GUN CONTROL CLICH?S

Shooting Down Faulty Arguments
by Robert W. Lee

Public discussion of many important issues, from the environment to health care, is being seriously garbled by misleading collectivist clich?s which at first glance may seem credible, but which crumble when closely scrutinized. The ongoing debate about gun control is no exception. Following are a few of the most widely utilized — and deceptive — clich?s currently parroted by advocates of gun control in their quest for domestic disarmament.

The Second Amendment does not apply to individuals. Were that actually the case, there would be little basis for concluding that other rights protected by the Bill of Rights apply to individuals. Just as the Second Amendment safeguards the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms, the Fourth Amendment guarantees the right of “the people” to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. Are we to believe that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to individuals? Or that the First Amendment protections for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, etc. do not apply to individuals?

As attorney Stephen P. Halbrook notes in his important book That Every Man Be Armed, “If a court held that ‘the people’ mentioned in the First Amendment are a select group of orators, or that small printing presses and cheap handbills could be outlawed as long as expensive newspapers are published, outraged civil libertarians would quickly disprove these restrictive views by reference to history.”

Gun control laws are needed to curb crime and violence. This claim is predicated on the preposterous assumption that such laws can keep guns out of criminal hands. They cannot. But even if everyone but the police and military were somehow disarmed (a seemingly impossible task since criminals would not willingly turn in their guns), thugs could still secure guns simply by stealing them from the police or military. It happens all the time. On occasion, even felons in maximum security prisons have escaped using smuggled guns.

If everyone, including the police and military, were legally disarmed, the problem would remain, since serviceable homemade “zip” guns can be easily manufactured from such raw materials as radio antennas, gas pipes, rubber bands, door latches, and nails. Were guns outlawed, outlaws would still find ways to secure them.

Guns are a public health menace. Violence (not guns) is a public health issue. Guns are an effective deterrent for quelling violence and for protecting the life and limb of the innocent.

Florida State University criminologist Dr. Gary Kleck estimates that at least 75 percent of all uses of guns in crime-related incidents are defensive uses by crime victims (about 2.4 million incidents annually). One of six defensive gun users claims that someone would almost surely have died had they not used their gun, which, Dr. Kleck notes, “would imply about 400,000 purportedly lifesaving uses of their guns annually, a figure which would dwarf the nearly 37,000 lives taken with guns.” Dr. Kleck observes that “taking guns away from millions of crime victims who would have effectively used them to prevent death and injury could cost thousands of lives,” to say nothing of the astronomical health care cost.

Countries with strict gun control laws, such as Japan, Britain, and Canada, have a small fraction of the U.S. level of violent crime. Dr. Kleck notes in Point Blank the many flaws in equating crime and the availability of guns in the U.S. with other countries. Kleck notes that it is true, for instance, that Great Britain “does indeed have both stricter gun laws and less homicide than the United States,” but “Britain’s rates of knife homicide and of killings with hands and feet are also far lower than the corresponding rates in the United States,” and “no one is foolish enough to infer from these facts that the lower violence rates were caused by a lower rate of knife ownership in Britain, or to the British having fewer hands and feet than Americans.” Great Britain “had far less violence than the United States long before it had strict gun laws,” and “England’s homicide rate relative to that of the United States was the same or even slightly worse after fifty years of strict gun control.”

Comparisons between gun crime in the U.S. and Japan also ignore cultural differences. To partially control for such differences, Dr. Kleck compared homicide rates among Japanese-Americans and their presumably culturally similar brethren in Japan. He found that “in Japan, where civilian gun ownership is virtually nonexistent and gun control laws are extremely strict, the homicide rate is 2.3 times as high as it is among Japanese-Americans living where guns are easily available and gun laws are far less restrictive.”

Internationally, there is simply no meaningful correlation between violent crime and gun control laws. In such relatively crime-free countries as Switzerland, Israel, and New Zealand, guns are even more available than here in the United States. But in Taiwan and South Africa, the two nations that most severely restrict gun ownership (violators are subject to the death penalty), the apolitical murder rates are far higher than in the U.S.

Guns have only one purpose: to kill. There are an estimated 200 million privately owned guns in the United States, and there were about 38,000 gun-related deaths (homicides, suicides, and accidents) in 1991. Even assuming the use of a different firearm in each incident, less than 0.02 percent of all firearms were involved. In more than 90 percent of instances when guns are used for self-defense, they merely frighten assailants into retreat without injury or death to those involved. Since guns are also used for hunting, sports competition, recreation, collecting, etc., the fallacy of this clich? is apparent.

Using a gun for self-defense increases the likelihood of mistakenly killing an innocent person. Such unfortunate accidents will happen, but the available data indicates that they happen less frequently among homeowners than among the police. In their important 1992 study Myths About Gun Control, Dr. Morgan O. Reynolds of Texas A&M University and W. W. Caruth III of the National Center for Policy Analysis note that armed citizens mistakenly kill innocent persons about 30 times a year. In contrast, police mistakenly kill around 330 persons annually.

The risk of being murdered is higher in homes with guns than in those without. This claim is largely based on an article which appeared last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that the risk of being murdered was 2.7 times higher in homes with guns. In a subsequent analysis published as a guest editorial in the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, Dr. Gary Kleck noted some of the NEJM study’s flagrant flaws. For one thing, the researchers had “found more guns in the households of homicide victims than households without homicide victims and concluded that the guns must have somehow caused the violence.” It is as if they “had found that insulin was more common in the households of diabetes patients than in households without a diabetic patient and concluded that insulin causes diabetes.”

Dr. Kleck points out that “violent circumstances (such as associating with dangerous people and engaging in dangerous activities) can lead people to acquire guns for protection.” Because the NEJM study “did nothing to distinguish cause from effect,” it “can tell us nothing about the effects, either risk-increasing or risk-decreasing, of keeping guns for self-protection.”

Most gun uses are defensive in nature, and most criminals are frightened off without a shot being fired. When the hundreds of thousands of defensive uses that save lives without anyone being injured are taken into account, it becomes obvious that far more lives are saved when homeowners are armed than when they are defenseless.

Gun owners, like automobile drivers, should be licensed and required to pass proficiency tests. It is not illegal for an unlicensed person to buy an automobile or drive one on his or her private property. Though automobiles are both licensed and registered, and those who drive them on public roads and highways must also be licensed, they account for about 28 times as many accidental deaths as do firearms. This despite estimates indicating that there are more firearms in American homes (around 200 million, including 70 million handguns) than registered and licensed motor vehicles on our highways (about 187 million in 1991).

Waiting periods for purchase of handguns have kept many convicted felons from obtaining firearms. Gun control lobbyists claimed that some 1,300 illegal purchasers were blocked by Maryland’s waiting period in 1990. Firearms Coalition head Neal Knox notes, however, that most such denials “are subsequently approved. They are initially rejected due to misidentification, police records that do not include dispositions [as when charges are dropped following an arrest], or outstanding arrest warrants due to excessive parking tickets and similar innocuous reasons.”

According to the commander of Maryland’s Firearms License Section, “Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been initially disapproved over the years … and were approved” on subsequent appeal. In other words, waiting periods inconvenience the law-abiding far more than the lawbreaker.

A waiting period such as the Brady bill could have prevented John Hinckley from obtaining the gun he used to wound President Reagan and Jim Brady. When the Brady law went into effect on February 28th, President Clinton phoned Jim Brady and his wife, Sarah (chairman of Handgun Control, Inc.), and claimed that “Jim Brady has paid a terrific price for the fact that we didn’t have the Brady bill” when he was shot and wounded during the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan.

The implication that a waiting period would have stopped John Hinckley from obtaining a firearm is unjustified. Indeed, a waiting period would likely have made matters even worse. Hinckley had no criminal record and no public record of mental problems. Although he purchased his weapon in Texas, which had no waiting period, he could just as easily have obtained it in a state with a waiting period.

Colin Ferguson, who killed six unarmed persons and wounded 17 others on a crowded New York commuter train on December 7, 1993, obtained his gun legally after passing California’s 15-day waiting period. Patrick Purdy, who killed five children in a California schoolyard, passed California’s waiting period despite a record that included seven felony arrests that were not on his record since they were all plea-bargained down to misdemeanors. And Mark David Chapman murdered musician John Lennon in New York in 1980 after purchasing his pistol legally in Hawaii following a seven-day wait.

Most murders with guns are committed against friends or family members. To the contrary, Reynolds and Caruth report that a “majority of murders involve strangers or people with whom the killer is not acquainted. Fewer than a fourth of all murders involve family members or friends.” Indeed, “murders involving family members or friends have been a declining share of all murders….”

We must not return to the violent days of the Old West. Compared to the United States today, the frontier was a blissful haven. As UCLA historian Dr. Roger McGrath documented in his book Guns, Highwaymen and Vigilantes: Violence in the Old West (1984), rates of murder, rape, robbery, and other violent crimes were a small fraction of what they are today specifically because so many persons were armed. Contrary to myths about the Old West, bank robberies were few (tellers and managers were armed), as were stagecoach robberies (especially those transporting bullion, which carried extra armed protection). Dr. McGrath observes that “the young, the old, and the female — those most vulnerable -were far safer in the most wild and wooly frontier towns than they are in any American city today,” since “people had arms, knew how to use them, and were willing to fight with deadly force to protect their persons or property.”

Gun controls have kept many criminals from obtaining guns. Reynolds and Caruth note that “the places where gun control laws are toughest tend to be the places where the most crime is committed with illegal weapons.” They point out that among “the 15 states with the highest homicide rates, 10 have restrictive or very restrictive gun laws” and “20 percent of U.S. homicides occur in four cities with just 6 percent of the population — New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, DC — and each has a virtual prohibition on private handguns.” New York, with “one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation,” has “20 percent of the armed robberies.”

Individual citizens do not need guns for self-protection since that is the job of the police. Numerous state and federal court decisions have firmly established that the police have no legal obligation to protect individual citizens and cannot be held liable for failing to do so. Some of those key decisions are summarized in an important report, Dial 911 And Die?, published by the Wisconsin-based Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO), which concludes that Americans who believe that their local police have a duty in law to protect them against criminals “are wrong.” As a result of this complacency-inducing belief, JPFO contends, many persons have become crime victims after being “duped by ignorant or else dishonest politicians or police chiefs, who promise protection that they cannot give and have no legal duty to give.”

Dr. Gary Kleck agrees that the claim that “citizens can depend on police for effective protection, is simply untrue,” since it “implies that police can serve the same function as a gun in disrupting a crime in progress, before the victim is hurt or loses property. Police cannot do this, and indeed do not themselves even claim to be able to do so. Instead, police primarily respond reactively to crimes after they have occurred …. ” The idea that “modern police are so effective in controlling crime that they have rendered citizen self-protection obsolete is widely at variance with a large body of evidence that police activities have, at best, only very modest effects on crime.”

Guns are largely to blame for teen suicide. Writing in Reason magazine for July 1993, David P. Kopel, director of the Second Amendment Project at the Independence Institute, pointed out that “while teenage suicide has remained stable in the United States in the last 15 years, it has risen sharply in Europe, where gun control is much stricter. In Great Britain, where gun laws are very strict and the gun ownership rate is less than one tenth that in the United States, adolescent suicide has risen by more than 25 percent in just five years. Similarly, in Japan handguns and rifles are illegal and shotguns very difficult to obtain. Yet teenage suicide is 30 percent more frequent in Japan than in the United States.”

If average citizens are allowed to carry weapons in their cars and on their persons, the homicide rate will skyrocket. Mr. Kopel and colleague Clayton E. Cramer evaluated the impact of laws that allow citizens to carry guns. In the ten states that have adopted laws requiring authorities to issue a carry permit for self-protection to anyone who passes a background check and completes a safety course, some states saw modest decreases in the murder rate, while others saw slight increases, but “in neither large or small states do we see evidence of obvious long-term increases in murder rates after passage of these laws.” The researchers concluded that carry-permit laws can do much good, especially in those states with high murder rates, and are unlikely to do significant harm. The most dramatic effect was in Florida, where they found that between 1975 and 1986, the murder rate was 18 percent to 57 percent above the national average. But after the state approved a carry-permit law in 1987, the murder rate fell steadily, from 36 percent above the national average in 1986 to some four percent below the national average in 1991.

More than two centuries ago, in his book On Crimes and Punishments (1764), criminologist Cesare Beccaria wrote that laws forbidding the carrying of firearms “disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes …. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” The passage containing those words was copied in full by Thomas Jefferson in his Commonplace Book, the source book for his ideas on government.

A huge increase in the federal tax on ammunition would help to reduce the criminal misuse of guns. Criminals use guns as tools of their sordid trade. Were the ammunition tax hiked dramatically, it would simply amount to an added overhead expense for thugs bent on generating tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of income via robberies and other crimes. In contrast, for the average American who purchases ammunition for recreation, sport shooting, and/or self-defense, there would be no financial return to offset the tax. As in so many other instances, a mammoth ammunition tax would tend to disarm the law-abiding while doing nothing to curb crime.

We can experiment with gun control legislation and repeal it if it doesn’t work. Once on the books, even the most outrageous and counterproductive anti-gun strictures are extremely difficult to negate. The original national firearms law set a minimal barrel length of 18 inches, which made certain existing commercial barrel lengths illegal. It took 25 years of continuous effort to achieve a reduction in the barrel length to 16 inches so that the affected sporting rifles could be sold legally once again.

Similarly, the 1968 Gun Control Act, adopted in the emotional climate that followed the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, was larded with provisions to harass and intimidate gun dealers, collectors, and law-abiding citizens. It took 18 years and an enormous amount of effort to make even the modest revisions incorporated in the 1986 Firearms Owners’ Protection Act.

Increasing federal firearms dealer fees will make it more difficult for criminals to get guns. In January, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen triggered the Clinton Administration’s drive for a draconian increase in the firearms dealer fee from $200 over three years (under the Brady bill) to $600 annually. The stated goal, he said, is to eliminate 200,000 of the estimated 284,000 current licensees (71 percent). Yet in virtually the same breath, he referred to studies by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms indicating that “45 percent of licensed dealers don’t acquire any firearms,” while another 36 percent acquire less than ten a year. Those two categories account for over 80 percent of all gun dealers, which makes one wonder how, if 81 percent of dealers sell so few guns, eliminating 71 percent of dealers will significantly reduce gun sales, much less crime.

Bentsen himself acknowledged that only about “one-third of the guns that criminals get are from licensed dealers,” while the other two-thirds come from “off-street sales,” and “no law enforcers — not 400 or 4,000 — can stop that.” So the real target is not so much the criminal element as (directly) law-abiding small firearms dealers and (indirectly) the American people as a whole.

Using a gun to resist a criminal will more likely than not get you killed or seriously injured. Whether one should resist a criminal attack depends largely on how one is equipped to resist. Based on available crime statistics, Dr. Gary Kleck concludes, “Robbery and assault victims who used a gun to resist were less likely to be attacked or to suffer an injury than those who used any other methods of self-protection or those who did not resist at all.”

After gun resistance, “the victim course of action least likely to be associated with injury is doing nothing at all,” but that strategy “is also the worst at preventing completion of the crime,” and “passivity is not a completely safe course either, since a quarter of victims who did not resist were injured anyway.”

All things considered, “active physical resistance without a gun often provokes offender attack, whereas resistance with a gun deters attack,” and “gun-armed victim resistance to robbery or assault almost never provokes the offender to injure the victim.”

The ominous statistics regarding gun violence speak for themselves. Few statistics are as prone to misleading interpretations as those involving guns. Homicide statistics do not reveal, for instance, how many were justified in self-defense. And the figures seldom reflect the extent to which firearms are being blamed for what are actually the failings of our criminal system of justice.

On June 2, 1993, for instance, Rodney G. Stokes shot and killed Francine Harris with a .38-calibre pistol at the state prison in Baltimore, Maryland, then killed himself. Ms. Harris, who had been having a “relationship” with Stokes, was employed by a wrecking company that was demolishing an obsolete wing of the penitentiary. Her death will appear in the year’s statistics as a gun homicide, and Stokes’ demise will appear as a gun suicide. But the stats will not explain that Stokes was an already-convicted killer who, instead of being executed for the brutal murder of a Baltimore man in 1975, received a life sentence, plus ten years, yet remained eligible for parole. He was placed on work release in January 1989, but instead of going to work on June 2nd he took a cab to the prison, where he killed Harris.

Had Stokes received the death penalty following his first murder, he would not have been around to ratchet up the gun-crime statistics that advocates of gun control so enthusiastically cite as a basis for battering the Second Amendment