By Mona Charen
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
I stand out among my conservative friends in disliking
guns. I favor reasonable restrictions on the Second Amendment, like bans on
fully automatic weapons, background checks for purchases, and forbidding the
sale of guns to those with histories of mental illness or criminality.
Yet I cannot agree with liberals that more gun control
will lead to fewer gun crimes.
President Obama’s choice for defense secretary, Chuck
Hagel, actually illuminated one of the weaknesses of the gun-control case.
Hagel had been closely associated with Global Zero (though he’s since
repudiated it), a movement dedicated to “the elimination of all nuclear
weapons.” Hagel isn’t alone in endorsing this cause. President Obama supports
the concept as well.
Liberals like Hagel and Obama think nuclear weapons are a
problem in themselves. Call it the instrumental view. It’s the weapon, rather
than the person wielding it, that presents the danger. But American possession
of nuclear weapons didn’t threaten world peace. On the contrary, our nuclear
arsenal arguably kept the peace for the whole second half of the 20th century.
On the other hand, a nuclear weapon in Iran’s hands would be a profound threat
to the world.
By the same instrumental logic, many ask how we can
tacitly tolerate Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons while declaring that
Iran must not be permitted to obtain them. The answer is the same. No matter
how awful the weapon, the relevant question is about the weapon’s owner. Israel
is a peace-seeking democracy whose nuclear weapons are clearly intended purely
for defense. Iran is ruled by a terrorist gang that managed to gain control of
a country.
To propose, as Hagel did, that the existing nuclear
powers completely divest themselves of nuclear weapons wouldn’t make the world
safer. It would make it profoundly less safe, because the U.S. would be
powerless to prevent smaller powers, which would acquire nuclear weapons after
we had destroyed our own, from bullying the world — or worse.
Wouldn’t it be a better world if nuclear bombs had never
been invented? That’s hard to say. History isn’t over. The U.S. military
projected that casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland would be
between 500,000 and 1 million American dead and between 5 and 10 million
Japanese dead. Dropping two atomic bombs, as terrible as that was, cost about
200,000 lives.
Similar arguments animate the gun-control debate. The
ready availability of guns, we’re told, is responsible for America’s extremely
high rates of gun crime and for the horrific mass shootings we’ve experienced
in recent years. Possibly, but there are other nations with high rates of gun
ownership, like Switzerland and Israel, that have low rates of gun crime. In
our own recent history, we know that many high schools hosted rifle teams and
many had ranges in their buildings. Yet school shootings were exceedingly rare
and mass shootings unheard of.
We are told that studies have shown that gun ownership
does not make home owners safer, but that, on the contrary, having a gun in the
home makes it much more likely that the homeowner will be shot by a family
member. This claim rests chiefly on a study by Arthur Kellerman that compared
420 homicide victims with others living in the same neighborhood. As Gary Kleck
observed, the subjects of the study lived in a crime-ridden neighborhood, and
Kellerman did not control for membership in gangs or participation in the drug
trade. Additionally, only 4.7 percent of the homicide victims were killed by
spouses, lovers, other relatives, or roommates using the gun that was kept at
home. The overwhelming majority of the deaths were the result of guns brought
into the home from elsewhere.
It’s doubtless true that more guns in homes are
correlated with more gun accidents, gun suicides, and gun homicides. It’s hard
to find gun deaths in homes without guns. But there are no swimming pool deaths
in homes without pools, either. There is also no doubt that Americans defend
themselves and others with guns quite frequently. Data are difficult to come by
for complex reasons, including reporting errors, varying state laws, and even
lying by gun owners. But when the CATO Institute studied news reports of
defensive gun uses over an eight-year period ending in 2011, they found more
than 5,000 documented instances of gun owners preventing mayhem (murder, rape,
robbery, and assault) with guns. Interestingly, they found only eleven cases in
which the criminal was able to disarm the gun owner, but 227 cases in which the
criminal was disarmed.
We can no more make guns disappear than we can uninvent
nuclear weapons. The key in both cases is whose finger is on the trigger.
No comments:
Post a Comment