Control (15 page)

“I was denied the one equalizing factor that I had,” she said.

And what about those campus safe zones that Representative Salazar talked about? “Well,” Collins said, “
I was in a safe zone and my attacker didn’t care.”

Gun-free zones don’t deter criminals—they help them by providing a guarantee that they will not face any armed resistance. But they do deter the law-abiding. A faculty member with a concealed-handgun permit who breaks the campus gun ban would be fired and likely find it impossible to get hired at another university. A student with a permit who brings a gun to school faces expulsion and would probably find it difficult to get admitted to another school. Bringing a firearm into a gun-free zone can have serious adverse consequences for law-abiding people. But for someone like the Virginia Tech killer, the threat of expulsion is no deterrent at all.

“I don’t understand why the police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say
we’re going to go on strike [until more gun control is adopted].”

—MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
,
July 23, 2012

It is illegal for police to go on strike, and Bloomberg later backed off his statement. But, aside from the fact that he probably should’ve known that already, this is a classic case of once again trying to click those heels and wish that people would behave the way you think they should. However, unlike with his restrictions on cigarettes, painkillers, and baby formula, Bloomberg can’t just force the police into believing that more gun control is needed.

The annual survey by the National Association of Chiefs of Police polls more than twenty thousand chiefs of police and sheriffs. In 2010, 95 percent of respondents said they believed that “any law-abiding citizen
[should] be able to purchase a firearm for sport or self-defense.” Seventy-seven percent said that concealed-handgun permits issued in one state should be honored by other states “in the way that drivers’ licenses are recognized through the country” and that making citizens’ permits portable would “facilitate
the violent-
crime-fighting potential of the professional law enforcement community.”

National surveys of street officers are rare, but the ones that have been done show officers to be overwhelmingly in favor of law-abiding civilians’ owning and carrying guns. A 2007 national survey of sworn police officers by
Police
magazine found that 88 percent did not agree that “tighter restrictions on handgun ownership would increase or enhance public safety.” In the same survey, 67 percent said they opposed tighter gun control because the “
law would only be obeyed by law-abiding citizens.”

Regional and local surveys show similar patterns. For example, a 1997 survey conducted by the San Diego Police Officers Association found that 82 percent of its officers opposed an “assault weapons” ban, 82 percent opposed a limitation on magazine capacity, and 85 percent supported
letting law-abiding private citizens carry concealed handguns. And, just recently, the non-partisan association that represents all 62 of Colorado’s elected sheriffs issued a position paper against attempts to limit the capacity of magazines. “Law enforcement officers carry high-capacity magazines because there are times when 10 rounds might not be enough to end the threat,” the group wrote. “County Sheriffs of Colorado believe the same should hold true for civilians who wish to defend themselves,
especially if attacked by multiple assailants.”

So, Mr. Mayor, maybe the reason police aren’t begging for more gun control is the very same one that, despite the evidence, you won’t listen to: our cops know that more guns mean less crime.

“[W]hy can’t we restrict the big magazines? If you sort of have a smaller magazine, it’s very likely fewer people would have gotten shot in Tucson.
Why can’t we ban assault weapons?”

—E. J. DIONNE JR.
(
Washington Post
columnist), January 13, 2011

“Extended magazines for handguns, for example, are not used in hunting. They’re not used in self-defense. An extended magazine for a handgun is the sort of thing that is
only used for killing a large number of humans or trying to.”

—RACHEL MADDOW
,
January 10, 2011

“What we’re trying to do, which seems reasonable, is to limit the number of rounds in a magazine to two. Excuse me, to 10. That was in the Assault Weapons Ban, which we allowed to expire. At least 10 fewer people would had been shot [in Tucson] had that been the case and I can’t understand any rational argument for not,
at least restricting the size of the magazines to 10.”

—REPRESENTATIVE JIM MORAN
(D-VA), January 13, 2011

This is such common sense that I can’t believe we haven’t done it already! Just limit the number of bullets a magazine can hold to ten and mass killings will magically disappear.
Or should it be seven bullets, as New York has decided? Or five? Or, as Senator Feinstein suggested many years ago,
three rounds?

Or how about zero?

A magazine is basically a metal or plastic box with a spring. Before 3-D printing came into existence it was pretty easy for people to make these at home. A few years from now, anyone will be able to make a magazine in virtually any size they want. Restricting their capacity to some arbitrary number may ensure that law-abiding people can’t buy a larger one, but it will not stop a criminal who wants one, especially since many millions are already in circulation.

In some ways I can understand this argument, since it follows the typical pattern. Controllists think more guns mean more crime, so naturally they think more ammunition means more fatalities from mass killings. The problem is that the data just doesn’t bear that out.

Mother Jones,
whose data issues we’ve already covered, claims that half of the incidents
they looked at involved magazines holding
more than ten bullets. That’s thirty-one incidents over the last thirty years. Whether U.S. policy involving millions of people, not to mention a constitutional right, should really be changed over something that happens an average of once a year can be debated—but let’s put that aside and instead think about the practical impact on criminals of restricting magazine sizes.

I looked at the underlying
Mothers Jones
data from those thirty-one incidents involving so-called high-capacity magazines (remember, a 30-round magazine is
standard
on many guns) and found that twenty of them involved a killer who brought multiple guns to the scene. Using multiple weapons is obviously one convenient way around any kind of magazine capacity restriction. (Having multiple smaller magazines is another way around it, but then you get into dumb arguments about how quickly someone can switch magazines.) If you exclude the massacres where the murderer possessed multiple firearms, you are left with eleven incidents. Over three decades.

Controllists like to make the argument that a gunman who has to reload is more likely to be stopped during that process, but I know of only two incidents where that has ever actually happened: Tucson and the 1993 Long Island Rail Road massacre. If others exist I’d be curious to know why those who think that restricting magazine size will reduce fatalities do not cite them more often.

There is also the obvious issue of control. Once a magazine limit is determined, controllists have a starting point. Right now they are fighting for ten, but is that really the end of it? In his essay
Guns,
Stephen King gave a glimpse into how this mentality works: “Ban the sale of clips and magazines containing more than ten rounds. I think that’s too many; to borrow the title of an old sitcom, I believe eight is enough. But I’d happily accept ten.”

So he’d happily accept ten . . . right now. But what about a few
years from now? Will he push for eight? You can see how quickly this can get out of hand. In fact, controllists may have found a back door into the overall gun ban they dream of. After all, the Constitution may guarantee the right to keep and bear arms, but it says nothing about ammunition.

Many gun control advocates don’t care about the data or the practicality or the history (or the Constitution) and instead simply can’t stand the idea that these magazines even exist.
Why does anyone need a thirty-round magazine,
they ask rhetorically.

I think there are two answers. The first is simple: none of your business. We are not a “needs-based” society when it comes to rights. We don’t dole out freedoms based on the collective wisdom of some group of elitists. The second reason is more practical, though controllists aren’t going to like it: sometimes people need more than seven or ten bullets to defend themselves.

There are plenty of examples to highlight, but a recent one occurred in late February 2013 in Houston. A family was baking a cake in their kitchen when three men invaded their home. After taking down the father the men went for his wife. Their son, seeing what was happening, ran and got his father’s gun. He opened fire, killing one of the attackers and
forcing the others to flee. Had his gun started clicking after seven or ten shots this home invasion could have ended very differently.

Controllists may scoff, but it’s a pretty good bet that the number of lives saved each year because law-abiding people had access to magazines holding more than ten rounds is greater than the lives lost in mass killings because the gunmen did. For some reason, that other side is never counted—maybe because stories about people saving their own lives are not as interesting to the media as those where lives are taken.

One final note on this topic. There’s a fairly widespread belief among those who have probably never held a gun before that so-called
assault weapons hold larger magazines than hunting rifles. But that is totally wrong.
Any
gun that can hold a magazine can hold one of virtually any size. And that is true for handguns as well as rifles. An “assault weapon” ban would therefore not limit the number of rounds that guns could fire.

“Gun control in Germany came prior to Hitler, and
Hitler in fact relaxed gun control laws (though not for the Jews and other groups).”

—DAILY KOS

“By 1938, when Hitler was riding high, those laws were pretty much the same as American gun laws today . . . you needed a permit to acquire and carry a handgun, but you could have as many rifles as you wanted. Unless you were a Jew, of course, but that was the annoying thing about the Nazis, wasn’t it? They killed lots of Jews, and they didn’t need restrictive gun legislation to do it; it was the government that armed the killers.”

—STEPHEN KING
,
Guns

One of the ways that dictatorships maintain their power is by
disarming opponents in order to prevent resistance. Tyrants no more recognize the right to keep and bear arms than they do the right to free speech. Yet, for some reason, people are either confused or in denial about how this worked in regard to Nazi Germany.

Some claim that Hitler and the Nazis didn’t disarm people because gun control laws were already in place before he rose to power. This is partially true—as I’ll detail later on—but first I have a much more important question: so what?

If there had been no gun control laws in Germany prior to Hitler, and the German people were as heavily armed as Americans are today, would things still have played out the same way?
Obviously, no one knows for sure—but it’s hard to make a convincing case that things could’ve been much worse.

Let’s put the hypotheticals aside for now and instead go through the actual history to see how gun control and confiscation really worked. Once you have the facts and understand the time line it’ll be a lot easier to see how important gun control was for the Nazis.

Before Hitler rose to power, it was the Weimar Republic’s gun laws of 1928 and 1931 that ruled the land. They provided that “
licenses to obtain or to carry firearms shall only be issued to persons whose reliability is not in doubt, and only after proving a need for them.” It also prohibited gun possession for anyone “who has acted in an inimical manner toward the state, or it is to be feared that he will endanger the public security.”

A 1931 Weimar “
emergency decree”
authorized the German states to register all firearms, which could be confiscated if “public security and order so requires.” The interior minister warned the states to provide “the secure storage of the lists of persons who have registered their weapons,” so that they would not “
fall into the hands of radical elements.” Unfortunately, they never considered that those radical elements might be the government itself and those lists would eventually fall right into the hands of the Nazis.

According to Stephen P. Halbrook, a constitutional attorney who has done extensive research on German firearm laws, “the Nazi seizure of power in 1933
was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as ‘communists.’ ”

After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the Nazis used gun control to repress Jews and political opponents. Using the Reichstag (the German parliament building) fire as evidence of an impending plot to overthrow the government, Hitler successfully pushed through the ironically titled “
Decree of the Reich President
for the Protection of People and State” emergency measure. This decree suspended civil liberties, thereby allowing the state to restrict basic rights, like freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. Guarantees of personal privacy were also suspended as
Nazi police began to search homes and offices for subversive literature and firearms under the guise of suppressing “Communists.”

During the early months of 1933, storm troopers raided the apartment of the widow of Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic. According to the
New York Times,
they
searched “for hidden arms, but found only a revolver belonging to Herr Ebert [Jr.], which he handed to them together with a permit that had expired.”