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| GUN FIGHT The Battle Over the Right To Bear Arms in America Adam Winkler New York: W. W. Norton & Co., September 2011 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-393-07741-4 | ||||
| ISBN 0-393-07741-1 | 361pp. | HC/BWI | $27.95 | |
Gun Fight focuses on a specific fight: the maneuvering that centered around District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). This was the Supreme Court case that gave us the ruling that the Second Amendment imparts an individual right to own firearms. However, the ruling is not so clear-cut as today's NRA (National Rifle Association) pretends — and neither were the machinations that went on behind the scenes of the legal arguments. But along with coverage of this landmark case, Adam Winkler delves into the long history of gun laws, going back to the reign of England's James II, who took advantage of laws passed before he took the throne to confiscate as many guns from his opponents as he could. Winkler's narrative continues through the formation of America, the growth of its western frontier, and the spate of advancements in firearm technology that led to the crime wave of the early twentieth century. And of course he covers the history of the National Rifle Association.
The National Rifle Association was formed in 1871 by William C. Church and George W. Wingate, both of whom had fought on the Union side during the Civil War. Its purpose was to improve the marksmanship of Union troops, who had been found to be deficient during that conflict.1 Many of the Union soldiers were city-bred, not familiar with firearms — unlike their adversaries from the largely agrarian society of the Confederacy.
The founding fathers enshrined the right to bear arms in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but they also supported gun control laws so extensive that few Americans would today support them. They barred large portions of the population from possessing firearms, required many gun owners to register their weapons, and even conditioned the right on a person's political leanings. The Wild West, which occupies the very heart of America's gun culture, was filled with firearms; yet frontier towns, where the civilized folks lived, had the most restrictive and vigorously enforced gun laws in the nation. Gun control is as much a part of the history of guns in America as the Second Amendment. – Page ix |
From the time of the Founding in 1787 up through the NRA's origin, guns were strictly regulated. However, those regulations differed greatly from those the twentieth century brought. It was then that rapid improvements in firearm performance began. The Thompson submachine gun, or "Tommy Gun," was introduced after World War I. By the 1930s it became the weapon of choice for organized crime, from Al Capone's Chicago gang to Bonnie and Clyde. These gangs often outgunned the police, and rovers like Bonnie and Clyde could avoid capture by slipping from one jurisdiction to another. The rampant crime spurred the passage of a series of federal laws cracking down on gun possession throughout the country and the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to give those laws teeth in every jurisdiction.
Discount the NRA position that no new gun-control measures will make a difference in the rates of gun violence, and are covert steps toward confiscating all privately-owned firearms. As the hysterical speeches of Wayne LaPierre attest, these are delusional views and are based in large part on deceptive research. Extensive history shows the persistent efforts of the NRA and other gun-right groups to weaken the laws regulating gun possession. These efforts included:
Winkler shows us two scholarly works that turned out to be fatally flawed. The first was
Lott said he had conducted a telephone survey of almost 2,500 people. Lindgren asked Lott to provide him with that data so that he could verify Lott's claim. Lott said he couldn't do that. He had lost all the data in a computer crash. Lindgren then requested any evidence of the survey: the identity of the funding source, the names of any research assistants who made calls, phone records, the survey questions, the coding instrument, anything. Echoing Bellisiles, Lott said he had no such evidence. – Page 77 |
There is credible research to show that various measures proposed to reduce the deaths of innocents by gun violence — e.g. waiting periods — can be effective. Despite their strident claims, I have yet to see any equally reputable research from the pro-gun side.
Historically, the NRA was open to gun controls. In the 1920s and 1930s, its leaders lobbied the states for landmark legislation like the Uniform Firearms Act, which barred anyone without a permit and a "proper reason" from carrying a concealed weapon in public. That began to change in the 1960s when rising crime rates led members to buy handguns for self-protection. The NRA leadership stuck to its traditional focus on hunting and sport shooting, and even proposed to move its headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado Springs, the better to serve these interests. The plan triggered a wave of dissent, led by Harlon Carter. The revolt took some time, but by the 1977 convention Carter had emerged as the NRA's Executive Vice President: effectively its leader. He was succeeded in 1991 by Wayne LaPierre, and the adamant opposition of the organization to almost every gun control measure became firmly entrenched.
During the middle of the 1960s, as the laws brought by the civil rights movement failed to end racial strife, militant African-American groups like Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense were formed. The Black Panthers arose in Oakland, California in response to police brutality and were seen as a threat by the police.2 Together with the riots in Detroit and the Watts district of Los Angeles, this movement solidified NRA opposition to most forms of gun control. The organization's leaders, and many of its members, viewed America as hostile territory where police were often too far away and personal firearms were tools of survival — as well as essential for the anticipated onslaught of tyranny.
The book also, in Chapters 2 & 3, examines the extreme views found on both sides: "gun grabbers" and "gun nuts." For example, Winkler considers the DC gun ban to be extreme, as well as bad law. He writes:
Whether or not a proposed law will actually curb gun deaths is irrelevant; gun control extremists will stand behind it. John Hetchinger and the D.C. city council offer a perfect example. They knew that the gun ban was not going to reduce crime or gun violence, but they supported it anyway in hopes of starting a nationwide trend. Bad gun laws do start trends—only they might be better termed backlashes. The gun rights community sees ineffective gun laws as proof that gun controllers are less interested in reducing crime than in harassing lawful gun owners and laying the groundwork for eventual disarmament. Liberals dismiss this fear as nonsense, but feel the same way when even minor hurdles are erected to women's ability to choose abortion. There, such restrictions on access are seen only as efforts to bully women and to set a precedent for ultimately outlawing all abortions. – Page 36 |
Winkler goes on to discuss the 1994 federal ban on assault weapons, which sprang from earlier efforts by Josh Sugarmann, founder of the pro-gun-control Violence Policy Center, to brand semiautomatic rifles as the lethal tools of criminals.
Sugarmann was unusually frank about how public misperception of assault weapons would make banning the sale of them easier. "The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semiautomatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons." – Page 37 |
The other side of the coin is the increasingly dogmatic rhetoric of gun-rights groups. The NRA is the largest and, with its budget, the noisiest. Its leader Wayne LaPierre has waged a strident campaign against what he calls liberal attempts to disarm law-abiding citizens.
Wayne LaPierre's rhetoric often strayed beyond the bureau to include law enforcement officers more generally. LaPierre, objecting to what he saw as the increasing militarization and aggressiveness of law enforcement under President Clinton, wrote, "if you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens." The men and women in blue may have shared the NRA's love of firearms, but they couldn't help being offended by LaPierre's overheated accusations. – Page 81 |
This particular outburst came when Rep. Mario Biaggi (D-NY) introduced a bill to ban KTW bullets that, unlike standard handgun bullets, could pierce police body armor. Other radicals include Larry Pratt,4 founder of Gun Owners of America, and Aaron Zelman,5 deceased founder of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Like LaPierre, they held firearms to be an essential bulwark against federal government tyranny. This paranoid view was reinforced by federal mistakes at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and later expanded to encompass the United Nations. Militant groups sprang up in response all over America.
Prone to conspiracy theories, militia members were convinced that the United Nations was secretly coming to take away America's guns. "Whether American citizens support the idea, damn the concept or deny its existence, the new world order conspiracy has been upon us for a long time," argued Richard Mack, an Arizona sheriff who started his own militia. Wayne LaPierre concurred: "The U.N. is the most lethal threat ever to our Second Amendment rights." The "U.N. wants to impose on the U.S." nothing less than "total gun prohibition," wrote LaPierre. First comes disarmament, then genocide. "How long until a U.N.-declared official date of hate is celebrated with governments actually killing people?" he asked.6 – Page 87 |
The great majority of gun owners in America do not hold such views, and most handle their weapons responsibly. Even the majority of NRA members support sensible measures like closing the gun-show loophole. The NRA leadership, however, brooks no compromise. It consistently lobbies at all levels of government for less gun regulation, and has even reached out to succor allies in foreign governments. Its influence has been immense, but there are signs it is beginning to fade — that the decades-long freeze on logical gun laws may be ending. Thaw the law!
For seventy years, the Supreme Court remained on the sidelines of the gun debate, and the result was anything but a gradual move toward consensus. Instead, the Court's absence allowed the forces of unreason to command the field. Without any Supreme Court decisions firmly protecting the right to bear arms and articulating the scope and limits of that right, extremists were free to cast the Second Amendment in their own preferred terms. Gun rights advocates, fearful that the right to bear arms could be legislated away completely, insisted that almost no forms of gun control were legitimate. Gun control hard-liners, eager to reduce gun violence, could say that 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms' meant no such thing. Debates over gun control proposals didn't focus on their merits as a matter of policy but instead became ensnared in arguments about the history and meaning of the Second Amendment. Neither side felt the need to compromise because total victory was still possible: one day the high court might make their extremist view the law of the land. Rather than give either side in the gun debate a total victory, the Supreme Court's decision in Heller validated a compromise position on guns. Individuals have a right to possess a gun for self-defense, but that right can and should be subject to some regulation in the interest of public safety. Private ownership of guns cannot be completely banned, and the civilian disarmament long desired by anti-gun people is now constitutionally impossible. No one can come and take away all the guns, even if many other forms of gun control remain permissible. Unlike the radical right to keep and bear arms envisioned by gun rights and gun control groups—in which the right to own guns cannot coexist with gun safety regulation—Heller stands as a symbol of a truly reasonable right to bear arms in which we can have both. – Pages 293-294 |
In any case the general situation in this country, from its founding up through the present day, is that the right to own guns has coexisted amicably with gun-control regulations. Adam Winkler describes that situation well in this informative and thoroughly researched book. I give it full marks and rate it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.