"Buy a gun. Learn to use it safely and appropriately. Carry
it with you at all times. Be prepared to defend yourself, your
loved ones, and your neighborhoods,"
-J. Neil Schulman on ABC TV World News Tonight,
May 2, 1992, during the Los Angeles Riots
Yes, I admit it: the title of this book is a bad pun.
Technically speaking, "stopping power" is a measurement
of the ability of a firearm or a round used by a firearm
to incapacitate an attacker.
But I also mean it as the ability of an armed citizenry to stop
tyrannical power.
This book contains my writings on firearms-related topics,
although it expands out from there into issues of criminology,
political history, and theories of justice.
I'm not what you'd call a gun nut. When I started writing in defense
of firearms, I didn't even own a gun.
I shot my father's .22 rifle in the back yard of our house
in Natick, Massachusetts once or twice, got an NRA marksmanship
certificate with an air rifle when I was 12 or so, and
didn't shoot again for another two decades.
I only bought my first firearm, a .380 Colt Government
Model semi-automatic pistol, in late summer, 1991.
Since that time I've bought two more semi-auto
pistols, have taken California police reserve training, and have
received a license to carry a concealed firearm
in California and Massachusetts. I've also become a pretty decent
marksman, though not up to competition standards.
The reason I started writing about guns is that I'm interested
in justice - not to mention life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness - and I don't believe any of these things are possible
if the government and criminals are well-armed and the people
aren't.
In this book I'm going to try to explain two things. I hope I'm
explaining them to people who have never owned, or even considered
owning, a firearm.
The first thing I'm going to try to explain is why 70 million
Americans - about half the adults in the United States of America
- already own at least one firearm, and many Americans own
a veritable arsenal of them.
The second thing I'm going to try to explain is why - despite
a barrage of anti-gun propaganda by virtually the entire institutional
establishment in this country - these 70 million American gun
owners are morally, historically, legally, and politically justified
in their choice to be armed.
That is about as far as the National Rifle Association would
take you. I'm going to go farther. I'm going to give reasons why
the other half of the adult population in the United States -
the half who aren't armed - are the reason this country
suffers from the epidemic of violent crime that it does.
This is not a textbook. I'm not a professional historian, nor
am I a constitutional lawyer or a criminologist.
I'm a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. In other words,
I'm a self-appointed pundit.
That should make me at least as qualified to write about
guns as other self-appointed pundits such as Sarah Brady
of Handgun Control, Inc. Aside from
ideology, the emotional difference between Sarah Brady's
and my view of guns is that Sarah Brady's husband
was badly hurt by a gun in an assassination attempt on President
Reagan, and my father, a concert violinist, saved
his life from muggers several times because he was carrying a
gun.
I'm not going to present you with a systematic defense
of gun ownership. I'm going to give you a bunch of things I wrote
over the last few years. Some were published as newspaper opinion
pieces and magazine articles, and others presented as editorial
replies, letters, computer bulletin-board arguments, broadsides,
speeches, polemics, and proposals. Everything you're going to
read in this book was written in the heat of battle, as I responded
to wave after wave of anti-gun hysteria on television and radio,
and in prestigious newspapers and journals that should know better.
If you don't have any interest in what a self-appointed pundit
has to say on this subject, and you're looking for more systematic
or academic presentations on the issues I cover in these articles,
I include a recommended list for further reading in the back of
the book. I'll forgive you for flipping to the back of the
book, writing down some of those other titles, and putting this
book back on the shelf. Just don't let the bookstore clerk catch
you.
We live in an age of soundbytes. Maybe you're not in the mood
to read a whole book on this subject. Okay, the next time you
get into an argument about guns, here's all you need to know:
o Every 13 seconds an American gun owner uses her or his firearm
in defense against a criminal. If you're
only counting handguns, it's every 16 seconds.
o Women use handguns 416 times each day in defense
against rapists, which is a dozen times more often than rapists
use a gun in the course of a rape. Handguns are
used 1145 times a day against robbers. Handguns
are used 1510 times a day in defense against
criminal assaults.
o A gun kept in the home for protection is 216
times as likely to be used in a defense against
a criminal than it is to cause the death of an innocent victim
in that household.
o The U.S. cities with the strictest gun-control laws also have
higher homicide rates than U.S. cities with less gun control. Switzerland and
Israel both have highly armed civilian populations, and
have extremely low rates of gun-related homicides.
o Gandhi once said, "Among the many misdeeds of the British
rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole
nation of Arms as the blackest."
o Hitler once said, "The most foolish mistake we could make
would be to allow the subject races to possess arms." (I
like quoting this to people who've just seen Schindler's List.)
And no list of soundbytes would be complete without a bumper sticker:
"When guns are outlawed, only liberals won't have
guns."
This, then, is the case for the civilian population
to be better armed than the government. - JNS