Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

1

Luke Jaywalker said on June 28, 2008 at 6:29 am

From my experience as a local reporter in urban Boston, the people likely to commit gun crimes - gang members, etc - don’t have much of a problem getting illegal weapons anyway. They’re connected to the black market and don’t see any practical or moral issues with an illicit handgun. (If you’re walking around with a couple of eight-balls of coke in your pocket, is the fact that your gun’s illegal *really* a big deterrent from you having it?)

I’m an Australian emigrant, and am not accustomed to guns. Personally, I’m uncomfortable with and around them. In fact, I’d say that that dislike is probably a function of the dread equation you describe. I might go so far as to say that your dislike is an unconscious reflection of the same function in your mind.

I do have friends here who own guns. Several of them (I now live in Colorado) carry them wherever they go. These guys are stable, middle-class professionals who consider safety a big concern. Intellectually, I know that I’m safer around them than not - if some violent incident happened, these guys would be able to defend themselves (and by extension, the people around them.)

That’s what the Heller decision enables - or at least, it enables people to legally have a weapon in their own homes. I don’t see it increasing DC’s already-stratospheric crime rate; the criminals are, by definition, going to get illegal weapons anyway.

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Wendell Hall said on June 28, 2008 at 6:58 am

People don’t “see guns as a God-given right”, as you casually dismiss it.  People see _self-defense_ as a “God-given right”, which if you think about it I believe you’ll agree with, if you believe in a God. 

If not you may recognize self-defense as a natural right which only those bred for docility (sheep, and perhaps city-dwellers) fail to exercise.  Give an example of a circumstance in which one does NOT have an absolute right to defend oneself, if you can.  All I can come up with is judicial execution—unless, of course, one is opposed to capital punishment.

The dread may come from government reserving to itself and its cronies effective means of self-defense, like guns, with the rest of the citizenry left to plead with 911 operators to get the people with guns to come to their aid quickly enough to make a difference.  What kind of a civilization prevents its law-abiding members from accessing effective means of self-defense?  Answer:

“The colonies were wholly interested in overcoming the French in North America and appealed to the King for permission to raise armies and monies to defend themselves.* Despite sincere petitions from the royal governors, George II was suspicious of the intentions of the colonial governments and declined their offer. English officers in America were also widely contemptuous of colonials who volunteered for service. A few of the men who signed the Declaration had been members of volunteer militia who, as young men, had been dressed down and sent home when they applied for duty. Such an experience was not uncommon. It led communities throughout the colonies to question British authorities who would demand horses, feed, wagons, and quarters — but deny colonials the right to fight in defense of the Empire, a right which they considered central to their self-image as Englishmen.”

http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/related/frin.htm

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Dan King said on June 29, 2008 at 11:57 am

Three points, no grand conclusion.

First, there is a huge disconnect in the chain of logic about gun control.

As I understand it the logic goes like this, “We want to reduce the number of people murdered, but we can’t, so we look at the statistics and find that firearms are used in the majority of murders, so we try to control firearms by passing laws.” (Sorry for all the commas.)

The problem is laws don’t stop people from getting firearms.  I am in favor of people not being murdered.  The question is, do gun bans work, which leads to my second point.

Second, the analysis and use of statistics relating to violent death in this country is a stark, sickening example of people perverting method and language to support personally held opinions.  Most of the examples I know of come from people in favor of gun control, but questionable science has become a competitive sport with no shortage of players.

Third and not related to the previous two points.  I think this quote from the article has it exactly backwards “so restrictions on guns (unlike restrictions on, say, tobacco, another deadly product) feel more unfair”.  It seems to me there are a lot more restrictions on guns than on tobacco.  To buy a gun you have to be an adult, you can’t be a felon or mentally ill, you have to prove you have taken a class in firearm safety, and you have to wait for a background check.  To buy tobacco you have to be an adult.  I leave it to the reader to compare laws about using tobacco with laws about using guns and the consequences of breaking those laws. 

The reason I say the quote has it backwards is that, clearly, we have more restrictive laws about guns than tobacco and nobody says those laws will be removed.  The Heller decision specifically says they are constitutional.  They are accepted as fair.

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James said on June 29, 2008 at 12:21 pm

It astounds me how many educated people are completely clueless when it comes to the issue of guns. The ruling, surprisingly, was intelligent and correct.

As a famous mobster once said, gun control is the best thing you can do for criminals. As long as there are people who demand guns for the purposes of committing crimes, there will be people who will find ways to supply them, and who actually believes that laws are a deterrent for violent criminals? This is why we call them criminals, because they act despite laws. Disarming law abiding citizens by making it illegal to have guns in their houses empowers only criminals and government.

5

Max D. said on June 29, 2008 at 2:43 pm

Ms. Ripley:

I’ve only recently become a reader of your blog, but I suspected this issue might come up eventually (after all, you do write for TIME). I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but your argument, such as it is, is full of holes and sloppy methodology. Do they teach you in J-school to couch your opinions in questions, thereby hiding your bias?

What I read in your post is that guns scare you. Irrational, but understandable. I suggest that you find someone to introduce you to shooting; there is no shortage of people willing to “bring you into the fold,” so to speak. Have you ever read the article “My Transformation From Anti-Gun Feminist To Armed Feminist” by Katherine von Tour? (This is not the article I was looking for, but it might do. The one I’m thinking of is by a woman writer who wants to investigate the “gun culture” and ends up becoming a gun owner.)

I realize that this is a blog post and not a term paper, but you can’t just blithely toss out random “statistics” and hope you won’t be called on them. Other commenters have ably addressed some issues, so I won’t go over those. I will, however, address a few things you bring up.

I’ve been thinking about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn DC’s ban on guns. As someone who lives in DC and has in the past covered random, drive-by shootings and seen boys bleeding on the street become a routine part of the landscape, I am having a hard time understanding how more guns will make things better.

First, “routine” is defined as “nothing out of the ordinary” and “boringly predictable.” Are you implying that you have to dodge bullets and step over bleeding bodies to get your morning latte?

Second, we often hear calls and promises to hire more police officers. More police officers = more guns. So won’t “more guns” make things better? That is precisely the conclusion John Lott came to when he did the research for what would become “More Guns, Less Crime.”

Before this decision, it was still easy to get a gun in DC, partly because it was easy to get one in neighboring states.

Easy for whom? For criminals? Well, of course. It’s easy for criminals to get pretty much anything, despite laws ostensibly intended to keep them from doing exactly that. In most states, unless you are a resident, you cannot legally purchase a firearm in that state. But it doesn’t matter a whole lot what laws you pass; criminals, by definition, don’t obey laws. Laws are only effective in inhibiting law-abiding citizens.

In no state I’m aware of could it be considered “easy” to legally purchase a gun. Go into any gun store and ask them to walk you through the process. (Journalistic integrity would seem to demand that you do so before making claims about the ease of buying a gun.) I guarantee you will no longer consider it easy.

The overturning of the ban means that law-abiding citizens will now be able to keep a firearm in the home, for their own protection. That means that you, as a woman, are now more able to protect yourself from someone bigger and stronger than you who is intent on doing you harm. Do you believe that you shouldn’t have the ability to protect yourself from being raped or killed in your own home?

Pop quiz: A 6-foot, 230-pound felon has just broken into your house and cornered you in your bedroom. What do you do?

a) Dial 911 and hope the police get there in time*
b) Offer him your money and valuables
c) Lie on the bed and hope he doesn’t kill you after he’s finished
d) Pick up your legal handgun and calmly order him to leave
e) a and d

*Courts have ruled that the police have no duty to protect individuals. NY Times

DC is tiny, keep in mind. It’s an intersection, not a state. Now it will be even easier to get a gun.

No. It will be legal to keep a gun in the home. You are deliberately misstating the facts. No purchase laws (of which there are many) were struck down. If a state has a waiting period, it still has a waiting period. Age limits on purchases are unaffected.

The decision does not allow people to carry concealed weapons outside the home. But do you know who does that, and will continue to do so? Criminals.

And who are the people most likely to be killed by a gun? Young people, without a doubt.

Based on what? The wildly inflated claim that “guns kill 13 children per day” or some equally false assertion by the gun control lobby? Your personal observations?

What kind of a civilization knowingly encourages the murder of its youngest members?

What kind of journalist knowingly engages in unrestrained hyperbole?

I am starting to think that guns are like lightning in America. They fall into blind spots in our brains, for a lot of reasons, and we fear them less than we should.

Why would you fear guns? Guns are tools. They are merely extensions of the will of the user. A shovel is a tool. A frying pan is a tool. A kitchen knife is a tool. Yet in the wrong hands, any one of them can be (and has been) used to kill.

Guns cannot be inherently evil, because if they were, then it would be immoral to give them to police officers. Think about that: You decry that people will have access to guns, yet you depend on people armed with guns to protect you. How do you rationalize that? If it is immoral to have a gun, then it is doubly immoral, as well as hypocritical, to expect someone else to carry a gun to protect you (e.g., Rosie O’Donnell, Senator Dianne Feinstein, any high-level politician). See also “A Nation of Cowards” by Jeffrey R. Snyder.

They say we fear what we don’t understand. I don’t fear guns; I fear people who want to hurt my loved ones or me. And I fear them less when I’m armed. I carry specifically to protect my infant son and my wife. And I am well trained. As Uncle Ben said in Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I, for one, don’t want to shoot anyone. But if the choice is between my son and some animal invading my home…

Guns seem more in our control--like driving. Even though cars and guns kill a total of 70,000 people per year in this country, we have a vague sense that they are under our control, and safer than they are.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can’t lump two separate statistics together like that and come up with a legitimate assertion. I might as well say that “cars and women named Amanda kill a total of 42,000 people per year.” It’s meaningless. The facts are that more children are killed by accidentally drowning in plastic buckets every year than by gunfire. That’s not gun lobby propaganda; that information comes from the CDC.

You are conflating—purposely so, I suspect—completely different things to make your case. Where did you get your numbers, and what are they separately? I’ll bet the gun-related deaths are a mere fraction of the vehicle-related deaths. Why would you be so willingly deceptive?

That said, it’s worth noting that most Americans support gun control.

Says who? I’m reminded of the infamous (and maybe mythical) Pauline Kael quote about Nixon: “How can [he have won the election]? No one I know voted for Nixon!” But in one sense, you’re correct. If you define gun control as some kind of regulation on guns, no matter how minimal, then yes, I suppose you can claim that “most Americans support gun control.” The question is how much gun control. Sure, there are a lot of people I wouldn’t trust with a gun, but there are many, many more I don’t trust behind the wheel of a car. And cars prove themselves deadlier every year than guns.

But the debate is shaped--and the dread is alternately amped and suppressed--by the gun lobby.

Huh? You must be joking. Who gets all the press in the mainstream media? The Brady Campaign. Journalists are overwhelmingly left-liberal, so pro-gun press is virtually nonexistent. I’ll bet you weren’t aware that there are more defensive uses of guns every year than there are gun crimes. (See ”Guns and Self Defense” by Gary Kleck, Ph.D.)

When someone shoots up a school and he is stopped by a citizen with a gun, the media reports that the gunman was tackled or subdued or otherwise stopped, rarely if ever mentioning the defensive use of a gun or guns. The MSM doesn’t want us to see guns as tools for good (although we give them to police, don’t we?). See the Civilian Gun Self-defense Blog.

Why is the gun lobby so much more powerful than the popular consensus?

Is it possible that the gun lobby is only powerful because it aligns with the popular consensus?

Well, they have far more money than the gun-control lobby.

Really? George Soros is a big-time gun-control supporter; I’ll bet that guy has way more money than the NRA. Again, please quote sources.

And why is that? I am not sure. I’d suspect it has something to do with dread, once again. Where there is dread, there will be money. (See: terrorism.)

Are you subtly trying to equate the gun lobby with terrorists? That’s downright devious. Another J-school trick?

Look, the information is out there if you want to find it. Are you willing to entertain ideas and facts that don’t align with your currently held worldview? There is a forum I belong to called “The High Road,” thus named because members are held to high standards regarding posts. It’s a very civil board. Why not stop by and ask a few questions? You might get a new article out of it.

Respectfully,

Curtis Gropp
(aka Max D.)

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Max D. said on June 29, 2008 at 9:23 pm

In my haste to post, I forgot to include a moving and relevant self-defense anecdote from the Xavier Thoughts blog called ”An Encounter at Wal-Mart.”

Oh, and a conclusion: There won’t be blood in the streets. DC will not turn into the Wild West. You may choose to own a gun or you may choose not to. The point is, it’s not the end of the world.

Thatisall.

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Max D. said on June 29, 2008 at 9:25 pm

Dammit. How about a “preview” button?

http://xavierthoughts.blogspot.com/2008/03/encounter-at-wal-mart.html

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M. Rush said on June 30, 2008 at 8:22 am

I respect your opinion (and look forward to reading your new book) but I must disagree with your view of guns in this country.  No criminal, determined, or merely inclined to harm others, is celebrating this court decision.  Any who would turn a gun on another without just cause will have no trouble finding a gun, or other implement of destruction, regardless of the current law.  It can easily be argued that people would be safer without many of the liberties that we now enjoy, but that fact does not make those liberties less sacred.  Our founders cautiously and thoughtfully crafted our form of government and our constitution to stand as the most effective means of safeguarding the free and unrestrained condition in which all people have a natural right to exist. 

All responsible people should enjoy the right to speak without fear of the hand of authority.  All should be free to worship their creator as their conscience dictates, or not at all.  All should enjoy the right to conduct their affairs of business, commerce, craft or trade, without undue interference or the obligation to unjust taxation of their gains.  These rights all seem an undisputable foundation of any reasonable, modern society.  But there is one right that stands apart in several respects.  That right is the right to bear arms in one’s own defense.  This right is unique in that it seems to stand unshielded from criticism and outright damnation unlike the others that enjoy loud and vocal defense.  It is also unique in that it is the right that stands as the final safeguard for all others.  The right to defend one’s own life is one of the most fundamental rights recognized as being inherent by reasonable government long before our own.  It would seem that all our other rights which any thinking person will agree are unassailable, would be in peril, or exercised far more cautiously, if one did not retain the natural right to defend one’s self by force of arms.

There can be no doubt that lawless violence is a cancer, threatening all that our great nation is or will ever be.  But if the good were all timid, meek and incapable arming themselves against the wicked, what would evil have to fear?  One could certainly make an argument that popular culture, the media, the entertainment industry, all have sown the seeds of destructive, senseless violence in our society.  Yet there are no outcries to the legislatures to compel them to cease promoting senseless, destructive behavior.  The things that should rightly fill our nation’s collective mind with dread are the near loss of family centered social order, the death of individual responsibility as an expectation we hold for our neighbors, our children and ourselves, and the extinction of self reliance as an indispensable American character trait.

It is true we should have a fear of the gun and the damage it can cause.  We should have far greater fear, however of the degraded sense of moral obligation and civic duty that allows crime witnesses to remain silent, parents to leave the education of their children to mass media and young people to behave like animals.  What we should not fear, is a reasonable, responsible, cautious fellow citizen, who has chosen to arm himself with the intent only to accept the full measure of responsibility for the security of his life.

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tom ellew said on July 07, 2008 at 10:01 am

Amanda makes one statement that , to my way of thinking is at he heart of he whole gun control issue. She says,” Before this decision, it was still easy to get a gun in DC, partly because it was easy to get one in neighboring states.” It may be easy for criminals, but not for those of us who obey the law. Sure, a criminal can easily be walking around with a gun, but not a law abiding citizen. In Chicago, I cannot have handgun in my home. Yet go down to juvenile court and see the number of gun violations being ajudicated, and these are kids. To me it is criminal that citizens can’t use the technology that can help protect their right to life.

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David Webb said on August 11, 2008 at 7:02 am

As a peace officer in California, I know something about guns, criminals, and useless gun laws.  Please read the book More Guns, Less Crime by Dr. John Lott.  My experience tells me his study is correct.  Criminals will always get guns if they want them.  Laws will never prevent this.  Thinking otherwise is ignorant.

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Smoking Cigars said on February 05, 2009 at 1:41 pm

How do you rationalize that? If it is immoral to have a gun, then it is doubly immoral, as well as hypocritical, to expect someone else to carry a gun to protect you (e.g., Rosie O’Donnell, Senator Dianne Feinstein, any high-level politician! It is also unique in that it is the right that stands as the final safeguard for all others.  The right to defend one’s own life is one of the most fundamental rights recognized as being inherent by reasonable government long before our own.
Cheers
Smoking Cigars

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