shooten
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Wow! Great blog from Clayton Cramer.
Here's the link:
Clayton's excellent blog
Here's the text:
Interacting With Gun Control Supporters
I received the following email from a gun control advocate in Ohio:
Hi Clayton: I found your Web log after reading an excerpt from it on the Ohioans for Concealed Carry Web site. Interesting reading.
It would be lovely if more people who favor unrestricted access to firearms were as reasonable as you appear to be. While we certainly do not agree on many things, I respect your ability to address the issues Americans face with thoughtfulness and a tone that invites the reader in rather than immediately offending. Additionally, it is abundantly clear that you do a lot of reading before you post your thoughts. Would that more people did the same.
As for the question (raging debate) of concealed carry weapons in Ohio, I agree with you that those who claim a need to carry a loaded handgun in public should observe the current law. Carry openly. The current law provides Ohioans with abundant opportunities to protect themselves, both at home and in public. The reality of the matter is that those who want the right to carry hidden guns misunderstand the deterrent effect an openly carried gun provides. It always makes me wonder what they really want.
I have recently returned from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence annual conference, and I think the message I heard there bears repeating. We are not working to restrict access to legally sold firearms. We are not trying to take firearms away from law abiding Americans, we are working to pass laws that provide for greater safety for all citizens. Namely, renewing and strengthening the Assault Weapons Ban, which needs to better define weapons that have no business in private hands; making the NICS system more accurately reflective of criminal records in our country; removing loopholes that make it easy for criminals and those who could not pass a background check to get guns; and designing firearms that make it difficult for children to shoot unintentionally.
This may all sound like blasphemy to you--it certainly does to the NRA--but what about this agenda is so alarming to law abiding Americans who own firearms? For the vast majority it isn't.
We all want our children to be safe. We all want to live in a country where firearms deaths are reduced. It would be wonderful to see some cooperation going forward from all groups concerned with firearms.
Since OFCC quoted you, I wonder how close your relationship is with them, and if they are capable of understanding the above stated message. Perhaps if someone like you, who they clearly respect, began this sort of dialogue, we could all work together. A naive dream perhaps, but one worth pursuing.
Thanks for reading.
My response: My experience is that most gun control advocates (as I used to be, 20+ years ago) don't fully understand the issues involved, for the same reason that I didn't: they haven't researched the subject, but have relied on the impressions gathered from reading newspapers and popular magazines. At first glance, a lot of the measures that you talk about seem to make perfect sense--but that's because you are applying very middle class values to a problem that is largely not middle class.
Violent criminals in America are very atypical; they are disproportionately minors coming from severely dysfunctional homes; disproportionately mentally ill people who have been deinstitutionalized; people who are intoxicated, and for whom intoxication is a way of life; and adults with long felony conviction histories behind them. The values that you and I share are completely irrelevant to the vast majority of murderers.
There are adults with no criminal history, no mental illness history, and not part of the intoxication culture, who commit murder with a gun, but they are pretty exceptional. The news media emphasize these relatively rare cases for the same reason that "man bites dog" gets news coverage--because they are so unusual and so shocking. Even the "crime of passion" cases seldom fit into the "nice normal guy who just snapped" category; they almost always involve people who are long-known to the police, often with long histories of antisocial behavior. One study of accidental gunshot victims in
Vermont some years ago found that these people were also very disproportionately involved in DUIs and motor vehicle accidents. If you want to make America a safer place, your energy is best spent on the relatively small number of people who are in these high risk groups, instead of the Brady Campaign's focus on general strategies of gun control that primarily impact the law-abiding.
Open carry is a deterrent that protects the person who is carrying openly; concealed carry is a general deterrent. It creates uncertainty in the minds of criminals as to who is armed, and who is not. My daughter is 19 years old. She is away at college at the University of Idaho. If open carry were the only choice, a criminal would look at here and know that she can't defend herself. (She's about 5'4", and no match for any adult man.) But there's no way to look at her and know that she is 19. She could be as old as 25--and therefore, she could be carrying a gun concealed. I rather prefer that a rapist have to wonder if she is one of the 4% of Idahoans with a permit to carry a pistol.
Ditto for my wife. She has a concealed carry permit, but doesn't carry often. (We have effectively no gun control here in Idaho, although I would be the first to agree that this is only one small part of why our violent crime rates are so low.) It makes both of us feel a bit more secure knowing that any predator with half a brain knows that she might be armed--and attacking her would likely be the last criminal attack he made.
Do these laws make us safer? Dr. John Lott thinks so, but I will be the first to admit that I don't know enough to meaningfully evaluate whether he has done this right or not. I can tell you that the Tennessee Law Review paper by Dave Kopel and myself demonstrates that non-discretionary concealed weapon permit laws don't cause any obvious increase in murder rates. You can read it here.
You say, "We are not working to restrict access to legally sold firearms."
So is this a new policy? The Brady Campaign was originally founded for the stated purpose of prohibiting handgun ownership except by police, military, security guards, and a few licensed gun collectors. I've looked up the quote myself in New Yorker magazine from 1976. Nelson "Pete" Shields was very direct that the purpose of registration was a step towards that goal.
"We are not trying to take firearms away from law abiding Americans, we are working to pass laws that provide for greater safety for all citizens."
Is this a new policy in the last year or two? Quite a number of Californians were required to turn in legally purchased SKS rifles three years ago--and what was especially galling was that those that had registered them in good faith received no compensation, while those who had not registered them (believing that they weren't required to, because of how badly the law was written) did receive compensation. Of course, the entire California assault weapons ban is an attempt to take firearms away from law-abiding adults. California's Assault Weapons Control Act made sale of an AR-15 rifle into a more serious crime (minimum four years in prison) than forcible rape (minimum sentence only three years in prison).
I have never been arrested. I do not drink or use other intoxicants. I own my home. I have been married 23 1/2 years. Yet there was no lawful way for me to purchase a target rifle like a Colt AR-15 in California. After the AWCA took effect in 1989, the only permits that were available to purchase an "assault weapon" were for movie studios--so they could make movies glorifying violence. The Brady Campaign played a major part in writing that law.
In New Jersey, which has had a vigorous gun licensing program since the 1960s, the Brady Campaign pushed for an assault weapon ban that required all existing licensed owners to dispose of those guns, render them inoperable, or take them out of state.
In New York City, which has had mandatory registration of all long guns since 1967, Mayor Dinkins got an assault weapon ban passed--and then used the registration lists to inform all the residents of New York City that they had to dispose of or remove those guns from the city, or face criminal prosecution.
Mayor Feinstein, speaking about the federal ban on new manufacture and import of assault weapons in 1994, told CBS that if she could have gotten a complete ban, "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them in," she would have.
The Brady Campaign is "trying to take firearms away from law abiding Americans...." You may have been told differently, but that doesn't make it true.
"Namely, renewing and strengthening the Assault Weapons Ban, which needs to better define weapons that have no business in private hands;"
The most restrictive decisions of the courts in the 19th century--and the cases that used to be cited by gun control advocates, 20 years ago, such as Aymette v. State (Tenn. 1840)--held that the only weapons that were constitutionally protected were those appropriate to military use. You can see images of a number of these decisions at http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary.html#RKBADecisions, and Aymette specifically at http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/rkbadecisions/Aymette1840.pdf.
Back when the Brady Campaign was Handgun Control, Inc., they used to carefully quote these decisions because they seemed to offer a way to ban handguns without banning long guns. Now these decisions--which are actually atypical of American jurisprudence on this subject--tend to get ignored, or quoted in different ways.
One of the reasons that I became an activist about gun rights was because of the assault weapon ban. At least handguns represent a real problem. There's a serious criminal misuse problem with handguns, and there always has been. It's typical for half the murders in the U.S. to be with handguns. But assault weapons? You are talking about fractions of 1% of all murders. All rifles combined are typically 3% of U.S. murders, and those assault weapons that are classed as rifles are
a tiny fraction of that. The one category of rifle that is actually widely used for murder--the .22LR semiautomatic rifles that are cheap and common--are typically exempted from assault weapon bans. The assault weapon ban is about the least justified ban that I can imagine. It's part of why I regard the Brady Campaign (although not necessarily you) as cynical and dishonest.
Of course, when the first Congressionally mandated study of the federal assault weapon ban came in, the results were unsurprising: "As shown in exhibit 1, about half the banned makes and models were rifles, which are hard to conceal for criminal use…. Further, the banned guns are used in only a small fraction of gun crimes; even before the ban, most of them rarely turned up in law enforcement agencies' requests to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) to trace the sales histories of guns recovered in criminal investigations." [Jeffrey A. Roth and Christopher S. Koper, "Impacts of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban: 1994-96," NCJ 173405, (Washington: National Institute of Justice, 1999), 2.] A more detailed article about this study can be found at http://www.claytoncramer.com/Impacts.htm.
"making the NICS system more accurately reflective of criminal records in our country; removing loopholes that make it easy for criminals and those who could not pass a background check to get guns;"
You won't get any argument from me about improving NICS, or a background check system. Background checks probably make a small difference in preventing some mentally ill people from getting guns, and discouraging the less motivated criminals from getting guns. They may actually discourage some criminals enough that they don't acquire guns. But that's not necessarily a discouragement from murder. I lived in a county where the DA prosecuted a murder for hire committed with a crossbow. California's background check system might have been the factor, but big deal--the victim was still dead.
If you want to get a mandatory background check system for private sales on a nationwide basis, you can probably get it. But that involves some compromises that Brady Campaign won't make:
1. Acknowledge that there is a constitutional right of law-abiding adults to own guns. They haven't ever been willing to do so. What makes this especially silly is that until the 20th century, there was no dispute about this. The only disputes were whether handguns and Bowie knives were protected; if the 2nd Amendment limited only the federal government's authority to control guns (most courts held this), or limited the state government's authority as well (a minority viewpoint, but still a
respectable number of state supreme courts have held that the 2nd Amendment limits state law as well); did the right of the people include the right of blacks to own guns (with more than a few state supreme courts insisting that it did not).
2. Make the system instant background check. The 3 day waiting period proposal was blatantly an attempt to shut down gun shows.
3. Have the government pay for it. Who benefits from this system? The gun owner? No. The society as a whole benefits from it, if anyone does.
4. Keep no long-term registration records. Registration records are, according to Nelson Shields, a first step towards confiscation. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Haynes v. U.S. (1968) that convicted felons may not be punished for failing to register a gun; only those of us who may lawfully own a gun may be punished for failing to register. (See http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.haynes.html for an article my wife and I wrote about this bizarre decision.) This means that gun registration is primarily of value for gun control law violations by those who can lawfully possess them--and of nearly zero value for finding gun control violations by those who can't lawfully possess them. For these reasons, while mandatory registration is probably not contrary to the Second Amendment, it is certainly dangerous, and no long-term record of who owns which guns will ever be acceptable.
"and designing firearms that make it difficult for children to shoot unintentionally."
If there was a big problem with children accidentally shooting each other with guns, this might make some sense. But that's not the problem. Gun accidents kill a pretty small number of kids each year. In 1997, there were 21 accidental handgun deaths for children up through age 14. Even the 15-19 year olds only add other 34 accidental handgun deaths. Visit http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/statab/unpubd/mortabs/gmwki.htm, and use ICD 922.0 for this category.
Here's an article that I wrote about the subject a while back: http://www.claytoncramer.com/TriggerLocks.htm. And here's a flyer that I put together for the 2000 elections that gun rights groups distributed in many parts of California: http://www.rkba.org/research/cramer/FourFacts.pdf.
The big problem for children isn't accidental gun deaths; it's being beaten to death; it's drowning in bathtubs and pools; it's motor vehicle accidents. These causes of death far outstrip gun accidents.
posted by Clayton at 8:20 PM
Closure, But Still Very Depressing
Here's the link:
Clayton's excellent blog
Here's the text:
Interacting With Gun Control Supporters
I received the following email from a gun control advocate in Ohio:
Hi Clayton: I found your Web log after reading an excerpt from it on the Ohioans for Concealed Carry Web site. Interesting reading.
It would be lovely if more people who favor unrestricted access to firearms were as reasonable as you appear to be. While we certainly do not agree on many things, I respect your ability to address the issues Americans face with thoughtfulness and a tone that invites the reader in rather than immediately offending. Additionally, it is abundantly clear that you do a lot of reading before you post your thoughts. Would that more people did the same.
As for the question (raging debate) of concealed carry weapons in Ohio, I agree with you that those who claim a need to carry a loaded handgun in public should observe the current law. Carry openly. The current law provides Ohioans with abundant opportunities to protect themselves, both at home and in public. The reality of the matter is that those who want the right to carry hidden guns misunderstand the deterrent effect an openly carried gun provides. It always makes me wonder what they really want.
I have recently returned from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence annual conference, and I think the message I heard there bears repeating. We are not working to restrict access to legally sold firearms. We are not trying to take firearms away from law abiding Americans, we are working to pass laws that provide for greater safety for all citizens. Namely, renewing and strengthening the Assault Weapons Ban, which needs to better define weapons that have no business in private hands; making the NICS system more accurately reflective of criminal records in our country; removing loopholes that make it easy for criminals and those who could not pass a background check to get guns; and designing firearms that make it difficult for children to shoot unintentionally.
This may all sound like blasphemy to you--it certainly does to the NRA--but what about this agenda is so alarming to law abiding Americans who own firearms? For the vast majority it isn't.
We all want our children to be safe. We all want to live in a country where firearms deaths are reduced. It would be wonderful to see some cooperation going forward from all groups concerned with firearms.
Since OFCC quoted you, I wonder how close your relationship is with them, and if they are capable of understanding the above stated message. Perhaps if someone like you, who they clearly respect, began this sort of dialogue, we could all work together. A naive dream perhaps, but one worth pursuing.
Thanks for reading.
My response: My experience is that most gun control advocates (as I used to be, 20+ years ago) don't fully understand the issues involved, for the same reason that I didn't: they haven't researched the subject, but have relied on the impressions gathered from reading newspapers and popular magazines. At first glance, a lot of the measures that you talk about seem to make perfect sense--but that's because you are applying very middle class values to a problem that is largely not middle class.
Violent criminals in America are very atypical; they are disproportionately minors coming from severely dysfunctional homes; disproportionately mentally ill people who have been deinstitutionalized; people who are intoxicated, and for whom intoxication is a way of life; and adults with long felony conviction histories behind them. The values that you and I share are completely irrelevant to the vast majority of murderers.
There are adults with no criminal history, no mental illness history, and not part of the intoxication culture, who commit murder with a gun, but they are pretty exceptional. The news media emphasize these relatively rare cases for the same reason that "man bites dog" gets news coverage--because they are so unusual and so shocking. Even the "crime of passion" cases seldom fit into the "nice normal guy who just snapped" category; they almost always involve people who are long-known to the police, often with long histories of antisocial behavior. One study of accidental gunshot victims in
Vermont some years ago found that these people were also very disproportionately involved in DUIs and motor vehicle accidents. If you want to make America a safer place, your energy is best spent on the relatively small number of people who are in these high risk groups, instead of the Brady Campaign's focus on general strategies of gun control that primarily impact the law-abiding.
Open carry is a deterrent that protects the person who is carrying openly; concealed carry is a general deterrent. It creates uncertainty in the minds of criminals as to who is armed, and who is not. My daughter is 19 years old. She is away at college at the University of Idaho. If open carry were the only choice, a criminal would look at here and know that she can't defend herself. (She's about 5'4", and no match for any adult man.) But there's no way to look at her and know that she is 19. She could be as old as 25--and therefore, she could be carrying a gun concealed. I rather prefer that a rapist have to wonder if she is one of the 4% of Idahoans with a permit to carry a pistol.
Ditto for my wife. She has a concealed carry permit, but doesn't carry often. (We have effectively no gun control here in Idaho, although I would be the first to agree that this is only one small part of why our violent crime rates are so low.) It makes both of us feel a bit more secure knowing that any predator with half a brain knows that she might be armed--and attacking her would likely be the last criminal attack he made.
Do these laws make us safer? Dr. John Lott thinks so, but I will be the first to admit that I don't know enough to meaningfully evaluate whether he has done this right or not. I can tell you that the Tennessee Law Review paper by Dave Kopel and myself demonstrates that non-discretionary concealed weapon permit laws don't cause any obvious increase in murder rates. You can read it here.
You say, "We are not working to restrict access to legally sold firearms."
So is this a new policy? The Brady Campaign was originally founded for the stated purpose of prohibiting handgun ownership except by police, military, security guards, and a few licensed gun collectors. I've looked up the quote myself in New Yorker magazine from 1976. Nelson "Pete" Shields was very direct that the purpose of registration was a step towards that goal.
"We are not trying to take firearms away from law abiding Americans, we are working to pass laws that provide for greater safety for all citizens."
Is this a new policy in the last year or two? Quite a number of Californians were required to turn in legally purchased SKS rifles three years ago--and what was especially galling was that those that had registered them in good faith received no compensation, while those who had not registered them (believing that they weren't required to, because of how badly the law was written) did receive compensation. Of course, the entire California assault weapons ban is an attempt to take firearms away from law-abiding adults. California's Assault Weapons Control Act made sale of an AR-15 rifle into a more serious crime (minimum four years in prison) than forcible rape (minimum sentence only three years in prison).
I have never been arrested. I do not drink or use other intoxicants. I own my home. I have been married 23 1/2 years. Yet there was no lawful way for me to purchase a target rifle like a Colt AR-15 in California. After the AWCA took effect in 1989, the only permits that were available to purchase an "assault weapon" were for movie studios--so they could make movies glorifying violence. The Brady Campaign played a major part in writing that law.
In New Jersey, which has had a vigorous gun licensing program since the 1960s, the Brady Campaign pushed for an assault weapon ban that required all existing licensed owners to dispose of those guns, render them inoperable, or take them out of state.
In New York City, which has had mandatory registration of all long guns since 1967, Mayor Dinkins got an assault weapon ban passed--and then used the registration lists to inform all the residents of New York City that they had to dispose of or remove those guns from the city, or face criminal prosecution.
Mayor Feinstein, speaking about the federal ban on new manufacture and import of assault weapons in 1994, told CBS that if she could have gotten a complete ban, "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them in," she would have.
The Brady Campaign is "trying to take firearms away from law abiding Americans...." You may have been told differently, but that doesn't make it true.
"Namely, renewing and strengthening the Assault Weapons Ban, which needs to better define weapons that have no business in private hands;"
The most restrictive decisions of the courts in the 19th century--and the cases that used to be cited by gun control advocates, 20 years ago, such as Aymette v. State (Tenn. 1840)--held that the only weapons that were constitutionally protected were those appropriate to military use. You can see images of a number of these decisions at http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary.html#RKBADecisions, and Aymette specifically at http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/rkbadecisions/Aymette1840.pdf.
Back when the Brady Campaign was Handgun Control, Inc., they used to carefully quote these decisions because they seemed to offer a way to ban handguns without banning long guns. Now these decisions--which are actually atypical of American jurisprudence on this subject--tend to get ignored, or quoted in different ways.
One of the reasons that I became an activist about gun rights was because of the assault weapon ban. At least handguns represent a real problem. There's a serious criminal misuse problem with handguns, and there always has been. It's typical for half the murders in the U.S. to be with handguns. But assault weapons? You are talking about fractions of 1% of all murders. All rifles combined are typically 3% of U.S. murders, and those assault weapons that are classed as rifles are
a tiny fraction of that. The one category of rifle that is actually widely used for murder--the .22LR semiautomatic rifles that are cheap and common--are typically exempted from assault weapon bans. The assault weapon ban is about the least justified ban that I can imagine. It's part of why I regard the Brady Campaign (although not necessarily you) as cynical and dishonest.
Of course, when the first Congressionally mandated study of the federal assault weapon ban came in, the results were unsurprising: "As shown in exhibit 1, about half the banned makes and models were rifles, which are hard to conceal for criminal use…. Further, the banned guns are used in only a small fraction of gun crimes; even before the ban, most of them rarely turned up in law enforcement agencies' requests to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) to trace the sales histories of guns recovered in criminal investigations." [Jeffrey A. Roth and Christopher S. Koper, "Impacts of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban: 1994-96," NCJ 173405, (Washington: National Institute of Justice, 1999), 2.] A more detailed article about this study can be found at http://www.claytoncramer.com/Impacts.htm.
"making the NICS system more accurately reflective of criminal records in our country; removing loopholes that make it easy for criminals and those who could not pass a background check to get guns;"
You won't get any argument from me about improving NICS, or a background check system. Background checks probably make a small difference in preventing some mentally ill people from getting guns, and discouraging the less motivated criminals from getting guns. They may actually discourage some criminals enough that they don't acquire guns. But that's not necessarily a discouragement from murder. I lived in a county where the DA prosecuted a murder for hire committed with a crossbow. California's background check system might have been the factor, but big deal--the victim was still dead.
If you want to get a mandatory background check system for private sales on a nationwide basis, you can probably get it. But that involves some compromises that Brady Campaign won't make:
1. Acknowledge that there is a constitutional right of law-abiding adults to own guns. They haven't ever been willing to do so. What makes this especially silly is that until the 20th century, there was no dispute about this. The only disputes were whether handguns and Bowie knives were protected; if the 2nd Amendment limited only the federal government's authority to control guns (most courts held this), or limited the state government's authority as well (a minority viewpoint, but still a
respectable number of state supreme courts have held that the 2nd Amendment limits state law as well); did the right of the people include the right of blacks to own guns (with more than a few state supreme courts insisting that it did not).
2. Make the system instant background check. The 3 day waiting period proposal was blatantly an attempt to shut down gun shows.
3. Have the government pay for it. Who benefits from this system? The gun owner? No. The society as a whole benefits from it, if anyone does.
4. Keep no long-term registration records. Registration records are, according to Nelson Shields, a first step towards confiscation. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Haynes v. U.S. (1968) that convicted felons may not be punished for failing to register a gun; only those of us who may lawfully own a gun may be punished for failing to register. (See http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.haynes.html for an article my wife and I wrote about this bizarre decision.) This means that gun registration is primarily of value for gun control law violations by those who can lawfully possess them--and of nearly zero value for finding gun control violations by those who can't lawfully possess them. For these reasons, while mandatory registration is probably not contrary to the Second Amendment, it is certainly dangerous, and no long-term record of who owns which guns will ever be acceptable.
"and designing firearms that make it difficult for children to shoot unintentionally."
If there was a big problem with children accidentally shooting each other with guns, this might make some sense. But that's not the problem. Gun accidents kill a pretty small number of kids each year. In 1997, there were 21 accidental handgun deaths for children up through age 14. Even the 15-19 year olds only add other 34 accidental handgun deaths. Visit http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/statab/unpubd/mortabs/gmwki.htm, and use ICD 922.0 for this category.
Here's an article that I wrote about the subject a while back: http://www.claytoncramer.com/TriggerLocks.htm. And here's a flyer that I put together for the 2000 elections that gun rights groups distributed in many parts of California: http://www.rkba.org/research/cramer/FourFacts.pdf.
The big problem for children isn't accidental gun deaths; it's being beaten to death; it's drowning in bathtubs and pools; it's motor vehicle accidents. These causes of death far outstrip gun accidents.
posted by Clayton at 8:20 PM
Closure, But Still Very Depressing
