Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America

367 Pages·2011·1.96 MB·English

by  Adam Winkler

GUNFIGHT
The Battle over the Right to
Bear Arms in America
ADAM WINKLER
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
To Melissa, for her enduring inspiration;
and to Danny, for her smile.
C
ONTENTS
NEW INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
PART I
Chapter 1 Big Guns and Little Guns at the Supreme Court
Chapter 2 “Gun Grabbers”
Chapter 3 “Gun Nuts”
PART II
Chapter 4 Guns of Our Fathers
Chapter 5 Civil War
Chapter 7 Gangsters, Guns, and G-men
Chapter 8 By Any Means Necessary
Part III
Chapter 9 Decision
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
N I
EW NTRODUCTION
ON DECEMBER 14, 2012, AMERICA’S DEBATE OVER GUNS WAS TRANSFORMED. That
morning, Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old with a history of mental problems,
took a gun belonging to his mother, killed her, and then broke into a nearby
school, the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Once
inside the school, Lanza used another of his mother’s guns, a Bushmaster XM-
15 rifle, to slaughter twenty six-and seven-year-old children and six adults,
including the school’s principal. The scene was horrific. Children were shot at
close range multiple times. One six-year-old had eleven gunshot wounds.
It was not the first mass shooting of the year. In February, four people were
shot and killed at a Georgia health spa, and three others died after a shooting at a
high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In April, seven people were murdered at Oikos
University in Oakland, California. In May, a shooting at a café in Seattle,
Washington, took the lives of three men and two women. In July, a man went on
a rampage at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing twelve and injuring
fifty-eight others. In August, a man entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and
killed six. In September, five men were killed by a former co-worker after he
was terminated from his job. In October, a shooter took the lives of three people
at a day spa in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Just days before the Newtown massacre,
two people were killed and another injured when a masked gunman began
shooting at a shopping mall in Portland, Oregon.
Prior to Newtown, Americans had come to seem almost blasé about the
nation’s continuing epidemic of gun violence. Long ago, high-profile shootings
often led to significant reform of gun laws. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of
1929, for example, led to the first major federal gun control effort, and the
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 helped
speed enactment of the Gun Control Act. Yet little followed in the wake of more
recent shootings. The Columbine High School shooting in 1999, in which two
students killed thirteen people, and the 2011 attempt on Representative Gabrielle
Giffords that left a federal judge and five others dead did not spark any
meaningful reforms. Only after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, the worst
school shooting in American history, did Congress act. But the law enacted,
designed to improve the reporting of mental health adjudications into the federal
background check system, was widely recognized by public policy experts to be
partial and ineffective.
The response to the Newtown shooting was in many ways unusual. Americans
were shocked to learn that so many young children perished at the hands of a
madman. Signs of change came unambiguously from Washington. President
Barack Obama, who had disappointed many gun control supporters by avoiding
to talk about guns during his first term, immediately called for “meaningful
action” to stem the tide of violence. His previous reluctance had been
understandable, given the conventional wisdom in Democratic circles that gun
control was a losing issue on Election Day. After Newtown, however, the
president’s political calculus changed. Having just been reelected, he no longer
had to worry about alienating swing-state voters strongly opposed to any
regulating of guns.
Other Democrats in Washington also reacted differently to the Newtown
shooting than to previous mass killings. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and
Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, both longtime opponents of gun control
who enjoyed “A” ratings from the National Rifle Association, announced the
time had come for lawmakers to begin discussing gun control. Senator Warner
called the tragedy a “game changer.” The two senators may have been
emboldened by the NRA’s poor showing the preceding month, when the
organization failed for the second time to persuade enough voters to defeat
Barack Obama and also lost numerous down-ballot races. According to a
Sunlight Foundation report, the NRA had the worst return on investment of all
major political contributors in the 2012 elections. Politicians were beginning to
wonder whether the NRA still had the political clout it was often believed to
possess.
In other ways, however, the response to Newtown fit established patterns in
America’s debate over guns. Proponents of gun control answered the shooting
with a proposal to ban guns. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California promised to
introduce on the first day of the new Congress a proposal to reenact the assault
weapons law that had been in effect from 1994 to 2004, even though the earlier
law had been notoriously ineffective. In order to exempt commonplace
semiautomatic rifles used by hunters and recreational shooters, the law defined
the guns whose sale it prohibited partially by superficial characteristics like a
bayonet fitting or a pistol grip. Manufacturers easily skirted the law by
producing the same guns with the same lethality but without those features.
Moreover, assault weapons are rarely used in crime. Banning assault weapons
would be largely a symbolic act to please people’s desire to do something—
anything—even if it was unlikely to save lives.
Many proponents of gun control also revealed their profound misunderstanding
of both firearms themselves and the politics of guns. The media were filled with
stories that incorrectly called assault rifles such as the Bushmaster “machine
guns.” In fact, today’s assault weapons do not have automatic fire like a machine
gun. They shoot only one round for each pull of the trigger, just like a six-
shooter from the Wild West or the sidearm on every police officer’s hip. Gun
control proponents also failed to recognize how the gun enthusiast community
would react to another effort to ban a particular type of firearm. While polls
show that gun owners overwhelmingly support laws requiring universal
background checks for gun purchasers and other limited reforms, banning the
Bushmaster and other variants of the military-style rifle, like the AR-15, which
is the most popular rifle among consumers today, was destined to maximize
resistance to any reform.
The NRA, the uncontested leader of the gun rights movement, also reacted true
to form. After refusing to address the shooting for a week, Wayne LaPierre, the
NRA’s executive vice president, gave a remarkably tone-deaf speech blaming
everything but Lanza’s access to guns for the Newtown shooting: violent video
games, the media, the lack of a comprehensive database of people with mental
health problems. LaPierre insisted the answer to gun violence was, as usual,
more guns: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a
gun.” To ensure that good guys with guns would be there the next time someone
tried to kill schoolchildren, he proposed that armed guards be stationed at every
single school in America.
The more guns, less crime philosophy has not worked to protect Americans
very well so far. Although some studies show that permissive concealed carry
laws slightly reduce violent crime rates, other studies show that the positive
effect is illusory. Moreover, other data are irrefutable. The United States has the
highest rate of gun ownership of any developed country and the highest rate of
gun violence. There is already nearly one gun per person in the United States.
We have more guns than anyone, yet we don’t have the idyllic, low-crime
society that some imagine a gun-saturated world will bring.
There is also reason for skepticism about stationing armed guards in every
school. Columbine High School had an armed guard who engaged in a shootout
with Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, but he was quickly overpowered. The
killers had better numbers and more powerful firearms. Fort Hood in Texas also
had armed guards, yet a U.S. Army major went on a terrorist rampage there in
2009, killing thirteen. While better security at schools and elsewhere would be
welcomed by many people, we can’t expect to have armed guards at every place
where a mass shooting might occur. As the list of mass shootings in 2012
indicates, we’ve had mass shootings at movie theaters, day spas, coffee shops,
offices, temples, and shopping malls. Unless we intend to turn the country into a
police state with armed guards everywhere that people gather, mass shooters will
always be able to find victims.
Civilians with guns is one potential solution. There are reports of occasional
incidents in which an armed civilian, usually someone carrying a concealed
firearm, has interfered with a mass shooting and limited the damage. We should
not be blind to the possibility that guns in trained hands can be an effective
lifesaver, given the right circumstances. Yet we should also recognize the limits
of making more shootouts our answer to gun crime. Several of the mass
shootings in 2012 took place in states with permissive concealed carry laws.
None of them, however, were stopped by people with guns, in part because even
in these states not very many people want to carry guns.
Moreover, states with permissive concealed carry laws generally don’t require
extensive training in order for an individual to obtain a concealed carry permit.
An hour or two on the gun range shooting at targets isn’t adequate training to
engage in a high-stress shootout in a public place. Indeed, police officers in New
York City, who receive more training than what states generally require of
concealed carry permit holders, found themselves in a shootout after a man
killed a co-worker at the Empire State Building just a few months before
Newtown. Nine innocent bystanders were shot—all by the relatively well-trained
police officers.
Perhaps the mistake begins with the goal of preventing mass killings. Although
it takes a high-profile incident like that at Newtown to finally begin discussion
about guns and gun control, such shootings cannot be prevented. Norway has
very restrictive gun laws, yet an extremist went on a killing spree in 2011 and
took the lives of sixty-nine people, most of them youths at a summer camp, by
gunfire. France also has highly restrictive gun control but suffered a mass
shooting in March of 2012. If guns were exceedingly difficult to obtain, then
mass shootings would perhaps be rarer. In America, however, guns are
everywhere and easy for someone with a criminal intent to acquire. Those guns
are here to stay, which means—awful as it is to admit—that mass shootings are
here to stay as well.
Gun control resources would be better spent in trying to reduce the daily,
routine death toll from guns. Every day in America, nearly forty people die as a
result of the criminal misuse of guns. If we can lower that number only slightly,
to thirty-nine or thirty-eight, in every month we will save as many lives as were
lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School. There are gun law reforms that hold
promise on this front, like requiring universal background checks for gun
purchasers. As of this writing, federal law requires only licensed dealers to
conduct a background check before selling a gun; anyone else can sell a gun
without verifying that the purchaser is legally allowed to buy it. This gap in the
law allows a large number of lawful gun sales to be completed without a