P
Patriot Games
Guest
Conclusion
Although firearms are used in about 12 percent of violent crimes, it is
unlikely that any kind of gun control legislation could remove more than a
handful of those firearms from felons' hands - and there is no evidence that
the disarmed criminals using them would not then turn to other weapons.
Most criminals do not obtain firearms through conventional sources. Thus,
as opponents of gun control correctly contend, gun control measures in the
United States, if anything, contribute to increased criminal violence
because
they deny guns to honest citizens but not to criminals. They might
accurately
be called victim disarmament laws.
Armed citizens pose a risk of punishment to criminals - perhaps more so
than does the criminal justice system. Gun ownership may exert as much
deterrent effect on violent crime and burglary as the criminal justice
system
does. The battle over gun control is not about controlling inanimate
objects;
it is about controlling people. To extend gun controls would make the nation
better for criminals and worse for the rest of us.
Notes:
1.Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1963 [1764]), pp. 87-88.
2.U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization,"
BJS Technical Report, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office,
March 1987.
3.Gary Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Hawthorne, NY:
Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), p. 203.
4.Not all 18 came to this conclusion. But some earlier studies that did not
were shown to be defective by later studies. See Kleck, Point Blank, pp.
185-203.
5.Philip J. Cook, "The Influence of Gun Availability on Violent Crime
Patterns," in Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, eds., Crime and Justice: An
Annual Review, Vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp.
49-90; and David McDowall, "Gun Availability and Robbery Rates: A Panel
Study of Large U.S. Cities, 1974-1978, - Law and Policy, 1986, Vol. 8, pp.
135-48.
6.Gary Kleck, "Lifesaving Benefits to Use of Weapons for Self-Defense,"
Houston Chronicle, May 31, 1992, p. 1E.
7.David B. Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy (Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus, 1992); and Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 188-91.
8.Martin Killias, "Gun Ownership and Violent Crime: The Swiss Experience
in International Perspective," Security Journal, 1990, Vol. 1, pp. 169-74;
and Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy, ch. 8.
9.The same is true of weapons of war and international aggression. While
weapons serve aggressors, they also serve to deter aggressors. Most
students of war doubt the value of mutual arms reductions as a device to
reduce the chance of war. See James L. Payne, Why Nations Arm (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 166.
10.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 44; U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Handgun
Crime Victims, July 1990.
11.H. C. Brearly, Homicide in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1932), p. 68; and Kleck, Point Blank, p. 20.
12.Since there are 650,000 crimes involving guns each year and 201 million
firearms, the maximum number of guns that could be used to commit a crime
each year would be 650,000/201,000,000 or 0.3 percent.
13.Long guns are twice as numerous as handguns, yet account for only a
sixth of gun crime.
14.See Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 44-45; and Gary Kleck, "Evidence that
'Saturday Night Specials' Not Very Important for Crime," Sociology and
Social Research, 1986, Vol. 70, pp. 303-07.
15.The Gun Owners, December 1991, p. 3.
16.The New Gun Week, January 17, 1992, p.3.
17.Reported in the New American, June 15, 1992, pp. 14-15. In another
incident during the Los Angeles riots, merchant Byung Kim and his sons
abandoned their south Los Angeles appliance warehouse after gunfire hit
two Korean-American friends helping to protect the property. The
undefended property was burned to the ground. Their well-defended
Koreatown store " where the Kims and others stood on the roof with rifles "
wasn't touched. (Wall Street Journal, June 16, 1992, p. A5.)
18.New American, June 15, 1992, p. 15.
19.Morgan O. Reynolds, Crime By Choice: An Economic Analysis (Dallas:
Fisher Institute, 1985), pp. 165-68.
20.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 397-99.
21.Ibid., p. 408-11.
22.Ibid.
23.U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, International Crime Rates, May 1988;
and Ministry of Supply and Services, Canada Yearbook, 1980-81 (Ottawa,
Canada: 1981), p. 55.
24.Kopel, The Samurai, The Mountie and the Cowboy, ch. 7.
25.U.S Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Statistics
1991, p. 432.
26.David T. Hardy, "Gun Control: Arm Yourself with Evidence," Reason,
November 1982, p. 41.
27."Trust the People: The Case against Gun Control," Cato Policy Analysis
No. 109, July 11, 1988, p. 29.
28.Kleck, Point Blank, ch. 4 and pp. 170-73.
29.Kleck, Point Blank, and Gary Kleck, "Crime Control Through the Private
Use of Armed Force," Social Problems, 1988, Vol. 35, pp. 1-21.
30.Gun Week, June 15, 1990; National Association of Chiefs of Police,
American Law Enforcement Officers Poll, 1989.
31.Handloader Magazine, no date available.
32.Carol Ruth Silver and Don B. Kates, Jr., "Self-Defense, Handgun
Ownership, and the Independence of Women in a Violent, Sexist Society,"
in Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, Don B. Kates, Jr.,
ed. (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: North River Press, 1979), p. 152.
33.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 116.
34.Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 111-17.
35.U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, International Crime Rates, Special
BJS Report, May 1988, pp. 1, 3. Australia, Canada, Denmark, Britain,
Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden all have much lower
overall crime rates but higher reported burglary rates than the United
States.
Also see Kleck, Point Blank, p. 140.
36.George Rengert and John Wasilchick, Suburban Burglary: A Time and
Place for Everything (Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas, 1985).
37.Ibid., p. 30.
38.James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous:
A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter,
1986). The true percentages are likely to be higher because they were
obtained from interviews with self-conscious "tough guys."
39.Kleck, Point Blank, Chapter 4.
40.Unpublished study reported in Carol Ruth Silver and Don B. Kates, Jr.,
"Gun Control and the Subway Class, Wall Street Journal, January 10, 1985;
and Don B. Kates, Jr., "Some Remarks on the Prohibition of Handguns," St.
Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 23 (1979).
41.Ibid; Kleck, Point Blank; Kleck, "Crime Control Through the Private Use
of Armed Force," Social Problems, 1988, Vol. 35, pp. 1-21; and Gary Kleck
and Karen McElrath, "The Effects of Weaponry on Human Violence," Social
Forces, Vol. 67, No. 3, March 1991, pp. 669-92.
42.Sporting events also feature the firing of machine guns and so-called
assault weapons.
43.For example, some people hunt deer with pistols.
44.Barry Bruce-Briggs, "The Great American Gun War," The Public Interest,
1976, Vol. 45, pp. 37-62.
45.Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 25-26.
46.Ibid., p. 117.
47.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 23.
48.Ibid., p. 24.
49.Ibid., pp. 35-38; and Jo Dixon and Alan J. Lizotte, "Gun Ownership and
the 'Southern Subculture of Violence'" American Journal of Sociology, Vol.
93, September 1987, pp. 383-405.
50.Of the "good Samaritans" who came to the aid of victims of violent crime,
81 percent are gun owners because they are "familiar with violence, feel
competent to handle it, and don't believe they will get hurt if they get
involved." Ted L. Huston, Gilbert Geis and Richard Wright, "The Angry
Samaritans," Psychology Today, June 1976, p. 64.
51.Legal gun ownership is unrelated or negatively related to gun crime
rates, even after statistical control for urban locales. See Kleck, Point
Blank, pp. 201-02, and studies cited therein.
52.Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous; and D. E. S. Burr,
Handgun Regulation (Tallahassee: Florida Bureau of Criminal Justice
Planning and Assistance, 1977).
53.Charles F. Eckhardt, "Debunking the Wild West Fantasy," Guns & Ammo,
September 1973, pp. 36-37.
54.W. Eugene Hollon, Frontier Violence: Another Look (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974).
55.Terry L. Anderson and P. J. Hill, "An American Experiment in
Anarcho-capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West," Journal of Libertarian
Studies, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 9-29.
56.Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 44.
57.Ibid.
58.Roger D. McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), p. 247.
59.Frank Prassel, The Western Peace Officer: A Legacy of Law and Order
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 22.
60.New York Times, June 28, 1992.
61.Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous.
62.The 40 to 70 percent gap represents the inmates' own uncertainty about
the source.
63.DMI (Decision-Making Information), Attitudes of the American Electorate
Toward Gun Control (Santa Ana, CA: DMI 1979), p. 71.
64.Roper Survey 1985, DIALOG database, cited in Kleck, Point Blank, p.
117.
65.Lee R. McPheters, Robert Mann and Don Schlagenhauf, "Economic
Response to a Crime Deterrence Program: Mandatory Sentencing for
Robbery with a Firearm," Economic Inquiry, 1984, Vol. 22, pp. 550-70.
66.Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous.
67.A study conducted at Case Western University concluded that a gun in
the home is six times as likely to kill family members as it is to kill an
intruder. Among other defects, the study: (1) included suicides (which
accounted for most of the incidents) as "killings," (2) focused exclusively
on
that category of crime (home burglary) which almost never results in a
criminal's being killed and (3) ignored the number of times that guns were
used to defend a home without resulting in a killing. The study results were
published in Norman Rushforth et al., "Accidental Firearm Fatalities in a
Metropolitan County," American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 100, 1975, p.
499. For a critique of the study, see Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 127-29; and
Don B. Kates, Jr., "Guns, Murders and the Constitution," Policy Briefing,
Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990, pp. 24-32, 43.
68.Cynthia K. Gillespie, in Justifiable Homicide: Battered Women,
Self-Defense and the Law (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989),
estimates that there are as many as 500 homicides each year in which
women kill their husbands or men with whom they live intimately; she
concludes that the majority are self-defense, saving innocent lives.
69.This means that of the one million instances of the use of firearms for
self-defense, 400,000 were against another member of the same family.
70.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 110.
71.See Don B. Kates, Jr., Gary Kleck and David J. Bordua, "The Factual
Foundations for Certain Key Assumptions of Gun Control," Law and Policy
Quarterly, 1983, Vol. 5, pp. 271-98; Murray A. Strauss, Richard J. Gelles
and Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American
Family (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1980); and Gary Kleck and David J.
Bordua, "The Assumptions of Gun Control," in Don B. Kates, Jr., ed.,
Firearms and Violence (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy
Research, 1984), pp. 39-44.
72.See G. Marie Wilt et al., Domestic Violence and the Police: Studies in
Detroit and Kansas City (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1977); and Glenn D. Walters, The Criminal Lifestyle: Patterns of Serious
Criminal Conduct (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990).
73.Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous.
74.There are also other reasons why handguns are preferred by criminals.
The ammunition fired by semiautomatic rifles is smaller than average and
has milder wounding effects than civilian hunting ammunition or regular
infantry rifle cartridges. While a semiautomatic can easily fire six rounds
within 1.5 seconds, an ordinary revolver can be fired equally fast.
Military-style semiautomatic weapons can use large ammunition magazines,
but so can civilian-style weapons. Gun assaults usually involve only a few
shots being fired, anyway. In shoot-outs with New York City police,
suspects average only 2.5 shots fired at the police. See Kleck, Point Blank,
p. 79.
75.Purdy fired 110 rounds in three or four (or more) minutes " about 30
rounds per minute " a rate of fire available with an ordinary double-action
revolver. No higher rate of fire was necessary for Purdy to carry out his
murderous aim - he did all the shooting he wanted in four minutes, then
killed
himself. See Kleck, Point Blank, p. 70, and Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie
and the Cowboy, p. 390.
76.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 73.
77.New York Times, April 7, 1989. Cited in Kleck, Point Blank, p. 73.
78.Don B. Kates, Jr., and Patricia Terrell Harris, "How to Make Their Day,"
National Review, October 21, 1991, p. 31.
79.Morgan O. Reynolds, "Why Does Crime Pay?" NCPA Policy
Backgrounder, No. 110, National Center for Policy Analysis, November 6,
1992.
80.Editor & Publisher, August 1, 1992, p. 20.
81.FreeMarket, July 1992, p. 1.
82.Reuters dispatch, Dallas Morning News, September 21, 1989.
83.For further discussion of this point, see "The War on Gun Ownership Still
Goes On! Dial 911 and Die!" Guns & Ammo, July 1992, p. 23, p. 87; and
"Police Protection or Self-Defense?" New American, April 20, 1992, p.16.
84.New American, April 20, 1992, p. 16.
85.South v. Maryland, 1856.
86.Bowers v. DeVito, U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, 686F.2d 616
[1982].
87.New American, April 20, 1992, p. 16.
88.See Don B. Kates, Jr., "Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of
the Second Amendment, Michigan Law Review, Vol. 82, November 1983,
pp. 205-75; Bernard J. Bordenet, "The Right to Possess Arms: The Intent of
the Framers of the Second Amendment," Journal of Firearms and Public
Policy, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 127-58; J. Neil Schulman, "The Text
of the Second Amendment," Journal of Firearms and Public Policy, Vol. 4,
No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 159-63; and Sanford Levinson, "The Embarrassing
Second Amendment, " Yale Law Journal, Vol. 99, December 1988, pp.
637-59.
89.The "militia" was the entire adult male citizenry, who were not simply
allowed to keep their own arms but were required to do so. The duty to keep
arms applied to every household, not just those containing persons subject
to militia service. In 1792 Congress, meeting immediately after adoption of
the Second Amendment, defined the militia to include all able-bodied
military-age male citizens of the United States and required each to own his
own firearm (First Militia Act, 1 Stat. 271, 1792). The founders invariably
defined militia in some phrase like "the whole body of the people," while
their
references to organized military units as militia were invariably termed
"select militia" and were strongly pejorative, dating back to the reign of
Charles II, who was believed to have used "select militia" to disarm and
tyrannize the people.
90.Writing in Federalist Paper No. 46, James Madison says: Let a regular
army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be
entirely at the devotion of the Federal Government: still, it would not be
going too far to say that the State Governments with the people on their
side would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which,
according to best computation, a standing army can be carried in any
country is not to exceed 100th part of the whole number of souls; or one
twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not
yield, in the U.S., an army of more than 25 or 30 thousand men. To these
would be opposed a militia amounting to near a half million citizens with
arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves,
fighting for their common liberties and united and conducted by governments
possessing their affections and confidences. It may well be doubted
whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a
proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the late
successful resistance of this country against British arms will be most
inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being
armed,
which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation,
the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached
and by which militia officers are appointed, forms the barrier against
enterprises of ambition more insurmountable than any which a simple
government of any form can admit of. 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.
91.The Federal Gazette and Pennsylvania Evening Post, June 18, 1789, p.
20.
Although firearms are used in about 12 percent of violent crimes, it is
unlikely that any kind of gun control legislation could remove more than a
handful of those firearms from felons' hands - and there is no evidence that
the disarmed criminals using them would not then turn to other weapons.
Most criminals do not obtain firearms through conventional sources. Thus,
as opponents of gun control correctly contend, gun control measures in the
United States, if anything, contribute to increased criminal violence
because
they deny guns to honest citizens but not to criminals. They might
accurately
be called victim disarmament laws.
Armed citizens pose a risk of punishment to criminals - perhaps more so
than does the criminal justice system. Gun ownership may exert as much
deterrent effect on violent crime and burglary as the criminal justice
system
does. The battle over gun control is not about controlling inanimate
objects;
it is about controlling people. To extend gun controls would make the nation
better for criminals and worse for the rest of us.
Notes:
1.Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1963 [1764]), pp. 87-88.
2.U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization,"
BJS Technical Report, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office,
March 1987.
3.Gary Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Hawthorne, NY:
Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), p. 203.
4.Not all 18 came to this conclusion. But some earlier studies that did not
were shown to be defective by later studies. See Kleck, Point Blank, pp.
185-203.
5.Philip J. Cook, "The Influence of Gun Availability on Violent Crime
Patterns," in Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, eds., Crime and Justice: An
Annual Review, Vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp.
49-90; and David McDowall, "Gun Availability and Robbery Rates: A Panel
Study of Large U.S. Cities, 1974-1978, - Law and Policy, 1986, Vol. 8, pp.
135-48.
6.Gary Kleck, "Lifesaving Benefits to Use of Weapons for Self-Defense,"
Houston Chronicle, May 31, 1992, p. 1E.
7.David B. Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy (Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus, 1992); and Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 188-91.
8.Martin Killias, "Gun Ownership and Violent Crime: The Swiss Experience
in International Perspective," Security Journal, 1990, Vol. 1, pp. 169-74;
and Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy, ch. 8.
9.The same is true of weapons of war and international aggression. While
weapons serve aggressors, they also serve to deter aggressors. Most
students of war doubt the value of mutual arms reductions as a device to
reduce the chance of war. See James L. Payne, Why Nations Arm (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 166.
10.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 44; U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Handgun
Crime Victims, July 1990.
11.H. C. Brearly, Homicide in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1932), p. 68; and Kleck, Point Blank, p. 20.
12.Since there are 650,000 crimes involving guns each year and 201 million
firearms, the maximum number of guns that could be used to commit a crime
each year would be 650,000/201,000,000 or 0.3 percent.
13.Long guns are twice as numerous as handguns, yet account for only a
sixth of gun crime.
14.See Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 44-45; and Gary Kleck, "Evidence that
'Saturday Night Specials' Not Very Important for Crime," Sociology and
Social Research, 1986, Vol. 70, pp. 303-07.
15.The Gun Owners, December 1991, p. 3.
16.The New Gun Week, January 17, 1992, p.3.
17.Reported in the New American, June 15, 1992, pp. 14-15. In another
incident during the Los Angeles riots, merchant Byung Kim and his sons
abandoned their south Los Angeles appliance warehouse after gunfire hit
two Korean-American friends helping to protect the property. The
undefended property was burned to the ground. Their well-defended
Koreatown store " where the Kims and others stood on the roof with rifles "
wasn't touched. (Wall Street Journal, June 16, 1992, p. A5.)
18.New American, June 15, 1992, p. 15.
19.Morgan O. Reynolds, Crime By Choice: An Economic Analysis (Dallas:
Fisher Institute, 1985), pp. 165-68.
20.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 397-99.
21.Ibid., p. 408-11.
22.Ibid.
23.U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, International Crime Rates, May 1988;
and Ministry of Supply and Services, Canada Yearbook, 1980-81 (Ottawa,
Canada: 1981), p. 55.
24.Kopel, The Samurai, The Mountie and the Cowboy, ch. 7.
25.U.S Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Statistics
1991, p. 432.
26.David T. Hardy, "Gun Control: Arm Yourself with Evidence," Reason,
November 1982, p. 41.
27."Trust the People: The Case against Gun Control," Cato Policy Analysis
No. 109, July 11, 1988, p. 29.
28.Kleck, Point Blank, ch. 4 and pp. 170-73.
29.Kleck, Point Blank, and Gary Kleck, "Crime Control Through the Private
Use of Armed Force," Social Problems, 1988, Vol. 35, pp. 1-21.
30.Gun Week, June 15, 1990; National Association of Chiefs of Police,
American Law Enforcement Officers Poll, 1989.
31.Handloader Magazine, no date available.
32.Carol Ruth Silver and Don B. Kates, Jr., "Self-Defense, Handgun
Ownership, and the Independence of Women in a Violent, Sexist Society,"
in Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, Don B. Kates, Jr.,
ed. (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: North River Press, 1979), p. 152.
33.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 116.
34.Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 111-17.
35.U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, International Crime Rates, Special
BJS Report, May 1988, pp. 1, 3. Australia, Canada, Denmark, Britain,
Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden all have much lower
overall crime rates but higher reported burglary rates than the United
States.
Also see Kleck, Point Blank, p. 140.
36.George Rengert and John Wasilchick, Suburban Burglary: A Time and
Place for Everything (Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas, 1985).
37.Ibid., p. 30.
38.James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous:
A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter,
1986). The true percentages are likely to be higher because they were
obtained from interviews with self-conscious "tough guys."
39.Kleck, Point Blank, Chapter 4.
40.Unpublished study reported in Carol Ruth Silver and Don B. Kates, Jr.,
"Gun Control and the Subway Class, Wall Street Journal, January 10, 1985;
and Don B. Kates, Jr., "Some Remarks on the Prohibition of Handguns," St.
Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 23 (1979).
41.Ibid; Kleck, Point Blank; Kleck, "Crime Control Through the Private Use
of Armed Force," Social Problems, 1988, Vol. 35, pp. 1-21; and Gary Kleck
and Karen McElrath, "The Effects of Weaponry on Human Violence," Social
Forces, Vol. 67, No. 3, March 1991, pp. 669-92.
42.Sporting events also feature the firing of machine guns and so-called
assault weapons.
43.For example, some people hunt deer with pistols.
44.Barry Bruce-Briggs, "The Great American Gun War," The Public Interest,
1976, Vol. 45, pp. 37-62.
45.Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 25-26.
46.Ibid., p. 117.
47.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 23.
48.Ibid., p. 24.
49.Ibid., pp. 35-38; and Jo Dixon and Alan J. Lizotte, "Gun Ownership and
the 'Southern Subculture of Violence'" American Journal of Sociology, Vol.
93, September 1987, pp. 383-405.
50.Of the "good Samaritans" who came to the aid of victims of violent crime,
81 percent are gun owners because they are "familiar with violence, feel
competent to handle it, and don't believe they will get hurt if they get
involved." Ted L. Huston, Gilbert Geis and Richard Wright, "The Angry
Samaritans," Psychology Today, June 1976, p. 64.
51.Legal gun ownership is unrelated or negatively related to gun crime
rates, even after statistical control for urban locales. See Kleck, Point
Blank, pp. 201-02, and studies cited therein.
52.Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous; and D. E. S. Burr,
Handgun Regulation (Tallahassee: Florida Bureau of Criminal Justice
Planning and Assistance, 1977).
53.Charles F. Eckhardt, "Debunking the Wild West Fantasy," Guns & Ammo,
September 1973, pp. 36-37.
54.W. Eugene Hollon, Frontier Violence: Another Look (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974).
55.Terry L. Anderson and P. J. Hill, "An American Experiment in
Anarcho-capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West," Journal of Libertarian
Studies, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 9-29.
56.Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 44.
57.Ibid.
58.Roger D. McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), p. 247.
59.Frank Prassel, The Western Peace Officer: A Legacy of Law and Order
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 22.
60.New York Times, June 28, 1992.
61.Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous.
62.The 40 to 70 percent gap represents the inmates' own uncertainty about
the source.
63.DMI (Decision-Making Information), Attitudes of the American Electorate
Toward Gun Control (Santa Ana, CA: DMI 1979), p. 71.
64.Roper Survey 1985, DIALOG database, cited in Kleck, Point Blank, p.
117.
65.Lee R. McPheters, Robert Mann and Don Schlagenhauf, "Economic
Response to a Crime Deterrence Program: Mandatory Sentencing for
Robbery with a Firearm," Economic Inquiry, 1984, Vol. 22, pp. 550-70.
66.Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous.
67.A study conducted at Case Western University concluded that a gun in
the home is six times as likely to kill family members as it is to kill an
intruder. Among other defects, the study: (1) included suicides (which
accounted for most of the incidents) as "killings," (2) focused exclusively
on
that category of crime (home burglary) which almost never results in a
criminal's being killed and (3) ignored the number of times that guns were
used to defend a home without resulting in a killing. The study results were
published in Norman Rushforth et al., "Accidental Firearm Fatalities in a
Metropolitan County," American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 100, 1975, p.
499. For a critique of the study, see Kleck, Point Blank, pp. 127-29; and
Don B. Kates, Jr., "Guns, Murders and the Constitution," Policy Briefing,
Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990, pp. 24-32, 43.
68.Cynthia K. Gillespie, in Justifiable Homicide: Battered Women,
Self-Defense and the Law (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989),
estimates that there are as many as 500 homicides each year in which
women kill their husbands or men with whom they live intimately; she
concludes that the majority are self-defense, saving innocent lives.
69.This means that of the one million instances of the use of firearms for
self-defense, 400,000 were against another member of the same family.
70.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 110.
71.See Don B. Kates, Jr., Gary Kleck and David J. Bordua, "The Factual
Foundations for Certain Key Assumptions of Gun Control," Law and Policy
Quarterly, 1983, Vol. 5, pp. 271-98; Murray A. Strauss, Richard J. Gelles
and Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American
Family (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1980); and Gary Kleck and David J.
Bordua, "The Assumptions of Gun Control," in Don B. Kates, Jr., ed.,
Firearms and Violence (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy
Research, 1984), pp. 39-44.
72.See G. Marie Wilt et al., Domestic Violence and the Police: Studies in
Detroit and Kansas City (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1977); and Glenn D. Walters, The Criminal Lifestyle: Patterns of Serious
Criminal Conduct (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990).
73.Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous.
74.There are also other reasons why handguns are preferred by criminals.
The ammunition fired by semiautomatic rifles is smaller than average and
has milder wounding effects than civilian hunting ammunition or regular
infantry rifle cartridges. While a semiautomatic can easily fire six rounds
within 1.5 seconds, an ordinary revolver can be fired equally fast.
Military-style semiautomatic weapons can use large ammunition magazines,
but so can civilian-style weapons. Gun assaults usually involve only a few
shots being fired, anyway. In shoot-outs with New York City police,
suspects average only 2.5 shots fired at the police. See Kleck, Point Blank,
p. 79.
75.Purdy fired 110 rounds in three or four (or more) minutes " about 30
rounds per minute " a rate of fire available with an ordinary double-action
revolver. No higher rate of fire was necessary for Purdy to carry out his
murderous aim - he did all the shooting he wanted in four minutes, then
killed
himself. See Kleck, Point Blank, p. 70, and Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie
and the Cowboy, p. 390.
76.Kleck, Point Blank, p. 73.
77.New York Times, April 7, 1989. Cited in Kleck, Point Blank, p. 73.
78.Don B. Kates, Jr., and Patricia Terrell Harris, "How to Make Their Day,"
National Review, October 21, 1991, p. 31.
79.Morgan O. Reynolds, "Why Does Crime Pay?" NCPA Policy
Backgrounder, No. 110, National Center for Policy Analysis, November 6,
1992.
80.Editor & Publisher, August 1, 1992, p. 20.
81.FreeMarket, July 1992, p. 1.
82.Reuters dispatch, Dallas Morning News, September 21, 1989.
83.For further discussion of this point, see "The War on Gun Ownership Still
Goes On! Dial 911 and Die!" Guns & Ammo, July 1992, p. 23, p. 87; and
"Police Protection or Self-Defense?" New American, April 20, 1992, p.16.
84.New American, April 20, 1992, p. 16.
85.South v. Maryland, 1856.
86.Bowers v. DeVito, U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, 686F.2d 616
[1982].
87.New American, April 20, 1992, p. 16.
88.See Don B. Kates, Jr., "Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of
the Second Amendment, Michigan Law Review, Vol. 82, November 1983,
pp. 205-75; Bernard J. Bordenet, "The Right to Possess Arms: The Intent of
the Framers of the Second Amendment," Journal of Firearms and Public
Policy, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 127-58; J. Neil Schulman, "The Text
of the Second Amendment," Journal of Firearms and Public Policy, Vol. 4,
No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 159-63; and Sanford Levinson, "The Embarrassing
Second Amendment, " Yale Law Journal, Vol. 99, December 1988, pp.
637-59.
89.The "militia" was the entire adult male citizenry, who were not simply
allowed to keep their own arms but were required to do so. The duty to keep
arms applied to every household, not just those containing persons subject
to militia service. In 1792 Congress, meeting immediately after adoption of
the Second Amendment, defined the militia to include all able-bodied
military-age male citizens of the United States and required each to own his
own firearm (First Militia Act, 1 Stat. 271, 1792). The founders invariably
defined militia in some phrase like "the whole body of the people," while
their
references to organized military units as militia were invariably termed
"select militia" and were strongly pejorative, dating back to the reign of
Charles II, who was believed to have used "select militia" to disarm and
tyrannize the people.
90.Writing in Federalist Paper No. 46, James Madison says: Let a regular
army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be
entirely at the devotion of the Federal Government: still, it would not be
going too far to say that the State Governments with the people on their
side would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which,
according to best computation, a standing army can be carried in any
country is not to exceed 100th part of the whole number of souls; or one
twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not
yield, in the U.S., an army of more than 25 or 30 thousand men. To these
would be opposed a militia amounting to near a half million citizens with
arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves,
fighting for their common liberties and united and conducted by governments
possessing their affections and confidences. It may well be doubted
whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a
proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the late
successful resistance of this country against British arms will be most
inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being
armed,
which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation,
the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached
and by which militia officers are appointed, forms the barrier against
enterprises of ambition more insurmountable than any which a simple
government of any form can admit of. 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.
91.The Federal Gazette and Pennsylvania Evening Post, June 18, 1789, p.
20.
