Point Blank and The Samurai / the Mountie and the Cowboy
Kleck, Gary & Kopel, David B.
I once attended a conference on gun-control policy. Most of the participants were earnest scholars, but a few were real gun enthusiasts. At one point, a law professor spoke of the gulf between gun...
...Rape was virtually unheard Of and women walked freely through Dodge City and such towns, even at night, without fear of abusive language, let alone physical assault...
...You shouldn't call us pro-gun," she chided...
...Two recent books on the problems of gun control document the "pro-choice" case for guns particularly well...
...For example, Kopel acknowledges that the extreme individualism of American society may be responsible for the extraordinarily high rate of violent crime in contemporary America (though he is quick to note that the pattern extends to violence with knives or other weapons as much as to gun crimes...
...For all the Court's efforts to safeguard abortion, obstetricians have become increasingly reluctant to perform abortions or to be seen doing so...
...Kopel's book is not simply a collection of historical curiosities...
...On the one hand, disarming the potential victims of crime may make criminals bolder...
...In fact, he is "a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizaJeremy A. Rabkin is an associate professor of government at Cornell University...
...This has not led judges to question gun-control measures (even when couched as total prohibitions on private gun ownership...
...And even in the United States, suicide rates are higher in communities where guns are less widely held...
...Even today, while Japan is quite efficient in keeping guns away from civilians, its gun controls are only one part of a wide network of controls: local police constables monitor neighborhood doings, down to the dating patterns of teenage girls (and do not hesitate to warn the girls when their dating partners are regarded as unsuitable...
...Kopel doesn't let himself get bogged down in statistical regressions...
...The states of continental Europe have long feared to allow their own peoples to have guns, and Kopel argues that this reflects a pattern dating to the efforts of modernizing princes to keep their subjects under control...
...There are many disputed findings in this literature and much remaining uncertainty, but Kleck compiles impressively extensive evidence on several key points...
...Kleck shows that strict gun controls in cities like Washington and New York have had no demonstrable effect in constraining criminal use of guns...
...Even in Britain, Canada, and Australia, with traditionally limited governments, gun ownership has been severely restricted in recent decades, and Kopel traces the ease with which such restrictions have been implemented to greater patterns of deference to state authority...
...But neither, Kopel stresses, do they have to contend with anything like the American Civil Liberties Union, and these two facts are closely related...
...He may overdo it at times...
...He invokes the armed citizen militias fending off British regulars in the Revolution—an experience subsequently enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution...
...At one point, a law professor spoke of the gulf between gun control advocates and "pro-gun forces...
...But it is certainly true that banning guns will not prevent people from obtaining ready access to guns in underground markets...
...Kleck speculates that people who are more aware of nearby suicides, or more tempted by suicide themselves, are more fearful of gun ownership...
...Kleck's book reads less like the work of a political liberal, however, than of an academic sociologist—which he also is (at Florida State University...
...But The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy remains a well-researched, carefully argued book...
...He dwells on the westward pioneers, deploying their guns against dangerous animals, Indians, and cattle rustlers—experiences enshrined in Hollywood film...
...Along the way, Kopel offers a number of fun facts...
...Vigilante justice," the bugaboo of contemporary gun-control advocates, was at one time considered an entirely honorable and necessary adjunct to the ponderous machinery of official justice: in 1890, Kopel reports, there were four U.S...
...But she didn't laugh...
...While gun wounds are more likely to be fatal than knife wounds, gun crimes less often result in any wound—whether as the result of greater caution around the more dangerous weapon or greater difficulties in aiming...
...But Kleck demonstrates that gun-control measures are also likely to cost lives...
...opel reinforces the point by K showing that much of the momentum for gun control in twentieth-century America has been motivated by fear that guns would indeed be too equalizing—affording too much selfassurance to political radicals, immigrants in the northern cities, blacks in the South, and others feared by the majority...
...Advocates of "choice" on abortion usually deplore emotional moralism and seek to focus attention instead on the practical difficulties of abortion restrictions, on the equity and enforcement problems they would raise, and on the challenge they would present to constitutional rights...
...Kopel traces the American fascination with guns to the founding experiences of the nation...
...Yet there are many parallels in these debates...
...Other countries do not have to contend with a political force like the National Rifle Association...
...But judicial decisions, after all, bear only a remote connection to national traditions or to the deeper currents of public sentiment...
...his sort of cultural speculation T is the central concern of David Kopel's book, which is much more readable and in many ways much more fun than Kleck's...
...In the abortion debate, choice advocates insist that no one exercises this choice lightly...
...In Japan, the peasantry was systematically disarmed in the seventeenth century by a samurai elite that feared the leveling effects of guns on a society where rank was confirmed by elaborate rituals of sword use...
...Yet even if one assumes that gun-control measures will—somehow—also disarm violent criminals, the result may still be more loss of life...
...Kopel argues, with much persuasiveness, that tight governmental control on gun ownership in other countries has reflected the hierarchical, statist character of these societies, even as the prevalence of guns in America reflects its own individualistic and egalitarian culture...
...Historically, an armed population was not seen as a threat to peace and order in America but quite the reverse...
...American speech is still "loaded with gun metaphors" ("going off half-cocked," "high caliber," "bite the bullet," "straight shooter"—he lists over thirty such phrases whose origins are often forgotten...
...It demonstrates that America's gun culture reflects enduring aspects of its larger political culture...
...Robbery and other crimes were vastly less common in the Old West than in contemporary America...
...But Kleck notes that the suicide rate in the United States is actually very much lower than in countries where guns are not available...
...Yet he seems to take it for granted that little can be done to enhance social controls without infringing constitutional liberties...
...He was interrupted by a woman who was clearly a gun enthusiast (proved by the gun-shaped ornament she wore around her neck...
...The point is brought out through contrasts with other countries, where civilian gun ownership has been largelysuppressed...
...G ary Kleck begins his book with a "voluntary disclosure notice" affirming that he "is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or a contributor to, the National Rifle Association , . . nor has he received funding for research from any such organization...
...Canada maintained order on the western frontier with "Mounties"—federal mounted police—and never developed anything like the citizen posses or vigilantes of the American West...
...Though ammunition is not nearly so durable as guns, it is much easier to make illicitly, according to Kleck, so that even restrictions on ammunition sales are not likely to have much effect on criminal use of guns...
...It is probably true, for example, that banning legal abortion will not prevent large-scale resort to illegal abortions...
...Guns are a threat to others, guns actually kill, whereas abortion . . . but it would be in poor taste to dwell on this point...
...In contrast to the abortion right proclaimed in Roe v. Wade, the right to bear arms is expressly guaranteed in the Bill of Rights...
...We are simply pro-choice on guns...
...For example, he notes that guns were America's first manufacturing export—and at one time the most important, for American guns were the first to be made with in-terchangeable, precision-tooled parts...
...Kleck presents extensive evidence that gun owners are generally quite careful with their weapons...
...And it shows clearly that access to guns is an old and fundamental tradition in America—in a way that abortion clearly is not...
...But it may be that gun ownership is steadying to the nerves...
...Even in the wildest mining towns of the Old West, however, the murder rate was less than in contemporary Washington, D.C., with its strict gun-control laws...
...But it displays an encyclopedic grasp of the social-science literature on guns and violence, which is by now quite vast: a list of published studies on the subject at the end of this book stretches to almost thirty pages of closely packed print, and Kleck seems to feel compelled to comment on the technical flaws and merits of almost every one of these studies...
...Kleck also notes evidence that a very large number of crimes are foiled when the would-be victims turn out to be armed...
...Similarly, abortion restrictions may drive many women to seek "back-alley abortions" posing serious, sometimes fatal, health hazards...
...Kleck notes in this regard that in Canada and other countries where guns are much less widely held, burglars frequently go after houses even when the residents are at home: in America, where burglars know that homeowners may well be armed, burglars overwhelmingly seek empty houses...
...On reflection, I began to think she had a point...
...01...
...National controls are not likely to be much more effective when there are already some 200 million guns in private hands in this country...
...I thought it was a joke...
...tions...
...Gun accidents and suicides are trumpeted by control advocates, but Kleck shows that gun accidents are actually relatively rare and gun suicides are . . . well, not entered into lightly, either...
...The book is not light reading...
...Taken together, they confirm that in the gun-control debate, the "pro-choice" side really does have strong grounds to protest the simpleminded moralism of its opponents...
...And surveys of convicted felons find that a solid majority agree that "a criminal is not going to mess around with a victim he knows is armed with a gun...
...In the end, he does make a compelling case that an effective campaign to disarm the American people would require levels of police surveillance and intervention beyond anything we have previously accepted...
...Contemporary judges prefer government guarantees of "privacy" and "autonomy" to the effective capacity for self-defense...
...Knowing the terms of the debate, Kleck has evidently concluded that one cannot gain a hearing without first displaying appropriate liberal credentials...
...It is the would-be victims, of course, who are most likely to be disarmed by gun control measures, as criminals are not likely to pay as much attention to gun laws...
...Kopel's book—sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute—continually seeks to connect government controls with "repression...
...He is a lawyer who has worked in the American West, and has a good eye for the telling little fact that gives punch to a wider argument...
...Most "choice" advocates in the abortion debate would probably reject the analogy with indignation...
...senators and several state governors who boasted of their past service as "vigilantes," protecting their communities against outlaw depredations...
...It is true that guns are the most common and the most reliable instrument of suicide in the United States...
...No one has reported any similar reticence at gun stores...
...On all of these grounds, the case against restrictions on guns is a good deal stronger than the case against restrictions on abortion...
Vol. 26 • August 1993 • No. 8
