<div dir="ltr"><div id="printbody"><div id="pagebody" class=""><div id="entry-2000000002077876" class=""><i>The New Yorker</i><br></div><div id="entry-2000000002077876" class=""><h1 class="">The Simple Truth About Gun Control</h1>
<div class="">Posted by <cite class=""><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/adam_gopnik/search?contributorName=Adam%20Gopnik" title="search site for content by Adam Gopnik" rel="author">Adam Gopnik</a></cite></div>
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<p><img alt="h_14304038-465.jpg" src="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/h_14304038-465.jpg" class="" style="text-align: center; display: block; margin: 0px auto 20px;" height="270" width="465"></p>
<p>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. </p>
<div id="entry-more"><p>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 <em>have</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik" target="_blank">As I wrote last January</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Look at <a href="http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html" target="_blank">the Harvard social scientist David Hemenway’s work on gun violence</a>
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, <a href="http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/david-hemenway/files/Review_of_Gary_Kleck_2004.pdf" target="_blank">is a pure fantasy</a>,
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 <a href="http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/index.html" target="_blank">they did not exist</a>.) Hemenway has discovered, as he explained in <a href="http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/09/death-by-the-barrel.html" target="_blank">this interview with <em>Harvard Magazine</em></a>,
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.”</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html" target="_blank">the idea that the Second Amendment assures individual possession of guns</a>,
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.) </p>
<p>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. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html" target="_blank">As I wrote last week</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><em>Photograph by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times/Redux.</em></p></div>
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