







American Firearms Council, Inc. - 10 Essential Observations On Guns In America













 



Ten Essential Observations

on Guns in America 







By James D. Wright 





Professor of Sociology

Tulane University







Talk of &quot;gun control&quot; is very much in the

air these days. Emboldened by their successes in getting the Brady

Act enacted, the pro-control forces are now striking on a number

of fronts: bans on various so-called assault weapons, mandatory

gun registration, strict new laws against juvenile acquisition

and possession of guns, and on through the list. Much current

gun-control activity springs from a recent and generally successful

effort to redefine gun violence mainly as a public health issue

rather than a criminal justice issue.



Increasingly, the ammunition of the gun control war

is data. Pro-control advocates gleefully cite studies that seem

to favor their position, of which there is no shortage, and anti-control

advocates do likewise. Many of the &quot;facts&quot; of the case

are, of course, hotly disputed; so too are their implications

and interpretations. Here I should like to discuss ten essential

facts about guns in America that are not in dispute-ten fundamental

truths that all contestants either do or should agree to and briefly

ponder the implications of each for how the problem of guns and

gun violence perhaps should be approached. These facts and their

implications derive from some twenty years of research and reflection

on the issues.



1. Half the households in the country own at least

one gun. So far as I have been able to determine, the first

question about gun ownership asked of a national probability sample

of U.S. adults was posed in 1959; a similar question asking whether

anyone in the household owns a gun has since been repeated dozens

of times. Over the ensuing thirty-five years, every survey has

reported more or less the same result: Just about half of all

U.S. households own one or more guns. This is probably not the

highest gun ownership percentage among the advanced industrial

societies (that honor probably goes to the Swiss), but it qualifies

as a very respectable showing. We are, truly, a ..&quot;gun culture.&quot;



Five important implications follow more or less unambiguously

from this first essential observation.



The percentage of households owning guns has been

effectively constant for nearly four decades; at the same time,

the total number of guns in circulation has increased substantially,

especially in the last two decades. The evident implication is

that the increasing supply of guns has been absorbed by population

growth, with newly formed households continuing to arm themselves

at the average rate, and by the purchase of additional guns by

households already owning one or more of them. In fact there is

fairly solid evidence that the average number of guns owned by

households owning any has increased from about three in the late

1970s to about four today.



The second implication is thus that many (and conceivably

nearly all) of the new guns coming into circulation are being

purchased by people who already own guns, as opposed to first-time

purchases by households or individuals who previously owned no

guns. I think it is also obvious that from the viewpoint of public

safety, the transition from N to N + I guns is considerably

less ominous than the transition from no guns to one gun. If this

second implication is correct, it means that most of the people

in the gun shops today buying new guns already own at least

one gun, a useful point to keep in mind when pondering, for

example, the alleged &quot;cooling off&quot; function to be served

by waiting periods imposed at the point of retail sale.



Furthermore, it is frequently argued by pro-control

advocates that the mere presence of guns causes people to do nutty

and violent things that they would otherwise never even consider.

In the academic literature on &quot;guns as aggression-eliciting

stimuli,&quot; this is called the &quot;trigger pulls the finger&quot;

hypothesis. If there were much substance to this viewpoint, the

fact that half of all U.S. households possess a gun would seem

to imply that there ought to be a lot more nuttiness &quot;out

there&quot; than we actually observe. In the face of widespread

alarm about the skyrocketing homicide rate, it is important to

remember that the rate is still a relatively small number of homicides

(ten to fifteen or so) per hundred thousand people. If half the

households own guns and the mere presence of guns incites acts

of violence, then one would expect the bodies to be piled three

deep, and yet they are not.



Fourth, gun ownership is normative, not deviant,

behavior across vast swaths of the social landscape. In certain

states and localities, it would be an odd duck indeed who did

not own a gun. Surveys in some smaller southern cities, for example,

have reported local gun ownership rates in excess of 90 percent.



And finally, to attempt to control crime or violence

by controlling the general ownership or use of guns among the

public at large is to attempt to control the behaviors of a very

small fraction of the population (the criminally or violently

inclined fraction) by controlling the behaviors and activities

of roughly half the U.S. population. Whatever else might be said

about such an approach, it is certainly not very efficient.



2. There are 200 million guns already in circulation

in the United States, give or take a few

tens of millions. It has been said, I think correctly, that firearms

are the most commonly owned piece of sporting equipment in the

United States, with the exception of pairs of sneakers. In any

case, contestants on all sides of the gun debate generally agree

that the total number of guns in circulation is on the order of

200 million-nearly one gun for every man, woman, and child in

the country.



It is not entirely clear how many acts of gun violence

occur in any typical year. There are 30-35,000 deaths due to guns

each year, perhaps a few hundred thousand nonfatal but injurious

firearms accidents, maybe 500,000 or 600,000 chargeable gun crimes

(not including crimes of illegal gun possession and carrying),

and God knows how many instances in which guns are used to intimidate

or prey upon one's fellow human beings. Making generous allowances

all around, however, the total number of acts of accidental and

intentional gun violence, whether fatal, injurious, or not, cannot

be more than a couple of million, at the outside. This implies

that the 200 million guns now in circulation would be sufficient

to sustain roughly another century of gun violence at the current

rates, even assuming that each gun was used once and only once

for some nefarious purpose and that all additions to the gun supply

were halted permanently and at once. Because of the large number

of guns already in circulation, the violence-reductive effects

of even fairly Draconian gun-control measures enacted today might

well not be felt for decades.





Most of the people in the gun

shops today buying new guns already own at least one gun.











Many recent gun-control initiatives, such as the

Brady Act, are aimed at the point of retail sale of firearms and

are therefore intended to reduce or in some way disrupt the flow

of new guns into the domestic market. At the outside, the number

of new guns coming onto the market yearly is a few million, which

adds but a few percent to the existing supply. If we intend to

control gun violence by reducing the availability of firearms

to the general public, as many argue we should, then we have to

find some workable means to confront or control the vast arsenal

of guns already circulating through private hands.



Various &quot;amnesty,&quot; &quot;buyback,&quot;

and &quot;please turn in your guns&quot; measures have been attempted

in various jurisdictions all over the country; in one well-publicized

effort, teenagers could swap guns for Toys R Us gift certificates.

The success of these programs has been measured in units of several

dozen or at most a few hundred relinquished firearms; the net

effect on the overall supply of guns is far too trivial to even

bother calculating.



3. Most of those 200 million guns are owned for

socially innocuous sport and recreational purposes.

Only about a third of the guns presently in circulation are

handguns; the remainder are rifles and shotguns. When one asks

gun owners why they own guns, various sport and recreational activities

dominate the responses-hunting, target shooting, collecting, and

the like. Even when the question is restricted to handgun owners,

about 40 percent say they own the gun for sport and recreational

applications, another 40 percent say they own it for self-protection,

and the remaining 20 percent cite their job or occupation as the

principal reason for owning a gun.



Thus for the most part, gun ownership is apparently

a topic more appropriate to the sociology of leisure than to the

criminology or epidemiology of violence. Many pro-control advocates

look on the sporting uses of guns as atavistic, barbaric, or just

plain silly. But an equally compelling case could be made against

golf, which causes men to wear funny clothes, takes them away

from their families, and gobbles up a lot of pretty, green, open

space that would be better used as public parks. It is, of course,

true that golf does not kill 35,000 people a year (although middle-aged

men drop dead on the golf course quite regularly), but it is also

true that the sport and recreational use of guns does not kill

35,000 people a year. There are fewer than a thousand fatal hunting

accidents annually; death from skeet shooting, target practice,

and such is uncounted but presumably very small. It is the violent

or criminal abuse of guns that should concern us, and the

vast majority of guns now in circulation will never be used for

anything more violent or abusive than killing the furry creatures

of the woods and fields.





The sport and recreational use

of guns does not kill 35,000 people a year. 









Unfortunately, when we seek to control violence by

controlling the general ownership and use of firearms among the

public at large, it at least looks as though we think we

have intuited some direct causal connection between drive-by shootings

in the inner city and squirrel hunting or skeet shooting in the

hinterland. In any case, this is the implication that the nation's

squirrel hunters and skeet shooters often draw; frankly, is it

any wonder they sometimes come to question the motives, not to

mention the sanity, of anyone who would suggest such a thing?



4. Many guns are also owned for self-defense against

crime, and some are indeed used for that purpose;

whether they are actually any safer or not, many people certainly

seem to feel safer when they have a gun. There is a fierce

debate raging in gun advocacy circles these days over recent findings

by Gary Kleck that Americans use guns to protect themselves against

crime as often as one or two million times a year, which, if true,

is hard to square with the common assumption of pro-control advocates

that guns are not an efficacious defense against crime. Whatever

the true number of self-defensive uses, about a quarter of all

gun owners and about 40 percent of handgun owners cite defense

against crime as the main reason they own a gun, and large percentages

of those who give some other main reason will cite self-defense

as a secondary reason. Gun owners and gun advocates insist that

guns provide real protection, as Kleck's findings suggest; anti-gun

advocates insist that the sense of security is more illusory than

real.



But practically everything people do to protect themselves

against crime provides only the illusion of security in that any

such measure can be defeated by a sufficiently clever and motivated

criminal. Dogs can be diverted or poisoned, burglar bars can be

breached, home alarm systems can be subverted, chains and dead-bolt

locks can be cut and picked. That sales of all these items have

skyrocketed in recent years is further proof, as if further proof

were needed, that the fear of crime is real. Most people have

also realized, correctly, that the police cannot protect them

from crime. So people face the need to protect themselves and

many choose to own a gun, along with taking many other measures,

for this purpose. Does a society that is manifestly incapable

of protecting its citizens from crime and predation really have

the right or moral authority to tell people what they may and

may not do to protect themselves?



Since a &quot;sense of security&quot; is inherently

a psychological trait, it does no good to argue that the sense

of security afforded by owning a gun is &quot;just an illusion.&quot;

Psychological therapy provides an illusion of mental wellness

even as we remain our former neurotic selves, and it is nonetheless

useful. The only sensible response to the argument that guns provide

only an illusion of security is, So what?



The bad guys do not get their guns through

customary retail channels. Research on

both adult and juvenile felons and offenders has made it obvious

that the illicit firearms market is dominated, overwhelmingly,

by informal swaps, trades, and purchases among family members,

friends, acquaintances, and street and black-market sources. It

is a rare criminal indeed who attempts to acquire a gun through

a conventional over-the-counter transaction with a normal retail

outlet. It is also obvious that many or most of the guns circulating

through criminal hands enter the illicit market through theft

from legitimate gun owners. (An aside of some possible significance:

Large numbers of legitimate gun owners also obtain guns through

informal &quot;street&quot; sources.) 









The national five-day waiting

period will have no effect on the acquisition of guns by criminals

because that is not how the bad guys get their guns in the first

place. 









As I have already noted, many efforts at gun control

pertain to the initial retail sale of weapons, for example, the

prohibition against gun purchases by people with felony records

or alcohol or drug histories contained in the Gun Control Act

of 1968, the national five-day waiting period, or various state

and local permit and registration laws. Since felons rarely obtain

guns through retail channels, controls imposed at the point of

retail sale necessarily miss the vast majority of criminal firearms

transactions. It is thus an easy prediction that the national

five-day waiting period will have no effect on the acquisition

of guns by criminals because that is not how the bad guys get

their guns in the first place.



Having learned (now more than a decade ago) that

the criminal acquisition of guns involves informal and intrinsically

difficult-to-regulate transfers that are entirely independent

of laws concerning registration and permits, average gun owners

often conclude (whether rightly or wrongly) that such measures

must therefore be intended primarily to keep tabs on them, that

registration or permit requirements are &quot;just the first step&quot;

toward outright confiscation of all privately held firearms, and

that mandated registration of new gun purchases is thus an unwarranted

&quot;police state&quot; intrusion on law-abiding citizens' constitutional

rights. Reasoning in this vein often seems bizarre or even psychotic

to proponents of registration or permit laws, but it is exactly

this reasoning that accounts for the white-hot ferocity of the

debate over guns in America today.



And similar reasoning applies to the national waiting

period: Since it is well known that the bad guys do not generally

obtain guns through normal retail channels, waiting periods enforced

at the point of retail sale can only be aimed at thwarting the

legitimate intentions of the &quot;good guys.&quot; What conceivable

crime-reductive benefit will a national five-day waiting period

give us? If the answer is &quot;probably very little,&quot; then

the minds of average gun owners are free to speculate on the nefarious

and conspiratorial intentions that may be harbored, consciously

or not, by those who favor such a thing. The distinction between

ill-considered and evil is quickly lost, and the debate over guns

in America gets hotter still.



That the illicit gun market is supplied largely through

theft from legitimate owners erodes any useful distinction between

legitimate and illegitimate guns. Any gun that can be owned legitimately

can be stolen from its legal owner and can end up in criminal

hands. The effort to find some way to interdict or interfere with

the criminal gun market while leaving legitimate owners pretty

much alone is therefore bootless. So long as anybody can have

a gun, criminals will have them too, and it is useful to remember

that there are 200 million guns out there, an average of four

of them in every second household.



6. The bad guys inhabit a violent world, a gun

often makes a life-or-death difference to them. When

one asks felons, either adult or juvenile, why they own and carry

guns, themes of self-defense, protection, and survival dominate

the responses. Very few of the bad guys say they acquire or carry

guns for offensive or criminal purposes, although that is obviously

how many of them get used. These men live in a very hostile and

violent environment, and many of them have come to believe, no

doubt correctly, that their ability to survive in that environment

depends critically on being adequately armed. Thus the bad guys

are highly motivated gun consumers who will not be easily dissuaded

from possessing, carrying, and using guns. If street survival

is the issue, then a gun is a bargain at practically any price.

As James Q. Wilson has argued, most of the gun violence problem

results from the wrong kinds of people carrying guns at the wrong

time and place. The survival motive among the bad guys means exactly

that the &quot;wrong kinds of people&quot; will be carrying guns

pretty much all the time. The evident implication is that the

bad guys have to be disarmed on the street if the rates of gun

violence are to decline, and that implies a range of intervention

strategies far removed from what gun control advocates have recently

urged on the American population.



7. Everything the bad guys do with their guns

is already against the law. That

criminals will generally be indifferent to our laws would seem

to follow from the definitions of the terms, but it is a lesson

that we have had to relearn time and time again throughout our

history. So let me stress an obvious point: Murder is already

against the law, yet murderers still murder; armed robbery is

against the law, yet robbers still rob. And as a matter of fact,

gun acquisition by felons, whether from retail or private sources,

is also already illegal, yet felons still acquire guns. Since

practically everything the bad guys do with their guns is already

against the law, we are entitled to wonder whether there is any

new law we can pass that would persuade them to stop doing it.

It is more than a little bizarre to assume that people who routinely

violate laws against murder, robbery, or assault would somehow

find themselves compelled to obey gun laws, whatever provisions

they might contain.



8. Demand creates it own supply. That

&quot;demand creates its own supply&quot; is sometimes called

the First Law of Economics, and it clearly holds whether the commodity

in demand is legal or illegal. So long as a demand exists, there

will be profit to be made in satisfying it, and therefore it will

be satisfied. In a capitalist economy, it could scarcely be otherwise.

So long as people, be they criminals or average citizens, want

to own guns, guns will be available for them to own. The vast

arsenal of guns already out there exists in the first instance

because people who own guns like guns, the activities that guns

make possible, and the sense of security that guns provide. &quot;Supply

side&quot; approaches to the gun problem are never going to be

any more effective than &quot;supply side&quot; approaches to

the drug problem, which is to say, not at all. What alcohol and

drug prohibition should have taught us (but apparently has not)

is that if a demand exists and there is no legal way to satisfy

it, then an illegal commerce in the commodity is spawned, and

we often end up creating many more problems than we have solved.



Many nations manufacture small arms; many of these

lines are relatively inexpensive but decent guns. In fundamental

respects, the question whether we can disarm the American criminal

population amounts to asking whether an organized criminal enterprise

that successfully illegally imports hundreds of tons of Colombian

cocaine into the U.S. market each year would not find the means

to illegally import hundreds of tons of handguns from other countries.

And if this is the case, then it seems more or less self-evident

that the supply of firearms to the criminal population will never

be reduced by enough to make an appreciable difference.



9. Guns are neither inherently good nor inherently

evil, guns, that is, do not possess teleology. Benevolence

and malevolence inhere in the motives and behaviors of people,

not in the technology they possess. Any firearm is neither more

nor less than a chunk of machined metal that can be put to a variety

of purposes, all involving a small projectile hurtling at high

velocity downrange to lodge itself in a target. We can only call

this &quot;good&quot; when the target is appropriate and &quot;evil&quot;

when it is not; the gun itself is immaterial to this judgment.



Gun-control advocates have a long history of singling

out &quot;bad&quot; guns for policy attention. At one time, the

emphasis was on small, cheap handguns, &quot;Saturday Night Specials&quot;,

which were thought to be inherently &quot;bad&quot; because no

legitimate use was thought to exist for them and because they

were thought to be the preferred firearm among criminals. Both

these thoughts turned out to be incorrect. Somewhat later, all

handguns, regardless of their characteristics, were singled out

(as by the National Coalition to Ban Handguns); most recently,

the so-called military-style assault weapons are the &quot;bad

guns of the month.&quot;







From the gun culture's viewpoint,

restrictions on the right to &quot;keep and bear arms&quot; amount

to the systematic destruction of a valued way of life and are

thus a form of cultural genocide. 









Singling out certain types of guns for policy attention

is almost always justified on the grounds that the type of gun

in question &quot;has no legitimate use&quot; or &quot;is designed

only to kill.&quot; By definition, however, all guns are &quot;designed

to kill&quot; (that is, to throw a projectile downrange to lodge

in a target), and if one grants the proposition that self-defense

against predation and plunder is a legitimate reason to own a

gun, then all guns, regardless of their type or characteristics,

have at least some potentially &quot;legitimate&quot; application.

It seems to me, therefore, that the focus in gun-control circles

on certain &quot;bad&quot; guns is fundamentally misplaced. When

all is said and done, it is the behavior of people that we should

seek to control. Any gun can be used legitimately by law-abiding

people to hunt, shoot at targets, or defend themselves against

crime; and likewise, any gun can be used by a criminal to prey

upon and intimidate other people. Trying to sort firearms into

&quot;inherently bad&quot; and &quot;inherently good&quot; categories

seems fundamentally silly.



10. Guns are important elements of our history

and culture. Attempts to control

crime by regulating the ownership or use of firearms are attempts

to regulate the artifacts and activities of a culture that, in

its own way, is as unique as any of the myriad other cultures

that comprise the American ethnic mosaic. This is the American

gun culture, which remains among the least understood of any of

the various sub-cultural strands that make up modern American

society.



There is no question that a gun culture exists, one

that amply fulfills any definition of a culture. The best evidence

we have on its status as a culture is that the single most important

predictor of whether a person owns a gun is whether his or her

father owned one, which means that gun owning is a tradition transmitted

across generations. Most gun owners report that there were firearms

in their homes when they were growing up; this is true even of

criminal gun users.



The existence and characteristics of the American

gun culture have implications that rarely are appreciated. For

one, gun control deals with matters that people feel strongly

about, that are integral to their upbringing and their worldview.

Gun-control advocates are frequently taken aback by the stridency

with which their seemingly modest and sensible proposals are attacked,

but from the gun culture's viewpoint, restrictions on the right

to &quot;keep and bear arms&quot; amount to the systematic destruction

of a valued way of life and are thus a form of cultural genocide.



Guns evoke powerful, emotive imagery that often stands

in the way of intelligent debate. To the pro-control point of

view, the gun is symbolic of much that is wrong in American culture.

It symbolizes violence, aggression, and male dominance, and its

use is seen as an acting out of our most regressive and infantile

fantasies. To the gun. culture's way of thinking, the same gun

symbolizes much that is right in the culture. It symbolizes manliness,

self-sufficiency, and independence, and its use is an affirmation

of man's relationship to nature and to history. The &quot;Great

American Gun War,&quot; as Bruce Briggs has described it, is far

more than a contentious debate over crime and the equipment with

which it is committed. It is a battle over fundamental and equally

legitimate sets of values.



Scholars and criminologists who speculate on the

problem of guns, crime, and violence would thus do well to look

at things, at least occasionally, from the gun culture's point

of view. Hardly any of the 50 million or so American families

that own guns have ever harmed anyone with their guns, and virtually

none ever intend to. Nearly everything these families will ever

do with their firearms is both legal and largely innocuous. When,

in the interests of fighting crime, we advocate restrictions on

their rights to own guns, we are casting aspersions on their decency,

as though we somehow hold them responsible for the crime and violence

that plague this nation. It is any wonder they object, often vociferously,

to such slander?









James D. Wright is the Charles and Leo Favrot

Professor of Human Relations in the Department of Sociology at

Tulane University. He has written widely on problems of

firearms and gun control, including two books. His current

researches are on the effect of poverty on the urban underclass,

alcohol and drug treatment program for the homeless, and

health problems of street children in Latin America.





WHAT IS THE 





AMERICAN FIREARMS COUNCIL?











The American Firearms Council is an educational foundation

for the firearms industry whose purpose is to study the issues,

conduct and collect research, and disseminate information in order

to educate the public and the media on the sporting uses of firearms

and public safety, including firearm safety.





The American Firearms Council has sponsored educational

conferences for the media on public safety issues and firearm

safety, including one in Washington, DC in 1995. Additionally

the AFC is starting a guest editorial program, where opinion pieces

are being written and sent to newspapers from academics, legislators,

firearm experts, athletes and others on a variety of topics. The

AFC also purchases advertising promoting the safe handling of

firearms.





Through research, meetings, seminars, publications,

and other communications, the AFC hopes to create a forum for

developing a dialogue on all facets of the legitimate, responsible

and proper use of firearms.





American Firearms Council



PO Box 725187 

Atlanta, GA 31339 

Phone (770)933-0200 

Fax (770)953-9778 









