Negroes and the Gun (61 page)

To the first point, the focus on strict supply controls blunts militant prescriptions for self-help that public officials will naturally find discomforting. That worry is illustrated by the public declaration of Carl Lawrence, president of the New York NAACP, who in the early 1970s urged harsh medicine against the criminal
microclass. Lawrence exhorted the “good people” of every harassed community to arm themselves and “take the streets away from the hoodlums.”
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This is uncomfortable territory for everyone, but especially for progressives, whose political coin is the promise of public solutions to a wide array of problems. Even those who privately acknowledge that people are on their own within the window of imminence will be reluctant to say it and loath to build security policy around a theme of violent self-help. The modern orthodoxy, with its simplistic prescription for gun control, allows one to avoid the conversation about state failure and self-help.

The modern orthodoxy also avoids the political risk of stigmatizing the criminal microclass. The nature of this risk becomes apparent when we consider that the young men and boys of this class are also husbands, lovers, fathers, sons, and grandsons of people who may be willing to condemn the criminal down the street, but will go to the mat to defend their own wayward kin. In places with high offender rates, harsh rhetoric and tough policies against the criminal microclass will step on many toes and commit the sin of airing “family” problems in public.
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Careful politicians might navigate this problem by distinguishing between the full population of offenders, which might be relatively high, and the microculture of violent predators, which always has been quite small. But that is a more complicated strategy than the familiar appeal to community victimization and blame-casting onto distant villains.

The modern orthodoxy allows policy leaders to avoid openly choosing between Otis McDonald and the thugs who besieged him. It casts them both as victims of the gun or of the “outsiders” who provided it. It promises to make things safer for everyone by attacking that outside threat. At least that is the script.

But the reality, acknowledged by any serious analysis, is that the success of supply controls depends on taking the gun inventory down toward zero. That is simply impossible in a society that already has nearly as many private firearms as the rest of the world combined. So in practice the modern orthodoxy really
does
choose between the interests of Otis McDonald and the thugs who besieged him. And perversely, it subordinates McDonald's self-defense interest and gives the advantage to his tormentors.

On this balance, the modern orthodoxy seems ill advised. More so because it essentially dismisses promising criminological assessments—like this one from one of the most prolific and sensitive researchers in the field, who advises:

There is substantial evidence that much could be learned about black homicide and other aspects of black life in the United States if more careful attention were paid to differences among blacks as well as between black and whites. The incidence of homicide among blacks as among non-blacks is significantly correlated with social
class. . . . The study of homicide among blacks may benefit from a within-group as well as a between-group analytical framework.
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But even if blacks are reticent to have this public conversation about the family's dirty laundry, shouldn't we at least privilege the interests of innocents and refuse to hand the advantage of arms to their tormentors? Conceding just this much sharpens the remaining analysis in an important way.

Whether it protects innocents like Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald is a crucial gauge of firearms policy. But what really does it mean to protect this class of innocents? What sort of regulatory scheme leaves the Parker/McDonald class better or worse off?
Does giving these people the choice of armed self-defense really offer a plausible chance of good results, or is armed self-defense so dangerous that we can justify taking that choice away?

We might dismiss the self-defense interest of the Parker/McDonald class by saying that their desire for defensive firearms is simply misguided; that
armed self-defense is ineffective, uncommon, or counterproductive.
This conclusion might rest on a variety of assumptions that, if sound, could leave us confident that, black tradition of arms notwithstanding, the modern orthodoxy represents the clearly better contemporary policy. Those assumptions require careful attention.

Although it has long been debunked, one of the early and sometimes still-repeated claims about gun use is that
you are
44 times more likely
to hurt yourself or someone you love than to use the gun for self-defense. This conjures images of June Cleaver mistakenly shooting Ward when he pops home early from a business trip. The image is false. It is rooted in a study counting gun deaths, most of which were suicides, and ignoring the vast majority of defensive gun uses where no one is shot and the gun is not even fired.
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The point is underscored by the actual data on the June-shoots-Ward incidents. It turns out that “fewer than 2 percent of fatal gun accidents (FGAs) involve a person accidentally shooting someone mistaken for an intruder.”
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But even if it turns out that people rarely accidently shoot their loved ones, there is still the objection that
armed self-defense really doesn't work.
The data say otherwise. Survey data show that Americans defend themselves with guns at a startling rate. There have been fourteen major surveys of defensive gun use (DGU), with results ranging as high as 2 million DGUs per year. The figure is contested. But even skeptics who conducted their own surveys obtained similar results. This has led to a variety of other speculations by incredulous critics. Accounting for the various criticisms, the
National Opinion Research Center puts DGUs in the range of 256,500 to 1,210,000, per year.
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These DGUs do not garner headlines because in the vast majority of cases no shots are fired. There is no indication that this phenomenon excludes blacks.
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What about the risk that
you will have your gun taken
and used against you? This concern is generally at odds with the DGU data, and textured research shows explicitly that people actually are better off resisting than submitting. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) show that a victim's weapon is taken in about 1 percent of cases. The NCVS and other sources also conclude that there is no sound empirical evidence that resistance provokes fatal attacks.
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In a study of all of the NCVS data on robberies from 1979 through 1985, the firearm offered the most effective form of resistance. Resistance with a gun was the method most likely to thwart the crime and most likely to prevent injury to the victim.
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The NCVS data show that “the use of a gun by the victim significantly reduces her chance of being injured in situations when a robber is armed with a non-gun weapon.”
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Another worry about armed self-defense is that
you will hurt yourself or have an accident
. The most compelling rendition of this is the image of children who find the family gun and shoot themselves or a playmate. This scenario triggers our most powerful protective instincts. These intuitions about the risk of accidental gun death may be the most exaggerated aspect of the firearms debate. In one telling example, a group of elite New York lawyers was asked to estimate the number of children under the age of fourteen killed in firearms accidents each year. Essentially everyone in the room of several hundred guessed more than 10,000 per year. Roughly half the room said 50,000 per year. The trend continued, with some saying 100,000 and a few guessing even more.
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The National Safety Council reports that for children under the age of fourteen, the death rate from firearms accidents has generally been below 100 deaths per year.
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This does nothing to diminish the tragedy for the families involved. But it puts things in perspective to note that swimming-pool accidents account for more deaths of minors than
all
forms of death by firearm (accident, homicide, and suicide).
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All this said, it is still hard to shake the draw of supply controls, even though we know they are mainly symbolic. The appeal of the “no guns” logic presses through in the intuition that any sort of incremental reduction in the firearm supply will push gun crime proportionately downward. The modern orthodoxy advances this logic through the contention that
easier access to guns explains the exceptional rate of homicide in black communities
.

The data say otherwise. This is demonstrated by the fact that urban areas where disproportionate black murder rates now center generally have stricter gun laws, fewer guns, and more gun crime than rural areas where there are far more guns,
easier access to guns, and less gun crime. Among young black males, the gun homicide and victimization rate is higher in urban areas (where gun regulation is stricter and gun ownership is lower) than in rural areas (where gun regulation is looser and gun ownership is higher). But despite the fact that rural blacks own more guns and have easier access to guns, the modern murder rate for young urban blacks has been as much as 600 percent higher than that of their rural counterparts.
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Overall, blacks own guns at no greater rate than whites, and some surveys say that blacks own fewer guns. A study published in the
Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy
summarizes the data this way:

Preventing law-abiding, responsible African-Americans from owning guns does nothing at all to reduce murderers, because they are not the ones who are doing the killing. The murderers are a small minority of extreme antisocial aberrants who manage to obtain guns whatever the level of gun ownership in the African-American community.

Indeed, murderers generally fall into a group some criminologists have called “violent predators,” sharply differentiating them not only from the overall population but from other criminals as well. Surveys of imprisoned felons indicate that when not imprisoned the ordinary felon averages perhaps 12 crimes per year. In contrast, “violent predators” spend much or most of their time committing crimes, averaging at least 5 assaults, 63 robberies, and 172 burglaries annually. A National Institute of Justice survey of 2,000 felons in 10 state prisons, which focused on gun crime, said of these types of respondents: “[T]he men we have labeled Predators were clearly omnibus felons . . . [committing] more or less any crime they had the opportunity to commit. . . . Thus, when we talk about ‘controlling crime' in the United States today, we are talking largely about controlling the behavior of these men.”

The point is not just that demographic patterns of homicide and gun ownership in the African-American community do not support the more guns equal more death mantra. More importantly, those patterns refute the logic of fewer guns equal less death. The reason fewer guns among ordinary African-Americans does not lead to fewer murders is because that paucity does not translate to fewer guns for the aberrant minority who do murder. The correlation of very high murder rates with low gun ownership in African-American communities simply does not bear out the notion that disarming the populace as a whole will disarm and prevent murder by potential murderers.
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The general data on violent crime and the gun inventory also refute the instinct that incremental decreases in the gun supply will reduce gun crime. The telling point here is that
the overall gun inventory and gun crime have split in dramatically different directions
. Over the last seventy-five years, the number of guns per 100,000 of population has grown from about 34,000 per 100,000 to roughly 100,000 per 100,000. Yes, we have enough
guns literally to arm every man, woman, and child in the nation. But an interesting thing has happened as the gun inventory has grown to this record level.

The more-guns-equals-more-gun-crime assumption has not turned out. While the inventory of civilian firearms has grown steadily, the overall gun homicide rate has oscillated from around three per 100,000 to highs of around six per 100,000. In recent years,
the gun
crime rate and violent crime rate (even among blacks) have
declined even while the number of guns has risen sharply
. Gun homicides have trended down over recent decades from highs of around 14,000 per year to the current rate of around 8,000 per year. Over this same period, the number of guns in the civilian inventory has continued to grow to its now-record level of more than 325 million firearms. (This estimate is in the middle of a range that includes William Bratton's 350-million-guns estimate on the high end and lower estimates toward 300 million.) Not only have more guns not equaled more crime, both violent crime and gun crime have sharply declined while the gun stock has accelerated to record levels.
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