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Ban the gun, part 2

Readers write

Bill of Rights

Violence Studies Program, Emory University

National Rifle Association

"Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself" is what I remember my father saying. I was in kindergarten or just beginning first grade, tearfully complaining about how practically every day on my long walk to and from elementary school a bully was picking on me.

I was easy and predictable pickings as a kid: weak and chubby with bright orange hair and large freckles decorating my face and arms; second grade brought glasses. I would be picked on and teased practically my entire childhood, enduring humiliations like being yoked in a "full nelson" and marched around the playground. I rarely offered much resistance. But after getting that "standing up" talk from Dad I did.

A day or two later, the bully — whose name, incredibly, I can’t even remember — started walking on my shoe heels when we were alone. The details of what happened next are even less clear in my memory. Somewhere I found a length of two-by-four. I swung my arm with all my might. The lumber made contact with his face. He went down. I ran home, not looking back for fear he might be coming after me. When I got home I didn’t say anything to my parents.

The phone call from the bully’s parents came that evening. There was talk about the cost of dental work. Why had I done such a thing, my parents wanted to know. Through scared sobs and shuddering gasps, I got across that I was following Dad’s advice and standing up for myself.

I don’t remember being punished for knocking that kid’s teeth out with a two-by-four. Further encounters were precluded by our moving to another neighborhood within a year, one with a much shorter walk to school, if no fewer bullies.

I also don’t recall my act of aggravated assault being spoken of again in our household. I’ve rarely thought about it myself over the years. But it has come to mind several times in the past year. What I’ve thought is: "What if Dad had kept a gun in the house?" Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself. Even a kindergartener knows that a gun will stop a bully, and from a nice safe distance. If I’d been able to lay my hands on a gun, would I have shot my tormenter? Possibly.

Then I imagine Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walking into Columbine High School on Hitler’s birthday, seething with jealousy and hatred for the jocks and other popular kids. I see fat, balding, spectacled Buford O. Furrow Jr. looking in the mirror, seeing a fine specimen of a superior race and pondering how to send a wake-up call to kill Jews. I think of Mark Barton, depressed after a string of day-trading losses and striding into a stock-trading office in Atlanta to get even.

Take away those people’s guns and they’re racists and outcasts and delusional failures. On better days, of course, they were also husbands and students and employees. I’m willing to bet also that each was full-nelsoned around a playground at least once in their youth.

What they weren’t, what they almost certainly wouldn’t and couldn’t have become without possessing the right tool for the job of killing, were mass murderers.

And that would have been good enough for me.

If the mass shootings of the past two years have taught us anything it should be this: The very existence of guns in our society is dangerous to our health. Not the existence of guns in criminals’ hands, but the existence of guns in anyone’s hands, except maybe those people whose job it is to keep the peace. And only then because they’re supervised by people who can be voted out of their jobs for inattentiveness.

Every year about 15,000 people are killed by other people with guns in the United States. Guns are the implement of choice in even more suicides. Throw in shooting accidents, and about as many Americans die every year from firearms — the record was 39,595 in 1993 — as were killed during the entire Korean War (33,651). Among all consumer products, only motor vehicles outpace firearms as a cause of fatal injury, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects guns to pass cars and the like by 2003.

This, even though violent crime has been on the decline nationally the past six years. It only seems things have gotten worse because of this past year’s massacres of mostly white people by mostly white people in suburban and rural schools, churches and offices. Shootings of minorities by minorities long ago ceased being network news.

Defenders of gun rights shake their heads sadly at the footage from Littleton, Jonesboro, Paducah and other communities made infamous by gun carnage. Tragedies all, they say. But why should we law-abiding citizens have to endure the infringement of our right to bear arms because of the actions of a few lunatics? Keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally disturbed, they insist, and all will be well.

What this argument misses is that every criminal was at one-time a law-abiding citizen. Every well-adjusted citizen is at some time mentally disturbed, if only from alcohol or someone walking on the heels of their shoes. Everybody hates somebody sometime. Which makes everyone who has or can get a gun a potential "gunman."

We know intuitively that guns are trouble. A person who is violently unpredictable is called a "loose cannon" or a "loaded gun." Disarming paramilitary groups like the Irish Republican Army and Kosovo Liberation Army is the first thing peace-keepers try to do. They understand that the only sure way to keep people from shooting each other is to take away their guns. So why is it that no one in authority seriously proposes disarming the United States?

Here are the typical arguments.

Because the Bill of Rights won’t let us

Gun-rights advocates inevitably quote the Constitution’s guarantee of the people’s right to bear arms, but they rarely quote the guarantee in full. In its entirety, 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."

Sounds pretty clear that the Founding Fathers were talking about the need for citizen-soldiers to keep firearms so they could rally to the national defense in case the Redcoats ever returned or some future invader threatened, doesn’t it? Yet legal scholars have managed to find room for debate.

"There seems to be a consensus out there (among scholars) that there is a personal right to own weapons," says Donald P. Kommers, Robbie Professor of Government at Notre Dame and concurrently a professor in the Law School.

By the "Militia," some scholars argue, the Founding Fathers meant not today’s National Guard reservists but the entirety of the electorate. Our forefathers, these scholars tells us, believed that everyone with the right to vote — when the Constitution was written you had to be white, male and a property owner, and in some places practice the right religion — should also have the right to get and keep a gun. As for that introductory clause about the militia, gun-rights advocates say it was included to show one reason it was a good idea to have an armed citizenry, not the only reason.

Gun-rights advocates also insist that as part of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment should be given no less respect than the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and freedom of the press. Under this interpretation, making someone wait a week to buy a gun is akin to making someone wait a week to buy a book or magazine.

Others who have studied how the Constitution was written and ratified, however, keep coming back to that militia reference. They say James Madison, the document’s principal author, worded the amendment that way for a political reason: The anti-federalists, who fought ratification, wanted the state militias preserved because they feared a large standing federal army like the British one they had just fought to expel.

"[N]o one cared about an individual right to bear arms," declares historian Michael A. Bellesiles, director of the Violence Studies Program at Emory University, who has researched the origins of America’s gun culture, "they were concerned with the fate of the militia."

The Second Amendment isn’t a guarantee of an individual’s right to buy guns for self-protection, either, Kommers says. "It means to keep and bear arms for civil defense."

The same goes for guns designed for hunting. As Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale Law School, puts it: "The Framers envisioned Minutemen bearing guns, not Daniel Boone gunning bears."

Even if one doesn’t believe that those old-fashioned citizen militias were intended to be the end-all of the Second Amendment, it doesn’t matter. Because the Supreme Court does. The highest court has yet to declare any gun-control law unconstitutional on Second Amendment grounds. In fact, the last time the Supremes even agreed to review a challenge to a gun-control law was in 1939, when it upheld a federal ban on transporting sawed-off shotguns across state lines. The reason? The justices couldn’t see how such as weapon belonged in a militia arsenal.

Some gun-rights groups have since tried to argue that if that’s the standard, the government can’t bar people from owning assault rifles, machine guns and other military-style weapons, which would obviously be appropriate for militia warfare. So far that reasoning hasn’t won any legal battles. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, never one to suffer limits on personal freedoms gladly, believes that the right to own a gun is not absolute and that reasonable regulation is constitutional.

The other problem gun-rights Second Amendmenteers face involves the Fourteenth Amendment. As Kommers explains, the Bill of Rights speaks to Congress, telling federal legislators which personal liberties it may not restrict without due process. The Fourteenth Amendment essentially extends those power limits to the states. But one of the few provisions of the Bill of Rights that the Supreme Court has never said apply to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment is the Second Amendment. At least up to this point, the court’s attitude has been that states and localities are free to regulate guns however they see fit, and that includes banning them.

Because we need guns for self-defense

In October 1991, a mentally disturbed man rammed his pickup truck through the plate glass window of a Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and started firing pistols at the people inside. George Hennard methodically killed 23 people in 10 minutes, pausing only to reload. He probably would have killed more, but police arrived and shot him four times. He retreated to a restroom and killed himself with a shot to the head.

A chiropractor named Suzanna Gratia and her parents were in the cafeteria that day. Gratia had a gun in her car but didn’t carry it into the restaurant because it was against Texas law (then, but not anymore). Unarmed, she watched helplessly as the madman killed both her parents.

Later she testified that if she’d had the weapon she could have ended the slaughter. "I had a perfect shot at him. It would have been clear. I had a place to prop my hand."

Now a Republican state representative in Texas, Suzanna Gratia-Hupp campaigns coast to coast for laws to allow people to carry concealed weapons. According to the National Rifle Association, such laws are now in place in 31 states representing 50 percent of the nation’s population.

People in these states who have obtained the permits necessary to take their gun with them when they dine out presumably feel safer. But are they?

In a column for George magazine last year, writer Ann Coulter explained why as a woman she favors carrying a gun: "Guns are our friends, because in a world without guns I’m what is known as prey. Almost all females are." She said she’s often asked if she wouldn’t prefer a world without guns. "No, I’d prefer a world in which everyone is armed, even the criminals who mean to cause me harm. Then I’d at least have a fighting chance." But would she?

As common sense suggests, and law enforcement officials acknowledge, criminals almost invariably rely on the element of surprise. Even if trained and practiced in gun use, one is unlikely to be able to draw and fire a gun in time to stop an attack, or retrieve, unlock and load a weapon secured properly at home.

Yet millions of people believe they’ll be able to fire their gun in self-defense. According to a 1994 telephone survey by the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, almost three-quarters of the estimated 30 million American adults who own handguns keep them primarily for self-protection.

More than a few of those gun owners have probably been read the research of criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University. In 1995 Kleck reported that based on his surveys of random people, firearms are successfully used to ward off criminals as many as 2.5 million times a year. That number came as a surprise for many in law enforcement, who were used to the figure of 108,000 defensive gun uses yearly, gleaned from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey.

In 1994 the Justice Department attempted to resolve the discrepancy with a new national survey of firearms owners. This time the figure came out to be 23 million defensive gun uses a year. The researchers immediately knew the number had to be wrong because it meant guns were being used more often to stop crimes than commit them!

What the federal researchers figured out is that gun-owners exaggerate. The ones they surveyed, for instance, sometimes reported an instance of defensive gun use even though they never saw a perpetrator or knew exactly what crime was afoot.

Statistics are manipulated by both sides in the gun debate, though. A study published in 1993 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that, even controlling for contributing factors like drug use and a history of family violence, people who keep a gun in their house are three times more likely to be killed in their homes than those who don’t. The implication was that you’re more likely to shoot or be shot by a family member than to frighten off or shoot an intruder. But as gun-rights advocate John R. Lott Jr. of the University of Chicago Law School pointed out, the study never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the killing. If a household owned a gun and if a family member or acquaintance was shot to death while in the home, the gun in the household was blamed.

"In fact, virtually all the killings in the study were committed with guns brought in by an intruder," Lott noted. "No more than 4 percent of the gun deaths in the study can be attributed to the homeowner’s gun."

Either way it’s death by guns. People may buy guns believing they’re gaining protection. But protection from what? Guns. Who wouldn’t wish their purse contained a gun when faced with a madman executing everyone in sight? But who wouldn’t prefer that the madman didn’t have a gun either?

Because guns don't deter crime

Maybe a gun doesn’t have to be fired to deter crime. In his 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Lott analyzed crime statistics from 1977 to 1994 for all 3,054 counties in the United States. His conclusion: Violent crime declines as more and more people in an area obtain permits to carry concealed weapons.

"More concealed handguns, and increased gun ownership generally, unambiguously deters murder, robbery and aggravated assaults," wrote Lott. "This is . . . in line with the well-known fact that criminals prefer attacking victims that they consider weak."

That might explain why criminals don’t hold up police officers, who typically wear their guns in plain view, but how does a violent criminal know a potential victim is concealing a weapon? I’ve yet to see a gun carrier wearing the lapel button equivalent of that bumper sticker popular with some motorists, "Protected by Smith & Wesson."

Of course, if you carry a gun out in the open, someone is liable to steal it, a fate worse than being robbed of one’s credit cards. Gun manufacturers talk of developing "smart guns" that could be fired only if they recognize the owner’s fingerprint on the trigger, or incorporating some other high-tech locking device. But as of this writing, no 800 number exists to call to cancel your lost or stolen gun.

In the case of property crime, the presence of a gun in the home is usually irrelevant because the overwhelming number of burglaries take place when no one is home, according to Don Griffin, director of business and personal lines for the National Association of Independent Insurers, the country’s largest property and casualty insurance organization. If Lott is right and more guns mean less crime, one would expect insurance companies to reward gun-owning homeowners with lower insurance rates. In reality, just the opposite is the case. Because guns are sometimes quite valuable, policy holders may be required to list them for extra coverage at additional cost, Griffin says.

As far as the criminal-repelling properties of a home gun, Griffin says, "First, I don’t think we’ve ever looked at it specifically and, second, we don’t believe it’s the case that it reduces crime."

One also has to wonder about the scenario gun-owners imagine would call their household weapon into service. If in the unlikely event — a staple of Hollywood — that a homeowner heard something downstairs late at night and went to investigate, would he or she really prefer shooting it out in the living room over possession of the VCR to pretending to be asleep and filing an insurance claim the next day?

The authors of a 1997 report from the National Institute of Justice also point out an important chicken-and-egg phenomenon that comes into play when more and more people keep guns.

"When a high percentage of homes, vehicles and even purses contain guns, that presumably has an important effect on the behavior of predatory criminals. Some may be deterred or diverted to other types of crime. Other may change tactics, acquiring a gun themselves or in some other way seeking to preempt gun use by the intended victim."

There’s something chilling about imagining oneself "preempted."

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