Youre Too Easy on Gun Rights Supporters Wendy Kaminer
Efforts to prohibit popular behaviors are bound to be futile at best. Prohibition offers simple lessons in the power of the market that both liberals and conservatives ignore when their fear or loathing of particular behaviors is stronger than their logic (or their respect for individual liberty). Black markets predictably arise to fill illegal demands, even when the cost of satisfying them, for suppliers and consumers, is high. That helps explain why prisons are filled with low-level drug offenders.
So Abigail Kohn is right to confront gun control advocates with the simple fact that efforts to ban firearms are bound to fail. Regardless of how scholars or judges interpret the Second Amendment, the Fourth Amendment may make seizures of guns difficult, as Kohn observes. (The Fourth Amendment has been greatly eroded by the drug war, but confiscation of guns from private homes would generate much more resistance than confiscation of drugs.) I suspect she is also correct in asserting that recent legal and political victories by gun rights advocates should ease their concerns about the prospect of prohibition and make them more amenable to regulation.
But while Kohn exhorts both sides of the gun debate to re-examine their assumptions, she seems to expect more compromise from proponents of gun control. How many assumptions must gun enthusiasts re-examine, after all, in order to support strategies for shutting down black markets and reducing juvenile violence? Im not inclined to let them off this easily.
If gun rights advocates want to gain credibility with advocates of gun control (and others not enamored of right-wing Republicanism), they might re-examine the politics of the National Rifle Association. It is not only a gun rights organization; it is effectively a right arm of the GOP, promoting the party line on issues having nothing to do with guns. Check out its Web site (nra.org), and youll find pages and pages of links to articles in the partisan press, including attacks on the U.N., John Kerry, trial lawyers, Tom Daschle, and Clintonomics.
What you are less likely to find in the NRA is a consistent concern for individual rights, including the rights of criminal suspects. Im not suggesting the NRA should transform itself into the Cato Institute, much less the American Civil Liberties Union. But an organization that promotes gun ownership partly as a means of controlling or deterring crime and partly as a check on repressive government should at least avoid supporting criminal justice policies that increase the arbitrary power of government at the expense of individuals, particularly those involved in nonviolent crime.
While the NRA has sometimes rallied to counter direct threats to Fourth Amendment rights, recognizing their value to gun owners, it has been AWOL, at best, in the battle to protect the Fourth Amendment from the War on Drugs. In fact, the NRA lent support to some of the most abusive criminal justice practices in effect today. During the 1990s, to counter rising concern about violent crime and gun violence in particular, the NRA advocated harsh mandatory minimum sentences, including Californias notoriously draconian three strikes law. According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the NRA helped derail congressional efforts to alleviate the effects of mandatory minimums on nonviolent offenders. In the mid-1990s, when former Harvard researcher David Kennedy was helping to establish the Boston Gun Project (justly praised by Kohn), the NRA was helping to ensure that unarmed, nonviolent offenders would spend most if not all of their lives in prison.
The NRA also was busy opposing the Brady Bill. Inside the bubble of the gun rights movement, waiting periods for gun purchases have been treated as worse deprivations of liberty than life sentences for shoplifting. The federal waiting period expired in the late 1990s, and researchers have concluded that waiting periods have only marginal effects on gun violence; but marginal effects can have enormous significance to individuals. In any case, waiting periods also have only marginal effects on gun purchases. Kohn does not press gun rights advocates to rethink their categorical opposition to modest regulations such as waiting periods, but if they dont like being viewed as gun nuts, they might consider doing so.
Finally, gun rights advocates who indulge in quasi-survivalist rhetoric should reconsider the highly anachronistic insistence that gun ownership is essential to mounting successful insurrections against an oppressive state. If David Koresh had been taken alive instead of incinerated by federal agents, he might testify to the uselessness of firearms to a small group besieged by officers of a large government. Today that uselessness is only increasing. Invisible surveillance techniques are proliferating, privacy is history, and the notion that guns guarantee liberty is increasingly ridiculous. Second Amendment rights are relatively secure today, but as restraints on government, theyre also less important.
http://www.reason.com/0505/fe.ak.straight.shtml.
