Straight Shooting on Gun Control

A Reason debate.

Abigail Kohn, Don Kates, Wendy Kaminer & Michael Krauss from the May 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

Use local gun owners as a resource. There are more than 75 million gun owners in the U.S. Chances are that most supporters of gun control are well-acquainted with at least one person who owns a gun and considers him or herself a gun enthusiast. Instead of relying on letters to the editor in the national press or sound bites from the NRA to explain gun enthusiasm or pro-gun ideology, perhaps gun control supporters should simply ask their friends and neighbors. If people begin honest dialogues with others they are predisposed to trust, they might be less inclined to take a hard-line position in the broader gun debate.

Asking local residents who are knowledgeable about guns to give children and teenagers a run-down about what they do, how they work, and why children shouldn't touch them except under adult supervision in controlled circumstances might help dispel the myths and fantasies that are attached to these seductive, powerful icons. The absence of accurate information about guns does not make them less appealing; it only fosters ignorance about their dangers.

Give up on dead-end gun control proposals. As the Democrats have discovered, nothing kills a political career faster that the words licensing and registration. Al Gore learned this the hard way, and four year later no amount of duck and goose hunting could negate John Kerry's image as a potential gun grabber. It's true that the NRA is very good at painting any Democrat--or the odd Republican--who dares mention gun regulation as an enemy of the people. But the gun control movement has provided bad advice to liberal hopefuls, encouraging them to believe that most Americans want tighter federal gun laws.

The gun control movement needs to take responsibility for its own poor showing, which is largely due to its reliance on policies that are not only unpopular but unlikely to reduce gun crime. A national licensing and registration system for handguns, for example, would be very costly (just ask Canada), impossible to manage effectively, and likely to generate widespread noncompliance, creating more criminals than it would catch. Records of sale (kept by dealers now in several states, including California) accomplish most of the benefits of registration without nearly as much of the negative fallout.

Why not advocate that approach instead?

Another example of counterproductive gun control is discretionary carry permit laws, which give police the authority to decide who should be allowed to carry firearms. Such laws penalize the poor and disenfranchised, battered women, even gay activists--people whose applications police are likely to reject. By contrast, politicians and local celebrities (who often have well-armed bodyguards anyway) usually have no problem getting permits. Amazingly, such laws are still proposed as solutions for cities plagued by gun crime, where the citizens most often denied permits tend to be the ones most vulnerable to crime. These poorly thought-out policies don't just anger gun owners; they discredit the very notion of gun control.

Gun control supporters should make a real effort to research the gun control policies they support. Even if they think general disarmament is a good idea, are they really interested in policies that selectively disarm people with the least political influence? They need to identify and promote violence-reducing gun control policies that everyone can rally around, including law-abiding gun owners.

And why would gun owners want to get behind any kind of gun control policy? Because gun control is not going away. Despite the lack of evidence, many Americans continue to believe that gun control will prevent gun violence, or at least reduce it. As long as there are guns around, there will be people who insist on controlling them. No matter how effectively gun owners demonstrate their safety consciousness, or how often they use guns to defend themselves, there will always be gun control supporters who genuinely believe that owning guns causes crime.

To beat gun controllers at their own game, gun owners should:

Recognize the power of their recent political victories. The 5th Circuit's ruling in Emerson, the election of George W. Bush, John Ashcroft's term as attorney general, and the Justice Department's support for an individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment all were important victories for the gun rights movement. What these wins mean is that gun enthusiasts, and in particular the NRA, no longer need to take an absolutist stance against all forms of gun control. The NRA traditionally has argued that most, if not all, gun control is dangerous because it will lead the U.S. down a slippery slope to gun confiscation. But because of the Emerson decision and the well-articulated position of the Justice Department, Americans now have a fairly clear Second Amendment right to own guns. American courts are slowly but surely recognizing what gun owners have known all along.

That being the case, the strongest position gun owners can take is to look long and hard at the laws on the books and decide how they can be improved. Gun owners should start thinking proactively and constructively about how they can contribute to a body of law that continues to respect their rights but more effectively prohibits dangerous and criminal gun use, gun dealing, and firearms trafficking. These are the kinds of crimes (the latter two in particular) that are rampant in areas of the nation where gun control laws are strictest. Gun owners should lead the way in championing laws that address these problems. This means they should...

Rethink what is meant by "gun control." Until now, gun control has largely been about attempting (generally unsuccessfully) to reduce or eradicate gun crime by controlling legal access to guns. Licensing and registration, bans on "assault weapons," discretionary licensing laws: These are the defining aspects of the contemporary gun control paradigm. Instead we need to start thinking about gun control as an attempt to control the black market in firearms.

A good example is private gun sales, which are largely unregulated. This creates a serious problem, since there is strong evidence that guns used in crime are purchased through informal, third-party channels. Criminologists such as Joseph F. Sheley of California State University at Sacramento and James D. Wright of the University of Central Florida have documented the ways in which crime guns move quickly through a community by means of informal transactions, a problem that should be addressed by harshly penalizing people who engage in nonprofessional gun transfers and circumvent legal dealers. Straw purchasing--in which a person with a clean background purchases a gun through legal means, then turns around and sells it illegally to a prohibited buyer such as a convicted felon--is a related example of a serious gun crime. Massive amounts of guns can move quickly and easily into the black market through consistent straw purchasing, which should be heavily penalized on both the supply and demand sides.

Shooters can help police these problems. In any given community, gun enthusiasts are often quite familiar with the dealers who are not always scrupulously careful about selling only to legal buyers. When I conducted research with shooters in Northern California, I found it was no secret which dealers were selling guns to straw buyers. If such dirty dealing was public knowledge (or quasi-public knowledge), why didn't shooters notify local or state authorities? Why would they keep silent about criminal activities that hurt law-abiding gun owners?

I suspect some shooters distrusted the local office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF, now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) or felt a sense of loyalty to the gun-owning community (always beleaguered in San Francisco). Or perhaps they simply didn't care to get involved with the issue, figuring it wasn't such a big deal if it didn't directly affect them. But solid research by criminologists such as David M. Kennedy, Anthony A. Braga, and Anne M. Piehl, all at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, has demonstrated that small numbers of dirty dealers can move an enormous number of guns into the black market, thereby making the surrounding areas more dangerous for everyone living there.