Shooting Gallery

Jacob Sullum from the December 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

But Spitzer explicitly rejects what he calls "the good guy­bad guy myth": the belief "that guns in the hands of good guys are good, whereas guns in the hands of bad guys are bad." Not surpris ingly, he is hostile to the idea of armed self-defense. Although Justice Department data indicate that a victim who resists with a gun is considerably less likely to be injured than a victim who does not resist or who resists by other means, Spitzer asserts that "death is more likely to occur when victims resist or are armed." He refers to people foolish enough to want a gun in the house for self-defense as "those inordinately concerned with home protection." He notes that criminologists' estimates of how many times guns are used in self-defense each year have ranged from 80,000 to roughly 1 million. Instead of assuming that the true number lies somewhere in the
middle, as caution might dictate when expert opinion is divided, he settles on the low figure, even though (as Kates et al. note) the criminologist who came up with it now concedes that the total is probably in the hundreds of thousands.

"Far from serving as a deterrent to crime," Spitzer writes, "guns in the home are especially tempting targets for theft, particularly since most burglaries occur when no one is home." But the fact that burglars like to steal guns hardly proves that guns do not deter crime; indeed, if Spitzer had stopped to wonder why in the United States (unlike England, for example) "most burglaries occur when no one is home," he might have seen evidence of deterrence.

If Spitzer doesn't like the idea of guns in the home, he is even less keen about people carrying them in public. He grants that an armed train passenger might have stopped Colin Ferguson before he killed six people and wounded 19 on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993. "But if, as a matter of policy, train authorities allowed or encouraged passengers to carry guns," he writes, "the likelihood of gun injuries and deaths would certainly escalate." Later he says, "The consequences of a citizenry armed to stave off crime would inevitably result in more gun crimes and gun deaths." And, "Arms proliferation and carrying among citizens would inexorably lead to an escalation of gun-related violence, injuries, and deaths."

But Spitzer offers no evidence for these confident assertions. He might have considered the experience of states with liberal carry-permit policies, but that would have undermined his case, since the waves of violence predicted by gun-control advocates have not materialized. Instead, Spitzer bases his fear of an armed citizenry on a theory of international conflict that says weapons are bad and more are worse. "The mere act of gun possession," he explains, "is offensive regardless of intent, because weapons are inherently offensive...."

Despite the implications of this theory, Spitzer has to admit that "a host of practical and other problems all but eliminates the citizen disarmament option." Instead he supports "arms control" and "nonproliferation" strategies such as banning "assault weapons" and severely restricting the avail ability of handguns. Hunters, target shooters, and collectors would still be allowed access to "tradi tional hunting and sporting weapons." (Edel, who favors a strict licensing system similar to New Zealand's, which lets local police decide who should be allowed to own a gun, is also anxious to avoid interfering with "the activities of hunters, target shooters and gun collectors.") Spitzer thinks allaying the concerns of gun owners is so important that he puts this sentence in italics: " The only way to reconcile fears of control opponents with the efforts of control proponents is to recognize the fundamental distinction between arms control and disarmament. "

But this distinction is not likely to reassure anyone, especially when it comes from a political science professor who considers the Second Amendment irrelevant, disapproves of armed self -defense, and would like to disarm gun owners if it weren't for all the "practical and other problems" involved. Every time an advocate of gun control promises not to impair the recreational activities of hunters and target shooters, he demonstrates his contempt for the values underlying the Second Amendment, implying that the issues at stake are trivial.

As Robert Cottrol and Don Kates note in Gun Control and the Constitution, recognizing a constitutional right to keep and bear arms is by no means the end of the gun control debate, any more than recognizing a constitutional right to free speech settles all issues concerning speech restrictions. We still have to resolve questions such as which weapons are covered and what kinds of regulations are appropriate and consistent with the Second Amendment. (In this debate libertarians may well part company with Kates and Cottrol.) But until proponents of gun control concede that it impinges on something more important then shooting deer or putting holes in targets, they should not be surprosed that many people find their proposals inherantly offensive, regardless of intent.

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