From: bobworn@aol.com
Subject: SNET: Your Second Amendment - Don't Leave Home Without It
Date: 24 Jul 2000 13:23:46 -0400
To: EasterFairy@BrightEggs.Com, ToothBunny@QuarterUnderThePillow.Net

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Subj:    And Don't Forget Your Gun
Date:   7/23/00 2:05:57 PM CDT
From:   therepublican@ideasign.com (The Republican)
To:       bobworn@aol.com

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"And Don't Forget Your Gun"

by Jonathan Rauch, from the National Journal


My friend Tom is running, possibly for his life. It is a sweet summer
evening in San Jose, and he and a colleague have just left work and are
walking through a dicey neighborhood when they catch the eye of some young
men, as many as 20 of them, sitting around an old car in a driveway.

"Hey, you faggots!" one of the young men shouts. Tom and his colleague
walk past, quickly, but their persecutors rise like a flock of gulls and
follow, shouting taunts and threats: "When we're done with you, they'll
find your bodies!" The two pick up the pace and the men come after them.
"Run," says Tom, but the gang breaks into pursuit while Tom, trying to
hold the pace, gropes in his backpack. The two reach a streetlight and
there, where everybody can see, Tom suddenly stops, turns, and levels a
semiautomatic handgun.

Oh.

At that point, the young men chasing my friend lost their enthusiasm for
blood sport. Tom and his colleague left the neighborhood as fast as they
could. And if there had been no gun? "There's no question in my mind,"
says Tom, "that my friend and I would have been at least very seriously
beaten, and maybe killed." I asked how the gang reacted to the gun. Tom
says their leader demanded officiously: "Have you got a permit for that?"

Tom didn't have a permit, which is bad -- but then he probably couldn't
have gotten one if he had tried, which is also bad. California is among
the states where, if you want permission to carry a concealed weapon, you
have to prove that you are of "good moral character" and that you have
some special reason to carry. Tom could have shown that he was of good
character, but he had no special reason. Until, of course, the reason
arose one summer night.

As recently as a dozen years ago, almost every state was like California.
Today, by contrast, almost half of all Americans live in the 31 states
with so-called "shall issue" laws, which require the authorities to
approve a permit for (typically) anyone over 21 who is mentally sound, has
no criminal record, pays a fee, and takes a gun-safety course.

Florida began the stampede in 1987. Before then, about 17,000 people in
the state had concealed-weapon permits; today, about 250,000 do. The
Daytona Beach News-Journal notes that a number of local judges have
permits. "I became convinced that some of these people might become
dangerous," one judge told the paper. "So I took a firearms course, got
the permit, and kept a weapon handy in the courthouse."

Any time now, a national majority will live in "shall issue" states.
Colorado, Missouri (with a referendum in April), Nebraska, and Ohio (with
a new Republican governor) are all candidates to switch to "shall issue"
this year, with the noisy support of the National Rifle Association.
Grover G. Norquist, a conservative activist who expects to join the NRA
board later this year, busies himself lobbying for concealed- carry when
he is not busy lobbying for lower taxes -- both issues, he says, being
sides of the same conservative coin. "The more people who view themselves
as independent of the state," he says, "the more people who are available
to the center-right coalition."

In effect, and to the horror of many liberals and gun-control groups,
America is now running an uncontrolled national experiment in
self-policing. There are something like 70 million handguns in the
country, and the odds have increased dramatically that today you passed
one of them in the street.

So what do we know about the results of the experiment? First, that about
1 percent to 5 percent of a state's population typically take out
concealed-gun permits. Second, we know what does not happen: America does
not turn into the Dodge City of myth, with fender- benders becoming
hailstorms of lead. (Actually, Dodge City, Kan., wasn't the Dodge City of
myth. It was much safer than today's Washington, D.C., with homicides
running to one or two per cattle-trading season and marshals mostly
concerned, writes the historian Roger Lane, "with arresting drunks and
other misdemeanants.")

People who are willing to register with the sheriff, pay a fee, and take a
gun-safety course turn out to be unusually law-abiding, safer even than
off-duty cops. In Florida, only 0.13 percent of concealed-carry licenses
were revoked from 1987-97 for criminal activity of any sort. No murders
seem to have been committed by people carrying licensed guns in public.
The "shall issue" law may actually deter bad behavior, since if you get
into any sort of trouble you can lose your license.

What is harder to say is what we all want to know. Do concealed weapons,
lawfully carried, reduce crime, or increase it?

The most comprehensive study of the subject is also the most
controversial. John R. Lott Jr., an economist at the University of Chicago
Law School, assembled data for all 3,054 U.S. counties over 18 years (1977
through 1994) and controlled for all sorts of variables. "This study uses
the most comprehensive set of control variables yet used in a study of
crime, let alone any previous study on gun control," he writes in his book
More Guns, Less Crime, published last year by the University of Chicago
Press.

The title gives away the punchline. "When state concealed-handgun laws
went into effect in a county, murders fell by about 8 percent, rapes fell
by 5 percent, and aggravated assaults fell by 7 percent." (Note: This is
after controlling for other variables.) "On the other hand, property-crime
rates increased after nondiscretionary laws were implemented. . . .
Criminals respond to the threat of being shot while committing such crimes
as robbery by choosing to commit less risky crimes that involve minimal
contact with the victim."

Moreover, and maybe more surprising, Lott also finds that women and blacks
-- who are, for different reasons, disproportionately vulnerable to
violence -- benefit disproportionately from "shall issue" laws. Thus, for
example, each new concealed-gun permit issued to a woman increases women's
overall safety three to four times as much as a new permit to a man
increases men's safety.

In 1997, two economists, Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt, found that people
who install LoJack radio- tracing systems in their cars pay about $600
each for devices that, by deterring auto theft, save society more than 10
times that amount. The trick is that LoJack is hidden; the thief doesn't
know which car has it (steering-wheel clubs, by contrast, just displace
theft to unprotected cars). If Lott is right, concealed guns have the same
sort of effect. In Oregon, he finds, each new concealed-carry permit saves
the state $3,500; in Pennsylvania, $5,000. So law-abiding people who pack
heat are doing the rest of us a favor.

*If* Lott is right. Predictably, other scholars have found all sorts of
things wrong with his work. "Lott's research is so fundamentally flawed in
a number of different ways that his research really can't tell us anything
about what the effects of these laws are," says Jon Vernick, of the Center
for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of
Public Health.

Also predictably, and somewhat annoyingly, the results of concealed-gun
studies tend to coincide with the authors' predisposition toward gun
control generally. Gun nuts love "shall issue." Gun-control nuts hate it.

This is annoying because it is so obtuse. The question of whether guns
should be available readily is completely distinct, logically and
empirically, from the question of who should be carrying guns around. As
it happens, I've lived in two countries with strict gun laws, Japan and
Great Britain, and if I could press a button and make America's guns
vanish, I would do so in a blink (and I'd repeal the Second Amendment
while I was at it). It turns out that a country with few guns is a better
place to live than a country with, say, a fifth of a billion guns.

But the fact is that America is awash with guns, and this fact is not
going to change in my lifetime, and criminals carry guns already. A
rational country would make guns harder for criminals to get (that's gun
control) but easier for lawful citizens to carry (that's "shall issue").
By contrast, the current policy in states such as California -- easy to
get, hard to carry -- is perversity incarnate.

In 1999, the debate is not about whether "shall issue" causes much harm --
by now we would have heard of any mayhem -- but whether it does much good.
So why in the world are liberals clinging to opposition to
concealed-carry? No doubt because the gun debate has been infected by the
culture wars, and people have taken up sides, and liberals feel obliged to
revile any proposal supported by the likes of the NRA and Grover Norquist.
This is a pity, as thinking with one's knees usually is. Liberals should
be on Tom's side.

* * *

Jonathan Rauch is a columnist for the National Journal,
http://www.nationaljournal.com, and author of "Kindly Inquisitors" and
"Demosclerosis."


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