The Great American Gun Debate/No More Wacos

...And most gun-owners tell pollsters they would be ready to use the gun in self-defense...

...Jefferson, who remains a favorite of civil libertarians for his admonitions against overpowerful government, was—as most civil libertarians now tend to forget—quite enthusiastic about gun-ownership...

...They generally avoid shrill polemical tones and certainly they betray no sympathy for extremist violence...

...Kates offers a quotation from a letter Jefferson wrote to his 15-year-old nephew, regarding the proper regimen to maintain a "strong body": As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun...

...The one characteristic substantially distinguishing them from the general populace is that they are much more likely to report having been the victim of violent crime...

...The best argument for this policy is that local police apparently never had any trouble with Randy Weaver or David Koresh, neither of whom was causing any trouble to local people...

...In yet another chapter, Kates skewers common misperceptions fostered by gun-control advocates and passed along by a credulous or biased media...

...What alarms the authors is that even with so much of this evidence already in public view, Janet Reno's Justice Department managed to escape serious condemnation and no serious reforms have been undertaken to ensure that such outrages do not occur in the future...

...And such wider complaints rang true for many liberals because politicians on the right were still trying to win elections by appealing to racial resentments or anti-Communist alarms...

...They also assemble a good deal of evidence that BATF agents fired first in the shoot-out that resulted when the agents mounted a military-style assault on the compound to arrest Koresh for illegal gun possession...

...Republicans have been skittish about the gun issue ever since...

...While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind...

...Similarly, he notes, individual instances in which adult (civilian) gun-owners kill someone by mistake receive wide publicity but are actually rare, running about 30 per year—while the annual rate of erroneous killing of innocent people by police is 5-to-n times higher...

...Both books take as their premise —though they do not quite put it this way—that antigun hysteria is the contemporary liberal counterpart of those partisan alarms about the Red menace—or the black militant menace —that so exasperated an earlier generation of liberals...

...and Gary Kleck Pacific &search Institute for Public Policy /30o pages / $16.95 No More Wacos: What's Wrong With Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It David B. Kopel and Paul H. Blackman Prometheus Books /4.41 pages / $26.95 REVIEWED BY Jeremy Rabkin I n the late 1960's, the left-wing of the Democratic Party gave at least a sympathetic hearing to charges that the FBI, having previously framed Alger Hiss JEREMY RABKIN is a professor of government at Cornell University...

...Given the wealth of data demonstrating the efficacy of gun-ownership as a means of defense, some such pacifist thinking must lie behind such determined advocates as James and Sarah Brady who have said that "the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes...

...In fact, in surveys of prison inmates convicted of violent crime, 42 percent said they had run into a victim who was armed with a gun and 43 percent said they had, at some time in their criminal careers, "decided not to commit a crime because they knew or believed the victim was carrying a gun...

...What No More Wacos also demonstrates is that the Waco affair was the culmination of a long pattern of abuse in which BATF agents have ransacked homes without proper warrants, questioned suspects with abusive force, and confiscated property on vague allegations...

...This equation is indeed championed by the federal government's Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which in recent years has sponsored and publicized research findings treating handgun-ownership as a "public health threat," just like narcotic addictions or AIDS...

...Paul Blackman, one of the co-authors of No More Wacos, is, in fact, an official "research coordinator" at the National Rifle Association, while David Kopel has published two previous, well-researched books in defense of gun-ownership...

...Though many gun-owners are primarily oriented toward hunting or recreational use of guns, a 1989 survey found that almost 80 March 1998 • The American Spectator two-thirds of gun-owners (62 percent) acknowledge protection from crime as one of their reasons for owning guns...

...President Clinton moved quickly to denounce fevered anti-government rhetoric...

...Still, as Kates protests, editorial writers, when campaigning for stricter gun laws, are quite ready to stigmatize gun-owners as "gun nuts," "gun fetishists," "terrorists," "vigilantes," "thugs," and "bullet-brains" (again he provides citations), fostering "a bigoted stereotype which would be recognized and denounced as such if directed against gays, Jews, African-Americans or virtually any group other than gun-owners...

...But despite the demonstration of NRA political support in the Republican electoral sweep of the previous fall, the spring of 1995 proved a most awkward moment to air the accumulated grievances and concerns of gun-owners...

...Self-reliance was once widely understood as a safeguard against dangerous dependence on government...

...He offers, as not altogether unrepresentative, the plea of a Methodist minister who urged that even the "woman accosted in the park by a rapist" should remember that "criminals are members of the larger community...or, as Jesus put it, our brothers...

...Even Koresh's "brides" were sharing his bed with the approval of their parents...

...They do point out, however, that Koresh, who had pursued Bible studies with rabbis in Israel, gained the leadership of a 50year-old sect (the Davidian branch of the Adventist church) by impressing his following with his preaching...

...The resort to military backup and reliance on military equipment and methods, along with draconian confiscation laws, were breaks with past constitutional tradition that began in the 1980's in the context of intensified efforts to control drug use...

...What BATF did learn, however (from the reports of an undercover agent sent to spy on the Davidians), was that Koresh had a lot of guns and a lot of hostility to the BATF...

...Jefferson would surely be startled at the premise of contemporary gun-control advocates—that people would be safer if the government prevented them from using guns to defend themselves...

...Nearly half of those who report a DGU are women and disproportionately single women...

...B attling such perceptions is the main aim of The Great American Gun Debate...

...Yet as Kopel and Blackman repeatedly hint, much of what they say about the excesses of federal gun-control operations could be said as well about the federal "war on drugs...

...11 chapter, co-authored by a Columbia University medical school professor (John Lattimer), a professor of bio-statistics at the Minnesota School of Public Health (James Boen), and a former Stanford Law professor (Donald Kates), which demonstrates the "bias and mendacity in the public health literature on gun usage...

...The Great American Gun Debate has several chapters highlighting media bias against guns and gun-owners...

...Nor are followers of the Aryan Nations—or bizarre religious sects like Koresh's Branch Davidians— exactly the sort of people with whom contemporary Republicans want to be associated...

...David Koresh, who led his followers in Waco to fiery deaths at the end of another FBI-BATF siege, was a grotesque caricature of a religious authoritarian...

...DGUs, according to Kleck, are essentially exercises in self-defense rather than organized efforts to pursue criminals: "The late twentieth century substitute for vigilantism is individualistic resistance to criminals by those directly victimized...

...But the authors' main plea is to repeal most federal gun laws and get the federal government out of a mission that now invites excessive militarization, dangerously exaggerated shows of force, and a general sense of official hubris...

...and the Rosenbergs and other alleged Communists, was now conspiring to disrupt the anti-war movement, to kill innocent black men in a vicious conspiracy to destroy the Black Panther movement, and generally to perpetrate the abuses of a secret police...

...An essay by Donald Kates, which appears as the last chapter in The Great American Gun Debate, suggests this conclusion would not at all have startled Americans of earlier generations...

...But that is only the foreground...

...Kleck vehemently rejects the claim that these figures represent a vast tide of "vigilante" activities, however...

...So, while gun accidents involving children receive a good deal of publicity, they are actually quite rare...

...Some ten to fifteen children under the age of six are killed in handgun accidents each year—which is about half the number who die fromingesting common household poisons (iron supplements, ant killer, cleaning fluid, etc...

...His followers in Waco, who included a respected local attorney, an electrical engineer, and other quite educated and capable people, could (and did) go freely in and out of Koresh's compound and remained in contact with friends and relatives outside...

...Their tone is sometimes reminiscent of those reports that used to be issued by pious liberal jurists in the 1960's, disavowing the goals of the Panthers or of the campus SDS but still intoning that "abuses" in the treatment of such groups deserved "the attention of every thoughtful citizen...

...Kates provides all the citations for anyone who wants to review this now impressive body of literature...

...Not a few people noticed the irony in the mid-1990's, when conservative Republicans began to heed claims that the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had indulged in murderous rampages at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and at Waco, Texas...

...and one-sixth the number who drown in swimming pool or bathtub accidents...

...W hat is most compelling about The Great American Gun Debate, however, is not its effort to rebut exaggerated fears about guns or gun-owners...

...Kopel and Blackman have many practical suggestions for reform, such as allowing victims of law-enforcement abuse a more reliable civil remedy against the offending officers, so that agents know they will be personally responsible for their abuses...

...All these fringe phenomena were readily associated with rage against the federal government and the demented act of Tim McVeigh was assumed to be motivated by such rage, given its target and timing—a federal office building, blown up on the second anniversary of the Waco fire...

...households and 31 percent of adults reported owning a gun in a 1993 survey...

...For example, a National Public Radio series by Nina Totenberg reported that the NRA's view of the Second Amendment can find no support in "America's law schools or its scholarly journals" — when, in fact, of more than 6o law review articles on the subject since 1980, "only a handful" deny that the Second Amendment was intended to protect individual gun-ownership...

...They are somewhat more likely to live in urban areas, somewhat more likely to be black or Hispanic, but also somewhat more affluent or middle class compared with gun-owners — or even compared with non-gun-owners...

...But while pointing out these connections and deploring the excesses of the drug war, too, No More Wacos does not urge the repeal of federal drug laws as it does with federal gun laws...

...They do not reach any firm judgment about whether Koresh's followers, after a 50-day siege, deliberately set fire to the compound in a willful act of martyrdom (as the government claims) or whether the devastating fire was inadvertently set off by the federal assault team...

...The American Spectator • March 1998 81 Taking these two books together suggests a conclusion which now appears paradoxical: that the country would be safer if federal authority were demilitarized and substantially disarmed, but more private citizens armed...

...Both books are, however, impressively well-documented and soberly argued...

...Each of these books seeks, in effect, to revive the challenge to prevailing policies that was overwhelmed in the reverberations of the Oklahoma City bomb blast...

...Almost all the evidence for these tales of official lawlessness are drawn from public documents, including congressional testimony, various law-enforcement files, J The American Spectator • March 1998 79 and reports of official inquiries...

...It was, almost as much as the ill-fated confrontation over the budget that year, a turning point for Clinton, allowing him to reposition himself as the nation's 78 March 1998 • The American Spectator shield against right-wing extremists and their reckless allies in the new Republican Congress...

...It includes an instructive44 Kates skewers common misperceptions fostered by gun-control advocates and passed along by a credulous media...

...In the Randy Weaver case, a paid BATF agent first persuaded Weaver to refit a shotgun in a way that is illegal, paying him for the service and directing him on exactly how it should be done—and then set in motion a BATF raid on Weaver's remote mountain cabin in which agents killed his wife and son...

...Liberals in the 1960's and early 70's were receptive to the claims about FBI abuse because such claims echoed wider notions of a government abusively targeting racial minorities and "obsessed with subversives...

...What they do document is that the final FBI-BATF assault on Koresh's compound deployed grossly disproportionate force...

...Among other things, this chapter notes that CDC-sponsored studies base key claims on statistical breakdowns of handgun usage, which these studies attribute to standard government reports — reports that turn out not to include any separate breakdown of handgun usage at all...

...Being threatened or shot at by a gun-wielding victim is more likely than arrest and far more likely than conviction or incarceration...

...Where the Black Panthers professed to admire Castro and Che Guevara, Randy Weaver—whose wife and son were killed in the joint FBIBATF operation at Ruby Ridge —had been associated with the Aryan Nations...

...Thus what Kleck calls episodes of "DGU" (defense gun use) are twice as common as police arrests for violent crime and burglary (1,16o,000 in 1993...

...On both sides, there was a readiness to embrace particular sensational charges because they resonated with a wider sense of victimization...

...77 Janet Reno claimed that federal authorities were concerned about child abuse in the Davidian compound, the Justice Department could not subsequently adduce any basis for this claim...

...Gun use, like drug use, is seen by much of the country as having no redeeming value, while, again like drug use, often bringing havoc and tragedy in its wake...

...The authors do not try to make Koresh a sympathetic figure and do not mince words on his "loathsome" sexual practices (in taking several young teenage "brides...

...Rather, the book is most remarkable for the evidence it presents about how much guns do, in fact, contribute to personal security...

...No sooner were the hearings under way when the horrifying bombing in Oklahoma City prompted a wave of excited media reports on private "militias," gun-nuts, and right-wing extremists...

...Of course, the Feds have been goring different oxen in the past decade...

...And this time, liberals rallied to the defense of law and order and demanded trust and respect for law enforcement officials...

...Though44 The Waco assault team made use of chemical weapons already banned by international treaty...

...Another national survey in 1989 found that 78 percent of gun-owners would even be "willing to shoot a burglar" (Kleck's italics...

...04 82 March 1998 • The American Spectator...

...In fact, those who report DGUs seem not much different than other Americans...

...In 1995, the House of Representatives, as one of the first priorities of its new Republican majority, launched recriminatory hearings on what had happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco...

...Some 90 percent of prisoners who did encounter an armed victim had been "scared off, shot, wounded or captured at least once by such a victim...

...Games played with the ball, and the others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind...

...A great many Americans, however, see the war on drugs and the war on guns as parallel responses to similar social crises...

...Based on a review of subsequent testimony by the then Director of the BATF, Kopel and Blackman conclude that the agency decided to make a search of Koresh's compound not only because of his strange religious views but also (and perhaps more importantly) because of his "pro-gun views, criticism of federal gun laws and hostility toward the BATF...

...As Kleck notes, "1300 to 2800 criminals are killed by gun-wielding private citizens each year...

...Bearing arms was seen as a sign of civic virtue, proving one's capacity for self-defense, even against an abusive government...

...He notes that while most Americans still approve of self-defense — even if it involves violent or even fatal retaliation — many advocates of gun control argue, with a certain consistency, that it is wrong to use violence, even in self-defense...

...Studies indicate that they are not that different from the rest of America—as one might expect from a group that includes almost half the nation: 49 percent of U.S...

...The National Rifle Association, which had long been critical of BATF abuses, urged such oversight and provided a good deal of staff support in organizing the hearings...

...Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, assembles some eye-opening data on this point...

...N o More Wacos has a more uphill struggle in this respect...

...There is, as Donald Kates notes in adifferent chapter, a genuine difference of opinion about the propriety of self-defense...

...Don Kates reports in another chapter on the relentless misrepresentation of gun stories in the mass media...

...So again, there is sensational media coverage of particular crimes of passion, but it is wrong to infer that the presence of guns frequently causes a lovers' quarrel or a family dispute —among otherwise law-abiding individuals —to result in a fatal shooting: 90 percent of murderers actually have serious criminal records and are in no way simply ordinary folk who impulsively grab for a gun in a momentary fit of rage...

...Based on a careful survey which Kleck organized—which included sizable samples in 48 states—he estimates that "each year in the U.S...

...Hence in another survey of convicted felons—most of whom are presumably rather informed about the risks of their profession —58 percent agreed that "a store owner who is known to keep a gun on the premises is not going to get robbed very often...

...there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million defensive uses of guns of all types by civilians against humans, with about 1.5 to 1.9 million of the incidents involving use of handguns...

...A previous investigation by state authorities—months earlier—had been closed for lack of evidence...

...Among other things, the assault team made use of chemical weapons of a type already banned for military use by international treaty...

...And as Kleck notes, this should hardly be surprising, since there are only 600,000 police officers in the country (fewer than one quarter of whom are on duty at any one time), while there are "tens of millions of civilians who have immediate access to firearms and are well motivated to disrupt crimes directed at themselves, their families or their property...

...But this is not, it appears, boastful fantasy...

...Or else one must have a faith in the efficacy of the police, which most Americans—and certainly most gun-owners — do not share...

...Let your gun therefore be the companion of your walks...

...On the other hand, only a tiny fraction of gun-owners are people with criminal records or a propensity to violence...

...This compares, as he blandly reports, with a total of only143 criminals executed by the criminal justice system between 1967 and 1990...

...The caution seems well-placed...

...Though there were many guns and other firearms in Koresh's compound, all these devices were, so far as the BATF could show, perfectly legal, and, given the num-" ber of adults in the compound, not even such a large store of guns: "If the Branch Davidians had lived in separate houses...their gun-ownership rate would have been unremarkable by Texas standards"—in a state where "45% of [gun-owners] own two to five guns and i.8% own more than five guns...

...Kopel and Blackman offer a good deal of evidence that BATF agents wanted to make a raid on the Koresh compound towin favorable publicity, as they had already prepared press releases and notified the media of the impending raid to assure good coverage...

...Not even the most liberal Democrats in the 1960's wanted to be seen embracing the violent rhetoric of the Black Panther Party...