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As an example of the restrictions now in place: any time I buy a gun, I have to pass a background check. The licensed firearms dealer calls the people who administer a database listing people who should not be allowed to possess guns, and why. If and only if they tell him/her, after checking, that I'm not on the “no-shoot” list, I'm allowed to buy it. If I buy a gun online, the seller ships it to a licensed dealer, and when I go to pick it up, I go through the same background check.
As a further example, I have a concealed carry permit. I obtained it after two members of an exceptionally violent prison gang, who were being treated in the prison psychiatric hospital where I was working as a therapist, told me that they were going to kill me or have their friends do so. One of these guys was scheduled to be paroled a few months after this. So I got my permit and started carrying a pistol where I could legally do so. To get that permit, I had to attend a training course (despite having been a firearms instructor myself in both the military and state government) including classroom training and a written test, followed by a practical test at a local range to demonstrate that I could hit what I aimed at. I then submitted a set of fingerprints, releases to allow the state police to do two background checks on me – one for a criminal record, the other for a history of having ever been adjudged a danger to myself or others – and pay a fee of $100. Again, once I got my permit I was still not allowed to take a gun to any school, to anyplace that served alcohol, any state or federal government property (including the prison where I worked), on any Native American reservation, or on any property where the owners had posted a notice that they didn't want guns on the premises.
Some information widely accepted as fact is not accurate, with some of these false beliefs landing on both sides of the argument. Types of guns and ammunition are mislabeled and their capabilities are often wildly exaggerated. On the other side of the aisle, so to speak, the chances that one will be the victim of a violent crime or will be quick, alert, skilled, and lucky enough to effectively defend oneself with a gun are also heavily exaggerated, as is the likelihood of the morphing of the government into some sort of oppressive fascist or Marxist police state and the hypothetical utility of privately owned guns in resisting such a change. Similarly, people on both sides of the issue argue that the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights clearly supports their interpretations, when in fact that Amendment is ambiguous. Misleading statements about guns that I've heard often include the following:
a. Ordinary Americans (or criminals) are able to buy assault rifles, automatic weapons, on the open market. As noted, any gun you or I could buy without having the FBI do a background check similar to that needed for a top secret security clearance is not automatic, it's at most semi-automatic, i.e one shot fired per pull of the trigger.
b. These “assault weapons” can fire 700 rounds in a minute. The truth is that even with the military versions, the actual assault rifles that aren't in gun stores anyway, it would be impossible to fire 700 rounds in a minute. First, the magazines only hold 20 to 30 cartridges, after which you have to remove the empty magazine and replace it with a full one. If the rifle is being used for hunting, it will normally have a special three- to five-round magazine to limit the number of times a hunter can shoot before stopping and reloading. Beyond that, if someone did make a 700-round magazine (which would weigh about 40 pounds loaded) and tried to fire it off nonstop, the heat would destroy the internal workings of the gun and make the outside too hot to hold without oven mitts. That 700-rounds-per-minute figure is the cyclic rate of fire, meaning how fast the action of a machine gun works while the trigger is held down and there's ammunition coming in. The best analogy I can think of is the speed at which a cheetah can run. They've been timed at 70 mph, but that doesn't mean a cheetah can run 70 miles in one hour, because they can only run that fast for a very short distance before they're exhausted.
c. Criminals are buying deadly .50-caliber sniper rifles. No crime has ever been committed in the U.S. with a .50-caliber rifle. They cost thousands of dollars, can be five feet long, usually weigh upwards of 25 pounds, and use ammunition that costs about five dollars per cartridge. These are exotic toys for rich target shooters who like to shoot at targets at extreme long distances, not tools of crime.
d. Criminals are using special armor-piercing bullets against police. Actually, any basic rifle cartridge powerful enough to hunt deer with, let alone larger animals like elk or moose, will penetrate body armor under some conditions. It's not special ammunition.
e. Hollowpoint bullets have no purpose other than to do as much damage to a person as possible, and anyone who uses them for self-defense is actually eager to kill someone. Not true. The main reason for using hollowpoint bullets for self-defense is to reduce the chances of the bullet going through an attacker and then hitting someone or something else behind him or her, or riccocheting in the event of a missed shot, as a solid bullet is more likely to do. This is why most police departments now use hollowpoint ammunition.
f. The semi-automatic rifles often sold to civilians can be quickly and easily converted to have full-automatic capability, turning them into machine guns. False. It takes a trained machinist with the tools of a machine shop to alter a semi-automatic firearm this way, and if someone is caught with it thus modified, they're facing a decade in federal prison. One BATFE (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) agent testified that of about 50,000 guns he knew of that had been confiscated from people who possessed them illegally during his career, not one had been modified from semi-automatic to full automatic capability. And again, if someone does this and is caught, it's a ticket to ten years in a federal penitentiary.
g. Among many pro-gun individuals and groups, it's almost dogma that everyone who advocates any limits on gun ownership is part of a massive conspiracy with the ultimate aim of total disarmament of the population and imposition of a police state. There's some paranoia going on here; it's understandable, because when basic physical safety is at stake people tend to emote rather than thinking. There have been abuses of trust: for example, in California, the legislature passed a law in the mid-90s requiring owners of a particular type of semi-automatic rifle, the SKS (a design invented in the USSR toward the end of World War II) to register them with the state. This was accompanied by the reassurance that they would never be asked to give those rifles up. Shortly after this registration took place, the state turned around and ordered the confiscation of all those SKS rifles, leaving owners feeling betrayed – rightly so, I think. Gun owners everywhere are very wary of similar things happening again.
The Basic Goals
Those are the basic facts. On to goals: often with this and other issues, when people think they're arguing about goals, i.e. about desired ends, they're really arguing about means to those ends. This is true with the issue of gun ownership. Once a goal is agreed upon – and the goal of safety is one both sides are seeking – the effective next step is to research solutions for similar problems in other times and places rather than trust gut hunches and go charging off to work on a strategy that may not accomplish the goal at all.
This was what I was coaching that county health council to do, and like that health council, my question to the people who worked so hard to pass the 1994-2004 ban on semi-automatic firearms and other laws restricting legal gun ownership is, “I respect your aim and admire your dedication, but what difference has this effort made – how has violence in your community been reduced as a result?” I don't know of any place where they can point to significant benefits.
If restrictive gun laws made a place safer, then Washington, DC would be one of the safest cities in the U.S., but it's not, because legal gun ownership is not a significant contributor to crime or violence. As noted earlier, crime has dropped considerably from its worst levels a generation ago in New York City, but that's due mostly to demographic change. In New York, like the rest of the country, the proportion of the population that is most likely to commit violent crimes, i.e. young men, has been dropping as the tail end of the Baby Boom generation aged into their late twenties and older.
Guns are lethally dangerous when misused. They are also very useful for self-protection and hunting for food, and for people who enjoy target shooting or other recreational gun sports, a great deal of fun. They’re deeply embedded in our culture, at least in large parts of it. Guns are a big part of what many people think of as the American way of life, though others may not.
What else does this describe? Well, cars, for one thing. Hear me out, please. Cars are very dangerous; they are also very useful, and for some purposes, necessary, and to a lot of people a source of great pleasure. Cars are as deeply embedded in American culture as guns, though there isn't a Constitutional amendment that mentions them.
