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455 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1981)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0455 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE The study of gun control has never lacked for polemicists, but there was little in the way of respectable analytical research in this area before George Newton, Jr., and Franklin E. Zimring's work for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.' Their monograph initiated a trickle that only in the last year or two has become a steady stream of dispas- sionate, scholarly research. The articles in this issue are intended to provide a cross section of the best of this new and important work. We begin in the future, with Zimring's interesting effort to project the evolution of firearms regulation into the twenty-first century. National prohibition is not one of his likely scenarios, but John Kaplan's article is a useful reminder of the foreseeable consequences if we should try another Great Experiment-the lessons from marijuana and alcohol are clear. The next section, dealing generally with the politics and history of gun control, includes two articles that present a collection of startlingly de- finitive findings from national public opinion surveys. James D. Wright is able to resolve the apparent contradictions in two polls taken in 1978- sponsored by rival camps-and leaves us with a satisfying sense that the American public has well-defined beliefs about guns and gun control and that these beliefs are subject to measurement. Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser use results from a series of public opinion survey experiments to shine new light on why the large majority of the American public who favor stricter federal regulations have not had their way with Congress. Another perspective on this same conundrum emerges from the history of federal legislative efforts during the 1920s and 1930s, reviewed in the article by Carol Skalnik Leff and Mark H. Leff. There remain the questions of policy design and evaluation: which of the alternative gun control strategies appear most promising? My article on the role of weapons in violent crime leads off this section, serving as deep back- ground for assessing alternative approaches. My second article, with James Blose, describes the current structure of state and federal regulations in- tended to prevent certain groups of people from obtaining firearms. Mark H. Moore's article is a natural sequel; he assesses the relative importance of alternative sources of guns used in crime and suggests some interesting conclusions about the appropriate role for each level of government in the effort to regulate firearms commerce. James Lindgren concludes this section with a policy analysis of a different sort of gun control problem-dis- couraging inappropriate use of firearms by the police. The final section presents three case studies, assessing the effects of the Bartley-Fox Amendment in Massachusetts (Glenn L. Pierce and William J. Bowers); the District of Columbia's ban on handgun transfers (Edward D. Jones, III); and Michigan's mandatory sentencing provisions for criminals 1. Firearms & Violence in American Life (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office). vii

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