Date: Mon, 27 Jun 94 20:53:56 EDT
From: John Grossbohlin <GROSSBOJ%[email protected]>
Subject: File Transfer
To: Jeff Chan <[email protected]>
This article is copyrighted. It was provided by the author, and is
distributed with the permission of the author. It can be uploaded
to other BBSs as long as it is not altered, and it may be cited as
long as credit is given. As per Don Kates' note to me:
"John: If you post this, it must indicate that it is a reprint of
an article which appears in the 1992 PUBLIC INTEREST LAW REVIEW."
John Grossbohlin [email protected] or [email protected]
=================================================================
BIGOTRY, SYMBOLISM AND IDEOLOGY
IN THE BATTLE OVER GUN CONTROL
Don B. Kates, Jr.
It is a truism that gun owners hysterically oppose controls
that are indistinguishable from those they readily accept as
applied to automobiles. Yet underlying this irony are crucial
differences in the rationale and implications for applying even
apparently identical control mechanisms to firearms rather than
cars. For example, automobile regulation is not premised on the
idea that cars are evils from which any decent person would
recoil in horror -- that anyone wanting to possess such an awful
thing is atavistic and warped sexually, intellectually,
educationally and ethically. Nor are driver licensing and car
registration proposed or implemented as ways to radically reduce
the availability of cars to ordinary citizens or to secure the
ultimate goal of denying cars to all but the military, police and
those special individuals whom the military or police select to
receive permits.
But those are the terms many prominent and highly articulate
"gun control" (more correctly, gun prohibition) advocates have
insisted on using over the past three decades in promoting any
kind of control proposal -- no matter how moderate and defensible
it might be when presented in less pejorative terms. For these
advocates, just owning a gun is analogous not to owning a car but
to driving it while inebriated. Thus, in 1967 ---- Harris wrote
in [or told?] the Chicago Daily News: "The mere possession of a
gun is, in itself, an urge to kill, not only by design, but by
accident, by madness, by fright, by bravado." Because advocates
like Harris regard gun ownership as inherently wrong, banning it
does not implicate any issue of freedom of choice. Nor, for the
same reason, do they think that the interests and desires of
those who own, or want to own, guns are entitled to
consideration. "The need that some homeowners and shopkeepers
believe they have for weapons to defend themselves," opined the
Washington Post in 1972, may be dismissed as representing "the
worst instincts in the human character."
The theme of gun ownership as morally illegitimate pervades
the control literature. "[G]un lunatics silence [the] sounds of
civilization," proclaims ---- Braucher [who is he or she? need
some ID] in the Miami Herald.1 In his syndicated column, Garry
Wills, reviles "gun fetishists" and "gun nuts" as "anti-
citizens," "traitors, enemies of their own patriae," people
arming "against their own neighbors." Historian Richard
Hofstadter applies to gun owners D. H. Lawrence's description of
"'the essential American soul'" as "'hard, isolate and a
killer.'" In his 1971 book, Crime in America, former Attorney
General Ramsey Clark decried gun ownership as an insult to the
state because "a state in which a citizen needs a gun to protect
himself from crime has failed to perform its first purpose" and
as a return to barbarism, to "anarchy, not order under law -- a
jungle where each relies on himself for survival." An
alternative ground of denying that the interests of gun owners
deserve respect or consideration has been espoused by Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., Harriet Van Horne, Rep. Fortney Stark, Dr.
Joyce Brothers, Harlan Ellison and others who assert that gun
ownership does not involve real choice because it is actually
only a preconditioned manifestation of sexual inadequacy or
perversion.
The definitive analysis of American gun control literature
was conducted for the National Institute of Justice by the Social
and Demographic Research Institute. From that literature this
study derived the following description of the way those I call
"anti-gun" see gun owners -- "demented and blood-thirsty
psychopaths whose concept of fun is to rain death on innocent
creatures, both human and otherwise."2 This view of gun owners
amounts to bigotry -- it has no empirical support at all.3 Even
so, it has helped inspired a political program that has been
articulated by, among others, Michael Dukakis. In 1986, while
governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis in effect enunciated the
program associated with the anti-gun view: "I do not believe in
people owning guns. Guns should be owned or possessed] only [by
the] police and military. I am going to do everything I can to
disarm this state."
Of course, disarmament is not the only possible control
scheme. Nor is it espoused by all gun-control proponents. Nor
are the anti-gun views that inform it the only policy basis for
gun controls generally. But the anti-gun rhetoric remains the
most important feature of the public debate over gun control.
For it is the anti-gun rhetoric of so many gun control advocates
that plays into the hands of their opponents. The gun lobby has
proved effective in using that rhetoric to persuade gun owners
that gun control is synonymous with "disarmament," that this is
what all proponents of gun control really have in mind when they
propose any regulation, and that their agenda is inspired by the
conviction that owning a gun is morally wrong.
A THREE-SIDED DEBATE
The public debate over guns in the United States is often
seen as having two sides. In fact, there are three. To be sure,
the debate is monopolized and its agenda fixed by the conflict
between the anti-gun view that dominates the active gun control
movement and the pro-gun view that is characterized by hysterical
opposition to any additional control proposal, however moderate
and reasonable. But the debate's virtual monopolization by these
opposing high-decibel extremes obscures the fact that if the
adherents on both sides were added together, their combined
numbers would not represent more than a small minority of the
American public. The vast majority -- including a majority of
gun owners -- espouse the markedly different view I call "pro-
control." It differs from the anti-gun view in that it
recognizes the moral legitimacy of, and accords consideration to,
the choice to own guns (particularly for reasons of self-
defense). At the same time, unlike the pro-gun view, the "pro-
control" view recognizes the need to accommodate the legitimate
interests of gun owners to the social imperative to control a
dangerous instrumentality.
Unfortunately, the pro-control consensus has been undermined
and frustrated as the American gun debate has been dominated over
the past quarter-century by extreme views hostile to compromise
and accommodation. About half of all American households own
guns. So all that the gun lobby needs to do in order to marshal
massive opposition against gun control proposals is capitalize on
the terms of debate established by anti-gun luminaries. As one
analyst notes, exposure to this debate
convinces America's handgun owners that they are a hated
minority whose days are numbered by mortal enemies --
enemies who hate them more than crime. With the die cast
so, gun owners are made to think that they have everything
to lose if those who loath them have any success at all.
[Knowing this, the gun lobby actually] disseminate[s] the
nastier [anti-gun] cartoons and vituperative op-ed pieces in
publications read by gun owners to fan the flames of
incipient paranoia.4
The last point is both remarkable in itself and telling in its
implications: In reprinting anti-gun cartoons the gun lobby is
actually paying anti-gun cartoonists royalties for penning those
cartoons! This money is well spent. Mobilizing gun owner
opposition requires that owners believe that every gun control
proposal is bottomed on hatred for them -- that however moderate
and reasonable a control may seem, it is actually only a further
step toward the hatemongers' ultimate goal of banning and
confiscating all guns. Only by thus convincing gun owners can
the gun lobby move them to rabidly oppose controls many of which
they themselves would, in other circumstances, deem reasonable
and sensible. In sum, indispensable to gun lobby success is an
anti-gun discourse designed to convince gun owners that "gun
control" is not a criminological imperative but a matter of
cultural or moral hatred directed at them.
This is the case even though some gun owner response to
anti-gun vituperation, which is notoriously counter-productive as
political rhetoric, is no less full of hate. Yet in the long
run, anti-gun hatefulness is even more counter-productive. In a
nation where more than 100 million potential voters live in
households with 170-210 million guns, anti-gun advocates create
almost insurmountable opposition to controls by presenting them
in terms of hatred and contempt for gun owners. Moreover, what
anti-gun advocates do by heaping contempt on gun owners is
alienate those whose compliance is indispensable if gun laws are
to work. The emotional satisfaction anti-gun crusaders evidently
find in portraying gun owners as "demented and blood-thirsty
psychopaths whose concept of fun is to rain death upon innocent
creatures both human and otherwise" must be weighed against the
catastrophic effects this has for the cause of gun control.
It is the divisive effect of anti-gun discourse on a pro-
control consensus that explains the gun lobby's remarkable
ability to defeat new controls.
"THE GUN CONTROL PARADOX"
Fifty years of nationwide polls have documented a virtually
universal American consensus for some forms of "gun control."5
Moreover, polls that isolate gun owners as an opinion group find
a majority of them also favor controls, many of which are
anathema to the gun lobby. For example, in a poll of gun owners
reported by Time in January 1990, some 87 percent supported a
waiting period/background check for handgun buyers; 73 percent
supported registration of all "semi-automatic weapons"; 72
percent supported registration of all handguns; and 54 percent
supported registration of all rifles and 50 percent of all
shotguns. Two 1975 Gallup Polls found registration of all guns
and a permit requirement for possessing a gun outside the owner's
own premises supported by 55 percent and 68 percent of all gun
owners (respectively) and by 76 percent and 85 percent of all
non-owners (respectively).6 Thus we have what has aptly been
called the "gun control paradox," found in the gun lobby's
notorious ability over the years to defeat legislative proposals
embodying the consensus favoring controls.
One might quibble with the concept of a "paradox," inasmuch
as some of its proponents give credence to polls phrased in terms
of public approval of "gun control" -- a term not defined. These
polls are meaningless because it is impossible to divine from an
affirmative answer whether respondents are expressing support for
the approximately 20,000 controls that already exist, or for some
undefined additional control, much less any specific kind of new
control.
Indicative of the fatuity of these undefined questions is
that where polls do focus on specific new control proposals, the
most popular is a law requiring that judges give severe prison
terms to anyone found guilty of a gun crime. Despite its
apparently uniform support across the spectrum of pro-gun, pro-
control and anti-gun respondents, this proposal is the "gun
control program" of the National Rifle Association. Conversely,
regarding the measure that anti-gun advocates deem the primary
goal for an acceptable gun control policy -- an absolute ban on
handguns -- polls consistently show that less than a majority of
the public say they favor the idea.7
Nevertheless, it remains true that large majorities of the
American populace support a variety of other control proposals
that are anathema to the gun lobby. So the "gun control paradox"
remains. So does the explanation for the paradox: the divisive
effect on a pro-control consensus of a gun "control" movement
that is ardently anti-gun. This effect is registered in three
ways.
First, the majority of Americans regard self-defense as the
most compelling reason to have a gun, but the anti-gun advocate
sees that as the most compelling reason to forbid them. Second,
the pro-control concept rests on the need for accommodation of
the legitimate interests of gun owners to the social imperative
of regulating deadly instruments -- but equally basic to the
anti-gun concept is that owning a gun is not a legitimate choice
and that the interests of those who would make that abhorrent
choice do not deserve consideration. Third, pejorative anti-gun
advocacy helps the gun lobby convert gun owners from a rational
pro-control stance to one of rabid, reflexive opposition at the
mere mention of the words "gun control."
One might put forward an alternative explanation of the "gun
control paradox" -- one that emphasizes differential levels of
commitment between gun control supporters and opponents.
Pollster George Gallup has argued that the extreme commitment
level of gun owners frightens legislators into seeing gun control
as too politically hazardous to embrace: though the great
majority of Americans support gun control, few of them are
fervent enough to vote against legislators who eschew it;
whereas, he writes, citizens
who oppose any kind of gun control laws, though
constituting a minority of the public, feel so strongly
about this issue that they will do anything they can do
to defeat such legislation. As a result they have
succeeded in keeping strict gun laws from being adopted
in most states and by the federal government.8
This thesis incorrectly analyzes the tripartite division of views
I have limned by assuming that there are only two -- pro-gun and
anti-gun. The conceptual error results in empirical
falsification. Research shows that those holding anti-gun views
are just as committed (to the point of being "single-issue
voters") as are fanatic pro-gunners. Gallup's thesis becomes
empirically sustainable only when a third group is recognized --
a pro-control majority less fanatic than either the pro- or anti-
gun extremists.
Additional difficulties plague Gallup's explanation for the
gun control paradox. In the first place, what does his phrase
"strict gun laws" mean? At a very minimum, from the anti-gun
position, "strict gun laws" would include a general prohibition
on handgun ownership. Yet, as we have seen, polls consistently
show that only a minority of the American people support such a
prohibition. So there is nothing paradoxical about its non-
enactment. A second problem with Gallup's hypothesis is
indicated by polls showing that a majority of gun owners also
support (at least in theory) controls which the gun lobby has
consistently been able to defeat. It is difficult to believe
that Congress and state legislators are being bullied by a
fanatic minority so small that it does not even include a
majority of its own constituency.
GUN CONTROL PLEBISCITES
Gallup's hypothesis has been directly contradicted by the
voting behavior of the American people. Gallup believes that the
majoritarian sentiment in favor of controls is frustrated because
it has to be implemented by legislators who are personally too
timorous to translate it into law. If Gallup is right, it would
seem that the voting public would enact "strict gun laws" when
asked to do so. But voters have not done that. Consider the
overwhelming rejections of sweeping anti-gun initiatives put to
the voters in Massachusetts and California in 1976 and 1982,
respectively. Moreover, during the past 15 years voters in nine
other states have amended their state constitutions to add
guarantees to the effect that every responsible, law abiding
adult may possess a gun; these include Idaho, Louisiana, New
Hampshire, Nevada, West Virginia, Utah, Maine, North Dakota, and
Nebraska. Obviously, actual tallies of the electorate provide
much better evidence of the views of the electorate (in these
states at least) than Gallup's polling of only 500-1,000 citizens
who supposedly represent the views of upwards of 215 million
potential voters.
The Massachusetts and California initiatives are especially
significant because the gun control movement itself chose those
states as the ideal places to go on the offensive. Massachusetts
and California were chosen because they had exhibited the
nation's most "liberal" electoral record and because polls
supposedly showed that urban electorates supported outlawing or
radically reducing handgun ownership. Of particular significance
for the argument here is the pattern of opinion change in both
states as the campaign progressed. Polls taken at the outset
showed both initiatives winning by roughly the same 65 to 70
percent majorities by which they eventually lost. (Not
coincidentally, at the outset the sponsors, particularly in
California, sought to present the initiative as a handgun
registration measure, downplaying its prohibition of new handgun
sales.) Subsequent polls showed support steadily diminishing as
the campaign went on. In other words, the more the proposals
were debated -- with accompanying exposition of their anti-gun
premises -- the more opposition they garnered, until their
eventual landslide defeats.
These results dovetail with findings from sophisticated in-
depth polls sponsored by both pro- and anti-gun groups (though
using different independent polling organizations). Unlike the
short Gallup and Harris polls, which miss nuances because the
number of questions asked are severely limited, the sponsored
polls involve extensive questioning designed to reveal patterns
and attitudes. The results are highly consistent, despite the
differing wording and antagonistic sponsors. They show that most
Americans support permissive controls on guns similar to those
now applied to automobiles and driving: a permit system to disarm
felons, juveniles and the mentally unstable -- but without
denying ordinary, responsible adults the freedom to choose to own
guns for family defense.9
This analysis -- and the thesis advanced here -- are
further confirmed by the gun lobby's defeat in the 1988 Maryland
referendum. The referendum's subject was a law passed by the
Maryland legislature to prohibit future sales of "Saturday Night
Specials." The law incorporated standards expressly defining the
only handguns to be banned as being diminutive and too cheap and
poorly made to be useful for self-defense or sport. The law
created a commission to apply those standards, its membership
including representatives of a gun company, pro- and anti-gun
groups and law enforcement.
Pro-gun extremists, believing the commission's powers would
be abused to outlaw sale of most or all handguns, dragooned a
reluctant National Rifle Association into mounting a referendum
under Maryland's highly restricted referendum procedure. Far
from offering a clear-cut referendum on guns (or just on
handguns), the campaign revolved around the fact that the
standards embodied in the new law expressly guaranteed every
responsible, law abiding adult's freedom to buy any handgun that
would be useful for self-defense or sport.
This was confirmed by the denouement (after voters ratified
the statute by a 57 to 42 percent margin). Fifteen months later
two anti-gun commission members were complaining bitterly that
under the standards the commission had been compelled to approve
almost 99 percent of handguns submitted to it (10 rejections out
of almost 800 models submitted) and that the approved weapons
included a 36 shot "assault pistol." Within weeks of their
complaint the approved list of handguns had grown to 930,
including the Mac-10 and 11 "assault pistols." This was
particularly ironic since one complaining commissioner, Baltimore
Police Chief Cornelius Behan, had just displayed a Mac-11 in a
New York Times ad (sponsored by Handgun Control, Inc.) calling
for a federal ban on such guns. Behan and the other
commissioners felt compelled to approve the Mac-11 because, as he
explained to the Baltimore Sun, the Maryland law "is designed to
take out of circulation [only] highly concealable, poorly
manufactured, low-caliber weapons. The Mac-10 and 11
unfortunately don't fit into that category."
It typifies the mutually skewed perspectives of pro- and
anti-gun advocates that both see the 1988 Maryland referendum as
a great anti-gun victory. In fact, the referendum was a pro-
control victory -- at the expense of both extremes. Obviously,
it was a defeat for the gun lobby's mindless anti-regulatory
stance. But for the anti-gun lobby it was a pyrrhic victory
attained by implicitly conceding that the public will not accept
its views. The fruits of that victory were meager. The
commission approved every gun type submitted to it by every major
domestic and foreign manufacturer. In the end, about one percent
of handgun models representing perhaps .001 percent of the
handguns sold annually in the U.S. were disapproved for future
sale in Maryland (without affecting either handguns currently
owned in the state or long guns at all). The victory itself was
attainable only by the ruinous means (for the anti-gun lobby) of
embracing a law that expressly rejects both the anti-gun purpose
of outlawing handguns and the premises underlying that purpose.
ON THE MORALITY OF PERSONAL SELF-DEFENSE
One of those premises is great dubiety about, or even flat
rejection of, the legitimacy of self-defense against violence. A
half century ago Herbert Wechsler could still justify the legal
right of deadly force self-defense in terms of the "universal
judgment that there is no social interest in preserving the lives
of the aggressors at the cost of those of their victims."10
That is not a universal judgment today. As of 1985, 13 percent
of respondents to a Gallup Poll answered negatively the question,
"If the situation arose, would you use deadly force against
another person in self-defense?" Presumably some respondents
were expressing only their personal repugnance at killing rather
than any moral imperative. That this is not the whole
explanation is clear from responses to another Gallup question
posed at the height of the Bernhard Goetz controversy to two
different survey groups a month apart. Of one group, 23 percent
of the respondents said that self-defense was "never" justified;
of the other, 17 percent gave that response.
No less telling is the language in which the Gallup Poll put
the question: "Do you feel that taking the law one's own hands,
often called vigilantism, is justified by circumstances?" This
question, so phrased, treats the right of self defense as
morally, if not legally, wrong. The language is subject to
criticism as being highly prejudicial; perhaps to such a degree
as to impugn the polls' results. But the Gallup organization's
considered use of it is itself evidence of a concept which is now
quite widespread, as is also shown by endemic misuse of the word
"vigilantism." That word is constantly employed as if it applied
only to private citizens, and as if it signified that there is
something illegal or wrong about private citizens who act to
defend their lives and those of others. (This is a solecism
since such conduct is clearly legal, and the misusage not only
broadens the historical meaning of vigilantism, but contradicts
it.)11
In contrast to the responses given above from the two 1985
Gallup surveys, 71 to 80 percent of the respondents therein
answered that there are circumstances in which self-defense may
be justified. Indeed, 3 to 8 percent volunteered the assertion
that self-defense is always justified, despite Gallup's failure
to offer that option. Such approval sharply differentiates the
moral premises of the majority of Americans from those embraced
by many anti-gun advocates. Disapprobation for self-defense
permeates the gun control movement, surfacing whenever gun issues
are debated. However moderate, even innocuous, a new gun control
proposal may be, its appearance sparks impassioned philippics to
the effect that "the only purpose of a [gun, handgun, etc.] is to
kill." The clear implication is that killing is always wrong --
even when necessary to defend against violent felony -- and that
the purpose of gun control is to prevent such killing. In this
regard, consider New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's assertion that
Bernhard Goetz was morally wrong in shooting even if that was
clearly necessary to resist robbery: "If this man was defending
himself against attack with reasonable force, he would be legally
[justified, but] not morally...."
Illustrative of anti-gun (but not pro-control) disapproval
of self-defense is a May 1977 article on guns published in
Engage-Social Action Forum, the magazine of the Board of Church
and Society of the United Methodist Church. The author, at the
time the magazine's editor, avers that women should submit to
rape rather than do anything that might imperil a rapist's life.
Rhetorically posing the question, "Is the Robber My Brother,"
Rev. Allen Brockway answers affirmatively, for although the
burglary victim or the
woman accosted in the park by a rapist is [not] likely
to consider the violator to be a neighbor whose safety
is of immediate concern *** [c]riminals are members of
the larger community no less than are others. As such
they are our neighbors or, as Jesus put it, our
brothers. . . . [Though violent criminals act
wrongfully,] it is equally wrong for the victim to
kill, save in those extremely rare circumstances when
the unambiguous alternative is one own's death.
The views articulated by Reverend Brockway are neither
unrepresentative of the gun control movement nor uninfluential
within it. Indeed, the most senior of the national gun control
organizations, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (NCBH) is a
creation of the Board of Church and Society of the United
Methodist Church. NCBH's national office is in the Methodist
Board's Washington building and the Board was NCBH's official
fiscal agent until 1976 when gun lobby complaints to the Internal
Revenue Service threatened the Church's tax exemption. (NCBH has
recently changed its name to Coalition Against Gun Violence to
facilitate its current emphasis on banning rifles and shotguns as
well as handguns.)
Reverend Brockway's language seems to concede that a woman
may shoot a rapist if she knows with certainty that he will kill
her. This concession is of special interest because another NCBH
affiliate, the Presbyterian Church USA, disagrees. Its official
position is that the handgun should be banned because a victim
may not take an attacker's life under any circumstance, even if
she knows he will kill her after the rape. Testifying in a
Congressional gun control hearing in the middle 1980s, the
church's representative, Rev. ------- Young, director of its
Criminal Justice Program, stated: "The General Assembly [of the
Presbyterian Church USA] has declared in the context of handgun
control and in many other contexts, that it is opposed to "the
killing of anyone, anywhere, for any reason." Reverend Young
emphasized that the Presbyterian position is moderate in that it
seeks only to ban handguns, not hunting guns. Rifles and
shotguns are not condemned because the church sees them as owned,
as he put it, "by sports people." They are different from
handguns whose purpose is self-defense. Making no distinction
between murderers and victims who lawfully defend themselves, the
Presbyterian Church USA categorically condemns handguns as
"weapons of death ... that are designed only for killing." In
the church's view, "There is no other reason to own a handgun
(that we have envisioned, at least) than to kill someone with
it."
Some secular opponents go farther, rejecting even sport as a
legitimate purpose of gun ownership. Thus, in a 1968 editorial,
the Detroit Daily Press said:
No private citizen has any reason or need at any time
to possess a gun. This applies to both honest citizens
and criminals. We realize the Constitution guarantees
the "right to bear arms" but this should be changed.
The theme of self-defense as atavistic and morally abhorrent is a
constant theme in statements by anti-gun luminaries. University
of Chicago Prof. Robert Replogle, M.D. (founder and leader of
several Illinois anti-gun organizations) has said in
congressional testimony: "The only legitimate use of a handgun
that I can understand is for target shooting." Prof. Morris
Janowitz objects to even that: "I see no reason ... why anyone
in a democracy should own a weapon."
The natural outgrowth of this point of view is the law that
NCBH succeeded in having adopted by the District of Columbia City
Council in 1976. Under it, householders may not buy handguns nor
may guns of any type be kept assembled or loaded for self-
defense. While Handgun Control, Inc. claims to be more moderate
than NCBH, it too supports this as the ultimate gun control law.
Gun control proposals presented in these terms are patently
unacceptable to the kind of people who own guns. Though their
attitudes and psychological profiles are not generally
distinguishable from those of the rest of the population, one
respect in which they do differ is in being even more likely than
non-owners to approve the use of defensive force against violent
felons.12 This approval seems to transcend political
differences: Analysis of another national poll reveals that,
while liberals are less likely to own guns than the general
populace, those liberals who do own a gun are just as willing as
other gun owners to use it if necessary to repel a burglar.13
But it would be highly misleading to infer that belief in
the legitimacy of self-defense is confined to gun owners. Though
this belief may no longer be "universal," it was exhibited by the
78 percent of the respondents in the 1985 Gallup Poll who averred
that, if the situation arose, they would themselves use deadly
force against an attacker. Assuming that 50 of those 78
percentage points reside in the roughly 50 percent of households
that have guns, that leaves another 28 percentage points (i.e.
well over half of the non-gun owners) who concur in the
legitimacy of deadly force self-defense. It is little wonder
that public enthusiasm for gun control proposals fades as those
associated with them express an attitude toward self-defense
which is disagreeable to a large majority of the public and
vehemently so to upwards of 50 percent of the public.
KILLED BY THEIR OWN ARGUMENTS
Why do those I describe as "anti-gun" insist that advocacy
of gun controls include portraying gun owners as "demented and
blood-thirsty psychopaths whose concept of fun is to rain death
upon innocent creatures both human and otherwise"? While this
may partially reflect mere cultural antagonism against gun
owners, it also involves genuine, ethically-based abhorrence of
self-defense and consequent abhorrence of the gun owners and the
gun as symbols thereof. To recall some of the quotations given
earlier:
No private citizen has any reason at any time to
possess a gun... the need that some homeowners and
shopkeepers believe they have for weapons to defend
themselves [represents] the worst instincts in the
human character... I see no reason ... why anyone in a
democracy should own a weapon... [W]eapons of death ...
designed only for killing... There is no other reason
to own a handgun (that we have envisioned, at least)
than to kill someone with it... [Armed] against their
own neighbors, ...gun nuts [are] anti-citizens,
traitors, enemies of their own patriae....
Anti-gun insistence on this kind of discourse is indispensable to
the gun lobby's success in defeating control proposals that, in
principle, enjoy overwhelming support. Instead of dealing with
the merits of the proposals, the gun lobby is enabled to mobilize
gun owners' opposition by portraying all "control" as a hate-
inspired scheme designed to systematically multiply controls to
the ultimate purpose of making gun ownership impossible. It is
this discourse which convinces gun owners that "gun control" is
not a criminological imperative but an expression of culturally
or ethically based hatred of them.
Recognizing this, gun control organizations try to refrain
from officially endorsing anti-gun rationales. Unfortunately,
that usually is not enough to counteract the chorus of (more or
less) unofficial anti-gun champions using every occasion to
proclaim anti-gun rationales and hailing even the most moderate
control proposals as steps toward the eventual banning of all
guns. In principle, pro-control forces could defuse this by
disavowing and vehemently denouncing overtly anti-gun rationales
for moderate controls. But anti-gun advocates are so numerous
and influential among gun control organizations that it is
impossible for less extreme forces to repudiate anti-gun ideology
and disassociate their proposals from it. Yet the failure to do
this makes it impossible to convince skeptical gun owners that a
restriction championed by those who revile them does not really
do or imply what those enemies claim.
Thus, one reason for the defeat of gun controls which seem
to have almost universal support is that anti-gun discourse has
made fanatic opponents out of gun owners who would otherwise have
been supporters. The second (and related) obstacle to enactment
of gun controls is that certain elements that underlie anti-gun
discourse tend to alienate a substantial proportion of even non-
gun owners who would otherwise support moderate controls. Though
polls show that most Americans support "gun control" (undefined),
what that means to them (and why they support it) is very
different from what (and why) anti-gun activists support. Close
analysis of recent state plebiscites demonstrates this and the
baleful effect expression of anti-gun rationales has upon gun
control efforts that otherwise would enjoy overwhelming support.
The intense debate in these campaigns exposes how different the
public's "pro-control" pragmatism is from the moralism of "anti-
gun" groups.
In sum, it is not the innate strength of the gun lobby that
defeats gun control proposals. Rather it is anti-gun zealots
whose extreme proposals, and extremist arguments for even
moderate controls, alienate a public that is open to rational
ideas for control.
=================================================================
======
Don B. Kates, Jr., is editor Restricting Handguns (1979) and the
author of "Firearms and Violence: Old Premises, Current Evidence"
in T. Gurr (ed.) Violence in America (1989) and the entry on the
Second Amendment in M. Levy & K. Karst, The Encyclopedia of the
American Constitution.
Note: Kates is also the GunRights columnist for Peterson's
HANDGUNS magazine as well as a Civil Rights Lawyer based in San
Francisco, CA. He is also a member of the Supreme Court Bar
Association.
=================================================================
======
References
1 Similar pronouncements are easy to find. Owning guns for
defensive reasons is characterized as "simply beastly behavior"
in "Gun Toting: A Fashion Needing Change," 93 Science News
(1968) p. 613-14. See generally ---------- Luedens,
"Wretchedness is A Warm Gun," 48 Progressive 50 (1984) and Harlan
Ellison, "Fear Not Your Enemies," Heavy Metal, March 1981.
2 J. Wright, P. Rossi, K. Daly, Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime
and Violence in the United States (N.Y., Aldine: 1983), p. 4.
This is the commercially published version of the analysis.
3 Studies undertaken to link rates of gun ownership to violence
rates find either no relationship or a negative one; thus, cities
and counties with high gun ownership suffer less violence than
demographically comparable areas with lower gun ownership. See,
e.g., Douglas Murray, "Handguns, Gun Control Law and Firearm
Violence", 23 Social Problems (1975), p. 81; David Bordua and
Alan Lizotte, "Patterns of Legal Firearms Ownership", 2 Law &
Policy Quarterly (1979); Alan Lizotte and David Bordua, "Firearms
Ownership for Sport and Protection: Two Divergent Models", 45
American Sociological [?] Review (1980), p. 229, and 46 American
Sociological Review (1981), p. 499; Gary Kleck, "The Relationship
between Gun Ownership Levels and Rates of Violence in the United
States" in D. Kates (ed.) Firearms and Violence (1984); ------
McDowall, "Gun Availability and Robbery Rates: A Panel Study of
Large U.S. Cities, 1974-1978," 8 Law & Policy Quarterly (1986),
p. 135. See also ------- Eskridge, "Zero-Order Inverse
Correlations between Crimes of Violence and Hunting Licenses in
the United States," 71 Sociology & Social Research (1986), p. 55.
4 Lance Stell "Guns, Politics and Reason", 9 Journal of American
Culture (1986), pp. 71, 73. (emphasis in original). Compare
the observation by the author of a Ford Foundation study of gun
control: "[G]un owners believe (rightly in my view) that the gun
controllers would be willing to sacrifice their interests even if
the crime control benefits were tiny." Mark Moore, "The Bird in
Hand: A Feasible Strategy for Gun Control," 2 Journal of Policy
Analysis and Management (1983), pp. 185, 187-8.
5 ----- Schuman and ------ Presser, "Attitude Measurement and
the Gun Control Paradox," 41 Public Opinion Quarterly (1983), p.
345; and ----- Erskine, "The Polls: Gun Control," 36 Public
Opinion Quarterly (1972), p. 455.
6 The Time poll found that 67 percent of gun owners expressed
general agreement with the NRA and 63% and did not think strict
controls would reduce violence. But this does not sharply
differentiate gun owners from most Americans; polls show
substantial dubiety that gun laws can reduce crime and general
disbelief that they will reduce crime. See "Attitudes Toward Gun
Control: A Review," in Federal Regulation of Firearms: A Report
Prepared for the Use of the Committee on the Judiciary U.S.
Senate (97th Cong. 2nd Sess.) by the Congressional Research
Service, Library of Congress (U.S. Gov't Printing Office, 1982).
7 Id., p. 230. The only Gallup Poll showing majority support
for a handgun ban was one taken in 1959. No polls on the issue
seem to have been taken during the 1960s. But the approximate
doubling of handgun ownership during that decade, and the average
2 million new handguns sold yearly since 1969 seem to have had an
effect. As of 1975 when Gallup next plumbed the issue, majority
sentiment had reversed. A Harris Poll taken the same year
reached the same conclusion. Since 1980 Gallup has asked the same
question in 1980, 1982, 1987 and twice in 1981 without ever
finding a majority favoring a handgun ban.
8 George Gallup, The Sophisticated Poll Watcher's Guide (1972),
p. 105.
9 James D. Wright, "Public Opinion and Gun Control: A Comparison
of Results from Two Recent Surveys", 455 Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science (1981), p. 24; David
Bordua, "Adversary Polling and the Construction of Social
Meaning" 5 Law and Policy Quarterly (1983), p. 345.
10 Herbert Wechsler, "A Rationale of the Law of Homicide", 27
Columbia Law Review (1937), p. 701, 736. (emphasis added).
11 For a discussion of the law see Don B. Kates, Jr., and Nancy
Engberg, "Deadly Force Self-Defense Against Rape" 15 University
of California at Davis Law Review (1982), p. 873, 877-80. As to
"vigilantism," accurately used it does not distinguish between
private citizens and police, it does not necessarily imply deadly
force and it would never apply to any defensive use of force,
even excessive force. Vigilantism defines a highly specific kind
of wrongdoing: a citizen or police officer taking the law into
his own hands by subjecting a "criminal" to violence as a means
of imposing punishment without due process of law. The
limitations of the concept may be illustrated by three
alternative hypotheticals of the facts in the Goetz case: a) if
Goetz shot in reasonably necessary defense against an attempt to
rob him, the shooting was lawful and thus not vigilantism; b) if
Goetz actually but unreasonably feared that mere panhandlers were
menacing his life, the shooting was illegal, but still not
vigilantism; c) the shooting was vigilantism only if Goetz used
deadly force (or any force at all) knowing it was unnecessary and
for the purpose of arrogating to himself the judicial function of
punishing. Vigilantism is always illegal, whether engaged in by a
private citizen or by an officer misusing his powers.
Conversely, it is a contradiction to apply the term to lawful
conduct either by private citizens or by officers.
12 Alan Lizotte and Jo Dixon, "Gun Ownership and the 'Southern
Subculture of Violence'", 93 American Journal of Sociology
(1987), p. 383. This approval of "defensive force" must be
distinguished from generally "violent attitudes" (as defined by
approval of violence against social deviants or dissenters). Gun
owners are no more likely to have generally violent attitudes
than are non-owners. Indeed, the holders of violent attitudes
were less likely than the average gun owner to approve of
defensive force (perhaps perceiving it would be directed against
violent people like themselves).
13 ----- Whitehead and ------ Langworthy, "Gun Ownership:
Another Look," 6 Justice Quarterly (1989), p. 263.
*** EOF ***
John A. Grossbohlin
SUNY at New Paltz - Business Administrtion Dept
[email protected]
SUNY at Albany - Organizational Studies Ph.D. Program
[email protected] 
Here's a longish, but authoritative and scholarly article of similar bent: