| Chapter
11
Guns and Gun Control
By David J. Krajicek
Mitchell Johnson
Certain real-world examples highlight the absurdity of some firearms protocols in America, whether your are pro-gun or pro-gun control.
On March 23, 1998, two boys in Jonesboro, Ark., stole into the woods and hunkered down on a hill that afforded a good view of a local school.
One of them, Mitchell Johnson, 13, directed the other, Andrew Golden, 11, to go inside the building and activate a fire alarm. Golden then ran to rejoin Johnson at the vantage point.
As students and teachers began filing out of the building, Johnson and Golden opened fire with three rifles they took from the home of Johnson’s grandfather.
They fired for 5 minutes as terrified kids scrambled for cover. The boys killed four girls and a female teacher and injured 10.
They were prosecuted and convicted of murder, but under the state and federal laws that the applied, the boys could be held only until they turned 21.
Johnson was freed on his birthday in 2005. Arkansans were stunned to learn that no law would prevent him from buying and owning firearms.
His mother assured the edgy city that young Johnson had discovered God and planned to study to become a minister.
On Jan. 1, 2007, police in Fayetteville, Ark., pulled over Mitchell Johnson’s van for a traffic violation. He was carrying a loaded 9mm pistol.
Gun Basics
How Many Guns?
America’s complicated relationship with firearms is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that we don’t even know how many we own. Some of us are determined to keep it that way.
The federal gun law enacted in 1986 prohibited the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from creating a central database of gun transactions.
Those who oppose government regulation of firearms see any sort of database or count as a potential first step toward licensing, which they see as an infringement upon an individual’s right to keep arms.
This has led to a curious situation in which the ATF cites figures from a study of gun ownership completed more than a decade ago by Gary Kleck, a Florida State University professor.
“No nation counts guns per se, but rather registered guns,” Kleck said. “So you can't have official government counts without registration. Fear of registration leading to mass confiscation is not entirely paranoid, since the latter is not administratively feasible without the former. Although the average American supporter of registration does not see it as a tool for achieving gun prohibition, I doubt that is also true of the leaders of gun control
advocacy groups or their hard-core members.”
Estimates on the number of guns in America come from public surveys that are then extrapolated for the population as a whole.
Kleck says the number of privately owned guns in the country reached approximately 288 million at the end of 2006. The number grows by about 4 million each year.
The total is believed to include roughly 104 million handguns, 100 million rifles and 84 million shotguns.
Many people own large gun collections. Surveys indicate that about 20 percent of gun owners account for half of the firearms.
Great Britain, which banned most types of handguns in 1997, keeps a very precise gun count based upon licensing requirements.
In 2005, there were 1,514,098 million licensed shotguns and 422,062 licensed rifles and pistols in England, Scotland and Wales, according to Home Office statistics.
For decades, journalists have cited a conventional-wisdom statistic that there is at least one gun in nearly half of all American households.
In 2007, the pro-gun control Violence Policy Center in Washington released the results of a survey that indicated firearms ownership has “declined dramatically” since 1972.
The organization, citing work by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, said the percentage of households reporting having guns had declined from a high of 54 percent in 1977 to 34.5 percent in 2006. The number of gun owners also has declined, according to the survey. In 2006, 21.6 percent of those surveyed said they personally owned a gun, down from nearly one-third from 1985.
Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, asserted that the results showed that America is “leaving the gun culture behind.” The NRA, meanwhile, continues to insist that the number of gun owners in America is at an all-time high.
Some believe that a significant percentage of gun owners are so leery that they lie in firearms surveys.
But if both groups are correct—that the number of households with guns has declined, yet there are more guns than ever in America—it can only mean that there are more guns in the hands of fewer people.
There are about 109 million households in America, so roughly 38 million of them have guns, according to the Violence Policy Center survey. If there are 288 million guns in the country, then each household with firearms has about seven guns, on average.
Guns and Crime
The use of guns in the commission of crimes has mirrored the broad trends of American crime statistics.
Gun use in crime reached unprecedented levels in 1993 and 1994, when 1.3 million Americans each year faced assailants wielding firearms. A gun was used in about one-quarter of the 4.4 million murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults in 1993, and handguns were used in nearly nine in 10 of the gun crimes counted that year. Blacks were three to four times more likely than whites to fall victim to a gun crime.
The Justice Department has tracked those and other gun statistics since 1973 in the National Crime Victimization Survey, in which 134,000 people age 12 and older are interviewed twice a year.
The survey tracked a precipitous decline in the use of firearms in crime during the late 1990s and early years of this decade—mirroring the overall crime decline in America.
The number of nonfatal firearms victims, for example, dropped from 1.3 million in 1994 to 332,000 in 2004—a decline from six out of every 1,000 citizens in 1994 to 1.4 per 1,000 in 2004.
The figure edged up to 477,000 in 2005.
The trend of homicides committed with firearms follows the same general pattern. For the 15 years beginning in 1973, the number held steady in the 13,000 range, varying from 10,990 in 1984 to 14,052 in 1980.
But in 1990, the homicides-by-gun count began to ascend, reaching a high of 17,048 in 1993. The number then began to recede, leveling out and holding steady at about 11,000 from 1998 to 2005.
Statistics for robberies committed with firearms follow the same pattern. The robbery-with-guns tally was 168,000 in 1977, 257,000 in 1994 and 176,000 in 2005. The count of assaults with guns was similar.
(For more on these numbers, visit this Office of Justice Programs report.)
John R. Lott, a controversial pro-gun academic, summarized one point of view about firearms ownership and crime in a four-word book title: More Guns, Less Crime.
One tenet of that doctrine holds that criminals might think twice when they face a victim who may be armed. Since the early 1990s, about half of all states have approved some form of a right-to-carry law that enables citizens to have concealed weapons.
The Violence Policy Center responded in a report with a similarly self-explanatory title, “More Guns, More Crime.”
Gary Kleck, the Florida State University criminologist, has said that gun availability has no measurable effect on crime rates—neither negative nor positive. (See the resources in Chapter Eight for contact information.)
Nonetheless, many cities have made gun initiatives a police priority, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns have painted a target on firearms.
The federal government initiated a gun enforcement prototype program, Project Exile, in Richmond, Va., in the late 1990s. Gun violators were arrested under a federal law and were subjected to a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.
The program has been used in many cities and states under various names, including FACE 5 in Atlanta and Project Safe Streets or Operation Exile elsewhere.
Police in New York and many other cities have pursued a “stop-and-frisk” anti-gun policy of random pat-downs, which were upheld in the Terry v. Ohio Supreme Court decision in 1968.
New York police said they are effective, leading to dozens of illegal handgun confiscations each year. But random frisks have been criticized because a disproportionate number of those targeted are minorities.
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