onelesson

I wrote this for an English class two years ago. I just re-read it today, and entertained the idea of posting it here to see what other people think. I debated going back and rewriting certain parts but decided against that no matter how bothered I am by the imperfections and the sloppy parts. Any potential errors are mine and do not belong to the authors quoted. Worth noting is that since this was written, the Heller case referred to was decided by the Supreme Court in favor of Heller with the implication being that: individuals have a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms that are in common civilian use for the purposes of self-defense apart from any hunting or sporting use. Feel free to re-post or use anything from this essay but please give credit where it is due. I would also be interested in any feedback.
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The Ugly Truth About Guns

A bitter divide exists between the citizens of the United States over the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which states: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Some, like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, see this Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights as a collective right that refers to the States’ rights to have “well-regulated militias,” while others, such as the National Rifle Association, read this as an individual right of “the people” to own and use guns. This issue is alive and well in American politics as seen in: the 2004 expiration of the nation-wide 1994 Clinton ban on “assault weapons,” the recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to hear the Heller/Parker case over the constitutionality of Washington D.C.’s total ban on handguns, the recent massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech, and the recent mention of gun control in three out of thirty-four questions on November 28th’s CNN/YouTube Republican Debate. 2008 will undoubtedly be a big year for the Second Amendment debate to be decided on one way or the other. The quibbles over Constitutional interpretation in this matter usually stem from how differently people view and experience life in America.

If a person is surrounded by gun crime everyday, or has deeply felt the loss of a loved one to meaningless gun violence, then, perhaps, he or she might understandably want to ban or severely restrict the ownership of guns. If one were to grow up in a different part of the country, he or she might only see the positive and useful purposes of firearms such as hunting, pest control, and self-defense, even enjoyable uses such as target shooting and the shooting sports. From these different viewing lenses, arguments are made over the Second Amendment and the legitimate place for firearms in our society. Each side wants the same things: less crime and a safer environment for everybody. Yet the American people remain divided by their perceptions of firearms: are they unsafe and unnecessary killing devices or merely effective tools that can be harnessed for good as well as evil? This paper will argue that gun control does not work in reducing gun crime and will achieve this in a brief, yet logical, manner by looking at three relevant pieces to the gun control puzzle: history, statistics, and what the Constitutional framers meant by “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”
Learning the past and its lessons is crucial to human understanding in how to move forward into the future. Roger D. McGrath, a UCLA and California State University, Northridge history professor and a captain in the Naval Reserves, wrote an essay in an October 2003 issue of Chronicles that spoke deeply into the folly of gun control for a nation of free people. He wrote that “once disarmed, populations either submit meekly to tyrants or fight in vain.” He goes back into the highlights of the republics of Greek city-states and Rome (before its population was disarmed and was formed into an Empire), and reminds us that slaves and undesirables have nearly always been kept from owning a means of defense throughout history. He specifically makes mention of the Gaels- the Irish and Scots- under English rule and the tragic consequences they endured after surrendering their weapons. This latter group was not part of a mere obscure event in history, unrelated to America’s founding, because these people’s descendants made up a “quarter of the American colonists… and when England tried to disarm the American colonists, all under the guise of preserving public order and peace, the colonists reacted violently.” This was exactly what happened at the first site of hostilities in the American Revolutionary War: Lexington and Concord. To those who say that type of thing (what happened to the Gaels) would never happen here, it is worth mentioning that a very significant portion of America’s population was at one time completely disarmed (total gun control) and were horribly abused: African slaves. Likewise, in the 20th century European Jews were completely disarmed, while fascist or communist governments murdered millions of “undesirables” all under the guise of pursuing “public safety” by only allowing “trained professionals,” i.e. police and military, to be armed.

Recent gun control history has not gone over very well either. The Great New Orleans Gun Grab by Gordon Hutchinson and Todd Masson documents what happened to Louisiana residents after they were forcibly disarmed by police and National Guard troops after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Not only did this not help the crime spree situation, but it also left citizens disarmed and defenseless to armed thugs and police brutality. This was all under the order of the former New Orleans Police Superintendent P. Edwin Compass and Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley who stated: “Only law enforcement is allowed to have weapons. No one will be armed. We are going to take all the weapons.” Those citizens have still not had their firearms returned to them and many related lawsuits are pending. Meanwhile, other friendly Western nations, such as Britain and Australia, have recently done away with guns in similar fashion.
A British newspaper, the Telegraph, reported in 2001 that “gun crime was on the rise” since the 1997 total ban on handguns after the Dunblane massacre in which 16 children and a teacher were gunned down in their classroom. Philip Johnston reported in this article that despite the fact that law-abiding citizens turned in over 160,000 handguns, the “number of crimes in which a handgun was reported to have been used… was up 40 per cent.” This same newspaper reported six years later, in an article by Sophie Borland and Aislinn Simpson, that gun crime among youths had soared 20% above 2001 levels by 2005. This article also mentioned a recent wave in inner city gun crime. This article came two days before David Leppard of The Sunday Times reported that the government was accused of “covering up the full extent of the gun crime epidemic… and that the number of deaths and injuries caused by gun attacks in England and Wales soared from 864 in 1998-99 to 3,821 in 2005-06.” Obviously this contradicted claims by the UK’s home secretary that gun crime was falling since the handgun ban. Why all this gun crime, if all the guns were banned? Didn’t these criminals get the memo? Home burglaries, even “hot burglaries” which occur while the homeowners are actually in their homes at the time of the crime, have skyrocketed thanks to the ban on firearms. Now the law-abiding citizens of the UK are perceived by criminals as virtually disarmed and defenseless. The history of gun control is speaking to America’s citizens and it is saying clearly this is not in their best interest. Gun control simply hasn’t worked, and indeed can not work, because gun laws target the law-abiding, while the criminals go about their business. Naturally much recent gun control history, like these British news articles, is very statistic-heavy because the events are directly observable.

The recent Supreme Court case, the D.C. vs. Heller case, highlights some interesting statistics related to the gun control issue. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence released a statement on their website recently, condemning the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ “activist judges” who “struck down a District of Columbia law restricting handgun possession that has been on the books for more than 30 years” (“Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence”). The case is being appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States and has become the D.C. vs. Heller case. What the Brady Campaign doesn’t inform their supporters of in this article is the fact that, since the handgun ban in 1976, in addition to a ban on any assembled firearm kept in the home at all, the gun crime rates have skyrocketed, peaking in the 1990s, leading to a nickname that the nation’s capitol earned in blood: “America’s Murder Capitol.” John Lott, the author of More Guns Less Crime, a massive statistical study that looked at concealed carry laws (laws that permit citizens to carry firearms for defense) and crime rates, wrote about Washington DC specifically in an October 2004 article stating:

“Proponents of the bans claim that the laws failed because guns leaked into the District… from neighboring areas, but there was not even the smallest reduction in crime. We all want to take guns from criminals. The problem is that gun bans appear to have disarmed only law-abiding citizens while leaving criminals free to prey on the populace” (“Armed Citizens Mean a Safer City”).

Dr. Lott, a senior research scholar in the School of Law at Yale University, wrote at great lengths in his book that a major factor in reducing crime rates is deterrence. “When crime becomes more difficult, less crime is committed. Higher arrest and conviction rates dramatically reduce crime. Yet criminals respond to more than just actions taken by the police and the courts… citizens can take private action” (Lott 19). A simple way of thinking about it would be to picture what it would be like to be in a potential robber or rapist’s shoes. If the victim is armed, or better yet, many in the community are armed, the decision to commit that heinous crime becomes that much more difficult. Lott did a study that spanned across the country, as more than 32 states signed into law concealed carry permit systems, and covered almost two decades, finding that in areas of the country with more guns on the streets, in the hands of law-abiding citizens, a massive deterrence factor existed and consequently yielded a correlated drop in violent crime rates. Lott is not without his critics, but seems very open and willing to debate with these critics, still standing by his conclusions more than a decade later. Perhaps confirming Dr. Lott’s work, sociologists James Wright and Peter Rossi surveyed close to 2,000 felons and found that “40% of the sample had at one time decided to abort committing a crime because they believed their intended victim was armed” (Wright and Rossi 155).

Furthermore, many statistics used by groups like the Brady Campaign seem to not be telling the full story. For example, the Brady Campaign states in their fact sheet on children and guns that “one young person is killed by a firearm every three hours” based on a total of 2,852 deaths in 2004. No doubt this is a lot of deaths that may have been prevented but they fail to mention that “young person” refers to anyone within the age range of 0 and 19. Furthermore, according to the Centers for Disease Control about 69% (1,954 to be exact) of these deaths were 17, 18, and 19 year olds and these statistics include all incidents of all “intents” including: police shootings, justifiable defense shootings, suicide with a gun, accidental shootings, and crime-related shootings such as gang shootings. Only 351 children between ages 0 and 14 died from a firearm related death, of which only a mere, but nonetheless tragic, 62 were “unintentional” (“Injury Mortality Reports”). Even if we include ages up to 19 years old, the number of accidental and “unintentional” deaths by firearm remains at a mere 143 for a nation with over 200 million guns! Just by looking at the numbers the CDC provides, America should be much more worried about falling (with 243 deaths), fire (641), poisoning (1037), or transportation-related deaths (7,944). These numbers are all from 2004 data and are only for the age range of 0-19 years old.

The commercials that depict children playing with firearms and accidentally dying are produced in order to further the agenda of gun control but they are portraying an event that rarely happens (31 times in 2004 for children ages 0-10). The mass shootings we see on the news are also prominently shown as reasons we need more gun control, but if America learns anything from Dr. Lott’s study of concealed carry laws and the concept of deterrence, perhaps our schools and other public places would be safer with more guns in them, not less! Due to the inherent problem of free will and freedom, an insane or ill-willed person can never be definitively stopped from shooting up a school, or blowing up a pipe bomb, or running into a classroom and stabbing everyone inside (Japan has had several mass murders take place with mere knives). Banning guns because of gun crime, or banning commonly used construction materials and household products because they can produce a bomb if combined properly, or banning kitchen knives because of their lethality doesn’t really make any sense. Before banning guns perhaps we should ban gravity or maybe cars, trains, boats, and planes since they seem to be killing far more “young people” according to the CDC. The statistics, just like the history, do not seem to support the case for gun control.

All of this debate is still going on today because of a little sentence in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. Without that amendment, we would have perhaps rid ourselves of guns a long time ago. As previously mentioned, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence stated their outrage over the “judicial activism” seen in the Parker vs. D.C. case stating that historically there have been many cases, including one in 1939, the United States v. Miller, that have consistently stated the Second Amendment does not protect a right of the individual citizen to bear arms. They are correct when they discuss these select cases, but it is important to note that they only mention cases from the 20th century. According to GunCite.com:

“The Second Amendment preserves and guarantees an individual right for a collective purpose. That does not transform it into a “collective right.” …There is no contrary evidence from the writings of the Founding Fathers, early American legal commentators, or pre-twentieth century Supreme Court decisions, indicating that the Second Amendment was intended to apply solely to active militia members” (“Original Intent and Purpose”).

So perhaps it is the Brady Campaign who should be accused of appealing to cases of “judicial activism.” GunCite.com is quite correct in this matter. Some states at the time of ratification of the Bill of Rights even had their own provisions within their state constitutions including phrases similar to the Second Amendment including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, and North Carolina. Pennsylvania’s constitution referred to the people’s “right to bear arms in defense of themselves” and maintained no state-organized militia. Vermont later copied Pennsylvania’s provision. Virginia’s Declaration of Rights of 1776 stated:

”That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free State; that standing armies in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

It is no wonder that the states had language like this in their state constitutions since they had just fought off a large standing army of a centralized government with a mere rabble of armed farmers and “average Joes.” Naturally they did not want to repeat the process of fighting a large standing army to secure their liberty again (if they had to fight their own). In other words, kings of the Old World commanded and owned armies, but free people in the New America, just like in the Greek city-states, were the army. Leonard W. Levy, a Mellon Professor Emeritus at the Claremont Graduate School, wrote against the “collective right” theory bunch stating in The Origins of the Bill of Rights that: “If all it (the Second Amendment) meant was the right to be a soldier or serve in the military, whether in the militia or the army, it would hardly be a cherished right and would never have reached constitutional status in the Bill of Rights” (135, parentheses added). He also states that the “right to have arms is an inheritance from England, as are many American rights” (136).

Levy then details how this right came to be solidified in English common law after a revolution deposed a Catholic monarch, who had banned Protestant firearm possession, paving the way for a law that allowed Protestants to have arms “for their common defense” in 1689 (that language should seem familiar). That basically armed the entire populace since Protestants were “98% of the population.” The right to bear arms goes back even further to the twelfth century with Henry II who “required all free people to own certain arms” (136-137). Imagine if laws were passed that required everyone in America to own a gun? Further proof that the Second Amendment was indeed intended to secure an individual right is that the use of the phrase “the people” is never interpreted in any other way than to refer to the body of citizens in all the rest of the founding documents, including the Preamble, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and the Ninth Amendment. The American Revolution, as Dr. Thomas E. Woods Jr. has stated in one of his works, was a “conservative revolution unlike the French war, intended to assert the colonists’ historic rights as Englishmen.” Certainly they appealed to this history of common law that the King had no right to take their guns.

There was a big debate when the Constitution was ratified over whether or not to have a Bill of Rights at all, because in the Federalist mind the Constitution did not specifically grant a power to take guns away, therefore there was no need to worry about specifically stating that people have a right to keep and bear arms. This kind of thinking can be found in The Federalist Papers, and is especially found in Federalist #46 in which James Madison stated: “[the Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation… (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” Before moving on, it is worth mentioning one more quote from America’s most famous founding father: George Washington. In his first annual message to Congress on January 8, 1790 he stated:

“A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly for military supplies.”

A common argument that groups like the Brady Campaign make, if they admit the original intent of the Second Amendment, is that a lot has changed since 1787. The Second Amendment didn’t envision machine guns, bazookas, or tanks. Well, if the American people understood exactly what the Founders had envisioned, the only reason the American military would have these items is because American civilians would have brought them to the battle. The new Republic wasn’t supposed to have a standing army in the first place. Our adoption of a national standing army does not negate the original intent of “a well-regulated militia (composed of the armed citizenry) being necessary to the security of a free state.” If the Brady Campaign were truly worried about crime sprees with so-called “assault weapons,” which function no differently from other semi-automatic weapons including hunting rifles, perhaps they should look at Switzerland where every household owns a fully-automatic weapon and has little to no crime!

What about crazy insane serial killers? John Lott’s study on deterrence only works for rational criminals, but if the entire populace was armed anyway, no killer would get very far in their hellish plans of mass murder. Mass murders happen in “gun free zones” for a reason: no resistance. This is why some students of Virginia Tech have come forward in protest of that campus’ policy that disarms students, even those who have concealed carry permits, forcing them to leave their means of protection at home. The murderer in that case was able to methodically slaughter 32 people, reloading multiple times, because he met no resistance in a “gun free zone.” All the victims could do was to block the door and pray. The Brady Campaign uses this tragic event as a rallying cry for even more gun control laws (in addition to the 20,000 laws already on the books in America). Meanwhile, Ted Nugent, the NRA, and other pro-gun groups and individuals are calling for an end to “gun free zones” because they believe that these laws and policies simply do not work in preventing gun crime. Tom Gresham, host of the nationally-syndicated radio talk show GunTalk, calls on his listeners to “stamp out these killing zones.” The only one with a gun (the means to attack or defend) in these zones is the person who chooses to break the law and ignore the ‘Gun Free Zone’ sign. The “Gun Free Zones” issue is a perfect example of how people from the same America, can see the same situation, and call for two completely different courses of action.

By looking at the tragic history of gun control, in which millions of people have been murdered by their own governments, and the true statistics which seem to say things that the Brady Campaign would not admit to, and the Constitution itself, Americans should be waking up to the fact that more gun control will not keep them safe from the next shooting. A total ban on firearms, as in American “gun free zones” or the UK, only creates an environment that makes it easier for mass murderers to make their statements or criminals to continue their business without being harmed. Disarmed citizens have no means to defend themselves. As the old saying goes, “Dialing 911 may only take seconds, but waiting for help might take the rest of your life.” Americans need to know, especially in the uncertain age of terrorism, that they need to be prepared with the right tools for when disaster strikes. As Dr. Lott’s research and the CDC’s data has shown, Americans should be reaching for guns rather than campaigning to ban them. The ugly truth about guns is that they work, for the good guys and the bad, and to the same degree.

Works Cited

Borland, Sophie and Aislinn Simpson. “Britain’s rising levels of gun crime.” Telegraph
24 August 2007. 30 Nov 2007.
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/23/nshot323.xml>.

“Children & Guns.” Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence 17 April 2007. Brady
Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. 30 Nov 2007 <http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/factsheets/pdf/children.pdf>.

Hutchinson, Gordon and Todd Masson. The Great New Orleans Gun Grab. Louisiana
Publishing Inc., 2007.

Johnston, Philip. “Gun crime rises despite Dunblane pistol ban.” Telegraph 17 July
2001. 30 Nov 2007
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/07/17/nhand17.xml>.

Leppard, David. “Ministers ‘covered up’ gun crime.” The Sunday Times 26 August
2007. 30 Nov 2007 <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2328368.ece>.

Levy, Leonard W. Origins of the Bill of Rights. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1999.

Lott, John R. More Guns, Less Crime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
McGrath, Roger D. “A God-Given Natural Right.” Elements of Argument: A Text and
Reader 8th ed. Ed. Annette T. Rottenberg and Donna Winchell. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 362-367.

“Original Intent and Purpose of the Second Amendment.” GunCite 09 Sep 2007 30 Nov
2007 <http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndpur.html>.

“The Truth About the Second Amendment.” Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
2007. Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. 30 Nov 2007 <http://www.gunlawsuits.org/defend/second/index.php>.

“WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports, 1999-2004.” National Center for Injury Prevention
and Control. Centers for Disease Control. 1 Dec 2007
<http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.html>.

Wright, James D., and Peter H. Rossi. Armed and Considered Dangerous. New York:
Aldine de Gruyter, 1986.

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