Shot down.

CRIMINOLOGISTS, criminals, and cops all have a professional interest in crime. It is therefore significant that criminological research has generally validated the skepticism of both police and criminals about the effectiveness of gun control. Yet the consensus among these three sets of professionals has received little attention in the popular media.

Surprisingly, in light of the fervent support for stringent gun control that many academics expressed in the 1960s, serious research in this area did not begin until the 1970s. That research demonstrates that no amount of control over mere weaponry can overcome the fundamental socio-cultural and economic determinants of crime. Indeed, the evidence indicates that banning gun possession by the general public is actually counterproductive.

The most prolific researcher in this area is Gary Kleck of Florida State University's School of Criminology. His encyclopedic 1991 book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, has won high praise even from academics distressed by its findings. Broadly speaking, those findings are: 1) Gun possession by ordinary citizens is not a problem; the perpetrators of gun crime and accidents are aberrant individuals with histories of substance abuse, violence, felonies, and other dangerous behavior. 2) While outlawing possession of guns by such people is plainly sensible, it can bring at best marginal benefit as long as the fundamental determinants of their behavior remain unchanged. 3) Because guns empower the weak against the strong, and because victims are generally weaker than felons, widespread gun ownership is a net benefit for society.

Based on surveys of both the general populace and incarcerated felons, Kleck finds that gun-armed victims rout criminals three to four times more often than gun-armed criminals attack victims. And a victim who resists with a gun is only half as likely to be injured as a victim who submits--and far less likely to be robbed or raped.

In 1993 the American Society of Criminology declared Kleck's book the single most important contribution to criminological research in the previous three years. Kleck's findings are so unimpeachable that critics often resort to ad hominem attacks. They falsely accuse Kleck of being a National Rifle Association member, minion, or even employee. In fact, Kleck, a liberal Democrat and opponent of the death penalty, is a member not of the NRA but of Amnesty International and the ACLU. Moreover, Kleck started out on the other side of the gun-control debate. In a 1991 speech to the National Academy of Sciences, he said:

When I began my research on guns in

1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the `anti-gun' thesis. . . . It

seemed then like self-evident common

sense which hardly needed to be empirically

tested.... [But] the best currently

available evidence, imperfect though it is

(and must always be), indicates that general

gun availability has no measurable

net positive effect on rates of homicide,

suicide, robbery, assault, rape, or burglary

in the U.S.... Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors

will attack or injure them and less likely

they will lose property in a robbery

The positive associations often found between

aggregate levels of violence and

gun ownership appear to be primarily due

to violence increasing gun ownership,

rather than the reverse.

Other scholars have also changed their views. University of Maryland political scientist Ted Robert Gurr and State University of New York criminologist Hans Toch were closely associated with the Eisenhower Commission, which concluded in the Sixties that "reducing the availability of the handgun will reduce firearms violence." Based on subsequent research, however, each now repudiates this judgment. "When used for protection," Toch writes, "firearms can seriously inhibit aggression and can provide a psychological buffer against the fear of crime. Furthermore, the fact that national patterns show little violent crime where guns are most dense implies that guns do not elicit aggression in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, these findings suggest that high saturations of guns in places, or something correlated with that condition, inhibit illegal aggression."

Gurr has come to believe that handgun prohibition "would criminalize much of the citizenry but have only marginal effects on criminals," while "overemphasis on such proposals diverts attention from the kinds of conditions that are responsible for much of our crime, such as persisting poverty for the black underclass and some whites and Hispanics." Gurr adds that guns can be an effective defense," noting that UCLA historian Roger McGrath's evidence from the 19th-century American West "shows that widespread gun ownership deterred" acquisitive crimes. "Modern studies," he writes, "also show that widespread gun ownership deters crime.... Convicted robbers and burglars report that they are deterred when they think their potential targets are armed."

Ask the Felons

INDEED, felons have consistently said that banning handguns would make their lives safer and easier by disarming victims without affecting their own ability to obtain weapons. "Ban guns," said a typical convict interviewed by New York University criminologist Ernest van den Haag in the mid 1970s. "I'd love it. I'm an armed robber."

In 1982 the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove received nationwide publicity for enacting the nation's first handgun ban. Surprisingly little attention was paid to two remarkable responses. One was a letter an inmate in a Florida prison wrote the editor of a local newspaper: "If guns are banned, then I as a criminal feel a lot safer. When a thief breaks into someone's house or property, the first thing to worry about is getting shot by the owner. But now, it seems we won't have to worry about that anymore." Branding it a "fantasy that just because guns are outlawed we, the crooks, can't get guns," the author asserted that "the only people who can't are the ones we victimize.... Drugs are against the law. Does that stop us? It's also against the law to rob and steal. But does a law stop us? One more thing: I thank you, the public, for giving me this fine opportunity to further my criminal career."

Similarly, the editor of the inmate newspaper at the Illinois Correctional Center in Menard "made it a point to get the views of those in the real know--convicts here for armed robbery, some of them extremely professional individuals with years of experience in their chosen field. The[y] ... were unanimous that you in Morton Grove are making things a bit easier for us ... [The] law is meaningless and useless in curbing crime. However, it is very effective in curbing the general populace. This coming from "hardened criminals," professionals, convicts . . . someone should listen!"

Perhaps the National Institute of Justice did listen. In 1983 it funded a survey of two thousand felons in state prisons across the U.S. In addition to overwhelmingly endorsing the views set out above, 39 per cent of the felons in the NIJ survey said they had aborted at least one crime because they believed the intended victim was armed; 8 per cent had done so "many" times; 34 per cent had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"; and 69 per cent knew at least one acquaintance who had had such an experience.

Thirty-four per cent of the felons said that in contemplating a crime they either "often" or "regularly" worried that they "might get shot at by the victim." Asked about criminals in general, 56 per cent of the inmates agreed that "a criminal is not going to mess around with a victim he knows is armed with a gun"; 57 per cent agreed that "most criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police"; 58 per cent agreed that "a store owner who is known to keep a gun on the premises is not going to get robbed very often"; and 74 per cent agreed that "one reason burglars avoid houses when people are home is that they fear being shot during the crime."

Since 1976 the District of Columbia has had the country's most extreme gun law: no civilian may buy or carry a handg-un, nor may any gun be kept loaded or assembled in a home for self-defense. Nevertheless, Washington has one of the highest homicide rates in the country. In 1992 Washington Post reporters interviewed the 114 inmates in D.C.'s Lorton Prison who had been convicted of at least one gun crime. The consensus was clear: "Gun control is not the answer, the inmates agreed." And they anticipated no difficulty obtaining an illegal gun. Though many claimed to want to go straight, 25 per cent flatly said they would get a gun as soon as they emerged from prison.

A week later a newspaper in Syracuse found similar opinions when it combined a survey of inmates in a nearby maximum-security prison with a survey of police officers in the local department. The two groups concurred that tougher gun laws would have no effect on crime; neither would banning assault weapons.

This congruence of opinion contradicts the impression that several prominent police chiefs have created that cops generally oppose civilian gun ownership. The truth is that these police chiefs were appointed precisely because their views sharply diverged from their peers'. Furthermore, strong political pressure tends to silence police administrators who oppose gun bans. In the mid 1980s Maurice Turner became Washington, D.C.'s first black police chief. When reporters inquired into the new chiefs opinion of D.C.'s severe gun law, he replied that it was not just useless but actually promoted crime, since felons knew it had rendered victims defenseless. When his remarks were reported, he was called on the carpet by Mayor Marion Barry, who told him banning guns was a city policy that he was forbidden to criticize. Thereafter Chief Turner refused to comment on gun control (until he retired, whereupon he reiterated his previous views).

Boston Police Chief Robert DiGrazia, on the other hand, did sincerely champion the banning and confiscation of handguns. In 1976 he had his research division poll police opinion nationwide, hoping the results would support a Massachusetts ballot initiative to ban handguns. Thinking patrol officers would oppose the initiative, he limited the poll to administrators. Yet the survey found "a substantial majority of the respondents looked favorably on the general possession of handguns by the citizenry (excludes those with criminal records [or] history of mental instability). Strong approval was also elicited from the police administrators concerning possession of handguns in the home or place of business." The poll confirmed Chief DiGrazia's views in only one respect: the administrators agreed that officers who dealt with crime on the streets would be even more opposed to banning handguns.

This pattern has been confirmed by subsequent polling. For instance, in Law Enforcement Technology magazine's 1991 poll of two thousand cops across the nation, 76 per cent of street officers believed that licenses to carry concealed handguns for protection should be issued to every trained, responsible adult applicant; only 59 per cent of managers agreed. Ninety-one per cent of street officers opposed banning semi-automatic "assault rifles," compared to 66 per cent of top management. On the other hand, 94 per cent of street officers felt that private citizens should keep handguns in their homes and offices for self-defense, and 93 per cent of top management agreed. Over all, 93 per cent of the respondents supported defensive ownership of handguns, 85 per cent felt gun control had little potential to reduce crime, 79 per cent opposed banning "assault weapons," and 63 per cent supported widespread carrying of concealed handguns by trained civilians.

Every year since 1988, the National Association of Chiefs of Police has polled the nation's more than fifteen thousand police agencies, with a response rate of 10 per cent or more. The respondents have consistently said that their departments are understaffed and unable to adequately protect individuals; that law-abiding, responsible adults should have the right to own "any type of firearm" for self-defense; and that banning guns will not reduce crime. In these and other surveys police generally support moderate controls, such as background checks, designed to exclude felons from gun ownership to the extent possible without obstructing defensive ownership by law-abiding citizens.

It's possible, of course, that the cops, the criminals, and the criminologists are mistaken about gun control. But given the remarkable consensus, it's time to reconsider the casual assumption that weapons cause crime.

RELATED ARTICLE: Bad Guys, Bad Guns

ADVOCATES of gun control frequently make the mistake of assuming that good intentions are enough. The "Report to the President" from the Interdepartmental Working Group on Violence, which sums up the Clinton Administration's thinking on gun control, is a good example.

Like practically everyone else who has thought about gun-control issues in the last four or five decades, the working group wants "a method for restricting access by potential criminal users without compromising access by legitimate users." This requires some means of distinguishing between good guys and bad guys before they get a gun and do something nefarious with it. The report suggests requiring "a criminal record or mental health background check" as part of the Brady Law's five-day waiting period. After all, we don't want people who are "impaired by a mental illness, impaired by alcohol or drugs, or blinded by rage" to be able to buy guns.

The data-management problems with a criminal-background check were aired in the debate over the Brady Bill. Many police departments do not maintain their records in a fashion that allows quick computer access; sharing of records across jurisdictions is difficult. But one can at least imagine a national data system that would contain names and identifiers for every person ever convicted of (suspected of? arrested for?) a felony offense.

What would such a system accomplish? Even now, with no background check required (or even performed in most jurisdictions), only about one crime gun in six is directly obtained through normal retail channels. Most bad guys get guns through informal, off-the-record swaps, purchases, and trades with relatives, friends, drug dealers, or other street sources. Now imagine spending several hundred million dollars to create a fail-safe nationwide checking system that would identify people with felony records whenever they tried to make a retail gun purchase. The principal effect would probably be to drive that sixth felon out of the gun shop and into the street market-assuming that a serviceable fake ID could not be obtained.

The proposed "mental-health background" check seems sensible at first blush but in practice borders on the bizarre. Unlike felony records, which are public by definition, mental-health records are highly privileged and extremely confidential. The same is true of alcohol and drug histories. A national data system containing everybody's "mental-health background" and directly accessible by every gun dealer in the country poses some serious privacy issues, to say the least. Do you really want the proprietor of Bubba's Bait and Gun Shop, a federally licensed fire-arms dealer, to have direct, computerized access to your psychiatric history?

What mental-health conditions should prevent people from legally owning guns? The latest version o the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the American Psychiatric Association's official listing of mental disorders, includes such things as "disorders of the written expression," which covers such dangerous psychiatric infirmities as poor spelling, bad penmanship, and inability to punctuate. A recent University of Michigan survey found that fully half of all Americans suffer at some time in their lives from one or another of the DSM "illnesses," with a third afflicted in any given year.

People create a "mental-health background" when they seek professional counseling for marital problems, or see a psychiatrist because of compulsive over-eating, or in a thousand other ways. Just how much of a mental-health "background" would be enough to disqualify someone from owning a gun? And who would set the criteria? The government? The American Psychiatric Association?

As noted, the general problem with "background checks" of all sorts at the point of sale is that the bad guys do not buy guns through customary retail outlets. Such checks are typically justified on the grounds that "it can't do any harm and might do some good." But background checks take up police time and resources that might otherwise be spent in other, more cost-effective ways. The working group's report asserts (without documentation or reference) that "states which have implemented such checks report that they prevent legal firearms purchases by thousands of prohibited persons each year." That sounds impressive until one realizes that there are some four to six million retail gun transactions in the U.S. each year. If you have to check millions of records to prevent a few thousand acquisitions, have you made the most efficient possible use of police resources?

IN ADDITION to mandatory criminal and mental-health background checks, the report recommends banning certain types of guns and ammunition, restricting other types of guns, further limiting production and importation of these weapons, and raising taxes on handguns and other firearms. Among the guns to be banned are the so-called assault weapons, covered by last year's Omnibus Crime Act. Among those to be "restricted" would be all handguns and any "semi-automatic long guns" that are not otherwise outlawed. Hence all that would be left on the unrestricted list would be long guns that are not semi-automatic, such as bolt-action rifles.

The report thus seeks to distinguish between good guns and bad guns, as well as between good guys and bad guys. But a firearm is basically a chunk of machined metal that can be used for a variety of purposes, all of which involve hurtling a projectile at high velocity toward a target. Guns are neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Benevolence and malevolence inhere in the motives and behaviors of people, not in the technology they use.

The report proposes limiting ownership of "restricted" firearms, including all handguns, to persons who could show that "the firearm would be used only for specified legitimate purposes." Nothing in the report suggests just what purposes would be considered "legitimate." Such guns could only be possessed "in one's home, one's place of business, on the premises of a target range . . . or while being transported to or from any of the above." One gathers that all outdoor use of "restricted" weapons would be banned.

Many guns are owned, either primarily or secondarily, for defense against crime, and a substantial number dust how many is a matter of dispute) are actually used for that purpose each year. Would self-defense be considered a "legitimate" reason for gun ownership? Who would decide whose need for self-protection is "legitimate" and whose is not? Would the beleaguered single mother in the housing project and the affluent suburbanite be looked upon with equal favor? More generally, does a society that is manifestly incapable of protecting its citizens from crime and predation really have any moral authority to tell people what they may and may not own or do to protect themselves? The report does not consider these issues.

THE report recognizes, however, that restrictions on manufacture and new sales of guns do not address the vast arsenal of firearms already circulating in the U.S.: some 200 million guns in private hands, more than enough to sustain the present level of violence for another century or two. In the face of this challenge, the report recommends:

Amnesty and buy-back programs. Various "buy-back" programs have been tried in a number of cities. They usually net a few dozen to a few hundred guns. Most of the guns brought in by these programs have a street value lower than the buy-back price. A buy-back program is an opportunity to unload a piece of junk for enough cash to pick up a really good piece of equipment.

Eliminating the sale of confiscated guns back to the general public. Nationwide, the police confiscate something on the order of a quarter-million guns annually. At that rate, we will be rid of all the guns now circulating in the market in about eight hundred years.

Requiring that all firearm transfers be registered. That criminals will generally be indifferent to the law seems obvious, but it is a lesson we have had to relearn time and time again. Murder is already against the law, yet murderers still murder; armed robbery is against the law, yet robbers still rob. And as a matter of fact, gun acquisition by felons, whether from retail or private sources, is also already illegal, yet felons still acquire guns. We can certainly pass a law requiring that every gun transfer be registered with the police, or one requiring that the buyer and seller both trundle off to a licensed dealer to document the transaction and run the mandatory background check. But who, exactly, do we expect to comply with such laws?

In general, the report approaches gun control as a public-health issue, to be treated like automobile safety, cigarette smoking, and alcohol consumption. Some of the report's recommendations in this connection are sensible: public education to promote firearm safety, sound scientific research on the effectiveness of various interventions, experimentation with safer gun technology. And there is a sense in which violence is a public-health problem. So let me illustrate the limitations of this line of reasoning with a public-health analogy.

After research disclosed that mosquitoes were the vector for transmission of yellow fever, the disease was not controlled by sending men in white coats to the swamps with tweezers to remove the mouth parts from all the insects they could find. The only sensible, efficient way to stop the biting was to attack the environment where the mosquitoes bred.

Guns are the mouth parts of the violence epidemic. The contemporary urban environment breeds violence no less than swamps breed mosquitoes. Attempting to control the problem of violence by trying to disarm the perpetrators is as hopeless as trying to contain yellow fever through mandible control.

Mr. Wright, a professor of sociology at Tulane University, is co-author of Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms and Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America.

Mr. Kates, a San Francisco civil-liberties lawyer and criminologist, is the editor of Firearms and Violence (Ballinger) and the firearms-regulation issue of Law and Contemporary Problems.