Increasingly, the United States appears to be two nations when it comes to gun control. For instance, even as President Obama attempted to mobilize congressional support for universal background checks and for a federal ban on assault weapons following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, many states in the South and West loosened rather than tightened rules about gun ownership and use. Others—mostly liberal Democratic bastions—passed a battery of new restrictions and controls over who could buy firearms and introduced new penalties for criminal use. One of the most comprehensive of these reform efforts, and the subject of James B. Jacobs and Zoe Fuhr’s sobering book, The Toughest Gun Control Law in the Nation, was New York’s 2013 SAFE Act—pioneering gun control legislation supported by Governor Andrew Cuomo that introduced a comprehensive series of new regulations. In the debate between those in favor of restrictive firearms regulations and gun rights groups like the National Rifle Administration (NRA), policy efforts appear as simply another manifestation of US political polarization.

But what of the regulatory efforts themselves? As Jacobs and Fuhr convincingly demonstrate, the SAFE Act has largely been a failure, arguing that multiple “implementation and enforcement problems”—including problems paying for new systems required to monitor compliance, coordinating information across various bureaucracies involved in enforcement, and adjudicating jurisdictional responsibility—arose in the aftermath of its passage. These failures, in turn, are due to the “design flaws, decentralized administration, lack of leadership, lack of funding, and high rates of noncompliance” associated with the law itself and with the environment in which it was enacted (p. 196). Most of the time, proponents (and opponents) of such control efforts focus on the need to establish and pass regulations, not on the manner in which they are enforced. But “if gun control laws are to be more than political theater,” the authors note, “there must be effective implementation and enforcement” (p. 6).

The Toughest Gun Control Law in the Nation makes this case by exploring each of the SAFE Act’s major regulatory initiatives. These include an expanded restriction on the purchase of assault weapons (as well as new registration requirements), a ban on magazines capable of storing more than 10 rounds, an attempt to close the “gun show loophole” by requiring all firearms transactions to include background checks, the creation of reporting requirements for mental health workers to county directors of Community Services to prevent possession of firearms by mentally ill people, a provision mandating the revocation of firearm licenses in response to certain protection orders, a requirement that those in possession of firearms licenses (mostly for handguns) recertify them, a limit on the ability to sell ammunition to federally licensed firearms dealers, and enhanced penalties for certain gun-related crimes. With each regulation, the authors show, implementation and enforcement have fallen short. The database of those suffering mental illness reported by medical professionals, for example, remains inaccessible by the licensed sales agents responsible for conducting background checks. And, although the SAFE Act bans large-capacity magazines, the efficacy of such a ban remains disputable, and opportunities for evasion abound. The effort to require handgun owners to recertify, in turn, was left to a State Police force lacking the manpower and resources necessary for enforcement. The act’s redefinition of assault weapons relies on primarily aesthetic rather than functional features, undercutting the credibility and coherence of its intended effect. And so on.

Despite the occasional factual inaccuracy—the Las Vegas shooting of 2017, rather than the Orlando nightclub shooting of 2016, was the “most deadly mass shooting in American history” (p. 161), and Faisal Hussain rather than Alek Minassian was responsible for the Danforth shooting in Toronto (p. 49)—the book presents a wealth of evidence to make its case. The authors demonstrate in exhaustive detail exactly how difficult it is to actually implement complex legislation, particularly when it is passed in an expedited way and in an environment of considerable political opposition. Moreover, it serves as an important theoretical reminder to political scientists that policy making is rarely the same as policy enacting; it is also a compelling example of how to trace, in a granular way, the inadvertent byproducts of legislation in actual enforcement settings. Indeed, for proponents of restrictive firearms regulation, the authors’ thorough catalog of inadequacies in one of the most significant pieces of gun control legislation ever devised, inclusive of a wishlist of policy adoptions like universal background checks and gun bans, and fully backed by the state’s gubernatorial administration and a large progressive political coalition, should force a reconsideration of whether policy change should even be a focus of reform efforts.

However, cataloging is not the same as explaining. And it is here that, despite its many strengths, the book falls somewhat short. The authors do provide a series of reasons why the SAFE Act remains a failed project, including leadership, administrative and design problems, and inadequate resources (pp. 196–200). These are common problems confronting much legislation, so it is not particularly clear if there is anything specific to gun control that would exacerbate these kinds of concerns. However, two of the other reasons sketched out by the authors—high rates of noncompliance with the regulations as passed and legal contestation of its provisions by gun rights supporters, mental health providers, and county governments, which were expected to bear the brunt of the enforcement load (pp. 16–20)—seem especially promising in explaining what, exactly, makes gun control so difficult to achieve.

Yet the authors do not really explore why the politics of guns, in particular, is so likely to promote noncompliance. The book does not discuss in any detail the question of American gun culture or firearms manufacturing lobbying, nor do the authors embed their research in a larger discussion of the underlying social structural or scope conditions facilitating or undermining gun control efforts (a short discussion on pp. 3–4 is the only exception). They claim, for instance, that “the governor’s [Cuomo’s] staff did not anticipate the breadth and intensity of post-enactment opposition to the SAFE Act” (p. 25), but this seems difficult to accept given the deeply polarized nature of the issue in US political culture. Moreover, while “New York has been a strong gun control state since the early twentieth century” and is certainly “one of the nation’s bluest states” (p. 17), it also contains a huge rural contingent and is the historical home of the NRA, as well as ground zero for some of the most hotly contested debates over gun regulation since the early twentieth century, as Patrick Charles details in his excellent Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry (2018). Cuomo must have been aware of this, leading one to wonder whether “expressive politics” (p. 191) might have been the primary intent of the law in the first place. The book would also have benefited from a discussion of how generalizable the case of New York really would be to other prime regulatory experiments in Connecticut or California, as well as an exploration of the larger political strategy involved in its passage on the part of the Cuomo administration.

Nevertheless, this book ought to lead to a reckoning on the part of supporters of restrictive gun regulation. Kristin Goss diagnosed the pathologies of the gun control movement in her 2009 book, Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control, as a consequence of lack of local mobilization, an unclear message, and a focus on federal-elite politics rather than local government. Since then, groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Never Again have begun to rectify some of these organizational and messaging problems, making it possible to imagine a political counterweight to the gun rights movement. As Jacobs and Fuhr clearly demonstrate, however, without taking into consideration implementation and enforcement, these efforts will never be enough. The United States might appear to be two nations with regard to the regulatory response to firearms, but even for those in progressive enclaves, easy access to guns and opportunities for evasion abound.