"AMENDMENT
II"
: 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.
From the March 31, 1995 statement of Tulane University
criminologist James Wright before the U.S. House of
Representatives Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the
Judiciary:
My first essential observation is that half the households in
the country possess at least one gun. So far as I can tell, the
first question about gun ownership in a national probability
sample of U.S. adults was asked in 1959, and similar questions
have been asked dozens of times since. Over the last 35 years or
so that we've been asking the question, every survey has reported
more or less the same result, namely, that half of all U.S.
households own one or more guns.
Although many people know this to be true, I think many of the
implications of this fact are not well appreciated. The fact that
the ownership percentage has been effectively constant for nearly
four decades, for example, while at the same time the total
number of guns in circulation has increased rather substantially,
implies that the increasing supply of guns has been absorbed
largely by the purchase of additional guns among households
already owning one or more of them. Indeed there is fairly
substantial and independent evidence that the average number of
guns owned by persons owning any has increased from
about three guns 15 years ago to approximately four guns today. I
think it is also obvious that from the viewpoint of public
safety, the transition from N to N + 1 guns is considerably less
ominous than the transition from no guns to one gun.
If this first implication is correct, incidentally, it means
that most of the people in the gun shops today buying new
firearms already own guns -- a useful point to keep in mind when
pondering the alleged "cooling off" function to be
served by waiting periods imposed at the point of retail sale.
A second implication is that gun ownership is not deviant
behavior, but rather, normative behavior across vast swaths of
the social landscape. There are areas of the country where it
would be an odd person indeed who did not own a gun.
Finally, when we attempt to control crime or violence by
controlling the general ownership and use of guns among the
public at large, we are attempting to control the behaviors of a
very small fraction of the population, the violent or
criminally-inclined fraction, by controlling the behaviors and
activities of roughly half the American population, and whatever
else might be said about such an approach, it is certainly not
very efficient.
The second essential observation on guns in America today is
that there are already something like 200,000,000 firearms in
circulation, give or take a few tens of millions, to be sure. It
has been said, I believe correctly, that firearms are the most
commonly owned pieces of sporting equipment in the United States,
with the exception of pairs of sneakers and running shoes. It is
not entirely clear just how many acts of gun violence occur in
the United States in any typical year. In recent years, we've
been pushing 40,000 deaths from firearms. There are, in addition
to that, perhaps a few hundred thousand nonfatal, but injurious,
firearms accidents, conceivably 500,000 or 600,000 chargeable
firearms crimes committed every year, and God-knows-how-many
instances where guns are used to intimidate or to prey upon one's
fellow human beings.
Making very generous allowances all around, however, the total
number of acts of accidental and intentional gun violence,
whether fatal or not, whether injurious or not, cannot possibly
be more than a couple of million per annum at the absolute
outside. This implies, moreover, that the 200,000,000 firearms
now circulating in the U.S. market would be sufficient to sustain
gun violence at the current rate for at least another century,
this even assuming that every gun was used once and only once for
some nefarious purpose, and that all additions to the supply were
halted permanently and at once. Because of the immensely large
number of firearms already circulating in the U.S. market, the
violence- reductive effects even of fairly draconian gun control
measures might very well not be felt for many decades.
A third observation is that most of the 200,000,000 guns that
are out there are owned for what I would consider to be socially
innocuous sport and recreational reasons. About a third of the
guns presently in circulation are handguns, the remainder rifles
and shotguns. When one asks gun owners why they own guns, various
sport and recreational activities dominate the responses:
hunting, target shooting, collecting, and the like. Even when the
question is restricted just to handgun owners, about 40% will say
they own the gun for recreational applications, another 40% will
say they own it for self-protection, and the remaining 20% will
cite some job-related reason as the reason for them to own a gun.
Thus, in the majority, I believe gun ownership is a topic more
appropriate to the sociology of leisure than to the criminology
or epidemiology of violence. Unfortunately, when we seek to
control violence by controlling the general ownership and use of
firearms among the public at large, it at least looks as though
we think we have intuited some direct causal connection between
drive-by shootings in the inner city and squirrel hunting or
skeet shooting in the hinterland. Or such, in any case, is the
implication that the nation's squirrel hunters and skeet shooters
often draw, and frankly, it's no wonder they sometimes question
the motives, not to mention the sanity, of anybody who would
suggest such a preposterous thing.
My fourth observation is that many firearms are also owned for
self-defense against crime, that some are indeed used for that
purpose, and, whether they are actually any safer or not, many
people certainly seem to feel safer when they have a gun.
Findings have been mentioned this morning from recent work done
by my colleague Gary Kleck at Florida State University that
Americans use guns to protect themselves from crime as often as a
couple of million times a year, a finding that I know the other
panelist Dr. Bordua will discuss in more detail. If this is true,
it's very hard to square with the common assumption of gun
control advocates that guns are not efficacious as a private
defense against crime.
Whatever the true number of self-defensive uses proves to be,
about a quarter of all gun owners, and about 40% of handgun
owners mention defense against crime as the main reason they
owned a gun, and large percentages who give some other main
reason will mention self-defense as a secondary reason.
Gun owners and gun advocates insist that guns provide real
protection, as indeed the panel that preceded us testified, and
indeed as Gary Kleck's findings suggest. Anti-gun advocates
insist that the sense of security is more illusory than real. But
the fact is practically everything people do to defend against
crime provides only the illusion of security, in that any such
measure can be defeated by a sufficiently clever and motivated
criminal.
Most people have realized, no doubt correctly, that the police
cannot protect them from crime. So people face the need to
protect themselves, and many choose to own a gun along with
taking many other measures for precisely this purpose. My
question is whether a society that is manifestly incapable of
protecting its citizens from crime really has any right or moral
authority to tell people what they may or may not do to protect
themselves.
My fifth observation is that the bad guys do not obtain their
guns through normal retail channels. Research on both adult and
juvenile felons and offenders has made it obvious that the
illegal firearms market is dominated overwhelmingly by informal
swaps, trades, and purchases involving family members, friends,
acquaintances, drug dealers, street and black market sources of
various sorts. It is a pretty rare criminal indeed who attempts
to acquire a gun through a conventional over-the-counter
transaction with a normal retail outlet.
Now, many efforts at gun control pertain to the initial retail
sale of weapons, for example, the prohibition against gun
purchases by people with felony records, or by people with
alcohol and drug abuse histories, or the national five-day
waiting period in the Brady Bill, or various state and local
permit and registration laws.
Since felons rarely obtain guns through customary retail
channels, these kinds of controls imposed at the point of retail
sale must necessarily miss the vast majority of criminal firearms
transactions.
Having learned now well more than a decade ago, incidentally,
that the criminal acquisition of guns involves these informal and
hard-to-regulate transfers, average gun owners often conclude,
whether correctly or not, that such measures as registration,
permits, waiting periods, and so on and so forth, must therefore
be intended primarily to keep tabs on them, that registration or
permit requirements are just the first step towards outright
confiscation of all privately held firearms, for example, or that
mandated registration of new gun purchases is an unwarranted
police-state intrusion on the Constitutional rights of
law-abiding citizens.
It doesn't really matter whether they're correct in this
judgement or not, that they reason in this vein, I think, is
sufficient. It is reasoning in precisely this vein that often
seems bizarre, or even psychotic, to proponents of these kinds of
measures, but it is exactly the style of reasoning, I think, that
raises the stakes in the debate over guns and that accounts for
the white-hot ferocity of that debate today.
My sixth observation is that the bad guys inhabit a violent
world. As such, a gun often spells a life or death difference to
them. If you ask felons, whether adult or juvenile, why they own
guns, why they carry guns, themes of self protection, self-
defense, survival, and so on, dominate their responses. Very few
of the bad guys say they acquire or carry guns specifically for
offensive or crime-committing purposes, although that is
obviously how many of them get used. These men live in an
extraordinarily hostile environment. Many of them come to
believe, no doubt correctly, that their ability to survive in
that environment depends critically on being adequately armed.
"Adequately armed," in this case, means being better
armed than your most likely adversary, namely the police. If
sheer survival is indeed the issue, then a gun is a bargain at
practically any price.
As James Q. Wilson has recently argued, the largest share of
the gun violence problem results from the wrong people carrying
guns at the wrong time and place. The survival motive among the
bad guys means exactly that the wrong kinds of people will be
carrying guns pretty much all the time. The evident implication
is that the bad guys have to be disarmed on the streets if rates
of gun violence are to decline, and that, I think, implies a
range of interventions far removed from what gun control
advocates have recently urged on the American population.
My seventh observation is that everything the bad guys do with
their guns is already against the law. That criminals will
generally be indifferent to the law would seem to follow from the
definition of the terms, but it's a lesson that we've had to
learn time and again throughout our history. As a matter of fact,
and as has already been stated by the panel this morning, gun
acquisition by felons, whether from retail or private sources,
for whatever reason, is already_illegal. Yet obviously felons
still acquire guns. Since practically everything the bad guys do
with their guns, or do to obtain their guns is already against
the law, one is entitled to wonder whether there is some new law
that we haven't yet thought up that we can somehow pass that will
persuade them to stop it.
My eighth observation, is a theoretical observation from my
colleagues in the Department of Economics. Demand creates its own
supply. This is sometimes called the First Law of Microeconomics,
and it clearly_holds whether the commodity in demand is legal or
illegal. So long as a demand for some product exists, then there
will be profit to be made in satisfying that demand, and
therefore the demand for that product will be satisfied. That is
only a fancy way of saying that as long as people wish to own
guns, be they criminals or average Joes, then guns will be there
for them to own.
I think it relevant that, for example, Brazil, manufactures
small arms. Brazil makes actually pretty inexpensive, but
relatively decent small arms. I think in fundamental respects the
question whether we can disarm the American criminal population
amounts to asking whether an organized criminal enterprise that
successfully imports hundreds of tons of Colombian cocaine into
the U.S. market every year would not find the means to illegally
import hundreds of tons of handguns from Brazil, if there were
some reason to do so, or some profit to be made in so doing. And,
if you agree with me that this proposition is more or less
self-evidently true, then you will conclude that we will never
reduce the supply of firearms to the criminal population by
enough to make an appreciable difference.
My ninth observation is that per se guns are neither
inherently good nor inherently evil. Guns, that is, do not
possess their own teleology. Benevolence and malevolence are
things that inhere in the motives and behavior of people, not in
the technology they possess. All guns, are nothing more, nothing
less, than a chunk of machined metal that has a variety of
purposes to which it can be put, all involving a small projectile
hurtling at high velocity downrange, to lodge itself in a target.
We can only say that guns are good when the target strikes us as
an appropriate one, and evil when not. The gun itself is
immaterial to this moral judgement.
Singling out certain types of guns for specific policy
attention, 'assault weapons' these days, "Saturday Nite
Special" handguns in an earlier area... earlier era, is
almost always justified on the grounds that the type of gun in
question "has no legitimate use" or "is designed
only to kill." By definition, however, all guns are designed
to kill, which is to say, designed to hurtle a projectile
downrange to lodge in a target. And if one grants the
proposition, which, I admit is an arguable proposition, that
self- defense against predation and plunder is a legitimate
reason to own a gun, then all guns, regardless of their type,
regardless of their characteristics, regardless of their
firepower, regardless of their quality, all guns, regardless,
have some potentially legitimate application.
It seems to me, therefore, that the focus... the frequent
focus, in gun control circles on certain "bad guns," is
fundamentally misplaced -- the idea that there are good ones and
bad ones and that we want to get rid of the bad ones. When all is
said and done, it is the behavior of people, I think, that we
evidently need to control.
And then, finally, my tenth observation is that guns are
important elements of our history and our culture. Attempts to
control crime by regulating the ownership or use of firearms are
attempts to regulate the artifacts and activities of a culture
that in its own way is as unique as any of the other myriad
cultures that comprise the American ethnic mosaic. This is what
is referred to as the American gun culture, about which many have
written, and, I believe it remains among the least understood of
any of the various subcultural strands that make up modern
society.
The existence and characteristics of the American gun culture
also have implications that are rarely appreciated. For one, gun
control deals with matters that people feel strongly about, that
are part of their background, and their heritage, and their
upbringing ... and their worldview. Advocates for gun control are
frequently taken aback by the stridency with which their
seemingly modest and sensible proposals are attacked. But from
the gun culture's point of view, restrictions on the right to
keep and bear arms amount to the systematic destruction of a
valued way of life, and are, in that sense, a form of cultural
genocide. Scholars, and criminologists, and legislators, who
speculate on the problem of guns and crime and violence would, I
think, profit to look at things, at least occasionally, from the
gun culture's point of view.
There are about 50,000,000 U.S. families who own firearms, and
hardly any of these families have ever harmed anyone with their
guns, and virtually none ever intend to. Nearly everything these
families will ever do with their guns is both legal, and largely
innocuous. So when we advocate restrictions on their rights to
own guns, as a means to fighting crime, we are casting aspersions
on their decency, as though we somehow hold them responsible for
the crime and violence that plague the nation. Is it any wonder
they object often loudly and vociferously to such slander?