Federalism and Firearms: Gun Control Policies and the Intractability of Gun Violence in America

Since the beginning of 2023, the United States has seen over 100 mass shootings. In 2022, death by firearm in the United States became the leading cause of mortality among children and teens ages 0 to 18, surpassing motor vehicle collisions, suffocation, drowning, and birth abnormalities. Only two years prior, in 2020, the CDC reported the highest number of deaths by firearm in U.S. history and noted that “young people under 30 were nearly 10 times more likely to die by a firearm than from COVID-19.”

In response to these developments, President Joseph Biden recently signed an executive order on March 14, 2023 that primarily expands universal background checks and increases the likelihood that dangerous persons will be “red-flagged” to prevent their ownership of a firearm. And yet, concurrently, many U.S. states — particularly in the American hinterland and the Deep South — have sought to make firearms access even easier. In Texas, lawmakers have removed the requirement for handgun owners to have a permit. Nebraska and other states are expected to follow suit in the coming months. Although such executive orders and legislative actions frequently provide considerable fodder for the perennial debate about gun control policies in America, the intractable paradox of solving gun violence in a decentralized federal system is rarely discussed.

For many external observers outside the United States, the country’s contradictory inclinations to regulate firearms on the federal level and the simultaneous pushback against doing so by states at the lower level can be mystifying. In a sense, the national intransigence over gun control exemplifies the inherent tension between centralization and decentralization in a federal system of government. Although the U.S. federal government has passed stringent firearms restrictions, a number of U.S. states openly oppose such federal policy on the grounds that their laxer gun control laws are an accurate reflection of the heterogeneity in preferences from state to state. The State of Missouri, for example, passed a law prohibiting the enforcement of federal gun control laws, and state legislators in Iowa and Ohio have proposed similar bills.

Amid this continued tension between the federal government and various state governments, a paradox emerges: Whereas states with lax gun control laws benefit by their proximity to neighboring states with stricter gun laws, states such as California and Illinois that do enforce federal gun control laws and enact their own stricter gun laws nevertheless suffer from elevated gun violence due to spillover effects from adjacent states with weaker laws. For example, Illinois with its restrictive firearms legislation still experiences high-rates of gun violence due to bordering neighboring states with lax gun control laws. In Illinois’ largest city of Chicago, four out of five guns used in Chicago crimes are imported from such distant states such as Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and Mississippi.

A 2018 study published by the Journal of Urban Health examined both firearms laws and the interstate transfer of weapons in all fifty U.S. states from 2006 to 2016. The authors noted that the overwhelming majority of firearm-involved crimes in states with strict gun control laws such as Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts involved weapons originating from distant states with lax gun control regulations. (Revealingly, firearm-involved crimes in states with lax gun control laws typically featured weapons purchased in-state.)

Even remote U.S. territories are no exception to the spillover effects of lax gun control laws. Located over a thousand miles from the U.S. mainland, the tropical island of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean has some of the strongest gun control laws in the U.S. and yet suffers from endemic gun violence due to firearms imported from states with lax gun control laws such as Georgia, Florida, and Texas. Even if Georgia and Florida tightened their gun control laws, the number of guns imported from Texas would commensurately increase to fill the vacuum.

Due to the spillover effects between U.S. states, it appears that the pandemic of gun violence in the United States cannot be easily solved in a decentralized system. If the country had a more centralized form of government, the adherence of all U.S. states to federal gun control laws would greatly attenuate this pandemic, but likely at the peril of civil unrest in particular states due to heterogeneity in preferences. The decentralized nature of the U.S. federal system of government also allows for the capture of particular states by local interest groups. In states like Texas, for example, although nearly 60% of state residents oppose unlicensed carry, the Texas legislature passed a law which made it legal for anyone over 21 or over to carry a handgun without a permit largely due to the influence of the Texas State Rifle Association which donated considerable campaign contributions to state lawmakers.

As long as the United States remains a patchwork quilt of disparate gun control laws which vary state-by-state and as long as many state legislatures remain controlled by interest groups, the likelihood of resolving the national pandemic of gun violence is bleak. Even if 30 of 50 U.S. states enacted stricter gun control laws, gun imports from the remaining states will likely offset these stricter regulations, and the death toll will continue to rise. Hence, Biden’s latest executive order expanding background checks and red-flagging dangerous gun-owners will likely not have any considerable effect on slowing the ongoing pandemic of gun violence. Given that the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court can invalidate any meatier executive order signed by Biden to reduce gun violence in America and given that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently blocked any significant gun control legislation at the federal level, the only remaining option is for coordinated action undertaken by all U.S. states. Unfortunately, it seems most states — and most Americans — have not learned much since Benjamin Franklin warned in 1776 at the signing of the Declaration of Independence that “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”