Download This is an electronic packet of information to use to write your

This is an electronic packet of information to use to
write your Research Paper. Think of this packet like a
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want to use in your Research Paper and leave all of
the other items.
From this packet you are to select the BEST pieces of
particulars to provide perfect proof that your Claim
(thesis) is correct. Your quotes, your block quotes and
your paraphrases will all come from the material in
this packet. Nothing will be documented in your
paper that is not in this packet. You are NOT to use
information from any other sources; your “research” has been done for you – it is this packet,
and only this packer. The packet contains a variety of information. Some of which you will not
be able to use because it will not support your claim. Remember to select the best proof. The
Research Paper IS TO BE YOUR WRITING AND YOUR IDEAS, SUPPORTED BY TEXTUAL SPECIFICS
FROM THESE SOURCES.
You may not be able to write a complete Works Cited page entry for every text in this electronic
packet, but remember: MLA rules state that if an item is missing that would usually go into an
entry for the Works Cited page, the writer ignores the missing piece and created an entry
without the missing information. Are you asking yourself why won’t you know all the
information to write a complete entry? Only the information given at the top of each of the
first pages of each piece of information (some information may take more than one page) can
be used. Remember, using MLA rules – if a piece of information is not provided, ignore it and
move to list the next piece of information that you do have.
If you have a question, ask in class….e-mail me… stop in before school or after school.
Remember that famous saying by Jim Rohn: “Discipline is the bridge between goals and
accomplishments." Don’t put off working on this paper.
We will go to the Media Center to work on this. I strongly suggest that you have a flash-drive,
and/or save everything to your space on the school website.
Don’t waste time. This is a big project and worth many points.
You can do this!
Mrs. C
2014 AP English Language/ Hon. Am Lit Synthesis Paper
Question 3: Federal Government Gun Control
Gun politics is a controversial area of American politics that is primarily defined by the actions of two groups: gun
control and gun rights activists. These groups often disagree on the interpretation of laws and court cases related
to firearms as well as about the effects of gun control on crime and public safety. Since the 1990s, debates
regarding firearm availability and gun violence in the U.S. have been characterized by concerns about the right to
bear arms, such as found in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the responsibility of the
government to serve the needs of its citizens and to prevent crime and deaths. Gun control supporters say that
broad or unrestricted gun rights inhibit the government from fulfilling that responsibility. Gun rights supporters
promote firearms for self-defense, hunting, and sporting activities. Gun control advocates state that keeping guns
out of the hands of criminals results in safer communities, while gun rights advocates state that firearm ownership
by law-abiding citizens reduces crime. A 2003 study by the Centers for Disease Control called for further study
because there was insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of firearms laws with regards to violent
outcomes. Gun legislation in the United States is constrained by judicial interpretations of the Constitution. In
1789, the United States adopted the Second Amendment, and in 1868 adopted the Fourteenth Amendment. The
effect of those two amendments on gun politics was the subject of landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 2008
and 2010, that upheld the right for individuals to possess guns for self-defense.
Carefully read the following 15 sources, including the introductory information for each source. Then
synthesize information from at least three (3) of the sources and incorporate it into a coherent, welldeveloped essay that argues a clear position on whether the United States Federal Government has the
legal right to pass laws controlling/ limiting the ownership of guns by private citizens in America or
private citizens in American should not be limited by federal laws in their ownership of guns.
Make sure your argument is central; use the sources to illustrate and support your reasoning. Avoid
merely summarizing the sources. Indicate clearly which sources you are drawing from, whether
through direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary. In the paper, you may cite the sources as Source A,
Source B, etc., or by using the descriptions in parentheses. In the Works Cited, you may NOT cite
sources as Source A, Source B, etc.; the Works Cited page must be in alphabetical order – using the
information needed from the box for each source (author, title, etc.). Remember, the “website”
information is given only for your information; websites are not given in a paper or in Works Cited page.
Source A (Agresti )
Source B (“Information” )
Source C (“Background” )
Source D (“International”)
Source E ( “Gun Control Controversy”)
Source F ( Kopel )
Source G ( Marois )
Source H ( Whitney )
Source I (Rosenfeld )
Source J (Wolfgang)
Source K (Ballsep)
Source L (O’Mara)
Source M (Caplan-Bricker )
Source N (Harvard)
Source O ( Millstein)
Source: A
Agresti, James D. and Reid K. Smith. “Gun Control
Facts.” Just Facts online, January 22, 2012.
Web. August 8, 2014.
website: http://justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp
Gun Control Facts
Introductory Notes
This research is based upon the most recent available data in 2010. Facts from earlier years are cited based upon availability
and relevance, not to slant results by singling out specific years that are different from others. Likewise, data associated with
the effects of gun control laws in various geographical areas represent random, demographically diverse places in which such
data is available. Many aspects of the gun control issue are best measured and sometimes can only be measured through
surveys,[1] but the accuracy of such surveys depends upon respondents providing truthful answers to questions that are
sometimes controversial and potentially incriminating. Thus, Just Facts uses such data critically, citing the best-designed surveys
we find, detailing their inner workings in our footnotes, and using the most cautious plausible interpretations of the results.
Particularly, when statistics are involved, the determination of what constitutes a credible fact (and what does not) can contain
elements of personal subjectivity. It is our mission to minimize subjective information and to provide highly factual content.
Therefore, we are taking the additional step of providing readers with four examples to illustrate the type of material that was
excluded because it did not meet Just Facts' Standards of Credibility.
General Facts
* Firearms are generally classified into three broad types: (1) handguns, (2) rifles, and (3) shotguns.[3] Rifles and shotguns are
both considered "long guns." * A semi-automatic firearm fires one bullet each time the trigger is pulled and automatically loads
another bullet for the next pull of the trigger. A fully automatic firearm (sometimes called a "machine gun") continuously fires
bullets as long as the trigger is pulled.[
Ownership
* As of 2009, the United States has a population of 307 million people. * Based on production data from firearm
manufacturers, there are roughly 300 million firearms owned by civilians in the United States as of 2010. Of these, about 100
million are handguns. * Based upon surveys, the following are estimates of private firearm ownership in the U.S. as of 2010:
Households With a Gun Adults Owning a Gun Adults Owning a Handgun
Percentage 40-45%
30-34%
17-19%
Number
70-80 million
40-45 million
47-53 million
* A 2005 nationwide Gallup poll of 1,012 adults found the following levels of firearm ownership:
Category
Percentage Owning
a Firearm
Households
42%
Individuals
30%
Male
47%
Female
13%
White
33%
Nonwhite
18%
Republican
41%
Independent 27%
Democrat
23%
Page 1 of 2
* In the same poll, gun owners stated they own firearms for the following reasons:
Protection Against Crime 67%
Target Shooting
66%
Hunting
41%
Crime and Self-Defense
* Roughly 16,272 murders were committed in the United States during 2008. Of these, about 10,886 or 67% were committed
with firearms.
* A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 0.5% of households had
members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone "almost certainly would have been
killed" if they "had not used a gun for protection." Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 162,000 such incidents per
year. This figure excludes all "military service, police work, or work as a security guard."
* Based on survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 5,340,000 violent crimes were committed in the United
States during 2008. These include simple/aggravated assaults, robberies, sexual assaults, rapes, and murders. Of these, about
436,000 or 8% were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun.
* Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, U.S. civilians use guns to defend
themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.
* A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 3.5% of households had
members who had used a gun "for self-protection or for the protection of property at home, work, or elsewhere." Applied to
the U.S. population, this amounts to 1,029,615 such incidents per year. This figure excludes all "military service, police work, or
work as a security guard."
* A 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans use guns to frighten
away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year.
* A 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons dispersed across the U.S. found:
• 34% had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"
• 40% had decided not to commit a crime because they "knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun"
• 69% personally knew other criminals who had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"
* Click here to see why the following commonly cited statistic does not meet Just Facts' Standards of Credibility: "In homes with
guns, the homicide of a household member is almost 3 times more likely to occur than in homes without guns."
└ Vulnerability to Violent Crime
* At the current homicide rate, roughly one in every 240 Americans will be murdered.
* A U.S. Justice Department study based on crime data from 1974-1985 found:
• 42% of Americans will be the victim of a completed violent crime (assault, robbery, rape) in the course of their lives
• 83% of Americans will be the victim of an attempted or completed violent crime
• 52% of Americans will be the victim of an attempted or completed violent crime more than once
* A 1997 survey of more than 18,000 prison inmates found that among those serving time for a violent crime, "30% of State
offenders and 35% of Federal offenders carried a firearm when committing the crime."
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Source: B
“Information: Gun Control.” Fibromyalgia Organization.
Fibromyalgia website, 2002. Web. August 10, 2014.
website: http://www.faqs.org/health/topics/9/Gun-ontrol.html
Information: Gun Control
The headlines could not be believed: two teenage boys had opened fire in their Colorado high school, killing 12 fellow students
and a teacher. That incident at Columbine, on April 20, 1999, following a number of other shootings in schools and workplaces,
has led to an increase in the number of people calling for strict gun control legislation. Gun control is a term that describes the
use of law to limit people's access to handguns, shotguns, rifles, and other firearms, through passing statutes that require, for
example, gun purchasers to undergo background checks for criminal records, for guns to be registered, or a number of other
methods. In the United States, gun control is a hotly contested political issue that can make or break the careers of politicians.
The use of firearms is also a health issue, because more than 35,000 people die each year after being shot.
Statistics
The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, keeps
track of injuries and fatalities resulting from firearms. The NCIPC reported that in 1994, there were 38,505 firearm-related
deaths. These included: more than 17,800 homicides; more than 18,700 suicides; more than 1,300 unintentional, firearmsrelated deaths related to firearms. Nationwide, approximately 70 percent of people who commit suicide do so with a firearm.
Among young people, the impact of guns is huge. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each day in the
United States, fourteen people under the age of 19 die in gun-related incidents. The rate of firearm-related deaths for
Americans age 14 and younger is twelve times that of children in other industrialized nations combined. In addition, the NCIPC
estimates that there were approximately three gun-related injuries for every death--a rough figure of 115,515 injuries for the
year. Also according to the NCIPC, in 1990, firearm injuries cost over $20.4 billion--directly, for hospital and other medical care,
as well as indirectly, for long-term disability and premature death, and at least 80% of the economic costs of treating firearm
injuries are paid for by taxpayers.
How the U.S. Compares to the Rest of the World
The United States is home to a tremendous number of guns. Current estimates place the number of guns in the United States at
between 200 million and 250 million. In the period between 1968 and 1992, gun ownership in the U.S. increased 135 percent-and during that same period, handgun ownership increase 300percent. The 17 million residents of Texas alone own 68 million
guns. The United States has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and leads western nations in homicides. More
Americans are shot in one day than Japanese are shot in an entire year. Whereas other nations, such as Great Britain, have
moved to ban handguns and assault rifles after shooting incidents, the United States has not done so. In Australia, just two
weeks after a shooting at Port Arthur that killed 35 people, the nation's various levels of government agreed to ban weapons
like those used in the attack. Similarly, Great Britain banned handguns after a man broke into a Scottish school and opened fire,
killing 16 children.
Other nations treat gun control as a public health issue, Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York at Cortland, told ABC
News. "There is general agreement in other nations that the government has the right to engage in regulation that is good
public policy protecting the health and safety of the populace," he said. However, in the United States, strong political interest
groups such as the National Rifle Association oppose gun control and say that the Second Amendment guarantees the rights of
Americans to own weapons.
History of the Issue
Americans are fiercely protective of their right to own guns. The founders of this country believed that this "right to bear arms"
was so important that they made it the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. "A well-regulated Militia, being
necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," the founders
wrote. Today there is considerable argument over just what the founders intended by their words. Did they mean to provide
only for armed units, such as the Army and National Guard, to protect us from invasion, or did they mean that each individual
has a right to a gun? Both gun-control supporters and gun-rights advocates have their legal arguments to support their side, but
the federal courts have upheld all laws regulating gun ownership when the laws have been challenged on the basis of violating
the second amendment.
Page 1 of 4
In the early days of the American colonies, nearly every settler owned a gun; guns were a more obvious necessity for members
of an expanding nation. However, as the European population became more settled here, as the frontier was driven westward
and the native populations driven out, fewer people owned guns. As historian Michael Bellesiles notes, during the time
between the American Revolution and the Civil War, no more than one-tenth of the American population owned guns. They
became more a part of American culture due to the marketing efforts of gun manufacturer Samuel Colt, who played on the
fears of the middle-class to sell weapons for "self-defense"; the end of the Civil War also played a role in the increase of gun
ownership, as many soldiers returned home with their weapons in hand.
In 1876, the Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Cruikshank, that neither the Constitution nor the Second Amendment
grant the right to bear arms; rather, the Second Amendment restricts the power of the federal government to control firearms.
Several other Supreme Court cases (notably U.S. v. Miller, 1939) spoke to gun control during the late 1800s and first half of the
1900s; but overall, gun control was not a major issue or concern. However, that all changed in the 1960s. After the
assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Congress passed the 1968 Gun Control Act, which banned mail-order
gun sales and instituted more stringent licensing requirements for dealers.
After John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, gun control became the hot issue it is today.
Congress passed several laws concerning armor-piercing bullets and automatic weapons. In 1993, President William J. Clinton
signed the Brady bill, which requires a five-day waiting period for all handgun purchases. The following year, Congress and
President Clinton passed a ban on assault-style weapons and a number of semiautomatic weapons.
The Arguments For and Against Gun Control
Advocates of gun control maintain that by making firearms--especially handguns--more difficult to obtain, the number of
shootings (both accidental and deliberate) will be reduced. They also support licensing all persons who own firearms and
registering each gun as well. However, just because a gun is registered does not mean that it won't be used in an illegal act. For
example, Buford O. Furrow, the man who opened fire at a Los Angeles Jewish community center in 1999, was armed with seven
guns, including a Glock 9mm automatic handgun and a custom-made assault rifle--and every one of his guns was registered.
Similarly, Bryan Uyesugi, the man who shot and killed seven employees of the Xerox Corporation in Hawaii on November 2,
1999, had 17 firearms registered. Between June 18, 1990 and November 3, 1999, workplace shootings caused the deaths of 116
people. Just registering a gun does not guarantee that its owner will not use it to commit a crime. Advocates of gun
registrations say that by having to register their weapons with the federal government, gun owners will be more careful in
making sure that their guns do not become stolen, or that they do not sell or trade their guns to a criminal. Opponents fear that
one day the federal government may use gun registrations against gun owners and confiscate all registered weapons.
As mentioned previously, Americans vary widely in their attitudes toward gun control. According to various polls and studies,
residents of New England and the mid-Atlantic states tend to be strongly in favor of gun control; they are far less likely to have
ever owned a gun than are other Americans. While two out of five Southerners and one out of three Westerners have owned
guns, fewer than one in seven residents of the Northeast have. Meanwhile, Southerners are more likely to have a gun at home
and elsewhere (such as in the car), and they are more likely to shoot to kill. Westerners are most likely to hear gunshots. As a
group, residents of the mountain states are the most certain that guns deter crime. Midwesterners are most concerned about
crime. As might be expected given these regional variables, gun control laws vary from state to state. For example, Arizona
residents are not required to register their weapons, and they may carry concealed weapons. (A concealed weapon is one that
is hidden from view, such as under a shirt or in an ankle holster.)In Massachusetts, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon, and
gun owners must be licensed and their weapons registered, even if the gun is used solely for target shooting.
There is great debate as to whether allowing concealed weapons decreases or increases crime. Some supporters of concealed
weapons reason that people are less likely to attempt to commit a crime when they face the possibility that the potential victim
may be armed. Detractors say that carrying a weapon makes a person more likely to use it--particularly in anger, such as after
being cut off in traffic. Currently, there is no nationwide law that requires gun owners to be licensed. The federal government
has left that up to the individual states.
Self-Defense or Self-Destruction?
Supporters of guns maintain the need for the weapons as a means of self-defense. Through surveys of jailed criminals,
sociologists have found that 40 percent of criminals say they would not commit a crime they were considering if they thought
the potential victim was armed. In addition, criminals who attempted break-ins of occupied homes succeeded only 14 percent
of the time when the homeowner was armed--compared to 33 percent of the time when the homeowner was not armed.
page 2 of 4
Researcher Gary Kleck of Florida State University has done a number of surveys regarding the successful use of guns in selfdefense, and he estimates that American use guns for self-defense between 800,000 and 2.45 million times each year. They fire
less than one-quarter of the time.
However, figures from the Census Bureau maintain that the numbers of Americans defending themselves with guns is much
lower--closer to 80,000 times per year. And while having a gun in the house may make the gun owner feel more secure and
safe, the problem with having guns in the home, argue gun control supporters, is that they are a temptation both for children
and adults. Children die every year by being accidentally shot while playing with guns, or by being nearby when someone else is
playing with them. Such tragedies can occur when the parents keep a loaded gun in the house--particularly in a night-table
drawer--for self-defense. The child finds the gun, and tragedy follows. In such cases, it is important that the gun be stored
unloaded, with a trigger lock, and with its ammunition stored separately from it.
Guns are also often used in domestic squabbles. Prompted by the 1984 shooting death of singer Marvin Gaye (who was killed
by his father after a family argument), researcher Arthur Kellermann began studying the role of the firearm in domestic
incidents. His results, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that for each homicide that was
committed in self-defense in the home, there were 37 suicides, 1.3 accidental deaths, and 4.6 criminal homicides. Another of
his studies, which tracked domestic homicides in three cities over a five-year period, found that a home that contained guns
were three times more likely to be the site of a homicide than a home without guns. Under the influence of strong emotions,
alcohol, or drugs, people often do things they might not normally do otherwise--including drawing a gun on a family member
and pulling the trigger. Experts note that it's important to recognize the social influences that may drive people to gun violence.
For example, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two teens who opened fire at Columbine High School, were described as
outsiders. Michael Carneal, who opened fire on a prayer group at his West Paducah, Kentucky, high school, killing three and
wounding five in 1997, was similarly described. In cases like these, or those of Buford Furrow or Bryan Uyesugi, there is rarely a
single cause. It would be naive to say that Harris and Klebold and Carneal shot 16 people in their separate rampages solely
because they had guns; they shot those people because something inside them that would normally have prevented such an
occurrence, broke down.
Experts on both sides of the gun control issue urge people to consider their personal situation when thinking about bringing a
gun into the home. Are there children or young people in residence who may find the gun a temptation? Is there someone
living in the house who has problems controlling his or her temper? Someone who has been depressed and may be suicidal? In
any of these cases, experts urge potential gun owners to think twice before introducing a weapon into the equation.
Controversial Measures for Control
Numerous laws and regulations have been passed in an effort to control guns. In June 1999, Connecticut legislators passed a bill
that allows police to seize the weapons of anyone whom they believe presents a threat to him- or herself and others. The law
went into effect October 1, and on November 1, police in Greenwich, Connecticut, made the first seizure under the new law,
raising a house and taking 11 guns--six handguns, two rifles, a shotgun, an assault rifle, and a submachine gun--from a 45-yearold man. The man, Thompson Bosee, told the Hartford Courant newspaper that he would challenge the seizure and the law's
constitutionality. Part of controlling where guns go is controlling the people who sell them. Massachusetts recently enacted a
law that requires gun dealers to maintain their businesses in separate buildings from their homes--no longer allowing "kitchen
table" gun sales.
Possible Solutions
It seems unlikely that the United States will ever ban firearms. However, there are measures that both gun supporters and gun
detractors do agree on that may help cut down on gun violence.
Trigger locks. Trigger locks are small, inexpensive devices that fit over a gun's trigger and make it impossible to fire. As the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch reported, "Mandating locking devices for each firearm owned is a logical first step in controlling guns by
limiting who has access to firing them."
Education. Just as people aren't allowed on the road until they have been taught to drive a car, so people should not be
allowed to own a gun until they successfully complete a gun education course, say supporters. Besides courses that teach
adults the rules of handling and storing guns, so too are there courses that teach children that guns are not toys. Gun education
programs are taught by such diverse groups as the National Rifle Association and the Boy Scouts of America, and more than 10
million children have completed the NRA's Eddie Eagle safety course. By teaching kids a healthy respect for guns and the
damage they can do, perhaps the number of accidental shootings that claim so many young lives can be reduced.
page 3 of 4
Background checks. The Brady bill, the national gun-control legislation named for James Brady, the presidential assistant
wounded in the attack on President Reagan, requires instant background checks on all purchasers. To date, this system has
prevented more than 200,000 gun purchases by people who had been in mental institutions, been dishonorably discharged
from military service, were fugitives, or had a history of domestic abuse.
The main drawback to this system is that all police records are not yet available in a nationwide database, making it possible
that someone will fall through the cracks. It also does not cover the "secondary" market of private sales at gun shows and flea
markets, where guns can be bought without a mandatory waiting period or a background check.
Legislation controlling guns bought by legitimate people--hunters or enthusiasts--does not reach such private-deal gun sales.
Nor does it control stolen guns, or guns purchased by licensed owners for resale to anyone--including criminals. How can this
aspect of the gun issue be dealt with?
Some have suggested that tougher enforcement of existing weapons laws is needed. For example, it is illegal to possess drugs
and a weapon. For years, authorities did not enforce this law. But Richmond, Virginia, started using these laws to crack down of
people apt to be involved in criminal acts. The apparent result has been that the homicide rate fell by nearly a third; 215
violators are in jail, and 512 guns have been seized.
Technology may be able to help, too. Scientists are working on developing a so-called "smart gun." This gun would be able to be
fired only by its owner. Two means of recognition are currently being tested. One method uses biometric technology to
recognize the fingerprints of the authorized user. The gun would recognize the fingerprints of the person holding it, and if the
prints did not match the ones in its memory, it would not go off. The other uses a device called a radio transponder that allows
the gun to be fired only within a given distance of the device; if a criminal should wrest a police officer's gun away and try to fire
it, the smart gun would not go off because it was too far from the device. A prototype model had the radio transponder in a
wristband; plans are to make it small enough to be worn as a ring. Research on smart guns began in the early 1990s, and the
weapons may be available in 2001. For the time being, however, it looks as if the debate over gun control will continue.
America may never become an unarmed nation, but with stronger enforcement of criminal laws, education of new gun owners,
and responsible care and storage of their weapons by gun owners, perhaps the current death toll of almost 100 Americans a
day will one day fall.
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SOURCE: C
“Background on Gun Control.” On the Issues Political Leader Group.
On the Issues website, 2008. Web. August 10, 2014.
website: http://www.ontheissues.org/Background_Gun_Control.htm
Background on Gun Control
Statistics on Gun Ownership:
to vote for.
gun ownership;
Child-Safety Locks
tering a combination to use the gun (or some other locking method); they are
intended to reduce inadvertent use by children or other unauthorized users.
Background Checks
-Show Loophole" means that there are no background checks when purchasing guns in a private
transaction.
Right to Bear Arms
only protects guns
suitable for a well-regulated militia -- for example, sawed-off shotguns can be banned because they're not
"ordinary military equipment".
uling prior to
“Heller”, in 1997, overturned part of the 1993 Brady Bill, but did not address 2nd amendment rights.
“District of Columbia v. Heller”, that the 2nd Amendment does define an individual right to gun ownership, as
opposed to a “collective right” for a state-run and state-armed National Guard.
e to further Supreme Court
cases.
Gun Control Buzzwords
more
gun laws are needed.
licensing" to describe seeking further restrictions legal ownership; or "close the loopholes" and "restrict access" for
further restrictions on illegal ownership.
-service
"sportsmen's rights" or respecting "the right of self-protection." A moderate compromise is to "extend waiting
periods" before allowing ownership, to perform "background checks" of varying degrees of severity.
or "allow concealed carry". A call for "instant background checks" pays lip-service to gun-control advocates: it
sounds like a restriction, but means allowing purchasing guns on the spot.
page 1 of 2
Look for buzzwords like "enforce existing gun laws," which implies not passing any NEW gun laws. Similarly, "more
strict enforcement" of gun laws implies a pro-Gun Rights stance, unless it is accompanied by a call for new gun
laws.
especially in the wake of tragedies like Littleton and other gun-related deaths.
-gun rights lobbying group) implies
support of gun rights, while opposing the NRA or "taking on the gun lobby" implies support of gun restrictions.
Amendment II to the US Constitution
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear
Arms, shall not be infringed. (1791)
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SOURCE: D
“International Gun Laws.” Now with Bill Moyers: PBS
Organization. PBS website, 2003. Web. August
2, 2014.
website: http://www.pbs.org/now/classroom/gun.html
International Gun Laws
The movement of guns across borders has become a major focal point for the War on Terrorism. Some of these efforts depend on
national information on gun production and transfer. Below you can compare U.S. guns registration requirements with those of other
nations.
The law enforcement agency INTERPOL has stepped up its efforts with a new tracking system, Interpol Weapons and Explosives Tracking
System (IWETS). IWETS is currently the only international analytical database designed to collate information on illegal firearms
trafficking. IWETS provides current indexes of firearms manufactures and other information that facilitates the identification of
firearms. IWETS is also the only international system for stolen and recovered weapons.
The UN General Assembly established a Terrorism Prevention Branch (TPB) in 1999 as an arm of the Vienna-based UN Office for
Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP). The group aims to combat the illegal traffic in arms — as noted in GUN LAND, 11
percent of illegal guns recovered worldwide came from the state of Florida. Check their Web site to see a list of the most common weapons
used by terrorists and lists gunmakers.
There are also several firearms-related bills in front of the U.S. Congress.
Country
Licensing of gun
owners?
Registration of
firearms?
Other Restrictions
Households with
firearms (%)
Total Intentional Gun
Death Rate per 100,000
Japan
Yes
Yes
Prohibits handguns with few
exceptions
0.6 %
0.07
Singapore
Yes
Yes
Most handguns and rifles
prohibited
0.01%
0.24
U.K.
Yes
Yes
Prohibits handguns
4.0 %
0.4
Netherlands
Yes
Yes
1.9 %
0.55
Spain
Yes
Yes
13.1 %
0.74
Germany
Yes
Yes
8.9 %
1.44
Italy
Yes
Yes
N/A
2.27
Israel
Yes
Yes
N/A
2.56
Australia
Yes
Yes
Banned semiautomatics
unless good reason
16.0 %
2.94
Canada
Yes
All guns by 2003
Assault weapons and some
handguns
26%
3.95
Some handguns and rifles
are prohibited
France
Yes
Yes, except
sporting rifles
22.6 %
5.48
Switzerland
Yes
Yes
27.2 %
5.74 6.2
Finland
Yes
Yes
50 %
6.65
USA
in some states
Handguns in
some states
41%
13.47
Some weapons in some
states
Source: W. Cukier, "Firearms Regulation: Canada in the International Context," Chronic Diseases in Canada, April, 1998 (statistics updated to
reflect most recent figures, January 2001).
Pro-Gun Rights
Pro-Gun Control
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which Americans
possess over the people of almost every other nation, the
existence of subordinate [State] governments, to which the
people are attached, and by which the militia officers are
appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition,
more insurmountable than any which a simple government of
any form can admit to. Notwithstanding the military
establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are
carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments
are afraid to trust the people with arms."
"In the 20th century, the Second Amendment has become an
anachronism, largely because of drastic changes in the militia it
was designed to protect. We no longer have the citizen militia
like that of the 18th century. Today's equivalent of a "wellregulated" militia - the National Guard - has more limited
membership than its early counterpart and depends on
government-supplied, not privately owned, firearms. Gun control
laws have no effect on the arming of today's militia, since those
laws invariably do not apply to arms used in the context of
military service and law enforcement. Therefore, they raise no
serious Second Amendment issues."
-James Madison, Federalist Papers, Article 46 January 29,
1788
"Mightn't it be better in those areas of high crime to arm the
homeowner and the shopkeeper, teach him how to use his
weapons and put the word out to the underworld that it is no
longer totally safe to rob and murder? One wonders indeed if the
rising crime rate isn't due as much as anything to the criminal's
instinctive knowledge that the average victim no longer has any
means of protection. No one knows how many crimes are
committed because the criminal knows he has a soft touch. No
one knows how many stores have been left alone because the
criminals knew them to be guarded by a man with a gun."
- Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, The Second
Amendment
"Assault weapons in the hands of civilians exist for no reason but
to inspire fear and wreak deadly havoc on our streets"
- President Bill Clinton, Weekly Radio Address to the Nation,
Saturday, November 15, 1997; As quoted in THE WASHINGTON
POST, Nov. 16, 1997 on Page A12.
- President Ronald Reagan, Letter to the Editor, GUN &
AMMO, 1975
"The job of the anti-gun think tanks is to come up with headlines
that will change public opinion. If they have to fudge the
numbers, they will do so."
- Joseph P. Tartaro, Second Amendment Foundation President
and GUN WEEK Executive Editor
"Ownership of weapons makes genocides more difficult to
commit...but it takes effective weapons to stop genocide
entirely." (original italics)
- From A-Human-Right.com in reference to the Nazi Holocaust
perpetrated against the Jews.
"The Bushmaster XM15 M4 A3 assault rifle used by the
Washington, DC-area sniper provides a clear illustration of how
and why the federal assault weapons ban needs to be
strengthened and renewed…"
- Violence Policy Center press release
"Fear, physical pain, and death are just part of the price
Americans pay for the easy access of handguns. It is estimated
that the total costs to Americans of gun violence (the vast
majority of which involves handguns) is measured in tens of
billions of dollars.3 In comparison, the wholesale value of the
1.3 million handguns manufactured in America in 1998 totaled
only $370 million."
- Josh Sugarmann from the introduction to EVERY HANDGUN
IS AIMED AT YOU
"The danger inherent in this mindset [banning guns because of
the possibility of potential harm] is why those very wise men we
call the Founding Fathers instilled the principle of "innocent until
proven guilty." Such a principle prevents the grouping of people
into perceived-dangerous groups, and forces us to deal with
people as individuals, with individual motives and morals. It is
the only way to live in a free society."
"Homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries committed with
guns take a staggering human and economic toll on our society
every day. The number of injuries and deaths has risen
dramatically since the nation's founding in 1776. Currently,
nearly 30,000 Americans die from firearms each year."
- Join Together Online, Overview from the Constitution to
Today,
- Michael Mitchell of KeepAndBearArms.com
"But, women are the fastest growing segment of gun owners
and NRA members. And, what motivates these daughters,
mothers and grandmothers to purchase firearms? The answer is
elementary; keeping themselves and their loved ones safe."
- Letter to Editor from James Jay Baker, NRA Institute for
Legislative Action, in response to an LA TIMES Editorial
arguing Republicans should court women voters by supporting
gun control measures.
"With nearly one thousand unintentional deaths each year — and
perhaps 17,000 nonfatal, unintentional gunshot wounds —
redesigning weapons in order to reduce the number of
unintentional incidents is reasonable, prudent and has nothing to
do with "gun control." It has to do with public safety."
- Doctors Against Handgun Injury, "The Issues: Treating Guns as
Consumer Products"
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Source: E
“Gun Control Controversy.” News Batch Agency. News
Batch website, 2011. Web. August 1, 2014.
website: http://www.newsbatch.com/guncontrol.htm
Gun Control Controversy
What are the latest developments in the U.S. gun control controversy?
In a major victory for gun control opponents, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2008 that the 2nd Amendment
does protect the strictest forms of gun control by rejecting the argument of a more narrow interpretation - that
the right is limited to militias. The ruling does not prevent reasonable efforts at gun control but it does prohibit the
kind of outright ban of handguns that has existed in Washington D.C.
Gun control was not a major issue in the 2004 Presidential campaign nor does it appear to be a prominent issue in
the 2008 campaign. The percentage of Americans who consider "gun control" as an important issue has declined
from 3% to 1%. Fewer Americans are supportive of gun control in general and handgun control in particular. While
the issue has dropped in overall public concern, it remains what politicians consider a "wedge issue" as many
opponents of gun control are passionate about their right to unfettered gun ownership and may make voting
decisions on this issue alone. Gun control opponents raise far more money than do gun control advocates. The
2008 Democratic platform affirms the 2nd Amendment right of Americans to own weapons while supporting the
extension of the assault weapon ban and closing the "gun show" loophole. The Republican Platform contains a
strong affirmation of the right to own guns and supports the June 2008 Supreme Court decision.
What is the present level of gun control in the United States?
Like many other aspects of public policy, gun control is a matter of federal, state and even local legislation.
Federal Gun Control
The first major gun control initiative was enacted by Congress in 1934 which regulated the sale of fully automatic
firearms like machine guns. This legislation was followed in 1938 by a new federal law which required gun sellers
to be licensed and which prohibited persons convicted of violent felonies from purchasing guns. No further
legislation was passed by Congress until 1968. The Gun Control Act of 1968 regulated imported guns, expanded
gun-dealer licensing requirements, and expanded the list of persons not eligible to purchase guns to include
persons convicted of any non-business related felony, minors, persons found to be mentally incompetent, and
users of illegal drugs. In 1986, federal legislation established mandatory penalties for the use of a gun in the
commission of a federal crime. Also prohibited were "cop killer" bullets capable of penetrating bulletproof
clothing. In 1990, legislation was passed which banned the manufacturing and importation of semi-automatic
assault weapons.
In 1994, Congress passed what has been regarded as the most comprehensive effort at national gun control. The
"Brady Bill" named for the press aide who was seriously injured in the assassination attempt on President Reagan
imposed a five day waiting period for purchasers of handguns and required local law enforcement authorities to
conduct background checks of all purchasers. The Supreme Court held that the background check provision was
unconstitutional because it infringed on state's rights. Presently, the law has been revised so that the background
check is instantly accomplished by gun dealers through a national computer system and there is no longer a
waiting period. Also in 1994, Congress passed a ban on certain types of assault weapons. This ban expired in 2004.
By a narrow margin, the Senate voted to extend the ban but the House did not take action and the ban was
allowed to expire. Efforts to revive the ban have been unsuccessful.
State and local gun control
Guns are additionally regulated by state and local legislation and there is little uniformity among the states. The
major regulatory issues are:
Page 1 of 14
 Child Access Prevention laws
Many states have passed legislation making it a crime to leave a loaded weapon within easy access of a minor.
 Concealed weapon laws
About seven states prohibit concealed weapons. Many others require an individual to show a need prior to
obtaining a license to carry a concealed weapon. In over half the states, all non-felons are able to obtain licenses to
carry concealed weapons. Only one state, Vermont, has no licensing or permit requirement.
 Regulation of private sales to minors
Under federal law, minors under 18 are prohibited from possessing guns and minor under 21 are prohibited from
purchasing guns from dealers. However, unless regulated by state law, minors 18 and over are able to freely
purchase weapons through private sales. Currently 21 states either prohibit or substantially regulate this
secondary market for minors.
 Regulating all secondary market sales
Over twenty states regulate all secondary sales through registration or licensing requirements. In the states that
have no such regulation, the secondary market allows minors and criminals to easily obtain weapons. This is the
so-called "gun show" loophole.
 Ban on "assault" weapons
In 1989, California was the first state to ban certain types of automatic weapons. More extensive bans have been
enacted in New Jersey, Hawaii, Connecticut and Maryland.
 "One handgun a month" laws
Many purchasers (felons and minors) have circumvented federal law by purchasing firearms from individuals who
have legally made bulk purchases of handguns. Four states (South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and California)
have laws that limit legal purchases of handguns to one a month per buyer.
 Ban on "Saturday Night Specials" and other "junk guns"
These are small, easily concealed lightweight guns which are unreliable but have appeal to criminals because of
their portability. A minority of states have laws which regulate the purchase and use of these weapons.
Additionally, local laws in a number of cities outlaw the possession of these weapons.
 Preemption
The majority of states have laws which prohibit local authorities from passing local gun control ordinances. These
"preemption" laws have been supported by the opponents of gun control. Officials in cities which are able to pass
such ordinances, such as New York, credit their existence to a dramatic reduction in violent crime.
 Waiting periods
Although background checks are no longer necessary under federal law, about half the states still use state data in
addition to federal data to conduct background checks prior to issuing a handgun permit. Eleven of these states
impose waiting periods as well.
How many guns are there?
According a 1994 Department of Justice survey, about 35% of American households own 192 million firearms of
which handguns constituted 35% of the total. Polling data shows that the actual household ownership rate is
higher but also that it declining slightly. Gun sales, has evidenced by Brady background check data, have
significantly increased in 2008 and there are reports that they have increased further in 2009 based on concerns
that a Democratic administration and Congress would bring in a new era of regulation. Slightly less than half of
gun owners own both handguns and shotguns or rifles. The typical gun owner is male, middle class, college
educated and lives in a small town or rural area. Gun ownership varies greatly by region and there is a significant
correlation between the percentage of handgun ownership and the rate of gun-related homicide.
How effective have gun control efforts been?
It is possible that recent gun control legislation has accomplished some of its goals. Although less than 3% of gun
applications have been denied since the enactment of the Brady bill, most of the denials have kept guns from
felons. The total amount deaths due to guns significantly decreased in the 1990's but has the rate of decrease has
leveled off in this decade. Handgun use is the overwhelming cause of such injuries and fatalities. Because most gun
Page 2 of 14
injuries and deaths result from criminal assault and homicide, part of the decrease is certainly due to the overall
decrease in the crime rate. It is difficult to obtain statistical data regarding the current popularity of handguns in
the United States. One indicator, the domestic production of handguns, shows that production decreased in the
early years of the 21st century but that it has now again increasing. Overall, handgun ownership in the United
States has remained relatively constant in the past three decades. Another indicator is the number of approved
Brady background checks.
But gun control activists still believe that it is far to easy for criminals to obtain guns and that an alarming
proportion of the population remains armed. Their concern has been fueled by an unprecedented recent rash of
school shootings and fatalities. Many experts are blaming this phenomena on violent video games and poor
parenting but in each case the youths involved had easy access to the weapons that they used. Gun control
advocates support measures which would require trigger locks on all guns and which would apply the provisions of
the Brady bill to gun shows. Gun control advocate groups also advocate a federal law authorizing only one
handgun purchase per month and raising the age for gun ownership from 18 to 21.
On the other hand, opposition to gun control led by the National Rifle Association (NRA) remains fierce and
passionate. These gun owners maintain that an unregulated right to bear arms is guaranteed to citizens by the 2nd
amendment and this position received support in a Supreme Court decision issued in 2008 which disallowed a
Washington D.C. complete ban on handguns. Opponents of gun control argue that gun owners often use their
weapons to deter crime and that handguns are most commonly used for this purpose. Some studies have shown
that such defensive use of weapons occurs at a much greater rate than the extent to which weapons are used in
criminal activity although the validity of these studies is in dispute. Gun control opponents are generally law
abiding citizens who put greater trust in individualism than in the government to protect their safety. They are
concerned that each step toward greater gun control will lead to the eventual confiscation of all firearms. Gun
control opponent groups spend far more than gun control supporters on campaign contributions.
How do other countries regulate guns?
Almost all major countries have systems for registration of firearms. Most major countries do permit the
ownership of handguns. Many countries ban ownership of certain types of weapons although some have no
restrictions. No country has anywhere near the rate of gun ownership as in the United States and there is a
correspondingly high gun homicide rate. But other countries such as Canada have a significant degree of gun
ownership yet a low rate of gun homicide. The Mexican gun homicide rate reflects the drug trafficking problem in
that country. Most of the guns involved have been smuggled in from the neighboring United States.
How do Democrats and Republicans differ on gun control?
Generally, Democrats support gun control proposals and Republicans do not although the votes on the Brady bill in
1993 show that this is not a strictly partisan issue. The partisan divide on this issue is somewhat reflected by public
opinion. Democrats overwhelmingly support gun control and Republicans are divided on the issue. During the 2000
Presidential campaign, President Bush indicated his support for a trigger lock requirement, raising the age limit,
and requiring background checks at gun shows. But no legislation on these issues has been initiated by the White
House. In 1999 the Senate narrowly voted to regulate gun shows and more substantially supported a measure for
trigger locks but no action was taken by the House with respect to either proposal. In April 2004, the Senate again
voted for handgun locks but the House did not consider the measure and the issue has not recently been
resurrected. Supporters of gun control measures are instead on the defensive as more recent Congressional votes
have increased rather than restricted gun rights. For example, continued Amtrak funding was conditioned on a
provision allowing guns to be in checked luggage.
Page 3 of 14
Gun Control Charts
Public Support of Stricter Gun Control 1999-2009
Percentage of Americans Favoring Handgun Ban 1959-2008
Page 4 of 14
Political Funding on Gun Issues
Extension of Assault Weapon Ban
Page 5 of 14
Evaluation of State Gun Control Laws 2008
Page 6 of 14
Gun Ownership in 1994
Page 7 of 14
Households Reporting Gun Ownership 1999-2009
Types of Guns Owned
Page 8 of 14
Rate of Firearm Deaths and Firearm Ownership By State
Reasons for Denial of Gun Purchase Applications By FBI, 1999-2003
Page 9 of 14
Violence-Related Firearm Death Rates per 100,000
Type of Weapon Used in Firearm Deaths in 2003
Page 10 of 14
Cause of Firearm Injury or Death
Handgun Production in the U.S.
Page 11 of 14
Brady Background Check Approvals 1998-2008
International Comparison of Gun Ownership and Gun Homicide Rate
Page 12 of 14
Congressional Vote on the Brady Bill 1993
Senate Vote on Regulating Gun Shows
Page 13 of 14
Senate Vote on Handgun Locks
Permitting Firearms on Checked Amtrak Luggage
Page 14 of 14
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Source F:
Kopel, David. “ Trust the People: The Case
Against Gun Control.” Cato Institute. cato.org
website, 2010. Web. August 3, 2014.
website: https://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa109.html
Trust the People: The Case Against Gun Control
David B. Kopel, formerly an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, is an attorney in Colorado.
Executive Summary
Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1) Those who fear and distrust the people . . . . 2) Those who identify
themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe . . . depository of the public
interest.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Few public policy debates have been as dominated by emotion and misinformation as the one on gun control. Perhaps this debate is so
highly charged because it involves such fundamental issues. The calls for more gun restrictions or for bans on some or all guns are calls for
significant change in our social and constitutional systems.
Gun control is based on the faulty notion that ordinary American citizens are too clumsy and ill-tempered to be trusted with weapons. Only
through the blatant abrogation of explicit constitutional rights is gun control even possible. It must be enforced with such violations of
individual rights as intrusive search and seizure. It most severely victimizes those who most need weapons for self-defense, such as blacks
and women.
The various gun control proposals on today's agenda-- including licensing, waiting periods, and bans on so-called Saturday night specials-are of little, if any, value as crime-fighting measures. Banning guns to reduce crime makes as much sense as banning alcohol to reduce
drunk driving. Indeed, persuasive evidence shows that civilian gun ownership can be a powerful deterrent to crime.
The gun control debate poses the basic question: Who is more trustworthy, the government or the people?
Guns and Crime
Guns as a Cause of Crime
Gun control advocates--those who favor additional legal restrictions on the availability of guns or who want to outlaw certain types of guns-argue that the more guns there are, the more crime there will be. As a Detroit narcotics officer put it, "Drugs are X; the number of guns in our
society is Y; the number of kids in possession of drugs is Z. X plus Y plus Z equals an increase in murders."[1] But there is no simple
statistical correlation between gun ownership and homicide or other violent crimes. In the first 30 years of this century, U.S. per capita
handgun ownership remained stable, but the homicide rate rose tenfold.[2] Subsequently, between 1937 and 1963, handgun ownership rose
by 250 percent, but the homicide rate fell by 35.7 percent.[3]
Switzerland, through its militia system, distributes both pistols and fully automatic assault rifles to all adult males and requires them to store
their weapons at home. Further, civilian long-gun purchases are essentially unregulated, and handguns are available to any adult without a
criminal record or mental defect. Nevertheless, Switzerland suffers far less crime per capita than the United States and almost no gun crime.
Allowing for important differences between Switzerland and the United States, it seems clear that there is no direct link between the level of
citizen gun ownership and the level of gun misuse. Instead of simplistically assuming that the fewer guns there are, the safer society will be,
one should analyze the particular costs and benefits of gun ownership and gun control and consider which groups gain and lose from
particular policies.
Guns as a Tool against Crime
Several years ago the National Institute of Justice offered a grant to the former president of the American Sociological Association to survey
the field of research on gun control. Peter Rossi began his work convinced of the need for strict national gun control. After looking at the
data, however, Rossi and his University of Massachusetts colleagues James Wright and Kathleen Daly concluded that there was no
convincing proof that gun control curbs crime.[ A follow-up study by Wright and Rossi of serious felons in American prisons provided further
evidence that gun control would not impede determined criminals.[ It also indicated that civilian gun ownership does deter some crime.
Three-fifths of the prisoners studied said that a criminal would not attack a potential victim who was known to be armed. Two-fifths of them
had decided not to commit a crime because they thought the victim might have a gun. Criminals in states with higher civilian gun ownership
rates worried the most about armed victims.
Real-world experiences validate the sociologists' findings. In 1966 the police in Orlando, Florida, responded to a rape epidemic by embarking
on a highly publicized program to train 2,500 women in firearm use. The next year rape fell by 88 percent in Orlando (the only major city to
experience a decrease that year); burglary fell by 25 percent. Not one of the 2,500 women actually ended up firing her weapon; the deterrent
effect of the publicity sufficed. Five years later Orlando's rape rate was still 13 percent below the pre-program level, whereas the surrounding
standard metropolitan area had suffered a 308 percent increase. During a 1974 police strike in Albuquerque armed citizens patrolled their
neighborhoods and shop owners publicly armed themselves; felonies dropped significantly. In March 1982 Kennesaw, Georgia, enacted a
law requiring householders to keep a gun at home; house burglaries fell from 65 per year to 26, and to 11 the following year. Similar
Page 1 of 10
publicized training programs for gun-toting merchants sharply reduced robberies in stores in Highland Park, Michigan, and in New Orleans; a
grocers organization's gun clinics produced the same result in Detroit.[9]
Gun control advocates note that only 2 burglars in 1,000 are driven off by armed homeowners. However, since a huge preponderance of
burglaries take place when no one is home, the statistical citation is misleading. Several criminologists attribute the prevalence of daytime
burglary to burglars' fear of confronting an armed occupant.[10] Indeed, a burglar's chance of being sent to jail is about the same as his
chance of being shot by a victim if the burglar breaks into an occupied residence (1 to 2 percent in each case).[11]
Can Gun Laws Be Enforced?
As Stanford law professor John Kaplan has observed, "When guns are outlawed, all those who have guns will be outlaws." [12]Kaplan argued
that when a law criminalizes behavior that its practitioners do not believe improper, the new outlaws lose respect for society and the law.
Kaplan found the problem especially severe in situations where the numbers of outlaws are very high, as in the case of alcohol, marijuana, or
gun prohibition.
Even simple registration laws meet with massive resistance. In Illinois, for example, a 1977 study showed that compliance with handgun
registration was only about 25 percent. A 1979 survey of Illinois gun owners indicated that 73 percent would not comply with a gun
prohibition.[14] It is evident that New York City's almost complete prohibition is not voluntarily obeyed; estimates of the number of illegal
handguns in the city range from one million to two million.
With more widespread American gun control, the number of new outlaws would certainly be huge. Prohibition would label as criminal the
millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens who believe they must possess the means to defend themselves, regardless of what legislation
dictates.
In addition, strict enforcement of gun prohibition--like our current marijuana prohibition and our past alcohol prohibition--would divert
enormous police and judicial resources to ferreting out and prosecuting the commission of private, consensual possessory offenses. The
diversion of resources to the prosecution of such offenses would mean fewer resources available to fight other crime.
Assume half of all current handgun owners would disobey a prohibition and that 10 percent of them would be caught. Since the cost of
arresting someone for a serious offense is well over $2,000, the total cost in arrests alone would amount to $5 billion a year. Assuming that
the defendants plea-bargained at the normal rate (an unlikely assumption, since juries would be more sympathetic to such defendants than
to most other criminals), the cost of prosecution and trial would be at least $4.5 billion a year. Putting each of the convicted defendants in jail
for a three-day term would cost over $660 million in one-time prison construction costs, and over $200 million in annual maintenance, and
would require a 10 percent increase in national prison capacity. Given that the entire American criminal justice system has a total annual
budget of only $45 billion, it is clear that effective enforcement of a handgun prohibition would simply be impossible.
Do Gun Laws Disarm Criminals?
Although gun control advocates devote much attention to the alleged evils of guns and gun owners, they devote little attention to the
particulars of devising a workable, enforceable law. Disarming criminals would be nearly impossible. There are between 100 and 140 million
guns in the United States, a third of them handguns. The ratio of people who commit handgun crimes each year to handguns is 1:400, that
of handgun homicides to handguns is 1:3,600. Because the ratio of handguns to handgun criminals is so high, the criminal supply would
continue with barely an interruption. Even if 90 percent of American handguns disappeared, there would still be 40 left for every handgun
criminal. In no state in the union can people with recent violent felony convictions purchase firearms. Yet the National Institute of Justice
survey of prisoners, many of whom were repeat offenders, showed that 90 percent were able to obtain their last firearm within a few days.
Most obtained it within a few hours. Three-quarters of the men agreed that they would have "no trouble" or "only a little trouble" obtaining a
gun upon release, despite the legal barriers to such a purchase.
Even if the entire American gun stock magically vanished, resupply for criminals would be easy. If small handguns were imported in the
same physical volume as marijuana, 20 million would enter the country annually. (Current legal demand for new handguns is about 2.5
million a year). Bootleg gun manufacture requires no more than the tools that most Americans have in their garages. A zip gun can be made
from tubing, tape, a pin, a key, whittle wood, and rubber bands. In fact, using wood fires and tools inferior to those in the Sears & Roebuck
catalogue, Pakistani and Afghan peasants have been making firearms capable of firing the Russian AK-47 cartridge.[20] Bootleg ammunition
is no harder to make than bootleg liquor. Although modern smokeless gunpowder is too complex for backyard production, conventional black
powder is simple to manufacture.[21]
Apparently, illegal gun production is already common. A 1986 federal government study found that one-fifth of the guns seized by the police
in Washington, D.C., were homemade. Of course, homemade guns cannot win target-shooting contests, but they suffice for robbery
purposes. Furthermore, the price of bootleg guns may even be lower than the price of the quality guns available now (just as, in prohibition
days, bootleg gin often cost less than legal alcohol had).
Most police officers concur that gun control laws are ineffective. A 1986 questionnaire sent to every major police official in the country
produced the following results: 97 percent believed that a firearms ownership ban would not reduce crime or keep criminals from using guns;
89 percent believed that gun control laws such as those in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City had no effect on criminals; and 90
percent believed that if firearms ownership was banned, ordinary citizens would be more likely to be targets of armed violence.
Guns and the Ordinary Citizen
Some advocates of gun prohibition concede that it will not disarm criminals, but nevertheless they favor it in the belief that disarming ordinary
citizens would in itself be good. Their belief seems to rely heavily on newspaper accounts of suicidal or outlandishly careless gun owners
shooting themselves or loved ones. Such advocates can reel off newspaper stories of children or adults killing themselves in foolish gun
accidents (one headline: "2 Year-old Boy Shoots Friend, 5") or shooting each other in moments of temporary frenzy.
In using argument by anecdote, the advocates are aided by the media, which sensationalize violence. The sensationalism and selectivity of
the press lead readers to false conclusions. One poll showed that people believe homicide takes more lives annually than diabetes, stomach
cancer, or stroke; in fact, strokes alone take 10 times as many lives as homicides. ]
Page 2 of 10
Even in the war of anecdotes, however, it is not at all clear that the gun control advocates have the advantage. Every month the National
Rifle Association's magazines feature a section called "The Armed Citizen," which collects newspaper clippings of citizens successfully
defending themselves against crime. For example, one story tells of a man in a wheelchair who had been beaten and robbed during five
break-ins in two months; when the man heard someone prying at his window with a hatchet, he fired a shotgun, wounding the burglar and
driving him away.[25]
Anecdotes rarely settle policy disputes, though. A coolheaded review of the facts debunks the scare tactics of the gun control advocates.
Some people with firsthand experience blame guns for domestic homicides. Said the chief of the homicide section of the Chicago Police
Department, "There was a domestic fight. A gun was there. And then somebody was dead. If you have described one, you have described
them all." Sociologist R. P. Narlock, though, believes that "the mere availability of weapons lethal enough to produce a human mortality bears
no major relationship to the frequency with which this act is completed."
Guns do not turn ordinary citizens into murderers. Significantly, fewer than one gun owner in 3,000 commits homicide; and that one killer is
far from a typical gun owner. Studies have found two-thirds to four-fifths of homicide offenders have prior arrest records, frequently for violent
felonies.[28] A study by the pro-control Police Foundation of domestic homicides in Kansas City in 1977 revealed that in 85 percent of
homicides among family members, the police had been called in before to break up violence. In half the cases, the police had been called in
five or more times. Thus, the average person who kills a family member is not a non-violent solid citizen who reaches for a weapon in a
moment of temporary insanity. Instead, he has a past record of illegal violence and trouble with the law. Such people on the fringes of society
are unlikely to be affected by gun control laws. Indeed, since many killers already had felony convictions, it was already illegal for them to
own a gun, but they found one anyway.
Of all gun homicide victims, 81 percent are relatives or acquaintances of the killer. As one might expect of the wives, companions, and
business associates (e.g. drug dealers and loansharks) of violent felons, the victims are no paragons of society. In a study of the victims of
near-fatal domestic shootings and stabbings, 78 percent of the victims volunteered a history of hard-drug use, and 16 percent admitted using
heroin the day of the incident. Many of the handgun homicide victims might well have been handgun killers, had the conflict turned out a
little differently.
Finally, many of the domestic killings with guns involve self-defense. In Detroit, for example, 75 percent of wives who shot and killed their
husbands were not prosecuted, because the wives were legally defending themselves or their children against murderous assault.[32] When a
gun is fired (or brandished) for legal self-defense in a home, the criminal attacker is much more likely to be a relative or acquaintance
committing aggravated assault, rather than a total stranger committing a burglary.
The "domestic homicide" prong of the gun control argument demands that we take guns away from law-abiding citizens to reduce the
incidence of felons committing crimes against each other. Not only is such a policy impossible to implement, it is morally flawed. To protect a
woman who chooses to share a bed and a rap sheet with a criminal, it is unfair to disarm law abiding women and men and make them easier
targets for the criminal's rapes and robberies.
It is often alleged that guns cause huge numbers of fatal accidents, far outweighing the minimal gain from whatever anticrime effects they
may have. For example, former U.S. Senate candidate Mark Green (D-N.Y.) warned that "people with guns in their homes for protection are
six times more likely to die of gunfire due to accidental discharge than those without them." Of course, that makes sense; after all, people
who own swimming pools are more likely to die in drowning accidents.
The actual number of people who die in home handgun accidents, though, is quite small. Despite press headlines such as "Pregnant Woman
Killed by Own Gun While Making Bed," the actual death toll is somewhat lower than implied by the press. Each year roughly 7,000 people
commit suicide with handguns and 300 or fewer people die in handgun accidents.] People who want to commit suicide can find many
alternatives, and even pro-control experts agree that gun control has little impact on the suicide rate. Japan, for example, has strict gun
control and a suicide rate twice the U.S. level. Americans have a high rate of suicide by shooting for the same reason that Norwegians have
a high rate of suicide by drowning; guns are an important symbol in one culture, water in the other.
If a U.S. gun prohibition was actually effective, it could save the 300 or so handgun victims and 1,400 or so long-gun accident victims each
year. Even one death is too many, but guns account for only 2 percent of accidental deaths annually.
Guns are dangerous, but hardly as dangerous as gun control advocates contend. Three times as many people are accidentally killed by fire
as by firearms.[37] The number of people who die in gun accidents is about one-third the number who die by drowning.] Although newspapers
leave a contrary impression, bicycle accidents kill many more children than do gun accidents. The average motor vehicle is 12 times more
likely to cause a death than the average firearm.[39] Further, people involved in gun accidents are not typical gun owners but self-destructive
individuals who are also "disproportionately involved in other accidents, violent crime and heavy drinking."
Moreover, there is little correlation between the number of guns and the accident rate. The per capita death rate from firearms accidents has
declined by a third in the last two decades, while the firearms supply has risen over 300 percent. In part this is because handguns have
replaced many long guns as home protection weapons, and handgun accidents are considerably less likely to cause death than long-gun
accidents. Handguns are also more difficult for a toddler to accidentally discharge than are long guns.[42]
The risks, therefore, of gun ownership by ordinary citizens are quite low. Accidents can be avoided by buying a trigger lock and not cleaning
a gun while it is loaded. Unless the gun owner is already a violent thug, he is very unlikely to kill a relative in a moment of passion. If
someone in the house is intent on suicide, he will kill himself by whatever means are at hand.
Gun control advocates like to cite a recent article in the New Enqland Journal of Medicine that argues that for every intruder killed by a gun,
43 other people die as a result of gunshot wounds incurred in the home.[43] (Again, most of them are suicides; many of the rest are assaultive
family members killed in legitimate self-defense.) However, counting the number of criminal deaths is a bizarre method of measuring
anticrime utility; no one evaluates police efficacy by tallying the number of criminals killed. Defensive use of a gun is far more likely to involve
scaring away an attacker by brandishing the gun, or by firing it without causing death. Even if the numbers of criminal deaths were the proper
measure of anticrime efficacy, citizens acting with full legal justification kill at least 30 percent more criminals than do the police.[44]
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On the whole, citizens are more successful gun users than are the police. When police shoot, they are 5.5 times more likely to hit an
innocent person than are civilian shooters.[45]Moreover, civilians use guns effectively against criminals. If a robbery victim does not defend
himself, the robbery will succeed 88 percent of the time, and the victim will be injured 25 percent of the time. If the victim resists with a gun,
the robbery "success" rate falls to 30 percent, and the victim injury rate falls to 17 percent. No other response to a robbery--from using a
knife, to shouting for help, to fleeing--produces such a low rate of victim injury and robbery success.[46] In short, virtually all Americans who
use guns do so responsibly and effectively, notwithstanding the anxieties of gun control advocates.
Enforcing Gun Bans
Apart from the intrinsic merit (or demerit) of banning or restricting gun possession, the mechanics of enforcement must also be considered.
Illegal gun ownership is by definition a possessory offense, like possession of marijuana or bootleg alcohol. The impossibility of effective
enforcement, plus the civil liberties invasions that necessarily result, are powerful arguments against gun control.
Search and Seizure
No civil libertarian needs to be told how the criminalization of liquor and drugs has led the police into search-and-seizure violations.
Consensual possessory offenses cannot be contained any other way. Search-and-seizure violations are the inevitable result of the
criminalization of gun possession. As Judge David Shields of Chicago's special firearms court observed: "Constitutional search and seizure
issues are probably more regularly argued in this court than anywhere in America."[47]
The problem has existed for a long time. In 1933, for example, long before the Warren Court expanded the rights of suspects, one quarter of
all weapons arrests in Detroit were dismissed because of illegal searches.[48] According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the St. Louis
police have conducted over 25,000 illegal searches under the theory that any black driving a late-model car must have a handgun.[49]
The frequency of illegal searches should not be surprising. The police are ordered to get handguns off the streets, and they attempt to do
their job. It is not their fault that they are told to enforce a law whose enforcement is impossible within constitutional limits. Small wonder that
the Chicago Police Department gives an officer a favorable notation in his record for confiscating a gun, even as the result of an illegal
search.[50] One cannot comply with the Fourth Amendment--which requires that searches be based upon probable cause--and also
effectively enforce a gun prohibition. Former D.C. Court of Appeals judge Malcolm Wilkey thus bemoaned the fact that the exclusionary rule,
which bars courtroom use of illegally seized evidence, "has made unenforceable the gun control laws we now have and will make ineffective
any stricter controls which may be devised."[51] Judge Abner Mikva, usually on the opposite side of the conservative Wilkey, joined him in
identifying the abolition of the exclusionary rule as the only way to enforce gun control. [52]
Abolishing the exclusionary rule is not the only proposal designed to facilitate searches for illegal guns. Harvard professor James Q. Wilson,
the Police Foundation, and other commentators propose widespread street use of hand-held magnetometers and walk-through metal
detectors to find illegal guns.[53] The city attorney of Berkeley, California, has advocated setting up "weapons checkpoints" (similar to sobriety
checkpoints), where the police would search for weapons all cars passing through dangerous neighborhoods.[54]School administrators in
New Jersey have begun searching student lockers and purses for guns and drugs; Bridgeport, Connecticut, is considering a similar strategy.
Detroit temporarily abandoned school searches after a female student who had passed through a metal detector was given a manual patdown by a male security officer, but the city has resumed the program.[55] New York City is also implementing metal detectors.[56]
Searching a teenager's purse, or making her walk through a metal detector several times a day, is hardly likely to instill much faith in the
importance of civil liberties. Indeed, students conditioned to searches without probable cause in high school are unlikely to resist such
searches when they become adults. Additionally, it is unjust for the state to compel a student to attend school, fail to provide a safe
environment at school or on the way to school, and then prohibit the student from protecting himself or herself. [57]
Perhaps the most harmful effect of the metal detectors is their debilitating message that a community must rely on paid security guards and
their hardware in order to be secure. It does not take much imagination to figure out how to pass a weapon past a security guard, with
trickery or bribery. Once past the guard, weapons could simply be stored at school. Instead of relying on technology at the door, the better
solution would be to mobilize students inside the school. Volunteer student patrols would change the balance of power in the schoolyard,
ending the reign of terror of outside intruders and gangs. Further, concerted student action teaches the best lessons of democracy and
community action. The majority of people possessing illegal weapons during a gun prohibition would never carry them on the streets and
would never be caught even by omnipresent metal detectors. Accordingly, a third of the people who favor a ban on private handguns want
the ban enforced with house-to-house searches.[58] Eroding the Second Amendment guarantees erosion of the Fourth Amendment.
Those who propose abolishing the exclusionary rule and narrowing the Fourth Amendment apparently trust the street intuition of the police to
sort out the true criminals so that ordinary citizens would not be subject to unjustified intrusions. However, one-fourth of the guns seized by
the police are not associated with any criminal activity.[59] Our constitutional scheme explicitly rejects the notion that the police may be
allowed to search at will.
Other Civil Liberties Problems
Although gun control advocates trust the police to know whom to arrest, the experience of gun control leads one to doubt police judgment. A
Pennsylvania resident was visiting Brooklyn, New York, to help repair a local church when he spotted a man looting his truck. The
Pennsylvania man fired a warning shot into the air with his legally registered Pennsylvania gun, scaring off the thief. The police arrived too
late to catch the thief but arrested the Pennsylvania man for not acquiring a special permit to bring his gun into New York City.[60] In California
a police chief went to a gun show and read to a machine gun dealer the revocation of his license; the dealer was immediately arrested for
possessing unlicensed machine guns.[61]
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been particularly outrageous in its prosecutions. Sometimes the BATF's zeal to inflate its
seizure count turns its agents into Keystone Kops. One year in Iowa, for example, the BATF hauled away an unregistered cannon from a
public war memorial; in California it pried inoperable machine guns out of a museum's display.
In the early 1970s changes in the price of sugar made moonshining unprofitable. To justify its budget, the BATF had to find a new set of
defendants. Small-scale gun dealers and collectors served perfectly. Often the bureau's tactics against them are petty and mean. After a
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defendant's acquittal, for example, agents may refuse to return his seized gun collection, even under court order. Valuable museum-quality
antique arms may be damaged when in BATF custody. Part of the explanation for the refusal to return weapons after an acquittal may lie in
BATF field offices using gun seizures to build their own arsenals.[62]
The BATF's disregard for fair play harms more than just gun owners. BATF searches of gun dealers need not be based on probable cause,
or any cause at all. The 1972 Supreme Court decision allowing these searches, United States v. Biswell, has since become a watershed in
the weakening of the Constitution's probable cause requirement.[63]
Lack of criminal intent does not shield a citizen from the BATF. In United States v. Thomas, the defendant found a 16- inch-long gun while
horseback riding. Taking it to be an antique pistol, he pawned it. But it turned out to be short-barreled rifle, which should have been
registered before selling. Although the prosecutor conceded that Thomas lacked criminal intent, he was convicted of a felony anyway. [64] The
Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Freed declared that criminal intent was not necessary for a conviction of violation of the Gun
Control Act of 1968.[65]
The strict liability principle has since spread to other areas and contributed to the erosion of the mens rea (guilty mind) requirement of
criminal culpability.[66] U.S. law prohibits the possession of unregistered fully automatic weapons (one continuous trigger squeeze causes
repeat fire). Semiautomatic weapons (which eject the spent shell and load the next cartridge, but require another trigger squeeze to fire) are
legal. If the sear (the catch that holds the hammer at cock) on a semiautomatic rifle wears out, the rifle may malfunction and repeat fire.
Accordingly, the BATF recently arrested and prosecuted a small-town Tennessee police chief for possession of an automatic weapon
(actually a semiautomatic with a worn-out sear), even though the BATF conceded that the police chief had not deliberately altered the
weapon. In March and April of 1988, BATF pressed similar charges for a worn-out sear against a Pennslyvania state police sergeant. After a
12-day trial, the federal district judge directed a verdict of not guilty and called the prosecution "a severe miscarriage of justice."[67]
The Police Foundation has proposed that law enforcement agencies use informers to ferret out illegal gun sales and model their tactics on
methods of drug law enforcement.[68] Taking this advice to heart, the BATF relies heavily on paid informants and on entrapment--techniques
originated during alcohol prohibition, developed in modern drug enforcement, and honed to a chilling perfection in gun control. So that BATF
agents can fulfill their quotas, they concentrate on harassing collectors and their valuable rifle collections. Undercover agents may entice or
pressure a private gun collector into making a few legal sales from his personal collection. Once he has made four sales, over a long period
of time, he is arrested and charged with being "engaged in the business" of gun sales without a license. [69]
To the consternation of many local police forces, the BATF is often unwilling to assist in cases involving genuine criminal activity. Police
officials around the nation have complained about BATF's refusing to prosecute serious gun law violations. [70]
In 1982 the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution investigated the BATF and concluded that the agency had habitual engaged in
conduct which borders on the criminal. . [E]nforcement tactics made possible by current firearms laws are constitutionally, legally and
practically reprehensible. . . . [A]pproximately 75 percent of BATF gun prosecutions were aimed at ordinary citizens who had neither criminal
intent nor knowledge, but were enticed by agents into unknowing technical violations.[71]
Although public pressure in recent years has made the BATF a somewhat less lawless agency, it would be a mistake to conclude that the
organization has been permanently reformed.
One need not like guns to understand that gun control laws pose a threat to civil liberties. Explained Aryeh Neier, former director of the
American Civil Liberties Union:
I want the state to take away people's guns. But I don't want the state to use methods against gun owners that I deplore when used against
naughty children, sexual minorities, drug users, and unsightly drinkers. Since such reprehensible police practices are probably needed to
make anti-gun laws effective, my proposal to ban all guns should probably be marked a failure before it is even tried. [72]
Gun Control and Social Control
Gun control cannot coexist with the Fourth Amendment (probable cause for search and seizure) and has a deleterious effect on the Fifth
Amendment (due process of law). Gun control is also suspect under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for it harms
most those groups that have traditionally been victimized by society's inequities.
The Second Amendment and the Sources of Political Power
Regardless of the utility or disutility of guns, laws about them are circumscribed by the Constitution. The Second Amendment means what it
says: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed." If we are to live by the law, our first step must be to obey the Constitution.
Attitudes of the Founding Fathers toward Guns
The leaders of the American Revolution and the early republic were enthusiastic proponents of guns and widespread gun ownership. The
Founding Fathers were unanimous about the importance of an armed citizenry able to overthrow a despotic government. Virtually all the
political philosophers whose ideas were known to the Founders--such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Locke,
and Sidney--agreed that a republic could not long endure without an armed citizenry.[99] Said Patrick Henry, "Guard with jealous attention the
public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give
up that force, you are ruined. . . . The great object is that every man be armed. . . . Everyone who is able may have a gun."[100] Thomas
Jefferson's model constitution for Virginia declared, "No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms in his own lands or tenements."[101]
Jefferson's colleague John Adams spoke for "arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion . . . in private self-defense."[102]
The Original Meaning of the Second Amendment
The only commentary available to Congress when it ratified the Second Amendment was written by Tench Coxe, one of James Madison's
friends. Explained Coxe: "The people are confirmed by the next article of their right to keep and bear their private arms."[103]
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Madison's original structure of the Bill of Rights did not place the amendments together at the end of the text of the Constitution (the way they
were ultimately organized); rather, he proposed interpolating each amendment into the main text of the Constitution, following the provision
to which it pertained. If he had intended the Second Amendment to be mainly a limit on the power of the federal government to interfere with
state government militias, he would have put it after Article 1, section 8, which granted Congress the power to call forth the militia to repel
invasion, suppress insurrection, and enforce the laws; and to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia. Instead, Madison put
the right to bear arms amendment (along with the freedom of speech amendment) in Article I, section 9--the section that guaranteed
individual rights such as habeas corpus.[104] Finally, in ratifying the Bill of Rights, the Senate rejected a change in the Second Amendment
that would have limited it to bearing arms "for the common defense."[105]
Gun control advocates argue that the Second Amendment's reference to the militia means that the amendment protects only official
uniformed state militias (the National Guard). It is true that the Framers of the Constitution wanted the state militias to defend the United
States against foreign invasion, so that a large standing army would be unnecessary. But those militias were not uniformed state employees.
Before independence was even declared, Josiah Quincy had referred to "a well-regulated militia composed of the freeholder, citizen and
husbandman, who take up their arms to preserve their property as individuals, and their rights as freemen."[106] "Who are the Militia?" asked
George Mason of Virginia, "They consist now of the whole people." [107] The same Congress that passed the Bill of Rights, including the
Second Amendment and its militia language, also passed the Militia Act of 1792. That act enrolled all able-bodied white males in the militia
and required them to own arms.
Although the requirement to arm no longer exists, the definition of the militia has stayed the same; section 311(a) of volume 10 of the United
States Code declares, "The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and . . . under 45 years of
age." The next section of the code distinguishes the organized militia (the National Guard) from the "unorganized militia." The modern federal
National Guard was specifically raised under Congress's power to "raise and support armies," not its power to "Provide for organizing, arming
and disciplining the Militia."[108]
Indeed, if words mean what they say, it is impossible to interpret the Second Amendment as embodying only a "collective" right. As one
Second Amendment scholar observed, it would be odd for the Congress that enacted the Bill of Rights to use "right of the people" to mean
an individual right in the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments, but to mean a state's right in the Second Amendment. After all, when
Congress meant to protect the states, Congress wrote "the States" in the Tenth Amendment. [109]Moreover, several states included a similar
right to bear arms guarantee in their own constitutions. If the Second Amendment protected only the state uniformed militias against federal
interference, a comparable article would be ridiculous in a state constitution.[110]
Modern Interpretations of the Second Amendment
For the Constitution's first century, there was no question that the Second Amendment prohibited federal interference with the individual right
to bear arms. During this period the Supreme Court did not view any articles of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment included, as
applicable to the states. Accordingly, the Second Amendment, like the First Amendment and all the others, was construed by the Supreme
Court to place no limits on state interference with individual rights. (Some state courts, however, treated the Second Amendment as binding
on the states.)[111]
In 1906 the Kansas Supreme Court announced in dicta that the Second Amendment did not guarantee an individual right to bear arms but
only guarded official state militias against federal interference. Over the following decades, the collectivist state militia theory was accepted
by many in the intellectual community but never by the American population as a whole. Today, 89 percent of Americans believe that as
citizens they have a right to own a gun, and 87 percent believe the Constitution guarantees them a right to keep and bear arms.[112] Recently,
the collectivist theory has begun to lose its standing even in the intellectual community. In the past two decades, scholarship of the individual
rights view has dominated the law reviews, especially the major ones. Indeed, only one article published in a top-50 law review argues that
individual citizens are not protected by the Second Amendment.[113] The Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution investigated the historical
evidence and concluded that the individual rights interpretation was unques- tionably the intent of the authors of the Second Amendment,
and was intended by the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment to be applied against the states.[114] Stephen Halbrook's That Every Man Be
Armed, the first book to deal in depth with the historical background of the Second Amendment, also endorses the individual rights
interpretation.
Sometimes writers in popular magazines claim that the Supreme Court has endorsed the collective theory. They are wrong. Twice in the l9th
century, the Court heard cases involving state or private interference with gun use. Both times the Court took the now-discredited view that
the Bill of Rights did not restrict state governments and therefore the Second Amendment offered no protection from state firearms laws.[115]
The collective theory was not even invented until the early 20th century; neither of the Court's l9th-century cases endorsed it.
The next (and last) time the Court ruled on the Second Amendment was 1939. In United States v. Miller the Court held that since there was
no evidence before that Court that sawed-off shotguns are militia-type, militarily useful weapons, the Court could not conclude that sawed-off
shotguns were protected by the Second Amendment. As for the meaning of "a well-regulated Militia," the Court noted that to the authors of
the Second Amendment, "The Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. . . . Ordinarily
when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the
time."[116]
Since the 1930s the Court has not had much to say about the Second Amendment. It denied a petition to review the Morton Grove case, in
which a suburb's handgun ban was upheld. (The lower court had gotten its result by stating that the intent of the Framers of the Second
Amendment was "irrelevant" to the amendment's meaning.)[117] As the Supreme Court has stated, though, a denial of review has no
precedential effect.[118] Had the Court wanted the Morton Grove case to apply nationally, the Court could have issued a summary affirmance.
More indicative of the modern Court's view of the Second Amendment is Justice Powell's opinion for the Court in Moore v. East Cleveland,
where he listed "the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and
seizures" as part of the "full scope of liberty" guaranteed by the Constitution.[119]
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Modern Utility
Some gun control advocates argue that the Second Amendment's goal of an armed citizenry to resist foreign invasion and domestic tyranny
is no longer valid in light of advances in military technology. Former attorney general Ramsey Clark contended that "it is no longer realistic to
think of an armed citizenry as a meaningful protection."[120]
But during World War II, which was fought with essentially the same types of ground combat weapons that exist today, armed citizens were
considered quite important. After Pearl Harbor the unorganized militia was called into action. Nazi submarines were constantly in action off
the East Coast. On the West Coast, the Japanese seized several Alaskan islands, and strategists wondered if the Japanese might follow up
on their dramatic victories in the Pacific with an invasion of the Alaskan mainland, Hawaii, or California. Hawaii's governor summoned armed
citizens to man checkpoints and patrol remote beach areas.[121] Maryland's governor called on "the Maryland Minute Men," consisting mainly
of "members of Rod and Gun Clubs, of Trap Shooting Clubs and similar organizations," for "repelling invasion forays, parachute raids, and
sabotage uprisings," as well as for patrolling beaches, water supplies, and railroads. Over 15,000 volunteers brought their own weapons to
duty.[122] Gun owners in Virginia were also summoned into home service.[123] Americans everywhere armed themselves in case of
invasion.[124] After the National Guard was federalized for overseas duty, "the unorganized militia proved a successful substitute for the
National Guard," according to a Defense Department study. Militiamen, providing their own guns, were trained in patrolling, roadblock
techniques, and guerilla warfare.[125] The War Department distributed a manual recommending that citizens keep "weapons which a guerilla
in civilian clothes can carry without attracting attention. They must be easily portable and easily concealed. First among these is the
pistol."[126] In Europe, lightly armed civilian guerrillas were even more important; the U.S. government supplied anti-Nazi partisans with a
$1.75 analogue to the zip gun (a very low quality handgun).[127]
Of course, ordinary citizens are not going to grab their Saturday night specials and charge into oncoming columns of tanks. Resistance to
tyranny or invasion would be a guerrilla war. In the early years of such a war, before guerrillas would be strong enough to attack the
occupying army head on, heavy weapons would be a detriment, impeding the guerrillas' mobility. As a war progresses, Mao Zedong
explained, the guerrillas would use ordinary firearms to capture better small arms and eventually heavy equipment.[128]
The Afghan mujahedeen have been greatly helped by the new Stinger antiaircraft missiles, but they had already fought the Soviets to a draw
using a locally made version of the outdated Lee-Enfield rifle.[129] One clear lesson of this century is that a determined guerrilla army can
wear down an occupying force until the occupiers lose spirit and depart--just what happened in Ireland in 1920 and Palestine in 1948. As one
author put it: "Anyone who claims that popular struggles are inevitably doomed to defeat by the military technologies of our century must find
it literally incredible that France and the United States suffered defeat in Vietnam . . . that Portugal was expelled from Angola; and France
from Algeria."[130]
If guns are truly useless in a revolution, it is hard to explain why dictators as diverse as Ferdinand Marcos, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, and the
Bulgarian communists have ordered firearms confiscations upon taking power.[131]
Certainly the militia could not defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles, but it could keep order at home after a limited attack. In case
of conventional war, the militia could guard against foreign invasion after the army and the National Guard were sent into overseas combat.
Especially given the absence of widespread military service, individual Americans familiar with using their private weapons provide an
important defense resource. Canada already has an Eskimo militia to protect its northern territories.[132]
The United States is virtually immune from foreign invasion, but as the late vice president Hubert Humphrey explained, domestic dictatorship
will always be a threat: "The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard
against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."[133]
The most advanced technology in the world could not keep track of guerrilla bands in the Rockies, the Appalachians, the great swamps of
the South, or Alaska. The difficulty of fighting a protracted war against a determined popular guerrilla force is enough to make even the most
determined potential dictator think twice.[134]
The Second Amendment debate goes to the very heart of the role of citizens and their government. By retaining arms, citizens retain the
power claimed in the Declaration of Independence to "alter or abolish" a despotic government. And citizens retain the power to protect
themselves from private assault. Ramsey Clark asked the question, "What kind of society depends on private action to defend life and
property?"[135] The answer is a society that trusts its citizenry more than the police and the army and knows that ultimate authority must
remain in the hands of the people.
Particular Forms of Gun Control
The foregoing discussion has focused on gun control in general. Many people who are skeptical about a complete ban on all guns
nevertheless favor some sort of intermediate controls, which would regulate but not ban guns or ban only certain types of guns. While some
of these proposals seem plausible in the abstract, closer examination raises serious doubts about their utility.
Registration
Gun registration is essentially useless in crime detection. Tracing the history of a recovered firearm generally leads to the discovery that it
was stolen from a legal owner and that its subsequent pattern of ownership is unknown.[136]
Analogies are sometimes drawn between gun registration and automobile registration. Indeed, a majority of the public seems to favor gun
registration not because a reduction in crime is expected but because automobiles and guns are both intrinsically dangerous objects that the
government should keep track of.[137]The analogy, though, is flawed. Gun owners, unlike drivers, do not need to leave private property and
enter a public roadway. No one has ever demanded that prospective drivers prove a unique need for a car and offer compelling reasons why
they cannot rely solely on public transportation. No Department of Motor Vehicles
has ever adopted the policy of reducing to a minimum the number of cars in private hands. Automobile registration is not advocated or feared
as a first step toward confiscation of all automobiles. However, registration lists did facilitate gun confiscation in Greece, Ireland, Jamaica,
Page 7 of 10
and Bermuda.[138] The Washington, D.C., city council considered (but did not enact) a proposal to use registration lists to confiscate all
shotguns and handguns in the city. When reminded that the registration plan had been enacted with the explicit promise to gun owners that it
would not be used for confiscation, the confiscation's sponsor retorted, "Well, I never promised them anything!"[139] The Evanston, Illinois,
police department also attempted to use state registration lists to enforce a gun ban. [140]
Unlike automobiles, guns are specifically protected by the Constitution, and it is improper to require that people possess- ing constitutionally
protected objects register themselves with the government, especially when the benefits of registration are so trivial. The Supreme Court has
ruled that the First Amendment prohibits the government from registering purchasers of newspapers and magazines, even of foreign
Communist propaganda.[141]The same principle should apply to the Second Amendment: the tools of political dissent should be privately
owned and unregistered.
Gun Licensing
Although opinion polls indicate that most Americans favor some form of gun licensing (for the same reasons they approve of auto licensing),
69 percent of Americans oppose laws giving the police power to decide who may or may not own a firearm. [142]That is exactly what licensing
is. Permits tend to be granted not to those who are most at risk but to those with whom the police get along. In St. Louis, for example,
permits have routinely been denied to homosexuals, nonvoters, and wives who lack their husbands' permission. [143] Other police departments
have denied permits on the basis of race, sex, and political affiliation, or by determining that hunting or target shooting is not an adequate
reason for owning a handgun.
Class discrimination pervades the process. New York City taxi drivers, who are more at risk of robbery than anyone else in the city, are
denied gun permits, since they carry less than $2,000 in cash. (Of course, most taxi drivers carry weapons anyway, and only rookie police
officers arrest them for doing so.) As the courts have ruled, ordinary citizens and storeowners in the city may not receive so-called carry
permits because they have no greater need for protection than anyone else in the city.[144] Carry permits are apparently reserved for New
Yorkers such as the Rockefellers, John Lindsay, the publisher of the New York Times, (all of them gun control advocates), and the husband
of Dr. Joyce Brothers.[145] Other licensees include an aide to a city councilman widely regarded as corrupt, several major slumlords, a
Teamsters Union boss who is a defendant in a major racketeering suit, and a restaurateur identified with organized crime and alleged to
control important segments of the hauling industry--hardly proof that licensing restricts gun ownership to upstanding citizens.[146]
The licensing process can be more than a minor imposition on the purchaser of a gun. In Illinois the automated licensing system takes 60
days to authorize a clearance.[147] Although New Jersey law requires that the authorities act on gun license applications within 30 days,
delays of 90 days are routine; some applications are delayed for years, for no valid reason.[148]Licensing fees may be raised so high as to
keep guns out of the hands of the poor. Until recently Dade County, Florida, which includes Miami, charged $500 for a license; nearby
Monroe County charged $2,000.[149] These excessive fees on a means of self- defense are the equivalent of a poll tax. Or licensing may
simply turn into prohibition. Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, ordered his police department never to give anyone license application
forms.[150] The police department in New York City has refused to issue legally required licenses, even when commanded by courts to do so.
The department has also refused to even hand out blank application forms.[151]
In addition to police abuse of licensing discretion, there is also the problem of the massive data collection that would result from a
comprehensive licensing scheme. For example, New York City asks a pistol permit applicant:
Have you ever . . . Been discharged from any employment?
Been subpoenaed to, or attended [!] a hearing or inquiry conducted by any executive, legislative, or judicial body?
Been denied appointment in a civil service system, Federal, State, Local?
Had any license or permit issued to you by any City, State, or Federal Agency?
Applicants for a business premises gun permit in New York City must also supply personal income-tax returns, daily bank deposit slips, and
bank statements. Photocopies are not acceptable. A grocer in the South Bronx may wonder what the size ofhis bank deposits has to do with
his right to protection.
The same arguments that lead one to reject a national identity card apply to federal gun licensing. A national licensing system would require
the collection of dossiers on half the households in the United States (or a quarter, for handgun-only record-keeping).
Implementing national gun licensing would make introduction of a national identity card more likely. Assuming that a large proportion of
American families would become accustomed to the government collecting extensive data about them, they would probably not oppose
making everyone else go through the same procedures for a national identity card.
Finally, licensing is not going to stop determined criminals. The most thorough study of the weapons behavior of felony prisoners (the WrightRossi project funded by the National Institute of Justice) found that five-sixths of the felons did not buy their handguns from a retail outlet
anyway. (Many of the rest used a legal, surrogate buyer, such as a girlfriend.)[152]As noted above, felons have little trouble buying stolen guns
on the streets. In sum, it remains to be proven that gun licensing would significantly reduce crime. Given the very clear civil liberties problems
with licensing, it cannot be said that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Waiting Periods
In the 1960s and 1970s bills to implement federal gun registration and licensing were soundly defeated in Congress, never to resurface as
politically viable proposals. The broadest federal gun legislation currently under consideration is a national waiting period for gun purchases.
Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) has introduced legislation to require a national seven-day waiting period for handgun transfers, which
would be permitted only after police officials had an opportunity to check an applicant's background. Because the bill applies to all gun
transfers, it would even compel a wife to get police permission before receiving a handgun as a gift from her husband. [153]
However, statistical evidence shows no correlation between waiting periods and homicide rates.[154] The image of a murderously enraged
person leaving home, driving to a gun store, finding one open after 10 p.m. (when most crimes of passion occur), buying a weapon, and
driving home to kill is a little silly.[155] Of course, a licensing system is bound to deny some purchasers an opportunity to buy, but only the
most naive rejected purchaser would fail to eventually find a way to acquire an illegal weapon.
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In addition, waiting periods can be subterfuges for more restrictive measures. Former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson proposed a six-month
waiting period--a long time to wait for a woman who is in immediate danger of attack from her ex-boyfriend. Senator Metzenbaum's bill would
give the police de facto licensing powers, even in states that have explicitly considered and rejected a police-run licensing system.
Mandatory Sentencing
Those who want to make simple gun possession a crime frequently call for a mandatory prison sentence for unlawful possession of a gun.
The National Handgun Information Center demands a one-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of a handgun during "any
crime" (apparently including drunk driving or possession of a controlled substance). Detroit recently enacted a 30-day mandatory sentence
for carrying an unlicensed gun.[156] None of those proposals is a step toward crime control.
Massachusetts's Bartley-Fox law, with a mandatory one-year sentence for carrying an unlicensed gun, has apparently reduced the casual
carrying of firearms but has not significantly affected the gun use patterns of determined criminals.[157] Of the Massachusetts law, a
Department of Justice study concluded that "the effect may be to penalize some less serious offenders, while the punishment for more
serious offenses is postponed, reduced, or avoided altogether."[158] New York enacted a similar law and saw handgun homicides rise by 25
percent and handgun robberies 56 percent during the law's first full year.[159]
The effects of laws that impose mandatory sentences are sometimes brutally unfair. In New Mexico, for example, one judge resigned after
being forced to send to prison a man with a clean record who had brandished a gun during a traffic dispute.[160]One of the early test cases
under the Massachusetts Bartley-Fox law was the successful prosecution of a young man who had inadvertently allowed his gun license to
expire. To raise money to buy his high school class ring, he was driving to a pawn shop to sell his gun. Stopping the man for a traffic
violation, a policeman noticed the gun. The teenager spent the mandatory year in jail with no parole.[161] Another Massachusetts case
involved a man who had started carrying a gun after a co-worker began threatening to murder him.[162] The Civil Liberties Union of
Massachusetts had opposed Bartley-Fox precisely because of the risk that innocent people would be sent to jail.[163]
The call for mandatory jail terms for unlicensed carrying is in part an admission by the gun control advocates that judges reject their values
and instead base sentences on community norms. A Department of Justice survey of how citizens regard various crimes found that carrying
an illegal gun ranked in between indecent exposure and cheating on taxes--hardly the stuff of a mandatory year in jail.[164] The current
judicial/community attitude is appropriate. In a world where first-time muggers often receive probation, it is morally outrageous to imprison for
one year everyone who carries a firearm for self-defense.
As a general matter of criminal justice, mandatory sentences are inappropriate. One of the most serious problems with any kind of mandatory
sentencing program is that its proponents are rarely willing to fund the concomitant increase in prison space. It is very easy for legislators to
appear tough on crime by passing draconian sentencing laws. It is much more difficult for them to raise taxes and build the prison space
necessary to give those laws effect. Instead of more paper laws, a more effective crime-reduction strategy would be to build enough prisons
to keep hard-core violent criminals off the streets for longer periods. If there are to be mandatory sentences for gun crimes, the mandatory
term should apply only to use of a firearm in a violent crime
Handgun Bans
A total ban on the private possession of handguns is the ultimate goal of a Washington lobby called the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.
Unlike some other gun control measures, a ban lacks popular support; only one-sixth to one-third of the citizenry favors such a measure.[165]
Handgun-ban proponents sometimes maintain that handguns have no utility except to kill people. The statement is patently wrong and typical
of how little the prohibitionists understand the activities they condemn. Although self-defense is the leading reason for handgun purchases,
about one-sixth of handgun owners bought their gun primarily for target shooting, and one-seventh bought the gun primarily as part of a gun
collection. In addition, hunters frequently carry handguns as a sidearms to use against snakes or to hunt game. [166]
Cost-benefit analysis hardly offers a persuasive case for a ban. One recent study indicates that handguns are used in roughly 645,000 selfdefense actions each year--a rate of once every 48 seconds. (As noted above, most defensive uses simply involving brandishing the gun.)
The number of self-defense uses is at least equal to, and probably more than, the number of times handguns are used in a crime.[167] Most
homicides (between 50 and 84 percent) occur in circumstances where a long gun could easily be substituted.[168] Besides, sawing off a
shotgun and secreting it under a coat is simple. Many modern submachine guns are only 11 to 13 inches long, and an M-1 carbine can be
modified to become completely concealable.[169] Since long guns are so much deadlier than handguns, an effective handgun ban would
result in at least some criminals switching to sawed-off shotguns and rifles, perhaps increasing fatalities from gun crimes. In the Wright and
Rossi prisoner survey, 75 percent of "handgun predators" said they would switch to sawed-off shoulder weapons if handguns were
unavailable.[170]
If families had to give up handguns and replaced them with long guns, fatalities from gun accidents certainly would increase. Since handguns
have replaced long guns as a home defense weapon over the last 50 years, the firearm accident fatality rate has declined.[171] The
overwhelming majority of accidental gun deaths are from long guns.[172]
Handguns are also much better suited for self-defense, especially in the home, than are long guns, which are more difficult to use in a
confined setting. Rifle bullets are apt to penetrate their intended target and keep on going through a wall, injuring someone in an adjacent
apartment. Further, the powerful recoil of long guns makes them difficult for women, frail people, or the elderly to shoot accurately. Lastly, a
robber or assailant has a much better chance of eventual recovery if he is shot with a handgun rather than a long gun.
Banning Saturday Night Specials
If a Saturday night special is defined as any handgun with a barrel length less than 3 inches, a caliber of .32 or less, and a retail cost of under
$100, there are roughly six million such guns in the United States. Each year, between 1 and 6 percent of them are employed in violent gun
crimes, a far higher percentage of criminal misuse than for other guns.[173] Although opinion polls find the majority of Americans in favor of
banning Saturday night specials, the practical case for banning these weapons is not compelling.[174]
Criminals do prefer easily concealable weapons; roughly 75 percent of all crime handguns seized or held by the police have barrel lengths of
3 inches or less.[175] At least for serious felons, though, low price is a very secondary factor in choice of firearm. Experienced felons prefer
powerful guns to cheap ones. The Wright and Rossi survey, which focused on hardened criminals, found that only 15 percent had used a
Page 9 of 10
Saturday night special as their last gun used in a crime.[176] It should not be surpris- ing that serious criminals prefer guns as powerful as
those carried by their most important adversaries, the police.
It is often said that a Saturday night special is "the kind of gun that has only one purpose: to kill people."[177] Again, this is untrue. Such guns
are commonly used as hunting sidearms, referred to as "trail guns" or "pack guns." One does not need long-range accuracy to kill a snake,
and lightness and compactness are important. Nor can all hunters afford $200 for a quality sidearm.[178] More importantly, inexpensive
handguns are used for self-defense by the poor.
There is no question that laws against Saturday night specials are leveled at blacks. The first such law came in 1870 when Tennessee
attempted to disarm freedmen by prohibiting the sale of all but "Army and Navy" handguns. Ex-confederate soldiers already had their military
handguns, but ex-slaves could not afford high-quality weapons.[179]
The situation today is not very different. As the federal district court in Washington, D.C., has noted, laws aimed at Saturday night specials
have the effect of selectively disarming minorities, who, because of their poverty, must live in crime-ridden areas.[180] Little wonder that the
Congress on Racial Equality filed an amicus curiae brief in a 1985 suit challenging the Maryland Court of Appeals' virtual ban on low-caliber
handguns. As the Wright and Rossi National Institute of Justice study concluded:
The people most likely to be deterred from acquiring a handgun by exceptionally high prices or by the nonavailability of certain kinds of
handguns are not felons intent on arming themselves for criminal purposes (who can, if all else fails, steal the handgun they want), but rather
poor people who have decided they need a gun to protect themselves against the felons but who find that the cheapest gun in the market
costs more than they can afford to pay.[181]
Indeed, one wonders what a ban on these low-caliber guns would accomplish. Criminals who use them could easily take up higher-powered
guns. Some criminals might switch to knives, but severe knife wounds are just as deadly (and almost as easy to inflict at close range, where
most robberies occur).[182]
If a ban on Saturday night specials failed to reduce crime, is it likely that its proponents would admit defeat and repeal the law? Or would they
conclude that a ban on all handguns was what was really needed? Once criminals started substituting sawed-off shotguns, would the new
argument be that long guns too must be banned?[183] That is the point that gun control in Great Britain is approaching, after beginning with a
seemingly innocuous registration system for handguns.
Conclusion
In 1911 state senator Timothy Sullivan of New York promised that if New York City outlawed handgun carrying, homicides would decline
drastically. The year the Sullivan law took effect, however, homicides increased and the New York Times pronounced criminals "as well
armed as ever."[184] Gun control does not reduce crime; gun ownership does. Gun control insists that citizens rely on the authorities. Gun
owners know better than to put their lives and liberty in the hands of 911 and the police. Gun control and the Bill of Rights cannot coexist.
The advocates of gun control believe that government agents are more trustworthy than ordinary citizens. The authors of the Second
Amendment believed just the opposite.
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Marois, Michael. “Jerry Brown Vetoes Tighter California Controls
on Assault Rifles.” Bloomsberg Magazine online, October
12, 2013. Web. August 3, 2014.
Jerry Brown Vetoes Tighter California Controls on Assault Rifles
California’s gun-control laws won’t be expanded to prohibit the types of rifles used in two of last year’s mass
shootings, Governor Jerry Brown said. Brown, a 75-year-old Democrat and a gun owner himself, vetoed a bill to
ban the sale of semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines, saying it encroached on citizens’ rights. At the
same time, he signed a bill blocking the sale of adapters giving the weapons greater ammunition capacity, and
approved the nation’s first ban on lead bullets. The rifle bill “rifles that are commonly used for hunting, firearms
training and marksmanship practice, as well as some historical and collectible firearms,” Brown said yesterday in a
statement explaining his veto. “I don’t believe this bill’s blanket ban on semiautomatic rifles would reduce criminal
activity or enhance public safety enough to warrant this infringement of gun owners’ rights.” California
lawmakers passed the measures in the wake of mass shootings in a Newtown, Connecticut, school that killed 20
children and six educators, and in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater where 12 died. The massacres prompted
lawmakers in Colorado, New York, Connecticut and Maryland to pass stricter gun laws, even as a push for federal
measures stalled in Congress.
The National Rifle Association, the nation’s biggest gun lobby, said it would challenge the constitutionality of a
California rifle limit, according to a posting Oct. 1 on the website of the Fairfax, Virginia-based NRA Institute for
Legislative Action. The bill’s author, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat, chided
Brown for blocking the measure.
‘Too Far’ “The governor said he believes this measure to ban semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines
goes too far,” Steinberg said in a statement. “Aggressive action is precisely what’s needed to reduce the carnage in
our communities, and to counter the equally aggressive action by the gun industry.” Brown also vetoed a bill to
allow the city of Oakland, where he was mayor for two terms, to establish gun registration and licensing programs
more restrictive than the state’s. Oakland officials sought the law to help combat a growing number of gun-related
crimes in the city of 400,000. The governor signed a bill making California the first state in the U.S. to prohibit the
use of lead ammunition for hunting, to curb the threat of poisoning to people and wildlife. Brown signed the ban
only after it was amended to make it less restrictive to hunters. Critics say he ban will hurt hunting.
Conservation Standing: “I am concerned, however, the impression left from this bill is that hunters and sportsmen
and women in California are not conservationist,” he said in a statement. “Since 1930, hunters have done more
than any other community to conserve species and their habitats and this is a lasting conservation legacy.”
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association based in Newtown, said it was dismayed that Brown
banned lead bullets, though it was pleased with his veto of the semiautomatic rifle bill. “Many types of rifles with
detachable magazines were at risk of being banned,” Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the foundation, said
in a statement. “We appreciate the governor’s action to prevent thousands of lawful gun owners from being
labeled as criminals.” The lead-bullet law “amounts to a virtual ban on hunting because the federal government
considers most types of non-lead ammunition to be ‘armor piercing’” and limits its manufacture and sale, Keene
said. “Many types of standard hunting long rifles are not compatible with alternative metal ammunition or will
require significant modification.” The law authorizes California’s Fish and Wildlife director to suspend the ban if
the federal government prohibits non-lead ammunition because of its armor-piercing aspect.
California passed the nation’s first ban on some semiautomatic rifles in 1989 after a gunman with an AK-47
sprayed an elementary school in Stockton, killing five children and wounding 29.
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Source: H
Whitney, Craig. “NRA has Some Good Ideas for Stopping
Massacres.” New York Times online, October 1, 2013.
Web. August 3, 2014.
NRA Has Some Good Ideas for Stopping Massacres
Gun-control advocates think the only way to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them is to
make it harder for everybody to get them. They should listen to some of the things National Rifle Association
Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, their biggest nemesis, has been saying. These aren’t the usual NRA
cliches about how President Barack Obama’s anti-gun bureaucrats are using mass shootings as an excuse to seize
everybody’s guns. After so many tragedies --Tucson, Arizona; Aurora, Colorado; Newtown, Connecticut; the
Washington Navy Yard -- most NRA members are appalled by gun violence. But what is LaPierre saying about what
it would take to stop or reduce it?
Here’s what he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” a week after a contractor -- who had a security clearance despite
clear signs of mental distress -- shot and killed a dozen people at the Washington Navy Yard on Sept. 16: “We have
a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed. We have no national database of
these lunatics.”
LaPierre said much the same thing after Adam Lanza killed his mother and then used her guns to slay 20 first-grade
children and six adults in Newtown last year. His comments on mental health were brushed off, and he was
ridiculed for saying schools would be safer with armed guards.
‘No Loopholes’: Yet he was making a valid point. Better diagnostic and treatment systems stand a chance of
preventing a disturbed person from descending into violent lunacy. That is the only way Lanza might have been
stopped, because he didn’t buy any guns. Still, better coordination between state health authorities and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System could more effectively
prevent criminals and mentally ill people from buying guns -- at least from federally licensed firearms dealers -- by
ensuring that their names are on the background-check list. In April, the NRA vigorously and successfully opposed
attempts by Senate Democrats to pass legislation to ban sales of semi-automatic rifles like the one Lanza used in
Newtown, as well as to close the “gun-show loophole” that exempts private gun sellers, who account for anywhere
from 10 percent to 40 percent of all sales, from the background-check requirement. When the Senate voted, no
gun-control measures could get the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster, and the NRA crowed victory.
But again, listen to what LaPierre has been saying: “On the gun check, the NRA supported the gun check because
we thought the mental records would be in the system; we thought criminals would be in the system. And we
thought they would be prosecuted.”
There are hopeful signs that some people in Washington are beginning to take the issue of mental health care
seriously. Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, and her co-sponsors, including a handful of
Republicans, are pushing the Excellence in Mental Health Act, which would promote emergency 24-hour
psychiatric services and other improvements. Replacing services that were largely dismantled decades ago will
take years and cost billions. LaPierre should be challenged to put at least some NRA lobbying clout, or money,
where his mouth is on the issue of improvements in mental health care.
He also has made unexpected comments on other areas related to gun control. In 1999, he and the NRA supported
Page 1 of 2
universal background checks. “We think it’s reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks
for every sale at every gun show,” he told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime at the time. “No loopholes
anywhere for anyone.”
Private Sales
Yet the NRA fought tooth and nail last spring against the universal background check bill that failed in the Senate,
saying it would “criminalize” private sales between family members and close friends and would be the first step
toward a federal gun registry and eventual seizure. In fact, the bill specifically banned establishment of a federal
gun registry and included exemptions for sales between close relatives, and it had bipartisan sponsorship. It also
included provisions to penalize states that lag in providing the database with names of criminals, addicts and
people who have been adjudicated as mentally ill and reward states for complying faster.
This will come up again. LaPierre should be asked, once again, to tell the truth, and to live up to his own words.
If legislators who vote in lockstep with the NRA would take the trouble to read the legislation they vote on, and if
they and their colleagues on the other side would pay closer attention to LaPierre’s statements, they might be able
to fight their way through the group that dominates the discussion about guns. They might then be able to find
agreement on common-sense ways to reduce, if not eliminate, routine gun violence and periodic gun massacres.
At the very least, gun-control advocates could point out that LaPierre often speaks out of both sides of his mouth.
He says, for example, that criminals pay no attention to gun-control laws, but he also says people who lie when
filling out the forms for the background checks should be prosecuted but aren’t. He should be asked why the NRA
fought legislation that would increase criminal penalties for “straw purchases” and gun trafficking.
Perhaps, of course, LaPierre occasionally says conciliatory things because he knows gun controllers have no
chance. Even so, if made aware of his inconsistent positions, some legislators who vote in lockstep with the NRA
might eventually see a path to an agreement on common-sense measures, mental health and, yes, gun control.
(Craig R. Whitney, a former assistant managing editor and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, is the
author of “Living With Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment.”)
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Rosenfeld, Steven. “Online Ads are the Latest Way Gun
Buyers Can Avoid Background Checks.” Alternet News
Service. Alternet on-line, October 7, 2013. Web.
August 2, 2014.
Online Ads are the Latest Way Gun Buyers Can Avoid Background Checks
They were people who wanted a gun to fix their problems. They were known to police for assaulting lovers and
spouses, using guns in violent crimes and being addicts. They knew that they would fail the FBI’s background
checks, so they went online and found private gun sellers who took their cash and asked few questions.
Wisconson’s Radcliffe Haughton was under court order to stay away from his wife Zina Daniel. But he went to
Armslist.comin October 2012 and bought a Glock handgun that he used the next day to kill her and two co-workers
before commiting suicide. In Illinois the previous April, Dmitry Smirnov also bought a gun on Armslist that he used
to kill Jitka Vesel, after stalking her to her job and shooting her 11 times in the parking lot. Armslist.com is like a
Craigslist for firearms. Created by “gun owning and gun loving Americans” in 2009, it takes no responsibility for
whatever transpires “in transactions between parties,” it states. Yet it is at the forefront of one of the biggest
loopholes in America’s gun laws: private sales that evade FBI criminal background checks.
Thirty-four states allow local online gun sales without the FBI checks that registered gun dealers in every state
must conduct. An investigative report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns looked at sales at Armslist.com earlier this
year and concluded that “tens of thousands” of people who would have failed the federal checks gt guns anyway
because of the private sales loophole. “Convicted felons, domestic abusers, and other dangerous people who are
legally barred from buying guns can do so online with little more than a phone number or email,” New York City
Mayor Micheal Bloomberg said. “As our investigation shows, thousands of criminals and other prohibited
purchasers are doing just that.”
The Mayors’ study found “the share of criminals purchasing guns on Armslist is nearly four times higher than the
share attempting to purchase guns at licensed dealers, finding that “one in 30 would-be buyers on Armslist have
criminal records that bar them from owning guns.” It stated, “Our findings suggest that tens of thousands of
criminals now use the online private sale loophole to acquire illegal guns.” This conclusion comes from a
remarkable investigation. The mayors wanted to how prohibited purchasers could get a gun online and how often
this occurred. They looked at 13,298 “want-to-buy” listings on Armslist.com between this past February and May,
and found that 1,430 of the classified ads had phone numbers or emails. Then, using reverse phone number
directories, they identified 607 of those people and scanned court records for files that would bar gun ownership,
such as felony and drug convictions, or domestic violence convictions of protective orders. They then called these
607 people to verify identities, eliminating six people who either posted the ad for someone else or had the same
name as a prohibited person.
What the mayors found debunked one of the National Rifle Association’s talking points. The NRA, which once
supported FBI background checks before more recently opposing them, often states that criminals will not try to
legally buy guns. “The report demonstrates that their claim is both false and true,” the mayors countered.
“Criminals undeniably do submit to background checks: in 2010 alone, federal and state checks blocked more than
150,000 gun sales to prohibited buyers. But criminals also undeniably avoid background checks—by exploiting the
private sale loophole.” The loophole in 34 states allows people buying guns from another state resident to avoid
the federal background check. When comparing the percentage of gun buyers who were stopped by background
checks—by gun dealers who ping a database that allows the sale to continue or stops it—the mayors’ found that
3.3 percent of the 600 gun buyers they tracked at Armslist.com would have been stopped. That “share of criminals
purchasing guns” was nearly four times higher than those blocked by the FBI’s checks.
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States with the private sale loophole have more gun-related violence, the mayors found, citing statistics on women
shot to death by intimate partners, law enforcement killed with handguns, assaults and suicide. They point to
Missouri as the state best illustrating this disparity. Before August 2007 when the state repealed its purchase
permit law, it had fewer firearms homicides, and fewer guns used in crimes were bought in the state.
The mayors want Congress and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to close
these loopholes and tighten gun-buying protocols. They point to other comparative risks where the federal
government acted to protect the public. At Armslist.com, they found more than 3 percent would-be gun buyers
would have been stopped by the FBI checks. The margin of error for that statistic is 1.4 percent, the report noted,
meaning that banned buyers could be as low as 1.9 percent or as high as 4.7 percent of those 607 people
screened.
In contrast, in 2010 when the federal government recalled more than 2 million Toyotas for acceleration problems,
that was an issue for 72 out of 100,000 vehicles, a rate of 0.0007 percent. In January 2013, when Fisher-Price
recalled newborn infant sleepers because of mold, that also was a problem in 0.0007 percent of the units sold.
When the Food and Drug Administration recalled the drug propoxphene because of a risk of death in six out of
100,000 cases, that was a problem in 0.00006 percent of incidents. “The 1-in-30 chance of selling a gun to a
criminal on Armslist is an order or magnitude greater than these,” the mayors report said, then giving the following
examples:
• A 25-year-old male in Louisiana posted an ad on March 21, 2013 offering to “meet face to face” and promising “cash in hand.”
A review of his criminal record revealed that a month earlier, he had been charged with aggravated assault with a firearm, a
felony. Two days prior to posting the ad, he had been charged with illegally carrying a weapon, also a felony. A month after
posting the ad, he received a third charge, for domestic abuse battery. Each of these offenses was sufficient to disqualify him
from possessing firearms.”
• A 25-year-old male in Columbus, Ohio posted an ad on March 24, 2013 offering “cash, ammo, or a combo of both for
payment.” Criminal records indicate that he was named as a defendant in 15 felony or misdemeanor cases between 2007 and
2013, including pending charges for aggravated robbery and drug possession and repeated charges of illegal gun possession. He
also pled guilty to possession of crack cocaine in 2010, a felony that prohibited him from buying guns.
• A 27-year-old male in Fort Collins, Colorado posted an ad on March 30, 2013 seeking an M&P22 handgun. In 2005, the wouldbe buyer had attacked his ex-girlfriend and was found guilty of domestic violence harassment; he later violated an order of
protection. Both offenses barred him from purchasing or possessing firearms.
• A 35-year-old male in North Carolina posted an ad for an M1A SOCOM 16 rifle on March 27, 2013, insisting on meeting “face
to face ONLY.” The would-be buyer had been arrested as a fugitive in Iowa in 2003 and extradited to North Carolina; he was also
found guilty of a series of felony charges, including robbery with a dangerous weapon, in 1996. These offenses rendered him a
prohibited purchaser.
• A 27-year-old in Louisville, Kentucky posted an ad on March 28, 2013 in search of an XDM 3.8” handgun, promising “will pay
cash.” In 2006, he had been found guilty in Ohio of misdemeanor assault against the mother of his child, which prohibited him
from possessing firearms. He had also been convicted twice for drug abuse.
Needless to say the founders of Armslist.com don’t want to concern themselves with any of this and consider it
unAmerican to stop anybody from getting a gun. They post this disclaimer, “Always comply with local, state,
federal, and international law. ARMSLIST does not become involved in transactions between parties. Review our
privacy policy and terms of use for more information. Report Illegal Firearms Activity to 1-800-ATF-GUNS FREE.”
In brief remarks about themselves, they say, “We wanted the site to be simple, easy to use, and non-intrusive, but
specifically for buying, selling, and trading guns!” They say, “ARMSLIST was created by a number of gun owning
and gun loving Americans after seeing firsthand how the popular marketplace sites on the Internet shun firearms.
We appreciate all the help and support that everyone has given us and hope for continued success of the site!”
They are quite successful. They have blood on their hands and they are proud of it
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Wolfgang, Ben. “Obama, Feinstein Reignite Fight for Gun Control
After Navy Yard Shooting.” The Washington Times. Washington Times
on-line, September 16, 2013. Web. August 3, 2014.
Obama, Feinstein reignite fight for gun control after Navy Yard shooting
Just hours after the deadly shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard, gun control advocates tried to reignite
the national debate over gun laws that had only just subsided. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat and a
longtime gun control advocate, denounced “the litany of massacres” over the past few years and asked
rhetorically, “When will enough be enough?” Mrs. Feinstein, who was first thrust into the national spotlight as
President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors announcing the shooting deaths of Mayor George Moscone
and Supervisor Harvey Milk, said, “Congress must stop shirking its responsibility and resume a thoughtful debate
on gun violence in this country. We must do more to stop this endless loss of life.”
President Obama was one of the first to link Monday’s incident to the larger issue of gun violence and the
legislative effort to curb it, though he did so without explicitly calling, as he has done repeatedly, for gun control
measures. “So we are confronting yet another mass shooting, and today it happened on a military installation in
our nation’s capital,” Mr. Obama said as he opened an economic speech at the White House. “Obviously, we’re
going to be investigating thoroughly what happened, as we do so many of these shootings, sadly, that have
happened, and do everything that we can to prevent them,” the President said.
The National Rifle Association had no comment on Monday, and pro-gun groups generally take the stance that
days of particularly shocking crimes are not the time to discuss policy. Popular conservative blogger and former
CNN commentator Erick Erickson admonished the rush to politicize the shooting, saying “seriously people, grow
up.” “I would not dare step in the way of America’s national pastime of bitching about the politics of everything on
Twitter, but there has to be a better time for it than as the temperature of bodies on the ground in the Navy Yard
are not even yet cold,” he said. “If you don’t have the judgment and good sense to understand that now is not the
time to say it, you have no capacity to understand why.”
But Mr. Obama’s words were echoed by Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief medical officer at MedStar Washington Hospital
Center, where three of the shooting victims were being treated. At the end of a televised medical briefing on the
survivors’ conditions, Dr. Orlowski contrasted trauma from accidental shootings and what she called “something
evil in our society that we as Americans have to work to try and eradicate.” “But there’s something wrong here
when we have these multiple shootings. … There is something wrong, and the only thing that I can say is we have
to work together to get rid of it. I would like you to put my trauma center out of business,” she said, her voice
weakening from emotion. “We just cannot have, you know, one more shooting with, you know, so many people
killed. We’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got to be able to help each other.”
At least 12 people were killed in Monday’s attack; an investigation by local, federal and military authorities is
ongoing. The FBI on Monday afternoon identified the gunman as Aaron Alexis, who reportedly worked at the Naval
Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth, Texas. The 34-year-old was killed inside the Navy Yard facility, but not
before inflicting the kind of carnage that immediately evoked memories of other recent mass shootings such as
those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo.
Mass shootings happen periodically, but the Newtown massacre, which claimed the lives of 20 elementary school
children, seemed to be a last straw for Mr. Obama, some lawmakers and other high-profile gun control proponents
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such as New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. In the aftermath of the December tragedy, the president
immediately called on lawmakers to take action to reduce gun violence. The effort met stiff resistance from the
National Rifle Association and other groups. Many congressional Republicans and red-state Democrats also
opposed tight gun restrictions.
In the end, Sens. Joe Manchin III, West Virginia Democrat, and Patrick J. Toomey, Pennsylvania Republican,
emerged with a bill that would have greatly expanded background checks for all firearms purchases. In April, the
bill was killed in the Senate by a 54-46 vote, six short of the 60 needed to proceed and stopping, for all practical
purposes, any movement toward federal gun control legislation. Making efforts even more daunting, two
Democratic state senators were ousted from office in a recall election that centered on support for gun
crackdowns in Colorado, including a ban on high-capacity magazines.
Still, the White House continues to prod Congress to tackle the issue. When asked about the rash of mass
shootings, White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that “this is why we should take action to reduce
gun violence.” “The president supports, as do an overwhelming majority of Americans, common-sense measures
to reduce gun violence,” he said. With the body count rising, most lawmakers and other public officials on Monday
avoided directly linking the Navy Yard shootings and the need for more gun control. Indeed, Senate Majority Whip
Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, canceled a hearing on gun laws and the Trayvon Martin shooting that had
been scheduled for Tuesday. The witness list featured Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon.
A spokesman for Mr. Durbin, who also is chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, civil
rights and human rights, announced Monday afternoon that the planned 10 a.m. hearing on “stand your ground”
laws had been delayed and not rescheduled.
Across Twitter, however, the debate gained new life. A member of the Russian parliament tweeted that “nobody’s
even surprised anymore,” a reference to America’s recent history of gun massacres.
Actor Henry Winkler tweeted, “Another shooting in Wash DC. Please. America do nothing to promote gun control
because that’s how we roll until we have all shot each other.”
David Frum, a journalist and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, tweeted a sarcastic series of
“rules” for how gun control advocates should discuss the Navy Yard shootings. “Rule 1: It is ‘ghoulish’ to suggest in
any way that the easy availability of guns might in any way enable gun slaughter,” he said. “Rule 4: Any attempt to
stop mass casualty shootings is ‘political.’ Allowing them to continue is ‘non-political.’”
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Ballsep, Molly. “The Death of Gun Control.” Atlantic Magazine
online. Atlantic news service, September 13, 2013.
The Death of Gun Control
Ever since the Senate voted down gun-control legislation in April, some advocates have remained convinced there
was still hope. As of Tuesday, that hope is officially dead. On Tuesday, two Colorado state senators, both
Democrats, were recalled by voters for their votes in favor of gun control. Gun-rights advocates instigated the
recall drives; the National Rifle Association spent $360,000, sending mailers and airing television ads calling the
lawmakers "too extreme for Colorado." Gun-control proponents, buoyed by donations from New York Mayor Mike
Bloomberg, outspent their opponents five to one. But the NRA turned the money against the lawmakers, painting
them as pawns of fancy-pants out-of-state liberal interests. And the NRA won.
Democrats and gun-control advocates have come up with a number of rosy rationalizations to minimize the loss.
Gun-rights campaigners failed to collect enough signatures to initiate two other recalls, they point out, so the
victory was really mixed. The gun-control laws passed by the Colorado legislature remain in place, and Democrats
retain control of both houses. Tuesday's recall was a low-turnout election with procedural irregularities that made
it harder for people to vote. Both lawmakers represented tough districts, particularly Senator Angela Giron, whose
district was Democratic but culturally conservative; she lost by 12 points, while state Senate President John Morse
lost by fewer than 400 votes.
All those things are true. And they don't matter. Here's what matters for the future of gun control: Advocates
needed to send a signal that politicians could vote for gun control without fear of ending their careers. Instead,
they sent the opposite message. Now risk-averse pols, already all too aware of the culture-war baggage the gun
issue has historically carried, will have no incentive to put their political futures in jeopardy by proposing or
supporting gun-control legislation. Indeed, it doesn't seem far-fetched to think that gun control might go back into
the policy deep-freeze where Democrats had it stowed for most of the last 10 years.
Politicians, to be obvious about it, value survival. They're not inclined to take stands on issues that put them at
odds with their constituents, and they don't like to wade into divisive debates that rile people up but don't win
them votes. The gay-marriage campaigners I wrote about last year understood this extremely well. They spent
years developing the credibility to assure politicians that if they voted in favor of gay marriage, advocates would
have their back in elections. Marc Solomon, now the national campaign director for Freedom to Marry, ran
campaigns for MassEquality a decade ago. The Massachusetts supreme court had just legalized gay marriage, and
lawmakers wanted to amend the state constitution to overturn the decision. MassEquality had to convince 75
percent of the legislature, over the course of two legislative sessions, to oppose putting the amendment on the
ballot. Only about 25 percent were with him at the beginning. But MassEquality fought to reelect every lawmaker
that took its side -- in the face of a major statewide Republican campaign backed by then-Governor Mitt Romney.
"We had two electoral cycles, 2004 and 2006, where we reelected every lawmaker who voted our way," Solomon
told me. "Some of these people were not easy to reelect -- alcoholism, ethics issues, bad votes. Some didn't collect
enough signatures [to get on the ballot] and had to run write-in campaigns. We were determined to reelect every
single one. Some of those people are now in prison, but we got them reelected." And Massachusetts politicians
learned that if you voted for gay marriage, you would have a powerful friend and ally.
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When it comes to gun control, politicians have feared the NRA for decades. They've seen Democrats lose at every
level, from president on down, in part because of the gun issue, and they saw their party make a comeback,
particularly out west, when it started embracing gun rights instead. The supposedly new-and-improved guncontrol lobby was convinced that conventional wisdom was out of date. It set out to convince politicians that the
landscape had changed. It had a less inflammatory message and more modest goals than the would-be gunprohibitionists of the 1980s and '90s. It had a public that seemed galvanized by the shootings in Tucson and Aurora
and Newtown, and polling data that seemed to show voters overwhelmingly supportive of its aims. The NRA's
message and tactics, by contrast, seemed laughably antique and tone deaf. A vote for gun control, advocates
claimed, wasn't just a safe vote; it was the only safe vote. Senators who voted against the federal gun-control bill
were punished with ad campaigns and saw their approval ratings dip. For the first time, the terrible calculus of
politics seemed to be on gun-control advocates' side.
But there was still one thing they needed to prove. They needed to prove that they could protect the lawmakers
whom they coaxed out on a limb. On Tuesday, they failed that test. Future lawmakers facing similar votes aren't
going to care about the particulars; they're going to look at John Morse and Angela Giron and think, That's going to
be me. No thanks.
Among gun-control campaigners, recriminations are flying behind the scenes about the strategic missteps that
allowed Tuesday's recalls to slip away. But many are convinced that the damage will be limited. Matt Bennett, a
veteran gun-policy strategist and researcher now with the center-left think tank Third Way, pointed me to a poll
that showed that even recall supporters still favored gun background checks; it was Colorado's ban on highcapacity magazines they revolted against.
But panicky lawmakers are unlikely to make such a fine distinction. All they'll see is a fight between Bloomberg's
lofty promises and the creaky old tactics of the NRA, and the NRA won.
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O’Mara, Mark. “I’m a Gun Owner and I Want Gun Control.” CNN
Opinion Poll. CNN on-line, May 25, 2014. Web. August 1,
2014.
I'm a Gun Owner and I Want Gun Control
By Mark O'Mara
Editor's note: Mark O'Mara is a CNN legal analyst. He is a criminal defense attorney who frequently writes and
speaks about issues related to race, guns and self-defense in the context of the American criminal justice system. A
version of this commentary appeared earlier this month. The opinions expressed in it are solely those of the
author.
(CNN) -- Another week in America, another mass shooting. This time the mayhem was at the hands of a drive-by
shooter Friday night, firing at people in Santa Barbara, California. Six dead, 13 others injured, gunman suicide,
police say. Officials called the man "severely mentally disturbed." The rampage comes only weeks after police
headed off a Minnesota teen's plans to shoot up his school. According to news reports, John David LaDue allegedly
possessed an arsenal (which included homemade bombs) that he allegedly planned to use to slaughter as many
students as he could at his high school in rural Minnesota. Thanks to a civilian tip and good police work, we
narrowly escaped a mass shooting then.
On Friday, we were not as lucky. A friend of mine predicted that the United States would suffer probably 10 such
shootings in 2014. I didn't want to believe him, but I knew it would be true.
It turns out we will suffer far more than 10. We've seen a shooting where an assailant targets multiple people
somewhere in this country every week this year, according to the website Shootingtracker.com. Only a small
number -- such as the recent FedEx shooting in Georgia, or those at Fort Hood, Texas, or Jewish facilities in Kansas - will gain national attention. We have a problem with gun violence in this country. I think this much is not in
dispute. The real debate is this: What do we do about it? Unfortunately, most answers to this question involve
greater governmental regulation and intrusion into our lives. Americans are fiercely independent, sometimes to a
fault, and we bristle at any effort seen as trampling our inalienable rights. But the freedoms guaranteed in our
Constitution have never been unfettered. Each amendment in the Bill of Rights has spawned a legacy of case law
that interprets, defines, refines and restricts our basic freedoms based on the values and needs of the people at
the time. Here are some examples: The First Amendment -- our freedom of speech, of expression, of assembly -is our most fundamental right, but even it is not unrestricted. No matter how strongly we feel, our words cannot
be used to incite violence. They cannot be used to further terrorism. We cannot incite panic (shouting "fire" in a
crowded theater). We are allowed our freedom of religion, yet we cannot force those religious beliefs on others.
The Fourth Amendment says we are secure in our home, and that the government cannot search and seize our
effects and paper without probable cause. While we're free from improper government intrusion, the
interpretation of probable cause has loosened over time.
We're free from government intrusion as long as we are not doing something illegal or something that would
negatively affect our community. (I can live at peace in my home; I cannot do so with a meth lab.) And of course
we have amendments that ended slavery and granted universal suffrage. The Constitution is not written in stone.
It evolves as our society evolves. The Second Amendment is more complicated, however, because it deals with
issues larger than freedom and oppression; it deals with life and death.
Buried in the Second Amendment is the right to self-defense, the very mechanism that allowed our Founding
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Fathers to win freedom from tyranny. Some argue it is the right that guarantees all other rights. Our forefathers
wanted us to be able to protect ourselves against outside threats, and even from internal tyranny. They may have
even intended us to be able to protect ourselves from each other. It is a stretch to argue they intended guns to be
so available, in such strength, that children, high-school populations and co-workers and law enforcement could be
so easily slaughtered.
A gun in the hands of a law-abiding citizen is the perfect, unassailable instrument for self-defense and for the
protection of one's family. To tell someone who is acting reasonably and rationally that they have to give up that
right is unfathomable to the responsible gun owner. That's why gun rights advocates have such a negative
response to any perceived restrictions on gun ownership: They know, without question, that they will only use
their weapon properly.
But all too often guns are used improperly, without justification, with tragic results. While we have laws preventing
convicted felons from legally owning guns, we live in a reality where even properly maintained guns wind up in the
wrong hands, where the overly free commerce of firearms virtually assures that some of them will be used by
people with criminal intentions.
Gun rights advocates often see a comment like that as an argument for further restriction on their use of weapons,
but that's not the way I intend it. I myself am a responsible gun owner. I believe in the right to justified selfdefense. I also believe that reasonable restrictions to assure that only law-abiding citizens can purchase firearms
better prevents over-restriction of our Second Amendment. Our Constitution is a resilient force, and our Bill of
Rights has survived countless modifications and restrictions without the erosion of fundamental freedoms. Our
Second Amendment right is no different: It can survive modification and restriction without the fear that it will
vanish altogether.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently pledged $50 million to address gun issues. In the face of such
a concerted effort, the failure of gun rights advocates to allow any reasonable flexibility to our right to bear arms
could mean that it will eventually buckle under the weight of thoughtful opposition propelled to action by the next
series of tragic and, unfortunately, inevitable mass shootings.
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Caplan-Bricker, Nora. “A New Study Makes the Case
for Gun Control.” Getty News Service. Getty online,
February 18, 2014. Web. July 4, 2014.
A New Study Makes the Case for Gun Control.
By Nora Caplan-Bricker
During last year’s battle over gun control, the pro-gun side did more than passionately invoke the Second
Amendment: They claimed that gun control doesn’t work. Sometimes even the reformers, surveying the limited
impact of legislation from the 1990s, feared the same. But a new study on universal background checks makes the
strongest case yet that the policy saves lives. “This is probably the strongest evidence we have that background
checks really matter,” said Philip Cook, a gun expert at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. The study, from the
Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, found the murder rate in Missouri jumped 16 percent—an
additional 55 to 63 murders a year—after the repeal in 2007 of a state law that required anyone purchasing a
handgun to obtain a permit showing they had passed a background check. (Though federal law mandates
background checks by licensed dealers, private dealers don’t have to perform them in all but 14 states.) "This study
provides compelling confirmation that weaknesses in firearm laws lead to deaths from gun violence," said Daniel
Webster, the study’s lead author, in a statement.
Since this is only a single study, "it's just suggestive," warned David Hemenway of Harvard's School of Public
Health. It is "another piece of evidence that is consistent with the bulk of the literature, which shows where there
are fewer guns, there are fewer problems... But you want eight more studies that say background checks really
matter." And the study isn’t perfect: Missouri also enacted a “stand your ground” law in 2007, creating some
challenges in disentangling the effects. But Cook said he is confident that background checks played a major role
because the authors tracked an increase in guns that went directly from dealers to criminals—exactly the scenario
background checks are designed to prevent. The study also notes an uptick in guns “purchased in Missouri that
were subsequently recovered by police in border states that retained their [permit-to-purchase] laws.”
The findings at least begin to fill a gap in the research that last year’s debate exposed. Mayors Against Illegal Guns,
Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group, found that the shortage of data stems from a shortage of funding—
especially federal funding. In 1996, the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby pushed Congress to eliminate
the $2.6 million appropriation that underwrote the Center for Disease Control’s research on firearm injuries.
President Barack Obama ended the funding freeze last year, and Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence
Research Program at the University of California, Davis, told NBC that private funding for gun research has also
spiked with the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and other high-profile acts of violence.
So why hasn’t the new finding gotten much attention? “I don’t mean to diminish the value of the study, but I don’t
think it could have made a difference last year, and I don’t think it will now,” said Tom Diaz, a former policy analyst
at the Violence Policy Center. He called the finding “very clear,” but added: “The debate is just unhinged from the
facts.”
As the study notes, 89 percent of Americans, and 84 percent of gun owners, supported universal background
checks in 2013, before this study bolstered the argument for them. But that’s just one more reason for Congress to
pick up the issue again—that, and a new analysis last week which found there have been 44 school shootings since
the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
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“Harvard Study: Gun Control is Counterproductive.”
American Civil Rights Union. ACRU online, April 2014.
Web. July 4, 2014.
Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive
I've just learned that Washington, D.C.'s petition for a rehearing of the Parker case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the D.C. Circuit was denied today. This is good news. Readers will recall in this case that the D.C. Circuit overturned
the decades-long ban on gun ownership in the nation's capitol on Second Amendment grounds. However, as my
colleague Peter Ferrara explained in his National Review Online article following the initial decision in March, it
looks very likely that the United States Supreme Court will take the case on appeal. When it does so - beyond
seriously considering the clear original intent of the Second Amendment to protect an individual's right to armed
self-defense - the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court would be wise to take into account the findings of a recent
study out of Harvard.
The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649694), set out to answer the question in its title: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of
International and Some Domestic Evidence." Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more
sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is "no." And not just no, as in there
is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as
gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.
The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American
and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling: Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have
substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the
lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three
times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per
100,000 population). For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet
possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest
gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder
rates but few guns. As the study's authors write in the report: If the mantra "more guns equal more death and
fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher
gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not
have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership
nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)
Finally, and as if to prove the bumper sticker correct - that "gun don't kill people, people do" - the study also shows
that Russia's murder rate is four times higher than the U.S. and more than 20 times higher than Norway. This, in a
country that practically eradicated private gun ownership over the course of decades of totalitarian rule and police
state methods of suppression. Needless to say, very few Russian murders involve guns. The important thing to
keep in mind is not the rate of deaths by gun - a statistic that anti-gun advocates are quick to recite - but the
overall murder rate, regardless of means. The criminologists explain: [P]er capita murder overall is only half as
frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling,
stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. (p. 663 - emphases in original)
It is important to note here that Profs. Kates and Mauser are not pro-gun zealots. In fact, they go out of their way
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to stress that their study neither proves that gun control causes higher murder rates nor that increased gun
ownership necessarily leads to lower murder rates. (Though, in my view, Prof. John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime
does indeed prove the latter.) But what is clear, and what they do say, is that gun control is ineffectual at
preventing murder, and apparently counterproductive.
Not only is the D.C. gun ban ill-conceived on constitutional grounds, it fails to live up to its purpose. If the
astronomical murder rate in the nation's capitol, in comparison to cities where gun ownership is permitted, didn't
already make that fact clear, this study out of Harvard should.
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Millstein, Seth. “How to Argue for Gun Control: 5 AntiGun Regulation Arguments, Debunked.” Bustle
website, March, 12, 2014. Web. July 5, 2014.
How To Argue For Gun Control: 5 Anti-Gun Regulation Arguments, Debunked
So you’re at a party, and someone says something ignorant. And while you know that they’re in the wrong, and
that you could totally engage them and win if you were a bit more prepared, your words escape you. To make sure
that doesn’t happen, we’ve compiled a series of handy reference guides with the most common arguments — and
your counter-arguments — for all of the hot-button issues of the day. This week’s topic: How to argue for gun
control.
Common Argument #1: Gun control laws violate the Second Amendment.
Your Response: The Second Amendment says “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Are you really arguing that, in the 21st
century, citizen militias are necessary to secure American sovereignty? If so, you’re clearly unfamiliar with how
powerful the U.S. military is.
Yes, the Supreme Court did rule in 2010 that the Second Amendment extends to private citizens who aren’t in
militias — but that same ruling, McDonald v. Chicago, also found that gun regulations are well-within the bounds
of the Second Amendment.
In any event, if you think the Second Amendment prohibits any and all restrictions on gun possession in the U.S. no
matter what the circumstances, then you must believe that convicted murderers have the right to carry machine
guns in prison. Right?
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Image credits: Washington Post
Common Argument #2: You know who else took people’s guns away? Adolph Hitler.
Your Response: No, Hitler actually relaxed gun control laws in Germany. You’re probably referring to the Weapons
Law of 1938, which Hitler signed, but that was a deregulation of guns in Germany. The Weapons Law eliminated
permit requirements for shotguns, rifles, and ammunition, which opened the door for unregulated sales of all
weapons other than handguns. Hitler also made more people eligible for permits, lowered the age limit for gun
ownership from 20 to 18, and extended the length of gun permits’ validity from one year to three. In an extensive
2004 study on the topic, Bernard E. Harcourt concluded that “the Nazi regime relaxed the gun laws that were in
place in Germany at the time the Nazis seized power.”
Common Argument #3: Citizens have the right to defend themselves against a tyrannical government.
Your Response: There’s no easy way to say this, so let’s just say it: If you believe that your personal firearms are
any match for the firepower that the a government has at its disposal, you are deluded. If you believe that any
group of private U.S. citizens would be able to accumulate the weaponry necessary to stand up to the military of a
nation in an armed conflict, you need to step back, take a deep breath, and acknowledge objective reality.
The national militaries have, among other things, invisible tanks, hydrogen bombs, one-handed shotguns,
blindness rifles, remote-controlled grenade launchers, unmanned drones, and a wave gun so powerful that it’s
been nicknamed “The Goodbye Weapon.” You may not like the fact that an armed domestic resistance against a
government would essentially be impossible, but it’s a fact nonetheless. Deregulating gun laws will not change this
fact, unless your idea of deregulating gun laws is to make rocket launchers available and affordable to the entire
U.S. population. There is an argument to be made that the government spends way too much money on weapons,
but that’s a completely separate argument from gun control.
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Common Argument #4: If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have them.
Your Response: I’m not arguing that we should outlaw guns. I’m saying we should erect legal barriers that make it
more difficult for individuals with a higher propensity for violence, such as convicted felons or the mentally ill, to
obtain guns. Look at the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). It was enacted in 1994 and
established, among other things, a centralized database of individuals who are federally prohibited from buying
guns — namely, convicted felons, domestic abusers, and fugitives. It’s one of the most significant gun control laws
in American history, and since it was put into place, 2.1 million outlaws have been blocked from purchasing guns.
So really, gun control does the opposite of your argument.
Common Argument #5: Gun control doesn’t make a country/state/city safer.
Your Response: Actually, most studies suggest that gun laws reduce violence. In the United States, the South
consistently has more deaths by assault than any other region. It also has the most lenient gun control laws. A
Harvard study from last year showed that between 2007 and 2010, states with fewer gun control laws generally
had higher gun-related mortality rates than states with stricter gun control. Another study published in the Journal
of the American Medical Association confirmed that finding; and a meta-analysis of other studies, also from
Harvard, showed that higher gun ownership rates was correlated with higher homicide rates, both within the U.S.
and amongst different high-income countries.
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What’s indisputable is that the amount of gun-related deaths in the U.S., which has the highest rate of private gun
ownership in the world, is appalling. On average, there is a mass shooting every day in America. Around 12,000
people in the U.S. were killed by guns in 2013, or over 30 people per day, and in the year after the Newtown
massacre, over 200 children have been shot to death. The average age of those child victims was six years old. On
the whole, the U.S. has more firearm homicides per capita than anywhere else on the planet.
That sounds pretty unsafe to me.
In Summary:
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment allows for restrictions on gun purchase and ownership.
No gun you can buy will ever be a match for what the U.S. military has at its disposal.
Gun control laws have directly prevented more than 2 million criminals from buying guns.
More gun control laws are correlated with lower rates of violence, and vice versa.
The U.S. has the highest rate of gun ownership and the highest rate of homicide-by-gun in the world.
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