Gesture politics

National Review, June 10, 1991

THE DEBATE over the Brady bill is a classic case of liberal evasiveness-and a rare case of Reaganite loss of nerve. Gun control serves mainly to let liberals avoid tackling crime seriously. But as surely as other liberal policies-endless procedural rights for criminals and restrictions on police-increase crime, gun control won't curb it.

That conclusion emerges incontestably from the research collected in Firearms and Violence, edited by Don B. Kates, in which criminologist Gary Kleck subjects the dominant sociological studies of Left and Right to a rigorous statistical analysis, investigating every likely relationship between guns and crimes. He discovers that 1) increased gun ownership does not lead to crime as much as increased crime leads to more gun ownership-a phenomenon made understandable by his discovery that burglars are more likely to be shot by the people they are robbing than to be sent to jail; 2) gun ownership among the law-abiding does not increase crime, even crimes of passion-observations supported by the simultaneous nationwide crime decrease and gun-ownership increase of the Fifties and early Sixties; and 3) increased gun availability for the identifiably violence-prone does lead to an increase in crime.

In other words, broadly based gun control is the unilateral disarmament of the law-abiding. It is irrelevant to reducing crime.

At first glance, the current debate on gun control seems to reflect this reality by centering on effective ways of keeping guns out of violent hands. Liberals defeated the NRA-backed Staggers bill in the House by pointing out that its instantaneous screening system would take years-and federal money-to get going. That was a fair argument, and the motives of the NRA in supporting such unenforceable legislation seem transparently cynical. But the Brady bill, which the House passed, simply transfers the cost onto equally hard-pressed localities. And since Brady's one-week waiting period is only effective insofar as local police devote resources to the screenings, it would mean pulling officers off the neighborhood streets and thus exacerbating the problem-crime-that it claims to solve.

But the greatest liberal dishonesty here is constitutional. Since we are strict constructionists, we do not argue that the Second Amendment permits private ownership of cruise missiles. Still, it plainly guarantees the right to bear arms, not the right to seek permission to bear arms. And that right should either be decently respected or honestly repealed. If gun-control advocates have confidence in their case, let them campaign for a constitutional amendment.

Meanwhile, where are the usual Bill of Rights watchdogs? Perhaps we need an organization to protect rights that are unpopular with civil-libertarians.