Why I Am A Gun-Owner, and Why Guns Aren't a Social Issue

I wrote this paper for my Medical Sociology (which should have been called "Why Republicans are Uncompassionate Monsters, and Why We Need Complete Universal Health-Care"). The basis of the paper was a small part in the beginning of my Sociology textbook that mentioned that guns are bad and they cause crime. It even had a small section about some physicians group that advocates gun-control. What the fuck? Do you see articles in Gun & Ammo about surgery? No. Anyway, here it is, all 12 pages or whatever it was:

Why I Am a Gun-Owner

And Why Gun-Violence Isn’t a Social Issue – Let Alone a Medical Issue

I am an almost uncompromising supporter of gun-ownership. Uncompromising is something one hears on both sides of the issue: “You can’t convince me of…” is heard all the time whenever gun-ownership and gun-control are discussed – it’s something found in most debates, actually. There are some problems with this attitude; this type of attitude is remarkably close-minded, and usually misinformed. If a person is not open to other opinions, then she doesn’t really think for herself, and is instead just regurgitating whatever has been fed to her by others. Therefore, her “opinions” are baseless and have no value, and are not worth consideration. I myself am almost uncompromising; I always listen to the other side of the issue, and if they can convince me that gun-ownership is bad, and gun-control will magically solve all kinds of problems, then I will buy it. But, this hasn’t happened yet. To be fair, I used to be a staunch opponent of gun-ownership. I used to cite – no, regurgitate – all these statistics that Sarah Brady, Pete Shields, and others, have claimed, the same ones that Weitz uses in a very short part of her book The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Health Care. Then, I started reading the other side, something that I am ashamed to admit I never did before, and of which many people on both sides are guilty. But, it currently stands that I am an almost uncompromising supporter of gun-ownership. I don’t believe there should be any restrictions on gun-ownership of any kind.

The issue of gun ownership and gun-control has many fervid people on both sides of the issue, and both sides argue their cases with equal conviction and evidence – the statistics and facts are all fairly correct, which seems contradictory and almost impossible, until one looks at the points of view of those that are responsible for the statistics, and the things that are wrong or incomplete with those statistics.

Rose Weitz in the chapter “The Social Sources of Illness” lists things like illicit drugs, alcohol, diet and exercise, as well as firearms as social sources of premature death, but fails to mention how many of these homicides are caused by gang-wars, drugs, poverty, or other actual social problems. The question I brought up was, how could firearms be considered a social source of premature death? “According to McGinnis and Foege (1993), firearms account for about 2 percent of all premature deaths in the United States: 16,000 homicides, 19,000 suicides, and 1,400 accidental deaths.” (Weitz 41) The murders and suicides were not caused by guns, they were caused by other things (which either Weitz fails to mention, or the authors McGinnis and Foege never addressed) – there is no physical way those guns caused those deaths, because a gun requires some person to pull the trigger, and some emotion or incentive from those people were the causes of the death; the guns were incidental to the deaths. A pulled trigger is the only way those 1,400 deaths could have happened, other than the gun itself malfunctioning and firing on its own, caused by a strong bump, from dropping the weapon, or something similar. Give credit (responsibility) where it’s due. And, while every one of those accidents is tragic, as proper precautions – read: not trigger locks or gun safes – could have prevented those accidents, benefits of gun-ownership truly far outweigh the detriments.

It is widely accepted that America has the highest gun-crime rate in any industrialized nation mostly due to the easy access of firearms, and sheer numbers. “Studies have found that having a gun in the home significantly increases the odds of suicide, of homicide, and of unintentional shooting deaths of children (Kellerman et al., 1993).” (Weitz 41) Again, this “fact,” while supported by evidence, fails to take into account why those people are attempting to murder someone or commit suicide. All a gun does is increase the chance of successfully doing so. Therefore, the claim that not allowing gun-ownership might reduce murders and suicides in the home is somewhat correct, but only enough so to advance the goals of gun-control advocates; those studies want people to not be able to kill themselves or others, rather than fixing the problem at the true source – the reasons for the homicide or suicide.

Canada has many privately owned firearms, yet it has a crime-rate far lower than America’s crime rate. Some attribute this to the easy access people have to handguns in this country, yet when England decided to ban and confiscate handguns, it didn’t decrease gun-crimes. In fact, the opposite happened; gun-crimes increased. “After the 1997 shooting of 16 kids in Dunblane, England, the United Kingdom passed one of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, banning its citizens from owning almost all types of handguns. Britain seemed to get safer by the minute, as 162,000 newly-illegal firearms were forked over to British officials by law-abiding citizens.” (Stossel) Supporters of gun-control declared the gun-ban as a mark of a new era of peace and nonviolence in England, but they spoke too soon. Crime rates actually increased, especially “hot” robberies – where the intruder breaks into the residence while the homeowner is there. “Officials estimate that more than 250,000 illegal weapons are still in circulation in the country. Without the fear of retaliation from victims who might be packing heat, criminals in possession of these weapons now have a much easier job, and the incidence of gun-related crime has risen.” (Stossel)

Colin Greenwood, the Chief Inspector for the West Yorkshire Constabulary, studied for six months at Oxford restrictive gun laws from many different countries and concluded the same thing:

“At first glance, it may seem odd or even perverse to suggest that statutory controls on the private ownership of firearms are irrelevant to the problem of armed crime; yet that is precisely what the evidence shows.

Armed crime and violent crime generally are products of ethnic and social factors unrelated to the availability of a particular type of weapon.

The number of firearms required to satisfy the crime market is small, and these are supplied no matter what controls are instituted. (Note: Please reread this sentence many times!)” (As quoted from Boston’s Gun Bible, pg. 32/17)

Weitz then says on page 42 that “…guns are far more often used against family members than against criminals. Furthermore, even when a home is forcibly entered or a victim attempts to resists, owning a gun increases the chances of being killed (Kellerman et al., 1993).” Besides the fact that there have been studies proving quite the opposite, what an argument like this does is it says that because you (falsely, as I’ll explain later) are more likely to be killed even when you have a gun at home, we won’t let you have one – the right of self-defense is not allowed, and you aren’t important enough to be allowed to defend yourself. Besides, you’ll probably just hurt yourself or someone you love, or you’ll turn it on someone in anger. You must therefore rely on those with more power to protect you. “Leave it to the professionals” is the common phrase.

But, a very interesting fact that many people are not aware of is this: the police have no legally enforceable duty to protect you. This sounds very crazy to people, but it’s completely true, as the courts have consistently ruled. If someone breaks into your home, and you dial 911, and the police arrive too late, or simply don’t arrive at all, you couldn’t (assuming you live) sue them and win. See, the police had no special relationship with you; you’re just an insignificant part of society as a whole, not an important member they were trying to protect. (Kassler) This distinction between the individual and society is a major component of sociology, and one that the book Dr. Golem addresses specifically, but not allowing the best form of self-defense, a firearm, is ludicrous.

Weitz, along with so many other gun-control advocates, do truly inadequate research, or cite incomplete and low-quality research; usually having a position before hand and then looking for research that supports them. They constantly quote “statistics” by Kellerman, Sarah Brady, Pete Shields, all of whom have their own agenda, namely the banning and confiscation of all firearms. I, myself, am not prejudiced, as I said before. I was a very strong supporter of gun-control, and I never read any arguments on the other side. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to own a firearm except for hunting, and I believed that there should be very strict gun-control laws – I’m pretty sure I mentioned Britain, Canada, or Australia a few times as great examples of what gun-ownership should be like. What Prejudice is not is deciding on what side of the issue you are on after you’ve done plenty of research and thought.

What Weitz and the rest of them need is a truly outside study, done by a fairly objective researcher, that is as complete as possible. I found such a study, and it is a fairly new study, but old enough to have been available for Weitz (and for myself when I was younger.) This study was done by a Criminologist named Dr. Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, and published in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology in 1995, entitled “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun.” This study’s research methods and quality are top-notch and are extremely thorough. There is a problem that the authors acknowledge when trying to research guns and self-defense: if people use a gun in self-defense, it won’t always be reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) simply because the defender may fear that it won’t be seen as lawful, and so there could be many unreported self-defense cases:

“Even under the best of circumstances, reporting the use of a gun for self-protection would be an extremely sensitive and legally controversial matter for either of two reasons. As with other forms of forceful resistance, the defensive act itself, regardless of the characteristics of any weapon used, might constitute an unlawful assault or at least the R might believe that others, including either legal authorities or the researchers, could regard it that way. Resistance with a gun also involves additional elements of sensitivity. Because guns are legally regulated, a victim's possession of the weapon, either in general or at the time of the DGU, might itself be unlawful, either in fact or in the mind of a crime victim who used one. More likely, lay persons with a limited knowledge of the extremely complicated law of either self-defense or firearms regulation are unlikely to know for sure whether their defensive actions or their gun possession was lawful… It is not hard for gun-using victims interviewed in the NCVS to withhold information about their use of a gun, especially since they are never directly asked whether they used a gun for self-protection. They are asked only general questions about whether they did anything to protect themselves.” (Journal of Criminology… p.155)

Another problem he saw in past surveys and research that had been done was that they focused primarily on defenders who had shot and/or killed their attackers. Kleck and Gertz wisely considered the possibility that hostile situations may defuse before they get bad, and decided to include the factor of simply using a gun, as in a display and/or verbal warning to the attacker. While this may not exactly accurately measure the prevention of a crime – how does one measure something that doesn’t happen? – Who is to say that the attacker didn’t simply have a change of heart, and the defender’s gun was purely coincidental? – It does quite accurately show the “Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense”, to quote the title of the study; the use of a survey and the inclusion of the “showing and/or verbal warning” option will show how often a gun is truly used in self-defense situations. The study did not only just address that option, but, to be truly complete, it also included instances in which the weapon was fired, and when the defender wounded or killed his attacker.

The study was done from 1988-1993, and the methods Kleck and Gertz used was a telephone survey, with the calling and questioning done by an agency which does so professionally, calling random numbers and asking very detailed questions. To get an accurate random sample of gun-owners, the survey was conducted on the lower 48 states, on a state-wide basis, although with sometimes small samples. To get an even more accurate survey of gun-owners they over sampled the southern states, as these states have higher gun-ownership rates, as well as higher rates of gun-carrying for self-defense purposes. Households with males were also oversampled as they are more likely to own or carry a gun for self-defense. Their data was readjusted for the oversampling at the end of the survey. The survey was conducted over 5 years and asked whether the person had been the victim of a crime, if they had responded defensively, how they had responded, if they had used a gun for self-defense, if they had fired or simply shown the gun and/or given a verbal warning, as well as if other family members had gone through anything. If there had been an incident of guns being used in self-defense, then a very detailed account of exactly what happened was recorded. Instances of self-defense did not count in the study if the interviewed was a Police Officer, Military Personnel, or Security Guard; only average citizens were interviewed. There were 1 year and 5 year recalls to those same numbers to verify those stories.

Of the almost 5,000 people interviewed, 222 had confirmed that they had used a gun in self-defense. While not a very high number alone, when it is applied to the national level the conclusions are quite staggering: defensive firearms are used anywhere from 2.1-2.5 million times per year in the United States. This seems far too high, explain the authors, unless you take into account that, at the time publication, there were estimated to be about 220 million firearms in the hands of 60 million adults. (Journal of Criminology… pg. 166) The study shows that handguns alone account for approximately 1.9 million of those cases. Of particular relevance to medical sociology is this part about the failure of both defenders and offenders to report any type of shooting:

“ The health system cannot shed much light on this phenomenon either, since very few of these incidents involve injuries.[61] In the rare case where someone is hurt, it is usually the criminal, who is unlikely to seek medical attention for any but the most life-threatening gunshot wounds, as this would ordinarily result in a police interrogation. Physicians in many states are required by law to report treatment of gunshot wounds to the police, making it necessary for medically treated criminals to explain to police how they received their wounds.” (Journal of Criminology… p.168)

If this study, which was highly praised for the quality of its research, doesn’t quite refute the argument that guns are a source of death in this country, and that guns should be banned, let’s take a look at another country in Europe.

It’s a well-known fact among those who study the issue that every Swiss man – trained to be a militiaman – is required to keep his fully automatic rifle in his home. (He also can keep heavy munitions such as grenades, rockets, and mortars, too, but that’s beside the point.) Furthermore, he can carry any privately-owned guns where ever he chooses, even to the voting polls. Shooting is the national sport of Switzerland. Switzerland has more guns per-capita than any other western country, and possibly the world. Yet, Switzerland has one of the lowest crime rates in the western world; in 1997 the homicide-rate was 1.2 in 100,000. In fact, many have said that Nazi Germany’s unwillingness or disinterest in Switzerland was due to this very fact. As a result, Swiss Jews, who served right alongside other Swiss militiamen, didn’t go to any concentration camp. (Halbrook)

An interesting side note: Nazi Germany enacted first gun registration in 1933, and then gun confiscation in 1939. In fact, all the genocides of the 20^th Century were preceded by severe gun-restrictions or outright bans, including, but not limited to, the genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, the Soviet Union’s genocide of political opponents and farming communities, Nazy Germany’s genocide of “inferiors”, the slaughter of Chinese under both the Nationalists and the Communists, the genocide of educated people and opponents in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and the Rwandan genocide of Tutsis. (Zelman) Even the current crisis in Darfur, Sudan, which has claimed the lives millions of people and displaced just as many was made possible in part due to severely restrictive gun laws. For instance, a black man in Sudan is only allowed to own a handgun after first providing enough proof that he needs it (based on economic and social status), and then he must undergo a physical exam by a doctor. If he is given the OK for a handgun, he can only purchase fifteen rounds of ammunition a year, which would be enough for only one full magazine on modern medium caliber pistols, such as a 9mm. However, gun laws with regards to Arabs and the horsemen are surprisingly lax. The government will even supply them with weapons, sometimes a half dozen rifles per person. (Kopel)

In both south Sudan (Christian and Animist Africans) and western Sudan (that is, Darfur, inhabited by Muslim Africans) there were armed rebels [sic] groups. That these resistance groups [who were trying to provide some kind of defense from the Janjaweed and Arab marauders] had been able to acquire weapons illegally was a great affront to the United Nations and the gun prohibition lobbies, who denounce any form of gun possession by “non-state actors.” A “non-state actor” is any person or group whose arms possession is not approved by the government; examples include the Sudanese who were fighting the genocidal dictatorship in their country, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and the American revolutionaries. (Kopel)

Guns are “liberty’s teeth” as George Washington put it. This isn’t to say that gun control isn’t a precursor or that it will inexorably lead to genocide, but it is a definite component; it makes the genocide by those in power much, much easier. That is what guns are for, a protection from a government that may get out of control. To imagine such happening in America is extremely difficult, but it has happened before; Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Civil War. Then again, it’s easy to dismiss this argument as alarmist. To be sure, an argument like this, of a philosophical, historical, and political nature, doesn’t have a very good place in a paper on sociology, but it is important to know that gun-owners generally do not feel gun-control and gun-violence is at all a social issue – the research has shown such to be so – and so any argument which takes the standpoint that it is some kind of social issue will immediately fall on deaf ears. This is regrettable, as it shows the sometimes narrow-mindedness of individuals on my side of the fence, as well. But, it’s a fundamentally different way of looking at the issue. So, in a way, author Rose Weitz was correct, it is a social issue, but not in the way she originally meant it. Gun control often has quite an effect on society, crime, and death, but not in the way Weitz was advertising; it’s almost always a negative effect.

Now it’s been shown that guns really can be used for self-defense, and that they don’t cause crime, I don’t see how any talk of them or gun-violence can be construed as a “social issue” or a “social source of premature death.” If anything about guns should be a social issue, it’s that banning them, confiscating them, and criminalizing them is a violation of basic human rights – to defend one self. All the time, effort, and money spent towards supporting gun-control could be better well spent trying to solve other problems, such as the actual sources of homicides and suicides. What this argument has to do with the medical aspect of sociology, other than the slanted view that guns cause tens of thousands of deaths a year, I’m not exactly sure. But, if so, why did Rose Weitz include it briefly in her book about the sociology of medicine? She does nothing to explain it’s significance.

I will make an assumption that the sources of these problems are multi-faceted, and I won’t presume to try to make any guesses, as they would be very uneducated and opinionated; I have ideas and conjectures about the causes of unhappiness, violence, rage, etc., but they aren’t supported by any kind of statistical or quantitative evidence. While leaving this subject like this would leave it unfinished and incomplete, I simply don’t have the resources to conduct any kind of research, except to draw on the information of others, which is varied at the least and outright contradictory at the most. Firearms should be left alone, as a given part of the landscape of American society, for there are no reasons, as I’ve shown, to want to adopt any other countries’ gun-control laws, or pass any more. Robert Heinlein once wrote “an armed society is a polite society.” As the Swiss have shown, it is in the best collective interest for every citizen to be armed. After all, Weitz, and the authors of Dr. Golem, would agree that sometimes the collective-side of the issue needs to be examined.

(SIDE NOTES THAT DIDN’T FIT IN WITH THE PAPER AND ITS ORGANIZATION)

The Real Goal of Gun-Control Advocates:

One argument made by many on the Gun-Control advocacy side is that they don’t want to ban guns or confiscate guns or restrict law-abiding citizens in any way. They simply wnt to make it harder for criminals to get guns. But, most of those people on the victim-disarmamanet side aren't the ones who are making the laws. The people who are making the laws or influencing such, people like McCarthy, Feinstein, Shields, etc., are the ones who are making the laws, and they don't intend to stop merely at tighter regulations and registrations. For them, these are stepping stones to the future goal of complete confiscation and disarmament. Senator Carolyn McCarthy has said just this about her H.R. 1022 “Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act.”

Unfortunately, this bill would in fact ban almost all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and make the possession of such punishable with a minimum of 10 years in prison. This bill, with a pen-stroke, would criminalize millions of law-abiding gun owners and guns instantly. How is this not banning and confiscating guns or restricting gun-owners? “The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws,” as Ayn Rand once said, and the banning of guns would do just that. It would be a two-fold effect: first, the government would criminalize an object (guns) and their owners removing guns from the hands of law-abiding citizens, and second, the people would have to rely on the government for any kind of protection, as the people can no longer defend themselves nearly as well. But, this would result in crime conditions worsening, as I’ve shown that banning guns has no positive effect on crime.

Let’s consider another quote, about the first Assault Weapons Ban, another name for the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994” from 1994, which ended in 2004. On April 5^th, 1996, Charles Krauthammer wrote in an article titled Disarm the Citizenry. But Not Yet that the Assault Weapons Ban was never intended to control crime, as the title suggests; “Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic — purely symbolic — move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.” (MUCH OF THIS VERBATIM FROM 'BOSTON'S GUN BIBLE')

Pete Shields, the director of Handgun Control, Inc., has also admitted exactly the same about gun controls:

“We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily -- given the political realities -- going to be very modest. . . . [W]e'll have to start working again to strengthen that law, and then again to strengthen the next law, and maybe again and again. Right now, though, we'd be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal -- total control of handguns in the United States -- is going to take time. . . . The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition-except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors-totally illegal.”

Richard Harris, A Reporter at Large: Handguns, New Yorker, July 26, 1976, at 53, 58 (quoting Pete Shields, founder of Handgun Control, Inc.) [http://www.gunscholar.org/gunban.htm]

Pete Shields, incidentally, has a Concealed Carry Permit, which probably means he, himself, carries a concealed handgun. Oops.

The argument that gun-controllers are not “out to get” all guns and punish gun-owners is completely false. They want guns to only be owned by the military and law enforcement. The military should have guns, yes, obviously, but what about law enforcement officers? As I’ve shown already, the police do not have to protect you, so why would they need guns? Well, to protect themselves, obviously. But, if there are no guns, why would they need guns to protect themselves against people who don’t have them? Well, because the criminals might have them, right?

Exactly. As tired as that old axiom is, when the guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

So, let’s assume (completely falsely) that banning guns leads to no guns being owned by anyone, legal or no. Why, then, would the police still need them? This is a very good question and one that can be answered by another quote from Ayn Rand; “A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”

Works Cited:

Wietz, Rose. The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Health Care, 3^rd ed. Belmont, CA. Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2004.

Kleck, Gary; Gertz, Marc. “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun”. Journal of Criminology and Law. 86.1 (1995): 150-186. JSTOR, Winona State University Library Catalog Database [http://www.jstor.org/] Accessed 24 Nov. 2007

Stossel, John. ABC News “20/20” Op/ed. April 26, 2007. Accessed 25 Nov. 2007. [http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Story?id=3083618&page=1]

Party, T. Boston. Boston’s Gun Bible, revised ed. united states of America. Javelin Press. 1997-2002.

Kasler, Peter Alan. “Police Have No Duty to Protect Individuals.” Copyright 1992. Accessed 26 Nov. 2007. [http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kasler-protection.html]

Halbrook, Stephen P. “Guns, Crime, and the Swiss”. 1999. Accessed 26 Nov. 2007. [http://www.stephenhalbrook.com/articles/guns-crime-swiss.html]

Zelman, Aaron. Stevens, Richard W. Death by “Gun Control” 2005, excerpted at:[http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm] Accessed 25 Nov. 2007

Kopel, Dave. “Gun Bans and Genocide: The Disarming Facts.” America’s 1^st Freedom. August 2006. Accessed 26 Nov. 2007 [http://www.davekopel.com/2A/Foreign/gun-bans-and-genocide.htm]