From: [h--s] at [unity.ncsu.edu] (HENRY E SCHAFFER) Newsgroups: rec.guns Subject: The Samuri, The Mountie, and The Cowboy - A Book Review Date: 24 May 1994 23:19:32 -0400 The Samuri, The Mountie, and The Cowboy Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? David B. Kopel "A Cato Institute Book" Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY 1992 ISBN 0-87975-756-6 6 1/4" x 9 1/4" 470 pp cloth I'd heard a lot about this book - from both its admirers and its detractors, and I finally decided that I had to read it. It is a long book, and a densely written and thought provoking book. It has many 'footnotes' (placed in sections at the end of each chapter - taking up multiple pages of fine print each time) and it gives citations to the literature, to the popular press and newspapers, and often adds additional quotes. Even the introduction has 'footnotes'! It is this careful approach which provides the detractors most of their arguments - they pore over the book until they find one of the thousands of footnotes which has an error, or perhaps which refers to a newspaper or other article which has an error - and then they run around screaming about that one point, and the screaming does continue over and over. They completely miss the point - which is a general comparison of the gun control history and policies of a number of democracies - more than the title hints at (see chapter list below.) I'm impressed by the scope of the book, and by the general perspective that it provides. Also note that Kopel doesn't take an uncritical pro-rkba stance. He seems to feel that controls are reasonable as long as they take into consideration the history, culture and needs of a country. Nevertheless, he is very strongly pro-rkba. If you want to view the historical and cultural background of gun control in the countries covered, then this book is a must-read. However it is also a thorough and slow-going treatment, so I only recommend it to people who can benefit from this type of detail. Contents [my comments in square brackets] [each chapter is divided into about 8 - 10 subsections - they are included after each chapter, separated by semi-colons - and give some flavor of the topics included - each chapter ends with a "Conclusion" which I've not typed below] [the page counts include the 'footnotes'] 1. Introduction [7 p.] 2. Japan: No Guns, No Gun Crime [39 p.] Gun Possession; gun-Related Crime; A Police State; History; The preference for Paternalism; An Unarmed Government; A Homogeneous Society; Economics; Suicide. [An opening quote is a Japanese proverb, "The nail that sticks out will be pounded down.", which is contrasted with the American proverb, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." This is an introduction to a discussion of a rather homogeneous and quite regimented society. By U.S. standards the Japanese police have very great authority in a great variety of situations including what we would consider private activities or protected civil liberties. The closing section discusses Japan's high overall rate, which occurs in a non-firearms owning environment and yet is nearly twice as high as in the U.S.] 3. Great Britain: The Queen's Peace [77 p.] The Government Disarms Some of the People Some of the Time; Modern Gun control; A Toy of the Landed Gentry; The Gun Lobby Resists: The Hungerford Massacre; The Momentum of Gun Control; Effects of British Gun Controls and Social Controls; Could British-Style Gun Laws Be Enforced in the United States?; The Pearl of Great Price: Civil Liberties. [This is a long treatment, as befits the close historical relationship, and the common legal grounding. The British waverings between arming and disarming subjects of various religions and classes is discussed, and then the modern situation is treated more thoroughly. Kopel's favorite point about the importance of the culture in determining crime rates is shown in "Culture matters more than statutes about guns. After New York City enacted strict gun controls in 1911, it suffered a much higher firearms crime rate than did London, where significant controls had not yet been enacted." 4. Canada: Love of Government [57 p.] History; New Restrictions in 1977; Restricted Weapons; Prohibited Weapons; Civil Liberties; Has Canadian Gun Control Reduced Gun Misuse?; Would Canadian-Style Laws Work in America?. [Early Canadian history is contrasted with U.S. history with respect to their need to create their own law, and the impact on attitudes regarding self-defense. The 1977 imposition of the FAC and other gun control additions is discussed. The 1988 Seattle/Vancouver homicide rate study is discussed in detail. Attitudes of Canadians towards gun control and governmental powers is discussed. Canadians may have fewer civil liberties than are found in the U.S., but also have a society in which people are more orderly on their own account.] 5. Australia: No One is Happy [40 p.] The Battle over Conflicting State Laws; "Rednecks, Reactionaries, and Rambos"; The Anti-Gun Lobby; More and More Guns; Crime Control; social Controls; Registrations: "An Elaborate Concept of Arithmetic with No Tangible Aim". [Australia had a turbulent frontier, but less so than the U.S. However it shares with the U.S. serious disputes between the population and the government with respect to the imposition and enforcement of gun control regulations. It also shares with the U.S. a confusing pattern of homicide rates not following the stringency of gun controls - e.g. (1985 data) the homicide rate in NSW was 2/100,000 while in the Northern Territory which had stricter regulations the rate was 11.8/100,000 which is even higher than the U.S.] 6. New Zealand: Everyone is Happy [24 p.] Subduing the Maori and Controlling the Workers; The Police Relax gun Control; The New Zealand Mountain Safety Council; New Zealand by the Numbers; Police Powers; The Aramoana Massacre and the Breakdown of Consensus. [NZ has a substantially different situation than Australia, and has adopted quite a difference approach to gun control.] 7. Jamaica: War on Guns [21 p.] The Violence Begins; Social Controls Collapse; "Radical Surgery for a Grave Disease"; Political Violence Worsens; The People Betrayed; The Gun Court's Bankruptcy; New Government, Old Repression. [what went on in Jamaica should give pause to us in the US - in his Conclusion, Kopel says - "Gun control costs no money yet it offers legislatures a quick and easy way to 'do something.' But as Jamaica illustrates, a government and nation that decide to 'do something' about gun control may be distracted from the real work of social control. Indeed, the diversion of society from the real fight against crime by the offering of a gun-control panacea may be one of the most destructive, criminogenic effects of efforts to control guns." I like that word "criminogenic"!] 8. Switzerland: The Armed Society [25 p.] Arms for Independence; Modern Military Service; "Switzerland Does Not Have an Army; It is an Army."; Gun Control and Gun-Related Crime; Sober Attitudes toward Firearms; Everyone is His Own Policeman; Why the Swiss System Cannot Work in America. [This chapter concludes with a discussion of why the typical anti-gun and pro-gun arguments about Switzerland fail.] 9. Civilization and Savagery: America's Half-Remembered Violent Past [71 p.] Guns and Their Owners - Enemies of Civilization; Conquering the Continent; The Militia; Private Law Enforcement; The "Wild West" and the Vigilante Tradition; Feuds; Race Relations; Urbanization, Immigration, and Ethnic Relations. ["The Soviet empire having collapsed, America faces a choice. America could demobilize much of its worldwide standing army, under the theory that large standing armies are made for war, and the cold war is over. Or America could conclude that the drug war is the next mission for the standing army. Deployment of the army in border interdiction may lead to the use of the army in purely domestic law enforcement. To James Harrington or James Madison, the sight of uniformed national army troops, armed with rapid-fire guns, and conducting commodity raids (most likely without probable cause) would be quite alarming." then later "The American experience offers little reason to trust that government will reduce violence against victimized groups. Too often, the government and its police and army ally with and help to arm an already dominant and oppressive group, such as company bosses or the Ku Klux Klan. The Canadian people trust a strong government to mediate conflicts between different interests. In America, the people have been unwilling to surrender their own right to use force, and skeptical that the government would use a monopoly on force to ensure justice. Too often, American governments have turned disarmament into racial or ethnic oppression." This chapter also attempts to cast a new light on what 'vigilante' means. This usually is a derogatory term, yet it is discussed in terms of the many times that a community organized to protect itself against outlaw gangs. Gun control laws after the Civil War are discussed, and the way they were used to disarm the free Negroes, but were carefully enacted in non-racial language. These discriminatory efforts continue. "The point of banning 'cheap' guns is that people who can only afford cheap guns should not have guns. The prohibitively high price that some firearms licenses carry ($500 in Miami until recently) suggests a contemporary intent to keep guns away from lower socioeconomic groups."] 10. Taking the Law into One's Hands: Firearms in Modern America [32 p.] The Modern Frontier; Guns and Violence in American Cultural Life; Citizens and the Law: America and Europe; The "Symbolic Crusade" against the Demon Gun; Transplanting Foreign Gun Controls to American Soil. [there has been much misunderstanding about the 'vigilantes', and this chapter continues to discuss the vigilante tradition, and points out that "It should also be noted that while there are 600,000 police officers in the United States (dedicated to protecting the whole population), there are 1,400,000 private security guards dedicated to protecting those who can pay them. 'Private security guards are simply vigilantes for the rich,' writes West Virginia Supreme Court Chief Justice Richard Neely. If society allows rich people to hire vigilante security guards (most of whom are vary poorly trained), is it just for society to forbid less wealthy citizens to protect themselves?" In a foreshadowing of recent 4th Amendment violations in Chicago, Kopel reports "It is true that America protects the right to bear arms far more vigorously than other nations do. America protects most other rights better as well. The United States is the only nation with a meaningful exclusionary rule to prevent the courtroom use of illegally seized evidence - much to the consternation of former federal Judge Malcolm Wilkey, who maintains that we cannot enforce current or future gun control unless we imitate 'other civilized countries,' such as Britain, Canada, and Japan by scrapping the exclusionary rule and the probable cause requirement of the Fourth Amendment." It sounds as if our President read this section and has decided that he's willing to scrap the Fourth Amendment, and perhaps many others as well.] 11. Guns, Crime, and Virtue [37 p.] Gun Control and Self-Control; Social Controls; What could Gun Control Accomplish in America?; The Permanence of Guns in American Culture; America's Only Realistic Option: Promoting Responsible Gun Ownership. [This is Kopel's conclusion and he ends "The encouragement of mature, responsible gun use is the policy best suited to the United States."] Index [28 p.] --henry schaffer