Welcome to the University of Wyoming Firearms Research Center (FRC) Forum. This Forum is the first of multiple website features that we will be rolling out over the coming months on this new, updated site. The forum’s goal, like the Center’s, is to be a cross-disciplinary discussion platform of all things firearms. It aims to be focal point for practitioners, scholars, policy types, and everyone else who’s work touches the field. At a time when the national conversation around firearms is at a low point, the FRC seeks to be a place for civil, fact-based, and nonpartisan discourse.
In this vein of dialogue and collaboration, the first set of Forum posts will be by participants in the Fifth Annual Firearms Law Works-in-Progress Workshop held on June 7th and 8th at Texas A&M University School of Law. The workshop is an annual event put on jointly, on a home-and-away basis, with the Duke Center for Firearms Law. This year was the FRC’s turn to host. In the interest of including as many voices from as many places as possible, we partnered with Texas A&M to hold the event in Fort Worth. Each year, each Center invites about half of the scholars whose papers we workshop. Although we’ve taken to calling it the Firearms Law workshop, works approaching the study of firearms from the legal, historical, design, economic, philosophical, sociological, or any other perspectives are welcome. Indeed, two years ago, when we hosted the event at the Cody Firearms Museum in Cody, WY, we a graphic designer attended to present his storyboard for an inner-city firearms safety course. The workshop’s goal is not merely to provide engaged and supportive feedback to other scholars, but to engage one another across divides. As in past years, we succeeded.
As for the website, in the coming weeks, we hope to post a Brief Bank, a Suicide Prevention Resource page, links to FRC leadership’s scholarship.
The brief bank will include PDFs of all brief filed in firearm cases—broadly understood to include more than Second Amendment cases—in the Supreme Court since 2008 and in the federal Courts of Appeals since 2020, through the end of May of this year. Earlier and more recent cases will also be added.
The Suicide Prevention Resource page will include suicide facts and awareness information, as well as a novel section on safe out-of-home storage. The latter, in short, will be a resource for firearm owners who wish to store their guns with an FFL or other identified location in times of crisis, and without fear of being unable to get their guns back.
With that, we welcome your input, and invite you to enjoy reading.
-George Mocsary and Ashley Hlebinsky