NOTE: This article appeared in the April, 1994 Washington State Bar News, the publication for the Washington State Bar Association and was added here with permission from the author for educational purposes.
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A BETTER AND SAFER PLACE TO LIVE
by Bill Dennis
Jack Richey's story in the February Bar News is simple enough on the surface, but it is a perplexing piece of work. The narrator is a woman with a husband and college student son. But her spouse insists on buying a revolver after their home is burglarized. The son knows all of this, but not wanting to wake his parents, decides to be stealthy during a midnight visit. The father hears him creeping about and calls 911. The operator tells him to stay in his bedroom while the police are on the way, but the father, perhaps in an excess of machismo, goes to confront the supposed burglar. Inevitably, the darkened house became the scene of a tragic shooting that leaves the son dead at his father's hand and the parents bereft. At the end of the story the parents make the gun the scapegoat, in an almost Biblical sense, by tossing it into Puget Sound in an effort to begin healing their relationship.
I like that ending. Any family this stupid shouldn't have any sharp instruments at home, let alone loaded guns.
My own experience and that of my family has been quite different. If my father had not taught his bride how to use a gun for self-protection I probably would not be here. On at least two occasions (once in Boston and once again in the Rainier Beach area of Seattle) she drove off individuals who appeared bent on harming her family and did so without firing a shot. That is not a completely unusual experience. My sister-in-law--in the affluent suburb of Kent--was awakened by a strange man leaning over her bed at 3 a.m. She shouted for her father to bring his gun and the visitor left abruptly. Estimates vary, but there is persuasive evidence that about 1,000,000 Americans have similar experiences each year (See Keck & DeLone, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March, 1993).
Since the Richey article ended with the couple ridding themselves of their gun, it is safe to surmise that the author's intent was to suggest that at least some of us are better off unarmed. Let's examine that proposition. The author has plausibly described one class of people who shouldn't be armed--the stupid and imprudent. The very young, the immature and those too damaged or befuddled to think clearly are other classes. I would also add anyone who resists being armed, both on libertarian principles and on the theory so that they can't be counted on to act intelligently in an emergency. But what about the rest of us? Is the normally intelligent individual who has spent a few hours familiarizing himself with a gun better off to be unarmed?
Before sharing some information that bears on that, let me point out that it's pretty hard for the average reader to be well-informed on this topic. I don't mean to point the finger at a particular publication because the Longview Daily News is actually a pretty good paper. But it was the one I took home every day for 90 days and read from cover to cover, cutting out every article on a shooting as I read. The hard part was finding all the datelined places and measuring the distances from Longview. When I was done I had 54 articles about someone abusing a gun to rob or kill and five about legitimate self-defense. The reader would conclude that guns are misused far more often than not if he did not know that the average distance from Longview was 26 times as far in the abuse stories as it was in the self-defense stories. The Daily News is typical in that it will print a story about legitimate self-defense only if the events in the story occur so close to home that the readers can be expected to know about them from some other source. But they will go anywhere in the world for a story about someone abusing a gun. (The farthest-away story was about someone's beer-drinking goat getting shot in Brisbane. I never did figure out why that was news in Longview.) So don't think that you have a balanced view of this subject unless you do a good deal more than read your local paper and a couple of weekly news magazines.
For instance, there is quite a bit of evidence that disarming the general population actually raises the homicide rate. Gun control advocates determinedly ignore the fact that the places with the highest crime rates in the country are those with the tightest gun laws and that homicide rates in those places have usually risen substantially since those laws were enacted. But when Florida and Oregon eased their laws governing the concealed carrying of handguns, they actually experienced a reduction in their crime rates (George F. Will, Newsweek, November 10, 1993, at p. 94). And Kennesaw, Georgia--the infamous nest of redneck crackers--turns out to be a pleasant suburb of Atlanta with a population of about 10,000. True, for the last decade it has had a law that mandates that every home be equipped with a gun, ammunition and someone who knows how to use them. But the odd thing is that the city has experienced a substantial drop in most categories of crime and no increase in accidental or other sorts of shootings (Dallas Morning News, February 3,1991). Ten years and a population that size is a useful experiment. Then there is the case of Chicago, where the homicide rate had been dropping steadily until the city banned the concealed carrying of handguns by ordinary citizens. The homicide rate has risen every year since (Jay Edward Sinkin, The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1991).
So it appears that people who are reasonably intelligent and even fairly well-trained at using a gun generally benefit from being armed for self-protection. Contrary to what you might think, allowing people to have this option doesn't place a great burden on society, either. I know that the much-cited comparison between Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C. purported to reach a different conclusion (New England Journal of Medicine, November 10, 1988). But anyone who is going to take that study seriously needs to read the correspondence section printed in the same publication on May 4,1989. The condemnation was virtually unanimous. My favorite was Dr. Gryder's remark that he was politically in favor of gun control and of using science to look at our social problems, but that it must not be flawed science that we use.
But if flawed science is the best that gun control advocates have to support their positions, then perhaps the points I've made have more than a little merit. It may even be that situations like Richey's fictional tragedy notwithstanding, an armed citizenry reasonably well-schooled in the safe and prudent use of their weapons might make this a better and safer place to live.
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Bill Dennis is a lawyer in Kelso.
LETTER AGAINST "A RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS?" AND AUTHOR'S RESPONSE!