Caught in a Crossfire: Legal and Illegal Gun Ownership in America

Abstract

Just beneath the surface of much of the popular, political, and scholarly debate on gun control is a set of assumptions about the propinquity of the legal and illegal gun worlds and the people who inhabit those arenas. Few people know about, or carefully consider, exactly what these two worlds look like. As a result, much of the debate is ill informed and results in poorly crafted, if well intended, policy suggestions or actions, or the lack thereof. It is important to understand the simple facts of legal and illegal gun ownership and use because these serve as the foundation of the entire debate on myriad gun control issues.