Chapter 2 locates the history of firearms litigation over the past sixty years as a progression through four distinction waves, in the context of the arc of mass tort litigation. The chapter surveys initial gun litigation in the 1960s–1970s based on conventional tort theories sounding in negligence and product defect, noting that virtually all these lawsuits failed. During the 1980s and 1990s, firearms litigation followed the mass tort pattern of attempted aggregation of claims, but courts still did not allow these suits to progress. The second wave of firearms litigation occurred in the early twentieth century, following the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. This new litigation model was based on governmental entity lawsuits seeking redress for communities harmed by gun violence. The third wave of gun litigation occurred after Congressional enactment of PLCAA in 2005. Plaintiffs in these PLCAA suits sought relief under PLCAA’s six exceptions. These suits also largely failed to gain traction. And the fourth and current wave of firearms litigation post-2019, after the successful Sandy Hook litigation, is being pursued by state attorneys general under new, targeted consumer protection and public nuisance accountability statutes.

This chapter explores two case histories where American politicians appear to have sided with intense minorities over less-intense majorities. First, I present the case of federal funding for stem cell research in the early 2000s. I find evidence that majorities supported allocating federal health research funds toward research using embryonic stem cells yet federal policy remained stringent for most of the decade. Second, I present the case of firearm regulation following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Although large majorities indicated support for new regulation of firearms, no new regulations passed Congress. An intense minority appears to have used costly political action to communicate their strong opposition to new regulations.

After the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, my lecture agent Scott Wolfman, whose offices are located only eight miles from the site of the deadliest school shooting in history, contacted me to inquire if I would be willing to engage in a debate over gun control. He felt the need to do something – anything – to address the problem, and as gun violence was a subject I had done some research on, I undertook a thorough review of the social science literature and, in the process of preparing to debate the pro-gun advocate John Lott, penned this research article, first published in Skeptic for a special issue on gun violence. In brief, I concluded that while preventing highly improbable mass murders like that at Sandy Hook is impossible, there are some things we can do to decrease violence and reduce the carnage, which has only gotten worse since that tragic event.