Voodoo Social Policy

Exorcising the twin demons, guns and drugs

Jacob Sullum from the October 1994 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Another propaganda trick shared by supporters of drug control and gun control is to justify restrictions in the name of children. Janet Cooke's fraudulent Pulitzer Prize-winning story about an 8-year-old heroin addict who never existed epitomizes the sort of pathetic child-in- danger story that is used to stir up anti-drug fervor. Drug warriors never tire of pointing to the young victims of drug abuse, whether children addicted to drugs or children abused by their addict parents. "Crack babies" are ideal for this purpose, since they combine both themes. And notice how California Gov. Pete Wilson responded to the surgeon general's tentative suggestion that legalization should be studied: "Dr. Elders is willing to relegate the youth of America to the perils of addiction and enslavement," he declared.

There's a certain ironic justice to that, actually, because Elders's comments about legalization came after a speech in which she insisted that stricter gun control is needed to save the young people of America. An ad that Handgun Control Inc. ran last year to promote the Brady Bill makes a similar point. The headline reads, in big block letters: "TOO MANY KIDS ARE GETTING A REAL BANG OUT OF LIFE. HELP SAVE THE NEXT GENERATION." Beneath the headline is a photo of Jim Brady in a wheelchair, flanked by quotes from children who are terrified by gun violence. Brady implores, "Do it for our kids."

Focusing on kids is one way to create a sense of urgency. Another gimmick is to speak of guns and drugs as if they were viruses transmitting a deadly disease. The public-health model gives a veneer of science to what should be controversial assumptions about human nature and the proper role of government.

Although "medicalization" is sometimes presented as an alternative to the war on drugs, it plays an important role in rationalizing current policies. The medical model transforms a pattern of behavior--drug use--into a contagious disease that justifies confinement and coercive "treatment." And as we have seen, even the people who use illegal drugs without serious harm need to be treated, because they are "carriers," encouraging drug use by their example. To stem "the epidemic of drug use," drastic measures are necessary.

The medical model is also becoming increasingly popular among supporters of gun control. Medical journals publish articles that advocate stricter gun control on public-health grounds. These articles often present research findings that, upon close examination, have little to do with the conclusions drawn by the authors.

Dr. Arthur Kellermann has published two studies in The New England Journal of Medicine that are widely cited to support the claim that it's a bad idea to keep a gun in the home for self-protection. The first study, published in 1986, was the source of the factoid that a gun in the home is 43 times as likely to kill a resident as it is to kill an intruder. There are several problems with this study, but the most glaring one is that it failed to consider defensive gun uses short of actually killing someone--which, according to research by the criminologist Gary Kleck, represent something like 95 percent of defensive gun uses. Kellermann's other study, published in 1993, shared this crucial defect, in addition to other weaknesses, including a case-control approach that starts with homes where a homicide has occurred, rather than homes where a gun is present.

More troubling than the specific problems with the design and interpretation of such studies is the very idea that gun control is a medical issue. I'll grant you that a physician is the person to see if you happen to have a gunshot wound. But M.D.s have no special qualifications when it comes to evaluating the merits of gun control. They are not criminologists or gun experts. They can claim to speak with authority in this area only by pretending that the misuse of guns is a disease.

In addition to having medical science on their side, supporters of gun control and drug control find that it helps to switch attention periodically to a new, supposedly unprecedented threat. By the time the claims about one threat have been punctured, there's another one to take its place. Among firearms, the bogeymen have included Saturday night specials, assault weapons, and plastic guns--none of which were what the gun-control lobby claimed they were.

Assault weapon is a neologism invented by gun-control advocates to play on the public's confusion of semi-automatic guns with machine guns. The definition of the term has never been clear, having more to do with scary appearances than a gun's actual capabilities. But most supporters of bans on "assault weapons" probably assume that these laws deal with guns that are especially dangerous and frequently used in crimes, neither of which is true.

The so-called plastic gun was a Glock 19 pistol, which is made with some plastic parts but includes over a pound of steel. It shows up on metal detectors and X-ray machines just like any other gun. Yet when the pistol was introduced in the United States, newspaper editorialists were outraged about what they described as an undetectable weapon, suitable only for terrorists.

Among drugs, the bogeymen have included just about every illegal substance at one time or another. Even people who laugh at the ridiculous stories that the government used to tell about marijuana, which supposedly drove people insane and made them commit horrible murders, are prepared to believe much the same thing about crack, PCP, LSD, and even khat, a mild stimulant popular in Africa and the Middle East that made headlines during the U.S. operation in Somalia. (See "Khat Calls," March 1993.)

The most revealing aspect of those horror stories is that the monsters are inanimate objects that somehow cause people to do terrible things. Hence we have the idea that the level of violence is directly proportional to the number of guns available, that there are many crimes that would not have occurred if a gun had not been lying around. Some supporters of gun control even argue that the very presence of a firearm elicits aggression.

And the history of drug prohibition is filled with warnings that reflect a fear of losing control, of being taken over by an outside force. If you smoke marijuana, you will chop up your family. If you take LSD, you will jump out a window. If you inject heroin, you will burglarize homes. If you smoke crack, you will have sex with animals.

Those fears are very powerful, especially when combined with a desire for easy solutions to the crime and violence that threaten everyone's security. Gun control and drug control promise to tame the ugly side of human nature, both within ourselves and within others. That they fail to do so is becoming increasingly hard to deny, but people have a need for demons.