Straight Shooting on Gun Control

A Reason debate.

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

(Page 3 of 5)

Dirty dealing and gun trafficking don't just provide literal weapons to violent criminals; they provide rhetorical weapons to the gun control movement, which never misses an opportunity to stick it to gun owners. If gun trafficking and gun crime increase, anti-gun crusaders will turn the spotlight to the most obvious "cause" of the problem: the legal gun-owning community. Shooters should remember their own stake in ridding the community of gun crime; it benefits them in every way to get more proactive about reducing crime. Gun owners need to work assertively within the system to accomplish change that ultimately benefits everyone, simultaneously demonstrating their willingness to compromise. Accordingly, shooters need to...

Support effective violence-reduction policies. A number of projects developed in the last several years show great promise in reducing youth violence, gang activity, and gun crime generally. One of the most impressive and sophisticated is the Boston Gun Project, also knows as Operation Cease Fire. The Boston Gun Project is the invention of a team of Harvard researchers (including Kennedy, Braga, and Piehl) who began in the mid-1990s to collaborate with the Boston Police Department, youth outreach coordinators, and community activists who work with inner-city youth and gang members. By uniting the efforts of these agencies and individuals, they disrupted the gun crime that was contributing to Boston's high homicide rate. With help from the police and the local BATF, the researchers learned that there were several dealers in Massachusetts (as well as surrounding states) who regularly sold guns to straw purchasers, thereby helping to sustain Boston's black market in guns. This was one method by which the project was able to identify and disrupt the sources of guns that were quickly finding their way into dangerous hands.

Working with community activists and gang specialists, project leaders also held meetings with local gang members and youth considered "at risk" for committing violent crime. Community activists and outreach workers discussed with them the ways in which their dangerous behavior was hurting them, hurting their families and friends, and damaging the community, both physically and in terms of morale. Project workers also discussed with these youths the potential consequences of their violent behavior, including seizure of assets and proceeds from drug transactions, harsher prosecutorial attention, and tougher bail terms. All participants in the project were informed that violence would not be tolerated, that in some cases it would be prosecuted in federal court, and that all of the project's separate agencies (the police, the BATF, and community services organizations) would make offenders' lives uncomfortable until the violence stopped. Individuals who were engaging in the most violent behavior were identified by the coordinating agencies, arrested, and prosecuted.

All the youth involved in the project (and in the community) witnessed what happened to those violent individuals, which helped deter further violence. Ultimately, the Boston Gun Project was credited with helping reduce the youth homicide rate in Boston by nearly two-thirds in the late 1990s. The project received numerous community and national awards for quality and innovation in law enforcement and policing.

It would be difficult to replicate these results without adequate funding, police support, and a community willing to make a strong commitment to its underclass. But this is the kind of program that gun owners in communities across the country should be seeking out and supporting. It jibes with the best ideas that shooters shared with me about reducing violence: better law enforcement, recognition that crime is not simply a matter of guns, programs targeting the people most likely to harm themselves and others, and working with individuals who have appropriate expertise for reducing crime. This program also could easily be considered part of effective gun control: The project discovered dealers who were engaged in illegal practices, attempted to disrupt gun trafficking, and sought to reduce or stop activities associated with gun violence.

The gun debate may not be entirely over, but shooters have an increasingly strong edge. Certainly they should be aware of the foolishness going on in places such as San Francisco, and they might even consider a boycott of Pizza Hut, if that's how they want to make their point. But more important than that, they should be actively engaged in promoting a better understanding of why violence occurs. They should be seeking out programs that reduce it, leading the way in this good fight. That is how they can really win the gun debate.�

Abigail A. Kohn ([e-mail]) is an anthropologist and writer. A version of this essay was first published in her book Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures, copyright 2004 by Oxford University Press Inc.

No Room for Compromise

Don B. Kates

Abigail Kohn's analysis is acute. Her suggestions are equally so--in the abstract. But are they practicable?

Once upon a time, compromise was practicable. In the 1920s the National Rifle Association headed off a nationwide campaign to ban handguns by proposing a set of moderate restrictions, including bans on gun possession by convicted felons and the insane. These rules were adopted in almost all states to the exclusion of laws requiring a permit to have a handgun.

But anti-gun goals have advanced, thereby eliminating any chance for compromise today. The first thing compromise would require is for the anti-gun movement to honestly admit that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution secures to all law-abiding, responsible adults freedom of choice to keep firearms for the protection of their families and homes. That is the only intellectually serious constitutional interpretation. But anti-gun advocates cannot acknowledge that, for it would foreclose their ultimate goal of banning and confiscating handguns, and eventually all guns, from the general population.

Admittedly, Handgun Control Inc., now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, champions the more moderate position that people may have firearms for hunting and target shooting. But these guns either must be locked up in a public armory or, if kept at home, must be unloaded and disassembled. The aim is to keep ordinary people from having firearms readily available for self-defense.

The ultimate goal of the anti-gun movement precludes any compromise. Gun control advocates disingenuously ridicule gun owners for fighting regulation of guns similar to what they readily accept for cars. But drivers too would adamantly oppose controls if they were promoted by people who believed that automobiles are evil instruments no decent person would want to have and that anyone who does desire them must be warped sexually, intellectually, educationally, and ethically. Car registration and driver licensing would be adamantly opposed if advocated on the ground that cars should be made increasingly unavailable to ordinary people and eventually denied to all but the military, police, and the influence peddlers and other "special" individuals whom the military or police select to receive permits.

Gun owners, like abortion rights supporters, know that if their opponents cannot get prohibition outright they are implacably determined to reach the same result through regulation that looks reasonable but can be manipulated by hostile administrators and courts. Long and bitter experience has taught gun owners that the only "compromise" the anti-gun movement offers them is their uncompensated agreement to ever more regulations furthering the short-term goal of multiplying red tape and administrative obstacles so as to make it progressively more difficult for ordinary people to have firearms for self-defense.