THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Shooting Straight: Telling the Truth about Guns in America by Wayne La-Pierre and James J. Baker (Regnery, 202 pp., $27.95) and Can Gun Control Work? by James B....
...Bottum...
...Most refreshingly, Jacobs acknowledges that the 1990s' epic decreases in crime— along with the preceding decades' increases—had little to do with guns and suggests that policymakers could better direct their energy and attention elsewhere...
...Where We Are Now...
...He "assumes that guns are a problem" and says, repeatedly, that he has no ideological problem with efforts to limit the availability of firearms...
...and devolution of many gun-policy issues to the state and local level...
...by James B. Jacobs (Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $27.50...
...How We'll Win by Michael A. Ledeen (St...
...Read these two books and you'll discover a curious thing: The case against gun control is made better by a left-wing academic than it is by the leaders of the nation's foremost pro-gun lobbying group...
...LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president, and Baker, a former director of its lobbying arm, have produced a book that is windy, sloppy, and unen-lightening—padded with white space, pulled quotations, a speech by Senator Zell Miller, and off-topic rants about subjects ranging from tort law to Oliver Stone...
...He comes up with a modest series of proposals: improved efforts to catch criminals who use or possess guns (a proposal LaPierre and Baker also endorse...
...Unlike most scholars—not to mention a great many politicians—Jacobs has taken the time to understand how guns actually work and which groups of people firearms regulations typically harm...
...Martin's, 262 pp., $24.95...
...Eli Lehrer The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened...
...September 11 restored it, and Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, sets forth a quick and readable case for the political and military steps necessary to translate that will into success...
...If that's true, then the terrorists made a terrible miscalculation when they escalated their attacks to destroy the World Trade Center...
...The long series of small murders and petty slaughters since the 1970s—an American Jew here, a pair of Marines there, even a destroyed barracks and a downed airplane—seemed to be sapping our will...
...one-gun-per-month restrictions on purchasers...
...In spite of himself, however, he makes a compelling case against existing gun-control measures and the wisdom of new ones...
...Although an all-out ban on gun shows seems extreme given the scanty evidence that criminals get weapons there, Jacobs still makes a convincing case that such shows are "tailor-made for selling stolen guns and . . . avoiding . . . background checks...
...Worse, it doesn't show even the most perfunctory signs of fact-checking: The authors use outdated crime statistics, take on straw men that even the most zealous gun-control groups have stopped talking about, and even mistype the names of such well-known organizations as AOL Time Warner...
...LaPierre and Baker repeatedly put forward the sensible idea that an armed citizenry provides good protection against terror attacks, but they support it with little more than quotations from Teddy Roosevelt and boasts about the NRA...
...LaPierre and Baker offer almost no original thoughts: Their short chapters combine oft-repeated pro-gun arguments with random dollops of commonsense advice about fighting terrorism...
...a total ban on gun shows...
...We neither foresaw nor forestalled the attacks of September 11—but we could have, and our "primary failure," says Michael Ledeen, "was political, a lack of will...
...Jacobs's lucid history of twentieth-century gun control and its abject failure in preventing crime is a good reason to read Can Gun Control Work...
...They even claim that Israel has permissive gun laws, though Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership—a group that equates nearly all gun regulations with Nazism—finds that it does not...
...Meanwhile, NYU professor James B. Jacobs, a former student of the prominent left-wing criminologist Franklin Zimring, is hardly the person one would expect to make LaPierre and Baker's arguments for them...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 3
