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Armed:
New Perspectives on Gun Control, by
Gary Kleck & Don B. Kates (Prometheus Books, 363 pp., $27)
 ritten
by two of the most important scholars in the world of firearms policy,
Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control could be a truly outstanding
book. Instead, it's merely good, mainly because so much of the book
fails to live up to this subtitle's promise to provide "new
perspectives."
Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University,
is by far the most important social scientist studying the gun issue.
His magnum opus, the 1991 book Point
Blank, won the highest award that the American Society of
Criminology has to bestow, and greatly advanced the sophistication
of social science research on firearms policy. An updated paperback
version, published in 1997 as Targeting
Guns, is indispensable resource for any serious writer about
firearms law or policy. (These days, John Lott of the American Enterprise
Institute is a much better-known gun scholar than Kleck, but Lott
conducts research on a far smaller range of gun issues than Kleck
does. Kleck specializes almost entirely in guns, whereas Lott also
studies many other subjects, such as antitrust, voting patterns,
and discrimination.)
Since the early 1980s, civil-rights lawyer and litigator Don Kates
has been the Leonardo of the Renaissance of Second Amendment scholarship.
Kates has encouraged and facilitated the research of countless scholars
on firearms issue. His persuasive analysis has caused a great many
journalists and scholars to change their positions on gun laws.
Accordingly, there is every reason to expect Armed to be one of
the best books ever written about gun control.
And sometimes, the book lives up to expectations. The book consists
of eight chapters, four each by Kates and Kleck. The best of these
Kleck's "Absolutist Politics in a Moderate Package: Prohibitionist
Intentions of the Gun Control Movement." Examining the rhetoric
and positions of the antigun movement from its founding in the 1970s
up to the present, Kleck shows that the antigun groups have always
favored every restriction or prohibition which has looked politically
achievable. The groups' program has no long-term coherence, other
than to limit guns any way possible.
The premises of the antigun movement, Kleck explains, lead inexorably
to prohibition, should prohibition be politically feasible. If,
as the antigun groups claim, guns do nothing to reduce crime, and
if guns substantially increase the risk that ordinary citizens will
commit violent crimes or victimize themselves accidentally, and
if there is no constitutional right to own guns, then it is hard
to see why guns should not be banned.
The past several months have seen a string of excellent new books
on media bias: Bernard Goldberg's Bias,
which looks at CBS News and television news in general; William
McGowan's Coloring
the News : How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism
focuses on elite newspapers; Joel Best's Damned
Lies and Statistics shows how interest groups invent phony
statistics which are then disseminated by the media. Of the these
three fine books, however, only Best's looks at the gun issue even
briefly. Kleck's chapter, "Modes of News Media Distortion of
Gun Issues," shows how many of the problems detailed by Goldberg,
McGowan, and Best show up in media coverage of guns. Especially
at the national level, the media tend to accept uncritically whatever
the antigun groups tell them, and to ignore or denigrate the perspective
of legitimate firearms owners.
Unfortunately, many of Kleck's examples involve late 1980s and early
1990s distorted reporting on the "assault weapon" issue
— such as television news clips showing pictures of fully automatic
guns being fired, even though the controversy had nothing to do
with fully automatic guns. Even though little has changed in the
last 10 years about national media distortion, the chapter would
have been stronger with some more contemporary examples.
The other two chapters by Kleck provide his quantitative analysis
of the frequency of defensive gun use and effectiveness of firearms
for self-protection. A great deal of this material covers the same
ground as Targeting Guns, and readers who already have that
book will probably feel they can do without these chapters.
The four chapters by Don Kates all reprise previously published
articles by Kates from the 1990s. The best of these is "The
Second Amendment: A Right to Personal Self-Protection." While
some people have argued that, even if the Second Amendment protects
an individual right, it is only a right of individuals to possess
guns for community defense, such as against invaders or tyrants.
Using the writings of the Founders and of the political philosophers
whom they admired, Kates shows that the Founders did not draw a
sharp distinction between different forms of self-defense. Resisting
a tyrant and his standing army was seen as simply a larger version
of resisting a pair of highway robbers. Accordingly, the self-defense
rights implicit in the Second Amendment are not limited to resisting
only some kinds of victimizers.
The most disappointing chapter is "Guns and Public Health:
Epidemic of Violence, or camp pandemic of Propaganda?" This
chapter was originally published in 1995 in the Tennessee Law Review,
and also appeared in 1995 in a book which I edited for Prometheus
Books, Guns:
Who Should Have Them?
In 1995, the chapter was a cutting edge, scathing critique of the
junk science being used to promote gun prohibition. The chapter
played an important role in Congress's decision to cut off funding
for the antigun propaganda research program at the Centers for Disease
Control.
Republished in 2001, the chapter contains virtually nothing new,
except for some updated tables on gun accidents and gun ownership.
Had the chapter included new analysis of the "public health"
literature published since 1995, the chapter would have made a major
contribution, but in its current form adds very little to the debate.
Besides the introduction, the other chapter written by Kates is
"'Poisoning the Well' for Gun Control," which, while old,
is timeless. Kates explains that the vast majority of Americans
do not want to ban guns, do support the right to armed self-defense,
and do not see anything wrong with moderate controls intended to
keep guns out of the wrong hands. While the majority of the public
is what Kates calls "pro-gun pro-control," the antigun
lobby frequently plays into the hands of the groups who prefer little
or no regulation of firearms. This is because the antigun groups
are premised on the extremist belief that armed self-defense is
immoral; thus, the groups do whatever they can, under existing political
conditions, to thwart armed self-defense. The extremist premises
of the antigun movement thereby drive many gun owners into a absolute
opposition to any form of gun control, since, quite rightly, they
fear that moderate controls are intended as stepping stones to prohibition.
Kates suggests that if it were not for the extremist of the antigun
lobbies, the enactment of moderate gun controls (e.g., fairly administered
licensing laws) would be considerably easier.
If you're new to the gun control debate, there's a lot to be learned
from reading Armed. If you've followed the gun debate carefully
for a while, then put Armed on your "optional but not
essential" reading list.
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