Chapter 2 presents the federal response to violence against women. We begin the chapter with a brief overview of the history of domestic violence in the United States. We then analyze the response of Congress to the domestic violence epidemic as compared to the Supreme Court’s response. This detailed presentation reveals the gaps that federal laws havr created by leaving states the option to enforce them and relegating nearly all of the enforcement of domestic violence law to local authorities. This chapter underscores the role and limi, of federal policy in remedying the inequities among women in their personal protection from domestic violence. The lack of a cohesive federal response contributes to all four levels of gender inequality in domestic violence policy.

Using quantitative data, we construct an explanation of the adoption of policies that address the intersection of firearms and domestic violence. Removing guns from perpetrators of domestic violence, including domestic violence among unmarried couples, decreases intimate partner deaths. Beyond the very positive effects that laws on DV gun ownership by domestic violence perpetrators can have to make women safer, the sponsorship and passage of these laws over the last thirty years have increased. Using our original dataset of domestic violence firearm law (DVFL) enactments, we analyze the circumstances under which states adopt these laws. We find evidence that state and federal factors that influence policy adoption employ a set of political and demographic indicators as independent variables, particularly, the number of gun-related homicides, legislative partisan control, citizen ideology, federal legislation, and election years influence the likelihood of DVFL enactments. We also find support for the effects of vertical policy diffusion but not for horizontal policy diffusion across states. We found no effects associated with support for gun ownership or the percent of women state legislators.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is good at using democracy to advance its agenda. Over the course of many decades, the United States’ foremost advocate of gun rights has built substantial political power by cultivating a politically unified and engaged base of grassroots supporters. The political intensity of US gun owners – and the NRA’s ability to mobilize them into action – has enabled the organization to consistently defeat proposed gun regulations and is a key reason that it has become a central pillar of the contemporary Republican Party.

This essay began as a blog post on Skeptic.com that I wrote after a series of debates I did with John Lott, who has emerged as one of the strongest opponents of gun-control measures and a regular guest on Fox News. The original blog included my PowerPoint slides and accompanying commentary that I used in my debates; here I primarily focus on my experiences debating Lott, drawing on some of the more poignant data slides I used to counter his thesis that more guns equals less crime. This is followed by a discussion of a more recent debate I did with a radical gun advocate named Michael Huemer, who made the argument for guns as a necessary bulwark against governmental tyranny, which I debunked in the previous essay. I did not fully understand where Lott and Huemer (or gun-rights advocates of any kind) were coming from until I read George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics, which lifted the scales from my eyes and enabled me to understand what both conservatives and liberals really want, and not just in the realm of gun control, but in all dominions of life. The final part of this essay addresses those insights.