Friday, around 9:30 in the morning, local churches will join others across the nation in ringing their bells 26 times — once each for the 26 people killed last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — followed by a moment of silence in their memory.
Afterward, if not in the church sanctuaries, through much of the rest of the nation the debate will rage on regarding guns and violence in American society.
With this latest shooting, in some ways the most awful in memory given the victims were mostly 6- and 7-year-olds, the call for gun control rings out across the land, as if the answer to the problem of violent deaths in the United States is to do away with all guns.
Try and have a reasoned discussion with those calling for tighter gun controls and most will quickly fall to impassioned, even angry, arguments. That’s understandable. In light of what happened at Sandy Hook, emotions are high. We believe nearly everyone would gladly give up their guns if guaranteed mass killings would go away, if no more children would be killed by madmen.
But that is simply not going to happen — evil people will find ways to kill. Consider:
- On the same day of the shooting at Sandy Hook, 22 children and one adult were injured in a knife attack at a school in central China. Over the past two years there have been a series of such attacks in China, including one in which a man stabbed 28 school children — most 4-years-old — and another in which eight children were murdered in a mass stabbing attack. The day the perpetrator of that attack was executed, another man attacked and injured 16 students and a teacher.
- In 1996, Timmy McVeigh killed 168 people, including 19 children age 5 or younger, in Oklahoma City with a home-made bomb he and Terry Nichols made from easily accessible material.
- Derrick Bird killed 12 people and injured 11 others in Cumbria, England, in 2010, a nation with some of the tightest gun control laws in the world.
- In 2011, a gunman in Norway killed 92 people in a rampage. Again, a nation with stringent gun control laws.
These are but a handful of examples which show even with strict gun control laws, people will kill, and kill widely, whether they find ways to circumvent the laws and illegally acquire firearms or they choose another form of weapon.
We also can point out that mass murders in the United States have not increased in recent years, according to criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston’s Northeastern University (though we understand the perception that they have, given the ad nauseum reporting by broadcast media, saying the same thing over and over for days after attacks).
In fact, Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said mass murders in America have been on the decline for the past decade. Most surprising, he said mass murders in the nation peaked in 1929 (that is no misprint).
That’s not to say gun control should be overlooked. We can’t think of a single rational explanation for allowing assault weapons on the street, or even automatic weapons. Because guns are legal doesn’t mean all firearms should be legal. And it seems that while the total number of mass murders might be down, the number of people killed in them seems to be larger and more tragic.
So what’s our point?
That it does no one any good to point fingers at gun owners and say they are evil, or call the NRA a terrorist group or vilify this lobbying organization, any more than it’s productive to ignore the very real need for a thorough examination of gun laws in the United States and, perhaps, outlawing certain types of guns.
The loss at Sandy Hook is a tragedy beyond measure, and nothing that happens in the debate can touch the loss that community will contend with for decades to come.
It would be another tragedy, albeit of a smaller and less personal nature, if knee-jerk reactions carry the day.
Let’s have a reasoned, rational discussion, and do away with the emotional, shrill squealing coming from both sides of the issue.
Luckily, some years ago, two famed economists, William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale, conducted a massive study of multiple victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected their frequency and death toll.
Landes and Lott examined many of the very policies being proposed right now in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun.
None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings. (I note that they did not look at reforming our lax mental health laws, presumably because the ACLU is working to keep dangerous nuts on the street in all 50 states.)
Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.
The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.
Someone planning to commit a single murder in a concealed-carry state only has to weigh the odds of one person being armed. But a criminal planning to commit murder in a public place has to worry that anyone in the entire area might have a gun.
You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in “gun-free zones” — even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.
Guns were banned in all these places. Mass killers may be crazy, but they’re not stupid.
If the deterrent effect of concealed-carry laws seems surprising to you, that’s because the media hide stories of armed citizens stopping mass shooters. At the Portland shooting, for example, no explanation was given for the amazing fact that the assailant managed to kill only two people in the mall during the busy Christmas season.
It turns out, concealed-carry-holder Nick Meli hadn’t noticed that the mall was a gun-free zone. He pointed his (otherwise legal) gun at the shooter as he paused to reload, and the next shot was the attempted mass murderer killing himself. (Meli aimed, but didn’t shoot, because there were bystanders behind the shooter.)
In a nonsense “study” going around the Internet right now, Mother Jones magazine claims to have produced its own study of all public shootings in the last 30 years and concludes: “In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun.”
This will come as a shock to people who know something about the subject.
The magazine reaches its conclusion by simply excluding all cases where an armed civilian stopped the shooter: They looked only at public shootings where four or more people were killed, i.e., the ones where the shooter wasn’t stopped.
If we care about reducing the number of people killed in mass shootings, shouldn’t we pay particular attention to the cases where the aspiring mass murderer was prevented from getting off more than a couple rounds?
It would be like testing the effectiveness of weed killers, but refusing to consider any cases where the weeds died.
In addition to the Portland mall case, here are a few more examples excluded by the Mother Jones methodology:
– Mayan Palace Theater, San Antonio, Texas, this week: Jesus Manuel Garcia shoots at a movie theater, a police car and bystanders from the nearby China Garden restaurant; as he enters the movie theater, guns blazing, an armed off-duty cop shoots Garcia four times, stopping the attack. Total dead: Zero.
– Winnemucca, Nev., 2008: Ernesto Villagomez opens fire in a crowded restaurant; concealed carry permit-holder shoots him dead. Total dead: Two. (I’m excluding the shooters’ deaths in these examples.)
– Appalachian School of Law, 2002: Crazed immigrant shoots the dean and a professor, then begins shooting students; as he goes for more ammunition, two armed students point their guns at him, allowing a third to tackle him. Total dead: Three.
– Santee, Calif., 2001: Student begins shooting his classmates — as well as the “trained campus supervisor”; an off-duty cop who happened to be bringing his daughter to school that day points his gun at the shooter, holding him until more police arrive. Total dead: Two.
– Pearl High School, Mississippi, 1997: After shooting several people at his high school, student heads for the junior high school; assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieves a .45 pistol from his car and points it at the gunman’s head, ending the murder spree. Total dead: Two.
– Edinboro, Pa., 1998: A student shoots up a junior high school dance being held at a restaurant; restaurant owner pulls out his shotgun and stops the gunman. Total dead: One.
By contrast, the shootings in gun-free zones invariably result in far higher casualty figures — Sikh temple, Oak Creek, Wis. (six dead); Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. (32 dead); Columbine High School, Columbine, Colo. (12 dead); Amish school, Lancaster County, Pa. (five little girls killed); public school, Craighead County, Ark. (five killed, including four little girls).
All these took place in gun-free zones, resulting in lots of people getting killed — and thereby warranting inclusion in the Mother Jones study.
If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation…and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.