More Guns Less Crime (38 page)

attacks. Compare this news coverage with the attention generated by Bu-ford Furrow's August 10, 1999, assault on a Jewish community center, which left five people wounded, three of them young boys. 127 Multiple-victim knife attacks have been ignored by the national media, and few people would realize that there were 1,884 bombing incidents in the United States in 1996, which left a total of 34 people dead and 365 people injured. 128

The news coverage is also constantly framed as, Is more gun control the answer? 129 The question is never asked, Have increased regulations encouraged these attacks by making potential victims more vulnerable? Do these attacks demonstrate the importance of letting people be able to defend themselves?

We are constantly bombarded with pro-gun-control claims. While my research, when it is referred to in the press, is labeled as "controversial" or worse, the claims from the Clinton administration and Handgun Control, Inc., are reported without reference to any academics who might object to them. For years the Clinton administration has been placing public service ads claiming that "thirteen children die every day from guns," linking this claim with elementary school children's voices or pictures. But few of these thirteen deaths fit the image of innocent young children. Nine of these deaths per day involve "children" between seventeen and nineteen years old, primarily homicides involving gang members. Eleven of the deaths per day involved fifteen- to nineteen-year olds. This does not alleviate the sorrow created by these deaths or the 1.9 children under age fifteen that die from guns every day, but it strains credulity to have this number mentioned as evidence justifying the importance of trigger locks.

The Clinton administration has also been attempting to help out the city lawsuits against the gun makers by producing other research that will back up their claims that guns are being sold recklessly to criminals. 130 The administration claimed that around a third of the guns used in crimes were purchased legally with the intent of reselling them to criminals—so-called straw purchases. Yet the evidence was very indirect and purposely excluded most gun crimes from the sample to ensure a particular answer. The administration did not measure straw purchases, but simply assumed that guns legally purchased from a dealer and then used in the commission of a crime within three years must have involved straw purchases. These guns could have been stolen between the original sale and their use in a crime, but they would still be classified as straw purchases. To arrive at the percentages the administration reports, only guns that were both sold and used in the commission of a crime between the beginning of 1990 and the end of 1996 are examined.

Yet using this method the administration could have produced virtually any percentage it wanted. For example, accept its definition of a straw purchase as guns that are both purchased and used within a three-year period of time. If the administration had simply limited the sample to guns that were purchased and used in the commission of a crime in a three-year period from 1994 through 1996, it could have claimed that 100 percent of guns used in crimes were obtained through straw purchases. In this case, all the guns they would have studied would fit their definition of a straw purchase.

Much of the debate today is framed so as to blame the greater accessibility of guns in America for the recent school violence. Gun-control groups claim that today "guns are less regulated than toasters or teddy bears." 131 The solutions range from banning gun possession for those under twenty-one to imprisoning adults whose guns are misused by minors under eighteen.

Yet, to the contrary, gun availability has never before been as restricted as it is now. As late as 1967, it was possible for a thirteen-year-old virtually anywhere in the United States to walk into a hardware store and buy a rifle. Relatively few states even had age restrictions for buying handguns from a store. Buying a rifle through the mail was easy. Private transfers of guns to juveniles were also unrestricted.

It was common for schools to have shooting clubs. Even in New York City, virtually every public high school had a shooting club up until 1969. It was common for high school students to take their guns with them to school on the subways in the morning and turn them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach so the heavy guns would simply be out of the way. After school, students would pick up their guns when it was time for practice. The federal government would even give students rifles and pay for their ammunition. Students regularly competed in citywide shooting contests, with the winners being awarded university scholarships.

Contrast those days with regulations today. College or elementary students are now expelled from school for even accidentally bringing a water pistol. Schools prohibit images of guns, knives, or other weapons on shirts, on hats, or in pictures. Elementary school students have been suspended for carrying around a mere picture of a gun. High schools have refused to publish yearbook pictures of students sitting on howitzers, even when the picture shows graduating students who are joining the military. School superintendents have lost their jobs for even raising the question of whether someone at a school should have a gun for protection. 132

Since the 1960s, the growth of federal gun control has been dramatic.

Before the Brady law in 1994, background checks and waiting periods were not required in most states. It was not a federal crime for those under eighteen to possess a handgun until 1994. The 1990s saw dramatically higher fees for registered dealers as well as many added paperwork requirements. Federal gun laws in 1930 amounted to only 3,571 words. They expanded to 19,907 words in 1960 and then more than quadrupled to 88,413 words today. 133

The growth in state laws has kept pace. By 1997, California's gun-control statutes contained an incredible 158,643 words, nearly the length of the King James Version of the New Testament. And in 1999, at least four new gun laws have already been signed into law by the governor. Even a "gun-friendly" state government such as Texas has gun-control provisions containing over 41,000 words. None of this even begins to include the burgeoning local regulations on everything from licensing to mandatory gun locks.

But whose access has really been restricted by these laws? There is no academic study showing that waiting periods and background checks have reduced criminal access or resulted in less crime or youth violence. Indeed, for the Brady law, I have found that rape rates have increased. While the object is obviously to disarm criminals, the laws are primarily obeyed by good people. If the research in this book convinces me of anything, it is that disarming potential victims relative to criminals makes crime more attractive and more likely.

To restrict firearm access further and promote "safe zones" for our children, a 1995 federal law now bans guns within 1,000 feet of a school. Unfortunately, again, it is the law-abiding citizens who obey the law— not the criminals who are intent on harming our children. With the recent school attacks, even the most die-hard proponents of this law will be hard pressed to claim that this law has worked out the way that it was intended.

In Virginia, where rural areas have a long tradition of high school students going hunting in the morning, before school, the governor tried but failed to get the state legislature in 1999 to enact an exemption to the federal law allowing high school students to store their guns in their cars in the school parking lot. Indeed, one reason few students have been prosecuted for possessing a gun on school grounds is that many violations involve these very types of cases. Prosecutors find it crazy to send good kids to jail simply because they had a rifle locked in the trunk of their car while the car was parked in the school parking lot. The recent attempts in Congress to "put teeth" into the current laws through mandating prosecutions will take away this prosecutorial discretion and produce unintended results.

The horror with which people react to guns is inversely related to how accessible they are. It would appear that, at the very least, gun-control advocates face something of a dilemma. If guns are the problem, why was it that when guns were really accessible, even inside schools by students, we didn't have the problems that plague us now including the mass school shootings?

Rules that are passed to solve a problem can make the problem worse, which in turn generates calls for yet more regulations. The biggest problem with gun-control laws is that those who are intent on harming others, and especially those who plan to commit suicide, are the least likely to obey them. The issue is often disparagingly phrased as whether hunters are willing to be "inconvenienced," but this misses the real question: Will well-intended laws disarm potential victims and thus make it easier for criminals?

The experiences of other countries with gun control should also raise real concerns. For example, Australia banned a wide range of guns after Tasmania's horrible multiple-victim public shooting in 1996. But neither total crime nor total crime with guns has declined. In the first two years after the law, armed robberies had risen by 73 percent, unarmed robberies by 28 percent, assaults by 17 percent, and kidnappings by 38 percent. 134 Murders declined by 9 percent, but manslaughter rose by 32 percent. Another country that has recently banned guns is England, yet it now leads the United States by a wide margin in robberies and aggravated assaults, and although murder and rape is still higher in the United States, that difference has been shrinking. 135 It is seldom mentioned that other countries, like Brazil and Russia, with some of the toughest gun bans and restrictions in the world, have murder rates four times higher than what we have in the United States.

Another important source of regulation is the constant threat of legal action now faced by gun makers and those in anyway involved in handling guns. Colt has terminated a thousand field representatives and virtually stopped selling handguns to the civilian market. 136 Other gun makers have filed for bankruptcy protection. 137 Other businesses have also been affected. The Wall Street Journal notes that "In part to avoid becoming a target of new lawsuits," United Parcel Service is "tightening its rules for shipping handguns" and effectively tripling its prices. 138

What seems missing from so much of the public debate is that regulations have both costs and benefits. Consider, then, the costs and benefits of some other recent gun-control proposals that have not already been addressed directly in this book:

Prison sentences for adults whose guns are misused by someone under 18. Parents are already civilly liable for any wrongful actions committed by their chil-

dren, but these recent federal proposals would institute a three-year minimum prison term for anyone whose gun is used improperly by any minor (not necessarily their own child), regardless of whether the gun owner consented to or knew of the use. The rules are being created for just one product when we would never think of applying them to other products. This is draconian, to say the least—the equivalent of sending Mom and Dad to prison because an auto thief kills someone while driving the family car. What about other household products like the propane tanks from barbecues or trailer homes used to make bombs? If the motivation is to prevent accidental deaths, why not apply this rule to items that pose a much greater risk to children in the home? Criminal penalties would surely motivate parents to store everything from medicines to knives to water buckets more carefully. Most would consider such an idea extreme, and it would only add to the grief or agony already suffered by parents when their children are killed or hurt.

Age limits. Mr. Clinton proposes a federal ban on the possession of handguns by anyone under twenty-one. Under a 1968 federal law, twenty-one is already the minimum age to purchase a handgun, but setting the age to possess a handgun has been a state matter. While some people between eighteen and twenty-one use guns improperly, others face the risk of crime and would benefit from defending themselves. As discussed earlier in this book (p. 86), laws allowing eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds to carry a concealed handgun reduce violent crime, just as they do for citizens over twenty-one.

New rules for gun shows. The Clinton administration has provided no evidence that such shows are important in supplying criminals with guns. Furthermore, it is simply false to claim that the rules for purchasing guns at a gun show are any different from purchases elsewhere. Dealers at a show must perform the same background checks and obey all the other rules that they follow when they make sales at their stores. Private sales are always unregulated whether they occur at a gun show or not.

If, as Mr. Clinton proposes, the government enacts new laws regulating private sales at gun shows, all someone would have to do is walk outside the show and sell the gun there. To regulate private sales, the government would have to register all guns. This is where the discussion will soon be headed, as it is certain that gun-control advocates will quickly point to the unenforceability of these new laws. Advocates of the new rules must know that the proposed rules are doomed to failure and should acknowledge openly whether they would advocate registration to close the new "loopholes" they are creating. The other goal here is set up fees and bureaucracy that will drive most gun shows out of business.

Background checks for buyers of bomb-making material. This will have little effect, simply because few items are likely to be covered. No one seriously discusses including fertilizer, used to make the bomb that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995, or propane tanks like the ones found after the Littleton massacre. There are simply too many common household items that can be used to make bombs.

Yet without academic evidence that existing regulations such as the Brady law and gun locks produce desirable results, it is surprising that we are now debating what new gun-control laws to pass. With that in mind, 294 academics from institutions as diverse as Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA released an open letter to Congress during 1999 stating that the proposed new gun laws are "ill advised." They wrote that "With the 20,000 gun laws already on the books, we advise Congress, before enacting yet more new laws, to investigate whether many of the existing laws may have contributed to the problems we currently face." 139