Being robbed at gunpoint is a strange experience. While it was occurring, I didn't feel particularly afraid. I actually remember feeling a bit like a spectator; the event was more surreal than anything else. Only in retrospect did I realize how completely frightening it was. These men were young, foolish, inexperienced and I think they could have easily pulled the trigger unintentionally. My most consuming emotion after this experience didn't turn out to be fear-it was anger. Something was wrong, it seemed to me, when people like this had such easy access to guns.
So I decided to learn about gun control. There seems to be plenty of right-wing propaganda about the right to bear arms. Take this advertisement from the Citizens of America Organization: "It's happening again: first, a media campaign demonizing certain people, either directly or by association with crime. Then a demand to register these people. The target isn't Jews this time-it's American gun owners." That, I think anyone will agree, is certainly not an apt comparison. Other examples of sensationalism in pro-gun literature abound. As Richard Poe writes in "The Seven Myths of Gun Control," "The gun-ban lobby can succeed only if it divides American against American, black against white, man against woman, young against old ... Americans of every color and creed must search their hearts today and decide where they stand."
One hears NRA-esque arguments like this all the time. One of particular interest to me is the "slippery slope" theory-the idea that once the government starts compromising our right to bear arms, all of our other rights (of religion, the press, etc.) will follow. Theories such as these have always seemed quite implausible to me. I have always dismissed the pro-gun lobby as a bunch of crazy American loons, whose fears that they are going to lose their guns are completely unfounded. Only recently have I begun to see why they might be so worried.
As recently as 1967, a 13-year-old could walk into a hardware store almost anywhere in the country and buy a rifle. During the same year, the vast majority of public high schools in New York-a city that now has some of the tightest anti-gun legislation in the country-still had shooting clubs. Students brought their guns with them on the subway and often stored them in their classrooms during the day, before practice. Can anyone imagine this happening now? Certainly not.
Things have changed, and Americans have become much more afraid of guns. I, for one, was terrified of them long before my carjacker thrust one into my stomach. In March of 1996, I was living in Britain when Thomas Hamilton, a middle-aged British man, walked into a kindergarten class and shot 16 tiny children, along with their teacher. My father covered the event for Newsweek and I have seen him come to tears when he describes the interviews with parents. America has had its share of Hamiltons as well: Columbine is one of many examples.
Accompanying this fear has been significant growth in gun-control legislation. The Brady Law of 1994 requires background checks on all (legal) gun purchases and the Brady Campaign fights for other gun control policies, such as the one-gun-a-month-law and safe-storage laws. Traditionally, I have always been an ally of the gun-control advocates and I have always supported the Brady Bill. If you visit the Brady Campaign website, you will see graphs that show that the murder rate has been declining ever since the Brady Bill has gone into effect. All of their claims seem to make sense to me. After all, if you make sure to check backgrounds, crime should automatically go down, right? It stands to reason.
I was forced to question my confidence in the Gun Control lobby, however, after I read a book by John R. Lott, an economist who has worked at the University of Chicago and at Yale Law School. He is also the former chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. In his book, "More Guns, Less Crime," he presents numbers on crime rates before and after gun laws were put into effect, and, controlling for all sorts of variables (which many studies fail to do), he finds that violent crime (murder, rape, aggravated assault) declines when non-discretionary concealed-carry laws are passed. In other words, when it is easiest for citizens to buy guns and carry them around, the crime rate falls significantly.
I know that the idea seems quite contrary to logic and, most of the time, when I bring it up with people, they tend to dismiss it automatically. This oversight would be a mistake. Always starting with the numbers, Lott finds that the people who buy gun permits tend to be extremely law-abiding citizens, many of whom are buying a gun to defend themselves. Criminals, on the other hand, have access to illegal channels through which they can easily buy guns. He points out that when a state makes it easier for potential victims to purchase guns with which to defend themselves, many potential murderers or rapists are afraid of getting shot themselves and, consequently, the number of murders and rapes declines. Over a 19-year period he studied, the number of mass public shootings declined "by a whopping 84 percent" when different states passed right-to-carry laws. He also found that "[a]mong the violent crime categories, the Brady law is only significantly related to rape, which actually increased by 3.6 percent after the law passed." Indeed, all of the statistics he found seem to show that looser gun regulation is better. Although I bought the book thinking that it was little more than right-wing propaganda, it is the most convincing thing that I have read about guns in America. Unlike Lott, the Brady Campaign doesn't explain where its numbers come from and I think that it would be a mistake to accept them on blind faith.
Although I didn't realize it at first, there are extremists on both sides of the gun control debate. I think, in the end, though, that most people on both sides of the issue want the same thing: to fight for the American gun policy that will actually result in the smallest number of murders, rapes and overall crimes. Trying to find out what that policy is is what I think everyone-both at Amherst and across America-should try to do. Only when both sides are open-minded and willing to discuss the controversial issue, will we be able to achieve this goal.