Straight Shooters

T. Markus Funk from the August/September 1997 issue

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Firearm statutes have long forbidden the possession of a gun by the relatively small group of aberrants most likely to commit violence (e.g., felons and the insane). With such restrictions in force, say Kates and Kleck, it makes no sense to disarm law-abiding citizens.

The question remains, however: If all the statistics support gun ownership as a social good, why is gun control--or even outright prohibition--still a popular cause? Kates and Kleck suggest that unsubstantiated claims about gun use, such as the oft-repeated and baseless factoid that guns are 43 times more likely to be used in a crime than for legitimate self-defense, have been so successfully incorporated into conventional wisdom that, to most citizens, the topic is not even worthy of debate. For many people, the "great American gun debate" is over and done with.

Ironically, say Kates and Kleck, such a reality is at least partly the gun lobby's own fault. "Until about the mid-1970s," they note, "academic writing about guns was virtually monopolized by crusaders seeking to validate their contempt and loathing for guns and gun owners. Neutral scholars eschewed the gun issue, and the gun lobby, though able to exert a great deal of pressure on the legislators, was incapable of, and uninterested in, addressing intellectually sophisticated audiences. But this intellectual default was a calamity for the gun lobby. It and its supporters may hold their views without feeling any need
for factual or scholarly support; but the biased, problem-oriented pre-1976 literature indelibly shaped a conventional wisdom which many humane and responsible citizens who do not own guns embrace and which the popular media continue to dispense."

The result is that anti-gun stories circulate constantly in the media, with few plausible counterparts. Kates and Kleck do an impressive job of documenting pervasive media bias against guns and gun ownership. They discuss, for instance, a 1991 study analyzing the content of national newspaper stories on gun issues which found that, of the 71 percent containing net bias in one direction or another, 81 percent were biased in favor of gun control. However, say Kates and Kleck, the media's unfriendliness to gun rights doesn't represent the sort of organized campaign to misinform the public that many gun rights advocates envision. Rather, evidence of the benefits of gun ownership does not "fit into [most reporters'] general world view as it pertains to guns and gun control." By and large, the authors suggest, journalists are unfamiliar with firearms and the criminological studies examining their use and abuse. Hence, journalists are more likely to buy uncritically the arguments of media-savvy, and ideologically sympathetic, gun control advocates.

Although the authors cite the "unequal character of the propaganda struggle over firearms," they seem not to have specific suggestions concerning what anti-prohibitionists must do to correct biased reporting. Similarly, the authors' attack on the public health literature--their nearest approach to intemperance in this book--suggests no corrective for the stream of what they see as results-oriented pseudoscience put out by, among others, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center on Injury Prevention and Control. (See "Public Health Pot Shots," April 1997.) But reform is not, after all, the theme of The Great American Gun Debate. Accurate description is.

Yet there is a perceptible, if gradual, shift occurring, at least in certain intellectual circles. Although recent scholarship demonstrating the benefits of gun ownership has yet to convert many mainstream journalists (who typically are not sophisticated consumers of criminological studies), such work has had a rather dramatic effect on those professional skeptics who make their living analyzing, criticizing, and proposing legislative responses to contemporary legal problems. A survey of the relevant literature reveals numerous scholars who, like the author of this review, concede in published articles that they entered the debate believing that the Second Amendment protects only firearms possessed by members of the National Guard or some similar official group, and that civilian firearms possession was an odious evil that should be eliminated.

After examining the competing constitutional and criminological arguments and studies more closely, however, more and more scholars are being persuaded by the anti-prohibition and pro-individual rights arguments, and are ultimately disavowing their prior views. Tellingly, as far as I can determine, not a single scholar who has written in favor of strict gun controls has similarly attested to being converted from a previously anti-prohibition position. This fact, in and of itself, may not establish the intellectual honesty of those "converted" academics who now oppose gun prohibition, but it does suggest that the argument for gun prohibition rests on shaky intellectual ground. It also seems quite plausible that, just as academics in the late 1960s and '70s helped create an anti-gun mindset, today's growing anti-prohibition scholarship may set the stage for a broad-based change in attitude toward gun ownership.

Whether a wholesale revision of attitudes toward guns is in the offing, at least this much is certain: For those already skeptical of prohibitions aimed at civilian firearm possession, The Great American Gun Debate will gratify by providing the sort of well-reasoned arguments and solid data that were previously available only by meticulously wading through volumes of dry academic journals. Perhaps more important (and impressive), for those who view gun prohibition as a welcome response to armed criminal violence, Kates and Kleck will challenge at every turn bedrock assumptions about the nature and impact of gun ownership. Indeed, some open minds may even be changed.