Guns in our society

  When you talk about government control of guns via gun registration, and that law that was written a decade ago (bottom of p3), I’m not sure which level of government you’re talking about. I think you’re talking about the federal level (rather than the state level), but you need to clarify that. In fact, I need more details in general about what gun control law you’re discussing and also how it functions in order to strengthen your argument. That could be a nice paragraph at the top of page four or so. This will also help you accomplish the last thing this paper needs, which is a connection to course concepts from one of our Environment & Society approaches – they are implicit in your paper, but not yet explicit. With your discussion of gun control laws, you are talking about institutional approaches to gun control, which is great because that ties to ideas from Institutions & The Commons. This case study is not a traditional environmental case study like grazing or fisheries management, which is totally fine, but some of the ideas from Ostrom’s institutional theories could still be useful for you. For example, when you talk about gun registration as a form of gun control, you are talking about monitoring, and how monitoring shapes behavior (p58 in our textbook). I could imagine you writing a couple of sentences about why monitoring matters to gun control (in the form of gun registration) in the same place that you provide some additional details about the existing gun control laws. For example, registering a gun allows the police to link the gun to its owner, which may change how the gun owner uses the gun (and may discourage them from committing a violent crime with it). This is an example of a monitoring system changing behavior. a screen shot of how the changes should be done and the paper doc are attached.