constitutionality of those modern laws.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, the decision is a terrible decision, in part because it’s ahistorical. For example, weapons-carrying was widely regulated, restricted and even barred in early America. In fact, from the 1600s to the start of the 20th century, every single state in the Union had restrictions against the concealed carrying of dangerous weapons, including, but not limited to, handguns or pistols. So to say that that is now protected under the Second Amendment, based on a reading of history, has history upside down.

Moreover, this history standard is riddled with vagueness, and it has opened the door to not only a flood of challenges of existing gun laws—laws that had been accepted without question before 2022—but it has also led to contrary conclusions, where judges in one place will decide that historically analogous laws do support the constitutionality of a modern law, and other judges ruling the exact opposite.

JJ: So there’s no need to automatically exalt any resort to history, as I think you’ve said, when we know the time in which it was forged. But in the case of guns, if I can just draw you out, it doesn’t even square, because as your work explains, gun rights have always been paired with regulations. Talk a little more about that.

Robert Spitzer: “Firearms and other weapons were regulated more strictly in the country’s first 300 years than in the last 30 years.”

RS: Many people think that in the old days, in the early decades and centuries of the country’s founding, that everyone owned guns, that everybody was skilled in the use of guns—or at least adult white men—and that there were no gun restrictions or weapons restrictions to speak of until you get into the 20th century.

And, really, my research has found and demonstrated that the opposite is true. In many respects, firearms and other weapons were regulated more strictly in the country’s first 300 years than in the last 30 years. From the 1600s, 1700s to the 1800s, states, colonies and localities enacted literally thousands of weapons laws of every imaginable variety. I mean, you would be hard pressed to come up with a gun regulation idea today that didn’t exist 100, 150, 200 years ago.

Today, in America’s politicized environment, the antagonists in the gun debate view a gain for one side as a loss for the other, what they call a zero sum game. But that was not how gun rights and gun rules were thought of in most of our history. The two were perfectly compatible. Sure, you’d have clashes at times, but they did not pose the kind of polarizing political paralysis, in terms of the gun issue, that seems to exist today.

JJ: Maybe you’ve answered this, but as a researcher on the actual history of gun restrictions existing alongside the ability to own guns, what role do you see misinformation or misunderstanding playing in this country’s evident inability to take meaningful steps? And how could media or journalists help in that regard?

RS: I think there is considerable misunderstanding about our own past, and the very idea that you might impose regulations on dangerous weapons doesn’t mean that you’re eliminating them entirely. It means that the government is doing the most important job that any government has, which is to protect the lives, health and safety of its people. That’s the single most important purpose of government.

And, of course, in a democratic society, you want to protect and guarantee individual rights and freedoms and the rest. But the idea that these two are mutually exclusive when it comes to gun laws is just a fallacy.

And I think that the news coverage—and I will say, I think news coverage has gotten better, in terms of reporting the knowledge that people have gained regarding our own gun past—needs to try and set aside the old kind of Wild West image of our frontier. Certainly it was an untamed piece of geography and period of time, but if you think of the West of the 19th century, far more people died from disease, died from accidents, died from malnutrition than ever died from guns, frankly. And there were far, far, far fewer actual gunfights in the Wild West than is depicted or has been depicted in popular culture.

So it’s important to set aside the popular-culture imagery of our historical past, whether it’s the colonial era or the 19th century Western lands, and understand that not only were guns strictly regulated—as I mentioned, every state in the country had restrictions on the concealed carrying of weapons by the start of the 20th century—but those weapons not only included guns, but also included knives and clubs. Over 40 states, for example, had restrictions on the books regarding what were called Bowie knives, the famous large-bladed knife named after the adventurer Jim Bowie.

And the idea that knives of a class called “fighting knives,” the idea that over 40 states restricted those things, is one indication that public safety was indeed a top concern, and our forefathers and foremothers well-recognized and understood that dangerous weapons were dangerous, and that you were not depriving people of rights if you regulated them, restricted them, and imposed laws pertaining to, let’s say, the time, place and manner for carrying weapons, or other kinds of restrictions.

JJ: Maybe it follows naturally, but listeners may know of the recent statement from the US surgeon general declaring gun violence a public health crisis, in recognition of the impacts of gun violence, beyond those that are killed—to the wounded, to the families, to the communities, to mental and emotional health. That whole framing is very much at odds with the ownership conversation about individual rights.

Can I ask you, finally, do you see ways forward that engage all of this? Or are we on maybe separate but complementary tracks, in terms of concrete ways forward? What would you like to see?

KFF, 7/8/22

RS: I think there are a number of ways forward, and I would note, at the outset, that I think the public health and medical communities have contributed significantly an important knowledge and research about the consequences of guns and violence.

Guns are uniquely destructive. They wreak more havoc on the body than any other interpersonal weapon. Any surgeon could tell you that, the people who staff emergency rooms could tell you that. It is a public health problem, crisis, and I think it’s appropriate and beneficial that those communities have become involved in writing about, researching and talking about the public health consequences, adverse consequences, of prolific firearms.

Beyond that, there are many public policy alternatives that demonstrably and measurably can reduce, and have reduced in places where they existed, gun harm and gun violence. And most people have heard of things like red flag laws, or universal background checks, or licensing schemes, and other kinds of laws. Some states have those, some states don’t.

What is needed most, of course, is for the federal government to act more aggressively with respect to those or other gun policy areas. And that’s been extremely difficult, because of the very close competition between the Republicans and Democrats at the national level, in Congress and in the presidency.

But the states that have adopted stricter laws with respect to guns and gun violence have lower crime rates, lower suicide rates, lower homicide rates than states that have not adopted those sorts of measures. So we know they can make a difference.

Yes, there are a great many guns in America. There are more guns than Americans, but most of them are owned by a minority of the country; that is, not every home in America has a gun, far from it.

And the average gun owner wants to do the right thing and the responsible thing. And when you talk to gun owners, and get past their instinctive suspicion of the phrase “gun control” or “gun policy,” and talk about, “Well, what do you think should be the public policy?” What you find is that most gun owners actually support most of the policy ideas to restrict and reduce gun harm that we are talking about in society today. So I think that all suggests some positive and constructive ways that the country can move forward.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Robert Spitzer, of William and Mary School of Law and SUNY Cortland. The Gun Dilemma is out now from Oxford University Press, and the ninth edition of his book The Politics of Gun Control is out this year from Routledge. Thank you so much, Robert Spitzer, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RS: My pleasure.