by Ann Jones

About the author: Ann Jones is the author of Women Who Kill and Next Time, She’ll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It.

December 23, 1993. I open a copy of USA Today to the headline “Holiday Rush on Firearms.” I read that “legions of Americans” are buying guns for Christmas, spurred by “a fear of crime and a dread of gun control.” Afraid that passage of the Brady Bill is only the first step toward gun-control legislation that will leave them unarmed in a nation of gunslingers, the legions are giving gun dealers what one calls their best sales year in two decades. Santa Claus, on the other hand, is having a hard time. On the same day, the New York...