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 ack
in 1994, police officer Patrick Merrill stopped a man for displaying
a false vehicle registration plate. As he later found out, the suspect
was wanted for a parole violation—a violation tied to an attempted
murder for which he had been convicted.
GUNS AND POLITICS
In the days following the March shootings at schools in California
and Pennsylvania, “the new reality of gun-control politics
became starkly clear,” The New York Times reported. “Unlike
in 1999, when Democrats reacted almost immediately to the massacre
at Columbine High School in Colorado with demands for tough
new gun restrictions, there were few calls to action.”
Last November, Colorado and Oregon passed measures
requiring background checks at gun shows, despite opposition
from the National Rifle Association. At the national level,
though, it’s a different story. A March segment on National
Public Radio declared gun control an issue that’s gone
into “hibernation.” There may be nothing new about
kids killing each other with guns, as the NPR story put it,
but there is something new about the response. “Silence
from Democrats is a sea change.”
Why has gun control disappeared as a political issue?
According to Michael Munger, Duke professor and chair of political
science, “it has different salience for supporters and
opponents.” Says Munger: “Supporters of gun control
see it as one of many issues. They don’t vote solely, or
even primarily, based on a candidate’s gun-control position.
That’s not true for opponents. For people who are against
gun control, it is a litmus test. If a candidate favors gun
control, such voters will vote against that candidate, even
if they know little about the opponent.”
Munger says Al Gore lost several states—“at
least arguably including West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas”—because
of his strong stand in favor of gun control. Even relatively
modest calls for trigger locks and gun-show background checks
tend to alienate many white, rural, and male voters across the
South and Midwest. “For Democrats, gun control just confirms
support. For Republicans and independents, gun control creates
support, bringing people to the polls who might otherwise stay
home.”
Democrats have gotten the message, says Munger.
Their new strategy of “hear no, see no, speak no gun control”
will position them, in his view, to take over the Senate in
2002. The Democrats have to be able to run candidates in the
Republican-controlled states, and to hold the Democratic-controlled
states. Munger says four of the Democratic seats that have to
be held, and eleven of the Republican seats that have to be
taken, are in firmly anti-gun-control states.
So gun control is being sacrificed for political
gain—and the Democrats will thereby gain the Senate majority,
he predicts. “The Republicans are really, really vulnerable,
because just by accident of Senate election classes, more of
their incumbents (twenty versus thirteen) are up for reelection.”
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“He hit me and ran into the woods near where
I stopped him,” Merrill recalls.“Once in the woods, he picked
up a three-foot-long tree limb  and
struck me first in the temple and then in the jaw. Needless to say,
I did not appreciate his use of potentially deadly force.”
Merrill ’89, M.A.T. ’90 managed to get the makeshift
weapon out of the hands of his assailant. But the blows to his head
caused him to begin to lose consciousness, and he collapsed onto the
ground. The man continued to beat him with his fists. “As my
vision began to fade, I realized that he might very well kill me once
I was unconscious. So I drew my handgun and commanded him to stop
hitting me.” As the assailant hesitated, Merrill was able to
place him in handcuffs, just before he collapsed again.
“Displaying my sidearm,” he says, “may
have saved my life in that situation.” It’s such situations
that have caused Merrill, who has served on the police forces in two
North Carolina cities, to look to guns less as a social problem than
a social necessity. “An armed public is the single best deterrent
to crime,” he says. He points out that in the last decade, many
states passed laws legalizing the concealed carrying of handguns,
and he sees those laws as contributing
to the decrease in the rates of violent crimes. Local police forces,
“spread as thin as they are, cannot ensure the safety of citizens,”
he says.
And he considers the proliferation of anti-gun
legislation disturbing. “These laws, as a whole, seem to be creating
two distinct classes of citizens: government-employed and non-government-employed.
Those within the government, specifically those who are empowered
to enforce laws, will be allowed to own and possess firearms. Those
who are not affiliated with the government, specifically those who
are less wealthy, will have their civil right to bear arms curtailed.”
When it hits close to home, gun violence doesn’t
always create commitment to a well-armed public. Last fall, a man
walked into the outer office of President Nannerl O. Keohane demanding
to see the president of Duke University, then whipped out a loaded
.32-caliber revolver. Holding three women hostage, he phoned a local
TV station to say he was about to blow his brains out. Moments later,
Duke police surprised him with pepper spray and a full-body tackle,
and the incident was over. “Although prompt action kept anyone
from being hurt, the staff members were mighty shaken,” Keohane
later wrote in a reflective piece. “The gritty pungence of pepper
spray lingered for an hour or two, but we cranked open the windows
and did our best to resume the daily round of university life.”
Although he claimed he intended to kill only himself,
the intruder had another thirty-two rounds in his backpack. “My
guess is that when he left home that morning, he wasn’t quite
sure what he intended,” Keohane said.
“As if we had learned nothing from the University
of Texas massacre in 1966, we somehow keep assuming that educational
communities will be exempt from the gun violence that so pervades
American society,” she observed. “Like medieval monasteries,
universities are supposed to be places of refuge for intellectual
exchange and scholarly debate, not shooting galleries.” But the
campus is not an isolated contemplative cloister, and she wondered,
“How do we defend intellectual freedom against a lone gunman?
Arm our secretaries?”
Long before the specter of the lone gunman, violence
was socially pervasive, and perhaps even socially acceptable. In her
book Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, Sissela Bok notes that
the ancient Romans acted out lethal inclinations not just in the spectacle
of the arena, but even in private banquets. Bok quotes an account
from the first decade A.D.: “Hosts would invite their friends
to dinner not merely for other entertainment, but that they might
witness two or three pairs of contestants in a gladiatorial combat;
on these occasions, when sated with dining and drink, they called
in the gladiators. No sooner did one have his throat cut than the
masters applauded with delight at this feat.”
Now, we’re more likely to applaud professional wrestlers
in their staged violence than arena-fighting or private-party gladiators.
But commercialized violence doesn’t mean sanitized violence.
In Senate committee testimony two years ago, Duke public policy professor
James Hamilton called television gunplay and the endless diet of violent
images “a problem of pollution.” As he put it in his testimony,
violence is used strategically to attract viewers—particularly
television’s most valuable if vulnerable demographic, viewers
between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. “During the sweeps
periods, the four major broadcast networks were much more likely to
air movies that deal with murder, focus on tales of family crime,
and feature family crime or murder stories based on real-life incidents.
Nearly a third of network movies during sweeps periods dealt with
murder.”
It’s simplistic to argue that violence on television
captures, rather than cultivates, violence in society, Hamilton told
the committee. From analyzing data across the country on local news
content, he found no tie-in between actual crime rates in a city and
the percentage of lead stories or later-in-the-broadcast stories devoted
to crime. Rather, he discovered what could fairly be called a warped
decision-making process, whereby entertainment successes would define
news decisions. “It was audience interest in crime, reflected
by ratings for Cops in the market, that predicted the degree local
news directors focused on crime in their newscasts. The stronger the
audience interest in reality police-show programming, the more likely
newscasts in an area were to focus on crime.”
Hamilton was dismissive of the notion that televised
images don’t influence behavior. “Social-science research
indicates that violent images are more likely to be imitated if they
go unpunished, show little pain or suffering, and involve attractive
perpetrators,” he said in his testimony. “This describes
the types of violence often used on television.”
One of Hamilton’s colleagues in public policy, ITT/Sanford
Professor Philip Cook, along with Jens Ludwig A.M. ’92, Ph.D.
’94, added to the social-science research base this fall. Cook
has been conducting research on firearms and violence for more than
twenty-five years.Ludwig is assistant professor of public policy at
Georgetown University and affiliated expert of the Johns Hopkins Center
for Gun Policy and Research. The two collaborated on the book Gun
Violence: The Real Costs.
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"The
stronger the audience interest in reality police-show programming,
the more likely newscasts in an area were to focus on crime."
JAMES HAMILTON
Professor of public policy |
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They point out that some 200 million guns are in
private hands in the United States; in 1997, 32,000 Americans died
of gunshot wounds, and since 1965, more than one million people have
been shot and killed—more than the number of Americans killed
in all foreign wars combined during the twentieth century.
“While gun assaults and unintentional injuries are
concentrated to a remarkable degree among a narrow demographic slice
of the population—younger black or Hispanic men—the rest
of the population is by no means immune,” they write. “And
in seeking to reduce our vulnerability, or paying our share of the
public bill for responding to violence, the burden is widely shared.”
According to their research, the annual burden of gun
violence in America, including the costs of prevention, avoidance,
amelioration, and injury, is about $100 billion, which averages to
$1,000 per household. And that’s after taking account of the
40 percent drop in gun crime since 1993.
Cook and Ludwig say that medical care accounts for only
a small portion of the costs of gun violence. More than half of those
who are killed by gunfire are suicides; typically they are physically
or mentally ill, and so their remaining economic productivity would
be low. The non-suicidal victims of gun violence, too, tend to be
at the low end of the productivity scale. Male gun-homicide victims
between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are half as likely as
other men of the same age to be married, more than twice as likely
to have dropped out of high school, and less likely to have worked
during the last year.
“Part of the motivation for writing the book was
to take on a belief that you don’t hear in polite company, but
that you certainly hear occasionally from National Rifle Association
officials,” says Cook. “That’s a sort of ‘good
riddance’ view that, despite the large numbers of deaths and
injuries, gun violence is not a problem for this country. And the
reason, they would say, is because the people who are getting killed
are people who are not contributing to society. It became a very central
issue for us to take on the ugly perspective, which remains influential
and important, even though it’s not often expressed.”
In their view, the more pernicious costs—though
typically hidden costs—tear at the social fabric in other ways.
The criminal-justice system feels the bite of the bullet appreciably.
A hundred assault-related gunshot injuries will result in around twenty
deaths, which is an uncomfortable fact of life, and death, in the
gun-violence world. And homicide cases are far more expensive than
prosecuting for aggravated assault; they have higher investigation,
pretrial, and trial costs. The punishment costs, too, may be higher
for convicted murderers since they are likely to be assigned to higher-security
(and thus more costly) prisons.
The criminal-justice system is hardly the only social
institution under economic pressure from guns. Each of Chicago’s
sixty-nine public high schools has a walk-through metal detector that
costs between $2,500 and $3,000. Those costs mean fewer educational
opportunities, and perhaps a diminished educational environment. While
school-based metal detectors may enhance the safety of children, they
“may also affect the morale of students and teachers and detract
from the educational climate of the school,” the authors say.
“Metal detectors may also directly affect student learning by
taking away from class time, since security precautions increase the
complexity of moving students in and out of classroom buildings, and
draw resources away from other instructional-related items such as
the hiring of additional teachers or new textbooks.”
Gun violence may have an impact on the shape of American
society in the largest sense, helping to define where we live and
work. Urban housing markets are super-sensitive to crime rates. Gun-based
crimes accelerate flight to the suburbs, reducing the vitality of
communal life in the city, increasing traffic congestion outside the
city, and changing patterns of work and tourism to the detriment of
the city.
Concluding that gun violence has redesigned the culture,
Cook and Ludwig would like to redesign the gun. They endorse personalized
(or “smart”) gun technology. That technology would make
guns inoperable to unauthorized users, including despondent teenagers,
curious children, or the criminals who commit around 500,000 gun thefts
every year. They also support sentence add-ons for gun crimes; they
document the drop-off in crime from such initiatives, even as they
acknowledge the burden on taxpayers from expanding the prison population.
But they present mixed evidence on the idea of a gun
ban. After a 1976 ban on the purchase, sale, transfer, and possession
of handguns in Washington, D.C., gun homicides and suicides decreased
by nearly 25 percent. But the ban raises the prices of guns to law-abiding
citizens who seek guns for self-protection. And it’s been argued
that handgun restrictions may lead criminals to substitute long guns,
which are more lethal than handguns.  The
two researchers are similarly cautious in discussing gun buybacks,
through which officials purchase guns from citizens on a “no
questions asked” basis. Such programs may have unintended consequences.
Washington, D.C., paid $100 per gun as part of its 1999 buyback program,
yet many of the gunsthat were turned in were estimated to have resale
values of no more than $30. The difference enabled at least some owners
to upgrade to newer and more lethal firearms.
Cook and Ludwig place their greatest emphasis on the
regulation of secondary-market gun sales, the source of the vast majority
of the guns used in crime. They point out that 30 to 40 percent of
all gun exchanges each year do not involve a licensed gun dealer,
and so are almost completely exempt from existing background-check
and other regulations. All secondary-market sales, they say, should
go through licensed dealers, which would make them subject to the
same regulations as sales of new guns.
“What we’re saying in this book is that this
is everybody’s problem, this is affecting everyone’s standard
of living,” Cook says. “It’s affecting your freedom
to live where you want to and how you want to.”
While the economic impact of gun violence extends to every American,
gun owners face an additional, less tangible cost in terms of their
social acceptability. Americans have a curious relationship with the
gun—finding it a reasonable, if not romantic, attachment on the
one hand, a repulsive fixation on the other. Ben Albers, a Duke graduate
student in sociology, says gun owners are saddled with “a stigmatized
identity.” He says he’s skeptical of the “cultural-deficiency”
model that sees gun owners as social misfits, and so he’s drawing
a more nuanced profile of them.
Albers’ insights are informed by his own membership,
however peripheral, in the culture he’s observing: “I’ve
always been interested in target shooting, although I don’t hunt
and I don’t think of gun ownership as a viable self-defense means.
I don’t keep them around the house for protection; I’m basically
just interested in punching holes in paper.” And now he may be
punching holes in some stereotypes.
For his research, Albers has been going to competitive
shooting events, attending meetings of gun organizations, having conversations
with gun enthusiasts, and even taking the class required for a concealed-weapon
permit. “People may be surprised at the degree to which gun owners
are almost indistinguishable from everyone else in the population,
except for the fact that they have a particular hobby or a particular
interest,” he says. He does note that gun shows draw overwhelmingly
male crowds; the “issues of masculinity” involved in gun
ownership may reflect the rough-and-tumble image of the frontiersman
in our popular culture and our literary heritage.
If they’re not themselves cut in the image of frontiersmen,
gun owners are possessive of what they take to be their historic rights.
As The New York Times reported in the aftermath of school shootings
in California and Pennsylvania, “accepted wisdom in
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"It
may fairly be questionable, example, whether the type of arms
one may have a 'right to keep' consistent with the Second Amendment
extend to a howitzer."
WILLIAM VAN ALSTYNE
Law Professor and Constitutional Scholar |
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Washington holds that opponents of gun control
are the most motivated single-issue voting bloc in the country.”
Albers says, “I’m not sure if the average guy who hunts
ducks is necessarily worried about U.N. helicopters flying overhead.
But if there’s not a fundamental distrust of government, there
is a concern that gun-control legislation is going to be crafted based
on political expediency rather than effectiveness. A common criticism
I heard of the recent administration was that they would tend to just
sort of showboat and capitalize on mass shootings, not pursue law-enforcement
solutions.”
Even if they are socially indistinguishable in a broad
sense, gun owners do show the sort of rituals that can define a subculture,
Albers says. “Gun competitors have a very ritualized set of procedures
for getting ready, preparing themselves mentally, preparing their
equipment. In terms of informal shooting, whether that’s backyard
plinking or going off to the range and banging around a bit, it would
be interesting to think about ritual behavior. I’ve seen the
same people every single Saturday at the range. Perhaps this is some
weekly stress-release or affirmation. Certainly hunting season is
highly ritualized; there are people who wait for hunting season to
begin like they wait for Christmas.”
If gun owners buy into a ritual belief, it’s the
Second Amendment, broadly interpreted. Albers says that pro-gun feelings
in the United States reflect “the absence of a clear sort of
aristocracy, the absence of such a clearly defined class system. Part
of the romance is our romance with democracy. It’s the idea that
even the commoner can hunt on public lands. It’s the idea that—and
this probably ties in to a certain interpretation of the Second Amendment—the
citizenry could have access to the means of force and it wouldn’t
be a monopoly in the hands of the state. I think a lot of Second Amendment
constitutionalists who are gun supporters would point to this romantic
ideal, this basic democratic and constitutional principle of emphasizing
individual rights and individual protection from authority.”
Yet it’s not clear that gun ownership is all that
deeply embedded in American history. A controversial book published
last fall, Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America: The Origins of
a National Gun Culture, looks at probate records, the distribution
of gunsmiths, merchants’ account books, and other evidence. Bellesiles
documents a dearth of guns for the early militia and incompetence
in using them. He ends up disputing the widely held notion (even by
historians) that Americans, from colonial days, have been armed to
the teeth.
A historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, Don Higginbotham Ph.D. ’59, says, “In the colonial
period and in the Revolution, it was not uncommon for a high percentage
of the militia to turn out without guns. Moreover, as Michael Bellesiles
says, the colonial and state governments not infrequently bought guns
for men to use. In 1794, Secretary of War Henry Knox reported that
of 450,000 men in the state militias, only about 100,000 owned arms.”
continues on page two |
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