1. Blake, Aaron, “Obama: This Was a Pretty Shameful Day for Washington,” The Washington Post, April 17, 2013, 1Google Scholar.

2. Although the author acknowledges the relevance of state level gun control issue framing and legislative action or inaction for the broader gun control policy debate, due to word limit constraints, this paper solely focuses on the federal perspective and does not include state-level analysis.

3. An electorally salient issue is one that is a priority concern for voters and thus an issue that influences or that members of Congress perceive to be influencing their reelection prospects. Although there are many factors that influence Congressional behavior including deeply held personal beliefs, the desire to achieve influence within their chamber, or the desire to enact good public policy—see Richard Fenno, Congressmen in Committees (Boston: Little Brown, 1973)—the arguments in this paper are built upon Mayhew’s—see Mayhew, David, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar—contention that the proximate goal of members of Congress is reelection, which they must continuously achieve before any of their other goals can be met.

4. According to Meir (1993), regulatory policy is “government restriction of individual choice to keep conduct from transcending acceptable bounds.” See Meier, Kenneth J., Politics and the Bureaucracy: Policymaking in the Fourth Branch of Government (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1993)Google Scholar.

5. Kingdon, John W., Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984)Google Scholar.

6. 103 Cong. Rec., 2d sess. H3090 (1994) (statement of Representative Marge Roukema, NJ-5th).

7. See Garland, David, The Culture of Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simon, Jonathan, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).Google Scholar

8. Gest, Ted, Crime and Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign of Law and Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Anderson, David C., Crime and the Politics of Hysteria: How the Willie Horton Story Changed American Justice (New York: Crown Publishing, 1995)Google Scholar. Dukakis countered this accusation by defending his anticrime record, telling the audience during the first televised presidential debate that “I’m also very tough on violent crime. And that’s one of the reasons why my state has cut crime by more than any other industrial state in America.” George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, “The first Bush-Dukakis Presidential debate,” (Wake Forest University, September 25, 1988), Commission on Presidential Debates, http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=september-25-1988-debate-transcript.

10. Ross Perot, and Clinton, Bill, “The first Clinton-Bush-Perot Presidential debate” (Washington University, October 11, 1992)Google Scholar, Commission on Presidential Debates, https://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-11-1992-first-half-debate-transcript.

11. George H. W. Bush, “State of the Union Address” (Capitol Building, Washington, DC: January 29, 1991).

12. William J. Clinton, “State of the Union Address” (Capitol Building, Washington, DC: January 25, 1994).

13. See Holly Idelson, “Work on House Crime Bill Gets It in Shape for Passage,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly, April 16, 1994; Dagan, David and Teles, Steven, Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned against Mass Incarceration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

14. Fandos, Nicholas, “Joe Biden’s Role in ’90s Crime Law Could Haunt Any Presidential Bid,” The New York Times, August 1, 2015, 1Google Scholar.

15. Meyer, Stephen and DeWolf, David, “Trouble in Political Paradise,” The Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1994, 1Google Scholar.

16. Michelle Locin, “Senate OK’s Tough Anti-Crime Bill,” The Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1991, 1.

17. Which comprises the offenses of murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault; see Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Uniform Crime Reports,” (1960–2019), https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/State/StatebyState.cfm?NoVariables=Y&CFID=347789100&CFTOKEN=c9b87e56b460a71-8D21E3C7-F319-1E67-B35C35636BF7A301.

18. As of this writing (July 2020), no national violent crime statistics for 2020 have been released by the FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Uniform Crime Reports,” (1960–2019).

19. Garland, 2001, 106.

20. Miethe, Terance D., “Fear and Withdrawal from Urban Life,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 539 (May 1995), 15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. “Most Important Problem” (Gallup historical trends), The Gallup Organization, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.aspx.

22. Among its many provisions, the Gun Control Act of 1968 expanded gun license requirements, required more thorough record keeping, restricted handgun sales over state lines without going through a licensed dealer, outlawed mail order sales of rifles and shotguns, and increased the list of those prohibited from purchasing guns to include the mentally incompetent and drug users. See Spitzer, Robert, The Politics of Gun Control: 5th Edition (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 132.Google Scholar

23. 90 Cong. Rec., 2d sess. S230701 (1968) (statement of Representative Roman Pucinski, D: IL-11th).

24. On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a gun control amendment to the omnibus crime bill—the first time a Congressional committee had approved gun control legislation since 1938. The day after Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, Congress cleared the omnibus crime bill, and five days later both chambers had introduced gun control bills in their respective committees. Perhaps the starkest evidence of change came in the Senate, where in the month prior to Kennedy’s assassination, that chamber rejected by a vote of 29-53 an amendment to the omnibus crime bill that would have banned interstate shipment of long guns. By September 18th, three months after the event, this same provision would pass as part of the Gun Control Act of 1968, with a staggering 31 Senators (17 Republicans and 14 Democrats) reversing their positions.

25. By 1986, gun control opponents in Congress were able to successfully reverse some provisions of the 1968 Act in the form of the Firearm Owners Protection Act. The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 included provisions both strengthening (banning the sale of machine guns to civilians) and weakening gun control (reopening interstate sales on some long guns, removing record keeping requirements for sales of non-armor-piercing ammunition, and prohibiting the ATF from requiring that gun dealers provide sales records (Spitzer 2012, 137). Although many opponents decried the bill in the context of rising national crime and opposition included law enforcement (with members of police organizations standing outside the halls of Congress in full uniform in protest) two years before Willie Horton took center stage in the 1988 presidential debates, crime concerns were not yet the driving force behind gun policy debates.

26. Gwen Ifill, “THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Clinton, in Houston Speech, Assails Bush on Crime Issue,” The New York Times, July 24, 1992, 1.

27. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, (1995), 274. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/1995.

28. Crime in the United States, 11.

29. 103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. H9096 (1993) (statement of Representative Michael Castle, R:DE-at large).

30. 103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S16417 (1993) (statement of Senator Bill Bradley, D:NJ).

31. 103 Cong. Rec., 2d sess. H3090 (1994) (statement Representative Rosa DeLauro, D:CT-3rd).

32. Harvard School of Public Health, April 1993. Retrieved from iPOLL Database at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/.

33. Time Magazine/CNN, August 1993. Retrieved from iPOLL Database at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.

34. 103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. H9093 (1993) (statement of Representative James Traficant, D:OH-17th).

35. 103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. H9098 (1993) (statement of Representative Butler Derrick, D:SC-3rd).

36. 103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S16319 (1993) (statement of Senator Bob Smith, R:NH).

37. 103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S15455 (1993) (statement of Senator Slade Gordon, R:WA). There was also an effort to emphasize that much of the violent crime plaguing America was due to repeat offending (an argument successfully employed by those behind the “three strikes” sentencing movement); Harold Volkmer (D:MO-9th) epitomized this sentiment, stating, “I believe the leading immediate cause of violent crime is the revolving door of violent criminals in our prisons … convicted criminals are allowed back out on the street, and we all know what happens then.” 103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. H9089 (1993) (statement of Representative Harold Volkmer, D:MO-9th).

38. In comparison, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was considered to be a relatively modest piece of legislation, to the extent that top NRA official Franklin Orth wrote at the time in the organization’s monthly magazine American Rifleman that “the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with” (See Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham, and Sari Horwitz, “How NRA’s true believers converted a marksmanship group into a mighty gun lobby,” The Washington Post, February 25, 2013, 5.

39. Erskine, Hazel, “The Polls: Gun Control,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 455 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. For example, in a 1993 Gallup poll, 88 percent of respondents indicated that they favored a waiting period before an individual would be allowed to purchase a handgun (Leslie McAneny, “Americans Tell Congress: Pass Brady Bill, Other Tough Gun Laws,” Gallup Poll Monthly, [March 1993]) while a 1992 New York Times/CBS News poll found that 79 percent of respondents supported a ban on assault weapons (Spitzer 2012, 119).

41. For example in 1995, urban areas had a violent crime rate of 774.4 per 100,000—higher than the national rate of 684.6 (FBI UCR 1995). Reports from the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation separately concluded that rising crime rates in urban areas in particular strongly contributed to the rising national violent crime rate, which peaked in 1991; see Detis T. Duhart, “Urban, Suburban, and Rural Victimization 1993-1998,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report (October 2000). Although no time series data on urban fear of crime are available, numerous studies and polls have shown urban fear of crime to be higher than suburban or rural fear (See Wesley G. Skogan and Michael G. Maxfield, Coping with Crime: Individual and Neighborhood Reactions (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1981), Warr, Mark, “Fear of Rape among Urban Women,” Social Problems 32, no. 3 (February 1985): 238–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ferraro, Kenneth, Fear of Crime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995)Google Scholar. In terms of gun control support, since the Pew Research Center began measuring public support for gun control by area in 2003, the greatest support has consistently come from individuals living in urban areas, with the least amount of support coming from those living in rural areas (support from suburban individuals, predictably, has historically fallen between urban and rural). See Ruth Igielnik, “Rural and Urban Gun Owners Have Different Experiences, Views on Gun Policy,” The Pew Research Center, July 10 2017.

42. Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control, 124.

43. Regional location and area type have historically been relevant variables for understanding Congressional voting patterns on gun control, as there have been regional and area type divides in support for gun control between both parties. The most stark divide is the North vs. South and urban vs. rural—the former categories historically having the lowest gun ownership levels and highest levels of public support for gun control and the latter categories the highest gun ownership levels and lowest levels of public support for gun control; see “Gun Rights vs. Gun Control,” The Pew Research Center; Lydia Saad, “Self-Reported Gun Ownership in U.S. Is Highest Since 1993,” Gallup, October 26, 2011; Jeffrey Jones, “Men, Married, Southerners Most Likely to Own Guns,” Gallup, February 1, 2013; and Igielnik, 2017.

44. Seth Mydans, “Freshman Withstands Volley of Calls on Guns,” The New York Times, May 9, 1994.

45. Steven A. Holmes, “Rifle Lobby Torn by Dissidents and Capitol Defectors,” The New York Times, March 27, 1991, 2.

46. Patrick T. Reardon and William Recktenwald, “Chicago among Top in U.S Violent Crime Rankings,” The Chicago Tribune, October 3, 1993.

47. For example see Josh Barbanel, “From L.I. Teller Machines to Gas Stations, Suburban Robberies Are on the Rise,” The New York Times, February 18, 1992; David Ferrell and Somini Sengupta, “A Stain Spreads in Suburbia: Issues of Teen Promiscuity, Forced Sex and Parental Neglect Rock Lakewood, Once a Bastion of Morality,” The Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1993; and the cover story “America the Violent: Crime Is Spreading and Patience Is Wearing Out,” Time Magazine, August 23, 1993.

48. Ronald Koziol, “Crime up 10 Percent in Cook Suburbs,” Chicago Tribune, November 8, 1992, 1.

49. Katharine Seelye, “In Gun Vote, an Odd Hero for Liberals,” The New York Times, May 7, 1994.

50. Clinton is credited with convincing some 30 Democrats in the House to shift positions and support the Assault weapons ban between 1991 and 1994 (see Idelson, “Work on House Crime Bill”).

51. By the early 1990s, being “tough on crime” had become “a core part of what it meant to be a conservative” (Dagan and Teles 2016, 18), and some conservatives (particularly urban, suburban adjacent to urban, and representatives of states with large urban areas) came to determine that supporting gun control (whether most forms or specific proposals such as background checks legislation, which had the greatest percentage of conservative support) was an electorally valuable or necessary component of their tough-on-crime position. And these conservatives were not afraid to be vocal—many extolling their support as a “common sense” approach to combating crime. For example, Michael Oxley (OH-4th) referred to the Brady Bill as a “commonsense approach” and urged members of the House to “Support the Brady Bill. It makes common sense. It gets us off the honor system in terms of sales to convicted felons” (103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. H9099 [1993]). Similarly, James Sensenbrenner (WI-5th) repeatedly told his colleagues that the Brady Bill was a “common sense” and “eminently reasonable” piece of legislation that needed to be passed immediately to curb criminal access to firearms (103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. H9101 [1993]). In a 1996 televised campaign ad in support of his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar touted his support for the assault weapons ban, stating that “being a conservative doesn’t mean you have to lose your common sense” (“Dick Lugar for President,” campaign ad, 1996, YouTube.com). And these “common sense conservatives” for gun control were backed by the “father of conservatism” himself, former president Ronald Reagan, who had publicly endorsed both the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban in op-eds for The New York Times; see William J. Easton, “Ford, Carter, Reagan Push for Gun Ban,” The Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1994; Tygiel, Jules, Ronald Reagan and the Triumph of American Conservatism (New York: Longman, 2004)Google Scholar.

52. Idelson, “Work on House Crime Bill.”

53. Numerous high-profile school shootings had occurred in prior years, including one at an elementary school in Stockton, California, that killed five and wounded 32 in 1989 and a shooting at a middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, that killed five and injured ten in 1998. Handgun Control, Inc. (later renamed the Brady Campaign) reported that there were at least 18 other mass shootings (both school shootings and non) in the United States in 1999. In terms of the highest casualty mass shooting event up to that point, the distinction went to a shooting at a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas in 1991 that killed 23 and wounded 27. Elizabeth Palmer, “Guns and Roots of Violence,” CQ Weekly, January 22, 2000.

54. Cullen, Dave, Columbine (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009).Google Scholar

55. 106 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. H4569, H4622 (1999) (statements of Representative Nancy Johnson, R:CT-6th and Senator Herb Kohl, D:WI, respectively).

56. Cullen, Columbine.

57. 106 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. H4569 (1999) (statement of Representative Ralph Hall, D:TX-4th).

58. Dan Carney, “Seesaw Struggle over Gun Control Imperils Senate’s Juvenile Crime Bill,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly, May 5, 1999, 1.

59. The Gallup Organization, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, May 2002.

60. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Congress Passes New Legal Shield for Gun Industry,” The New York Times, October 21, 2005.

61. See Juliet Eilperin, “House Democrats Seek a New Edge; Gephardt, Members Look for Ways to Get Votes of Rural White Men in 2002,” The Washington Post, December 8, 2000; Alex Koppelman, “Why Democrats Dumped Gun Control,” Salon.com, April 18, 2007.

62. Federal Bureau of Investigation, A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States between 2000 and 2013, September 16, 2013, https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-study-2000-2013-1.pdf/view.

63. Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller, “Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled since 2011, Harvard Research Shows,” Mother Jones, October 15, 2014.

64. David Trifunov, “Obama, Politicians React to Sandy Hook Shooting with Sadness, Questions,” Public Radio International, December 14, 2012.

65. Garance Franke-Ruta, “Obama, Romney Statements on Aurora, Colorado Shooting,” The Atlantic, July 20, 2012.

66. Harry Wilson, The Triumph of the Gun Rights Argument: Why the Gun Control Debate is Over (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015), 125.

67. 103 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S15431 (July 13, 1993) (statement of Senator Dianne Feinstein, D:CA).

68. 113 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S2751 (April 17, 2013) (statement of Senator Dianne Feinstein, D:CA).

69. 113 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S2742 (April 17, 2013) (statement of Senator John Cornyn, R:TX).

70. 103 Cong. Rec., 2d sess. S15376 (June 30, 1994) (statement of Senator Nancy Kassebaum, R:KS).

71. 113 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S2740 (April 17, 2013) (statement of Senator Chris Murphy, D:CT).

72. Including in the Senate in 2013, 2015, and 2016; the House did pass a background checks bill in 2019, but the Republican-controlled Senate declined to consider similar legislation.

73. The changing framing context has also provided a degree of political cover for those Republicans who used to support gun control who have since changed positions. For example, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-27th) was an urban Republican from Miami, Florida who consistently supported gun control throughout the 1990s, during a period when crime rates in Miami were higher than the national average. Over a decade later when asked whether she would support new gun control measures in the wake of Sandy Hook, Ros-Lehtinen told reporters “more laws are not going to stop these killings.” (Yael Ossowski, “Florida Officials Remain Confident in State Gun Laws,” Florida Watchdog, December 17, 2012). In the mass shooting context it has become easier for former gun control supporters to distance themselves from the issue and explain their change in position—they can deflect discussions of “drive-through, drive-by, and drive-in shootings” in their communities to isolated mass shooting events hundreds of miles away, while arguing that the gun control policies that worked in one context are not relevant for another.

74. According to polling conducted by the Pew Organization, in 2018, 83 percent of self-identified Republicans and 87 percent of self-identified Democrats supported a system of universal background checks for all gun purchases (See The Pew Organization, “Gun Policy Remains Divisive, but Several Proposals Still Draw Bipartisan Support,” October 18, 2018).

75. 113 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S2707 (April 17, 2013) (statement of Senator John Cornyn, R:TX).

76. 113 Cong. Rec., 1st sess. S2742 (April 17, 2013) (statement of Senator Chuck Grassley, R:IA).

77. ABC News, November 1994. Retrieved from iPOLL Database at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.

78. John Gramlich and Katherine Schaeffer, “7 facts about Guns in the U.S,” The Pew Research Center, October 22, 2019.

79. Frank Newport, “Two Broad Approaches to Preventing School Shootings,” Gallup, March 19, 2018.

80. Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S Preference for Stricter Gun Laws Highest since 1993,” Gallup, March 14, 2018.

81. According to Gallup’s “Most Important Problem” question, in November 2019 Immigration ranked first (27 percent), the government/poor leadership second (23 percent), and health care third (7 percent), as the most important issues facing the country. Guns/gun control tied for the 13th spot (sharing it with abortion, terrorism, the media, taxes, and the judicial system (“Most Important Problem,” Gallup, November 2019.) “Most important problem” polling from 2020 was not included in this paper, as the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic made it an atypical year for comparative purposes.

82. See Walker, J. L., “Setting the Agenda in the U.S. Senate: A Theory of Problem Selection,” British Journal of Political Science 7, no. 4 (January 1977): 423–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paul Light, The President’s Agenda (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); John Kingdon, Agendas Alternatives, and Public Policies (New York: Harper Collins, 1995); and Birkland, T., “Focusing Events, Mobilization, and Agenda Setting,” Journal of Public Policy 18, no. 1 (January 1998): 53–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

83. See Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Earle Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Barbara Sinclair, Party Wars, Polarization, and the Politics of National Policy Making (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006); Andrew Gelman, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Matthew Levendusky, The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Abramowitz, Alan, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)Google Scholar

84. Levendusky, The Partisan Sort.

85. Poole and Rosenthal, Congress, 232.

86. Grossman, Matthew and Hopkins, David A., Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

87. See William Jacoby, “The Impact of Party Identification on Issue Attitudes,” American Journal of Political Science 32, no. 3 (August 1988): 643–61; Marc Hetherington, “Resurgent Mass Partisanship: The Role of Elite Polarization,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (September 2001): 619–31; Carsey, Thomas and Layman, Geoffrey, “Changing Sides or Changing Minds? Party Identification and Policy Preferences in the American Electorate,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 2 (April 2006): 464–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Levendusky, The Partisan Sort.

88. Evidence of a “lagging electorate” suggests that the causal arrow flows from political elites to voters and not the other way around. A steady decline in support for gun control among self-identified Republicans began roughly three years after Congressional Republicans united in support of a gun rights agenda in the mid-2000s, whereas support for gun control among self-identified Democrats began to steadily increase after party leaders reclaimed the issue as a legislative priority after Sandy Hook; see Chapter seven of Quinn, Genevieve, “From Brady to Murphy: Gun Control Polarization in the Decades since the 103rd Congress” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2019), 273–77Google Scholar.

89. Levendusky, The Partisan Sort, 15.

90. Quinn, Genevieve, “Do Gun Policy Specifics Matter? Hyper-Polarization and the Decline of Vote Splitting in Congress,” The Forum 18, no. 2 (September 2020): 249–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

91. After a presidential campaign in which he frequently cited law and order, president Donald Trump would discuss crime in his 2017 inaugural address, condemning “the crime and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential,” adding “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now” (“Remarks of President Donald J. Trump,” Inaugural Address, January 20, 2017).

92. See Gramlich and Schaeffer, “7 facts”; U.S News and World Report, May 1994. Retrieved from iPOLL Database at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.

93. Mydans, “Freshman Withstands Volley of Calls on Guns,” 2.