| Chapter
11
Guns and Gun Control
By David J. Krajicek
The American Soul
I had witnessed another glimpse of the gun culture that night.
I regard my guns as tools for pursuing a hobby, like my tennis racquets or golf clubs. My Catskill friend clearly saw his guns as something more. He seemed to have the “atavistic” relationship cited by the NRA’s Orth.
If someone were to “come for my guns,” I suppose I would call a lawyer. But for some members of the gun culture, it would be a minuteman moment, a cause for a front-lawn standoff.
Historian Hofstadter called guns “an ingredient of the American imagination.”
In our national narrative, we learned that frontiersmen survived by wielding guns against human enemies and wild game. Gunfighters outlived opponents by learning to be quicker on the draw, according to our western legends.
D.H. Lawrence, the English writer, was a student of American frontier literature. In his 1923 study of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, Lawrence wrote, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
He was referring to the Americans portrayed in those 19th century novels. In the 20th Century, that “essential American soul” may have been found in the young men who traveled abroad to fight world wars. Perhaps it was found in Ernest Hemingway, whose life of manly wordsmithing, hunting and drinking ended when he shot himself in the head.
Although it still crops up in contemporary examinations of guns and America, Lawrence’s description seems dated now. I’m not sure our national soul has melted. But neither am I certain that any 11 words could describe our collective soul.
We are 300 million people, with an ideological range from George W. Bush to Ted Kennedy, from Al Franken to Rush Limbaugh, from Sarah Brady to Wayne LaPierre, from an art major at Cooper Union in Manhattan to a biblical studies major at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., from the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr. to the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.
We are not a monolith—on guns or any other issue.
For example, a number of prominent academics who regard themselves as liberal, including Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, agree with the NRA’s keystone assertion that the Second Amendment is a Constitutional guarantee of the right of private citizens to own guns without government interference.
And a new Maryland-based group, the American Hunters and Shooters Association, has splintered away from the NRA. The group says it has a traditional view of the Second Amendment as inviolate. But it opposes the polarizing tone of the NRA and says it supports “reasonable and sensible” guns-and-ammo regulations, including a ban on assault rifles.
Guns: A Health Issue
How does a journalist make his way through this mine field of conflicting views without endless and tedious point-counterpoint parrying?
For the past decade, advocates such as the Berkeley Media Studies Group have encouraged the media to treat crime and gun violence as a public health issue.
According to this point of view, too many news story lack context on the costs of violence. The Berkeley Group says this information can be added to even daily reporting on violent crime, and it gives examples in its primer, Reporting on Violence: A Handbook for Journalists, available on the Web at www.bmsg.org/pcvp/INDEX.SHTML.
In broad terms, the organization estimated in 1997 that the “lifetime costs” of violence in America amounted to $325 billion, including such things as medical costs and wages and quality of life lost.
In their 2000 book Gun Violence: The Real Costs, public policy professors Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig estimated a $100 billion annual price tag for gun violence in America. (www.amazon.com/Gun-Violence-Philip-J-Cook/dp/0195137930)
By one calculation, each shooting in America costs about $20,000 for medical care alone. That can rise dramatically with disabling injuries. Several news stories have calculated a cost of more than $1 million for shootings in which the victim was left a paraplegic.
The Brady Center provides a footnoted fact sheet on the costs of gun violence at www.bradycampaign.org/facts/factsheets/?page=econ. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center offers a number of reports at www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/.
Attitude Changes?
Has America’s attitudes toward guns evolved since 1970?
Our gun laws have not changed much, with the exception of the background checks on firearms purchases.
And the national gun count appears to be marching inexorably higher, in spite of any temporary “popular revulsion against guns,” in Hofstadter’s phrase, that follows shootings like the one at Virginia Tech University.
One clear current trend expands the legal tolerance for personal protection. Beginning in the mid-1800s, state and local regulations prohibited most citizens from carrying concealed weapons. That began to change in the mid-1980s, and today about half of all states have laws allowing concealed guns.
Another facet of that trend are the “Castle Doctrine” laws, which generally allow citizens to use lethal force against criminal attacks in one’s home, vehicle or place of employment.
No one has made a national estimate, but these laws are widely believed to have led to substantial increases in the number of Americans carrying a handgun.
The Orlando Sentinel reported in 2007 that nearly 20,000 people in Orange County, Fla., were licensed to carry concealed guns, up 57 percent in the past five years.
The Orange County figure of 20,000 means that roughly 2 percent of its 1 million citizens are licensed to carry concealed firearms. If the same percentage is extrapolated over Florida’s population of 18 million, roughly 360,000 citizens of the Sunshine State would be legally allowed to carry concealed guns.
The Sentinel said the state had sent concealed-weapon applications to nearly 250,000 Floridians in the first half of 2007, up a third from five years ago.
A University of Florida criminologist called the new gun-carry laws a “wicked conundrum.” She told the paper that people carry guns for safety, but research shows that those who arm themselves are at increased risk of injury or death.
The “Castle Doctrine” may prove a comparable conundrum. A 1998 article in the Journal of Trauma by Dr. Arthur Kellermann concluded that a gun kept in a home increased four times the likelihood of an accidental shooting there. Harvard studies available at the Website linked above indicate that suicides and homicides are more prevalent in states that have higher rates of gun ownership.
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