Gun Guys (44 page)

Of course, polling on gun control was distorted by how strongly those who answered the questions felt about the issue. Unlike the rest of the population, gun guys thought about their guns—and about efforts to take them away—every day. If 90 percent of victory was showing up, NRA members were going to win the gun-control fight every time.

But even if the numbers were imprecise, the trend was clearly toward
less and less public support for gun control. The big drop in crime probably explained a lot of that. NRA propaganda might have helped, too. But there was also this uncomfortable reality: It was almost impossible to prove that the measures we thought of as “gun control” saved any lives. The
American Journal of Preventive Medicine
took a swing at it in 2005, examining dozens of studies of gun-control effectiveness. In many cases, the researchers found flaws with the studies themselves. But the
Journal
was prepared to be declarative about a few gun-control measures. Gun registration, for example, rarely helped police solve crimes, because people so rarely committed a crime with the guns they’d registered. It was stolen guns, or guns in underground circulation so long that any registry would have missed them, that did the killing. Canada’s national long-gun registry ate up more than sixty million dollars a year and yielded so few practical results that in October 2011 the Parliament voted to scrap it. Gun licensing, banning classifications of weapons (assault rifles, Saturday night specials, etc.), waiting periods, one-gun-a-month laws, and paperwork requirements all yielded similarly ambiguous results at best. Usually they had no effect at all. Yes, gun crime fell after passage of the Brady Law … but it was already falling before. New York City had tough gun laws and, as the second decade of the twenty-first century began, remarkably low crime. But Chicago had even tougher gun laws, and lots of violent crime. Gun crime was almost nonexistent in Vermont, which had some of the loosest gun laws anywhere, and relatively high in California, with some of the strictest. While it was easy to argue that California and Chicago needed tougher gun laws than Vermont because they had more crime, arguing it that way reversed causality—that the crime rate spawned the laws, not the other way around. That high levels of violence continued despite the tough laws only weakened further the “guns cause crime” argument.

It’s possible that Chicago and California would have been even more violent had their laws been looser, and that gun crime wouldn’t have fallen as fast had the Brady Law never passed. But it was impossible to know—and therefore easy to sow doubt about the gun-control exercise.

The most useful way to think about gun laws was as an analogue to marijuana laws. Both let citizens and policymakers feel like they were “doing something.” Both were ineffective at achieving their stated goals. Laws like the assault-rifle ban responded not to a real public safety threat but an imaginary one, which reminded me of drug prohibitionists excoriating marijuana not as a hazard unto itself but as a “gateway drug.” Blaming
guns for crime was as dishonest an exercise in avoidance as saying that teenagers were alienated because they smoked pot—not because they were overstressed by competition, underfunded and unimaginative schools, and the divorces of their overworked parents. How much more convenient was it to ignore the totality of the lives lived by young black urban men—the group most likely to die by gunfire—and focus instead on taking away their guns?

Most of all, though, what both marijuana laws and gun laws did best was express disapproval of a lifestyle and the culture that enjoyed it.

NRA executive vice president J. Warren Cassidy once told a
Time
magazine writer, “You would get a far better understanding if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world.” Guns may have been fun, useful, nostalgia-inducing, and mechanically intriguing, but in the America I was touring, they also stood in for a worldview that, broadly defined, valued the individual over the collective, vigorous outdoorsiness over pallid intellectualism, certainty over questioning, patriotism over internationalism, manliness over femininity, action over inaction. The gun was the physical manifestation of the tribe’s binding philosophy. It was the idol on the altar. The tribe exalted it and invested it with supernatural powers—to stop crime, defend the republic against tyranny, turn subjects into citizens, make boys into men.

The opposing tribe, which tended to value reason over force, skepticism over blind certainty, internationalism over American exceptionalism, multiculturalism over white-male hegemony, income leveling over jungle capitalism, and peace over war—liberals, for lack of a better word—recognized the gun as the sacred totem of the enemy, the embodiment of his abhorrent worldview. They believed that they could weaken the enemy by smashing his idols—by banning the gun if possible and, if not, by forcing it into an increasingly small box with as many restrictive laws as they could pass.

The elite soldiers of the anti-gun tribe were those of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Washington’s premier gun-control organization, and the disparity in strength between them and the NRA was apparent even before I entered their offices. While the NRA filled those two soaring towers in Virginia, the Brady Center had stuffed itself into a cramped warren of cubicles in a downtown D.C. building that also housed a fusty collection of anti-genocide, anti-war, and anti-racism nonprofits.

Dennis Henigan, the Brady Center’s legal director, was fifty-nine years old and had the weary, exhausted manner of a man who knew that the
war he’d been waging would continue long after he’d left the field. He had an enviable head of hair; big, 1970s-style eyeglasses; and long fingers that he pressed together as he spoke. As we took seats in his office, I asked a very D.C. question: Who’s winning, your side or the other guy’s?

“My view,” he said, “is that we’re at a stalemate.”

Dude
, I thought,
are you joking?
If what most concerned the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence was gun
violence
, Henigan should have been taking a victory lap. Gun violence was falling faster and landing lower than at any time in American history. The only way to see a stalemate was to accept the gun-guy view that what people like Henigan wanted was not only to get rid of gun violence, but to get rid of guns.

By that standard, the NRA was cleaning Brady’s clock. Gun laws were looser almost everywhere than they’d been twenty years earlier. The Supreme Court had settled the meaning of the Second Amendment in the gun guys’ favor. Six million Americans had obtained licenses to carry concealed weapons. Hundreds of thousands more guns were going into circulation every year. One could logically argue that if the Brady Center’s goal was to reduce gun violence, perhaps the thing to do was declare victory and close up shop. But good luck convincing a D.C. nonprofit that it was time to turn out the lights and send back the contribution checks.

“I was raised just outside D.C., in Springfield, Virginia,” Henigan told me as we made tea in the Brady Center’s windowless break room. “You know—tract houses, shopping centers, the classic 1950s suburb.” Henigan’s father, a debate coach at George Washington University, was an Adlai Stevenson liberal who’d died young—“the same age I am now,” Henigan said. “He was a smoker; I’m very passionate about tobacco, too.”

We walked back to Henigan’s office through narrow hallways festooned with blowups of gun-control magazine ads going back to the 1970s; it had been a long fight.

“My father clearly had no use for guns,” Henigan said. “I had all the Davy Crockett accoutrements, cap guns and water guns. But my father wouldn’t allow me to have a BB gun, because they were real. You could put your eye out.” Henigan’s only childhood experience of guns was when a neighbor his family knew well was cleaning his gun in the kitchen and shot his wife in the leg. “I do remember how shocking that seemed to me and my parents,” Henigan said as we took seats in his office, “the notion that someone even had a gun. After that, she walked with a really pronounced limp.”

The incident made Henigan wonder whether even well-intentioned
people could handle guns safely at home. “All it takes is a single lapse in judgment,” he said. “It’s human not to be perfect.”

After law school, Henigan enjoyed work as a corporate litigator but found pro bono work more exciting. In 1989, he answered an ad in
Legal Times
: Handgun Control Inc. was looking for an attorney to bring the tactics of Thurgood Marshall–style public-interest law to the gun-control cause.

“From the first day I walked in, it was drummed into me that we were moderates,” Henigan said. “They didn’t want us to evoke an image of leftists or hippies or anything like that.” Pete Shields, who founded Handgun Control, was a Republican DuPont executive whose son had been the last victim of the Zebra killers, who shot random people with pistols in San Francisco in the 1970s. Charlie Orasin, another founder, was also Republican. They realized that restricting such a popular product as guns ran counter to the Republican impulse toward personal freedom, and they wanted a conservative, clean-cut organization. Spokesmen for the group cut their hair short and looked sharp. An American flag stood in the lobby. Shields and Orasin had zero tolerance for hostile or elitist comments about gun owners. And Handgun Control would never promote a ban. It changed its name to the Brady Center in 2001, in honor of James Brady, President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, who had been crippled with a handgun during an attempt on Reagan’s life.

Henigan had tried shooting a gun once, he told me. In the mid-1990s, his nephew and some friends invited him out for a day of practice in a field in rural Maryland. He didn’t like the Magnum or the shotgun, but “When we got down to the .22, I could understand the fun of shooting one. It was educational to be around people who enjoyed it, to hear them talk about it. They fascinate me, the gun people. I want to get into their heads.”

Though not enough to try shooting more than once every twenty years.

“I think my nephew was surprised to find neither I nor the Brady organization was in favor of banning guns,” Henigan said.

“Wait,” I said. It was the third time he’d mentioned that neither he nor Brady supported gun bans, yet reinstating the assault-rifle ban was the Center’s main legislative goal.

“We do say that there are kinds of guns that are significantly distinguishable from others, so ought not to be in civil society,” Henigan said, tenting his fingers.

“So you support a gun ban.”

“Of assault weapons.”

“So why do you keep saying that Brady doesn’t support banning guns?”

He spread his hands and looked at me through the bottom of his glasses as though I’d just fallen off a turnip truck. When Brady said it didn’t support gun bans, most of its friends in the Capitol understood that they meant guns that good Americans wanted. Assault rifles, with their pistol grips, barrel shrouds, long magazines, and sinister black plastic stocks, were evil and murderous—an entirely different category.

I thought of all the gun stores I’d been to in the past year, all the gun shows, competitions, and rifle ranges. The AR-15—an assault weapon, by Henigan’s definition—was so prevalent, so widely accepted as a hunting and sporting rifle, that to make a distinction between it and what Henigan called “other semi-automatics” seemed ridiculous. “When’s the last time you visited a rifle range?” I asked.

“I’ve never visited a rifle range.”

We met again the following day, and he clarified. “We understand here at Brady that you have to be careful when talking about banning a class of firearms. It’s just very difficult to make the case that you need to be able to fire thirty rounds in five seconds.” He swiveled in his chair and looked out along I Street, like an admiral surveying the sea. “It’s not that you can’t imagine legitimate uses,” he said. “You can take an AR-15 out on the range and have a good time. You can use it in competitions.” He swiveled around to face me and frowned at his desktop. “It is simply risk versus benefit. It would be a lot of fun to drive 120 miles an hour on our roads, but we have speed limits. Our position is—and you may disagree—that it’s more important to protect people from being shot by criminals than to allow gun owners to enjoy an AR-15. We have limits on enjoyable activity in this society because some would threaten death and serious injury to other people.”

It made sense in theory, and had we been speculating about what might happen if people were allowed to have such weapons, he might have convinced me. But we didn’t need to speculate: We had data.

The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report was as “hard” a set of numbers as could be found in the gun debate. It wasn’t a survey that depended on how questions were asked; it simply tallied the crimes that police departments were required to report to the FBI. And what it showed was
that assault rifles were not a public safety problem—and hadn’t been even back when the original ban was passed. The FBI didn’t delineate assault rifles from other rifles in its murder statistics. But in 1993, the year that the first assault-rifle ban was being debated, rifles of all kinds were used in only 3 percent—754—of the 23,271 murders committed. So the entire, polarizing assault-rifle debate was over a problem that, however telegenic and symbolically potent, barely existed. By 2004, when the ban was up for renewal, murder had fallen by a stunning 64 percent, and rifles of all kinds were responsible for the same 3 percent. Since then, rifles’ portion had fallen half a percentage point, with assault rifles only a fraction of that.

It made me wonder why the Brady Center refused to support a ban on handguns. Handguns killed almost twenty times more Americans than rifles of all kinds did in 2009. Assault rifles, though, were just as powerful symbolically as they were ballistically. A renewed assault-rifle ban would really smash the enemy’s idols. And politics was the art of the possible. Depending on whom you chose to believe, support for a handgun ban didn’t rise above about 35 percent, while anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of Americans supported reinstating the assault-rifle ban.