by Dan Baum
Some states published the number of concealed-carry permits they issued. Others did not. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated in 2011 that 6.8 million people, out of an adult U.S. population of 230 million, had concealed-carry permits.
Evidence of the relative good behavior of concealed-carry permit holders comes, ironically, from an organization that strongly opposed concealed carry: the Violence Policy Center. According to its 2010 report Concealed Carry Killers, 402 people had been killed by people holding carry permits from May 2007 to the end of 2010. A few were multiple killings, and a few were murder-suicides, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume one killer for each murder. Given that about six million people had concealed-carry permits then, that means that in round figures, one carry-permit holder in 15,000 had committed murder during that time. How does that compare with the rest of the adult population? In that same period, about 56,702 murders took place in the United States.* Assuming again one murderer per murder, if you divide the murders into 200 million, which was about the size of the adult population, you get, in rough figures, one murderer in every 3,500 adults. That means that, according to the VPC’s figures, concealed-carry permit holders were four times less likely to commit murder than members of the general adult population. Even if you consider that only about half of all murders are committed with guns, that still makes concealed-carry holders half as likely to kill with a gun as the general population. Perhaps the Violence Policy Center, instead of resisting concealed carry, should have been fighting to make it mandatory.
The high priest of the “more guns, less crime” theory was John Lott, an independent researcher who started out at the American Enterprise Institute and wrote the book More Guns, Less Crime. Lott and his book were lauded by the NRA and its allies and vilified by those supporting stricter gun control. Professor John J. Donohue III of Stanford, in the July 2003 edition of Criminology and Public Policy, published a detailed essay titled “The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis,” which only proved that when it comes to research on the effects of guns on crime, nothing is ever the final bullet. Nine years after Donahue’s article, Lott continued to be quoted by the gun-rights community, Fox News, and many media outlets. Setting aside the validity of his research, Lott himself was an odd duck. In 2003, a blogger named Julian Sanchez, tracing IP addresses, discovered that one of John Lott’s tireless defenders in online forums—a woman identifying herself as Mary Rosh—was in fact John Lott himself.
Regarding the dispute described on this page, Gary Kleck published his findings of 2.5 million annual defensive gun uses as “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self Defense with a Gun,” in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 86, no. 1, 1995, and defended them in such articles as “Carrying Guns for Protection: Results from the National Self-Defense Survey,” in the May 1998 issue of Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. David Hemenway published his rebuttal to Kleck in, among other places, the Spring 2009 Harvard Bulletin (“Comparing the Incidence of Self-Defense Gun Use and Criminal Gun Use”) and The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (“Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of Extreme Overestimates,” vol. 87, no. 1, 1997).
The National Research Council attempted to evaluate the Kleck/Hemenway defensive-gun-use dispute in its book Firearms and Violence in 2005. After churning through both researchers’ work, the NRC’s conclusions boiled down to this, on this page: “The committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.”
A great analysis of the whole brouhaha over defensive-gun use can be found in “A Call for Truce in the DGU War,” by Tom W. Smith, in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 87, no. 4, 1997.
A related disagreement continues over whether a family is safer with a gun in the home or without it. Gun-control advocates often argued that a family was “47 times safer” without a gun, a figure lifted from an article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Arthur Kellerman and Frederick Rivara, titled “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home” (October 7, 1993, vol. 329, no. 15, pages 1084–1090). Kellerman and Rivara found that people keeping guns at home were forty-seven times more likely to kill a friend or family member than an intruder. The problem with their reasoning, from the point of view of gun-rights proponents, is that people who keep guns at home rarely kill the intruder. Usually, the gun is used to frighten off the intruder, and sometimes to wound. Also, gun guys say, Kellerman wasn’t making distinctions. Guns properly locked up or left loaded in the nightstand? Homes with children or without? Guns owned by careful and trained shooters, or guns bought to stick under the mattress and never practiced with? Gun guys also pounce on this quote from Kellerman in Health magazine, vol. 8, no. 2, this page: “If you’ve got to resist, your chances of being hurt are less the more lethal your weapon. If that were my wife, would I want her to have a thirty-eight special in her hand? Yeah.”
In an earlier paper, Hemenway, along with Sara J. Solnick and Deborah R. Azrael, both of Harvard’s Injury Control Center, argued that while more than half of gun owners say they own guns for self-defense, their guns lowered the perceived (their italics) safety of others in the community. “This Article provides suggestive evidence that possession of firearms imposes, at minimum, psychic costs on most other members of the community,” they wrote in “Firearms and Community Feelings of Safety,” in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 85, no. 1, 1995. Senator Dianne Feinstein apparently agrees. The Associated Press quoted her on November 18, 1993, as saying, “Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of Americans to feel safe.”
Robert Bork tried out a similar argument in 1971 in defense of prosecuting such victimless crimes as drug abuse. In “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” in Indiana Law Journal (Fall 1971, page 20), Bork argued that “knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral.” It was as bad an argument when Hemenway and Feinstein made it as when Bork made it. We may not like it that other people are doing things we revile—smoking pot, enjoying pornography, making gay love, or carrying a gun—but if we aren’t adversely affected by it, the Constitution and common decency argue for leaving it alone. People may have felt less safe because people kept guns in their homes and on their persons, but the data suggested that they weren’t less safe.
On the other hand, although gun carriers felt safer when armed, they may not have been. In Philadelphia in 2009, five researchers from the University of Pennsylvania surveyed 677 people who had been shot in an assault between 2003 and 2006, and 684 control participants. Their conclusions, published in the American Journal of Public Health, vol. 99, no. 11, November 2009, as “Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault,” were that people carrying a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot than someone unarmed, and 5.45 times more likely to be shot if they had a chance to resist the assault.
And widespread concealed carry may actually have made criminals more dangerous. More than half of the felons surveyed by James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi, when researching Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms, said the chance their victim might be armed was a very important reason for carrying a gun during a crime.
Regarding how it could be possible that guns are used defensively as often as the research suggested without any of us hearing about it, I turned to John Lott. Lott is problematic for a lot of reasons, but he makes two good points on page 224 of his 2003 book The Bias Against Guns. “While the government releases an annual report on the top ten crime guns, there is no corresponding list of top ten guns used defensively.” And “each year the government releases reports on the number of crimes committed with guns, but the government surveys don’t directly ask people the other side of the issue, whether they have used a gun to stop crime.”
The rates
for gun accidents come from two sources. The first is a report from the Centers for Disease Control dated November 19, 1999, called Nonfatal and Fatal Firearm-Related Injuries—United States, 1993–1997, which found that fatal and nonfatal gun injuries decreased almost 41 percent in that period, from 40.5 per 100,000 people to 24. My second source was a chart generated on the CDC’s website, which has a fabulous feature called Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, or WISQARS. One can punch in many parameters—type of injury, age of injured, relevant years—and it will generate a chart. One that I generated, titled “1999–2006, United States Unintentional Firearm Deaths and Rates per 100,000,” showed the rate, for deaths only, dropping from .3 in 1999 to .22 in 2006.
It must be said, though, that according to another WISQARS chart I generated, the rate of nonfatal gunshot injuries from assault rose from 2001 to 2008, from 14.4 per 100,000 to 18.62, even while the CDC’s count of fatal gun accidents and the UCRs’ count of gun murder both fell during the same period. A downturn in marksmanship might explain it, or, more likely, an improvement in emergency medical care. It’s possible, then, that more people were shooting each other as the first decade of the twenty-first century elapsed but that fewer were dying, because responses were quicker and care was better.
And when I generated a chart called “1999–2006 United States Homicide Firearm Deaths and Rates per 100,000,” I got a very different picture than that reported by the UCRs. According to CDC figures, the gun-homicide rate went up from 1999 to 2006, from 3.88 per 100,000 people to 4.05—not a lot, but a big discrepancy from the UCRs.
The number of carry permits issued in Boulder comes from the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office.
That Boulder had a higher concentration of advanced degrees than other cities (page 33) comes from Forbes, October 20, 2011, in “In Pictures: America’s Smartest Cities,” which reported that 52.92 percent of Boulder’s residents over age twenty-four had bachelor’s degrees or higher, and 3.97 percent had Ph.D.s.
Despite what our police instructor says on this page, Massachusetts does not require citizens to retreat from their own homes in the face of a burglary. Section 8a, Chapter 278, Title II, Part IV of the state code states in its entirety: “In the prosecution of a person who is an occupant of a dwelling charged with killing or injuring one who was unlawfully in said dwelling, it shall be a defense that the occupant was in his dwelling at the time of the offense and that he acted in the reasonable belief that the person unlawfully in said dwelling was about to inflict great bodily injury or death upon said occupant or upon another person lawfully in said dwelling, and that said occupant used reasonable means to defend himself or such other person lawfully in said dwelling. There shall be no duty on said occupant to retreat from such person unlawfully in said dwelling.”
The line about never being in Condition White without being at home with the alarm on and your dog at your feet comes from “State of Awareness, the Cooper Color Codes,” by Tom Givens in Sharpen the Blade, 05-2004, published by the American Tactical Shooting Association at teddytactical.com.
The increase in residential robberies from 2004 to 2008 and the number of people killed in such incidents are from Table 7 of Crime in the United States, 2008, Uniform Crime Reports. The number of households in America—114 million—is from State & County QuickFacts, U.S. Census Bureau, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html.
In 2008, twenty-seven people were killed by lightning, and 303 injured, according to Struckbylightning.org.
The law that placed the tax on silencers, sawed-off shotguns, and machine guns was the National Firearms Act of 1934. Congress apparently did not believe it had the authority to ban such weapons. It figured that placing an astronomical tax on them would solve the problem. That the tax hadn’t risen in seventy-five years seems extraordinary. Some people told me that it is the only federal tax that has never risen since being instituted, but I was not able to confirm that.
A farmworker earned an average $27.17 a week in 1934, according to the World Almanac and Book of Facts 1935.
Directive 2003/10/EC of the European Parliament, with its language about silencers, can be found in the Official Journal of the European Union, L 42/38, February 15, 2003.
The 1990 killing spree that started at the shooting place outside Boulder was committed by a prison escapee named Michael Bell. One can read about him in “Police Catch Prison Escapee Suspected in Killing Spree,” which ran in The Washington Post on August 26, 1990.
CHAPTER THREE: THE iGUN
The assault-rifle ban was contained in H.R. 3355—Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994—a gigantic grab bag that contained funding for judges’ training, rewriting of federal prison rules, grants to police for various purposes, substance-abuse funding, and on and on. The ban was contained in Title XI, Sec. 110101 and 110102, which went by the smoke-and-mirrors title “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act.”
This is how the final law defined an “assault weapon”:
18 U.S.C. § 921 (30): The term “semiautomatic assault weapon” means—
(A) any of the firearms, or copies or duplicates of the firearms in any caliber, known as—
(i) Norinco, Mitchell, and Poly Technologies Avtomat Kalashnikovs (all models);
(ii) Action Arms Israeli Military Industries UZI and Galil;
(iii) Beretta Ar70 (SC-70);
(iv) Colt AR-15;
(v) Fabrique National FN/FAL, FN/LAR, and FNC;
(vi) SWD M-10, M-11, M-11/9, and M-12;
(vii) Steyr AUG;
(viii) INTRATEC TEC-9, TEC-DC9 and TEC-22; and
(ix) revolving cylinder shotguns, such as (or similar to) the Street Sweeper and Striker 12;
(B) a semiautomatic rifle that has an ability to accept a detachable magazine and has at least 2 of—
(i) a folding or telescoping stock;
(ii) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon;
(iii) a bayonet mount;
(iv) a flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor; and
(v) a grenade launcher;
(C) a semiautomatic pistol that has an ability to accept a detachable magazine and has at least 2 of—
(i) an ammunition magazine that attaches to the pistol outside of the pistol grip;
(ii) a threaded barrel capable of accepting a barrel extender, flash suppressor, forward handgrip, or silencer;
(iii) a shroud that is attached to, or partially or completely encircles, the barrel and that permits the shooter to hold the firearm with the nontrigger hand without being burned;
(iv) a manufactured weight of 50 ounces or more when the pistol is unloaded; and
(v) a semiautomatic version of an automatic firearm; and
(D) a semiautomatic shotgun that has at least 2 of—
(i) a folding or telescoping stock;
(ii) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon;
(iii) a fixed magazine capacity in excess of 5 rounds; and
(iv) an ability to accept a detachable magazine.
18 U.S.C. § 921 (31): The term “large capacity ammunition feeding device”—
(A) means a magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device manufactured after the date of enactment of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition; but
(B) does not include an attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition.
The Dianne Feinstein quotes about spray-firing and light triggers appear in The Congressional Record—Senate, May 8, 2003. You can watch Representative Carolyn McCarthy say “a shoulder thing that goes up” on YouTube. The interview with Tucker Carlson took place on April 18, 2007.
The Eric Holder comment about reinstituting the assault-rifle ba
n was reported by, among others, Jason Ryan on ABC News, February 25, 2009. His backpedaling was reported as “Holder Dials Back His Commitment to Pushing Ban on Assault Weapons,” by Sam Youngman in The Hill, November 15, 2009.
A list of the companies making AR-15s can be found at AR15.com.
The Gun Digest article on Frank DeSomma’s AR-15 ran in the July 2009 edition.
CHAPTER FOUR: BLOWBACK
The price of a 1934 Thompson submachine gun comes from a reproduction of the Thompson gun catalog from that year.
This is the way Thomas, the Library of Congress online service, summarizes the provisions of Public Law 99-308, the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986:
Amends the Gun Control Act of 1968 to redefine “gun dealer,” excluding those making occasional sales or repairs. Exempts certain activities involving ammunition from current prohibitions.
Permits the interstate sale of rifles and shotguns, provided: (1) the transferee and transferor meet in person to accomplish the transfer; and (2) such sale complies with the laws of both States. Presumes the licensee to have actual knowledge of the laws of both States.
Repeals certain recordkeeping requirements for the sale of ammunition (but retaining such requirements for armor-piercing ammunition).
Revises the current prohibition against the sale of firearms or ammunition to certain categories of individuals by: (1) prohibiting such sales by all persons (current law covers only licensees); and (2) including as additional categories illegal aliens, dishonorably discharged members of the armed forces, and U.S. citizens who renounce their citizenship. Extends the prohibition against shipping firearms or ammunition in interstate or foreign commerce to include such individuals.