FOREWORD
BY DON B. KATES, JR.
While still a student at Yale Law School, Don B. Kates,
Jr., did civil rights work in the South, was a law clerk for William
Kuntsler, and drafted civil-rights legislation for the House Judiciary
Committee. From 1966 to 1975 he held various administrative positions
with California Rural Legal Assistance and was deputy director
and director of litigation for the San Mateo County Legal Aid
Society, providing free legal representation for the poor. He
specialized in major constitutional litigation
and police misconduct litigation. In 1970 he was denominated the
nation's outstanding legal services lawyer by the National Legal
Aid and Defender Association. He has also been a member of the
California Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights
Commission.
Professor Kates has acted as a police legal advisor
to departments in California and Missouri and has been a consultant
on firearms, firearms legislation, and civil rights
legislation to police departments and state and federal legislative
committees. His articles on firearms have appeared in police
and firearms technical journals; and his articles on firearms
laws and "gun control" in general have appeared in Harper's,
The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor,
the Civil Liberties Review, the Criminal Law Bulletin,
the Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and various
law reviews and other publications. He is the author of Guns,
Murder, and the Constitution, and books
he has edited include Restricting Handguns: The
Liberal Skeptics Speak Out and Firearms and Violence.
Professor Kates has taught constitutional
and criminal law at St. Louis University and as a criminologist
is currently associated with the Pacific Research Institute.
He maintains a largely constitutional law practice
in San Francisco and has recently been litigating constitutional
issues regarding California's gun laws. - JNS
Most Americans, including most gun owners, support reasonable
gun controls. As a criminologist, so do I - with the caveat that
even the best controls can only have marginal effects because
the real determinants of violence are cultural and socioeconomic.
The reason gun control remains a controversy is that the gun "control"
movement has no interest in control, and no interest in working
with the millions of gun owners who support control. The gun-control
movement is dominated, rather, by prohibitionists whose ideologically
motivated program obstructs society's ability actually to control
guns.
Exemplifying that obstruction is Washington D.C.'s ban on handgun
sales, passed at the urging of Handgun
Control, Inc. (HCI) and the National Coalition to Ban
Handguns (NCBH). This ban just drove
the traffic underground, destroying the limited real control-value
gun laws can have. When gun sales are legal, they're concentrated
among gun dealers who can be required to register or conduct background
checks on buyers, and refuse sales to prohibited persons such
as felons and juveniles. Banning guns created a thriving business,
with black marketeers obtaining scores of handguns
in adjoining states and selling them on D.C.'s streets to anyone
with the money to buy.
The situation will be even worse if HCI and NCBH
attain their goal of a federal handgun ban. In addition
to importing millions of handguns, the black marketeers
will produce modern handguns in pot-metal copies.
Though such a gun could only fire perhaps 300 shots before
exploding, any competent machinist can fabricate one using tooling
no more sophisticated than that found in millions of home workshops.
Pot-metal guns would actually be less expensive than commercially
manufactured guns are today - being produced without safeties,
serial numbers, and brand names - by businesses free from costs
such as taxes, record keeping, and likelihood of product liability
suit. Similarly, "rotgut" sold for less during Prohibition
than good liquor had before it.
The issue of licensing good citizens to carry concealed guns further
illustrates the anti-gun movement's indifference to, and retardation
of, actual control. Under California law, the police are required
to license adults who have good cause and good character.
The City of Los Angeles has more population than Connecticut which,
as of mid-1993, had 110,000 licenses statewide.
Yet at the behest of HCI, NCBH, and their
ally the virulently anti-gun Los Angeles
Times, as of mid-1993 the City of Los Angeles hadn't issued
a handgun concealed-carry license
in 18 years.
Predictably, however, that didn't mean no one was carrying concealed
guns. A May 17, 1992 Los Angeles Times
poll found 250,000 people admittedly carrying handguns
without a license. Think of that: 250,000 uncontrolled
people carrying concealed guns around - their identities, training,
and qualifications completely unknown to the police! Now,
of course, criminals wouldn't seek licenses even
if they were freely available to good citizens. But the law-abiding
would - whereby society would have notice of their identities
and the power to condition licensure on training and testing.
That is pragmatic gun control. The program of the LA
Times, Handgun Control et
al. is prohibitionist myopia.
But they don't care that their program is non-pragmatic and ineffective.
Their real goal is a law symbolically affirming their deeply
held moral belief that people should depend on the police for
defense and never be prepared to defend themselves.
Nationally syndicated columnist Garry Wills, a distinguished cultural
historian, calls those who own guns for family defense
"anti-citizens," "traitors, enemies of their own
patriÆ," arming "against their own neighbors."
Ramsey Clark calls defensive gun ownership "anarchy, not
order under law - a jungle where each relies on himself for survival."
The Washington Post deems "The need that some homeowners
and shopkeepers believe they have for weapons to defend themselves"
to be among "the worst instincts of the human character."
Likewise, representatives of the Presbyterian Church regularly
seek a handgun ban because their church's "General
Assembly has declared in the context of handgun
control that it is opposed to 'the killing of anyone, anywhere,
for any reason.'"
The Presbyterians distinguish long guns, which they see as intended
for sporting use only, from handguns which they
seek to outlaw as primarily intended for self-defense.
The National Council to Ban Handguns (of which the
Presbyterian Church USA is a charter member) changed its name
to Coalition Against Gun Violence to clarify that it seeks prohibition
also of long guns that are especially adapted for self-defense
rather than sport. That is the real basis of the campaign against
so-called assault rifles.
The law NCBH and HCI got Washington D.C.
to pass (and which they see as the basic minimum gun control)
doesn't just ban sale of handguns. To preclude the
use of any firearm for self-defense,
it prohibits householders from keeping even long guns assembled
or loaded. NCBH was founded, and is still sponsored,
by the Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church.
Its rationale for gun "control" is explained by the
editor of its publication Engage-Social Action, Rev. Allen
Brockway. He is so deeply opposed to self-defense
that he solemnly informs women that it is their Christian duty
to submit to rape rather than do anything that might imperil a
rapist's life. Rhetorically posing the question "Is the Robber
My Brother?" Rev. Brockway answers "yes" for, though
the burglary victim or the "woman accosted in the park by
a rapist is [not] likely to consider the violator to be a neighbor
whose safety is of immediate concern ... [c]riminals are members
of the larger community no less than are others. As such they
are our neighbors or, as Jesus put it, our brothers ... "
Theological considerations aside, the Methodist Board and the
YWCA condemn the mere possession (not just the unlawful use) of
defensive firearms as "vigilantism." HCI
and the other dominant forces in the gun "control" movement
(quoted above) concur in condemning gun ownership for self-defense
on purely secular moral grounds. As Illinois anti-gun activist
and University of Chicago professor Robert Replogle puts it, "The
only legitimate use of a handgun that I can understand
is for target shooting." HCI's Sarah Brady,
in an interview from the Tampa Tribune of October 21, 1993,
agrees that "the only reason for guns in civilian
hands is for sporting purposes."
Concomitantly, on August 15, 1993 the New York Times quoted
Sarah Brady as saying that HCI proposes
federal gun licensing under which self-defense
would not be accepted as a ground for gun ownership. Only sportsmen
would be allowed to own guns. Of course the Los
Angeles Times, in an editorial from October 22, 1993, agrees.
So does NCBH, though it also seeks to have all handguns
(even target .22s) banned and confiscated. And, again, both
HCI and NCBH insist that all firearms
be kept unloaded and disassembled to make it impossible to use
them for self-defense.
If only to appeal to those who disagree with their anti-self-defense
moral premises, HCI and NCBH do avow pseudocriminological
arguments for such laws. Thus, when he was HCI Chairman,
Pete Shields in his book Guns Don't Die, People
Do advised that women submit to rapists and never physically
resist in any way: when attacked by criminals "the best defense
against injury is to put up no defense -
give them what they want or run." In fact, however, it is
only victims who run away or resist barehanded or with some weapon
less than a gun who increase their danger of injury. Though the
submissive are only half as likely to be injured by criminals
as are victims who resist without a gun, criminological data show
victims who submit are still twice as likely to be injured by
criminals as are victims who resist with a gun - not to mention
that the submissive are much more likely to be raped or robbed.
HCI and NCBH try never to acknowledge or mention these
facts, which have been established by the leading American authority
on guns and crime, Prof. Gary Kleck of Florida
State University's School of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
Kleck also finds that each year handguns
are used by good citizens three to four times as often in self-defense
as they are misused by criminals in committing crimes. Of course
this research has also escaped the notice of the Washington
Post, New York and LA Times, and the
rest of our ignorant and highly biased media. Fortunately, it
has not gone unnoticed by others. It is responsible for changing
the minds of many criminologists who started out, as did Kleck,
believing that gun ownership even by good citizens promotes crime.
In 1993, the American Society of Criminology awarded Kleck's
book Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America its coveted
Hindelang Award for the most important research in criminology
over the past several years.
HCI, NCBH, and gun prohibitionists
in general ignore Kleck's work because, at bottom,
their position is not criminological, but rather non-pragmatically
"moral" and ideological. Yet that position is morally
bankrupt because it can only be urged upon the American people
by active and consistent deceit. Consider what I call The Parable
of the Fox, the Rabbit, and the Porcupine: While our society is
ravaged by foxes, HCI, NCBH, and their allies
urge us to disarm and cower in our holes like rabbits. In contrast,
gun owners imitate the porcupine. But HCI, NCBH,
and their allies obscure the truth by pointing to the slain rabbits
and shrieking, "It's the porcupines' fault! The porcupines
are eating the rabbits!"
Note: Readers wishing more detailed verification for
the facts cited above can refer to Kates' "Bigotry,
Symbolism, and Ideology in the Battle Over Gun Control,"
1992 Public Interest Law Journal 31; also his "The
Value of Civilian Arms Possession as Deterrent
to Crime or Defense Against Crime," 18 American
Journal of Criminal Law 113 (1991); also his "Handgun
Banning in Light of the Prohibition Experience"
in Firearms and Violence 1984 (Kates is editor);
my own interview with Gary Kleck, later in this book;
and other sources referenced throughout or recommended at the
end of this book - JNS