The Great American Gun Debate. - book reviews

Reason, August-Sept, 1997 by T. Markus Funk

Gun control is one of those subjects on which virtually everyone has an opinion - usually strongly held. Whether pro- or anti-gun control, those opinions are often founded not on facts but on raw emotions fueled by widely publicized misinformation concerning gun use and misuse. Like few books before it, The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms and Violence, by Don B. Kates Jr. and Gary Kleck, pulls together the paramount sociological and criminological issues involved in this very public debate. The result is a readable, concise, and convincing argument that prohibiting civilian firearms possession is an ineffective - in deed, a counterproductive - means to deal with America's crime problem.

Although those who reflexively oppose any regulations on gun ownership may recoil at the authors' claim that "instant background checks, gun owner licensing, and permit-to-purchase systems seem preferable" to outright prohibition, the authors make an airtight case for the social utility of gun ownership. In fact, The Great American Gun Debate takes its analysis a step further by exploring a related - and under-examined - question: Why is there so large a gap between the media's pervasive harping on the unredeemed dangers of firearm ownership and the stream of recent scholarly studies demonstrating the benefits of civilian gun possession?

Kates is a San Francisco-based civil liberties lawyer and criminologist; Kleck is a criminology professor at Florida State University. They are among the most widely recognized and frequently cited experts on firearms issues. Kates authored a 1983 Michigan Law Review article, still the most widely cited treatment of the Second Amendment, that began the small flood of legal scholarship on the constitutional status of private firearms possession and use. Kleck wrote the authoritative Point Blank (1991) and has conducted re search that has conclusively demonstrated the social benefits of civilian gun owner ship.

Interestingly, the authors can't be easily categorized as libertarian or even conservative. In fact, both are rather "conventional" modern liberals, a predisposition they share with many other anti-gun-control scholars. This may surprise some readers, but it turns out that most academics who oppose gun prohibition are liberal, non-hunting civil libertarians who have no connection to, or interest in, the National Rifle Association and its legislative agenda. Kates and Kleck are quick to point out that this scholarly detachment and intellectual honesty stands in telling contrast to the results-oriented anti-gun research that inevitably dominates the headlines.

They also persuasively argue that legislation sought by the major anti-gun groups has nothing to do with "gun control," and everything to do with the ultimate objective of outright prohibition of guns in private hands (as prohibitionists Jim and Sarah Brady have put it, "no private citizen has any reason or need at any time to possess a gun"). The anti-gun lobby, con tend Kates and Kleck, takes what it can where it can, saying whatever it must say to justify its claims. Kates and Kleck suggest that reasonable controls, such as preventing felons and the insane from possessing firearms, are both constitutional and criminologically sound in light of the current research. But, they maintain, out right prohibition of civilian firearm ownership is neither.

While the authors address some constitutional issues, the focus of The Great American Gun Debate is a utilitarian analysis of gun ownership and its effects on criminals and law-abiding citizens alike. This is a strategy that is well worth pursuing: As scholars such as Northwestern Law School's Daniel Polsby have emphasized, the social utility of handguns, not the Second Amendment, is what does and should concern the public most when it comes to gun laws. The authors do note, however, that the academic literature on the Second Amendment is so heavily weighted in favor of interpreting it as protecting the right of individual Americans to possess a firearm that this interpretation has come to be known as the "Standard Model."

The Great American Gun Debate examines the normative consequences of civilian firearms ownership in great depth and very convincing detail, provocatively starting with the idea that the state offers relatively little security to its citizens. (In fact, in 1989's DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the Supreme Court held that the police have no affirmative obligation to provide protection, "even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests.") Fewer than 150,000 police officers are ever on duty at a given time in a country of over 3 million square miles and more than 260 million people. Estimates indicate that a 12-year-old child has an 83 percent chance of being the victim of a violent crime in his or her lifetime, but Department of Justice statistics reveal that for all crimes of violence, the police respond to 911 calls within five minutes only 28 percent of the time. Little wonder, then, that polls consistently show the public to have little confidence in the police's ability to protect them from criminals. Such a state of affairs is one reason why the National Association of Chiefs of Police, the American Federation of Police, and the National Police Officers Association of America all are on record as favoring civilian gun ownership.