From: [M--UE--T] at [alhrg.wpafb.af.mil] (System Manager Wuest)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Speech by Don Kates
Date: 3 Aug 1994 10:10:00 -0500

  (Text of a speech by Don B. Kates, renouned criminoligist at the 
   Sacramento rally, 2 JUL 1994   MEW).

     In this speech I am going to set out unfamiliar concepts and
facts. I shall explain and defend the concepts and I entreat anyone
who wants citations for the facts to ask for them. 

                                  BIGOTRY
     The first of my unfamiliar concepts is that the gun control
debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry and
the effort of an influence group to force its morality on everyone
by having it adopted as state and federal law. To see this it is
necessary only to review some unfamiliar facts: /\the average gun
owner is better educated and has a better job than non-owners;
/\attitude surveys find gun owners neither racist nor sexist;
/\liberals are only somewhat less likely than others to own
firearms; /\liberals who do are no less willing to use them to
defend their families; /\the only violence gun owners endorse is
willingness to come to the aid of crime victims. Gun owners do not
approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters, etc.
Also, good Samaritans who actually come to the aid of crime victims
are twice as likely to be gun owners as the general populace.

     Though these facts have been uniformly established by numerous
sociological studies, they will doubtless surprise you almost as
much as they would the anti-gun movement and the media. After all
the former (which is actually a gun BAN movement), with the
enthusiastic aid of the media, have succeeded in stereotyping gun
owners as violence-oriented yahoos -- educationally, intellectually
and morally retarded.

     There is a word for people who inaccurately, unjustly ascribe
negative characteristics to a whole group of others they dislike:
that word is BIGOT.

     Let me approach the matter from another direction. A couple of
years ago right here in Sacramento some nuts who happened to be of
some kind of Asian extraction -- I don't recall which and, of
course it doesn't matter -- took a bunch of hostages in the course
of a robbery and ended up shooting them. Now if I were to attribute
that conduct to Asians as a group I would rightly be thought a
bigot. But denouncing "gun owners" as a group and attributing such
crimes to that group is commonly thought entirely appropriate.

     Suppose I were to call gay leaders who oppose banning gay bath
houses callous, selfish collaborators in the spreading of AIDS. The
same public health leaders who support banning bath houses would
nevertheless denounce such bigoted language. Yet such vituperation
is commonly aimed at gun owners and gun leaders for opposing gun
bans without anyone (except perhaps the targets) seeing anything
wrong or even exceptional about it.

                      ORDINARY GUN OWNER AS MURDERER
     Of course the difference is that, as we all know, owning a gun
the ordinary average person puts family and friends at risk; as the
Coalition Against Gun Violence puts it, most murders "are committed
by law-abiding citizens who might have stayed law-abiding if they
had not possessed firearms." Except that, as a criminologist I know
no such thing. Criminological studies uniformly find that murderers
are NOT ordinary citizens, but extreme aberrants with life records
of serious crime. The typical murderer has a prior adult criminal
history of six years involving at least four documented major
felonies -- plus uncounted juvenile felonies. He is also a
substance abuser with a history of car and/or gun accidents.
Indeed, the life histories of those who cause fatal car and gun
accidents resemble the life histories of murderers: in each case
they tend to be young MALES with records of felony, violence
against those around them, substance abuse and dangerous accidents.

     In short, quoting a recent review in the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF
SOCIOLOGY: "fewer than 1% of all guns, and fewer than 2% even of
handguns will ever be used in a violent crime" and "more people are
killed in swimming pool accidents than firearms accidents." In
short, blaming all gun owners for the crimes and irresponsibility
of a tiny, highly aberrant minority is bigotry. In addition to
being criminologically false, it is a false issue, a diversion from
the true basis of anti-gun sentiment.

     At this point I have to draw a fundamental distinction which
is, once again, unfamiliar. That is the distinction between anti-
gun and pro-control. CONTROL implies what the great majority of
Americans, including most gun owners, believe: that law abiding,
responsible people have a right to possess arms to defend their
families, but that society has a right to reasonably control arms
-- and the issue is working out an accommodation between these two
things.

     But the so-called gun CONTROL movement is really a gun BAN
movement dominated totally by people I call anti-gun. Anti-gunners
see no objective need for accommodation because they do not see
self-defense as a legitimate desire. Their ultimate objective is
first the banning and confiscation of all handguns and then of all
guns. Given the state of public opinion there is a subjective, or
current, need to soft-pedal this for the present. Thus when they
say that the Brady Bill and banning so-called assault rifles (i.e.
rifles and shotguns designed primarily for self-defense) are "just
the first steps", they go on to say, as Sarah Brady now does, "the
only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes",
and to advocate, as Handgun Control, Inc. now does, a nationwide
permit requirement to own a gun under which only those desiring
guns for sport qualify -- those desiring a gun for self-defense
need not apply.

     To understand the anti-gun view we must review the origin of
the earliest anti-gun group. Founded as NCBH, it now calls itself
the Coalition Against Gun Violence. It was and remains an outgrowth
of the Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church
seeking to impose on American society the Board's moral position
which is that armed self-defense is immoral. The Board actually
teaches that it is a woman's Christian duty to submit to rape
rather than do anything to imperil her rapists' lives. Let me give
you the citation for that: It is an article entitled "Is the Robber
My Brother" (and, no, robbery may not be resisted either) by the
editor of the Board's magazine ENGAGE/SOCIAL ACTION an article
which appeared first there and then in a pamphlet available from
the Board under the title HANDGUNS IN THE UNITED STATES.

     Another member organization of the Coalition Against Gun
Violence, the Presbyterian Church, USA advocates, federal banning
and confiscation of handguns on the express ground that they are
designed for self-defense. The Church's representatives emphasize
that its General Assembly "has resolved, in the context of gun
control, that it is against the killing of anyone, anywhere FOR ANY
REASON." Among other places you will find that testimony is v. I at
p. 127 of the Hearings of the House Judiciary Committee,
Subcommittee on Crime 1986.

     This epitomizes the views and goals of the anti-gun movement,
including its non-religious supporters. The distinguished cultural
historian Garry Wills reviles "gun fetishists", "gun nuts" as
"anti-citizens", "traitors, enemies of their own patriae", who are
arming "against their own neighbors." "The need that some
homeowners and shopkeepers believe they have for weapons to defend
themselves" represents "the worst instincts in the human character"
according to the WASHINGTON POST. According to Ramsey Clark,
defensive firearms ownership is barbarism, "anarchy, not order
under law."

     I have already quoted Sarah Brady's view that "the only reason
for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes" and Handgun
Control's proposal for a national licensing requirement to exclude
anyone who wants a gun for self-defense. An additional "step" is to
have Congress pass the law HCI and the Coalition got D.C. to enact:
no one may buy any kind of handgun and, while long guns are
allowed, they too must be kept unloaded and disassembled so that
they may never be used for self-defense. The ultimate goal, once
again, is that expressed by Harvard public health professor Deborah
Prothrow-Stith: she frankly avows that she "hates guns and sees no
reason why anyone should ever own one."

     In the few minutes which remain to me I want to discuss what
is to be about done all this. One reason gun owners are in such a
terrible fix is that they are politically unsophisticated. That is
implicit in the fact that they are the targets of a vast campaign
of bigotry. Gun owners are not politicians. They are just ordinary
people wanting to go about their business. They have been ambushed
and are being subjected to a systematic campaign of hatred and lies
by an elite cadre of bigots who largely control the media and have
disproportionate influence throughout our society. Naturally all
too many gun owners react in mindless outrage. They leap to the
conclusion that disarmament of the American public is being
promoted by "liberals" -- it used to be "communists" -- for some
sinister, ulterior reason involving making people helpless against
tyranny. NONSENSE. Insofar as liberals support that -- and I must
note so do many conservatives -- it is just out of hypocritical
bigotry. They cannot see this because they view themselves as
fighters against bigotry and so imagine that they are themselves
incapable of it and of attempting to impose their morality on
others through law.

     And I want to briefly list other gun owner errors: First are
the people who play into the media's hands by wearing camos when
they make presentations against anti-gun proposals. Similar are the
gun owners who take pleasure in extreme and intemperate statements
-- at terrible cost to the cause in general. And then there are
liars and buffoons like Linda Thompson and her "armed march on
Washington." Demented is the best one can one say about an "armed
march on Washington."

     A particular pathology of gun owners is the idea that the
bigotry will all go away if some particular lawsuit is brought or
a strident manifesto screamed out. The simple fact is that the
bigots are not going to go away. Gun owners are going to have to
settle in to politics for the foreseeable future, smarten up, learn
how to make politically sensible statements.

     Most important, gun owners must learn the necessity and art of
horse trading. By that I do NOT mean giving important things away
in the absurd hope that it will satisfy the bigots and they will go
away and leave us alone. I repeat, they will not go away regardless
of what we do! I am not talking about compromises of principle. I
am talking about things about which reasonable people can agree or
disagree. For instance, raise the fee for a concealed carry license
to $150.00 and the duration of the license to five years. Require
that anyone who wants such a license show that they have the same
legal knowledge and competence about shooting as a police officer
-- but issue licenses as in Oregon and Florida to every responsible
law abiding applicant.

     The fact is that there are rational, non-bigoted people in the
middle who can be compromised with. They cannot be convinced by the
yahoo approach of "just say no to gun control." But, even as they
are open to new control approaches and initiatives, they are also
willing to recognize that old approaches may be unsound, or have
unsound aspects, which need to be abandoned. We are in the pickle
we are now in because the "just say no" attitude has allowed the
bigots to paint us as mindless obstructionists who are blind to
compassion and common sense. These people in the middle are open to
arguments that many control proposals don't make sense in terms of
crime control and to arguments based on the right and need to
defend of self and property. The future of gun ownership will
depend on whether we are willing and able to reach out to these
middle people and convince them that the misnamed gun control
movement is under the control of moralistic bigots.

                           -end-

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