Gun Control: What Are the Real Issues?

Published in Le Devoir, September 2, 1992, and La Presse, September 8, 1992; translated and reproduced in English in Aim

Gun Control: What Are the Real Issues?
by
Pierre Lemieux

Unfortunately, tragedy is part of the human condition, death being the final one. It is only natural to try to delay the instant of death to its ultimate moment. We can understand the dull pain, the crushing feelings of helplessness and waste that besiege those who lost a loved one at Concordia, or at Polytechnique in 1989, or at the National Assembly in 1984, or at Du Pont on Dorchester Street in 1971. Also we can well imagine the feelings of distress that must engulf the murderer's family.

However it is more difficult to understand those who, from the comfort of their living rooms, demand new and stricter authoritarian controls after each tragic event that previous laws could not prevent. This is the story behind gun control legislation which, since the beginning of this century, has more or less abolished the right of free men to own and bear arms, a right that was sanctioned in the 1689 Bill of Rights. The laws established in Canada in the thirties and, most importantly, the Federal legislation of 1977 have seriously infringed upon that right. The most recent law is bringing us one step closer to an irrational prohibition.

Why not prohibit alcohol and automobiles, which are responsible for much more tragic accidents, and in the case of alcohol, responsible for a larger number of assaults. The arguments set forth by people who support gun controls are very similar to those of the American Prohibitionists earlier in the century.

Even in a climate of pain and hysteria, and especially in such a climate, one must raise the real issues.

Self-defence

One of the questions that should be asked following tragedies such as those of the Concordia or Polytechnique killings is why didn't anyone try to help the innocent victims? I do not mean the police who cannot and must not be everywhere. But why was the disturbed killer the only one with a weapon? Why wasn't there a discreetly armed guard or an normal professor with a gun to exercise the right to self-defence that John Locke so brilliantly defended 300 years ago? The reason is that simple citizens are not allowed to carry guns and it is getting increasingly difficult for anyone to own a firearm.

Nevertheless, the right and the ability of individuals to defend themselves have often proven beneficial. In 1977 a very disturbed man who had just stabbed two people to death in Las Vegas tried to break into a home occupied by two women. A neighbor took out his gun, rushed to their defense, and shot the killer. On December 17, 1991 two robbers in Anniston, Alabama, took as hostages the customers of a restaurant and locked them up in the cold storage room. The thieves were gunned down by another customer who was hiding underneath a table. These are only a few examples of incidents that occurred in areas where people are allowed to carry guns.

Although guns availability can facilitate crime, it also enables honest citizens to defend themselves. Self-defense is a very effective deterrent. The city police in Orlando, Florida, alarmed by the increasing rape statistics in their city offered handgun training for women. In the following year the number of rapes per 100,000 inhabitants decreased 88% in Orlando (whereas it continued to increase everywhere else in the U.S. as well as in the outskirts of the city).[1] Obviously it is less tempting to assault a woman if there exists the outside chance that she may be carrying a revolver in her handbag.

Irrational controls

Gun control laws in Canada, in England and in United States, have been plagued with the kind of irrationality typical of political and bureaucratic processes. In United States, a second wave of gun control laws was enforced after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The killer had used a high-powered rifle. The new laws were also aimed at controlling shotguns and handguns. Arguments had been made to prevent minors from purchasing mail-order weapons. In the end, everyone wound up being treated as a minor. On August 1st, 1966, Charles Whitman, a disturbed former soldier, killed many passers-by from the top of a tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Even though two weeks earlier a killer had butchered eight student nurses with a knife, firearms were now being blamed for all the violence in the world.

Some local governments had already espoused prohibition, such as New York with the Sullivan Laws of 1911, which virtually prohibited handguns in the metropolis. Some Southern states had legislated gun controls in order to prevent Blacks from owning firearms. Whithin some other states, individuals remain more or less free to own and carry firearms.

It has yet to be established that a causality exists between the availability of firearms and crime. Let us compare New York and Washington, where gun controls are as strict as they are in Canada, to Vermont, one of the states that leaves its citizens the most freedom and which also happens to be one the of the most peaceful states. The main effect of gun control laws is that only criminals end up owning firearms. It is people who kill, guns are only tools among many others. Remember Félix Fénéon, accused of illegally carrying a firearm and who was told by the judge: "You were carrying everything necessary to commit murder", to which the anarchist replied: "I was also carrying everything necessary to commit rape."

Why are the intelligentsia and establishment so vehemently opposed to a citizen's right to keep and bear arms? Because it is Politically Correct? Or is it because they believe that the restrictions will not affect them? In 1981 the Wall Street Journal obtained a court order forcing the New York police to reveal their list of people holding gun permits. Whereas ordinary citizens and people living in dangerous neighborhoods had been disarmed by law for seven decades, the public learned that New York jet-setters had received dispensations in spite of the fact that they lived in safe neighborhoods and travel to their offices in limousines. Even some supporters of a ban on handguns had not hesitated to request and obtain a licence to carry a gun, notably the Rockfeller brothers and the director of the New York Times. The list of privileged handgun licence holders included the husband of Joyce Brothers, a dedicated prohibitionist according to whom the mere possession of a firearm reveals a male sexual dysfunction.

Resistance to tyranny

Then, there is the other questioned, raised by Juvenal: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? When the only armed men left are State agents (and criminals who buy guns on the black market), who will protect us against our protectors? The individual's modern right to own and bear arms was justified by the necessity of resisting tyranny, if need be, as well as for protection against common criminals.

Tyrannic regimes (like that of Vichy, in 1942) always begin by confiscating citizens' firearms, an easy task to accomplish when previous laws have imposed registration. The fate of many Jews arrested by the French National Police on the morning of July 16, 1942 and brought to the "Vel d'Hiv" then shipped to Nazi death camps could have been different had they only possessed arms necessary to defend themselves. One must read the petitions from fighters in the Warsaw ghettos and elsewhere begging outside supporters for firearms. The National Firearms Museum in Washington has on exhibit the rudimentary pistols manufactured for one dollar each that were later parachuted by allied planes to European fighters, disarmed by their own governments before the Invasion.

A gentler and kinder nation?

Whatever happened to the "gentler and kinder nation," the easygoing Canadian society with its social programs aimed at buying peace by bribing the outcasts? This easygoing society is more like a daycare centre for irresponsible individuals, who, having lost all freedom and dignity, have entrusted themselves to their local landlord, that is the State where fate and historic wars have led them to be born.

How can a man hold on to his individual sovereignty, when he is treated like a criminal, facing five years in jail under the Canadian Criminal Code, if he brings his handgun on a family camping trip in the wilderness? When he must ask a bureaucrat for the permission to purchase firearms? When, under present laws (which in fact impose a permanent War Measures Act), he can be searched without a warrant on the pretext that the police is searching for firearms? What kind of society will we become when the citizen-child will be required, in accordance with the new gun control laws, to lock up the firearms he keeps in his home, or have his Firearms Acquisition Certificate signed by two guarantors? (One reassuring fact is the list of possible guarantors include your dentist, your social worker and ... your university professor.)

A free man does not treat his own children in this manner. In a letter to his nephew, Thomas Jefferson recommended shooting which, says Jefferson, "gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind."

But the infantilizing society is not good to all. Lepine was but imitating organized and protectionist interest groups who legally make the weaker ones their hostages when he attacked those least able to defend themselves. I would even suggest that this infantilizing society has something to do in the proliferation of blind shootings that occur in Québec, in France and in many countries around the world. The child breaks his toy to show his frustration; the citizen-child takes revenge on everything that moves. One should not however push the argument too far. Jack the Ripper did not wait for the British Welfare State to follow his sadistic impulses.

From false political representations to bureaucratic irrationalities, the Canadian Criminal Code has even forbidden the possession of mace. This self-defence weapon is sold freely in France -- even if this country is not very liberal in this area. Here, shouting and crying are becoming the only legitimate means of self-defense. Many must have cried help at Concordia, on August 24, and at the Polytechnique, on December 6, 1989, but there was nobody who could help.

The risk of being assaulted is less dangerous than the ban on self-defence, especially when one considers that the one increases the other. As Benjamin Franklin said, those who would abandon liberty for security deserve neither one nor the other.

1. See Firearms and Violence, edited by Don B. Kates (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984). [Return to text]

Pierre Lemieux, an economist and author, is director of the "Iconoclastes" Collection at Les Belles Lettres. He is presently working on a book on firearms that will be published next year in Paris.

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