This episode, hosted by Katelyn Brewer, delves into the intricate history of gun ownership and regulations in the United States, from colonial times, to the National Firearms Act of 1934, the 1994 federal assault weapons ban and the pivotal Supreme Court case which redefined the Second Amendment to affirm individual gun rights.

00:00 Welcome to Frogmore Stew: Unpacking Gun Laws

00:34 The Roots of Gun Ownership in America

02:01 The Evolution of Gun Technology and Regulation

03:43 The Modern Debate: AR-15s and Assault Weapons Bans

04:51 The Impact of Federal Assault Weapons Ban and Research Findings

06:05 The Ongoing Battle for Gun Control

06:51 Supreme Court Decisions and the Future of Gun Rights

07:43 Concluding Thoughts on Gun Violence and Ownership

Copyright 2024 Grace Cowan

• The Poets of Rhythm - "South Carolina

Hi, this is Kaitlin Brewer and I'm in for grace on this week's episode of Frogmore Stew. Recently, South Carolina made national news when Governor McMaster signed an open carry bill into a law joining 27 other states nationally. If your social media timeline looked anything like mine, South Carolinians had a few things to say about a bill that law enforcement across the state testified against for months.

We at Frogmore Stew wanted to spend this week looking into the complex history surrounding gun ownership and regulation in the United States, probably later in the week on South Carolina and its most recent gun laws. To understand the current landscape of gun rights, it's essential to start at the beginning.

The colonial era saw prevalent levels of gun ownership among settlers, and it served both as a means of self defense as well as subsistence. And prioritizing gun ownership held additional importance as we approached the onset of the Revolutionary War, where it was branded as a fundamental right to securing independence from Great Britain.

After independence, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791, enshrining the right of a militia to keep and bear arms. The amendment's primary intention sought to prevent the United States government from establishing a standing army. As a modern citizen of the U.S., it might be hard to understand why we, the most powerful military force in the world, would not want a standing army. 18th century logic felt that any society with a professional army could never be truly free from the threat of a government ordering an attack on unarmed citizens. While regulated citizen militias were intended to solve this problem, the authors of the Bill of Rights were not specifically concerned with individual or personal right to bear arms, and because of that, we have debated for more than 200 years how we should control personal gun ownership.

Guns remained indispensable for protection, hunting, and settling the frontier. However, ownership was still regulated. As technology advanced in the late 1800s, so did the manufacturing of guns. The introduction of the first semi automatic weapon occurred just before the turn of the 20th century, followed quickly by the development of the Thompson machine gun, more commonly known as the Tommy gun, in the 1920s.

This weapon was widely utilized throughout World War I for trench warfare. When the war ended, the American military was no longer purchasing the gun at previous rates, and the inventor, John Thompson, sought to find a new revenue source. Insert the civilian market here. Unfortunately, by the middle of the 1920s, high profile news of gang violence using the Tommy gun was a daily occurrence.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, along with other tragedies, sparked for a government regulation leading to nearly 32 states restricting gun access. More significantly, this movement culminated in the first federal gun law, the National Firearms Act of 1934. While the National Firearms Act was sold by Congress to the public as an exercise of its authority to tax, the NFA did have underlying desire to curtail, if not prohibit, financial transactions on specific firearms linked to significant crime.

The NFA was amended 34 years later in 1968. Title II of the NFA removed requirement for possessors of unregistered firearms to register and added a provision of the law prohibiting the use of any application or registration information as evidence in criminal proceedings. Title II also amended the NFA definitions of firearm.

By adding destructive devices and expanding the definition of machine gun. So why is the Tommy gun history important to today? Well, it bears a striking resemblance to the evolution of modern political debates surrounding the AR 15 type assault weapons. AR 15s were also developed for military use, and as sales declined post Vietnam War, manufacturers ramped up marketing efforts with a civilian version of the gun that fired semi automatically as opposed to automatically.

Public consumption of the AR 15 didn't quite catch on until the 1980s, when foreign made, cheaper versions of the gun flooded the U. S. market. A politically catalyzing moment in particular came during the aftermath of a 1989 mass shooting at the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, when a man firing an AK 47 killed five children and wounded 33 others.

California became the first state to enact an assault weapons ban. Debate raged on in the following years, and in 1994, after increased violence associated with the weapons took center stage in the national media, then President Bill Clinton signed into law the federal assault weapons ban. This ban lasted 10 years and sunset in 2004, leaving many to wonder if it actually worked in research published by the Criminology and Public Policy Center in January 2020, Christopher Cooper, principal fellow at George Mason University Center for evidence based crime policy, and the author of the Department of Justice review on the 1994 assault weapons ban, Christopher Cooper, principal fellow at George Mason University Center for evidence based crime, and the author of the Department of Justice review on the 1994 assault weapons ban.

Focused on the role of large capacity magazines, as opposed to assault weapons in mass shootings. This is a quote from his paper. Crimes with assault weapons began to decline shortly after the ban's passage, likely in part because of the interest of collectors and speculators in these weapons, which helped to drive their prices higher through the end of the 1990s, thus making them less accessible and affordable to criminal users.

Criminal use of other semi automatics equipped with LCMs, large capacity magazines, appeared to climb or remain steady through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. Available evidence suggests that criminal LCM use eventually declined below pre ban levels, but only near the ban's expiration in 2004.

As noted, crimes with LCM firearms have since increased. Activists from organizations such as Everytown for Gun Safety continue to advocate for a ban on assault weapons. Citing that from 2015 to 2022, mass shootings with four or more people killed where an assault weapon was used, resulted in nearly six times as many people shot more than twice as many people killed, and 23 times as many people wounded on average compared to those that didn't.

Furthermore, they alleged that more than 1400 researchers estimate that a federal law prohibiting assault weapons in high capacity magazines was in effect from 2005 to 2019. It would have prevented 30 mass shootings that resulted in nearly 1500 people shot and killed or wounded. Let's now fast forward to nearly present day for many scholars to recent Supreme Court cases have changed the course of the 2nd amendments prior interpretations by affirming an individual's right to own firearms for defense.

Those 2 cases are the District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010. Before District of Columbia v. Heller, courts had ruled that the right of the individual citizens to bear arms existed only within the context of participation in a militia. In Heller, the Supreme Court overturned that precedent, delivering gun rights advocates their biggest legal victory and a return to the original understanding of the Second Amendment, as Justice Scalia claimed in his argument for the majority.

Here we are, left with this question. What do we do about the gun violence we clearly see and the balance of access to gun ownership? Especially here at home in South Carolina, that's all the stew for today.

This episode of Frogmore Stew was written and hosted by Kaitlin Brewer with editing and I. T. support by Eric Johnson, produced by TJ Phillips for the Podcast Solutions Network.