The Social Life of Gun Control: Handguns, Violence, & Disorder in the 1960s & 70s

Joshua Aiken

This paper examines legal and political responses to the mass proliferation of handguns in
the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the context of racial discourses surrounding violence and
disorder. In 1969, the National Commission on the Causes & Prevention of Violence found
that “one third of all handguns produced for the civilian market since the turn of the
century” were purchased from 1962-1968. In the 1970s, the National Coalition to Control
Handguns advanced an explicit agenda to ban all handguns and handgun ammunition. And,
according to Gallup polls from 1959-1967, Americans favored a general handgun possession
ban. I observe three juridical responses to social dynamics in this period, in order to
historicize conceptions of gun control in the context of American life. First, I consider the
evolution of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 and its emphasis on “dangerous”
individuals as the foremost targets of regulation. Second, I consider the passage of
Washington D.C.’s 1975 handgun ban (struck down in 2008), which emerged as the primary
response to rising firearm homicide and crime rates. I specifically consider the racial
discourses that underwrote a narrowed representation of what gun control means/meant.
Relatedly, third, I consider McIntosh v. Washington (1978), a legal challenge brought by the
National Rifle Association which was in the midst of a significant political shift. What is
often referred to as the “Cincinnati Coup”—a right-wing takeover of the NRA—coincided
with new notions of how gun ownership should be understood in a juridical sense. My focus
here is on how understandings of race and crime contributed to new legal and political
frameworks used to justify why individual Americans should have the right to bear arms.