In 2010, more than 105,000 people were injured or killed in the United States as the result of a firearm-related incident. Recent, highly publicized, tragic mass shootings in Newtown, CT; Aurora, CO; Oak Creek, WI; and Tucson, AZ, have sharpened the American public's interest in protecting our children and communities from the harmful effects of firearm violence. While many Americans legally use firearms for a variety of activities, fatal and nonfatal firearm violence poses a serious threat to public safety and welfare. In January 2013, President Barack Obama issued 23 executive orders directing federal agencies to improve knowledge of the causes of firearm violence, what might help prevent it, and how to minimize its burden on public health. One of these orders directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to, along with other federal agencies, immediately begin identifying the most pressing problems in firearm violence research. The CDC and the CDC Foundation asked the IOM, in collaboration with the National Research Council, to convene a committee tasked with developing a potential research agenda that focuses on the causes of, possible interventions to, and strategies to minimize the burden of firearm-related violence. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence focuses on the characteristics of firearm violence, risk and protective factors, interventions and strategies, the impact of gun safety technology, and the influence of video games and other media.

Guns can be very effective tools, but they are each of limited utility. There is no one weapon that is perfect for every purpose. Private persons may own a number of guns that fulfill a variety of functions. Ballistics is important for soldiers, law enforcement, sportsmen, and anyone who seeks to protect their life, their home, their family, or their workplace. If you are among these, this book is for you.Not surprisingly, gun owners and firearms enthusiasts are often part of a "social gun culture" in which certain facts, trends, and fads circulate and evolve with time, some stirring intense loyalty among shooters even when the realities suggest otherwise. For the average gun user some very popular myths, misconceptions, and miscalculations concerning ballistics and the terminal effects of bullets are strongly held, and it is not the purpose of this discussion to demonstrate why they are or are not true, only to lay out the parameters of the debate so that the readers can make their own judgments with increased confidence. The origin of ballistics is in the study of the flight path of projectiles, but its domain has been expanded in modern times. Among the modern ballistic sciences are areas of interest concerning how ammunition and weapons operate.

How ordinary Americans, frustrated by the legal and political wrangling over the Second Amendment, can fight for reforms that will both respect gun owners’ rights and reduce gun violence. Efforts to reduce gun violence in the United States face formidable political and constitutional barriers. Legislation that would ban or broadly restrict firearms runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment. And gun rights advocates have joined a politically savvy firearms industry in a powerful coalition that stymies reform. Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars suggest a new way forward. We can decrease the number of gun deaths, they argue, by empowering individual citizens to choose common-sense gun reforms for themselves. Rather than ask politicians to impose one-size-fits-all rules, we can harness a libertarian approach—one that respects and expands individual freedom and personal choice—to combat the scourge of gun violence. Ayres and Vars identify ten policies that can be immediately adopted at the state level to reduce the number of gun-related deaths without affecting the rights of gun owners. For example, Donna’s Law, a voluntary program whereby individuals can choose to restrict their ability to purchase or possess firearms, can significantly decrease suicide rates. Amending red flag statutes, which allow judges to restrict access to guns when an individual has shown evidence of dangerousness, can give police flexible and effective tools to keep people safe. Encouraging the use of unlawful possession petitions can help communities remove guns from more than a million Americans who are legally disqualified from owning them. By embracing these and other new forms of decentralized gun control, the United States can move past partisan gridlock and save lives now.

In the past decade, no individual act of violence has killed more people in the United States than the mass shooting. This well-researched, forcefully argued book answers some of the most pressing questions facing our society: Why do people go on killing sprees? Are gun-free zones magnets for deadly rampages? What can we do to curb the carnage of this disturbing form of firearm violence? Contrary to conventional wisdom, the author shows that gun possession often prods aggrieved, mentally unstable individuals to go on shooting sprees; these attacks largely occur in places where guns are not prohibited by law; and sensible gun-control measures like the federal Assault Weapons Ban—which helped drastically reduce rampage violence when it was in effect—are instrumental to keeping Americans safe from mass shootings in the future. To stem gun massacres, the author proposes several original policy prescriptions, ranging from the enactment of sensible firearm safety reforms to an overhaul of how the justice system investigates potential active-shooter threats and prosecutes violent crimes. Calling attention to the growing problem of mass shootings, Rampage Nation demonstrates that this unique form of gun violence is more than just a criminal justice offense or public health scourge. It is a threat to American security.

Cramer's work examines the motivations and legislative history behind the nation's first laws regulating the carrying of concealed deadly weapons and establishes a previously unexplored link between these laws and efforts to suppress dueling in the southern back country. Earlier attempts to analyze these laws focused upon efforts to maintain slavery by severely restricting the rights of free blacks: if free blacks could not possess arms and lacked other basic rights, slaves would be less inclined to seek their freedom. Cramer rejects such thinking by demonstrating that the concealed weapon laws of the early republic were not racially-motivated. He further supports the work of other scholars who have lately examined the role of Scots-Irish immigrants in creating a distinctive southern back-country culture of honor violence including dueling and brawling. It was the attempt to control such violence, Cramer argues, that led to the concealed weapons laws. Thus, rather than considering gun control laws primarily as legal or constitutional history, this study starts from a cultural and historical viewpoint. Southern state legislatures sought to improve the morals of their back-country population through increasingly severe punishments for dueling. When judges and juries regularly refused to convict duelists, these legislatures created extrajudicial punishments by requiring elected and appointed officials, as well as lawyers, to swear oaths of non-participation in dueling. Young men, obsessed with honor and reluctant to perjure themselves for fear of damaging their public reputation, soon took to carrying Bowie knives and handguns with which to kill those who insulted them—a perfectly honorable action to much of the population. The state legislatures then severely regulated carrying of concealed deadly weapons in the hope of suppressing the bloody results of what had been, until then, an accepted practice.