Kristin A. Goss

Duke University | DU · Sanford School of Public Policy

This article documents an important exception to the conventional wisdom that politicians just will not tighten gun laws. Over the past decade, and mostly under the radar, both state and federal legislators have enacted more than 80 laws designed to regulate access to guns by people with mental illness and to support programs to reduce gun violence...

The Million Mom March (favoring gun control) and Code Pink: Women for Peace (focusing on foreign policy, especially the war in Iraq) are organizations that have mobilized women as women in an era when other women's groups struggled to maintain critical mass and turned away from non-gender-specific public issues. This article addresses how these org...

Scholars are increasingly recognizing that design of a public policy influences the scope and nature of political engagement around that policy. Such ‘policy feedback’ models typically focus on organizational engagement (such as interest group lobbying) or on individual engagement (such as joining associations), with each form of participation trea...

In any healthy democracy, myriad policy issues compete for the public’s attention. Most remain on the periphery of politics, either because they achieve salience only in narrow communities of interest or because they grab headlines only for brief periods of time. But sometimes issues become what we term “durable attention items”—they capture public...

District of Columbia v. Heller was a landmark ruling in which the Supreme Court established that citizens have a constitutional right to possess firearms in their homes for self-protection. The 5-4 decision-along with the Court's subsequent ruling in McDonald v. Chicago-upended the prevailing wisdom that the Second Amendment protected the right of...

With So Many Guns Out There, Is There Any Point to Gun Control? Yes. The evidence suggests that certain regulations have been effective in reducing gun use in crime. And even in the United States, guns are not as readily available as some commentators...

Why Is Self-Defense Central to the Debate over Gun Control? Personal safety is a vital matter, and self-protection is a more compelling rationale for owning guns than recreation. We can all conjure up the nightmare scenario of being defenseless in a violent confrontation with...

What Is a Gun? A more precise term for the subject of this book is firearm, which is a portable weapon that shoots projectiles from a metal tube, propelled at high speed by expanding gas that is generated by the explosion of gunpowder in...

How Large Is the Gun Industry in America? The gun industry itself is rather small by traditional measures. Only a handful of companies produce a significant number of firearms in the United States, and at most 150,000 people are employed in the industry—about 1...

Every question about guns, gun violence, or gun policy is contentious. Basic facts—the annual number of gun transactions, or even the number of guns in private hands—are not known with any precision. Estimates of the costs and consequences of our nation’s gun laws are...

Is There a Uniquely American Gun Culture? Yes. We know of no other country where firearms are as plentiful and as inextricably linked to individual identity and popular values as they are in the United States. Citizens of other nations possess and use guns,...

No topic is more polarizing than guns and gun control. From a gun culture that took root early in American history to the mass shootings that repeatedly bring the public discussion of gun control to a fever pitch, the topic has preoccupied citizens, public officials, and special interest groups for decades. In this thoroughly revised second edition...

What Is the Gun Rights Movement? The gun rights movement consists of several hundred local, state, and national organizations that seek to promote a positive view of firearms in public life and to prevent and remove restrictions on gun ownership and use. Generally speaking,...

How Many Americans Are Killed or Injured by Gunfire? Approximately 1 million Americans have died from gunshot wounds in homicides, accidents, and suicides during just the last three decades—more than all combat deaths in all wars in US history. In 2017, the National Center...

Do Americans Want Stricter Gun Laws? Public opinion experts have long observed that the United States has a gun control paradox: Most Americans favor all sorts of firearms regulations—sometimes overwhelmingly so—yet these regulations are not enacted into law. Four decades ago, one scholar noted...

What Is the Gun Violence Prevention Movement? Like the gun rights movement, the gun violence prevention movement includes national, state, and local organizations. Some are single-issue organizations, spending all their time on gun violence prevention, while others are multi-issue allies from the women’s, religious,...

Who Can Be Trusted with a Gun? A simplistic but common understanding of crime is that the population can be divided neatly into two groups, good guys and bad guys. In this view, the bad guys commit crime unless they are locked up, and...

What Are the Basics of the US System of Gun Regulation? Gun regulations have a long history, stretching back to the colonial era. By and large, the laws have been enacted to secure the common defense, to protect individuals from harm, to assist law-enforcement...

en Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state). However, in practice the distinction between o...

Foundations are traditionally viewed as civic-minded but politically neutral organizations. Yet foundations, if they choose, can become involved in a wide variety of activities aimed at influencing public policy. Here we lay out the rationale for thinking about foundations as interest groups in the American political system. There are differences b...

After the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, a self-defined “resistance” movement arose to block his agenda. This movement cut across the normal boundaries of political activism to create new forms of advocacy and new models of cooperation. Major components of the resistance were ideological interest groups, women’s organizations, env...

Introduction to Advancing Philanthropic Scholarship: The Implications of Transformation - Kathryn E. Webb Farley, Kristin A. Goss, Steven Rathgeb Smith

Objectives: To examine the relation of "shall-issue" laws, in which permits must be issued if requisite criteria are met; "may-issue" laws, which give law enforcement officials wide discretion over whether to issue concealed firearm carry permits or not; and homicide rates. Methods: We compared homicide rates in shall-issue and may-issue states...

Background: To prevent intimate partner homicide (IPH), some states have adopted laws restricting firearm possession by intimate partner violence (IPV) offenders. "Possession" laws prohibit the possession of firearms by these offenders. "Relinquishment" laws prohibit firearm possession and also explicitly require offenders to surrender their firea...

The role of political scientists in public policy debates.

Introduction: Firearm violence injures or kills 100,000 Americans each year. This paper applies the Host-Agent-Vector-Environment model to this issue. Research on firearm violence tends to focus on two elements-the host (i.e., victims of firearm violence) and the environment (i.e., gun policies)-but little attention has been paid to the agent (the...

Objective This study considers efforts by gun rights and gun regulation groups to socialize the conflict over firearms policy by engaging a coveted issue public—women. I assess whether gun rights groups have succeeded in weakening women's support for gun control laws and increasing women's firearms ownership. I also examine whether gun regulation g...

Objectives: To describe a new database containing detailed annual information on firearm-related laws in place in each of the 50 US states from 1991 to 2016 and to summarize key trends in firearm-related laws during this time period. Methods: Using Thomson Reuters Westlaw data to access historical state statutes and session laws, we developed a...

Policy Plutocrats: How America’s Wealthy Seek to Influence Governance - Volume 49 Issue 3 - Kristin A. Goss

The U.S. Women’s Jury Movement and Strategic Adaptation. By McCammon Holly J. . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 298p. $99.00. - Volume 12 Issue 1 - Kristin A. Goss

More than any other advanced industrial democracy, the United States is besieged by firearms violence. Each year, some 30,000 people die by gunfire. Over the course of its history, the nation has witnessed the murders of beloved public figures; massacres in workplaces and schools; and epidemics of gun violence that terrorize neighborhoods and claim...

For at least 20 years, American universities, political scientists, and college students have each been criticized for holding themselves aloof from public life. This article introduces a pedagogical method—research service-learning (RSL)—and examines whether it can provide a means of integrating scholarly theory with civic practice to enhance stud...

From World War I through the 1960s, U.S. women's organizations regularly trekked to Capitol Hill to influence congressional foreign policy debates. Yet by the 1990s, these groups had largely disengaged from international affairs. Why? Using an original data set of women's group appearances before Congress from 1916 to 2000, this study documents and...

Objectives. Although recent research has documented the contributions of philanthropic foundations as “patrons” of the major identity movements, scholars know very little about the specific ways foundations have influenced these movements' development and impact. This study examines the role of foundations in shaping the U.S. women's movement of th...

Political-participation studies have paid too little attention to the cognitive and emotional motivations for citizen engagement. This study uses a natural experiment in issue-centered mobilization, a women's march for stricter gun control, to construct a fuller model of political participation, one that focuses on the interaction between individua...

By virtually every conceivable measure, civic participation is on the decline in America. Volunteering is one important exception. An analysis of a newly available archive of national surveys finds that the frequency with which Americans volunteer has increased 20% since the mid-1970s. However, nearly all of that increase is concentrated among olde...

In 1914, in the industrial city of Cleveland, a banker named Frederick H. Goff seized upon a novel mechanism for supporting good works - the community foundation - which would raise charitable donations from everyday Clevelanders and empower a committee of local notables to distribute the contributions (Hall 1992, 164). Tapping the reform spirit of...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Thesis (Ph. D., Dept. of Government (Political Science))--Harvard University, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-353).

Thesis (A.B., Honors)--Harvard University, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [82]-[86]). Microfilm.