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National Rifle Association

Violence Policy Center

Handgun Control Inc.

When a white supremacist named Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, a college student majoring in criminal justice, decided to go out shooting Orthodox Jews, African Americans and Asian Americans on July 4, 1999, he first tried to buy new guns from a licensed gun store in Peoria Heights, Illinois. The store’s owner dutifully ran Smith through the federal background check system, discovered Smith was under a court order to keep away from his girlfriend and turned his customer away.

Undeterred, Smith easily and quickly purchased used guns from an unlicensed private dealer who was under no obligation to check anything about his customer. Police believe that the 22-caliber and .380-caliber semiautomatic handguns he bought in this fashion were what he used on a three-day killing tour through the Chicago suburbs where he grew up and around the University of Illinois and Indiana University in Bloomington, both of which he’d attended.

Smith’s odyssey left two men — one black (a former basketball coach at Northwestern University) and one Korean — dead, both shot in the back. He wounded nine others. The episode ended in rural southern Illinois after Smith stole a van, was chased by the police and shot himself dead under the chin.

The Smith case demonstrates what the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights advocates have been saying for years: Conventional gun "control" doesn’t work. No matter how many ways legislatures nibble away at the right to own guns, they leave loopholes through which any determined person can easily pass. Can’t buy a gun at the gun store because of your criminal record or prior commitment to a mental hospital? No problem. Check out our wide selection at gun shows, flea markets, in the classified ads of magazines or on the Internet, or just buy, borrow or steal one from a friend. Under existing federal law, unlicensed dealers are required only not to knowingly sell to felons or minors.

Almost all of the weapons used in the mass shootings of the past two years were originally acquired legally by the owners of those weapons. Some of the youthful perpetrators were too young to purchase guns, so they stole them from relatives. Gun-obsessive Buford Furrow amassed an arsenal, including, apparently, the Israeli-made Uzi he used to spray a day-care facility at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, while holding a federal license to buy and sell guns across state lines from 1992 to 1995. After he pleaded guilty to felony assault for pulling a knife on a counselor and administrator at a psychiatric hospital where he was trying to get help in 1998, his weapons should have been confiscated but weren’t.

Dylan Klebold got an older girlfriend to buy three of the guns used in the Columbine massacre from three unlicensed dealers at a gun show outside Denver. Such so-called "straw purchasers" are a common conduit for guns getting into the hands of people who normally would be barred, says Lieutenant Ernest Brown, a 17-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department who last year was appointed acting first deputy chief of the Chicago Housing Authority Police.

"Say I’m a gang-banger and you’re a stand-up citizen," Brown says. "I give you $10,000 to go buy me 10 guns. You say, ‘It’ll only cost $5,000.’ I say, ‘The other $5,000 is for your trouble.’ It’s people cooperating in those kinds of arrangements that keep guns coming in."

Chicago, which like many large cities averages more than a homicide a day, has joined more than two dozen cities suing suburban gun stores and gun manufacturers. The cities allege, among other misdeeds, that the manufacturers and wholesale distributors knowingly ship to stores guns in quantities they know exceed the legitimate demand from consumers in the vicinity of a store. Around Chicago, the guns end up in the city, where, as in Washington, D.C., gun possession by civilians has been essentially banned for well over than a decade. That guns are still so prevalent (in 1994, Chicago police were recovering 61 a day) shows why local bans are doomed to fail.

Besides trying to restrict who can buy a gun, law-makers have attempted to curb sales of certain types of firearms. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act aimed to ban military-style assault weapons. But manufacturers easily sidestepped these restrictions by removing fire suppressors and bayonet lugs and making other cosmetic changes that brought weapons of undiminished firepower into technical compliance with the law.

Some gun control advocates argue that the answer is to require that all guns be licensed and registered like cars. That way gun purchasers could be held responsible for whatever mayhem was committed with their property. But as the anti-gun group the Violence Policy Center points out, licensing of cars had little effect on the death rate associated with autos. "It wasn’t until changes were made to the product itself — such as seat belts, air bags and improved structural design — that the number of deaths began to decline." It’s hard to imagine what design changes could be made to guns so they could blast holes only in bad people or inanimate objects like paper target silhouettes.

"Whether at the local, state or federal level, the principal flaw that has plagued legislative efforts," the Violence Policy Center declares, "has been an almost exclusive focus on over-the-counter sales standards and a mistaken belief that it’s possible to separate ‘good handguns’ (those in our hands for self-defense) from ‘bad’ handguns (those in the hands of criminals)."

Because it’s the culture, not the guns

In the wake of this past year’s shooting sprees, some politicians laid the blame on violent images from television, movies and video games. Dissent came almost immediately from across the Atlantic. The British and other Europeans watch many of the same movies and TV shows popular in the United States and play the same presumably homicide-inducing computer and video games. Yet homicides by firearms in England, Wales and Scotland in 1997 totaled 64, compared to 12,397 in the United State the same year.

"America’s population is only five times bigger than Britain’s — yet it had 194 times the number of lethal shootings," observed Jonathan Freeland, a former Washington Post correspondent now an editorial writer and columnist for the Guardian newspaper in Britain. "The explanation is simple enough: Britain bans guns. America loves them."

In Britain, not even the police carry guns, unless on special assignment involving a siege or terrorist acts, Freeland explained. "The result is not a British population left naked and defenseless against a gun-toting criminal onslaught. Instead we’re safe while America’s toddlers are vulnerable."

Numbers from other countries tell the same story. According to United Nations statistics, in Japan less than 1 percent of households have firearms and Japan sees, on average, fewer than 1 gun homicide per million people each year. By comparison, the United Nations says 41 percent of U.S. households contain guns and there are 62.4 gun homicides per million people annually.

But it’s not as simple as many guns equals many homicides and as few guns equals few. Gun homicides total a measly 4 to 6 per million persons annually in Canada, Switzerland and France, but about a quarter of the households in those countries have firearms.

Part of the explanation is that even in industrialized countries where people are allowed to own guns, the restrictions are much tighter than here. Another is that a large percentage of the firearms kept in homes in countries like Finland — where the U.N. says half of all households have them — are hunting rifles and shotguns, not handguns.

In Switzerland and Israel, firearms are prevalent because most citizens are members of a national defense force. They’re issued rifles and ammunition and trained how to use them. But these citizen-soldiers are also required to account for every round they’re given. "In Switzerland," says Nancy Hwa, spokeswoman for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the research and education arm of the anti-gun lobbying group Handgun Control Inc., "you’re given a limited number of bullets in a sealed tin. If [when you report for service] the seal is broken, you’re thrown in jail. If the NRA wants to adopt that system, it would be fine with us."

Because it’s too late to change

Last September 15, Larry Ashbrook of Fort Worth, Texas, a 47-year-old loner who wrote rambling letters to his local newspaper about how the CIA was spying on him, walked into a youth rally at a Baptist church in his neighborhood and began firing two handguns while screaming obscenities and ridiculing the Baptist faith. He shot 14 people, killing seven, before taking his own life.

Two days later, Texas Governor George W. Bush, the odds-on favorite to be Republican nominee for president, cut short a campaign trip to Michigan to visit some of the wounded in the hospital and meet with students at a nearby high school. Outside the hospital, Bush, who signed into law Texas’s concealed-carry law, was asked about gun control. He explained how he favors instant-background checks to keep criminals and people who are mentally deranged from buying guns, and he emphasized the need to enforce existing laws on sales and criminal use of guns.

"But the idea of ridding hatred out of somebody’s heart," he said, "requires something larger than government."

The governor needs a lesson in anatomy. It’s not people’s hearts the government should be trying to rid of anything, it’s their hands. Take away Larry Ashbrook’s guns, and he would have been just another surly suburbanite who liked to lie flat on the roof of his house behind the chimney as if conducting surveillance. Unfortunately, "Crazy Larry," as some teenagers in his neighborhood reportedly referred to him, was able to buy a .380-caliber handgun from a Fort Worth gun shop, now out of business, and a 9 mm semiautomatic at a flea market in a Dallas suburb. Both purchases were legal.

Many people — Governor Bush apparently among them — presume that if guns went away, people would find some other way to kill each other. But that would be require a massive shift in contemporary murder tactics. More than 70 percent of homicides today are committed with firearms.

In an op-ed published in the South Bend Tribune following the Columbine massacre, Sister Elaine DesRosiers of Mishawaka rightly wondered if as many students would have been killed if Harris and Klebold had had to resort to knives or clubs instead of guns. Without guns, she asked, "Would there ever be headlines like ‘Drive-by stabbings take three lives’?"

But is it possible to get rid of guns? Not overnight.

No one knows for certain how many firearms there are in the United States. Estimates run as high as 250 million, or roughly one for every man, woman and child; Texas reportedly has 80 million, four times the state’s population. A closer look, however, reveals that guns aren’t yet the lethal equivalent of toasters. According to a Justice Department survey, nearly 75 percent of gun owners own more than one, which means millions own none. Various reports put the actual percentage of American homes containing some kind of gun at 35 to 47 percent.

We could start by getting rid of handguns, the ventilator of choice in eight out of 10 murders. There are only 60 million of them, according to one recent estimate. In 1993 a Louis Harris Survey found a handgun ban was supported by 52 percent of the American public, the first time ever over 50 percent. And this was six years before Columbine. Last year, in a poll for Newsweek, half of all non-gun-owners said they favored a ban on nonpolice handguns, and even one in five gun owners concurred.

Not everyone in favor of outlawing handguns is a wildflower-gathering liberal either. Richard Nixon, who had good reason to fear firearms after seeing three of his political rivals (John and Robert Kennedy and George Wallace) targeted by gun assassins, told New York Times columnist William Safire after leaving office, "Guns are an abomination." Nixon favored making handguns illegal and requiring licenses for hunting rifles.

The Catholic Church also endorses strict gun control. A 1994 Vatican document on the global arms trade acknowledges that states have the right to obtain weapons for national defense but says control of the sale of handguns and small arms is "indispensable."

U.S. bishops go even further. In platform testimony submitted to both the Democratic and Republican parties in 1988 by the bishops’ public policy agency, the U.S. Catholic Conference, the bishops call for "strong and effective action to control handguns, leading to their eventual elimination from our society."

One could argue that a handgun ban would be unfair to people who own pistols strictly for target-shooting competition. But in their case the gun is nothing more than a very loud sporting good. Years ago the federal government banned lawn darts because people were getting skewered by them. No one screamed that their constitutional rights were being infringed. They probably switched to horseshoes. Let the target shooters take up archery.

Legally speaking, a ban on handguns might not be as difficult to enact as is commonly assumed. As discussed above, the Constitution doesn’t endow any particular firearm with untouchable status. (An alternative to banning guns, of course, would be to ban ammunition.)

On the other hand, if the Supreme Court switched gears and it came down to amending the Constitution, the immediate prospects would be dim. Amendments require a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress plus approval by three-fourths of the state legislatures. As journalist Daniel Lazare, author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy, pointed out an essay in Harper’s Magazine last October, it would take just 13 states, which could represent as little as 4.5 percent of the nation’s population, to doom such an amendment.

If the political will existed to ban handguns, the bigger question would be how to get rid of the guns themselves. It’s been noted that the Soviet Union was never able to confiscate all privately owned guns, and owning an unregistered weapon in that totalitarian society was a capital offense. If confiscation were tried in the United States today, it seems likely it would be met with armed resistance.

But confiscation wouldn’t be necessary. In 1981, the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove, Illinois, became the first community in the country to ban possession of handguns. Under the Morton Grove law, and others like it that passed quickly in Chicago and other nearby suburbs, police don’t go door to door looking for guns. They only confiscate them as discovered in the course of performing regular duties, like arresting bank robbers.

No one believes the passage of the ordinance in Morton Grove, which was aimed as much at preventing gun accidents as fighting gun crime, emptied every home in the community of guns. But as Village Trustee Don Sneider puts it, "Maybe they [gun owners] hid them a little better." Which would make them a lot less likely ever to be used.

Some people insist that citizens need to keep firearms at the ready so they can rise up against the government, 1776-style, if a president ever started acting like King George III. To these Jeffersonians, I suggest only that what George Washington considered a "great experiment" in democracy and freedom has passed out of the research and development stage. Let’s hang a sign from the Statue of Liberty: "Tyranny-Free Since 1789"(the year the Constitution took effect). Doesn’t that track record count for anything? Who would you rather put your faith in — democratically elected representatives or the high commander of the Michigan Militia?

What people often forget about our society and way of government is that it relies on people complying with laws voluntarily. In California, where it is now illegal to smoke in restaurants, people comply not so much because they could be issued a ticket if they didn’t, but because of the public disapproval they would suffer if they lit up. Were handguns simply outlawed everywhere, no exceptions, a similar stigma would likely emerge.

At one time people thought nothing of dumping spent motor oil down the storm sewer in front of their house. Then public consciousness was raised about pollution. Then improper disposal of spent oil became a crime. Today, if your neighbor spotted you pouring oil down the sewer, the neighbor might or might not call the police. But either way you’d be embarrassed to be seen doing it, so you probably endure the inconvenience and tote it Jiffy Lube.

Banning handguns may still seem impossible, but what is more realistic — that we can get rid of guns or that we can rid every heart of hatred? As it stands now, we’re already counting on every law-abiding, well-adjusted citizen who has a gun to remain so till the grave.

Too often we take the near-term view of issues like this, the one favored by politicians. As Hartford Courant columnist Denis Horgan reminded us in urging a ban on all guns last spring: "In my time, the laws of the land allowed terrible discrimination against our black neighbors, against women. We changed it. In my father’s time, women were not allowed to vote; they changed it. In my father’s father’s time it was legal to own another human being; they changed that."

What we need to remember is that 100 years from now, everyone who owns a gun today will be dead. Likewise, every one who could want to buy a gun in that far-distant time, or vote up or down on a Constitutional amendment banning guns, has not yet been born.

Getting rid of guns won’t get rid of hate or crime or stupidity, but it will make all three a lot less deadly. There is a future United States society out there waiting to be created. If we start now, guns don’t have to be the part of that one that they are of this one.

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