Sadly, if predictably, in the aftermath of last week’s assassinations, gun advocates are still vociferously rejecting any proposal to restrict the distribution of guns. Amongst the various arguments, there are two slogans that stand out:
“Guns don’t kill people; People kill People.” and
“If guns are made illegal, only criminals will have guns.”
The remainder of this post will be devoted to discussing these two slogans.
Of course, as with almost any slogan, there are oversimplifications inherent in these. That’s one of the problems with slogans. On the other hand, slogans allow a general position to be stated quickly and powerfully. These two slogans epitomize the latter point.
Let’s start by examining the first slogan — “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” For the most part, this is true. (Let’s neglect, for the moment, booby traps and automated gun emplacements. For the most part, these are [for the moment] limited to battlefield situations.) However, it’s also true that, as the recent assassin’s attack has shown, guns allow a single person to kill far more people than most other lethal weapons, such as a knife, bludgeon, or garrote. Further, it’s also true that bombs don’t, by themselves, kill people. Should we, therefore, allow the unregulated use and sale of explosive devices?? (It’s worth pointing out that the Second Amendment nowhere specifically mentions ‘guns’. It states that, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”)
Arms includes not only guns, but also grenades, bombs, and other “weapons of mass destruction”. Indeed, arguably the Second Amendment prohibits the government from preventing people from building their own nuclear devices. Where should one draw the line? Traditionally, the Supreme Court used the first phrase of the amendment to draw the line: “A well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free State.” Working from this, the Court had, until very recently, held that the amendment only protected the ability of state and local governments to establish and operate their own military or paramilitary forces unimpeded by restrictions from the federal government. I know of virtually no one who would find that reading objectionable.
When things became problematic was when the Court’s newer “original intent” proponent justices pushed the boundary to allow unorganized individuals, not well regulated militias, to keep and bear weapons, notably guns. Of course, the Court tried to make that reading sound more reasonable by indicating that governments could regulate what kind of guns and could also restrict who could keep and use guns — i.e., machine guns could be outlawed and convicts and the mentally ill could be prohibited from owning guns. However, under their literal read of the Second Amendment, such “reasonable” restrictions are still infringements, and therefore violate the amendment. In other words, the Court tried to take stake out a middle ground position that is illogical. Either the Second Amendment is aimed at well regulated militias and nothing else, or it’s open season for the arms market.
More broadly, the combination of people and guns does kill people; and far more efficiently than other more “primitive” weapons. If one looks abroad, there’s a strong correlation between countries with less regulated arms sales and those with higher rates of gun-related crimes. While once can reasonably make an exception for guns that are not efficient for killing (or threatening) people, such as bb guns or single-shot target pistols and rifles, there’s little question that eliminating the remainder of the private arms market would reduce gun crimes, and most specifically fatal shootings.
That brings us to the second slogan: “If guns are made illegal, only criminals will have guns.” Let’s neglect the obvious truism in the slogan — obviously if guns are illegal, if you have a gun you are, by definition, a criminal. The argument is that criminals will get their guns one way or another regardless of their legality, while law-abiding citizens who want a gun for a legitimate purpose will be those most affected by prohibiting legal private gun ownership.
Now, of course, there are ways that a gun possession statute could be tailored to minimize its impact on legitimate gun ownership interests. As I’ve noted, there could be an exception for single-shot weapons, especially those used primarily for hunting or target practice. There could also be an exception for participants in a “well regulated militia”. State and local governments often have auxiliary police detachments. Those participating in such detachments could be authorized to own appropriate weaponry. Such detachments would also allow state and local government to exercise appropriate control over who gets to join such groups and how they function, as well as to provide appropriate training on safe firearm storage and use that could minimize the number of accidental shootings that happen with our currently uncontrolled private gun ownership.
More broadly, however, the argument about making private gun ownership illegal could equally be applied to many other venues. For example, “If crack cocaine ownership is made illegal, only criminals will have crack cocaine.” Of course, crack cocaine ownership now is illegal. So maybe we should make crack cocaine ownership legal so that those who aren’t otherwise criminals can “safely” own (and use) crack cocaine? You can substitute your favorite illegal substance or activity into the syllogism, for example, machine guns, IEDs, or lynchings. They all work equally well. The point is, the argument only works when the illegality would unreasonably restrict any substance or activity that those we consider law-abiding citizens would expect to want to have or do. Where does gun ownership fit into that? Hunting (of animals, not people) and target practice are both generally considered reasonable activities for law-abiding citizens. As pointed out earlier, however, it would be relatively simple to craft laws that would allow both hunting and target shooting to continue unimpeded while still prohibiting the sale or private ownership of guns like the semi-automatic magazine-carrying Glock handgun used in last week’s killings.
Where things maybe get a little fuzzier is in the area of “self-protection”. This is, in large measure, where the slogan is aimed. Its focus is on people who fear being victimized by a gun-toting criminal. Let’s look more carefully at that. The vast majority of criminal use of guns (not counting gun battles between criminal gangs) is in armed robberies. In most armed robberies, one of the most important elements in the element of surprise. The person about to commit an armed robbery on a deserted nighttime street doesn’t usually walk up to you with their gun visible from half a block away. They’ll usually wait until they’re right next to, in front of, or behind you, and then brandish their gun and demand your valuables. Even assuming you would habitually carry around a concealed firearm, it’s probably in a holster of some sort with the safety on. By the time you could pull it out and unlatch the safety, you’d have been shot multiple times. In other words, a gun is of little use if the other person has, “got the drop on you.” Even in the home burglary situation, a gun is not necessarily an unalloyed benefit. For one thing, burglars, like other criminals, generally like to do their work undetected. Again, the element of surprise is generally not going to be in your favor. Even in the situation where you hear a funny noise downstairs, grab your gun from your nightstand, switch off the safety and creep downstairs; unless you “get the drop on” the burglar, you may well be looking at a gun battle where you could as easily be the victim as the victor. If you, instead, “shoot first and ask questions later,” you may end up unintentionally shooting your family pet, or even your own daughter or son “caught” in a midnight raid on the refrigerator. Not something most people want to have happen to them. Further, in most neighborhoods armed burglaries are extremely uncommon. It’d be interesting to compile statistics about how often an attempted burglary has been thwarted by a gun-toting homeowner versus other possible outcomes, including having the burglar apprehended by police, having the burglar flee when disturbed, and, conversely having an innocent pet or person shot by mistake.
The slogan also fails to consider the effect of making private gun ownership illegal on decreasing the supply of guns available to criminals. (Virtually all of the recent mass-murderers had obtained their guns legally.) Many guns owned by criminals were originally legal guns that were stolen from their rightful owner. If there were no legal private gun owners, the supply of guns to the criminal community would be greatly curtailed.
The bottom lines — slogans about gun ownership sound great when ranted on a radio show or silk-screened onto a tee-shirt, but they don’t stand up well to rational scrutiny.
