The Gun Effect

Was watching the third part in the series, got about halfway through and had to turn it off.

It is obvious that A&E are out to paint guns as the Devils work. They go on and on to list every name of everybody who has ever been shot with a gun in vivid detail.

That combined with last night's decidedly biased view of the NRA I am no longer going to watch anymore. They aren't going to stop there. The next two night focus in on more gun violence and kids with guns. (Why don't they just do a bit about how the gun has destroyed God while they are at it?)

I own a gun and won't hesitate to use it to defend my liberty in spite of the fact that gunshot wounds are nasty, bloody and painful. A friend of mine was shot in the Bronx with a .22 in the hip. Wasn't particularly pleasant. Did it stop me from buying a gun? Hell no. If they can shoot me I want to be able to shoot back. Call me crazy.

A&E has lost this viewer. I've made up my mind about the Second Amendment and I think it shouldn't be raped anymore that it has already been. A&E must have allegiance to some anti-gun lobbyist because although the series started out balanced it is painfully clear that they mean to portay guns in the worst possible way. Sorry but sometimes you got to pay a price for freedom and if that price is an armed America then consider me locked and loaded.

-- (AtlantaAS@aol.com), June 30, 1999

Answers

I take it they didn't mention any of the studies that show the benefits of firearms to society. This is why I wonder why people say the debate is over on private ownership of guns. I would think that for a debate to have occured, both sides would get to present their view.

But it's the same story. Evidence emerges that we are right, it never happens. The gun control types make a claim, it's reported as gospel. And when it turns out to be patently false (remember the "plastic gun" scare? Or black rhino ammo? ) no one reports that either

Keep your powder dry and your...

-- eyes_open (best@wishes.net), June 30, 1999.

"But it's the same story. Evidence emerges that we are right, it never happens. The gun control types make a claim, it's reported as gospel."

Gee, or the sentance could say: But it's the same story. Evidence emeges that we are right, it never happens. The Doomer types make a claim, it's reported as gospel

-- max (fear@yep.com), July 01, 1999.

Kind of a crazy mixed up world. Guns are 'evil' but abortion is OK with us.

-- Will continue (farming@home.com), July 01, 1999.

An armed society, is a POLITE society...

scratchin',

The Dog

-- Dog (Desert Dog@-sand.com), July 01, 1999.

will continue, and most pro-life(anti-choice)people tend to be pro-death penalty.

"the worlds wild at heart,and wierd an top!"-David Lynch

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@YAHOO.COM), July 01, 1999.

Ghandi Speaks I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done had he been present when I was almost fatally as- saulted in 1908 [by an Indian extremist opposed to Gandhi's agreement with Smuts], whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defend me, I told him it was his duty to defend me even by using violence. Hence it was that I took part in the Boer War, the so-called Zulu Rebellion and [World War I]. Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner be- come or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.

But I believe non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment. ...But... forgiveness only when there is the power to punish... A mouse hardly forgives a cat when it allows itself to be torn to pieces by her. I therefore appreciate the sentiment of those who cry out for the condign punishment of General Dyer (responsible for massacre at Jallianwala Bagh April 13,1919) and his ilk. They would tear him to pieces if they could. But I do not believe India to be a helpless creature. Only, I want to use India's and my strength for a better purpose.

...Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.... We in India may in a moment realize that one hundred thousand Englishmen need not frighten three hundred million human beings. A definite forgiveness would, therefore, mean a definite recognition of our strength.... It matters little to me that for the moment I do no drive my point home. We feel too downtrodden not to be angry and revengeful. But I must not refrain from saying that India can gain more by waiving the right of punishment. We have better work to do, a better mission to deliver to the world.

Mohandas K. Gandhi,Young India, August 11, 1920 from Fischer, Louis ed.,The Essential Gandhi, 1962. pp. 156-57.

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@yahoo.com), July 01, 1999.

TEN MYTHS ABOUT "GUN CONTROL (NRA/ILA)

Table of Contents Myth 1: Public Opinion Polls

Myth 2: Handgun uses

Myth 3: Armed Citizens Don't Deter Crime

Myth 4: Registration and Licensing

Myth 5: England and Japan

Myth 6: Crimes of Passion

Myth 7: Sporting Purposes Test

Myth 8: The Second Amendment

Myth 9: Mandatory Sentences

Myth 10: Gun Laws Reduce Crime

Facts We Can Live With "The only way to discourage the gun culture is to remove the guns from the hands and shoulders of people who are not in the law enforcement business."

The New York Times, September 24, 1975

"As you probably know by now, Time's editors, in the April 13 issue, took a strong position in support of an outright ban on handguns for private use."

Time Magazine, Letter to NRA, April 24, 1981

Those editorial conclusions by two of the nation's more influential news journals, noted for their advocacy of individual liberties, represent the absolute extreme in the firearms controversy - that no citizen can be trusted to own a firearm. This expressed attitude is particularly ironic since the overwhelming majority of the 60-65 million American firearms owners have done nothing to deserve such a sweeping condemnation. It is the product of a series of myths which - through incessant repetition - have been mistaken for truth. These myths are being exploited to generate fear and mistrust of the decent and responsible Americans who own firearms. Yet, as this brochure proves, none of these myths will stand up under the cold light of fact.

MYTH: "The Majority of Americans favor strict new additional federal gun controls."

Polls can be slanted by carefully worded questions to achieve and desired outcome. It is a fact that most people do not know what laws currently exist; thus, it is meaningless to assert that people favor "stricter" laws when they do not know how "strict" the laws are in the first place. Asking about a waiting period for a police background check presumes, falsely, that such a check could be completed accurately. Similarly, it is meaningless to infer anything from support of a 7-day waiting period when respondents live in a state with a 15-day wait or a 1-6 month permit scheme in place. Asked whether they favor making any particular law "stricter," most people do not. Unbiased, scientific polls have consistently shown that most people:

Oppose costly registration of firearms. Oppose giving police power to decide who should own guns. Do not believe that stricter gun laws will prevent criminals from illegally obtaining guns. One measure of the public's attitude on "gun control" comes when the electorate has a chance to speak on the issue. Public opinion polls do not form public policy, but the individual actions by hundreds of thousands of citizens do. For example, during the recent congressional debate over S. 49, the Firearms Owners' Protection Act, congressmen were told by pollsters Gallup and Harris that the public wanted more, not fewer firearms restrictions, but they were told by their constituents in margins of up to 95-to-1 (Philadelphia Inquirer, April 13, 1986) - that they wanted fewer restrictions. S. 49 was overwhelmingy approved by the U.S. Congress.

In November 1976, Massachusetts voters faced a referendum question calling for a ban on all handguns that was crushed by a margin of more than 2-to-1, despite public opinion polls which claimed the public supported the ban overwhelmingly. Since 1978, nine states have adopted, by large margins, constitutional amendments guaranteeing the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.; many others have enacted other progun owner legislation. In the 1980s, 28 states enacted preemption legislation preventing cities and counties from passing more restrictive legislation than what exists at the state level, and 34 states passed hunter protection laws insuring the right of sportsmen and women to a lawful, legitimate hunt.

In November 1982, Californians rejected, by a 63-37 percent margin, a statewide handgun initiative that called for a "freeze" on the number of handguns allowed in the state, again, with pre-election pollsters reporting support for the measure. That initiative was also opposed by the majority of California's law- enforcement community. Fifty-one of the state's 58 working sheriffs opposed Proposition 15, as did 101 Chiefs of Police. Nine law enforcement organizations, speaking for rank-and-file police, went on record against the initiative.

In 1987, five leading police organizations joined the NRA and Unified Sportsmen of Florida in the passage of legislation to reform the state's restrictive carry-for-protection law and to preempt local anti-gun ordinances.

The NRA has also actively supported initiatives calling for mandatory jail time for violent criminals. In 1982, the residents of Washington, D.C., enacted an NRA-endorsed mandatory penalty bill, actively opposed by the anti-gun D.C. City Council, that severely punished those who use firearms to commit a violent crime. In 1988, the residents of Oregon approved, by a 78%-22% margin, an NRA- supported initiative mandating prison sentences for repeat offenders after the state legislature and governor failed to act on the issue.

Most recently, in 1990, the National Association of Chiefs of Police polled every chief and sheriff in the country, representing over 16,000 departments, and discovered for the third year in a row that law enforcement officers over- whelmingly agree that "gun control" measures have no effect on crime. A clear majority of 91% of the respondents said that banning firearms would not reduce criminal ability to get firearms, while 87% confirmed that the banning of semi- automatic firearms would not reduce criminal access to such firearms. Eighty- seven percent felt that criminals obtain their weapons from illegal sources; 88% agreed that the banning of private ownership of firearms would not result in fewer crimes. Seventy-six percent felt that a national 7-day waiting period would have no effect on criminals getting firearms, while 86% agreed that a waiting period could not determine accurately whether or not a purchaser has a criminal, mental or alcohol or drug abuse history. An overwhelming 90% felt that such a scheme would instead make agencies less effective against crime by reducing their manpower and only serve to open them up to liability lawsuits. This is the only national poll of law enforcement officers in the country, with the leadership of most other major groups adamantly refusing to poll their membership on the firearms debate.

MYTH: "The only purpose of a handgun is to kill people."

This often repeated statement is patently untrue, but to those Americans whose only knowledge of firearms comes from the nightly violence on television, it might seem believable. When anti-gun researcher James Wright, then of the University of Massachusetts, studied all the available literature on firearms, he concluded: "Even the most casual and passing familiarity with this literature is therefore sufficient to belie the contention that handguns have 'no legimimate sport or recreational use."

There are an estimated 60-65 million privately-owned handguns in the United States that are used for hunting, target shooting, protection of families and businesses, and other legitimate and lawful purposes. By comparison, the FBI reported fewer than 10,000 homicides in which handguns were used in 1989 or less than 0.02 percent (two-hundreds of one percent) of handguns in America - many of these reported homicides are self-defense or justifiable and therefore not criminal. That fact alone renders the myth about the "only purpose" of handguns absurd, for more than 99% of all handguns are used neither to murder nor for any other criminal purpose.

By far the most commonly cited reason for owning a handgun is protection - to preserve life and discourage acts of criminal violence. At least one-half of the handgun owners in America own handguns for protection and security. A handgun's function is one of insurance as well as defense. A handgun in the home is a contingency, based on the knowledge that if there ever comes a time when it is needed, no substitute will do. Certainly no violent intent is implied, any more than a purchaser of life insurance intends to die soon.

MYTH: "Since a gun in a home is six times more likely to kill a family member than to stop an armed criminal, armed citizens are not a deterrent to crime."

This myth, stemming from a superficial "study" of firearm accidents in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, merely represents a comparison of 148 accidental deaths (and some suicides) to the deaths of 23 intruders killed by homeowners over a 16-year period. (Rushforth et al, "Accidental Firearm Fatalities in a Metro- politan County," 100 Am. Journal of Epidemiology, 499 (1975).)

Gross errors in this and similar "studies" - with even greater claimed ratios of harm to good - include: the assumption that a gun hasn't been used for protection unless an assailant dies; no distinction is made between handguns and long gun deaths; all accidental firearm fatalities were counted whether the deceased was part of the "family" or not; all accidents were counted whether they occurred in the home or not, while self-defense uses of guns in the home were excluded on the grounds that the criminal intruder killed may not have been a total stranger to the home defender; suicides were sometimes counted and some self-defense shootings misclassified; and Cleveland's experience with crime and accidents during those years was atypical of the nation as a whole - and, indeed, of Cleveland since the mid-1970s. Moreover, in a later study, the same researchers noted that roughly 10 percent of killings by civilians are justifiable homicides. (Rushforth et al, "Violent Death in a Metropolitan County," 297 N. England Journal of Medicine, 531,533 (1977).)

Research conducted by Professors James Wright and Peter Rossi (Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous: a Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1986), for a landmark study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, points to the armed citizen or the threat of the armed citizen as possibly the most effective deterrent to crime in the nation.

Wright and Rossi questioned over 1,800 felons serving time in prisons across the nation and found:

85 percent agreed that the "smart criminal" will attempt to find out if a potential victim is armed. 75 percent felt that burglars avoided occupied dwellings for fear of being shot. 80 percent of "handgun predators" had encountered armed citizens. * 53 percent did not commit a specific crime for fear that the victim was armed. 57 percent of "handgun predators" were scared off or shot at by armed vicims. 60 percent felt that the typical criminal feared being shot by citizens more than he feared being shot by the police. Professor Gary Kleck of Florida State University estimates that annually 1,500- 2,800 felons are legally killed in "excusable self- defense" or "justifiable" shootings by civilians, and 8,000-16,000 criminals are wounded. This compares to 300-600 justifiable homicides by police. Yet, in most instances, civilians used a firearm to threaten, apprehend, shoot at a criminal, or to fire a warning shot without injuring anyone.

Based on surveys commissioned by handgun-ban advocates (Caddell, Peter Hart Associates), Kleck estimates that nearly 650,000 Americans use handguns for protection from criminals annually - with over 300,000 additional protective uses of long guns. (Gary Kleck, "Crime Control Through the Private Use of Armed Force," 35 Social Problems 1 (1988). U.S. Department of Justice victimization surveys show that protective use of a gun lessens the chance that robberies, rapes, and assaults will be successfully completed while also reducing the likelihood of victim injury. Clearly, criminals fear armed citizens.

MYTH: "Honest citizens have nothing to fear from gun registration and licensing which will curb crime by disarming criminals."

"Gun control" proponents tout automobile registration and licensing as a model for firearm ownership. Yet driving an automobile on city or state roads is a PRIVILEGE, and, as such, can be regulated, while the individual RIGHT to possess firearms is constitutionally guaranteed from infringement. Registration and licensing do not prevent criminal misuse nor accidental fatalities involving motor vehicles in America, where about 47,000 people died on the nation's highways in 1989. According to the National Safety Council, however, only 1,600 persons were involved in fatal firearms accidents that same year, with 1987 to 1989 marking the lowest rates recorded during the 20th century.

Registration and licensing have no effect on crime, as criminals by definition do not obey laws. Indeed, the national survey of prisoners conducted by Wright and Rossi for the Department of Justice found that 82% agreed that "gun laws only affect law-abiding citizens; criminals will always be able to get guns."

Further, felons are constitutionally exempt from the registration requirement. According to a U.S. Supreme Court decision, since felons are prohibited by law from possessing a firearm, forcing them to register firearms would violate the Fifth Amendment provision against self-incrimination (Haynes v. U.S., 309 U.S. 85 (1968)). Only law- abiding citizens would be required to comply with registration - citizens who have not committed a crime nor have any intention of doing so.

Registration and licensing of America's 60-65 million gun owners would require the creation of a huge bureaucracy at tremendous cost to the taxpayer - with absolutely no tangible anti-crime return. Indeed, New Zealand authorities repealed registration in the 1980s, after police acknowledged its worthlessness, and a similar reccomendation was made by Australian law enforcement. Such schemes divert law enforcement from its primary responsibility, apprehending and arresting criminals, to investigating and processing paperwork on law-abiding citizens.

Finally, a national registration/licensing scheme would violate an individual's right to privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment and establish a basis from which gun confiscation could be implemented. More than 60,000 rifles and shotguns were confiscated in April 1989 from honest citizens who had dutifully registered their guns with the authorities in Soviet Georgia (Chicago Sun-Times, April 12, 1989, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, May 21, 1989). Could that happen in America? Gun prohibitionists in Massachusetts, Cleveland, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., have already proposed using registration lists for such purposes. Avowed handgun prohibitionist Charles Morgan, as director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office, in a 1975 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Crime state: "I have not one doubt, even if I am in agreement with the National Rifle Association, that that kind of record-keeping procedure is the first step to eventual confiscation under one administration or another."

Reasonable fears of such confiscation leads otherwise law-abiding citizens to ignore such laws, creating a disrespect for law and a lessened support for authorities. In states and cities which recently required registration of semi-automatic firearms, estimates of compliance range from 1 to 2 percent.

MYTH: "Stiff gun control laws work as evidenced by the low crime rates in England and Japan while the U.S. crime rates continue to soar."

All criminologists studying the firearms issue reject simple comparisons of violent crime among foreign countries as meaningless. It is impossible to draw valid conclusions without taking into account differences in the collection of crime data, and the political, cultural, racial. religious, and economic disparities among countries. Such factors are not only hard to compare, they are rarely, if ever, taken into account. Only one scholar, David Kopel, has attempted to evaluate the impact of "gun control" on crime in several foreign countries, and he concluded: "Despite the claims of the American gun control movement, gun control does not deserve credit for the low crime rates in Britain, Japan, or other nations." He noted that Israel and Switzerland, with more widespread rates comparable to or lower than the usual foreign examples. And he stated: "Foreign style gun control is doomed to failure in America; not only does it depend on search and seizure too intrusive for American standards, it postulates an authoritarian philosophy of government fundamentally at odds with the individualist, egalitarian... American ethos." (David B. Kopel, "Foreign Gun Control in American Eyes," Montreal, 1987, p. 108.)

Differences in crime can be attributed to American revolving-door justice. In a typical year in the U.S. there are 8.1 million serious crimes like homicide, assault, and burglary. Only 724,000 adults are arrested and convicted. Less than 150,000 are sentenced to prison, with 36,000 serving less than a year. (U.S. News and World Report, July 31, 1989). A 1987 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study found that the average felon released due to prison over- crowding commits, on average, 187 crimes per year, which costs society about $430,000.

Foreign countries are two to six times more effective in solving crimes and punishing criminals than the U.S. In London, about 20% of reported robberies end in conviction; in New York City, less than 5% result in conviction, and in those cases imprisonment is frequently not imposed. Nonetheless, England annually has twice as many homicides with firearms as before adopting its tough laws. During the past dozen years, the handgun-related robbery rate rose about 300% in Britain, while dropping in the U.S.

Part of Japan's low crime rate can be explained by the sheer efficiency of its criminal justice system, coupled with fewer protections of the right to privacy, and fewer rights for criminal suspects, than exist in the United States. Neither the police powers and secrecy of the police nor the docility of defense counsel would be acceptable to most Americans. In addition, the Japanese police understate the amount of crime, particularly covering up the problem of organized crime, in order to appear more efficient and worthy of the respect the citizens have for the police.

Widespread respect for law and order is deeply ingrained in the Japanese citizenry. This cultural factor has been pased along to their descendants in the United States where the murder rate for Japanese-Americans (who have access to firearms) is similar to that in Japan itself.

If gun availability were a factor in crime rates, one would expect European crime rates to be related to firearms availability in those countries, but the crime rates are similar in European countries with high or relatively high availability, such as Switzerland, Israel, and Norway, and in low availability countries like England and Germany (whose gun laws began with the Nazi gun laws and tightened them up). Furthermore, one would expect American violent crime rates to be more similar to European rates in crime where guns are often used, such as homicide. But the reverse is true: American violence is greater where guns are not involved.

MYTH: "Most murders are argument-related 'crimes of passion' against a rela- tive, neighbor, friend or acquaintance."

The vast majority of murders are committed by persons with long established patterns of violent criminal behavior. According to analyses of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, by the FBI, and the Chicago, New York City, and other police departments, about 70 percent of suspected murderers have criminal careers of long-standing - as do nearly half their victims. FBI data, indeed, shows that roughly 55% of the murders were known to their victims.

Recent studies by the Justice Department suggest that persons who live violent lives exhibit those violent tendencies "both within their home and among their family and friends and outside their home among strangers in society." A National Institute of Justice study reveals that the victims of family violence often suffer repeated problems from the same person for months or even years, and if not successfully resolved, such incidents can eventually result in serious injury or death. Indeed, studies conducted by the Police Foundation show that 90% of all homicides, by whatever means committed, involving family members, had been preceded by some other violent incident serious enough that the police were summoned, with five or more such calls in half the cases.

Circumstances which might suggest "crimes of passion" or "spontaneous" arguments, such as a lover's triangle, arguments over money or property, and alcohol-related brawls, comprise less than 10% of criminal homicides, according to FBI data.

Professor James Wright of the University of Massachusetts describes the typical incident of family violence as "that mythical crime of passion" and rejects the notion that it is an isolated incident by otherwise normally placid and loving individuals. His research shows that it is in fact "the culminating event in a long history of interpersonal violence between the parties."

Wright also notes that handguns may well be used defensively. "The common pattern, the more common pattern, is for wives to shoot their husbands. Proportionately, men kill their women by other means, more brutal means, more degrading means. To deny that woman the right to own the firearm is in some sense to guarantee in perpetuity to her husband the right to beat her at will," says Wright.

MYTH: "Guns that have no legitimate sporting purpose and are the preferred weapon of choice of criminals and terrorists should be banned."

Use of this myth by gun prohibitionists is predicated purely on pragmatism: whichever "catch phrase" can produce the most anti-gun emotionalism - phrases like "Saturday Night Special," "assault weapons," and "plastic guns" - will be utilized in efforts to generate support for a ban on entire classes of firearms.

Examples of this anti-gun legislative history abound. A "Saturday Night Special" ban bill enacted in Maryland establishes a politically appointed "Handgun Roster Board" with complete authority to decide which handguns will be permitted in the so-called Free State - ANY handgun could therefore be banned. Federal legislation aimed at the mythical "plastic gun" - a nonexistent item whose actual production is 10-25 years in the future - would have banned millions of all- metal handguns suitable for personal protection. Some proposed federal legislation purporting to ban so called "assault weapons" is so broadly written that virtually all semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, and handguns could be restricted or banned.

Criminals and law-abiding citizens both follow the lead of police and military in choosing a gun, whether it's a gun for the criminal to use to protect himself from other criminals, from police, and from private citizens, or it's the gun private citizens acquire for protection from criminals. Criminals generally pick as handguns .38 and .357 revolvers, with barrels about 4" long, and retailing (an unimportant matter for criminals) at over $350. Only about one-sixth fit the classic description of the so-called "Saturday Night Special" - small caliber, short barrel, inexpensive. Criminals rarely use rifles or shotguns, and, when they do, are more apt to use a sawed-off shotgun than a semi-automatic rifle, whether military style or not. In America's largest and most crime ravatged cities, only about 1/2-3% of "crime guns" are military- style semi-autos.

As more and more police departments, following the lead of the military, switch from revolvers to 9mm semi-auto pistols, criminals and the ordinary citizen will both follow suit. Indeed, semi-auto pistols have risen from one-fourth of American handgun manufacturing in the 1970s to two-thirds by 1989.

As more military establishments adopt medium-velocity rifles with straight- stick configuration (and thus modern pistol style grips, raised sights, and vertical forearm grips for comfortable shooting) for their lighter weight and durability, more and more target shooters, hunters, and plinkers will follow the lead, seeking out semi-automatic, sporterized models of these firearms.

While not all the guns incorrectly attacked as "preferred" by criminals are popular for hunting, that is not the only valid purpose for owning a firearm. Small handguns, which may be ill-suited for long-range target shooting, are useful for personal protection, where the accuracy range rarely needs to exceed ten feet. Semi-automatic rifles and shotguns may be suitable for medium-range hunting but not long-range hunting. Semi-automatic, military-style rifles, including the M1, M-14, and the Colt AR-15, are used in hundreds of sanctioned Highpower Tournaments each year and the National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio. Hundreds of thousands of individuals use these rifles for recreational target shooting and plinking.

The Second Amendment clearly contemplates owning firearms which may be useful for the efficiency of a well-regulated militia, and the semi-automatic version of military-style guns is clearly adapted to that purpose. It was the clear intention of the Framers of our Constitution that the citizenry possess more arms than the government. That was viewed as the best deterrent to a tyranny, and it has worked for over 200 years. It was further the intention of the Founding Fathers that citizens be able to protect themselves from criminals, and that doesn't necessarily require a gun suitable for hunting, target shooting, or plinking. All modern firearms are suitable for such purposes.

MYTH: "The right guaranteed under the Second Amendment is limited specifically to the arming of a 'well-regulated Militia' that can be compared today to the National Guard."

The Second Amendment reads: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." In contrast to other portions of the Constitution, this Amendment contains no qualifiers, no "buts" or "excepts." It is a straight- forward statement affirming the people's right to possess firearms.

The perception that the Second Amendment guarantees a "collective right" or a "right of states to form militias" rather than an individual right is a wholly inaccurate 20th-century invention. Historically, the term "militia" refers to the people at large, armed and ready to defend their homeland and their freedom with armes supplied by themselves. Current Federal law (Title 10, Section 211(a) of the U.S. Code) states: "The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age..." Moreover, historical records, including Constitutional Convention debates and the Federalist Papers, clearly indicate that the purpose of the Second Amendment was not to create a standing army, but to guard against the tyranny that the Framers of the Constitution feared could be perpetrated by any professional armed body of government. It should be noted here that the arms, records, and ultimate control of the National Guard today lie with the Federal Government, so that it clearly is not the "militia" protected from the federal government.

The Supreme Court recently ratified this virtually unlimited control by the federal government in the case of Perpich v. Department of Defense (1990). The Court there held that the power of Congress over the National Guard is plenary (entire, absolute, unlimited) and such plenary power is not restricted by the Constitution's Militia Clause. The Second Amendment was not even mentioned by the court, undoubtedly because it does not serve as a source of power for a state to have a National Guard.

In Federalist Paper No. 29, for example, Alexander Hamilton assured the people that the army would always be a "select corps of moderate size" and that the "people at large (were) properly armed" to serve as a fundamental check against the standing army, the most dreaded of institutions. James Madison, in Fed- eralist Paper 46, further promised the American people that, unlike the governments of Europe which were "afraid to trust the people with arms," the American people would continue under the new Constitution to possess "the advantage of being armed," and thereby would continually be able to form the militia when needed as a "barrier against the enterprises of despotic ambition."

A 1990 Supreme Court decision regarding searches and seizures confirmed that the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right, held by the "people" - a "term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution," specifically the Preample and the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments (U.S. v. Verdugo- Urquidez, U.S. Supreme Court, Feb. 28, 1990).

The case of United States v. Miller (1939) is frequently, albeit erroneously, cited as the definitive ruling that the right to keep and bear arms is a "collective" right, protecting the organized state milita - now the National Guard - rather than the individual right to possess arms. But that was not the issue in Miller and no such ruling was made; moreover, the word "collective" is not used at all in any place in the opinion.

While such a decision was sought by the Justice Department, which was the ONLY party presenting an argument in the case, the Court decided only that the National Firearms Act of 1934 was constitutional IN THE ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY. The case hinged on the narrow question of whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use, and its ownership by individuals thus protected by the Second Amendment.

The Court ruled that: "In the absence of (the presentation of) any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice (Ed. Note: common knowledge, that which need not be proven in court) that this weapon is any part of the military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense."

Because no evidence or argument was presented except by the Justice Department, the Court was not made aware that some 30,000 short- barreled shotguns we used as "trench guns" during World War I, nor could it have known that similar guns would be used in World War II and Vietnam.

The Supreme Court has ruled on only three other cases raising the Second Amendment - all during the last half of the nineteenth century. In each of these cases, the Court held that the Second Amendment only applied to actions of the federal government, not of private individuals (U.S. v. Cruikshank, 1876) or state governments (Presser v. Illinois, 1886, and Miller v. Texas, 1894). At the same time, the Court also held, in Presser, that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of assembly did not apply to the states; and in Miller v Texas, it held that the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizures did not apply to the states, since the Court believed that all the amendments comprising the Bill of Rights were limitations solely on the powers of Congress, not upon the pwers of the states.

It was not until two generations later that the Court began to rule, through the Fourtheenth Amendment, that the First, Fourth, and various other provisions of the Bill of Rights limited both Congress and state legislatures. No similar decision concerning the Second Amendment has ever been made in spite of contemporary scholarship proving conclusively that the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to apply all of the rights in the Bill of Rights to the states That research proves that the Fourteenth Amendment was to apply all of the rights in the Bill of Rights to the states (S. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Consti-utional Right (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984). That research proves the Fourteenth Amendment was made a part of the Constitution to prevent states from depriving the newly-freed slaves of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, including what the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision referred to as one of the rights of citizens, the right "to keep and carry arms wherever they went."

The only significance of the Supreme Court's refusal to hear a challenge to the handgun ban imposed by Morton Grove, Illinois, is that the Court will not rush to apply the Second Amendment to the states. The refusal to hear the case has no legal significance, and, indeed, it would have been very unusual for the Court to make a decision involving the U.S. Constitution when the Illinois courts had not yet decided if Morton Grove's ban conflicted with the state's constitution.

MYTH: "A person in a public place with a gun and without a permit is looking for trouble."

Gun prohibitionists have seized this myth to back legislative/administrative proposals to penalize and discourage gun ownership by imposing a mandatory prison term on persons carrying or possessing firearms without a license or permit. Massachusetts' Bartley-Fox Law and New York's Koch-Carey Law are premier examples of this "gun control" strategy. Such legislation is detrimental only to peaceful citizens, not to criminals.

By the terms of such a mandatory or increased sentence proposal, the unlicensed carrying of a firearm - no matter how innocent the circumstances - is penalized by a six-to-twelve month jail sentence. It is imposed on otherwise law-abiding citizens although in many areas it is virtually impossible to obtain a carry permit. Thus it is not difficult to contemplate circumstances which would extenuate such a sentence: fear of crime, arbitrary denial of authorization, red- tape delay in obtaining a firearm, or misunderstanding of the numerous and vague laws governing the transportation of firearms.

The potential for unknowingly or unwittingly committing a technical violation of a licensing law is enormous. Myriad legal definitions of "carrying" vary from state to state, and city to city, including most transportation of firearms - accessible or not, loaded or not, in a trunk or case. And out-of-state travellers are exceedingly vulnerable because of these various definitions.

One need only examine the first persons arrested under the Massachusetts and New York "mandatory penalty" laws for proof that such laws are misdirected: an elderly woman passing out religious pamphlets in a dangerous section of Boston and an Ohio truck driver coming to the aid of a woman apparently being kidnapped in New York City.

In New York City - prior to the enactment of the Koch-Carey mandatory sentence for possession law - the bureaucratic logjam in the licensing division, combined with a soaring crime rate, forced law- abiding citizens to obtain a gun illegally for self-protection. In effect, citizens admitted that they would rather risk a mandatory penalty for illegally owning a firearm than risk their lives and property at the hands of New York's violent, uncontrolled criminals. Honest citizens literally feared the streets more than the courtrooms.

In contrast, the city's criminal element faces no similar threat of punishment. A report carried in the March 1, 1984, issue of the New York Times says it all: "Conviction on felony charges is rare. Because of plea-bargaining, the vast majority of those arrested on felony charges are tried on lesser, misdemeanor charges." In one year, according to the Times, there were 106,171 felony arrests in New York City, but ony 25,987 cases received felony indictments and only 20,641 resulted in convictions wth imprisonment a rarity. Not surprisingly, with just 3% of the nation's population, in 1990 New york City accounted for one-eighth of the nation's handgun-related homicides.

In championing New York's tough Koch-Carey Law, then Mayor Ed Koch said contemptuously of gun owners, "Nice guys who own guns aren't nice guys." No such rancor was expressed about the city's revolving- door criminal justice system where the chances of hardened criminals being arrested on felony charges are one in a hundred.

When Bernhard Goetz - denied a carry permit despite having been injured in previous muggings - used a gun for protection from a gang of four would-be robbers, he was imprisoned, for unlawful possession of a handgun only, while New York authorities released his assailants, who went on to commit robberies, rapes, and other offenses.

Indeed, a 1982 National Instutute of Justice study of Massachusetts' Bartley- Fox Law concluded: "... the effect may be to penalize some less serious offenders, while the punishment for more serious cases is postponed, reduced or avoided altogether...it is difficult, perhaps fundamentally impossible, to substantiate the popular claim that mandatory sentencing is an effective tool for reducing crime." Furthermore, the Police Foundation study of New York's Koch-Carey Law found that it failed to reduce the number of guns on the street and did not reduce gun use in rape, robbery, or assault.

Such legislation invites police to routinely stop and frisk people randomly on the street on suspicion of firearms possession. In fact, the Police Foundation has called for the random use of metal detectors on the streets to apprehend people carrying firearms without authorization. In disregarding the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy and against unreasonable searches and seizures, police would be empowered under the Police Foundation's blueprint for disarmament to "systematically stop a certain percentage of people on the streets...in business neighborhoods and run the detectors by them, just as you do at the airport. If the detectors produce some noise then that might establish probable cause for a search."

While admitting that such "police state" tactics would require "methods... that liberals instinctively dislike," government researchers James Q. Wilson and Mark H. Moore called for more aggressive police patrolling in public places, saying: "To inhibit the carrying of handguns, the police should become more aggressive in stopping suspicious people and, where they have reasonable grounds for their suspicions, frisking (i.e., patting down) those stopped to obtain guns. Hand-held magnet meters, of the sort used by airport security guards, might make the street frisks easier and less obtrusive. All this can be done without changing the law." (The Washington Post, April 1, 1981) Note, they said "people," not criminals.

MYTH: "Gun control reduces crime.

The greatest myth perpetrated by national gun ban groups is that such laws reduce crime. They do not.

No empirical study of the effectiveness of gun laws has shown any positive effect - although, to the dismay of prohibitionists, such studies have shown a negative effect. That is, in areas having lower levels of private firearms ownership, the robbery rates are almost invariably higher, because criminals are aware that their intended victims are less likely to have the means with which to defend themselves.

Further, of all the gun laws enacted in the past quarter century - each promised by its advocates to result in a reduction of crime - not one city, not one state, not one nation, has experienced a reduction in crime rates, nor even a reduced rate of crime growth in comparison to its neighboring cities and states and nations without such laws.

If gun laws worked, the proponenets of such laws would gleefully cite examples of lessened crime. Instead, they uniformly blame the absence of tougher or wider spread measures for the failures of the laws they advocated. Or they cite denials of applications for permission to buy a firearm as evidence the law is doing something beyond preventing honest citizens from being able legally to acquire firearms. And they cite Washington, D.C. as a jurisdiction where gun laws are "working." Yet crime in Washington D.C. rose dramatically between 1976, the year before its handgun ban took effect, and 1982, the year the city's voters adopted an NRA-endorsed mandatory penalty for misue of guns in violent crimes. The violent crime rate rose 43% during those years, and the murder rate rose 14%, while the national rates were rising 20% and 3%, respectively.

No wonder former D.C. Police Chief Maurice Turner said, "What has the gun control law done to keep criminals from getting guns? Absolutely nothing... City residents ought to have the opportunity to have a handgun."

Criminals in Washington have no trouble getting either prohibited drugs or prohibited handguns, resulting in a skyrocketing of the city's murder rate - along with banned handgun use and homicide - making its 1990 homicide rate of about 80 per 100,000 population the highest ever recorded by an American big city, and marks a nearly 200% rise in homicide since banning handguns, while the nation's homicide rate rose less than 10%.

Clearly, criminals do not bother with the niceties of obeying laws - for a criminal is by definition, someone who disobeys laws. Those who enforce the law agree. A 1989 nationwide survey by the National Association of Chiefs of Police of command officers found that 90% agreed that criminals obtain "their weapons from illegal sources." Ninety percent also believe that banning all firearms WOULD NOT reduce the ability of criminals to obtain firearms and 88% believe there would not be a reduction in gun-related crime with such a ban.

In addition, restrictive gun laws create a "Catch-22" for victims of violent crime. Under court decisions, the police have no legal obligation to protect any particular individual, and under restrictive gun laws, it may be virtually impossible for the person to legally own a firearm to protect himself or herself.

The evidence that restrictive gun laws create scofflaws is evident to anyone willing to look. In New York City, there are only about 70,000 legally-owned handguns, yet survey research suggests that there at least 750,000 handguns in the city, mostly in the hands of otherwise law-abiding citizens. In Chicago, a recent mandatory registration law has resulted in compliance by only a fracion of those who had previously registered their guns. Officials in California cities which have banned some semi-automatic rifles (in violation of state preemption statutes prohibiting such acts by local government) report virtually no compliance with the ordinances. The same massive noncompliance - not by criminals, whom no one expects will comply, but by the particular minority groups fearful of repression - is evident wherever stringent gun laws are enacted.

FACTS WE ALL CAN LIVE WITH

Laws aimed at criminal misuse of firearms are proven crime deterrents. After adopting a mandatory penalty for using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime in 1975, Virginia's murder rate dropped 31% and robbery 23% in 14 years. South Carolina recorded a 38% murder rate decline between 1975 and 1989 with a similar law. Other impressive declines were recorded in other states using mandatory penalties, such as Arkansas (homicide rate down 25% in 15 years), Delaware (homicide rate down 42% and robbery 52% in 13 years).

The solution to violent crime lies in the PROMISE, not the mere threat, of swift, certain punishment.

Our challenge: To reform and strengthen our federal and state criminal justice systems. We must bring about a sharp reversal in the trend toward undue leniency and "revolving door justice." We must insist upon speedier trials and upon punishments which are commensurate with the crimes. Rehabilitation should be tempered with a realization that not all can be rehabilitated, and that prison construction costs society less than the crime of active predatory criminals.

The job ahead will not be an easy one. The longer "gun control" advocates distract the nation from this task by embracing that single siren song, the longer it will take and the more difficult our job will be. Beginning is the hardest step, and the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action has taken it. Join NRA. Support ILA. Work with us. We need your help.

-- mike (patriot@work.com), July 01, 1999.

THE FALSE PROMISE OF GUN CONTROL copyright by Daniel D. Polsby Previously printed the The Atlantic Magazine Reprinted with permission Gun-control laws may save some lives, but they can never stem the flow of guns, and they divert attention from the roots of our crime problem.

During the 1960s and 1970s the robbery rate in the United States increased six fold, and the murder rate doubled; the rate of handgun ownership nearly doubled in that period as well. Handguns and criminal violence grew together apace, and national opinion leaders did not fail to remark on the coincidence.

It has become a bipartisan article of faith that more handguns cause more violence. Such was the unequivocal conclusion of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in 1969, and such is now the editorial opinion of virtually every influential newspaper and magazine, from The Washington Post to The Economist to the Chicago Tribune. Members of the House and Senate who have not dared to confront the gun lobby concede the connection privately. Even if the National Rifle Association can produce blizzards of angry calls and letters to the Capitol virtually overnight, House members one by one have been going public, often after some new firearms atrocity at a fast-food restaurant or the like. And last November they passed the Brady bill

Alas, however well accepted, the conventional wisdom about guns and violence is mistaken. Guns don't increase national rates of crime and violence--but the continued proliferation of gun-control laws almost certainly does. Current rates of crime and violence are a bit below the peaks of the late 1970s, but because of a slight oncomIng bulge in the at-risk population of males aged fifteen to thirty-four, the crime rate will soon worsen. The rising generation of criminals will have no more difficulty than their elders did in obtaining the tools of their trade. Growing violence will lead to calls for laws still more severe. Each fresh round of legislation will be followed by renewed frustration.

Gun-control laws don't work. What is worse, they act perversely. While legitimate users of firearms encounter intense regulation, scrutiny, and bureaucratic control, illicit markets easily adapt to whatever difficulties a free society throws in their way. Also, efforts to curtail the supply of firearms inflict collateral damage on freedom and privacy interests that have long been considered central to American public life. Thanks to the seemingly never- ending war on drugs and long experience attempting to suppress prostitution and pornography, we know a great deal about how illicit markets function and how costly to the public attempts to control them can be. It is essential that we make use of this experience in coming to grips with gun control.

The thousands of gun-control laws in the United States are of two general types. The older kind sought to regulate how, where, and by whom firearms could be carried More recent laws have sought to make it more costly to buy, sell, or use firearms (or certain classes of firearms, such as assault rifles, Saturday-night specials, and so on) by imposing fees, special taxes, or surtaxes on them. The Brady bill is of both types: it has a background-check provision, and its five- day waiting period amounts to a "time tax" on acquiring handguns. AM such laws can be called scarcity-inducing, because they seek to raise the cost of buying firearms, as figured in terms of money, time, nuisance, or stigmatization.

Despite the mounting number of scarcity-inducing laws, no one is very satisfied with them. Hobbyists want to get rid of them, and gun- control proponents don't think they go nearly far enough. Everyone seems to agree that gun-control laws have some effect on the distribution of firearms. But it has not been the dramatic and measurable effect their proponents desired.

Opponents of gun control have traditionally wrapped their arguments in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Indeed, most modern scholarship affirms that so far as the drafters of the Bill of Rights were concerned, the right to bear arms was to be enjoyed by everyone, not just a Militia, and that one of the principal justifications for an armed populace was to secure the tranquillity and good order of the community. But most people are not dedicated antiquarians, and would not be impressed by the argument "I admit that my behavior is very dangerous to public safety, but the Second Amendment says I have a right to do it anyway." That would be a case for repealing the Second Amendment, not respecting it.

Fighting the Demand Curve

Everyone knows that possessing a handgun makes it easier to intimidate, wound, or kill someone. But the implication of this point for social policy has not been so well understood. It is easy to count the bodies of those who have been killed or wounded with guns, but not easy to count the people who have avoided harm because they had access to weapons. Think about uniformed police officers, who carry handguns in plain view not in order to kill people but simply to daunt potential attackers. And it works. Criminals generally do not single out police officers for opportunistic attack. Though officers can expect to draw their guns from time to time, few even in big-city departments will actually fire a shot (except in target practice) in the course of a year. This observation points to an important truth: people who are armed make comparatively unattractive victims. A criminal might not know if any one civilian is armed, but if it becomes known that a large number of civilians do carry weapons, criminals will become warier.

Which weapons laws are the right kinds can be decided only after considering two related questions. First, what is the connection between civilian possession of firearms and social violence? Second, how can we expect gun-control laws to alter people's behavior? Most recent scholarship raises serious questions about the "weapons increase violence" hypothesis. The second question is emphasized here, because it is routinely overlooked and often mocked when noticed; yet it is crucial. Rational gun control requires understanding not only the relationship between weapons and violence but also the relationship between laws and people's behavior. Some things are very hard to accomplish with laws. The purpose of a law and its likely effects are not always the same thing. Many statutes are notorious for the way in which their unintended effects have swamped their intended ones.

In order to predict who will comply with gun-control laws, we should remember that guns are economic goods that are traded in markets. Consumers' interest in them varies. For religious, moral, aesthetic, or practical reasons, some people would refuse to buy firearms at any price. Other people willingly pay very high prices for them.

Handguns, so often the subject of gun-control laws, are desirable for one purpose--to allow a person tactically to dominate a hostile transaction with another person. The value of a weapon to a given person is a function of two factors: how much he or she wants to dominate a confrontation if one occurs, and how likely it is that he or she will actually be in a situation calling for a gun.

Dominating a transaction simply means getting what one wants without being hurt. Where people differ is in how likely it is that they will be involved in a situation in which a gun will be valuable. Someone who intends to engage in a transaction involving a gun--a criminal, for example--is obviously in the best possible position to predict that likelihood. Criminals should therefore be willing to pay more for a weapon than most other people would. Professors, politicians, and newspaper editors are, as a group, at very low risk of being Involved in such transactions, and they thus systematically underrate the value of defensive handguns. (Correlative, perhaps, is their uncritical readiness to accept studies that debunk the utility of firearms for self-defense.) The class of people we wish to deprive of guns, then, is the very class with the most inelastic demand for them- -criminals--whereas the people most likely to comply with gun-control laws don't value guns in the first place.

Do Guns Drive up Crime Rates?

Which premise is true--that guns increase crime or that the fear of crime causes people to obtain guns? Most of the country's major newspapers apparently take this problem to have been solved by an article published by Arthur Kellermann and several associates in the October 7, 1993, New England Journal of Medicine. Kellermann is an emergency-room physician who has published a number of influential papers that he believes discredit the thesis that private ownership of firearms is a useful means of self-protection (An indication of his wide influence is that within two months the study received almost 1O0 mentions in publications and broadcast transcripts indexed in the Nexis data base.) For this study Kellermann and his associates identified fifteen behavioral and fifteen environmental variables that applied to a 388-member set of homicide victims, found a "matching" control group of 388 non- homicide victims, and then ascertained how the two groups differed in gun ownership. In interviews Kellermann made clear his belief that owning a handgun markedly increases a person's risk of being murdered.

But the study does not prove that point at all. Indeed, as Kellermann explicitly conceded in the text of the article, the causal arrow may very well point in the other direction: the threat of being killed may make people more likely to arm themselves. Many people at risk of being killed, especially people involved in the drug trade or other illegal ventures, might well rationally buy a gun as a precaution, and be willing to pay a price driven up by gun-control laws. Crime, after all, is a dangerous business. Peter Reuter and Mark Kleiman, drug- policy researchers, calculated in 1987 that the average crack dealer's risk of being killed was far greater than his risk of being sent to prison. (Their data cannot, however, support the implication that ownership of a firearm causes or exacerbates the risk of being killed.)

Defending the validity of his work, Kellermann has emphasized that the link between lung cancer and smoking was initially established by studies methodologically no different from his. Gary Kleck, a criminology professor at Florida State University, has pointed out the flaw in this comparison. No one ever thought that lung cancer causes smoking, so when the association between the two was established the direction of the causal arrow was not in doubt. Kleck wrote that it is as though Kellermann, trying to discover how diabetics differ from other people, found that they are much more likely to possess insulin than non diabetics, and concluded that insulin is a risk factor for diabetes.

The New York Times, the Ins Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune all gave prominent coverage to Kellermann's study as soon as it appeared, but none saw fit to discuss the study's limitations. A few, in order to introduce a hint of balance, mentioned that the NRA, or some member of its staff, disagreed with the study. But readers had no way of knowing that Kellermann himself had registered a disclaimer in his text. "It is possible," he conceded, "that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide." Indeed, the point is stronger than that: "reverse causation" may account for most of the association between gun ownership and homicide. Kellermann's data simply do not allow one to draw any conclusion.

If firearms increased violence and crime, then rates of spousal homicide would have skyrocketed, because the stock of privately owned handguns has increased rapidly since the mid-1960s. But according to an authoritative study of spousal homicide in the American Journal of Public Health, by James Mercy and Linda Saltzman, rates of spousal homicide in the years 1976 to 1985 fell. If firearms increased violence and crime, the crime rate should have increased throughout the 19805, while the national stock of privately owned handguns increased by more than a million units in every year of the decade. It did not. Nor should the rates of violence and crime in Switzerland, New Zealand, and Israel be as low as they are, since the number of firearms per civilian household is comparable to that in the United States. Conversely, gun-controlled Mexico and South Africa should be islands of peace instead of having murder rates more than twice as high as those here. The determinants of crime and law- abidingness are, of course, complex matters, which are not fully understood and certainly not explicable in terms of a country's laws. But gun-control enthusiasts, who have made capital out of the low murder rate in England, which is largely disarmed, simply ignore the counterexamples that don't fit their theory.

If firearms increased violence and crime, Florida's murder rate should not have been falling since the Introduction, seven years ago, of a law that makes it easier for ordinary citizens to get permits to carry concealed handguns. Yet the murder rate has remained the same or fallen every year since the law was enacted, and it is now lower than the national murder rate (which has been rising). As of last November 183,561 permits had been issued, and only seventeen of the permits had been revoked because the holder was Involved in a firearms offense. It would be precipitate to claim that the new law has "caused" the murder rate to subside. Yet here is a situation that doesn't flit the hypothesis that weapons increase violence.

If firearms increased violence and crime, programs of induced scarcity would suppress violence and crime. But--another anomaly-- they don't. Why not? A theorem, which we could call the futility theorem, explains why gun-control laws must either be ineffectual or in the long term actually provoke more violence and crime. Any theorem depends on both observable fact and assumption. An assumption that Can be made with confidence is that the higher the number of victims a criminal assumes to be armed, the higher to be the risk-- the price--of assaulting them. By definition, gun-control laws should make weapons scarcer and thus more expensive. By our prior reasoning about demand among various types of consumers, after the laws are enacted criminals should be better armed, compared with non criminals, than they were before. Of course, plenty of non criminals will remain armed. But even if many non criminals will pay as high a price as criminals will to obtain firearms, a larger number will not.

Criminals will thus still take the same gamble they already take in assaulting a victim who might or might not be armed. But they may appreciate that the laws have given them a freer field, and that crime still pays--pays even better, in fact, than before. What will happen to the rate of violence? Only a relatively few gun-mediated transactions--currently, five percent of armed robberies committed with firearms--result in someone's actually being shot (the statistics are not broken down into encounters between armed assailants and unarmed victims, and encounters in which both parties are armed). It seems reasonable to fear that if the number of such transactions were to increase because criminals thought they faced fewer deterrents, there would be a corresponding increase in shootings. Conversely, if gun-mediated transactions declined--if criminals initiated fewer of them because they feared encountering an armed victim or an armed good Samaritan--the number of shootings would go down. The magnitude of these effects is, admittedly, uncertain. Yet it is hard to doubt the general tendency of a change in the law that imposes legal burdens on buying guns. The futility theorem suggests that gun-control laws, if effective at all, would unfavorably affect the rate of violent crime.

The futility theorem provides a lens through which to see much of the debate. It is undeniable that gun-control laws work--to an extent. Consider, for example, California's background-check law, which in the past two years has prevented about 12,000 people with a criminal record or a history of mental illness or drug abuse from buying handguns. In the same period Illinois's background-check law prevented the delivery of firearms to more than 2,000 people. Surely some of these people simply turned to an illegal market, but just as surely not all of them did. The laws of large numbers allow us to say that among the foiled thousands, some potential killers were prevented from getting a gun. We do not know whether the number is large or small, but it is implausible to think it is zero. And, as gun- control proponents are inclined to say, "If only one life is saved.. .,'

The hypothesis that firearms increase violence does predict that if we can slow down the diffusion of guns, there will be less violence; one life, or more, will be saved. Hut the futility theorem asks that we look not simply at the gross number of bad actors prevented from getting guns but at the effect the law has on all the people who want to buy a gun. Suppose we succeed in piling tax burdens on the acquisition of firearms. We can safely assume that a number of people who might use guns to kill will be sufficiently discouraged not to buy them. But we cannot assume this about people who feel that they must have guns in order to survive financially and physically. A few lives might indeed be saved. But the overall rate of violent crime might not go down at all. And if guns are owned predominantly by people who have good reason to think they will use them, the rate might even go up.

Are there empirical studies that can serve to help us choose between the futility theorem and the hypothesis that guns increase violence? Unfortunately, no: the best studies of the effects of gun-control laws are quite inconclusive. Our statistical tools are too weak to allow us to identify an effect clearly enough to persuade an open- minded skeptic. But it is precisely when we are dealing with undetectable statistical effects that we have to be certain we are using the best models available of human behavior.

Sealing the Border

Handguns are not legally for sale in the city of Chicago, and have not been since April of 1982. Rifles, shotguns, and ammunition are available, but only to people who possess an Illinois Firearm Owner's Identification card. It takes up to a month to get this card, which involves a background check. Even if one has a FOID card there is a waiting period for the delivery of a gun. In few places in America is it as difficult to get a firearm legally as in the city of Chicago.

Yet there are hundreds of thousands of unregistered guns in the city, and new ones arriving all the time. It is not difficult to get handguns- -even legally. Chicago residents with FOID cards merely go to gun shops in the suburbs. Trying to establish a city as an island of prohibition in a sea of legal firearms seems an impossible project.

Is a state large enough to be an effective island, then? Suppose Illinois adopted Chicago's handgun ban. Same problem again. Some people could just get guns elsewhere: Indiana actually borders the city, and Wisconsin is only forty miles away. Though federal law prohibits the sale of handguns in one state to residents of another, thousands of Chicagoans with summer homes in other states could buy handguns there. And, of course, a black market would serve the needs of other customers.

When would the island be large enough to sustain a weapons-free environment? In the United States people and cargoes move across state lines without supervision or hindrance. Local shortages of goods are always transient, no matter whether the shortage is induced by natural disasters, prohibitory laws, or something else.

Even if many states outlawed sales of handguns, then, they would continue to be available, albeit at a somewhat higher price, reflecting the increased legal risk of selling them. Mindful of the way markets work to undermine their efforts, gun-control proponents press for federal regulation of firearms, because they believe that only Congress wields the authority to frustrate the interstate movement of firearms.

Why, though, would one think that federal policing of illegal firearms would be better than local policing The logic of that argument is far from clear. Cities, after all, are comparatively small places. Washington, D.C., for example, has an area of less than 45,000 acres. Yet local officers have had little luck repressing the illegal firearms trade there. Why should federal officers do any better watching the United States' 12,000 miles of coastline and millions of square miles of interior? Criminals should be able to frustrate federal police forces just as well as they can local ones. Ten years of increasingly stringent federal efforts to abate cocaine trafficking, for example, have not succeeded in raising the street price of the drug.

Consider the most drastic proposal currently in play, that of Senator John Chafee, of Rhode Island, who would ban the manufacture, sale, and home possession of handguns within the United States. This proposal goes far beyond even the Chicago law, because existing weapons would have to be surrendered. Handguns would become contraband, and selling counterfeit, stolen, and contraband goods is big business in the United States. The objective of law enforcement is to raise the costs of engaging in crime and so force criminals to take expensive precautions against becoming entangled with the legal system. Crimes of a given type will, in theory, decline as soon as the direct and indirect costs of engaging in them rise to the point at which criminals seek more profitable opportunities in other (not necessarily legal) lines of work.

In firearms regulation, translating theory into practice will continue to be difficult, at least if the objective is to lessen the practical availability of firearms to people who might abuse them. On the demand side, for defending oneself against predation there is no substitute for a firearm. Criminals, at least, can switch to varieties of law-breaking in which a gun confers little or no advantage (burglary, smash-and-grab), but people who are afraid of confrontations with criminals, whether rationally or (as an accountant might reckon it) irrationally, will be very highly motivated to acquire firearms. Long after the marijuana and cocaine wars of this century have been forgotten, people's demand for personal security and for the tools they believe provide it will remain strong.

On the supply side, firearms transactions can be consummated behind closed doors. Firearms buyers, unlike those who use drugs, pornography, or prostitution, need not recurrently expose themselves to legal jeopardy. One IQ to the marketplace is enough to arm oneself for life. This could justify a consumer's taking even greater precautions to avoid apprehension, which would translate into even steeper enforcement costs for the police.

Don Kates Jr., a San Francisco lawyer and a much-published student of this problem, has pointed out that during the wars in Southeast and Southwest Asia local artisans were able to produce, from scratch, serviceable pot-metal counterfeits of AK-47 infantry rifles and similar weapons in makeshift backyard foundries, Although inferior weapons cannot discharge thousands of rounds without misfiring, they are more than deadly enough for light to medium service, especially by criminals and people defending themselves and their property, who ordinarily use firearms by threatening with them, not by fixing them. And the skills necessary to make them are certainly as widespread in America as in the villages of Pakistan or Vietnam. Effective policing of such a cottage Industry is unthinkable. Indeed, as Charles Chandler has pointed out, crude but effective firearms have been manufactured in prisons--highly supervised environments, compared with the outside world.

Seeing that local firearms restrictions are easily defeated, gun- control proponents have latched onto national controls as a way of finally making gun control something more than a gesture. But the same forces that have defeated local regulation will defeat further national regulation. Imposing higher costs on weapons ownership will, of course, slow down the weapons trade to some extent. But planning to slow it down in such a way as to drive down crime and violence, or to prevent motivated purchasers from finding ample supplies of guns and ammunition, is an escape from reality. And like many another such, it entails a morning after.

Administering Prohibition

Assume for the sake of argument that to a reasonable degree of criminological certainty, guns are every bit the public-health hazard they are said to be. It follows, and many journalists and a few public officials have already said, that we ought to treat guns the same way we do smallpox viruses or other critical vectors of morbidity and mortality--namely, isolate them from potential hosts and destroy them as speedily as possible. Clearly, firearms have at least one characteristic that distinguishes them from smallpox viruses: nobody wants to keep smallpox viruses in the nightstand drawer. Amazingly enough, gun-control literature seems never to have explored the problem of getting weapons away from people who very much want to keep them in the nightstand drawer.

Our existing gun-control laws are not uniformly permissive, and, indeed, in certain places are tough even by international standards. Advocacy groups seldom stress the considerable differences among American jurisdictions, and media reports regularly assert that firearms are readily available to anybody anywhere in the country. This is not the case. For example, handgun restrictions in Chicago and the District of Columbia are much less flexible than the ones in the United Kingdom. Several hundred thousand British subjects may legally buy and possess sidearms, and anyone who joins a target- shooting club is eligible to do so. But in Chicago and the District of Columbia, excepting peace officers and the like, only grandfathered registrants may legally possess handguns. Of course, tens or hundreds of thousands of people in both those cities--nobody can be sure how many--do in fact possess them illegally

Although there is, undoubtedly, illegal handgun ownership in the United Kingdom, especially in Northern Ireland (where considerations of personal security and public safety are decidedly unlike those elsewhere In the British Isles), it is probable that Americans and Britons differ in their disposition to obey gun- control laws: there is reputed to be a marked national disparity in compliance behavior. This difference, if it exists, may have something to do with the comparatively marginal value of firearms to British consumers. Even before it had strict firearms regulation, Britain had very low rates of crimes involving guns; British criminals, unlike their American counterparts, prefer burglary (a crime of stealth) to robbery (a crime of Intimidation).

Unless people are prepared to surrender their guns voluntarily, how can the U.S. government confiscate an appreciable fraction of our country's nearly 200 million privately owned firearms? We know that It is possible to set up weapons-free zones in certain locations-- commercial airports and many courthouses and, lately, some troubled big-city high schools and housing projects. The sacrifices of privacy and convenience, and the costs of paying guards, have been thought worth the (perceived) gain in security. No doubt it would be possible, though it would probably not be easy, to make weapons-free zones of shopping centers, department stores, movie theaters, ball parks. But it is not obvious how one would cordon off the whole of an open society.

Voluntary programs have been ineffectual. From time to time community- action groups or police departments have sponsored "turn in your gun" days, which are nearly always disappointing. Sometimes the government offers to buy guns at some price. This approach has been endorsed by Senator Chafee and the Los Angeles Times. Jonathan Alter, of Newsweek, has suggested a variation on this theme: youngsters could exchange their guns for a handshake with Michael Jordan or some other sports hero. If the price offered exceeds that at which a gun can be bought on the street, one can expect to see plans of this kind yield some sort of harvest--as indeed they have. But it is implausible that these schemes will actually result in a less-dangerous population. Government programs to buy up surplus cheese cause more cheese to be produced without affecting the availability of cheese to people who want to buy it. So it is with guns.

One could extend the concept of intermittent roadblocks of the sort approved by the Supreme Court for discouraging drunk driving. Metal detectors could be positioned on every street corner, or ambulatory metal-detector squads could check people randomly, or hidden magnetometers could be installed around towns, to detect concealed weapons. As for firearms kept in homes (about half of American households) ' warrantless searches might be rationalized on the well- established theory that probable cause is not required when authorities are trying to correct dangers to public safety rather than searching for evidence of a crime.

In a recent "town hall" meeting in California, President Bill Clinton used the word "sweeps," which he did not define, to describe how he would confiscate firearms if it were up to him. During the past few years the Chicago Housing Authority chairman, Vincent Lane, has ordered "sweeps" of several gang-ridden public-housing projects, meaning warrantless searches of people's homes by uniformed police officers looking for contraband. Lane's ostensible premise was that possession of firearms by tenants constituted a lease violation that, as a conscientious landlord, he was obliged to do something about. The same logic could justify any administrative search. City health inspectors in Chicago were recently authorized to conduct warrantless searches for lead hazards in residential paint. Why not lead hazards in residential closets and nightstands? Someone has probably already thought of it.

Ignoring the Ultimate Sources of Crime and Violence

The American experience with prohibition has been that black marketeers--often professional criminals --move in to profit when legal markets are closed down or disturbed. In order to combat them, new laws and law-enforcement techniques are developed, which are circumvented almost as soon as they are put in place. New and yet more stringent laws are enacted, and greater sacrifices of civil liberties and privacy demanded and submitted to. But in this case the problem, crime and violence, will not go away, because guns and ammunition (which, of course, won't go away either) do not cause it. One cannot expect people to quit seeking new weapons as long as the tactical advantages of weapons are seen to outweigh the costs imposed by prohibition. Nor can one expect large numbers of people to surrender firearms they already own. The only way to make people give up their guns is to create a world in which guns are perceived as having little value. This world will come Into being when criminals choose not to use guns because the penalties for being caught with them are too great, and when ordinary citizens don't think they need firearms because they aren't afraid of criminals anymore.

Neither of these eventualities seems very likely without substantial departures in law-enforcement policy. Politicians' nostrums-- increasing the punishment for crime, slapping a few more death- penalty provisions into the code--are taken seriously by few students of the crime problem. The existing penalties for predatory crimes are quite severe enough. The problem is that they are rarely meted out in the real world. The penalties formally published by the code are in practice steeply discounted, and criminals recognize that the judicial and penal systems cannot function without bargaining in the vast majority of cases.

-- when guns are outlawed only liberals won't have guns (guns=freedom@usa.pow), July 01, 1999.

Thanks guys, you provided me with some much needed info for my position on gun control

-- (AtlantaAS@aol.com), July 01, 1999.

Dog,

::An armed society, is a POLITE society...

I just this past weekend had a conversation with a friend who travels quite a bit and works for a large bank in NYC.

I asked him "Which would you rather have, every person on the train with you armed, or just the bad guys?" After a moments thought he said (unbelievably) "just the bad guys".

Then I told him that 40 states have "shall issue" concealed carry laws, and that given the amount of travelling he does, he's probably been in the presence of armed citizens hundreds of times and never known it. His dead-serious response? "Stop it, you're scaring me".

This same guy also staunchly claimed that the whole gun control issue in congress a few weeks ago was about requiring background checks for any gun purchase, not just at gun shows. Only when I offered to bet him $500 that, today, any gun purchased at a gun store or from a licensed dealer ALREADY required a background check did he back down. I guess he didn't want to put his money where his mouth was...

The media has REALLY done a job on shaping public opinion, eh?

-TECH32-

-- TECH32 (TECH32@NOMAIL.COM), July 01, 1999.

TECH32,

I know I would prefer everyone on the train to be armed. That would mean all would be on a "level playing field". I would feel safe with my S&W 629 or my Ruger .45 on my hip, NOT concealed. Here in NM it is illegal to carry concealed. So, when I am going out for shooting practice, every week, the pistol goes on the hip. The looks you get when you walk into a store with a .45 on your hip is amazing. Store owners kind of flip the first time, but once they get to know you, they LIKE for you to shop there. No worries about anyone accosting you... ; )

Talk about spin on Y2K, I can't get over the spin on the subject of guns and ownership. But I feel the NRA is selling us out....

comments???

lounging on the porch...

The Dog

-- Dog (Desert Dog@-sand.com), July 01, 1999.

is it true the nra wrote the brady bill???

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@yahoo.com), July 02, 1999.