Bang! Bang! You're Dead

In the wake of a few spectacularly horrifying crimes involving the use of firearms there has arisen in the U.S. a clamor for legislation to "control" the ownership of guns. A little more than four years ago a President was slain. Three years later a demented University of Texas student, Charles J. Whitman, slew 14 persons before he himself was shot dead. Rifles were used last summer by snipers in racial riots, and there is grave fear that they may be used again.

A year and a half ago the Gallup poll found that 73% of the public favored a law that would require a person to obtain a police permit before buying a gun, and 83% of those polled said that the use of guns by persons under 18 should either be forbidden or restricted. An ominous Louis Harris poll reported last September that 55% of the 27 million whites who own guns would "shoot other people in case of a riot." And there is what appears to be a rising crime rate, though it may be just a rise in the rate of reported crime.

A political solution to this sort of thing would be to utter a campaign-year outcry and pass a law. It appears that the 90th Congress may well do just that. President Johnson has asked several times for firearms control legislation and more than 40 bills to that effect are now before the House and Senate.

Few nations are as permissive as the U.S. about civilian ownership of firearms. In most of the rest of the world it is assumed that weapons are dangerous to have freely about and that, therefore, the people should be severely constrained in their access to them, no matter how much fun hunting and target shooting might be. Now there has emerged legislative and editorial demand for "regulation" of long-arms ownership in America, often in terms that are quite vague as to just what the regulation might be (ownership of pistols is already regulated, to a greater or less degree, by the individual states). As a consequence of the outcry, what was once assumed to be a right in this country seems to some enthusiasts of the sport of weaponry to be in danger of becoming subject to the whims and prejudices of law-enforcement officers and, in one bill, to those of the Secretary of the Treasury.

All this is repugnant to many owners of sporting arms. They believe that in a free America the keeping and bearing of arms is a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment. In countries less influenced by libertarian principles, dictatorships of the right and left are understandably wary of an armed citizenry, since it would represent a threat to management. And even in many democratic countries, especially in Europe, there is little motivation for the average man to own a rifle or shotgun. Hunting there is pretty much restricted to those who possess extensive property on which game can be found or to those who can afford to lease shooting privileges. There is almost no tradition of arms-bearing in these places, and so there is no great opposition to restrictions on it.

Switzerland is an outstanding exception, for reasons remote from sport. Because of their historical insistence on defending their neutrality in a continent so often embroiled in war, the Swiss people have put into actual practice what is declared in Article II of the American Bill of Rights: "a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The Swiss have made arms-bearing not just a right but a duty. Every Swiss male between the ages of 20 and 50 is required to keep in his home a military weapon—anything from a pistol to a submachine gun, and there are at least 650,000 of these weapons—and ammunition for its use.

Those who believe that guns cause crime would conclude that the streets of Switzerland run lederhosen deep in blood. In fact, the use of firearms in Swiss crime has been minimal.

And it is minimal here in the U.S., where between 30 and 50 million homes—depending on whose figures you accept—contain firearms. Such weapons are used in only 3% of what the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls serious crime. There are other figures which indicate that the rate of death from firearms has declined 50% or so in the past two-score years, while our population has doubled.

Last July, Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan published in the Congressional Record a report by Alan S. Krug, a Pennsylvania State University economist, who concluded that there "is no statistically significant difference in crime rates between states that have firearms licensing laws and those that do not." Krug, who subsequently became assistant to the director of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, noted that a report prepared for the Wisconsin State Legislature in 1960 put greater importance on such factors as "geography, homogeneity of population, density of population, median school years completed, and per capita personal income."

"It is immediately apparent," Krug wrote, after statistical examination of FBI crime reports, "that in the cases of murder, aggravated assault and serious crime, the states with firearms licensing laws do not have lower crime rates than the non-licensing states."