[Vision2020] The Simple Truth About Gun Control

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Thu Dec 20 06:33:22 PST 2012


*The New Yorker*
The Simple Truth About Gun Control
Posted by Adam Gopnik<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/adam_gopnik/search?contributorName=Adam%20Gopnik>

[image: h_14304038-465.jpg]

We live, let’s imagine, in a city where children are dying of a ravaging
infection. The good news is that its cause is well understood and its cure,
an antibiotic, easily at hand. The bad news is that our city council has
been taken over by a faith-healing cult that will go to any lengths to keep
the antibiotic from the kids. Some citizens would doubtless point out
meekly that faith healing has an ancient history in our city, and we must
regard the faith healers with respect—to do otherwise would show a lack of
respect for their freedom to faith-heal. (The faith healers’ proposition is
that if there were a faith healer praying in every kindergarten the kids
wouldn’t get infections in the first place.) A few Tartuffes would see the
children writhe and heave in pain and then wring their hands in
self-congratulatory piety and wonder why a good God would send such a
terrible affliction on the innocent—surely he must have a plan! Most of
us—every sane person in the city, actually—would tell the faith healers to
go to hell, put off worrying about the Problem of Evil till Friday or
Saturday or Sunday, and do everything we could to get as much penicillin to
the kids as quickly we could.

We do live in such a city. Five thousand seven hundred and forty children
and teens died from gunfire in the United States, just in 2008 and 2009.
Twenty more, including Olivia Engel, who was seven, and Jesse Lewis, who
was six, were killed just last week. Some reports say their bodies weren’t
shown to their grief-stricken parents to identify them; just their
pictures. The overwhelming majority of those children would have been saved
with effective gun control. We know that this is so, because, in societies
that *have* effective gun control, children rarely, rarely, rarely die of
gunshots. Let’s worry tomorrow about the problem of Evil. Let’s worry more
about making sure that when the Problem of Evil appears in a first-grade
classroom, it is armed with a penknife.

There are complex, hand-wringing-worthy problems in our social life:
deficits and debts and climate change. Gun violence, and the work of
eliminating gun massacres in schools and movie houses and the like, is not
one of them. Gun control works on gun violence as surely as antibiotics do
on bacterial infections. In Scotland, after Dunblane, in Australia, after
Tasmania, in Canada, after the Montreal massacre—in each case the necessary
laws were passed to make gun-owning hard, and in each case… well, you will
note the absence of massacre-condolence speeches made by the Prime
Ministers of Canada and Australia, in comparison with our own President.

The laws differ from place to place. In some jurisdictions, like Scotland,
it is essentially impossible to own a gun; in others, like Canada, it is
merely very, very difficult. The precise legislation that makes gun-owning
hard in a certain sense doesn’t really matter—and that should give hope to
all of those who feel that, with several hundred million guns in private
hands, there’s no point in trying to make America a gun-sane country.

As I wrote last
January<http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik>,
the central insight of the modern study of criminal violence is that all
crime—even the horrific violent crimes of assault and rape—is at some level
opportunistic. Building a low annoying wall against them is almost as
effective as building a high impenetrable one. This is the key concept of
Franklin Zimring’s amazing work on crime in New York; everyone said that,
given the social pressures, the slum pathologies, the profits to be made in
drug dealing, the ascending levels of despair, that there was no hope of
changing the ever-growing cycle of violence. The right wing insisted that
this generation of predators would give way to a new generation of
super-predators.

What the New York Police Department found out, through empirical experience
and better organization, was that making crime even a little bit harder
made it much, much rarer. This is undeniably true of property crime, and
common sense and evidence tells you that this is also true even of crimes
committed by crazy people (to use the plain English the subject deserves).
Those who hold themselves together enough to be capable of killing anyone
are subject to the same rules of opportunity as sane people. Even madmen
need opportunities to display their madness, and behave in different ways
depending on the possibilities at hand. Demand an extraordinary degree of
determination and organization from someone intent on committing a violent
act, and the odds that the violent act will take place are radically
reduced, in many cases to zero.

Look at the Harvard social scientist David Hemenway’s work on gun
violence<http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html>to
see how simple it is; the phrase “more guns = more homicide” tolls
through it like a grim bell. The more guns there are in a country, the more
gun murders and massacres of children there will be. Even within this
gun-crazy country, states with strong gun laws have fewer gun murders (and
suicides and accidental killings) than states without them. (Hemenway is
also the scientist who has shown that the inflated figure of guns used in
self-defense every year, running even to a million or two million, is a
pure fantasy<http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/david-hemenway/files/Review_of_Gary_Kleck_2004.pdf>,
even though it’s still cited by pro-gun enthusiasts. Those hundreds of
thousands intruders shot by gun owners left no records in emergency wards
or morgues; indeed, left no evidentiary trace behind. This is because they
did not exist<http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/index.html>.)
Hemenway has discovered, as he explained in this interview with *Harvard
Magazine* <http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/09/death-by-the-barrel.html>,
that what is usually presented as a case of self-defense with guns is, in
the real world, almost invariably a story about an escalating quarrel. “How
often might you appropriately use a gun in self-defense?” Hemenway asks
rhetorically. “Answer: zero to once in a lifetime. How about
inappropriately—because you were tired, afraid, or drunk in a
confrontational situation? There are lots and lots of chances.”

So don’t listen to those who, seeing twenty dead six- and seven-year-olds
in ten minutes, their bodies riddled with bullets designed to rip apart
bone and organ, say that this is impossibly hard, or even particularly
complex, problem. It’s a very easy one. Summoning the political will to
make it happen may be hard. But there’s no doubt or ambiguity about what
needs to be done, nor that, if it is done, it will work. One would have to
believe that Americans are somehow uniquely evil or depraved to think that
the same forces that work on the rest of the planet won’t work here. It’s
always hard to summon up political will for change, no matter how
beneficial the change may obviously be. Summoning the political will to
make automobiles safe was difficult; so was summoning the political will to
limit and then effectively ban cigarettes from public places. At some
point, we will become a gun-safe, and then a gun-sane, and finally a
gun-free society. It’s closer than you think. (I’m grateful to my colleague
Jeffrey Toobin for showing so well that the idea that the Second Amendment
assures individual possession of
guns<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html>,
so far from being deeply rooted in American law, is in truth a new and
bizarre reading, one that would have shocked even Warren Burger.)

Gun control is not a panacea, any more than penicillin was. Some violence
will always go on. What gun control is good at is controlling guns. Gun
control will eliminate gun massacres in America as surely as antibiotics
eliminate bacterial infections. As I wrote last
week<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html>,
those who oppose it have made a moral choice: that they would rather have
gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of
freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns
owned—just as the faith healers would rather watch the children die than
accept the reality of scientific medicine. This is a moral choice; many
faith healers make it to this day, and not just in thought experiments. But
it is absurd to shake our heads sapiently and say we can’t possibly know
what would have saved the lives of Olivia and Jesse.

On gun violence and how to end it, the facts are all in, the evidence is
clear, the truth there for all who care to know it—indeed, a global
consensus is in place, which, in disbelief and now in disgust, the planet
waits for us to us to join. Those who fight against gun control, actively
or passively, with a shrug of helplessness, are dooming more kids to
horrible deaths and more parents to unspeakable grief just as surely as are
those who fight against pediatric medicine or childhood vaccination. It’s
really, and inarguably, just as simple as that.

*Photograph by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times/Redux.*
Comments


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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