Control (21 page)

A lot of people disagree. They find it easier to blame the weapon—especially when that weapon is a gun. If a boy stabs a cat to death with a steak knife, society doesn’t debate the knife, it debates how the boy got that way. We look at his life, his upbringing, his schooling, his friends, his medications, and what he does in his spare time. But if that same boy uses a gun to kill that cat, everything changes. All of a sudden it’s not about the boy, it’s about the weapon. What kind of gun was it? How many rounds did it hold? How did he get it? Why didn’t it have a trigger guard? While there are certainly legitimate questions to be asked in the wake of a violent act, gun crimes seem to divert attention from where it should really be: on the person committing the act.

One of the most popular arguments made in support of gun control is the idea that other countries have strict gun control laws and very few gun crimes. We looked at why that argument is wrong in Part One, when we saw how Switzerland has lots of firearms but very few gun-related crimes. Semi-automatics can be
legally purchased there and, according to
Time,
“nobody bats an eye at the sight of a civilian riding a bus, bike or motorcycle to the shooting range,
with a rifle slung across the shoulder.”

Yet, despite all of that,
Switzerland experiences about 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 people annually.
The rate in the United States is about six times higher.

The difference between the United States and Switzerland is not the guns; it’s the people and the culture. “Social conditions are fundamental in deterring crime,” Peter Squires, professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton in Great Britain, told
Time.
Squires has “studied gun violence in different countries and
concluded that a ‘culture of support,’ rather than focus on individualism, can deter mass killings.”

Unfortunately, that argument, even from a guy in Great Britain, is not going to persuade those who believe that the only thing that can deter mass killings is a ban on the weapons sometimes used to commit them.

So, for now, I’ll be happy to end with some apparent common ground that President Barack Obama and I share on this issue. During a recent trip to Chicago, a city riddled with gun violence despite very strict control measures, Obama acknowledged that perhaps guns shouldn’t really be blamed for everything. “[T]his is not just a gun issue,” he said. “
It’s also an issue of the kinds of communities that we’re building.”

And, I believe, the kinds of kids we’re raising.

I
. The “socialization hypothesis” is the theory that using violent video games predicts future aggressive behavior, while the “selection hypothesis” is the opposite: kids who are already aggressive seek out violent video games. This study found support only for the socialization hypothesis.

T
here are plenty of radical things we can do—and many of them have already been proposed—that will make no real difference. For some people, that’s okay. They would rather achieve a political goal or “do something” bold so they can sleep better at night, even if that means the underlying problem never gets solved.

I’m not one of those people. And I don’t think you are, either.

That doesn’t mean we have to sit on our hands. Far from it. But a reactionary response to a terrible event is how we ended up with Japanese internment camps. And a heavy-handed government-knows-best response is how we ended up with Prohibition—which, by the way, is still the only constitutional amendment to ever have been repealed.

Come to think of it, there is a lot in common between the way controllists now talk about guns and the way they talked about alcohol before Prohibition. Invoking terms like “public health crisis” and “a moral issue” has been done before, and, of course both alcohol and guns have been targeted as the root cause of whatever is wrong with society.

If we just took the alcohol away, everything would be solved.

That’s not hyperbole; it’s literally the way some people felt about alcohol back then. In a sermon celebrating Prohibition in January 1920, the Reverend Billy Sunday proclaimed:

The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh.
Hell will be forever for rent.

Not quite. What actually happened was that liquor went underground. Speakeasy clubs formed (according to the National Archives,
30,000–100,000 such clubs opened in the first five years in New York City alone), mob bosses and organized crime rose to power, and everyone else just got a lot more creative. According to the archives, “People found clever ways to evade Prohibition agents.
They carried hip flasks, hollowed canes, false books, and the like.”

Prohibition may have made some people feel good, but it did nothing to solve the underlying problem. Gun control works the same way. There are, however, a couple of big differences between the prohibitionists of the twentieth century and the controllists of today. First, the people behind these efforts have changed. Progressives and Do-Gooders brought us alcohol prohibition, but gun prohibition is being championed by Progressives, Do-Gooders,
and
the Marxists. This a far more lethal combination.

The other major difference is that the right to alcohol was not enshrined by our Framers in the Constitution. So while the tactics used to change public perception may be similar, the stakes are not. If prohibiting alcohol was a test of the government’s potential to be a nanny, prohibiting guns is a test of its potential to be a tyrant.

Those who are serious about finding real solutions to gun violence understand that effective change has to come from the bottom up. That means harnessing the collective grief we all feel after a tragedy and using it to promote real change—not in statutory
codes, but in the hearts and minds of people, especially our children. We must be honest enough about our failings to be willing to take another look at our schools—how we educate our kids and how we protect them while we’re doing it; to rethink personal responsibility—as parents and as law-abiding gun owners; and to engage in reasonable debate with reasonable people who are willing to have honest conversations—not as gun-grabbing ideologues, but as parents and friends.

With those principles as our foundation, let’s take a look at how we can improve on both sides of the issue.

For all the reasons explained in Part One, I am not in favor of more gun control (sorry, “gun safety”) legislation. I do not believe that government can heal the broken hearts and minds of those who think that picking up a weapon is the answer. However, there are still plenty of commonsense things we can do.

First, while it’s virtually impossible to know exactly how many existing gun control laws are on the books, no one disputes that it’s a staggeringly high number. However, many of those laws are either not enforced to their fullest extent or are disregarded altogether. Call me crazy, but I’d rather hold off on rushing a bunch of new laws through in the wake of tragedy until we can reasonably assess whether the ones we already have actually work.

Here’s one example: When purchasing a gun from a licensed dealer, a buyer must fill out ATF form 4473 for a background check. Lying on this form is
a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. According to a report done for the Department of Justice, 72,600 people lied on this form in 2010 alone. Of those, “
prosecutors pursued
just 44.
” Not 44 percent: 44 total cases. In
other words, only .06 percent of all people who committed this
felony
by lying on an ATF form were prosecuted. Does something about that seem wrong to you?

Given how badly most gun control advocates want to expand the background check system, it might be nice if we first pushed to fix the system we have. After all, if we don’t prosecute those who lie on this form, then what is the point of the form? People with a clear issue in their past will just lie and hope for the best, while everyone else still has to go through the motions.

When the NRA brought these lack of prosecutions up to Joe Biden, they reported that he responded by saying, “[W]e simply don’t have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form, that checks a wrong box,
that answers a question inaccurately.”

You don’t have the time? To enforce the law? To prosecute felons?

It’s incredible that a federal government that won’t use the power we’ve already given it is now asking for so much more. But even if we prosecuted everyone who lies on their forms, the background check system itself would still be broken. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) depends on certain federal agencies, like the Defense Department, along with each individual state, to continually supply the system with lists of those who have a criminal record, have failed drug tests, or
have been judged mentally ill.

But those updates just aren’t happening. The Defense Department has
yet to report much of anything and, according to Newark, New Jersey, mayor Cory Booker—who agrees that the system is flawed—“19 states have provided
fewer than 100 records of individuals disqualified on mental health grounds” since the NICS began. And, surprise, surprise, Congress hasn’t been helping. From 2009 to 2011 they “
appropriated just 5.3 percent of the
total authorized amount,” leaving the NICS underfunded. Just to be clear: I’m not fan of this system, but don’t tell me how great it would be to expand background checks when we clearly can’t even manage what we already have. And while several of President Obama’s recent executive orders on gun control were focused on some of these problems, we’re a long way off from fixing them.

The next thing we can do is make it easier to put gun traffickers away. Since I’ve included so many of Mayor Bloomberg’s quotes that I disagree with in this book, here’s one that I am with him on:

[M]ake gun trafficking a federal crime. Every year, illegal trafficking channels put tens of thousands of guns in the hands of criminals. But there is no clear and effective statute that makes gun trafficking a federal crime. Prosecutors who want to combat traffickers have no choice but to rely on a weak law that prohibits “engaging in the business of selling guns without a federal license,”
which carries the
same punishment as trafficking chicken or livestock.
(emphasis added)

If we all agree that keeping guns away from criminals is the goal, then this is just absurd. A Department of Justice study from 2001 revealed that almost 79 percent of criminals
got their gun somewhere other than a retail store. And that makes sense—people who acquire things with the intent of using them for harm generally don’t walk into a Walmart to buy them.

Finally, I do believe that putting armed and trained officers in our schools will help save lives. In Simpsonville, South Carolina, a town of about eighteen thousand, an officer who previously worked in a community service office relocated his desk to the elementary school. “All I needed from the school is a desk and Wi-Fi,” the officer said. “[I]t didn’t cost a dime.”

So far, the teachers love it, the kids love the officer and give him high fives every day, and the parents feel safer. As he told NBC News, in explaining why he made the move, “I’d rather be here and not be needed,
than be needed and not be here.”

This is a model that can and should be replicated across the country—and, in many cases, it won’t require any hard decisions about spending or budgets, just a strong majority of people who want to do something that will actually make a difference.

By now you’ve seen that entertainment violence is not the red herring that those from the industry, along with the controllists who think that banning guns is the only answer to all of society’s ills, say it is. The evidence of its impact on our children is, for anyone willing to give it a fair hearing, indisputable.

What’s also indisputable is how hard it is to shield our kids from these images. As a father of four, I’ve experienced this firsthand. We try so hard as parents to be role models and to show our kids the right path, but eventually we have to let go. When that time comes—and it always will—all we can do is pray that they remember what we’ve tried to teach them. It’s not foolproof, but if we do our jobs, they’ll usually do theirs.

In the meantime, there is plenty we can do. First, know the ratings system. All video games sold in stores are assigned a rating by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB). While there are plenty of problems with these ratings (for example, they are determined based on clips provided by the manufacturers, not after someone has actually played the game),
it’s still important for parents to understand how they work.

The highest rating a game can earn is AO, for “Adults Only.”
These games “[m]ay include prolonged
scenes of intense violence, graphic
sexual content and/or gambling with real currency.”

Games that obtain an AO rating solely due to violence are extraordinarily rare. Sexual or pornographic behavior will do it; gambling will make the cut—but no amount of violence appears to be sufficient for the ESRB to slap a game as AO. The only notable exception to this rule was the gruesome game
Manhunt 2,
which was first given an AO rating, later revised to M after
the manufacturer blurred some of the worst scenes. (Ironically, the Wii version of the game, in which you physically use the controller to beat, hack, bludgeon, strangle, and stab people to death,
also has an M rating.)

Part of the reason why games generally don’t receive an AO rating is that it’s essentially equivalent to a movie that gets a NC-17 rating: no one can make any money from it. All of the major gaming platforms prohibit AO-rated games from being licensed on their consoles, and major retailers won’t sell them. As a result, publishers will almost always modify and resubmit their games to get their rating improved, or they’ll cancel the title altogether.