Just as earlier reformers blamed the saloon and the liquor interests for the country's extravagant drinking,
their modern counterparts blame its impressive murder rate on the abundance of firearms and the national gun
lobby. The connection might seem obvious. The unregulated saloon fostered public drunkenness; the drinking
itself was voluntary. And most killings are committed with guns, especially handguns; but deciding who should
own them is as hard to legislate as temperance. The problems associated with booze and bullets have
uncomfortable similarities.
When Sunday-closing laws and other legal measures failed to remedy drunkenness, the word "temperance"
became a euphemism for prohibition. Today, "gun control" is now understood by the militants on
both sides to be a euphemism for gun prohibition. This was a major semantic victory for the anti-gun
movement, which can accuse those who fail to support even some totally impractical measure as being
"against gun control."
Since most Americans support controls short of prohibition, this fuels the ongoing debate between highly
vocal pro-gun and anti-gun minorities for whom it masks quite different life experiences, attitudes, geographics
and political agendas.
The fact that there are nearly as many guns as people in the U.S., and that they can be found in half the
country's households, can be translated two ways: Americans are dangerously gun happy, armed far beyond
the limits of any other modern, Western, industrialized nation (such qualifiers greatly limit the comparisons); or
Americans, although armed to the teeth, have proven themselves the safest and most responsible gun owners
in the world. Firearm opponents can proclaim that U.S. deaths by gunfire exceed those in selected foreign
countries by ten or 100 to one, and having an inside track to a media largely controlled by the “liberal
establishment,” their message is widely promulgated. The gun community challenges this idea with valid but
tedious research that fails to overcome the gut feelings of those who caricature the National Rifle Association
and gun dealers the way prohibitionists once portrayed brewers and bartenders.
Prohibition led to a decline in public and much social drinking, which no doubt saved some individuals from
themselves, but at a terrible cost in corruption, crime and literally thousands killed or maimed by trigger-happy
Prohibition agents and poisonous alcohol. It also transformed drunkenness from a working-class vice into a
fashionable form of middle-class rebellion that coincided with the proliferation of automobiles, creating yet a
new national problem.
In recent times more and more gun laws seemed essential to reduce murder rates that had doubled since
the Fifties and early Sixties, but this modern mayhem only matched the killings in the "Roaring Twenties" and
early 1930s, when the U.S. population was half what is today and gun laws were practically nonexistent.
Certain periods of the 19th Century were so murderous that few people went out, especially at night, unarmed
or unescorted; and one of the objections municipal police then had to wearing uniforms or even badges was
that these invited murderous attacks by neighborhood gangs.
Killing, with or without firearms, reflects a number of social conditions, the most important of which is the
population of young people in their "crime-prone" years. Booze wars and drug wars always aggravate violence,
but a study of newspapers from the Twenties and Thirties finds them filled with alarmist articles on murder
"epidemics" and full-page features on the homicidal tendencies of youngsters in their teens.
So it hardly serves the gun-control community to report that the 10,000 or so increasingly restrictive laws it
has managed to pass locally and nationally since the Twenties have done little more than make it harder to
purchase firearms legally. Nor does it serve the pro-gun people to cheerfully remind Americans that people are
not killing each other more often today than in the 1920s, despite a vast increase in the national gun
population. Gun buffs try to get across the fact that the firearm accident rate actually has plummeted; and that
the suicide rate has not significantly changed in the past hundred years. But even they recognize this as
negative advertising, hardly reassuring to residents of a crime-ravaged city, or to the "gun grabbers," as they
like to call their adversaries.
Two things make statistics on legal firearm ownership nearly meaningless when it comes to violent crime.
One is that nearly all gun violence involves a tiny fraction of one percent of the total gun population, and
almost all of these already are in criminal or irresponsible hands, outside the gun-control loop. The second is
that while robbing or shooting somebody is definitely a reason to call the cops, unlawful firearm sales and
possession are in fact "consensual crimes," like prostitution or drugs, prohibited by laws that are nearly
impossible to enforce. A small irony here is that a convicted felon, who cannot legally possess a firearm, also
cannot be prosecuted for failing to register one, for that would be self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment.
A third factor undermines practical efforts at "gun control." Police in cities like New York and Chicago
routinely confiscate well over 20,000 guns a year, despite the fact that handgun sales and possession are
virtually prohibited (in New York since 1911, and in Chicago since 1982). These guns are taken from people
who have done something to attract police attention. A few years ago a Chicago study of gun-law violators
found that out of 100 persons charged with UUW (Unlawful Use of a Weapon, the city's catch-all for simply
having a gun), only one in ten was convicted, and only one in those ten received a jail sentence. The police
kept the guns, but even those convicted got off with fines then averaging $47. Hence Chicago's ban on guns
strikes little fear in the hearts of kids who tangle with cops so often that the district station is like a second
home.
Partly in response to the notion that criminals are the last to comply with gun laws, a number of states are
now licensing ordinary citizens to carry weapons. Thousands of such licenses have been issued, but instead of
the bloodbath predicted by some, crime rates have generally declined, presumably because predatory
criminals now must weigh the possibility that a prospective victim might have a pistol. In this case, the
unintended consequence is that the robber may pass up a prosperous-looking businessman in favor of little
old ladies cashing their Social Security checks.
Urban geographics, unequal police protection, and the recent concept of "victimology" make personal risk
factors hard to establish, especially with the better medical attention shooting victims receive. No doubt with
good intentions, the FBI early on defined a "friends, family and acquaintances" category of murder, as distinct
from the felony murder committed during a holdup or some other crime. Such polite terminology implies that
these killings are bedroom and barroom crimes of passion that proved fatal mainly because a gun was handy.
This remains an article of faith in the anti-gun community, along with the "dead burglar" statistic showing that
few burglars are killed by armed homeowners.
However, a closer examination finds that police use this friends-and-family category as a dumping ground
for most homicides where the victim was known to his assailant, who might be a rival drug dealer, a street-gang
member, or acquaintances who didn’t like each other anyway. It often includes victim-precipitated murders,
when a threatened individual pulls a gun to avert a beating and his opponent proclaims that he hasn't got the
guts to use it. (Police usually find that one or both parties are full of drugs or alcohol, and that one or both
have a history of arrests.)
Even so, the murder rate for handguns is around five per 100,000, which puts the peril in perspective.
Especially when it's understood that the vast majority of U.S. murders occur in a few of our largest cities (many
of which prohibit handguns), and in certain high-crime neighborhoods where danger and risk-taking are
antidotes to boredom. In these neighborhoods guns circulate as freely as drugs, with no paperwork or waiting
periods.
Such social realities have no meaning in the gun-control debate, which represents a clash of cultures,
lifestyles and prejudices as much as did Prohibition. The "gun control" advocates, who tend to be educated
and insulated urban professionals, harbor a conviction that in the city most gun people are criminals and
elsewhere are rednecks who would shoot Bambi's mother; that firearms serve no good purpose in modern
society; and that somehow, some way, fewer guns simply have to mean fewer killings.
With equal sincerity and simplicity, their gun-buff adversaries, usually remote from daily urban worries, feel
righteously protected by the Second Amendment and consider possession of a means of self-defense to be an
Eleventh Commandment -- the one thing that still is right with America. These positions are as deeply felt and
nonnegotiable as the Right to Life or the Right to Choose.
Gun buffs like to point out absence of any obvious correlation between the number of guns and the number
of gun laws, or even the size of the population that has doubled in fifty years. The only thing truly predictable is
that the U.S. murder rate per 100,000 usually involved firearms and tracks closely with the percentage of
Americans in their "crime-prone" years, a relationship that goes up or down depending on other factors like
immigration, racial composition, neighborhood, mandatory public education and marriage age.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics, still trying to sort out earlier data, has decided that the murder rate
gradually rose to 7.2 in 1919 when troops started returning from Europe. During Prohibition the numbers
increased steadily to 9.7 in 1933 before trending downward again. They reached 5.0 in 1944, then fell as low
as the "fours" until the middle 1960s when another increase began. The numbers remained high--between 8.3
and 10.3--until 1993, when they began another steady decline into the "fives" after 2000. They've moved back
toward "six," but according to a guy on National Public Radio after the Virginia Tech shootings, they're still the
lowest they've been in forty years.
The magnitude of the problem, and the practice of comparing the U.S. murder rate to that in other countries,
is a perennial theme in newspaper reporting. Both alarms were woven into a typical article published in the
Chicago Tribune for April 9, 1931, headlined:
The story (despite the differing statistics) was quoting a reformer who actually was arguing against the death
penalty, but the writer found his murder statistics to be more newsworthy than his capital-punishment ideas and
used those to deplore the willingness of Americans to kill each other:
This, despite our ballooning cities that account for nearly eighty percent of the nation's murders, which
strictly prohibit guns, and where homicide rates approach fifty to ninety per 100,000 in high-crime
neighborhoods. The only thing such figures definitely establish is that violence, as the man said, is still as
American as apple pie.
A situation puzzling enough to rarely see print is that the proliferation of firearms has had no substantial
effect on the suicide rate, which has ranged between ten and fifteen per 100,000 since 1900. And while every
child killed accidentally with a gun receives the coverage of an airplane crash, the press also has ignored the
fifty percent decline in firearm accidents during the same years. Gun buffs, unwise in the ways of journalism,
see this as a conspiracy of silence. (The comparison might be meaningless, but the mortality rate for women
using birth control pills is something like three per 100,000; and I read somewhere that nearly 50,000 people
die each year from staph infections contracted in hospitals.)
Another journalistic hypocrisy, conscious or otherwise, has been the steady diet of reports on the criminality
of youth, which is currently a staple of gang-war drive-by shootings on television shows that get little space in
the metropolitan press. Aside from the fact that nobody runs out of ammunition, the most conspicuous
difference between teenage violence now and in the public-enemy era is that the perpetrators then were white,
at least as portrayed in newspapers so comfortably racist that they ignored any mayhem that confined itself to
the black community. In 1933 the Chicago Herald & Examiner devoted a full page to the problem of "THE
NATION'S BIGGEST CRIMINAL GROUP--AGED 20!" Two years later, the Chicago Daily News published a
similar page headlined, "YOUTH PREDOMINATES IN CRIME -- 60,000 JAILED EACH YEAR."
Fifty years later the phenomenal murder rate could be blamed on ghetto drug disputes, and though race is
never mentioned, the dangerous neighborhoods have become common knowledge.
The Madd Mothers are finally making a substantial dent in drunk driving because car crashes are usually
reported and erratic driving is a lot like waving a gun in public. But a pistol generally stays in the pocket or
waistband, has become a tough-guy symbol just because he can flash it, and people infrequently shoot each
other if there's a cop around.
"DEATH TO VIOLENCE!"
HOMICIDE RATE LEAPS FROM 9.9 TO 10.9 IN YEAR
…The homicide rate for the country leaped from 9.9 in 1929 to 10.9 last year. It has
been higher only twice since 1900 -- in 1924 it was 11.2, and in 1923 it was 11.3.
The 1929 figure for England and Wales was 0.5 [while] Germany, in 1927, had a rate
of only 2.0...
…The homicide rate for the country leaped from 9.9 in 1929 to 10.9 last year. It has
been higher only twice since 1900 -- in 1924 it was 11.2, and in 1923 it was 11.3.
The 1929 figure for England and Wales was 0.5 [while] Germany, in 1927, had a rate
of only 2.0...
HOMICIDE, GUN CONTROL AND YESTERDAY'S 'FLAMING YOUTH'
| The most exhilarating thing in life is to be shot at, without result. --Winston Churchill |
