Point Blank
Doyle, Kevin
WHO BUYS GUNS? POINT BLANK Guns and Violence in America Gary Kleck Aldine de Gruyter, $59.95, 512 pp. Kevin Doyle Whether taken as symptomatic of our bloodthirst or proof of our...
...It's particularly misplaced in a controversy where one camp, the armed one, constantly warns of hidden agendas and slippery slopes...
...Gun ownership varies regionally, with a Rocky Mountain high and a New England low...
...Further, he finds the womanunderarms no rarity...
...Such novelty might give pause to those Americans most vulnerable to crime...
...He cites some surveys to suggest the handgun is used defensively more often than offensively, that the handgun prevents victimization more often than it facilitates victimization...
...Given that Kleck locates methodological flaws or insufficient samplings in so many critical firearms studies, it's odd that he would offer any but the most tentative conclusions...
...And as noted by distinguished controlproponent Franklin Zimring in Scientific American this fall, the disarming of civilians, amidst soaring crime rates, would be novel in the history of Western nations...
...Kleck, however, points out that Great Britain also enjoys a far lower rate of nonfirearm violence...
...Kleck, finally, presses for recognition of handguns (and long arms) as tools critical to civilians defending against crime...
...More importantly, social science measurements, ultimately, must anchor so emotional a debate as gun control...
...discretionary sentenceenhancement for armed criminals...
...About 40 percent were homicides and 5 percent were accidental...
...Such studies, though, hardly persuade, when, as Kleck admits, they turn on respondents' characterization of their own gun use...
...News to count 70,000 women on the NRA membership roster...
...Gun ownership is higher in those groups and locales where violence is lower...
...Both blacks and women, for instance, clearly favor at least moderate gun regulation...
...These include: a national background check to prevent sales to minors, felons, violent misdemeanants, repeat perpetrators of alcohol-related offenses, and historically violent patients released from mental institutions...
...It is not the younger, poorer, single, urbanized individual who is more likely to own a gun...
...Indeed Kleck falters when he gets too far ahead of the available data and concludes Point Blank with a chapter of policy recommendations...
...Although he favors gun control, Kleck argues that polls, along with handgun-only hunting seasons, suggest that handguns are widely kept for legitimate sport...
...Kevin Doyle Whether taken as symptomatic of our bloodthirst or proof of our self-reliance, the firearm—along with Motown, Capra movies, McDonald's, and bourbon—is quintessentially American...
...Handguns, not shoulder weapons, figured in these fatalities most often...
...Be warned that the above arguments, like all the others in Point Blank, grow up in the thick statistical underbrush...
...Study after study is cited (and very often faulted...
...Kleck notes, though, that the black or female gun owner is more likely to keep the gun solely for self-defense, with the black owner four times more likely than average to keep his gun loaded...
...26: 5 June 1992 Commonweal...
...But, overall, roughly half the nation's households, and a quarter of its shops, keep a pistol, a long arm, or both...
...Handguns, likewise, figured in 540,000 of the 650,000 crimes in which guns served as at least threatening props...
...We all know about the mailorder rifle used to slay a gallant young president in the year national gun control debate first took root...
...Such substitution, Kleck contends—in what's become a hot and yet cloudy academic debate—could well lead to increased fatalities since a rifle wound brings death more easily than a handgun wound...
...and private transfer regulation...
...The figures are startling...
...For many, such statistics convey some bloody, horrible news...
...Even in the 1970s, for instance, heavily gun-controlled England and Wales had a firearm homicide rate that was eightyfive times lower than ours...
...It is the experience of other countries, Kleck maintains, that makes the case for American gun control...
...He also notes that the gun homicide rate among citizens of Japan, where civilian gun ownership is almost unknown, is about twice as high as among persons of Japanese descent living in America, where one can almost drive up and order a .38 to go with a side of fries...
...Finally, however, it is not how Kleck concludes but that he concludes at all which troubles most...
...It is the older, richer, married person living in the country or a small town...
...Any major gun reform in our fortified country is bound to be a very big deal in conception, enactment, and enforcement...
...The one attitudinal survey linking prejudice and gun-ownership, moreover, did so not based on a direct correlation but because racism was significantly related to a "tough-oncrime" stance, a stance marginally related to gun-ownership...
...the prose is largely "understandable to a general nonscholarly audience...
...Kleck has some very provocative and valuable perspectives on gun control...
...In Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, criminal justice professor Gary Kleck aims, inter alia, to make liberal thinking about guns a little less comfy and cozy...
...Kleck underscores, further, that over three-quarters of the households with handguns also stock rifles or shotguns...
...He is least convincing here...
...A racism association has totally eluded other researchers...
...But the final word is not yet in anybody's sights...
...The statisticians' lingo winds through almost every chapter...
...dealer licensing...
...They point to one of the coziest and most wholesome tenets of the liberal creed—gun control...
...Unfortunately, the reader never knows whether these prescriptions represent prudent compromises in Kleck 's position, for he never flatly proclaims the regulatory (or prohibitory) scenario he thinks ideal...
...At the same time, only the willfully naive can assume that millions of armed lawabiders have no gross crime-inhibiting effect...
...More than one in ten females can boast gun ownership (recently allowing U.S...
...Still, writer Kleck substantially sticks to his introductory promise...
...Just a few: The American gun owner is ignorant, macho, and more likely to commit violent acts and harbor racist Commonweal 5 June 1992: 25 sentiments than the nonowner...
...Limiting himself to the currently feasible, he rather lets political consensus preempt personal conviction...
...Kleck discerns little correlation between ownership and education...
...And she'll learn that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antigun laws targeted Southern blacks, immigrants, and other "troublemakers...
...The professed liberal Democrat does an interesting job...
...Less symbolically and more substantively, Kleck, though shunning all Second Amendment absolutism, casts empirical doubt on some of the most fundamental assumptions, spoken and unspoken, of gun opponents...
...Not surprisingly therefore, of all the handguns sold annually, arguably, no more than 2 percent will ever be criminally employed...
...more rigorous enforcement of state carry laws...
...Of course, our society's arsenal-at-large, consisting of 100 to 200 million guns, ceases to be an anthropological oddity and becomes a public policy concern once the body count begins: 1985, with over 30,000 national gun deaths, was not unusual...
...Our civilian population has armed itself more heavily than any other on the planet...
...Suicides accounted for the majority of these deaths...
...Kleck's reader, however, learns early on that JFK was himself a gun owner and lifetime NRA member...
...This mode of discourse, while not unprecedented, is nonetheless, ass-backwards...
...Still, they also point to an obvious fix, a neat social reform that should reduce carnage and, culturally, take off some rough red-neck edges...
...This, naturally, means many people would likely replace the side arm, if banished, with the available long arm...
...She will also learn that Eleanor Roosevelt held a carry permit for a revolver...
...Further, one does not demonstrate civilian handiness with guns by simply challenging the cliche of the paperboy mistaken for the burglar...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 11
