The False Promise of Gun Control

Daniel D. Polsby

from the March 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Gun-control laws may save some lives, but they can never stem the flow of
guns, and they divert attention from the roots of our crime problem.

During the 1960s and 1970s the robbery rate in the United States increased
sixfold, and the murder rate doubled; the rate of handgun ownership nearly
doubled in that period as well. handguns and criminal violence grew together
apace, and national opinion leaders did not fail to remark on that coincidence.

It has become a bipartisan article of faith that more handguns cause more
violence. Such was the unequivocal conclusion of the national Commission on
the Causes and Prevention of Violence in 1969, and such is now the editorial
opinion of virtually every influential newspaper and magazine, from The
Washington Post to The Economist to the Chicago Tribune. Members of the
House and Senate who have not dared to confront the gun lobby concede the
connection privately. Even if the National Rifle Association can produce
blizzards of angry calls and letters to the Capitol virtually overnight, House
members one by one have been going public, often after some new firearms
atrocity at a fast-food restaurant or the like. And last November they passed
the Brady bill.

Alas, however well accepted, the conventional wisdom about guns and violence
is mistaken. Guns don't increase national rates of crime and violence -- but the
continued proliferation of gun-control laws almost certainly does. Current rates
of crime and violence are a bit below the peaks of the late 1970s, but because
of a slight oncoming bulge in the at-risk population of males aged fifteen to
thirty-four, the crime rate will soon worsen. The rising generation of criminals
will have no more difficulty than their elders did in obtaining the tools of their
trade. Growing violence will lead to calls for laws still more severe. Each fresh
round of legislation will be followed by renewed frustration.

Gun-control laws don't work. What is worse, they act perversely. While
legitimate users of firearms encounter intense regulation, scrutiny, and
bureaucratic control, illicit markets easily adapt to whatever difficulties a free
society throws in their way. Also, efforts to curtail the supply of firearms inflict
collateral damage on freedom and privacy interests that have long been
considered central to American public life. Thanks to the seemingly
never-ending war on drugs and long experience attempting to suppress
prostitution and pornography, we know a great deal about how illicit markets
function and how costly to the public attempts to control them can be. It is
essential that we make use of this experience in coming to grips with gun
control.

The thousands of gun-control laws in the United States are of two general
types. The older kind sought to regulate how, where, and by whom firearms
could be carried. More recent laws have sought to make it more costly to buy,
sell, or use firearms (or certain classes of firearms, such as assault rifles,
Saturday-night specials, and so on) by imposing fees, special taxes, or surtaxes
on them. The Brady bill is of both types: it has a background-check provision,
and its five-day waiting period amounts to a "time tax" on acquiring handguns.
All such laws can be called scarcity-inducing, because they seek to raise the
cost of buying firearms, as figured in terms of money, time, nuisance, or
stigmatization.

Despite the mounting number of scarcity-inducing laws, no one is very satisfied
with them. Hobbyists want to get rid of them, and gun-control proponents don't
think they go nearly far enough. Everyone seems to agree that gun-control laws
have some effect on the distribution of firearms. But it has not been the
dramatic and measurable effect their proponents desired.

Opponents of gun control have traditionally wrapped their arguments in the
Second Amendment to the Constitution. Indeed, most modern scholarship
affirms that so far as the drafters of the Bill of Rights were concerned, the right
to bear arms was to be enjoyed by everyone, not just a militia, and that one of
the principal justifications for an armed populace was to secure the tranquility
and good order of the community. But most people are not dedicated
antiquitarians, and would not be impressed by the argument "I admit that my
behavior is very dangerous to public safety, but the Second Amendment says I
have a right to do it anyway." That would be a case for repealing the Second
Amendment, not respecting it.

Fighting the demand curve

Everyone knows that possessing a handgun makes it easier to intimidate,
wound, or kill someone. But the implication of this point for social policy has not
been so well understood. It is easy to count the bodies of those who have been
killed or wounded with guns, but not easy to count the people who have avoided
harm because they had access to weapons. Think about uniformed police
officers, who carry handguns in plain view not in order to kill people but simply
to daunt potential attackers. And it works. Criminals generally do not single out
police officers for opportunistic attack. Though officers can expect to draw
their guns from time to time, few even in big-city departments will actually fire
a shot (except in target practice) in the course of a year. This observation points
to an important truth: people who are armed make comparatively unattractive
victims. A criminal might not know if any one civilian is armed, but if it becomes
known that a larger number of civilians do carry weapons, criminals will become
warier.

Which weapons laws are the right kinds can be decided only after considering
two related questions. First, what is the connection between civilian possession
of firearms and social violence? Second, how can we expect gun-control laws to
alter people's behavior? Most recent scholarship raises serious questions about
the "weapons increase violence" hypothesis. The second question is emphasized
here, because it is routinely overlooked and often mocked when noticed; yet it
is crucial. Rational gun control requires understanding not only the relationship
between weapons and violence but also the relationship between laws and
people's behavior. Some things are very hard to accomplish with laws. The
purpose of a law and its likely effects are not always the same thing. many
statutes are notorious for the way in which their unintended effects have
swamped their intended ones.

In order to predict who will comply with gun-control laws, we should remember
that guns are economic goods that are traded in markets. Consumers' interest in
them varies. For religious, moral, aesthetic, or practical reasons, some people
would refuse to buy firearms at any price. Other people willingly pay very high
prices for them.

Handguns, so often the subject of gun-control laws, are desirable for one
purpose -- to allow a person tactically to dominate a hostile transaction with
another person. The value of a weapon to a given person is a function of two
factors: how much he or she wants to dominate a confrontation if one occurs,
and how likely it is that he or she will actually be in a situation calling for a gun.

Dominating a transaction simply means getting what one wants without being
hurt. Where people differ is in how likely it is that they will be involved in a
situation in which a gun will be valuable. Someone who intends to engage in a
transaction involving a gun -- a criminal, for example -- is obviously in the best
possible position to predict that likelihood. Criminals should therefore be willing
to pay more for a weapon than most other people would. Professors, politicians,
and newspaper editors are, as a group, at very low risk of being involved in
such transactions, and they thus systematically underrate the value of
defensive handguns. (Correlative, perhaps, is their uncritical readiness to accept
studies that debunk the utility of firearms for self-defense.) The class of people
we wish to deprive of guns, then, is the very class with the most inelastic
demand for them -- criminals -- whereas the people most like to comply with
gun-control laws don't value guns in the first place.

Do guns drive up crime rates?

Which premise is true -- that guns increase crime or that the fear of crime
causes people to obtain guns? Most of the country's major newspapers
apparently take this problem to have been solved by an article published by
Arthur Kellermann and several associates in the October 7, 1993, New England
Journal of Medicine. Kellermann is an emergency-room physician who has
published a number of influential papers that he believes discredit the thesis
that private ownership of firearms is a useful means of self-protection. (An
indication of his wide influence is that within two months the study received
almost 100 mentions in publications and broadcast transcripts indexed in the
Nexis database.) For this study Kellermann and his associates identified fifteen
behavioral and fifteen environmental variables that applied to a 388-member
set of homicide victims, found a "matching" control group of 388 non-homicide
victims, and then ascertained how the two groups differed in gun ownership. In
interviews Kellermann made clear his belief that owning a handgun markedly
increases a person's risk of being murdered.

But the study does not prove that point at all. Indeed, as Kellermann explicitly
conceded in the text of the article, the causal arrow may very well point in the
other direction: the threat of being killed may make people more likely to arm
themselves. Many people at risk of being killed, especially people involved in
the drug trade or other illegal ventures, might well rationally buy a gun as a
precaution, and be willing to pay a price driven up by gun-control laws. Crime,
after all, is a dangerous business. Peter Reuter and Mark Kleiman, drug-policy
researchers, calculated in 1987 that the average crack dealer's risk of being
killed was far greater than his risk of being sent to prison. (Their data cannot,
however, support the implication that ownership of a firearm causes or
exacerbates the risk of being killed.)

Defending the validity of his work, Kellermann has emphasized that the link
between lung cancer and smoking was initially established by studies
methodologically no different from his. Gary Kleck, a criminology professor at
Florida State University, has pointed out the flaw in this comparison. No one
ever thought that lung cancer causes smoking, so when the association
between the two was established the direction of the causal arrow was not in
doubt. Kleck wrote that it is as though Kellermann, trying to discover how
diabetics differ from other people, found that they are much more likely to
possess insulin than nondiabetics, and concluded that insulin is a risk factor for
diabetes.

The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston
Globe, and the Chicago Tribune all gave prominent coverage to Kellermann's
study as soon as it appeared, but none saw fit to discuss the study's limitations.
A few, in order to introduce a hint of balance, mentioned that the NRA, or some
member of its staff, disagreed with the study. But readers had no way of
knowing that Kellermann himself had registered a disclaimer in his text. "It is
possible," he conceded, "that reverse causation accounted for some of the
association we observed between gun ownership and homicide." Indeed, the
point is stronger than that: "reverse causation" may account for most of the
association between gun ownership and homicide. Kellermann's data simply do
not allow one to draw any conclusion.

If firearms increased violence and crime, then rates of spousal homicide would
have skyrocketed, because the stock of privately owned handguns has
increased rapidly since the mid-1960s. But according to an authoritative study
of spousal homicide in the American Journal of Public Health, by James Mercy
and Linda Saltzman, rates of spousal homicide in the years 1976 to 1985 fell. If
firearms increased violence and crime, the crime rate should have increased
throughout the 1980s, while the national stock of privately owned handguns
increased by more than a million units in every year of the decade. It did not.
Nor should the rate of violence and crime in Switzerland, New Zealand, and
Israel be as low as they are, since the number of firearms per civilian household
is comparable to that in the United States. Conversely, gun-controlled Mexico
and South Africa should be islands of peace instead of having murder rates more
than twice as high as those here. The determinants of crime and
law-abidingness are, of course, complex matters, which are not fully
understood and certainly not explicable in terms of a country's laws. But
gun-control enthusiasts, who have made capital out of the low murder rate in
England, which is largely disarmed, simply ignore the counterexamples that
don't fit their theory.

If firearms increased violence and crime, Florida's murder rate should not have
been falling since the introduction, seven years ago, of a law that makes it
easier for ordinary citizens to get permits to carry concealed handguns. Yet the
murder rate has remained the same or fallen every year since the law was
enacted, and it is now lower than the national murder rate (which has been
rising). As of last November 183,561 permits had been issued, and only
seventeen of the permits had been revoked because the holder was involved in
a firearms offense. It would be precipitate to claim that the new law has
"caused" the murder rate to subside. Yet here is a situation that doesn't fit the
hypothesis that weapons increase violence.

If firearms increased violence and crime, programs of induced scarcity would
suppress violence and crime. But -- another anomaly -- they don't. Why not? A
theorem, which we could call the futility theorem, explains why gun-control
laws must either be ineffectual or in the long term actually provoke more
violence and crime. Any theorem depends on both observable fact and
assumption. An assumption that can be made with confidence is that the higher
the number of victims a criminals assumes to be armed, the higher will be the
risk -- the price -- of assaulting them. By definition, gun-control laws should
make weapons scarcer and thus more expensive. By our prior reasoning about
demand among various types of consumers, after the laws are enacted
criminals should be better armed, compared with non criminals, than they were
before. Of course, plenty of noncriminals will remain armed. But even if many
noncriminals will pay as high a price as criminals will to obtain firearms, a
larger number will not.

Criminals will thus still take the same gamble they already take in assaulting a
victim who might or might not be armed. But they may appreciate that the laws
have given them a freer field, and that crime still pays -- pays even better, in
fact, than before. What will happen to the rate of violence? Only a relatively
few gun-mediated transactions -- currently, five percent of armed robberies
committed with firearms -- result in someone's actually being shot (the
statistics are not broken down into encounters between armed assailants and
unarmed victims, and encounters in which both parties are armed). It seems
reasonable to fear that if the number of such transactions were to increase
because criminals thought they faced fewer deterrents, there would be a
corresponding increase in shootings. Conversely, if gun-mediated transactions
declined -- if criminals initiated fewer of them because they feared
encountering an armed victim or an armed good Samaritan -- the number of
shootings would go down. The magnitude of these effects is, admittedly,
uncertain. Yet it is hard to doubt the general tendency of a change in the law
that imposes legal burdens on buying guns. The futility theorem suggests that
gun-control laws, if effective at all, would unfavorably affect the rate of
violent crime.

The futility theorem provides a lens through which to see much of the debate. It
is undeniable that gun-control laws work -- to an extent. Consider, for example,
California's background-check law, which in the past two years has prevented
about 12,000 people with a criminal record or a history of mental illness or drug
abuse from buying handguns. In the same period Illinois's background-check
prevented the delivery of firearms to more than 2,000 people. Surely some of
these people simply turned to an illegal market, but just as surely not all of
them did. The laws of large numbers allow to say that among the foiled
thousands, some potential killers were prevented from getting a gun. We do not
know whether the number is large or small, but it is implausible to think it is
zero. And, as gun-control proponents are inclined to say, "If only one life is
saved..."

The hypothesis that firearms increase violence does predict that if we can slow
down the diffusion of guns, there will be less violence; one life, or more, will be
saved. But the futility theorem asks that we look not simply at the gross
number of bad actors prevented from getting guns but at the effect the law has
on all the people who want to buy a gun. Suppose we succeed in piling tax
burdens on the acquisition of firearms. We can safely assume that a number of
people who might use guns to kill will be sufficiently discouraged not to buy
them. But we cannot assume this about people who feel that they must have
guns in order to survive financially and physically. A few lives might indeed be
saved. But the overall rate of violent crime might not go down at all. And if guns
are owned predominantly by people who have good reason to think they will
use them, the rate might even go up.

Are there empirical studies that can serve to help us choose between the
futility theorem and the hypothesis that guns increase violence? Unfortunately,
no: the best studies of the effects of gun-control laws are quite inconclusive.
Our statistical tools are too weak to allow us to identify an effect clearly
enough to persuade an open-minded skeptic. But it is precisely when we are
dealing with undetectable statistical effects that we have to be certain we are
using the best models of human behavior.

Sealing the border

Handguns are not legally for sale in the city of Chicago, and have not been since
April of 1982. Rifles, shotguns, and ammunition are available, but only to people
who possess an Illinois Firearm Owner's Identification card. It takes up to a
month to get this card, which involves a background check. Even if one has a
FOID card there is a waiting period for the delivery of a gun. In few places in
America is it as difficult to get a firearm legally as in the city of Chicago.

Yet there are hundreds of thousands of unregistered guns in the city, and new
ones arriving all the time. It is not difficult to get handguns -- even legally.
Chicago residents with FOID cards merely go to gun shops in the suburbs. Trying
to establish a city as an island of prohibition in a sea of legal firearms seems an
impossible project.

Is a state large enough to be an effective island, then? Suppose Illinois adopted
Chicago's handgun ban. Same problem again. Some people could just get guns
elsewhere: Indiana actually borders the city, and Wisconsin is only forty miles
away. Though federal law prohibits the sale of handguns in one state to
residents of another, thousands of Chicagoans with summer homes in other
states could buy handguns there. And, of course, a black market would serve
the needs of other customers.

When would the island be large enough to sustain a weapons-free environment?
In the United States people and cargoes move across state lines without
supervision or hindrance. Local shortages of goods are always transient, no
matter whether the shortage is induced by natural disasters, prohibitory laws,
or something else.

Even if many states outlaws sales of handguns, then, they would continue to be
available at a somewhat higher price, reflecting the increased legal risk of
selling them. Mindful of the way markets work to undermine their efforts,
gun-control proponents press for federal regulation of firearms, because they
believe that only Congress wields the authority to frustrate the interstate
movement of firearms.

Why, though, would one think that federal policing of illegal firearms would be
better than local policing? The logic of that argument is far from clear. Cities,
after all, are comparatively small places. Washington, DC, for example, has an
area of less than 45,000 acres. Yet local officers have had little luck repressing
the illegal firearms trade there. Why should federal officers do any better
watching the United States' 12,000 miles of coastline and millions of square
miles of interior? Criminals should be able to frustrate federal police forces just
as well as they can local ones. Ten years of increasingly stringent federal
efforts to abate cocaine trafficking, for example, have not succeeded in raising
the street price of the drug.

Consider the most drastic proposal currently in play, that of Senator John
Chafee, of Rhode Island, who would ban the manufacture, sale, and home
possession of handguns within the United States. This proposal goes far beyond
even the Chicago law, because existing weapons would have to be surrendered.
Handguns would become contraband, and selling counterfeit, stolen, and
contraband goods is big business in the United States. The objective of law
enforcement is to raise the costs of engaging in crime and so force criminals to
take expensive precautions against becoming entangled with the legal system.
Crimes of a given type will, in theory, decline as soon as the direct and indirect
costs of engaging in them rise to the point at which criminals seek more
profitable opportunities in other (not necessarily legal) lines of work.

In firearms regulation, translating theory into practice will continue to be
difficult, at least if the objective is to lessen the practical availability of
firearms to people who might abuse them. On the demand side, for defending
oneself against predation there is no substitute for a firearm. Criminals, at
least, can switch to varieties of law-breaking in which a gun confers little to no
advantage (burglary, smash-and-grab), but people who are afraid of
confrontations with criminals, whether rationally or (as an accountant might
reckon it) irrationally, will be very highly motivated to acquire firearms. Long
after the marijuana and cocaine wars of this century have been forgotten,
people's demand for personal security and for the tools they believe provide it
will remain strong.

On the supply side, firearms transactions can be consummated behind closed
doors. Firearms buyers, unlike those who use drugs, pornography, or
prostitution, need not recurrently expose themselves to legal jeopardy. One trip
to the marketplace is enough to arm oneself for life. This could justify a
consumer's taking even greater precautions to avoid apprehension, which would
translate into even steeper enforcement costs for police.

Don Kates, Jr, a San Francisco lawyer and a much-published student of this
problem, has pointed out that during the wars in Southeast and Southwest Asia
local artisans were able to produce, from scratch, serviceable pot-metal
counterfeits of AK-47 infantry rifles and similar weapons in makeshift backyard
foundries. Although inferior weapons cannot discharge thousands of rounds
without misfiring, they are more than deadly enough for light to medium
service, especially by criminals and people defending themselves and their
property, who ordinarily use firearms by threatening with them, not by firing
them. And the skills necessary to make them are certainly as widespread in
America as in the villages of Pakistan or Vietnam. Effective policing of such a
cottage industry is unthinkable. Indeed, as Charles Chandler has pointed out,
crude but effective firearms have been manufactured in prisons -- highly
supervised environments, compared with the outside world.

Seeing that local firearms restrictions are easily defeated, gun-control
proponents have latched onto national controls as a way of finally making gun
control something more than a gesture. But the same forces that have defeated
local regulation will defeat further national regulation. Imposing higher costs on
weapons ownership will, of course, slow down the weapons trade to some
extent. But planning to slow it down in such a way as to drive down crime and
violence, or to prevent motivated purchasers from finding ample supplies of
guns and ammunition, is an escape from reality. And like many other such, it
entails a morning after.

Administering prohibition

Assume for the sake of argument that to a reasonable degree of criminological
certainty, guns are every bit the public-health hazard they are said to be. It
follows, and many journalists and a few public officials have already said, that
we ought to treat guns the same we do smallpox viruses or other critical
vectors of morbidity and mortality -- namely, isolate them from potential hosts
and destroy them as speedily as possible. Clearly, firearms have at least one
characteristic that distinguishes them from smallpox viruses: nobody wants to
keep smallpox viruses in the nightstand drawer. Amazingly enough, gun-control
literature seems never to have explored the problem of getting weapons away
from people who very much want to keep them in the nightstand drawer.

Our existing gun-control laws are not uniformly permissive, and, indeed, in
certain places are tough even by international standards. Advocacy groups
seldom stress the considerable differences among American jurisdictions, and
media reports regularly assert that firearms are readily available to anybody
anywhere in the country. This is not the case. For example, handgun restrictions
in Chicago and the District of Columbia are much less flexible than the ones in
the United Kingdom. Several hundred thousand British subjects may legally buy
and possess sidearms, and anyone who joins a target-shooting club is eligible to
do so. But in Chicago and the District of Columbia, excepting peace officers and
the like, only grandfathered registrants may legally possess handguns. Of
course, tens or hundreds of thousands of people in both those cities -- nobody
can be sure how many -- do in fact possess them illegally.

Although though is, undoubtedly, illegal handgun ownership in the United
Kingdom, especially in Northern Ireland (where considerations of personal
security and public safety are decidedly unlike those elsewhere in the British
Isles), it is probable that Americans and Britons differ in their disposition to
obey gun-control laws: there is reputed to be a marked national disparity in
compliance behavior. This difference, if it exists, may have something to do with
the comparatively marginal value of firearms to British consumers. Even before
it had strict firearms regulation, Britain had very low rates of crimes involving
guns; British criminals, unlike their American counterparts, prefer burglary (a
crime of stealth) to robbery (a crime of intimidation).

Unless people are prepared to surrender their guns voluntarily, how can the US
government confiscate an appreciable fraction of our country's nearly 200
million privately owned firearms? We know that it is possible to set up
weapons-free zones in certain locations -- commercial airports and many
courthouses and, lately, some troubled big-city high schools and housing
projects. The sacrifices of privacy and convenience, and the costs of paying
guards, have been though worth the (perceived) gain in security. No doubt it
would be possible, though it would probably not be easy, to make weapons-free
zones of shopping centers, department stores, movie theaters, ball parks. But it
is not obvious how one would cordon off the whole of an open society.

Voluntary programs have been ineffectual. From time to time community-action
groups or police departments have sponsored "turn in your gun" days, which are
nearly always disappointing. Sometimes the government offers to buy guns at
some price. This approach has been endorsed by Senator Chafee and the Los
Angeles Times. Jonathan Alter, of Newsweek, has suggested a variation on this
theme: youngsters could exchange their guns for a handshake with Michael
Jordan or some other sports hero. If the price offered exceeds that at which a
gun can be bought on the street, one can expect to see plans of this kind yield
some sort of harvest -- as indeed they have. But it is implausible that these
schemes will actually result in a less-dangerous population. Government
programs to buy up surplus cheese cause more cheese to be produced without
affecting the availability of cheese to people who want to buy it. So it is with
guns.

One could extend the concept of intermittent roadblocks of the sort approved
by the Supreme Court for discouraging drunk driving. Metal detectors could be
positioned on every street corner, or ambulatory metal-detector squads could
check people randomly, or hidden magnetometers could be installed around
towns, to detect concealed weapons. As for firearms kept in homes (about half
of American households), warrantless searches might be rationalized on the
well-established theory that probable cause is not required when authorities
are trying to correct dangers to public safety rather than searching for
evidence of a crime.

In a recent "town hall" meeting in California, President Bill Clinton used the
word "sweeps," which he did not define, to describe how he would confiscate
firearms if it were up to him. During the past few years the Chicago Housing
Authority chairman, Vincent Lane, has ordered "sweeps" of several gang-ridden
public-housing projects, meaning warrantless searches of people's homes by
uniformed police officers looking for contraband. Lane's ostensible premise was
that possession of firearms by tenants constituted a lease violation that, as a
conscientious landlord, he was obliged to do something about. The same logic
could justify any administrative search. City health inspectors in Chicago were
recently authorized to conduct warrantless searches for lead hazards in
residential paint. Why not lead hazards in residential closets and nightstands?
Someone has probably already thought of it.

Ignoring the ultimate sources of crime and violence

The American experience with prohibition has been that black marketeers --
often professional criminals -- move in to profit when legal markets are closed
down or disturbed. In order to combat them, new laws and law-enforcement
techniques are developed, which are circumvented almost as soon as they are
put in place. New and yet more stringent laws are enacted, and greater
sacrifices of civil liberties and privacy demanded and submitted to. But in this
case the problem, crime and violence, will not go away, because guns and
ammunition (which, of course, won't go away either) do not cause it. One cannot
expect people to quit seeking new weapons as long as the tactical advantages
of weapons are seen to outweigh the costs imposed by the prohibition. Nor can
one expect large numbers of people to surrender firearms they already own.
The only way to make people give up their guns is to create a world in which
guns are perceived as having little value. This world will come into being when
criminals choose not to use guns because the penalties for being caught with
them are too great, and when ordinary citizens don't think they need firearms
because they aren't afraid of criminals anymore.

Neither of these eventualities seems very likely without substantial departures
in law-enforcement policy. Politicians' nostrums -- increasing the punishment
for crime, slapping a few more death-penalty provisions into the code -- are
taken seriously by few students of the crime problem. The existing penalties for
predatory crimes are quite severe enough. The problem is that they are rarely
meted out in the real world. The penalties formally published by the code are in
practice steeply discounted, and criminals recognize that the judicial and penal
systems cannot function without bargaining in the vast majority of cases.

This problem is not obviously one that legislation could solve. Constitutional
ideas about due process of law make the imposition of punishments
extraordinarily expensive and difficult. Like the tax laws, the criminal laws are
basically voluntary affairs. Our system isn't geared to a world of wholesale
disobedience. Recalibrating the system simply by increasing its overall
harshness would probably offend and then shock the public long before any of
its benefits were felt.

To illustrate, consider the prospect of getting serious about carrying out the
death penalty. In recent years executions have been running at one or two
dozen a year. As the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart observed, those
selected to die constitute a "capriciously selected random handful" taken from
a much larger number of men and women who, just as deserving of death,
receive prison sentences. It is not easy to be exact about that much larger
number. But as an educated guess, taking into account only the most serious
murders -- the ones that were either premeditated or committed in the course
of a dangerous felony -- there are perhaps 5,000 prisoners a year who could
plausibly be executed in the United States: say, 100,000 executions in the next
twenty years. It is hard to think that the death penalty, if imposed on this
scale, would not noticeably change the behavior of potential criminals. But what
else in national life or citizens' character would have to change in order to make
that many executions acceptable? Since 1930 executions in the United States
have never exceeded 200 a year. At any such modest rate of imposition, rational
criminals should consider the prospect of receiving the death penalty
effectively nil. On the best current evidence, indeed, they do. Documentation of
the deterrent effect of the death penalty, as compared with that of long prison
sentences, has been notoriously hard to produce.

The problem is not simply that criminals pay little attention to the punishments
in the books. Nor is it even that they also know that for the majority of crimes,
their chances of being arrested are small. The most important reason for
criminals behavior is this: the income that offenders can earn in the world of
crime, as compared with the world of work, all too often makes crime appear to
be the better choice.

Thus the crime bill that Bill Clinton introduced last year, which provides for more
prisons and police officers, should be of only very limited help. More prisons
means that fewer violent offenders will have to be released early in order to
make space for new arrivals; perhaps fewer plea bargains will have to be struck
-- all to the good. Yet a moment's reflection should make clear that one more
criminal locked up does not necessarily mean one less criminal on the street.
The situation is very like one that conservationists and hunters have always
understood. Populations of game animals readily recover from hunting seasons
but not from loss of habitat. Means streets, when there are few legitimate
entry-level opportunities for young men, are a criminal habitat, so to speak, in
the social ecology of modern American cities. Cull however much one will, the
habitat will be preoccupied promptly after its previous occupant is sent away.
So social science has found.

Similarly, whereas increasing the number of police officers cannot hurt, and
may well increase people's subjective feelings of security, there is little
evidence to suggest that doing so will diminish the rate of crime. Police forces
are basically reactive institutions. At any realistically sustainable level of
staffing they must remain so. Suppose 100,000 officers were added to police
fosters nationwide, as proposed in the current crime bill. This would amount to
an overall personnel increase of about 18 percent, which would be parceled out
according to the iron laws of democratic politics -- distributed through states
and congressional districts -- rather than being sent to the areas that most
need relief. Such an increase, though unprecedented in magnitude, is far short
of what would be needed to pacify some of our country's worst urban precincts.

There is a challenge here that is quiet beyond being met with tough talk. Most
public officials can see the mismatch between their tax base and the social
entropies they are being asked to repair. There simply isn't enough money;
existing public resources, as they are now employed, cannot possibly solve the
crime problem. But mayors and senators and police chiefs must not say so out
loud: too-disquieting implications would follow. For if the authorities are
incapable of restoring public safety and personal security under the existing
ground rules, then obviously the ground rules must change, to give private
initiative greater scope. Self-help is the last refuge of non scoundrels.

Communities must, in short, organize more effectively to protect themselves
against predators. No doubt this means encouraging properly qualified private
citizens to possess and carry firearms legally. It is not morally tenable -- nor,
for that matter, is it even practical -- to insist that police officers, few of
whom are at a risk remotely as great as are the residents of many city
neighborhoods, retain a monopoly on legal firearms. It is needless to fear giving
honest men and women the training and equipment to make it possible for them
to take back their own streets.

Over the long run, however, there is no substitute for addressing the root
causes of crime -- bad education and lack of job opportunities and the
disintegration of families. Root causes are much out of fashion nowadays as
explanations of criminal behavior, but fashionable or not, they are fundamental.
The root cause of crime is that for certain people, predation is a rational
occupational choice. Conventional crime-control measures, which by stiffening
punishments or raising the probability of arrest aim to make crime pay less,
cannot consistently affect the behavior of people who believe that their
alternatives to crime will pay virtually nothing. Young men who did not learn
basic literacy and numeracy skills before dropping out of their wretched public
schools may not have been worth hiring at the minimum wage set by George
Bush, let alone at the higher, indexed minimum wage that has recently been
under discussion by the Clinton Administration. Most independent studies of the
effects of raising minimum wages show a similar pattern of excluding the most
vulnerable. This displacement, in turn, makes young men free, in the nihilistic,
nothing-to-lose sense, to dedicate their lives to crime. Their legitimate
opportunities, as always precarious in a society where race and class still
matter, often diminish to the point of being for all intents and purposes absent.

Unfortunately, many progressive policies work out in the same way as increases
in the minimum wage -- as taxes on employment. One example is the
Administration's pending proposal to make employer-paid health insurance
mandatory and universal. Whatever the undoubted benefits of the plan, a
payroll tax is needed to make it work. Another example: in recent years the use
of the "wrongful discharge" tort and other legal innovations has swept through
the courts of more than half the states, bringing to an end the era of
"employment at will," when employees (other than civil servants) without
formal contracts -- more than three quarters of the workforce -- could be fired
for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all. Most commentators celebrated
the loss of the at-will rule. How could one object to a new legal tenet that
prohibited only arbitrary and oppressive behavior by employers?

But the costs of the rule are not negligible, only hidden. At-will employment
meant that companies could get out of the relationship as easily as employees
could. In a world where dismissals are expensive rather than cheap, and involve
lawyers and the threat of lawsuits, rational employers must become more
fastidious about whom they hire. By raising the costs of ending the relationship,
one automatically raises the threshold of entry. The burdens of the rule fall
unequally. Worst hit are entry-level applicants who have little or no
employment history to show that they would be worth their pay.

Many other tax or regulatory schemes, in the words of Professor Walter
Williams, of George Mason University, amount to sawing off the bottom rungs of
the ladder of economic opportunity. By suppressing job creation and further
diminishing legal employment opportunities for young men on the margin of the
work force, such schemes amount to an indirect but unequivocal subsidy to
crime.

The solution to the problem of crime lies in improving the chances of young men.
Easier said than done, to be sure. No one has yet proposed a convincing program
for checking all the dislocating forces that government assistance can set in
motion. One relatively straightforward change would be reform of the
educational system. Nothing guarantees prudent behavior like a sense of the
future, and with average skills in reading, writing, and math, young people can
realistically look forward to constructive employment and the straight life that
steady work makes possible.

But firearms are nowhere near the root of the problem of violence. As long as
people come in unlike sizes, shapes, ages, and temperaments, as long as they
diverge in their taste for risk and their willingness and capacity to prey on
other people or to defend themselves from predation, and above all as long as
some people have little or nothing to lose by spending their lives in crime,
dispositions to violence will persist.

This is what makes the case for the right to bear arms, not the Second
Amendment. It is foolish to let anything ride on hopes for effective gun control.
As long as crime pays as well as it does, we will have plenty of it, and honest
folk must choose between being victims and defending themselves.

Printed in Investors Business Daily on 01/8/97.
By MORGAN 0. REYNOLDS & H. STERLING BURNEFF
Nationally, gun-rights advocates have been on the defensive since the early
'90s. But in the states, where the fight against crime is won or lost,
they're winning the debate. That's because they have the facts on their
side.
Thirty-one states now let citizens carry concealed weapons-up from just
nine states in '86. Have these "right-to-carry" laws made the public safer,
or have they caused a sharp drop in public safety, as opponents warned?
The standard argument against "concealed carry" laws is that there is no
good reason for the average Joe to carry a gun. But federal courts have
ruled that police aren t obliged to protect individuals from crime. That
means citizens are ultimately responsible for their own defense.
But do concealed weapons deter crime? Criminals commit 10 million violent
crimes a year. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck found that
victims use handguns about 1.9 million times in self-defense.
Criminals weigh the costs of the crime against the benefits. You don't have
to be a criminal mastermind to know that the possibility of a concealed
weapon tilts the odds in the victim's favor. Research shows that robbery
and rape victims who resist with a gun are only half as likely to be
injured as those who don't.
A recent study by John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago
published in the Journal of Legal Studies bears this out. They found that
concealed handgun laws reduced murder by 8.5% and severe assault by 7% from
1977 to '92. Had "right-to-carry" laws been in effect throughout the
country, there would have been 1,600 fewer murders and 60,000 fewer
assaults every year.
Vermont has long had the least restrictive firearms-carry laws. Citizens
there can carry guns either openly or concealed without any permit. Perhaps
in part because of its liberal gun policies, Vermont has among the lowest
violent crime numbers in the country.
In 1980, when murders and robberies in the U.S. had soared to 10 and 251
per 100,000 people, respectively, Vermont's murder rate was 22% of the
national average and its robbery rate was 15%.
In 1996, Vermont's crime rates were among the lowest in the country:
25% of the national murder rate, 8% of the national robbery rate.
Another objection to concealed-carry laws is that they'll boost impulse
killings-fostering a "wild West" mentality with more shootings and deaths
as people vent their anger with pistols instead of fists. Yet FBI data show
that killings stemming from arguments are falling as a share of all
homicides.
In fact, concealed-weapon permit holders are involved in fewer incidents
than off-duty police officers.
Consider also:
Dade County, Fla., kept detailed records for six years. Of 21,000 carry
permit holders, there was no reported incident of a permit holder injuring
an innocent person.
Virginia issued more than 50,000 permits since it passed a right-to-carry
law in '95. In that time, not one permit holder has been convicted of a
crime, and violent crime has dropped.
Opponents are left to argue that concealed-carry laws will put guns in
untrained hands and accidents will go up.
But there has been no rise in accidental shootings in counties with
right-to-carry laws. Nationwide, there are about 1,400 accidental firearms
deaths annually-a figure far lower than the number of deaths blamed on
medical errors or car accidents.
And data show that civilians are even more careful with firearms than
police officers are. There are only about 30 mistaken civilian shootings in
the U.S. each year. The police commit more than three times as many
mistaken killings as civilians.
In fact, the death rate from firearms has dropped in the last 20 years even
as gun ownership has more than doubled and 22 states have passed
right-to-carry laws.
The fatal firearm accident rate has dropped more than 19% in the last
decade, and the number of gun-related accidents among children fell to an
all-time low of 185 in '94 -- down 64% since '75.
Keeping honest, law-abiding people unarmed and at the mercy of armed and
violent criminals was never a good idea. In the gun policy debate,
gun-rights advocates can argue honestly that a general concealed-carry law
is sound public policy.

"The totalitarian society seeks to destroy
whatever individuality exists in man by transforming him into an
insignificant atom of the mass. Totalitarianism is therefore hostile to
individuals pursuing their own private and personal goals. It reduces man to
a member of one vast whole - the "Nordic master race" under Nazism, the
"glorious proletariat under communism. Whereas democratic civilization seeks
progress through individuality, totalitarianism seeks to accomplish its ends
through socialist conformity."

"There is nothing kind or gentle about a big socialist government because socialism also requires jack-booted, goose-stepping storm troopers to enforce it's policies onto those
who would make any type of free choice not to participate in the socialist system"

- ILAM 1974 -