Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
From: [k--rk--y] at [world.std.com] (Ken B Kirksey)
Subject: Gun Play
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1993 02:37:51 GMT

Gun Play - What Kids Don't Know About Guns Can Kill Them
by David Kopel
from _Reason_, July 1993, pp.18-23

"Too many kids are getting a real bang out of life," announces a
full-page ad in _The New York Times_.  "Help save the next generation." The
body text elaborates:  "Too many kids are becoming victims of gun violence. 
Every day in the United States, 14 children are killed with guns--in
accidents, suicides and homicides.  Hundreds more are injured--many
seriously."

Beneath the main headline is a photograph of Jim Brady, the former White
House press secretary who was wounded and disabled in John Hinckley's
attempted assassination of President Reagan. (The ad appeared on March 30,
the 12th anniversary of Hinckley's attack.) Brady's picture is flanked by
quotes from urban kids discussing their fears of gun violence. The text
below his picture implores Americans to support the so-called Brady Bill,
which would impose a nationwide, seven-day waiting period for handgun
purchases. "I'm not asking you to do it for me," Brady says, "But do it for
our kids."

The ad, purchased by Handgun Control Inc., reflects the theme of the
organization's latest push for the Brady Bill.  In a February press
conference, Sarah Brady, Jim Brady's wife and Handgun Control's chairwoman,
noted that nearly 4,000 Americans under the age of 2O had been murdered in
1991. (That number, actually closer to 3700, covers a lot of ground. It's
based on arrests, so it includes 18 year-old armed robbers shot by their
victims. It also includes 19 year-old crack dealers shot by competitors.)
Acting Attorney General Stewart Gerson added that the Department of Justice
endorsed the Brady Bill because he was sick of seeing kids gunned down in
random violence.

Neither Brady nor Gerson suggested how many lives the Brady Bill might save.
Nor did they cite studies showing how similar laws, enacted by more than 20
states, have reduced crime. That's because there are no such studies. All
the scholarly research has found that laws like the Brady Bill have no
statistically significant impact on crime.

But the whole idea of asking people to "do it for our kids" is to avoid such
analysis. Gun-control advocates are hammering at the issue of children and
guns as never before, in the hope that it will be easier to enact gun
controls aimed at adults in an atmosphere of panic about children. Sen. John
Chafee (R-R.I. ), for example, says firearms are "infecting" America's
schools: he has proposed the confiscation of all civilian-owned handguns.
Chafee insists that America must "do something" about the current "handgun
slaughter," in which "our children are being killed and are killing," for
"sooner rather than later every family in the U.S. will be touched by
handgun violence." His confiscation legislation won immediate support from
pro-child lobbies such as the Children's Defense Fund and the American
Academy of Pediatrics.

The idea of curtailing the rights of adults to protect children is hardly
new to American politics. Prohibitionists have used this tactic in arguing
for bans on alcohol, marijuana, sexually explicit literature, homosexual
behavior, lawn darts, and just about everything else they have ever sought
to outlaw. It's precisely because such efforts have so often been successful
that the talk about protecting children through gun control should not be
dismissed as mere rhetoric. Threats to children, whether real or imagined,
tend to short-circuit rational discussion. Gun-control proposals should not
escape critical examination simply because their supporters paint a
horrifying picture of children at risk.

America does have a serious problem with children and guns, but it's a
problem quite different from the one described by America's gun
prohibitionists and their Washington allies. Indeed, it's a problem that has
been aggravated by anti-gun laws.

Consider how the repressive gun laws of cities such as Chicago, Washington,
and New York drive responsible gun use underground. While a man who operates
a bodega on the Lower East Side of New York City may keep an illegal pistol
hidden under the counter in case of a robbery, he is not likely to take the
gun to a target range for practice. Even if the storekeeper managed to get a
gun license, he could not take his teenage son to a target range to teach
him responsible firearm use. Just to hold the gun in his hand under
immediate adult supervision at a licensed range, the teenager would have to
obtain his own permit.

An airgun, which uses compressed air to shoot a pellet, is safe enough to
fire inside an apartment, yet New York City makes it illegal for supervised
minors to touch one. The city thus closes off one more avenue for children
to be taught proper firearm use.

Research suggests that the loss of these opportunities makes a difference.
In a 1991 study of 675 ninth and lOth graders in Rochester, New York, for
example, the children who were taught about guns by their families were at
no greater risk of becoming involved in crime, gangs, or drugs than children
with no exposure to guns. But the children who were taught about guns by
their peers were considerably more likely to be involved in various kinds of
misbehavior, including gun crime. A study of whites and aborigines in
northwest Australia in the late '80s yielded a similar result: Young men who
were taught about guns by responsible authority figures did not commit gun
crimes, even if they broke the law in other ways.

In this light, repressive gun laws are not merely ineffective. They actually
foster misuse of firearms, including gun violence. By making firearm
ownership illegal, or possible only for wealthy people with the clout to
move through numerous bureaucratic obstacles anti-gun laws render legitimate
gun owners invisible. Children are left with criminals and violent
television characters as their only models of gun use. In cities where no
child may shoot a BB gun with his parent, kids learn about firearms on the
street and shoot each other with 9-mm pistols.

The experience with gun accidents shows the importance of teaching our
children about proper firearm use. Gun-control advocates have sought to
create the impression that firearm accidents involving children are a large
and growing problem. Paradoxically, this impression has been reinforced by
the very fact that such accidents are rare. Almost every time a child dies
in a gun accident, the event is covered by the state's wire services, and
sometimes by the national news. Many people mistakenly conclude that
children die frequently in gun accidents and that sharp restrictions on gun
ownership are necessary to address the problem. But gun accidents involving
both children and adults have actually fallen dramatically in the last two
decades, almost entirely because of private safety efforts.

In 1988, 277 children under the age of 15 were killed by accidental firearm
discharges, according to the National Safety Council. That number represents
a 48-percent drop from 1974, even as the number of guns per capita increased
from 1968 to 1988. The annual rate of fatal gun accidents fell from 1.2 per
100,000 Americans to 0.6. Thanks to private educational efforts, including
programs sponsored by the National Rifle Association, the Boy Scouts, 4-H,
and other groups, the firearm accident rate has been cut in half.

Despite this impressive private-sector achievement, Sen. Howard Metzenbaum
(D-Ohio) thinks that the government could do better. He proposes giving the
Consumer Product Safety Commission authority over firearms, ostensibly to
reduce accidents. This move could be an indirect way to achieve gun controls
far more sweeping and restrictive than Congress is likely to pass. With
jurisdiction over firearms, the CPSC could, by unilateral administrative
action, ban the future production and sale of all firearms and ammunition.
Congress has forbidden the CPSC to regulate guns precisely because of such
fears.

Short of banning firearms, the CPSC might require features intended to
prevent accidents, such as child-proof grips or indicators   that show when
a gun is loaded. But such technological fixes, favorites of the gun-control
lobby, do not address the main cause of firearm accidents. A 1991 study by
the General Accounting Office found that 84 percent of gun accidents involve
deviations from basic safety rules. For example, accidents occur when people
carelessly wave a gun around, thinking it's unloaded, or put their fingers
on the trigger prematurely. Safety education is therefore the best way to
continue reducing gun accidents. Unfortunately, children whose parents have
no interest in firearms are unlikely to hear gun lessons. Firearm safety
programs ought to be expanded to reach more children

One successful effort to teach children about gun safety is the NRA's "Eddie
Eagle" Elementary Gun Safety Education Program. The Eddie Eagle program
offers curricula for children from kindergarten through sixth grade, using
an animated video, cartoon workbooks, and play safety activities. The
cartoon hero Eddie Eagle offers a simple safety lesson: "If you see a gun:
Stop! Don't Touch. Leave the Area. Tell an Adult." Although Eddie Eagle
includes no political content, some anti-gun activists have prevented the
program from being used in their schools because they disagree with the
NRA's position on policy issues. (Riflery programs in high schools, which
also teach safe gun habits, have generated even more resistance.)

While schools and other social institutions have an important role to play
in gun safety, the primary responsibility rests with parents. A child who
can, under parental supervision, invite a classmate to shoot a .22 rifle at
a target range will be less intrigued by the possibility of surreptitiously
playing with a pistol found in a closet.

In contrast to gun accidents, gun suicides do account for the deaths of many
young people-more than 2,000 in 1990. From the mid-1950s to the late '70s,
teenage suicide rose sharply, and most of the increase was due to gun
suicides. But since then, the teenage suicide rate has remained stable, and
so has the percentage of suicides involving guns. Teenagers are still less
likely to commit suicide than any older age group.

Although the teenage suicide rate has been about the same since the late
'70s, gun-control advocates insist that immediate action is necessary to
address this "crisis" as well. They often cite false statistics to justify
their sense of urgency. In 1989, for example, the American Academy of
Pediatrics told a congressional committee that "every three hours, a
teenager commits suicide with a handgun. "But this figure is valid only if
one counts all suicides as handgun suicides, or if one calls every person
under 25 a teenager.

In addition to exaggerating the extent of the problem, gun-control
supporters simply assume that fewer firearms would mean fewer suicides. One
might speculate that the presence of a gun can turn a teenager's fleeting
impulse into an irrevocable decision. If guns were less readily available,
perhaps suicide would decline. This theory is intuitively plausible, but it
is not consistent with the evidence.

In his 1991 book _Point Blank_, Florida State University criminologist Gary
Kleck analyzes suicide rates and gun laws in every American city with a
population over 100,000. He takes into account all the factors that might
affect suicide, such as race (whites are more likely to commit suicide),
religion (Catholics are less likely), economic circumstances, and 19 gun
control laws, ranging from waiting periods to handgun bans. Kleck finds no
evidence that any of the gun-control laws had a statistically significant
effect on suicide rates. While some gun-control laws did affect the rate of
gun suicide, the total suicide rate remained the same. People who had
decided to kill themselves simply substituted other, equally lethal methods.

Data from other countries appear to support Kleck's conclusion that gun
control is not an effective way to reduce suicide. While teenage suicide has
remained stable in the United States in the last 15 years, it has risen
sharply in Europe, where gun control is much stricter. In Great Britain,
where gun laws are very strict and the gun ownership rate is less than one
tenth that in the United States, adolescent suicide has risen by more than
25 percent in just five years. Similarly, in Japan handguns and rifles are
illegal and shotguns very difficult to obtain. Yet teenage suicide is
30-percent more frequent in Japan than in the United States.

Given the lack of evidence that gun control reduces suicide, anti-gun
activists have resorted to factoids such as this one, reported by Washington
Post columnist Richard Reeves last September: “Teenagers in homes with guns
are 75 times more likely to kill themselves than teenagers living in homes
without guns." The story behind this factoid illustrates how myths that
support gun control are generated.

A 1991 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association discussed
a study of several dozen homes in western Pennsylvania where a teenager had
committed or attempted suicide or where a non-suicidal teenager who had been
admitted to a psychiatric hospital lived. A home with a teenager who had
committed suicide was twice as likely as the other homes to contain a gun.
In an editorial accompanying the article, three employees of the federal
Centers for Disease Control incorrectly wrote: "The odds that potential
suicidal adolescents will kill themselves go up 75-fold when a gun is kept
in the home."

JAMA later published a retraction, noting that the 75-fold figure was
incorrect; the increase was in fact twofold (and the number was merely a
correlation, not proof of cause). Sen. Chafee saw the false claim but
apparently missed the correction, since he repeated the 75-fold figure in a
congressional hearing in October 1992. In his Washington Post column, Reeves
took the factoid one step further, telling his readers that it applied to
all teenagers, even though all of the subjects in the study had serious
psychological problems.

Factoids also play an important role in the debate about guns in school.
Chafee and Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) claim that "135,000 children carry a
gun to school every day." Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) ups the figure to
186,000. The National Education Association puts the number at 100,000. The
only comprehensive data on this question come from a 1990 survey by the
Centers for Disease Control that asked high-school students if they carried
a gun for protection. As a 1991 summary of the survey explained. "Students
were not asked if they carried weapons onto school grounds." Students who
answered yes included all those who occasionally carried guns anywhere, such
as in cars when driving at night in dangerous neighborhoods.

Interpreting the data realistically, Kleck, the FSU cnminologist, estimates
that 16,000 to 17,000 students carry a gun to school on a given day. That
figure translates into about 1 in every 800 high-school students.
Accordingly, guns play a relatively small role in the overall problem of
violence in school. In 1986, for example, there were 41,500 aggravated
assaults in schools and 44,000 robberies. Firearms were used in 1,700 of
these crimes, a little under 2 percent. (They accounted for 15 deaths and 95
injuries in 1992, according to the National School Safety Center.) Thus,
even a program that eliminated all guns would fail to deal with 98 percent
of the violent felonies in schools.

Rather than address the real problem of discipline and security in many
public schools, gun-control advocates have argued for "gun-free school
zones," which make possession of weapons within 1,000 feet of school
property a felony. Since the 1,OOO-foot school zone encompasses over half
the territory in most cities and towns, the school zone laws are frequently
a backhanded way to outlaw the possession of firearms by adults on public
property.

These laws can add to the regulatory obstacles that discourage people from
using guns for protection. In cities such as Los Angeles and New York,
police administrators routinely turn down applications from private citizens
seeking permits to carry a handgun for self-defense. About 7 percent of the
population carries guns anyway, figuring that it is better to risk
prosecution than to risk driving or walking in dangerous neighborhoods
without protection. The crime of carrying without a permit is a misdemeanor
in many jurisdictions, but gun-free school zones can turn it into a serious
felony.

Even when narrowly drafted, school-zone laws are misguided. A comparison of
the number of students carrying guns in school to the number of gun crimes
committed in school indicates that the vast majority of students who carry
firearms do so for non-criminal purposes. "To put it bluntly," one student
wrote in a recent letter to The Washington Post, "I think students bring
weapons to school to save their own lives. They have a constant fear of
being attacked, whether for money, for drugs, or for some other reason."
Most students who carry guns are trying to protect themselves on the way to
and from school, as they pass through neighborhoods ruled by gangs, or in
school itself. To focus on "guns in school" is to miss the larger picture of
the violent conditions that make unarmed teenagers feel vulnerable.

While the claims of gun-control advocates about a rising tide of gun
accidents and gun suicides are false, there is no doubt that violent crime
among teenagers is soaring. From 1985 to 1991, arrests of adults for murder
declined, but arrests for murder of 17-year-old males rose by 121 percent,
of 16-year-olds by 158 percent, of 15-year-olds by 217 percent, and of boys
12 and under by 100 percent.

Those figures conceal an even more serious problem. The murder arrest rate
of whites between the ages of 10 and 17 was the same in 1989 as in 1980 (it
dipped in the middle of the decade and then rose to its former level).
Meanwhile, the black rate has skyrocketed.

Most of these homicides are carried out with handguns. Yet if there is a
relationship between gun density and homicide in the United States, it is an
inverse one. The regions with the most guns are the regions with the lowest
homicide rates. And while whites have a higher rate of gun ownership than
blacks, they have a much lower homicide rate.

One possible explanation for this pattern is that widespread gun ownership
deters crime. But it may also be significant that the places with the
highest rates of gun ownership tend to be rural areas and small towns, where
family structures are relatively strong and communities are often more
stable and unified. The problem of violence in American inner cities may
have less to do with the fact that guns are available there (as they are
everywhere else) than with the fact that so many families are weak or
nonexistent and that so little sense of community exists.

The sharp increase in teenage violence that began in 1987 may also be
related to George Bush's escalation of the war on drugs. The drug war has
intensified violent competition among drug dealers. It has also crowded
prisons with drug offenders, making significant punishment of crimes against
people and property less likely and deterrence less credible. Texas A&M
economist Morgan Reynolds found that, largely because of inadequate prison
space, the expected punishment for murder (the average sentence multiplied
by the probability of punishment) fell by 2O percent from 1988 to 1990. In
1990 the average murderer could expect to spend 1.8 years in prison. A
society that treats violent crime so lightly sends the message to young
criminals that they can literally get away with murder.

In addition to improving the criminal justice system, we need to reconsider
our legal approach to firearms. Gun-control laws are undermining responsible
gun use in a futile attempt to eliminate the tools of crime. In a 1992
survey of young violent criminals from Washington, D.C., 77 percent of the
respondents said they had acquired a handgun in the District, where handguns
are illegal. Two out of three agreed that gun control would not reduce
violence in Washington.

As William Fox, a former member of the Brawling Street Rolling Crips, told
the Los Angeles Times: "How are you going to get the guns off the street
that are already there? No. It ain't going to change. It's not the guns that
have to change. It's the people that have to change."

[David B. Kopel is director of the Second Amendment Project at the
Independence Institute, a free-market public policy research center in
Denver, Colorado.]