Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification
How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning1
William Haltom
Michael McCann
University of Puget Sound
University of Washington
Prepared for presentation to the Western Political Science Association in San Francisco
on 2 April 2010 as part of Panel 07.05 “Politics and Litigation”
1
Funding for this study was generously provided by the National Science Foundation, Award # 0451207.
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
2
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom and Michael McCann
In a previous paper (McCann, Haltom, and Fisher 2009) we explored “creeping criminalization” of production and marketing of tobacco. We reviewed how ostensibly civil
litigation had evolved to “crimtorts,” a hybrid of criminal and civil litigation favored in
white-collar prosecutions. That paper argued that “… in official legal venues legal action
against tobacco mixed elements of civil with criminal in an increasingly complex, tangled
web of legal challenge” (McCann, Haltom, and Fisher 2009:12). As a result, mass media
disseminated tales of responsibility, liability, and culpability that tarred the reputations of
those who provide consumers nicotine. In this paper we look for “creeping criminalization” in litigation over the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of firearms, especially handguns. We find evidence that the tangled webs of legal challenge that afflicted
Big Tobacco in the 1990s have afflicted much smaller and more vulnerable firearms
companies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Newspapers increased reports of the
responsibility, liability, and culpability of manufacturers or marketers of firearms. Firearms reformers who emulated tobacco reformers appear to have fomented in newspapers
“cresting criminalization:” a huge increase in frames that assigned responsibility, liability, and at times culpability to makers and marketers of firearms.
This paper first reviews “creeping criminalization” as four shifts evident in litigation
against tobacco companies and concomitant coverage of disputing and policy-making in
The New York Times. Next, the paper shows how crusades against firearms emulated
crusades against tobacco, which suggests that reports, features, and editorials about firearms in major U. S. newspapers might greatly resemble tobacco’s press, especially when
we recall the broader cultural context of fiction and films that enveloped tobacco and firearms crusades alike. After briefly introducing the two samples of newspaper coverage
that supply our data, we search for criminalizing coverage. While we do not find that
newspapers directly vilified actors or agents on any side of the firearms battle, we find
considerable evidence that frames in coverage greatly disadvantaged firearms interests
and proclaimed the responsibility if not the culpability of firearms makers, distributors,
and dealers for social problems and evils. We conclude that firearms crusades criminalized firearms interests in the papers, but we draw attention to the short span within which
the battles were most pitched. We suspect that we have discovered that struggles over
firearms resulted in criminalization that did not creep so much as crest.
“CREEPING CRIMINALIZATION”
Although mechanisms of civil litigation have long been comparable or complementary to
mechanisms of criminal litigation, especially prosecution of white-collar crime (Simons
2008), legal campaigns against tobacco, we found, transformed as they burgeoned. The
four transformations that we have dubbed Creeping Criminalization involve shifts from
tobacco suits that more closely resembled private, civil litigation to tobacco suits far more
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
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public and quasi-criminal. In homage to Sir Henry Maine,2 we label each transformation
as a shift from relatively civil forms to at least somewhat criminal forms.
From Liability to[ward] Culpability―Early tobacco suits relied heavily on traditional
tort principles, meaning that plaintiffs had to persuade judges or juries that tobacco products injured consumers and to establish that the producers were negligent or reckless,
could foresee the harmful impacts of their products, and thus breached their duty of due
care. Tobacco corporations routinely foiled legal claims by disputing evidence of injuries
and by insisting that the statutorily required warnings on cigarettes adequately informed
consumers about the risks, thus fixing responsibility on the choices of smokers and/or
governments. Because jurors and judges attributed great weight to “individual responsibility,” corporate producers dodged legal liability not merely consistently but constantly.
After persistent failures in hundreds of actions invoking such conventional tort claims,
anti-tobacco activists advanced a different challenge: corporations knowingly, willfully
conspired to supply disinformation or outright lies intended to mislead the public about
scientific research on tobacco and to hide the boosting of nicotine’s impact as well as
deliberately targeting advertising to children and minority groups. This challenge shifted
litigation from familiar tort principles of negligence or reckless indifference to claims
framed as fraud on consumers and misrepresentations to legislators and citizenry alike.
Once reformers got beyond negligence to quasi-criminal liability, state attorneys general
could rely on evidence of criminal fraud by “Big Tobacco,” especially with evidence provided by whistleblowers. States such as Minnesota and Florida produced scores of thousands of documents during Medicare cases by invoking the “crime-fraud” exception to
strip away the attorney/client shield from lawyers for Big Tobacco. Representative
Marty Meehan [D-MA] delivered a “prosecution memo” alleging acts of perjury, fraud,
and conspiracy by tobacco officials after tobacco executives brazenly proclaimed their
innocence in 1994 congressional hearings. By 1997 a full-time Task Force in the Fraud
Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice was established to investigate the allegations of conspiracy under the “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act” [commonly referred to by the acronym RICO].
This shift in framing, we argued, not only outflanked attribution of responsibility for
health risks to consuming individuals or to governmental regulators but also tainted
corporate officials with misrepresentations, misprisions, and mendacity. Thus was
straightforward products liability repackaged as producers’ criminality.
From Private Parties to Public Actors―Private attorneys representing identifiable,
usually individual, plaintiffs who had suffered injuries or deaths of loved ones instituted
early cases against tobacco companies. Some regarded such independent advocates as
“private attorneys general” when they sought to regulate corporate behavior through civil
suits; few regarded such private advocates as prosecutors. Public prosecutors or executive branch regulators usually represented the general public [“the people”] and consulted
with discrete ‘victims” only modestly (Simons 2008:719). As the focus of tobacco cases
2
We allude here to Sir Henry’s formula “from status to contract” (Maine 1861).
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
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shifted from products liability to producers’ criminality, however, private attorneys such
as Richard Scruggs and Ron Motley yielded much of the public stage to state attorneys
general. The state AGs claimed to act in defense of the general public who bore costs of
increased health services or were subjected to illegally fraudulent behavior of corporate
giants. The attorneys general and select legislators who negotiated settlements emerged
as the media “heroes” of this episode, as often is the case in routine criminal prosecutions; the private attorneys were relegated to the background, except for a very short
period in 1997 when industry officials saturated newspapers with stories of excessive attorneys’ fees. In short, the mechanism and agents driving the state litigation were far
more similar in fact, and even more in mass-mediated accounts, to prosecutorial action
against white-collar crime than to private tort actions.
From Remuneration to Regulation and Retribution―State lawsuits against Big Tobacco likewise resemled criminal actions more than traditional civil models in “remedies” sought. Whereas conventional, private tort actions have sought compensatory damages to redress individual injuries and to make victims whole, prosecutions usually have
sought to punish via a combination of incarceration, fine, or injunction those proved to
have committed injuries. Moreover, fines usually accrued to governments rather than to
citizens or attorneys. On the other hand, punitive damages in tort actions have blended
features of civil and criminal law (Simons 2008:72). Damages negotiated as part of the
Master Settlement Agreement with tobacco companies looked more criminal than civil.
Nearly $250 billion was represented and justified in almost entirely in public regulatory,
deterrent, and punitive – quasi-criminal – terms. Most of the monetary damages went
directly to governments and not to private victims, likewise far more similar to criminal
penalties, underlining the quasi-criminal nature of crimtorts. The fees allocated to private
attorneys, in absolute terms large but relative to overall sums small, also lessened any resemblances to ordinary civil litigation. All in all, the normative logic and public representation, of the settlement – imposing regulatory restriction as well as moral stigma on
the defendants, reinforcing social norms and punishing behavior – is much closer to a
criminal than a tort law model (Simons 2008; see Kagan 2002).
From Civil Suits to Crimtorts―Private and public litigation against tobacco companies
became inextricably intertwined with explicitly criminal prosecutorial action from the
mid-1990s on. Lawsuits have continued to focus on white-collar issues of fraud, conspiracy, and misrepresentation, documenting that hybrid of civil and, especially, criminal
elements that some legal scholars refer to as “crimtorts” (Koenig and Rustad 2004, 1998;
Simons 2008; see generally Youngdale 2008). At the same time, new concerns about
other dimensions of criminal complicity in illegal smuggling by the tobacco industry surfaced following the Master Settlement episode. Federal investigations were initiated by a
U.S. Customs undercover team against Brown and Williamson in New Orleans for connections to criminal smuggling of cigarettes into Canada, leading to a successful prosecution. This was followed by more investigations, charges, and trials. Most actions were
technically founded in civil law, but allegations of racketeering, smuggling, and fraud, often joined with international protests that the tobacco industry was committing “crimes
against humanity,” reiterated the long developing quasi-criminal indictment in public.
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
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Criminalization of Cases and Coverage―The four shifts and concomitant coverage in
The New York Times should not be overstated. We intended “criminalization” to convey
movement from a relatively civil model of disputing and coverage toward a relatively criminal model of disputing and coverage. We did not claim that tobacco executives or corporations had been criminal. Rather, we meant that reports of tobacco disputes accumulated more and more indicia of crime even as tobacco companies risked greater and
greater liabilities. This combination of gradually increased perceptions of civil liability
and gradually increased suspicions of criminal or quasi-criminal activities is what we
meant and mean by “Creeping Criminalization” (see McCann, Haltom, and Fisher 2009).
FIREARMS LITIGATION IN COURT AND IN CULTURE
Because activists against firearms had explicitly emulated strategies and tactics from litigation against delivery systems for nicotine (McIntosh and Cates 2009: 101, 217 n. 1;
Lytton 2005:1-35), we wondered if firearms suits might work criminalization similar to
what we found in coverage of tobacco suits in The New York Times. Suits against firearms makers and dealers are both similar to and different from suits against tobacco companies, so some sullying of makers and dealers reputations might be expected.
Individuals sued firearms makers long before individuals sued tobacco companies, but in
the first few decades suits against firearms companies had as little success as suits against
tobacco. However, “… the idea of mass action based on the tobacco model bloomed very quickly and full-blown” (McIntosh and Cates 2009:101). The mass actions at first adhered to fairly routine theories of tortuous liability. In 1994 relatives of victims of handguns and a lone survivor sued 25 makers of firearms for negligent marketing. Suits for
negligence and public nuisance followed. In sniper suits and other actions, defendants included distributors and dealers. These, too, were fairly straightforward negligence suits.
During the second term of the Clinton Presidency, however, officials sought some degree
of regulation through innovative actions for negligence and nuisance, shifting litigative
strategies from private actors to public actors and from remuneration to regulation. The
Clinton Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development threatened to
litigate on behalf of more than 3,000 housing projects beset by gun violence. The Administration and HUD sought compensation for costs in protecting the housing projects,
but the larger aims were to change marketing practices that were “irresponsible” and to
get safety features added (McIntosh and Cates 2009:104-105).
Then public actors began to seek regulation and retribution by adding theories of culpability or criminality to their actions for liability (see McIntosh and Cates 2009:105-122).
When state and local governments went after firearms manufacturers – starting with the
Castano Group in New Orleans and Chicago and Cook County in 1998 – theories had
shifted away from traditional liability for abatement of nuisance or defective product
design toward attacks on deceptive advertising. Much as they had done in tobacco
disputes, revelations of deception, duplicity, and deceit by manufacturers, wholesalers,
and retailers of firearms moved lawsuits from policy disputes and compensation for
externalities toward fraud and outright criminality. Although use of “trace data” from the
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
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Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was banned from gun suits by Congress in
2005, information on webs of illegal distribution and sales of firearms became public,
much as whistleblowers’ releases and lawyers’ depositions and discovery became public
in nicotine cases. Concerning firearms as concerning tobacco, publicization of illegal
promotion and dealing pushed matters even further toward criminality and away from
mere liability. Judge Weinstein allowed a New York City suit to go forward for a while
based on gun distributors’ deliberate violations of laws. After that suit was barred by the
Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took to
U. S. court over gun dealers’ allowing “straw purchases.” Firearms crusades were deliberately, strategically criminalizing gun merchants (see Williamson 2007; Lytton 2000).
If public officials and lawyers thus took firearms “From Civil Suits to Crimtorts” in very
few years, popular culture may have criminalized or at least sullied firearms companies
further. Columbine High School and other school shootings, especially as amplified by
the Oscar-winning documentary “Bowling for Columbine” (2002) asked whether makers
or marketers were responsible or indeed culpable for readily available tools of violence.
“Thank You for Smoking” (2005), a movie based on Thank You for Smoking: A Novel
(1994), brought viewers the “Merchants of Death,” lobbyists for alcohol, tobacco, and
firearms interests. John Grisham’s 1996 condemnation of jury-tampering by tobacco interests in The Runaway Jury became, after the Master Settlement Agreement of tobacco
cases, Brian Koppelman’s denunciation of jury-tampering by firearms interests in the
screenplay for “Runaway Jury.” Koppelman’s Rankin Fitch [jury consultant for firearms
defendants] is not merely criminal but evil, perhaps nihilistic (www.script-o-rama.com/
movie_scripts/r/runaway-jury-script-transcript-grisham.html; last visited 7 March 2010):
Rankin Fitch [RF]: “Wendall Rohr. An overdue pleasure. Rankin Fitch.
Nice suit. Very, um, ‘of the people.’ ”
Wendall Rohr, lead attorney for the widow of firearms victim Jacob Wood
[WR]: “Yours is nicer. What would you call it? ‘Gun lobby protecting
its own?’ ”
RF: “Oh! Swank shoes. Big tobacco?”
WR: “Big alligator. Wrestled it myself. … What'd you do to my
witness? Threaten his family? Write him a check? Just curious about
what your technique is, Mr. Fitch.”
RF: “Maybe he, uh, decided against biting the hand that fed him these
past few years.”
WR: “You know exactly why he came to us.”
RF: “Oh, please. Don't tell me you hung your case on somebody's
conscience.”
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
WR: “I hung my case on my own conscience.”
RF: “Oh. I get it now. You are a moral man living in a world of moral
relativity. It's just so quaint, so precious. …”
WR: “This is about my witness, right? This is about you messing with my
client, my case and the rules of law that govern our country!”
RF: “Our country? … I didn't figure you for a patriot, Mr. Rohr, what
with your blatant disregard for the people's right to bear arms. You know,
the Second Amendment?”
WR: “Is that why you're doing this? To protect the Constitution, is that
it?”
RF: “Of course not. I'm in it to win. Just like you are. … Because that's
what I was hired to do. … Everything else is colored bubbles.”
WR: “Colored bubbles? Colored bubbles?! A system that calls for people
to sit and listen to testimony of witnesses, fella! And that includes my
witness, who you've disappeared!”
RF: “If you're relying on testimony to win this case, you've already lost it,
fella! You think this jury cares anything about negligent distribution?
Product liability? … most of 'em can't even say the words, let alone understand the meaning. You think your average juror is King Solomon? No!
He's a roofer with a mortgage. He wants to go home and sit in his Barcalounger and let the cable TV wash over him. And this man doesn't give a
single, solitary droplet of shit about truth, justice or your American way.”
WR: “They're people, Fitch.”
RF: “My point, exactly. … What do you hope to achieve if you win?
… You gonna bring Jacob Wood back to life? No. You just ensure that
his wife goes to the cemetery in a better car. And that the heel that she
snaps on the way to the graveside belongs to a $1200 shoe. You get your
name in the paper. But Jacob Wood and all the other gun violence victims
remain rotting in their crypts.”
WR: “You know what, Fitch? You're gonna lose.”
RF: “I doubt it.”
WR: “Well, maybe not this case, maybe not the next, but someday, you
know, someday. I've seen it before with guys like you. Because you
cannot carry that much contempt without it becoming malignant, until
7
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
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you're gonna be all alone in a room full of shadows, and all you're gonna
have is the memories of all those people's lives you have destroyed.
RF: “That's a good story, Wendall. But it's just further proof of why you
can't beat me. Because you may be right ... but the thing of it is, I don't
give a shit. What's more... I never have.”
The combination of searing depictions of firearms interests in popular culture and lurid
charges in legal venues encouraged the expectation that coverage of firearms suits would
vilify firearms interests as it had tarred tobacco interests. Indeed, many of the actions
against firearms transpired at the same time as some actions against tobacco, so firearms
actions might follow tobacco actions so closely as to draft on them as if racecars.
Despite similarities to tobacco cases, crusades and lawsuits against handguns confronted
differences that might obviate criminalization in coverage. First, tobacco corporations
are far larger and financially more secure than gun companies, so negotiations or settlements for big money were far less likely. Second, the right to keep and bear arms was
written into the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution as smokers’ rights
were not, so vilification might have to overcome constitutional principle as well as commercial interests. In addition, the National Rifle Association and other advocates for firearms seem far less commercial and far more principled and public-interested; they are
undoubtedly far more effective than tobacco’s defenders were in the 1990s. In a related
development, national and state legislatures moved quickly to quash crimtort suits, so
public or official actors were arrayed on multiple sides.
The major difference between firearms actions and tobacco actions, of course, is that almost all firearms actions have been stymied while some tobacco actions have settled and
some tobacco plaintiffs have prevailed in ways that survived appeals. Could an almost
uniform record of losing nonetheless loose criminalization on firearms manufacturers in
major U. S. newspapers?
LITIGATION-HEAVY AND LITIGATION-LIGHT SAMPLES
To investigate reporting of efforts to reform the manufacture, marketing, and ownership
of firearms, we sampled newspaper coverage of firearm-reform efforts in legislatures,
courts, and elsewhere over the last decades. We determined to contrast newspaper coverage concerning firearm-reform in reports most and least concerned with specific lawsuits to assess the difference that intensive, episodic reports of lawsuits might make relative to features about issues. Articles that reported specific lawsuits sparely if at all
would provide a rough baseline of what we might expect of reports of firearms issues in
the absence of specific disputes or suits. Articles focused on specific lawsuits or settlements would, we presumed, concentrate tendencies in defining responsibilities and in
describing reformers so that we could begin to understand what differences litigation
might work in papers. This purposive sampling represents not thousands of newspaper
articles over decades but hundreds of articles least and most concerned with litigation.
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
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We drew our contrasting samples from Lexis Nexis Academic’s “Major Papers” subset
under “General News.”3 One sample sought articles that most featured litigation: suits,
threats of suits, or other negotiations “in the shadow of the courthouse.” Our contrasting
sample – the “Litigation-Light Sample” – collected articles, features, editorials, and commentaries that least mentioned lawsuits. Our sampling seems to have succeeded in creating suitable contrasts: coders identified 669 lawsuits explicit or implicit in the 437 articles of the Litigation-Heavy Sample [153 suits per 100 articles] but only eight suits total
among the 270 articles in the Litigation-Light Sample [3 suits per 100 articles].4
DID COVERAGE CRIMINALIZE?
Coverage of campaigns against firearms reiterated major features of coverage of crusades
against tobacco. Although characterizations of actors in the manufacturing or marketing
of firearms continued to be as neutral as characterizations of those striving to reform the
making or selling of firearms, most frames have assigned responsibility, even culpability,
disproportionately to the marketers and manufacturers of firearms.
Characterizations of Actors Are Almost Always Neutral Across Litigation-Heavy
and Litigation-Light Samples―Coders scored almost all references to actors as neutral,
neither pejorative nor meliorative enough to justify assigning valence. Coders detected
more than 32,000 actors in more than 700 articles between 15 March 1978 and 16 August
2005 [see Appendix A for coding directions]. As Table One shows, coders were unable
to hazard a judgment whether 93.3% of the actors had been characterized positively or
negatively. Litigation-heavy and litigation-light samples alike were dominated by references in which a coder detected an agent or actor but could not detect a positive or negative connotation or denotation. Neutral references [boldface in Table One] ranged from
expert witnesses and commentators [99.8% neutral] and defense attorneys [98.8% neutral] to attorneys for victims and plaintiffs [89.8% neutral] and owners, collectors, buyers,
and sellers of firearms [84.8% neutral].
Except for victims of firearms, non-neutral characterizations in Table One trended more
to the negative than to the positive, as totals at the bottom of the table disclose. Corporate defendants were the most frequently cited actors in each column, a result to be expected when across articles one reference in three pertained to the makers or marketers of
firearms. Still, corporate defendants constituted nearly half of all strongly negative,
weakly negative, and weakly positive characterizations and nearly 60% of all strongly
positive characterizations, so the frequencies with which companies and corporations
were cited pejoratively or melioratively greatly exceeded their overall incidence in the
samples. Collectors, buyers, and sellers of guns are by percentages described both more
pejoratively and more melioratively than corporations or other actors.
3
Appendix A provides the Lexis Nexis commands by which samples were created and reproduces the
coding instructions that operationalize “frames” and “actors” in this research. Please note that Lexis Nexis
Academic has since altered its interface.
4
Appendix B displays some useful, elementary frequencies for the resulting datasets.
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
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Table One – Actors Coded for Direction and Strength of Valence
Across Litigation-Heavy and Litigation-Light Samples
Count
Row %
Column %
Corporations
Government
Gun Owners,
Buyers, Sellers
Corporate Interest
Groups
Gun Victims
Public Interest
Groups
Judges
Sporting/Hunting
Groups
Experts
Victims’/Plaintiffs’
Attorneys
Corporations’
Attorneys
Totals
Neutral
9,840
90.5%
32.6%
9,871
96.0%
32.7%
2,477
84.8%
8.2%
1,814
94.2%
6.0%
1,844
98.0%
6.1%
1,665
95.9%
5.5%
654
97.8%
2.2%
609
98.2%
2.0%
515
99.8%
1.7%
450
89.8%
1.5%
435
98.8%
1.4%
30,175
93.3%
100%
Strength & Direction
Strong
Weak
Negative
Negative
170
681
1.6%
6.3%
46.8%
46.4%
68
293
0.7%
2.9%
18.7%
20.1%
82
294
2.8%
10.1%
22.6%
20.1%
17
79
0.9%
4.1%
4.7%
5.4%
0
13
0.7%
0.9%
14
44
0.8%
2.5%
3.9%
3.0%
0
11
1.6%
0.7%
1
1
0.2%
0.2%
0.2%
0.1%
1
0
0.2%
0.2%
9
39
1.8%
7.8%
2.5%
2.7%
1
5
0.2%
1.1%
0.2%
0.3%
363
1460
1.1%
4.5%
100%
100%
Weak
Positive
151
1%
47.6%
42
0.4%
13.2%
64
2.2%
20.2%
14
0.7%
4.4%
23
1.2%
7.3%
9
0.5%
2.8%
4
0.6%
1.3%
8
1%
2.5%
0
Strong
Positive
25
0.2%
59%
3
0.0%
7.1%
5
0.2%
11.9%
2
0.2%
4.8%
1
0.1%
2.4%
4
0.2%
9.5%
0
2
0.4%
0.6%
0
1
0.2%
2.4%
0
317
1%
100%
42
0.1%
100%
1
0.2%
2.4%
0
Nothing in these articles suggests that characterizations of actors in firearms reform litigation substantially favored defendants, plaintiffs, or others. Instead we found:
 Nearly all descriptions or identifications of agents or actors could not be coded
positive or negative.
 Burgeoning newspaper coverage, episodic reportage, and litigation-heavy articles
did not substantially vilify reformers or makers and marketers of firearms.
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
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 Non-neutral descriptions were so few that distributing them over time or dividing
them by Litigation-Heavy Sample and Litigation-Light Sample yielded little or no
useful information.
Newspaper people may take pride that almost all references to actors struck our coders as
neither markedly pejorative nor noticeably meliorative. Makers and marketers of firearms might be encouraged that they are seldom vilified as persons or as groups in newspapers’ reports. Firearms crusaders who hoped to tar corporate interest groups, defense
attorneys, or defendants will find few signs that they have made much progress via lawsuits, but they may be encouraged that they appear to have suffered few losses in ridicule.
Across Litigation-Heavy and Litigation-Light Samples, Anti-Firearms Frames
Greatly Outnumber Pro-Firearms Frames―Table Two arrays the six most common
frames from our two samples taken together in a manner that enables us to contrast
reform-friendly themes with themes more advantageous to firearms companies.5 Here
our findings include:
 Responsibilities of corporations and companies proved to be the modal responses
in our newspaper articles. Coders found 683 “Corporate Responsibility” frames
in 707 articles in litigation-heavy and litigation-light samples taken together.
These were nearly one-third of the six most common frames across samples.
 Disclosures of makers’ or marketers’ duplicity or deceits, when combined with
“Corporate Responsibility” frames, constituted a majority of all frames found. By
themselves, “Corporate Duplicity/Disclosures” frames made up about one-fifth
[22.5% or 495] of the frames that coders found most often.
 If we add “Public Costs” to “Corporate Responsibility” and “Corporate
Duplicity/Disclosures,” more than two frames out of every three found would
favor firearms-challengers or plaintiffs or disadvantage firearms manufacturers or
marketers. Claims that firearms cost communities in ways not included in the
price of firearms appeared 334 times [15.2%] by themselves.
 Relative to frames discussed supra, frames that might be advantageous to firearms
makers or sellers were sparse. “Individual Responsibility” frames [345 or 15.4%
5
Appendix B specifies definitions of all eight categories of frames and reproduces instructions from which
trained coders proceeded and supplies frequencies across all eight categories of frames.
“Shared Responsibility,” a complicated compromise perspective that might have assigned responsibility
to makers, marketers, owners, collectors, and customers alike, was almost negligible and so, with the truly
negligible “Racial Aspects,” is overlooked in the rest of this report. The paucity of any sharing of responsibilities among owners, collectors, makers, and marketers of guns may suit the conventions of newspapers
far more than it suits a realistic allocation of responsibility in society. Adversaries in courts and other
venues tend to emphasize themes that advantage advocates and their interests and to de-emphasize more
measured, more inclusive, and more complex perspectives. To convey accurately what adversaries are
claiming and to focus accounts of conflicts, reporters will tend to report partial rather than nuanced or
balanced perspectives.
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
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of all six frames] and “Attorneys’ Fees/Motives” frames [264 or 3.5%] together
account for less than one-fifth of all frames.
 “Government Responsibility”6 accounted for about one frame in eight [264 or
12%].
Table Two – Six Frames Across Litigation-Heavy and Litigation-Light Samples
Count
Of All
Frames
Cumulative
Percentage
Frames that advantage Reformers/Plaintiffs:
Corporate Responsibility
Firearms manufacturers & retailers held responsible for
safety, accuracy, reliability, & distribution.
Corporate Duplicity/Disclosures
683
31.0%
31.5%
Firearms manufacturers/retailers knowingly engaged in lax
or negligent practices.
Public Costs
495
22.5%
53.5%
Firearms cost communities money and agony.
334
15.2%
68.7%
Frames that might advantage Makers, Marketers, or Defendants:
Individual/User Responsibility
Gun owners held responsible for safe handling & proper use
of guns; accidents attributed to individual carelessness;
criminals blamed for violence.
Attorneys’ Fees / Motives
345
15.7%
84.4%
Lawyers or fees are a great problem or a greater problem
than firearms manufacturing or marketing.
79
3.6%
88.0%
264
12.0%
100%
2200
100.0%
Frames concerning the Responsibilities of Governments:
Government Responsibility
Government must protect citizens from gun violence and
corporations from frivolous lawsuits.
Totals
6
Because responsibility that might be shouldered by governments made up but one frame in eight, litigation against firearms manufacturers does not seem particularly effective in making the case for more government regulatory or compensatory action where citizens are injured by mass manufactured products.
This finding, incidentally. corresponds to results from tobacco crusades and disputes as well.
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In sum, 31.3% of frames across our two samples might not accrue against firearms marketers or makers. Perhaps it is needless to add that if “Government Responsibility”
frames were reckoned to assist neither crusaders nor companies, more than 78% of
frames coded would militate against firearms makers and sellers.7
We emphasize, however, that “Corporate Responsibility” need not represent a criminal
judgment by reporters or editorialists. Attributions of responsibility to firearms companies may set them back when they are civil defendants, but they do not make firearms
companies into criminal defendants. Indeed, even “Corporate Duplicity/Disclosures”
frames need not attribute felonious conduct. Rather we interpret these data to show that,
overall, reporting between 15 March 1978 and 16 August 2005 sullied companies’ reputations and moved companies away from innocent victims of preposterous suits and
toward blameworthy culprits apprehended at last.
Across Litigation-Heavy and Litigation-Light Samples, Anti-Firearms Frames Appear More Prominently than Pro-Firearms Frames―Reform-friendly themes not only appeared in articles far more often than themes more advantageous to firearms companies but appeared far earlier in articles from both of our samples. In Graph One we
combine frames into three categories: frames that tend to favor firearms’ opponents
[Corporate Responsibility + Corporate Duplicity/Disclosures + Public Costs]; frames
that tend to favor firearms’ defenders [Individual Responsibility + Attorneys’ Fess]; and
“Governmental Responsibility.” When we distribute these three sorts of frames across
the paragraphs in which the frames were found – headlines defined as 0; lead paragraphs
set to 1; and so on -- the results strike us as telling. Frames beneficial to defenders of
firearms companies and frames assigning responsibility to government(s) hover below
25, meaning that those frames total fewer than 25 in the headlines or lead paragraphs of
articles. Frames beneficial for attackers of firearms companies, by contrast, never sum to
fewer than 25 until the 19th paragraph overall.8 Pro-opponent frames make up about twothirds of all frames detected but about three-quarters of all lead paragraphs and more than
three-quarters of second paragraphs. In sum, pro-challenger frames that appeared much
more often [Table Two] also appeared much closer to the beginning of articles.
As Crimtort Strategies and Tactics Increase, Anti-Firearms Frames Become More
Prominent Absolutely and Relatively Across Litigation-Heavy and Litigation-Light
Samples―Differences in prominence between anti-firearms frames and other frames are
more pronounced 1997-2005 than before 1997. Graph Two shows that anti-firearms
frames stand out in the earlier period but not overwhelmingly. From 1997 on, the
governmental responsibility frame and the combination of “Individual Responsibility”
and “Attorneys’ Fees” once again are overshadowed by frames that militate against the
interests of firearms makers and marketers.
If we exclude “Governmental Responsibility,” the sum of “Corporate Responsibility,” “Corporate
Duplicity/Disclosures,” and “Public Costs” frames [1512] would form 78.1% of the five frames [n=1936].
8
We except the headlines from this description.
7
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Graph One – Placement of Frames within Articles
Articles Focused on Lawsuits Disadvantaged Firearms Defendants Far More than
Articles Not Focused on Lawsuits―The perhaps paradoxic findings above – frames
strongly favored those who challenged firearms but characterizations of agents or actors
favored neither those who challenged nor those who defended – becomes at least slightly
more understandable when we take into account frames in coverage of specific suits.
Pie Chart One shows that articles focused on one or more specific lawsuits furnished far
more frames inimical to firearms merchants or defendants than did articles not concerned
with specific lawsuits. We have “exploded” the slice associated with “Government
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Graph Two – Placement of Frames within Articles by Periods
15
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Pie Chart One – Six Frames by Litigation-Heavy Sample & Litigation-Light Sample
446
…
112
273
540
1
143
152
61
Litigation-Light Sample (n=499)
49
93
Litigation Emphasized?
Litigation-Heavy Sample (n=1701)
252
Companies'
Deceptions Only
Responsibility
Companies' Only
Public Costs Frames
Only
Govtal Responsibility
Only
Attys' Fees/Motives
Only
Responsibility
Personal Only
Responsibility” to emphasize that “Government Responsibility” frames were absolutely
more numerous in the Litigation-Light Sample than in the Litigation-Heavy Sample
despite the latter sample’s featuring more than three times as many frames. Please notice
as well that:
 Taken together, “Corporate Responsibility,” “Corporate Duplicity/Disclosures,”
and “Public Costs” frames made up a slight majority of the Litigation-Light
Sample, while those three pro-challenger frames constituted a far greater majority
[1259 frames to 442 frames not advantageous to challengers or plaintiffs] of the
Litigation-Heavy Sample.
 Slices denoting “Corporate Responsibility” and “Individual Responsibility” were
comparable across the two samples.
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 “Corporate Duplicity/Disclosures” frames in the Litigation-Heavy Sample
outnumber those in the Litigation-Light Sample more than nine to one and
constitute more than a quarter of Litigation-Heavy Sample frames but less than
one-tenth of Litigation-Light Sample frames.
Pie Chart Two – Six Frames by Litigation-Heavy Sample and Litigation-Light
Sample and by Period
Before or After 1/1/1997?
Before 1/1/1997 (n=501)
After 12/31/1996 9 (n=1699)
389
…
57
19
93
4
269
450
90
29
32
1
82
0
61
65
87
45
16
Litigation-Light Sample (n=499)
20
61
Litigation Emphasized?
Litigation-Heavy Sample
(n=1701)
217
35
1
Companies'
Deceptions Only
Responsibility
Companies' Only
Public Costs Frames
Only
Govtal Responsibility
Only
Attys' Fees/Motives
Only
Responsibility
Personal Only
Frames in Articles Published After 1996 Differed from Frames in Articles Published
Prior to 1997 Only Slightly―We expected the Litigation-Heavy and Litigation-Light
Samples to incorporate “period effects,” the very different contexts based on increasingly
“criminal” orientations, strategies, and tactics. We have “exploded” frames coded as
“Corporate Responsibility” to note how that frame dominated before 1997 among
lawsuit-heavy articles. Other noteworthy period effects from Pie Chart Two include:
 “Public Costs” frames greatly increase in Period Two relative to Period One
among Litigation-Heavy Sample articles but decrease substantially, relatively, and
absolutely from Period One to Period Two in the Litigation-Light Sample.
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 Articles featuring “Corporate Duplicity/Disclosures” frames were nearly constant
across periods and samples and smaller than “Corporate Responibility” slices..
 “Attorneys’ Fees” frames crop up almost exclusively in latter-period, LitigationHeavy Sample articles.
Municipal Plaintiffs Highlight Cumulative Growth in “Corporate Duplicity/Disclosures” Frames ―A look at Pie Chart Three discloses a few visually grabbing differences among articles bereft of specific lawsuits. We have “exploded” the “Corporate
Duplicity/Disclosures” slice to draw attention to its absolute and relative increase as the
eye moves from the lower left [Litigation-Light articles without mention of municipal
plaintiffs] to the upper left [Litigation-Heavy articles without mention of municipal plaintiffs] and thence to the upper right [Litigation-Heavy articles with municipal plaintiffs
mentioned]. This result signifies, we believe, the compound influence of articles that
focus on lawsuits and mention municipal plaintiffs’ suits.
Pie Chart Three – Six Frames by Litigation-Heavy Sample and Litigation-Light
Sample and by Presence/Absence of Municipal Plaintiff
Municipal PLAINTIFF in ARTICLE?
No City Plaintiff in Article
(n=1379)
133
186
260
56
…
51
61
67
206
0
1
92
2
0
1
141
0
148
4
61
Litigation-Light Sample (n=499)
49
Litigation Emphasized?
255
285
Litigation-Heavy Sample
(n=1701)
119
City Plaintiff in Article (n=993)
Companies'
Deceptions Only
Responsibility
Companies' Only
Public Costs Frames
Only
Govtal Responsibility
Only
Attys' Fees/Motives
Only
Responsibility
Personal Only
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Graph Three – Pro-Plaintiff, Pro-Defendant, and Governmental Responsibility
Frames by Year of Publication of Article
Pro-Plaintiff Frames “Crest” 1997-2001― Graph Three reveals the limited period
within which themes contrary to the interests of firearms companies – deceit or duplicity
by companies or their representatives, assignment of responsibility to companies rather
than individuals or governments, and costs of marketing or manufacturing firearms
allegedly borne by states or localities – dominated coverage. Until 1994 these three
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frames were neck and neck. Pro-plaintiff themes edged ahead 1994-1997, then outdistanced the other two frames 1997-2001.9 We encourage readers to notice as well that:
 News articles disseminated each sort of frame relatively and absolutely seldom
prior to the 1990s.
 Dissemination of themes, especially themes favoring reformers and plaintiffs,
increased noticeably before municipalities started to sue firearms companies but
at about the time that governmental entities started to sue tobacco companies.
 Before and after the “crest” around 1999, “Individual Responsibility,”
“Attorneys’ Fees,” and “Government Responsibility” frames draw modest
attention.
Articles that mentioned tobacco or tobacco litigation were about twice as likely to emphasize pro-plaintiff themes as articles that did not.
DID NEWSPAPERS’ CRIMINALIZATION CREST RATHER THAN CREEP?
The foregoing findings support an interpretation of “Cresting Criminalization” far more
than “Creeping Criminalization.” Criminalization – the move away from purely civil
liability toward some mix of civil, quasi-criminal, and flat-out criminal culpability –
seems evident in the coverage of newspapers that we have reviewed. Criminalization of
firearms manufacturers and marketers ramified through episodic, feature, and editorial
copy, we have found. The increases in criminalization of firearms, however, did not
crawl upward; it leaped skyward. To adjust the metaphor: while we found last year that
the tide of tobacco coverage swelled over many years (McCann, Haltom, and Fisher
2009), we found supra that a wave of firearms coverage peaked in far fewer years.
We explain the criminalization of firearms products much as we explained the criminalization of tobacco products. If they reported on challenges or lawsuits at all, reporters
were bound to convey the major allegations of challengers or plaintiffs. As challengers
and plaintiffs adjusted their claims from allegations of liability toward accusations of criminality, challengers’ and plaintiffs’ frames were bound to appear – as we have shown,
early and often – in reports and features. Against these less civil and more criminal
claims, the usually defenses of challenged corporations and accused defendants were of
less and less utility. Those who misused firearms were individually responsible for their
crimes, but “Individual Responsibility” for deaths and injuries did not exonerate or insulate manufacturers or marketers for their misdeeds. Moreover, litigative discovery and
other revelations meant that even crimtort defendants who dodged adverse judgments in
court were liable to adverse judgments among attentive citizens. The best for which makers and sellers or firearms could hope, it seems, was the Scottish Verdict: “Not Proved.”
9
Of course, articles published between 1994 and 2001 constituted about 60% our samples. If instead we
used arithmetic averages, the line-graph would look very different. Please see Appendix D. We believe
that representing the spike of litigation 1997-2001 conveys the frames that would reach newspaper readers.
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Still, any explanations must take into account criminalization, creeping or cresting,
worked by crusades against Big Tobacco. We cannot gainsay the possibility that 1990s
lawsuits so maligned Big Tobacco that some of the results we report above may follow
from comparisons between suppliers of nicotine and firearms.
That said, crusaders against firearms could not win in courtrooms and could not lose in
newspapers.
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REFERENCES
Haltom, William, and Michael McCann. 2004. Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and
the Litigation Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kagan, Robert A. 2001. Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Koenig, Thomas H., and Michael L. Rustad. 2004. “Toxic Torts, Politics, and
Environmental Justice: The Case for Crimtorts.” Law & Policy 26(2):189-207.
Koenig, Thomas H., and Michael L. Rustad. 1998. “ ‘Crimtorts’ as Corporate Just
Deserts." University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 31:289–352.
Lytton, Timothy D. 2005. Suing the Gun Industry: A Battle at the Crossroads of Gun
Control and Mass Torts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lytton, Timothy D. 2000. “Tort Claims Against Gun Manufacturers for Crime-Related
Injuries: Defining a Suitable Role for the Tort System in Regulating the Firearms
Industry.” Missouri Law Review 65(1):1-89. Winter.
Maine, Henry James Sumner. 1861. Ancient Law: Its Connection With the Early
History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: John Murray.
McCann, Michael, William Haltom, and Shauna Fisher. 2009. “Criminalizing Big
Tobacco: Legal Mobilization and the Politics of Responsibility for Health Risks
in the United States,” Western Political Science Association.
McIntosh, Wayne V., and Cynthia L. Cash. 2009. Multi-Party Litigation: The Strategic
Context. Vancouver, B. C.: UBC Press.
Simons, Kenneth W. 2008. “The Crime/Tort Distinction: Legal Doctrine and Normative
Perspectives.” Widener Law Journal 17:720-732.
Williamson, Chet. 2007. “Murder and the Gun Maker: A Local Case is at the Heart of
the National Debate on Firearms.” Worcester Magazine 18 January.
www.rickross.com/reference/unif/unif301.html; last visited on 23 March 2010.
Youngdale, Elizabeth. 2008. “Reviewing the Law Reviews.” Defense Counsel Journal
(October 1).
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APPENDIX A – HOW SAMPLES WERE CREATED AND CODED
Litigation Sampling
In “Lexis-Nexis Academic,” in the “General News” and “Major Papers” libraries, enter in
the first search-term box the expression (gun or arm or weapon or firearm or handgun)
w/1 (maker or manufacturer or industry) and click “Headline, Lead Paragraph(s), Terms”
in the box to the right; use an “AND” to connect to the second search-term box, into
which insert the expression lawsuit or litig! or sue! or suit and leave “Headline, Lead
Paragraph(s), Terms” as above.
Have Lexis-Nexis Academic sort the hits by “relevance” within each of ten periods and
select as many hits from the top of the resulting list as the period’s share of total hits 1971
-2005.
Out of the 501 articles thus selected, we eliminated 31 from non-U. S. papers, which left
470 articles for the U. S. Litigation Sub-sample.
Non-Litigation Sampling
In “Lexis-Nexis Academic,” in the ”General News” and ”Major Papers” libraries, enter in
the first search-term box the expression (gun or arm or weapon or firearm or handgun)
w/1 (maker or manufacturer or industry) and click “Headline, Lead Paragraph(s), Terms”
in the box to the right; use an “AND” to connect to the second search-term box, into
which insert the expression (gun or arm or weapon or firearm or handgun) w/1 (control or
regulation or law! or legislation) and leave “Headline, Lead Paragraph(s), Terms” as
above; use an “AND NOT” to connect to the third search-term box, litigation or suits or
lawsuits in “Full Text”.
Have “LexisNexis Academic” sort the hits by “relevance” within each period and select
the appropriate number of articles to sum to 350. Excluding 48 articles from nondomestic newspapers, 303 domestic NON-litigation articles remained.
GUN CONTROL CODING INSTRUCTIONS
General Instructions:
1) Write your name at the top of the article.
2) Read the article all the way through.
3) Read the article again, this time legibly coding REFERENCES to the major
obesity ACTORS in the right-hand margin. As you do this, draw a horizontal
dividing line across the margin for each paragraph, indicating which codes pertain
to which paragraph.
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4) Read the article a third time, this time legibly coding the interpretive FRAMES in
the left-hand margin. As you do so, also draw a line across the left margin for
each paragraph, separating codes for that paragraph from the rest of the article.
5) With a highlighter, mark the first mention of each specific lawsuit.
6) If the article draws a connection between gun control and the campaign against
tobacco, write “TOB: Yes” at the top of the article. Otherwise, write “TOB: No”.
7) Decide which one of the article categories best fits the article, and write its name
at the top of the article.
Note: The marked up article will be the only record of your work, and it is therefore
imperative that you do not lose or misplace marked-up articles once you have coded
them. We must preserve your marked-up articles. When you have finished coding a
batch of articles, bring them to the LSJ advising office and leave them with Mark W. We
will then enter the data into a computer directly from the margins of your marked up
articles. For that reason, it’s important that you write legibly, so that we can properly
interpret your work.
Detailed Instructions:
1) Write your name at the top of the article. You do not need to write your full name,
but you do need to write it legibly. No autographs, please. Just write your name so we
can read it.
2) Begin by reading the article all the way through, without coding. You should try
to get a sense for where the article is going. Sometimes the context of a term or reference
will change its meaning; this is your opportunity to read for context and meaning, without
worrying about coding.
3) Now, read the article again. This time, you will be looking for references to the
major actors frequently mentioned in gun coverage. You should note each distinct
reference to an actor. There may be more than one in a sentence. When you find a
reference, take the following steps.
i.
In the Right-hand margin, write the abbreviation for that actor (listed
below). For a gun manufacturer/retailer, write C (for “corporation”). For a
Senator, Representative or the President, write G (for “government”), and so on.
ii.
Decide whether or not the reference makes a positive or negative judgment or
attribution about that actor. If no attribution is made, if it is simply a “neutral”
reference to an actor (i.e. “Roehm is one of the major manufacturers of
inexpensive handguns sold in the country.”), then write a Checkmark after the
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actor abbreviation. For Roehm, you would write: C√ and you would then move
on to the next reference in the text.
iii.
If a positive or negative attribution or judgment is made, code the following
characteristics.
a. Polarity. Indicate whether the judgment is positive or negative by
writing + (for positive) or – (for negative) next to the actor abbreviation.
The common negatives will refer to negligence, irresponsibility, greed,
callousness, public indifference, or stupidity. The positives will refer to
responsible action, productivity and justifiable profit, contributions to
safety or justice, and “common sense.”
b. Power. Once you have determined that a positive or negative
attribution has been made, you must also determine the “power” of that
attribution. For an indirect, implicit, or mild reference, write the number
1 by the actor abbreviation. For a direct, explicit, or strong reference,
write the number 2. A “soft hearted liberal” or some one who is “antirights” is a -2; someone who is “affiliated with too many liberal causes” or
“affiliated with too many conservative causes” is a -1. A corporation that
“is indifferent to the deaths it causes” or “hides behind the Second
Amendment” or is “only committed to profits” is a -2; a corporation that
“makes millions of dollars in profits and jobs” is a -1. A corporation that
“works hard to educate the public” or ”works for enforcement of gun
registration” laws is a +2; while a manufacturer that “is longstanding” and
“concerned about issues of weapons abuse” is a +1.
iv.
Once you have coded all the references to major actors in a given paragraph,
draw a dividing line in the right margin between this section of your coding and
the rest of your work. Coding for each paragraph should be separated from the
rest of your work by these dividing lines.
The following is a list of major actors to look for, a brief description of how some of
those actors might be described, and the abbreviation you should use in your coding.
Code
Actor
CS
Consumers
V
Victims
Description
Gun owners/buyers. Can be good and bad people, those who use
guns to kill, those who use guns responsibly, collectors, or those
who urge more regulation/bans. Can be pro or anti guns. Indeed, we
are interested in how the general public is portrayed on the gun
issue. Are people rational, informed, responsible or otherwise?
Persons and/or their families or other people harmed by guns or by
the absence or shortage of guns.
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C
Corporations
VA
Victims’
Attorneys
CA
Corporations
’ Attorneys
E
Experts
PIG
Public
Interest
Groups
CIG
Corporate
Interest
Groups
S
Sporting and
Hunting
Groups/Reps
J
Judges
G
Government
26
Makers and sellers of firearms. Look for allegations of negligence,
irresponsible distribution, and/or greed (profit-driven) as negatives
and for positive remarks suggesting they bear no responsibility for
the carelessness of others, fulfill protection and security needs,
create jobs or otherwise help the economy, and/or only respond to
market.
Lawyer-spokespeople for individual victims and/or their families.
Look for negative references to greed, opportunism, or zealotry,
and/or positive references to “tireless fighters for safety,” common
sense, or the public interest.
Lawyer-spokespeople for firearm manufacturers and sellers.
Look for negative references to greed, opportunism, reckless
disregard for health or honesty. Positive references might refer to
them as knowledgeable authorities or advocates of “common sense”
or agents of moderation and protection for rights.
Authorities identified as scholars, scientists, social scientists, legal
experts, or researchers. Positives will cite experts as informed, fair,
insightful, and/or concerned for honesty or health. Negatives will
state that experts tend to be self-interested, deluded, hired guns,
and/or political.
Critics of the status quo and gun manufacturers/retailers. These may
include the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the Coalition
to Stop Gun Violence. Positives will cite groups, advocates, or
leaders as informed, fair, insightful. Negatives will state that
groups, advocates, or leaders tend to be greedy, deluded, and/or
ideological or political.
Defending status quo and/or gun manufacturers/retailers. Gun
lobby, gun rights organizations. These groups may include
organizations like the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of
America, and industry trade associations. Same types of attributes as
Public Interest Groups.
Generally invoke Second Amendment and defend access to guns for
recreation by good, responsible people. Positives will cite groups’
efforts to educate and train people on safe/responsible gun use, for
example. Negatives will accuse groups of being political and/or
ideological.
Who may issue rulings in gun lawsuits. Positives will reference a
wise or reasonable judge. Negatives will refer to “activist” or “out
of control” judges, or judges with questionable mental acumen.
Individual government actors, politicians, or government agencies.
Positives will refer to government’s “common sense” and welltimed approach to gun policy. Negatives may decry the lack of
action by government, or accuse politicians of working for special
interests.
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4) Read the article again. This time, you will be looking for interpretive frames.
These “general interpretive frames” are themes that inform the article storylines. Read
the article, and mark these frames in the left-hand margin. Mark each reference to a
frame, but no more than one reference per sentence. If more than one reference to a
frame appears in a single sentence, code either as “SR” (Shared Responsibility, below) if
appropriate or code the first-mentioned frame. Note that these references are not
evaluated directly for positive or negative implications, although they often connote
values. These refer to the thematic ways issues are defined. If five references in three
sentences refer to blaming gun owners for being careless, mark down IR three times in
the margin.
The following is a list of interpretive frames to look for, a brief description of the
frame, and the abbreviation you should use in your coding.
Code
IR
Frame
Individual/User
Responsibility
CR
Corporate
Responsibility
GR
Government
Responsibility
CD
Corporate Duplicity/Disclosure
SR
Shared
Responsibility
AF
Attorney’s Fees
and Motives
PC
Public Costs
RE
Racial causes or
implications of
harm by guns
Description
Gun owners are responsible for safe gun handling and proper use;
individual negligence and carelessness are to blame for accidents;
criminals to blame for violent actions; “guns don’t shoot people,
people shoot people”
Firearm manufacturers and retailers are responsible for ensuring
the safety, accuracy, reliability of their products; for controlling
the distribution of firearms; for making/selling products suitable
only for “legitimate” purposes.
May appear in multiple forms. Government has a duty to protect
citizens from crime and gun violence. Or government has a duty
to protect manufacturers from frivolous lawsuits. Or simply that
government has a duty to do something about guns.
Firearm manufacturers/retailers knowingly engage in lax or
negligent sales practices.
Shared responsibility mixed in one claim – manufacturer/retailer
responsible for safety and distribution, gun owner responsible for
safe handling and proper use, both at once. This frame
emphasizes both Individual Responsibility and Corporate
Responsibility.
Includes the belief that the real problems come from lawyers
or/and money. This frame puts the focus on attorneys rather than
gun manufacturers and retailers.
Public costs of gun violence, treating gunshot victims . . . “nation
riddled by gun violence”
Indirect or direct efforts to distinguish responsible users of guns
(white) from unsafe users (minority, inner city, crimogenic). Will
often go with the IR frame at top.
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5) As you code, highlight the first mention of each specific lawsuit you find by
marking it with a highlighter. You do not need to highlight the same case over and over
in a single article. Simply mark the first reference to each individual case, so that all
cases in a given article are each highlighted once.
6) If the article makes a connection between gun control and the public health
campaign against tobacco, or makes other analogies to tobacco, write “TOB: Yes” at
the top of the article. Otherwise, write “TOB: No”.
7) Finally, determine which one of the following article categories best describes the
majority of the article, and write its name at the top of the article.

Editorial: Official opinion of newspaper, as documented on editorial page.

Thematic: About gun lawsuits, or gun control, gun violence, or firearms in
general; the “big picture.”

Episodic: Specific incidents or sets of incidents within a larger context; stories
about individuals

Other: Columnists, letters to the editor, opinion pieces by other writers that do
not reflect the official opinion of the newspaper.
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
29
APPENDIX B -- FREQUENCIES
Articles Coded
Frames Coded
Actors Coded
Non-Litigation
Sample
270
520
10,916
Litigation
Sample
437
1,723
21,461
Litigation & NonLitigation Sample
707
2,243*
32,378
* Coders found 129 Articles without discernible frames.
Episodic Articles
Frames
1,395 62.2%
Actors
21,836 67.4%
Thematic Articles
352
15.7%
5,725
17.7%
Editorial Articles
349
15.6%
3,354
10.4%
Other Articles
147
6.6%
1,453
4.5%
100.1% 32,378
100%
Totals 2,243
Frames
Litigation
Non-Litigation
Episodic Articles 1,172 68.0% 223 42.9%
Thematic Articles
301 17.5%
51
9.8%
Editorial Articles
206 12.0% 143 27.5%
Other Articles
44
2.6% 103 19.8%
Totals 1,723 100.0% 520 100.0%
Actors
Litigation
Non-Litigation
15,844 73.8%
5,991 54.9%
3,641 17.0%
2,084 19.1%
1,705
7.9%
1,651 15.1%
273
1.3%
1,190 10.9%
21,461 100.0% 10,916 100.0%
Count
Corporate Responsibility
Corporate Duplicity or Disclosure
Individual/User Responsibility
Public Costs
Government Responsibility
Attorneys’ Fees / Motives
Shared Responsibilities (mix of individual and corporate
responsibility)
Minority Causes / Implications (distinctions based on
race, ethnicity, or other demographics)
Totals
683
495
345
334
264
79
37
Of All
Frames
30.5%
22.1%
15.4%
14.9%
11.8%
3.5%
1.6%
Cumulative
Percentage
30.5%
52.5%
67.9%
82.8%
94.6%
98.1%
99.7%
6
0.3%
100%
2243*
100.1%
* Of 707 articles [437 in the Litigation-Heavy Sample, 270 in the Litigation-Light
Sample], 129 [34 in the Litigation-Heavy Sample and 95 in the Litigation-Light Sample]
featured no frames that coders could detect.
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
30
APPENDIX C
Major Newspapers in Lexis Nexis
Lexis Nexis “Major Papers”
New York Times
Washington Post
Boston Globe
Atlanta Journal and Constitution
San Francisco Chronicle
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Chicago Sun-Times
[New Orleans] Times-Picayune
USA Today
Houston Chronicle
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Columbus Dispatch
San Diego Union-Tribune
[Boston] Christian Science Monitor
Buffalo News
Tampa Tribune
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Denver Post
Seattle Times
St. Petersburg Times
[New York] Daily News
[Minneapolis] Star Tribune
Boston Herald
[Denver] Rocky Mountain News
[Portland] Oregonian
Sacramento Bee
Omaha World Herald
Los Angeles Times
San Antonio Express-News
Journal of Commerce
Count of
Frames
467
308
218
204
142
142
113
90
73
72
69
51
41
41
37
33
33
32
31
31
26
24
21
18
16
14
9
6
5
3
2
Totals
2372
Percent
of Frames
19.7
13.0
9.2
8.6
6.0
6.0
4.8
3.8
3.1
3.0
2.9
2.2
1.7
1.7
1.6
1.4
1.4
1.3
1.3
1.3
1.1
1.0
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.1
100
Cumulative
Percent
19.7
32.7
41.9
50.5
56.5
62.4
67.2
71.0
74.1
77.1
80.0
82.2
83.9
85.6
87.2
88.6
90.0
91.3
92.6
93.9
95.0
96.0
96.9
97.7
98.4
98.9
99.3
99.6
99.8
99.9
100.0
100
Litigation, Reputation, and Vilification: How Gun Activists Cannot Lose for Winning
William Haltom & Michael McCann
Western Political Science Association 2 April 2010
APPENDIX D
31