Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

Violence in the United States is distinctive in many ways, perhaps none more visceral and fundamental than the technologies with which it is practiced. American violence disproportionately involves guns, and because guns are such an effective tool of violence, confrontations involving them are disproportionately deadly. Decades of research confirm this "instrumentality effect, " and it is reflected in the broad, bipartisan agreement that the nation has a gun violence problem. The deep disagreement, of course, remains about how to address it, with most of the debate focused on regulating who can carry which guns, where, and how.

But fully understanding, let alone addressing, the problem of violence requires accounting for not only regulation but the economic and legal forces shaping the instruments that inflict and resist it-what we call the technologies of violence. Just as violence itself can be permissible and even desirable (as in cases of justified self-defense) or not (as in cases of criminal misuse), innovations in violence technology can simultaneously improve and threaten public safety. As the most prominent form of that technology, guns illustrate the point particularly clearly. Historically, innovation has made guns more lethal-a change whose overall impact on public safety is contested but it also has the potential to make them safer, for example through better reliability, safety switches, smart gun technology, microstamping, and other technological enhancements.

In this Article, we identify and evaluate the complex and intertwined roles of markets and law in driving and in some cases deterring gun safety innovation. For a variety of reasons, legal efforts to incentivize certain safety innovations have failed, even as markets have taken off for innovations designed to cope with gun violence, such as gun detection cameras and bulletproof backpacks. At the same time, statutory and constitutional law stifle and in some cases forbid safety innovations, for example by broadly immunizing gun manufacturers from regulatory and tort liability and through Second Amendment doctrines that protect increasingly powerful weapons while limiting government's ability to enact new rules regulating them.

We hope that bringing together previously separate scholarly discourses on innovation and public law can help generate new insights into their complex interactions, as well as possible solutions to the problem of American gun violence. We conclude with some possibilities for reform that could facilitate the role of markets and innovation in providing public safety.

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Library of Congress Subject Headings

Firearms--Law and legislation, Violence, Technological innovations, Firearms--Safety measures

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