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The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know. By Philip J. Cook and Kristin
A. Goss (Oxford University Press, 2014, 280pp. US$ 16.95)

Article  in  British Journal of Criminology · April 2015

DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azv021

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 Book Reviews

The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know. By Philip J. Cook and Kristin
A. Goss (Oxford University Press, 2014, 280pp. US$ 16.95)

In The Gun Debate, we have perhaps the leading authority on evidence-based gun policy
evaluation joining forces with one of America’s main academic commentators on gun
politics in order to answer a few simple, albeit self-selected, questions about the car
crash that the US gun debate has become. While the second part of the book’s title
makes the claim that the text will provide what ‘everyone needs to know’, undoubtedly
revealing a great deal about this most intractable question to the relatively uninitiated,
an impression quickly forms that ‘what most people need to know’ is also what many
people are studiously ignoring, denying or disputing. In the gun debate, like the war on
crime, truth and evidence are early casualties, or at least collateral damage.
Responding to a series of their own questions, here exploring why firearms are
exempted from various forms of product safety regulation, the kinds of regulations
applied to most other types of mass produced consumer goods, from vehicles, to cell-
phones and children’s toys, the authors explain, in turn, ‘politics’, ‘politics’ and ‘politics
mostly’ (118). And so it goes. One is reminded of a recent gun control poster which
featured two children, one holding an assault rifle and the other a kinder egg©—the
poster’s strapline asked which one of these products was banned for children in the
USA. Obviously, inexplicably, the answer is the kinder egg© on account of the small plas-
tic toy components inside the eggs which might become a choking hazard.
The question and answer format proceeds throughout the book taking us, in turns,
through chapters discussing just how many guns there are in private possession in the
USA, and whether the number is rising or falling—‘the answer maybe “both”’ (7), in
that nowadays fewer people may own guns, and fewer households contain them, but
those who do, have rather more of them. Basic demography, a comparative fall in the
gun owning proportion of the US population—white, suburban, mid-western, middle-
aged, middle-class, ex-military (African Americans and Latinos are less likely to be
gun owners)—alongside urbanization, education and a decline in shooting sports and
hunting, has seen to this, combined with a shift in the leading reason for owning a gun,
for self-defence now predominates.
Subsequent chapters deal with the values of guns for ‘self-protection’ or ‘resisting
tyranny’, the causes of gun violence and the costs of gun violence. In each chapter,
as the question/answer format proceeds, the authors draw together the best available
evidence, producing clearly considered and balanced, sometimes nuanced, arguments
where the evidence is less clear or absent. The overall effect, plainly and simply articu-
lated, is of an emerging, relentless, common-sense such that readers might question just
who could object or disagree. This, of course, begs the question as to who the reader-
ship might be. By the rest of the world, the book might be read as further evidence of
an ‘American exceptionalism’, in the USA itself, given the sharply polarized and ideo-
logical nature of the gun debate (discussed in a later chapter), will it only preach to the
converted or will it reach enough of the relatively non-aligned to help shape the debate?
A key question for the book, then, concerns how it will play into its own analysis, where
a tightly controlled interest group politics, cementing the claimed 4 million grass-roots
membership of the NRA with the financial clout of a tightly controlled gun lobby and
the gun industry itself, to the movers and shakers of the Republican party itself, have
enabled it repeatedly to block proposals for further firearm regulation. This leverage
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 Book Reviews

over political decision-making on firearms extends even to putative ‘common-sense

gun laws’ that are shared by majorities of the electorate at large, even majorities of
gun owners and, perhaps surprisingly, even majorities of card carrying NRA members,
such as the proposals, voted down in the Senate, to extend the national instant back-
ground check system for would-be gun purchasers introduced by President Obama in
2013 following the terrible shooting of 20 first-grade children and six teaching staff in
December 2012. As the authors remark ‘the NRA has not lost a major battle over federal
gun control legislation in nearly two decades’ (198).
Although the NRA has lost state-level gun fights, for instance, after the 2012 Sandy
Hook massacre several states did introduce tougher gun regulations, although these
were typically states with stronger gun laws in the first place. Generally speaking, how-
ever, the momentum is in the other direction. Over three decades, various waves of gun
law liberalization have traversed the country, ‘shall issue’ concealed carry laws (requir-
ing states to grant permits to all qualified applicants) prevail in most states while, begin-
ning in Florida, ‘stand your ground’ and ‘castle doctrine’ laws (rendered notorious in
the case of neighbourhood watchman George Zimmerman who, in February 2012, shot
and killed and unarmed black teenager he presumed to be trespassing—he was acquit-
ted) have allowed gun owners the benefit of the doubt when responding to perceived
threats. These new laws have interacted with a series of recent shifts in gun production,
marketing and purchase including the self-defence motive, the market shift to semi-
automatic pistols and the purchase of assault rifles significantly augmenting civilian
firepower and lethality. The latest legislative wave has involved so-called ‘pre-emption’
laws whereby states have legislated to nullify gun restrictions at city or county level and
to further prevent local authorities from passing any future laws which exceed those
passed by the states. Over the course of a series of chapters, Cook and Goss explore the
peculiar strength, grass-roots support and vitality of a gun rights lobby which could
have secured such results.
Particular attention, across two key chapters, is given to ‘how America regulates fire-
arms’ and when and how, in a country of almost 300 million firearms, firearms controls
can ever be effective. Yet Cook and Goss are cautious, evidence based, optimists and
their final chapter takes up the challenge of enquiring ‘what kinds of gun policies might
be politically acceptable going forwards’ (214). They argue that, despite evidence to the
contrary, the gun rights movement is not invincible, although it is notoriously strong
and the gun control movement historically fairly weak. Terrible gun outrages, the awful
deaths of white school-children in the suburbs, might cause a blip in the polls for a
while, but they tend not to last. By contrast, the thousands of African-American inner-
city youth killed year on year, the off-the-civilized-scale rates of lethal domestic violence
and the even greater numbers of older (predominantly white) male suicides (suicides
outnumber homicide by about two to one) scarcely bother the pollsters at all. Cook and
Goss reiterate the argument that it is often easier to block gun control proposals than
to advance them especially when the right to gun ownership, now apparently ratified
by two Supreme Court Judgements, is so draped in US values and culture and bolstered
by the vulnerabilities of ‘last resort’, when dialling 911 seems too slow. In close election
races or recall votes, the gun lobby’s ability to mobilize large numbers of single issue
voters can be decisive, nullifying broad based generic support for ‘sensible gun laws’,
cutting the budget of the Bureau of ATF, and blocking the funding of research into
gun-related violence. Even Barack Obama had his fingers burned in 2008 following an
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 Book Reviews

incautious, off the cuff remark about ‘red-neck’ values, and the embittered people who
‘cling to guns and religion’. Cautious Democrats now tend to avoid the gun question or
often seem obliged to reassure gun owners about their intentions. But as we have seen
in the longer term, the tectonic plates of US demography might be shifting in a more
positive direction.
Running against this, and amongst issues that Cook and Goss do not address, is a
question about whether, as the USA’s ‘minority groups’ embrace American culture and
values, they also adopt its personal technologies. Around the world, a form of US-led
global neo-liberalism has seen self-defence arming adopted as a perceived solution to
personal and political insecurities. As former Speaker of the US House of Representatives
and one-time Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich declared in 2012, ‘the
2nd Amendment is for all mankind’—even though the Pistorius case in South Africa
points to a different story. Furthermore, while the authors acknowledge the racialized
character of gun victimization, far more could be made of the racialized coding and
alleged ‘dog-whistle’ politics of gun control. For vulnerable, middle-aged and middle-
class, whites, gun control plays into their ontological insecurities, their self-reliance
ethos and their ‘last resort’ thinking. This may be why significant numbers feel reluc-
tant to vote, even for sensible gun regulations, such as extending background checks
and firearm confiscation from risky or dangerous people. Targeted policing strategies
such as ‘stop and frisk’ tend to fall foul of constitutional safeguards against police ‘pro-
filing’ and discriminatory enforcement practices (as currently in New York) leaving the
‘technological fix’ of the personalized gun (an unlikely solution to gun suicides) as the
best short-term hope for further reducing gun violence. It is a rather downbeat ending
for ‘what everyone needs to know’ about the gun debate.
Peter Squires
University of Brighton doi:10.1093/bjc/azv021
 Advance Access publication 1 April 2015

Preventive Justice. By Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner (Oxford University

Press, 2014, 306pp. £50.00)

In a world in which criminal law and criminal justice appear to be driven to an ever
greater extent by concerns with security, the expedient of preventive justice has assumed
a new and, to many, worrying salience in the policy repertoire of the United Kingdom
and a number of other western democracies. Preventive criminalization is, of course,
not a new phenomenon: inchoate offences; offences of possession and the binding over
power attendant on an anticipated breach of the peace are long-standing examples of
the preventive impulse in English criminal law. But this preventive turn appears to have
taken on a new intensity in the last two decades. Among the many scholars who have
turned their attention to this phenomenon, Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner are
probably the most influential. In particular, their analysis of no fewer than nine families
of preventive measures, many of them combining civil and criminal modes of enforce-
ment in what have been widely regarded as troubling ways, has quite rightly attracted

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2018
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