THE GUN UNDER FIRE
FORGET the democratic processes, the judicial system and the talent for organization that have long been the distinctive marks of the U.S. Forget, too, the affluence (vast, if still not general enough) and the fundamental respect for law by most Americans. Remember, instead, the Gun.
That is how much of the world beyond its borders feels about the U.S. today. All too widely, the country is regarded as a blood-drenched, continent-wide shooting range where toddlers blast off with real rifles, housewives pack pearl-handled revolvers, and political assassins stalk their victims at will.
The image, of course, is wildly overblown, but America's own mythmakers are largely to blame. In U.S. folklore, nothing has been more romanticized than guns and the larger-than-life men who wielded them. From the nation's beginnings, in fact and fiction, the gun has been provider and protector. The Pilgrim gained a foothold with his harquebus. A legion of loners won the West with Colt .45 Peacemakers holstered at their hips or Winchester 73 repeaters cradled in their arms.
In Thrall. Often as not, the frontiersman was an antisocial misfit who helped create a climate of barbaric lawlessness. No matter. Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill, Jesse James and Billy the Kid, hero and villain alike, all were men of the gun and all were idolized. "Have gun, will travel" was more than a catch phrase. It was a way of life. Even after the frontier reached its limits, the myths lingered and the legends multiplied, first in dime novels, later in movies and on TV. Americans flowed into great cities, but still they remained in thrall to the mystique of the gun, that ultimate symbol of both the land's lost innocence and the hardy pioneers who tamed it. They were intrigued by a new species of hero, very different yet somehow similar--the romanticized gangster.
Emulating their mythicized forebears, Americans have turned their country into an arsenal. Today they own somewhere between 50 million and 200 million pistols and revolvers, shotguns and rifles, as well as uncounted machine guns, hand grenades, bazookas, mortars, even antitank guns. At least 3,000,000 more are bought each year, some twothirds through the mails--"as easily," in Lyndon Johnson's words, "as baskets of fruit or cartons of cigarettes." Said Maryland's Democratic Senator Joseph Tydings last week in an appeal for more effective legislation to curb this traffic: "It is just tragic that in all of Western civilization the U.S. is the one country with an insane gun policy."
Ideal for Tanks. Strong words? Consider: a magazine recently advertised replicas of the derringer pistol as the dandy little model that killed "two of our country's Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley." Another suggested: SUBMACHINE GUN FOR FATHER'S DAY? Yet another offered, for $99.50, a 20-mm. antitank gun, "ideal for long-range shots at deer and bear or at cars and trucks and even a tank if you happen to see one."
In California, two attractive young San Franciscans named William and Louise Thoresen await trial next week on charges of possessing 70 tons of weapons and ammunition, including a 37-mm. cannon. On the national day of mourning for Robert F. Kennedy, promoters of a Davenport, Iowa, pistol-shooting match decided to go ahead with the event but to observe a moment of silence after each volley, out of respect to the assassinated Senator.
Spurred largely by fears of racial violence, Americans are engaged in a manic internal arms race. "There are more guns in Los Angeles," said a Negro leader, "than in Saigon"--at least 3,000,000. In Massachusetts, 1,100 gun dealers last year sold enough arms to equip an army of 56,000. Chicago's Blackstone Rangers, a 1,000-member black gang, are said to have 1,200 handguns among them.
White would-be vigilantes more than match them. The gun-run is naturally heaviest in areas of recent riots. In Michigan, Dearborn's racist Mayor Orville L. Hubbard exhorted townsfolk to "take up arms, learn to shoot and be a dead shot." Close to 500 Dearborn women are taking regular pistol practice; similar distaff firearm courses are under way from Redondo Beach, Calif., to DeKalb County, Georgia, to Dallas, where 1,000 women have completed a pistol program in recent months.
Increasing numbers of guns are falling into the hands of juveniles; in Chicago last year, 1,293 youths, one only eight years old, were arrested with guns in their possession. Last week in Oklahoma, two brothers, 12 and 10, were charged with shooting a 49-year-old grocer to death. Startling accidents happen, especially around inexperienced gun handlers. A Detroit man heard footsteps in his home, saw the knob of his bedroom door open slowly, leveled his bedside pistol--and fatally drilled his three-year-old daughter through the head. In Gunnison, Colo., Robert Delaney was riding along a dirt road on a motorbike when a shot rang out. His 15-year-old son Kirk, following on another motorbike, tumbled to the ground dead. Then his ten-year-old son was killed. Down the road, Delaney found a middle-aged hunter with a .30-'06 rifle, who explained that he had mistaken the boys, who were wearing red hats and riding a red bike, for an elk.
Like Bullet Holes. This "contagion of blood," as Italian Author Indro Montanelli called it, has understandably dismayed other nations, which despite their own long histories of violence have come to expect something better of the U.S. "Recourse to violence as a form of solving differences is one of the philosophic norms which the Yankees have spread with greatest efficacy throughout the world," lectured Barcelona's El Noticiero Universal, overlooking Spain's own sanguinary history. Foreign critics also tend to forget that there are many different forms of violence. A police state, which operates on the threat of violence by the government against its own citizens, can more easily maintain order and prevent crime that a free society. Soviet Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko chose to ignore that fact when he recently wrote:
The stars
In your flag,
America,
Are like bullet holes.
While it is necessary to discount such hysteria and maintain a sound historical perspective, it is still obvious that the U.S. must have gun legislation. Though states and localities have a bewildering crazy quilt of 20,000 weapon laws, only two are on the federal books. One is the National Firearms Act of 1934, taxing interstate shipments of such gangster-style weapons as machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. The other is the pallid Federal Firearms Act of 1938, prohibiting interstate gun shipments to felons. In 30 years, Congress has failed to enact a single new gun bill, thus allowing, as the President declared, "the demented, the deranged, the hardened criminal and the convict, the addict and the alcoholic" to order weapons by mail with no questions asked.
Toothless Answer. Attempts to tighten the absurdly loose laws have repeatedly been defeated, largely due to the efforts of the 1,000,000-member National Rifle Association. Two years before he became President, John F. Kennedy unsuccessfully sought a ban on imports of foreign weapons--which would have kept out of the U.S. the $12.78 Mannlicher-Carcano Italian rifle that killed him in 1963. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, declaring that "It is past time that we wipe this stain of violence from this land," testified in favor of a bill to tighten controls on handguns --such as the .22-cal. Iver-Johnson eight-shot revolver that felled him on June 4.
Pollster George Gallup maintains that in his very first opinion sampling on gun control 34 years ago, 84% of the nation favored strong legislation. The figure has remained at or near that level ever since. Yet Congress has assiduously ignored such evidence of public opinion. John Kennedy's assassination did not goad Capitol Hill to act. There was a brief flurry, centering around Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd's bill to ban the mail-order sale of all guns, but as soon as the N.R.A. started moving, Congress stopped. Its paralysis persisted after last April's slaying of Martin Luther King. Robert Kennedy's murder in Los Angeles brought an appeal from the President for an end to the "insane traffic" in guns, but Congress responded by completing action on a measure so toothless--it provides for little more than a ban on mail-order handguns--as to please even the N.R.A. Johnson scorned it as "watered-down" and "halfway," dropped hints that he might veto the entire crime bill of which it is a part.
Pop a Bag. But things are changing. In the past, Congressmen were swamped with mail from self-styled "gun nuts" whenever even the most limited controls were proposed. Now the rest of the nation has been making itself heard.
Carloads of pro-control mail have cascaded into Washington. Senators whose mail had run 100-to-1 against gun laws now found the ratio reversed. New Jersey's Republican Senator Clifford Case alone has received 11,000 letters since Senator Kennedy's death, 400-to-1 in favor of strong legislation. Tydings drew twice as many letters on guns in a few days as he has on Viet Nam in the past three years. The 16-month-old National Council for a Responsible Firearms Policy launched a campaign to send 10 million pro-control letters to Congress, also got 400 pickets to march around the N.R.A.'s gleaming, $3,500,000 Washington headquarters, where an armed guard is posted at the door. Thousands of brown paper bags, lettered with the words "Ban all guns" were sent to Senators. They also bore the message: "Pop one of these in the Senate. The surprise might get to the Senators."
In a rebuke to violence, 1,000 New York schoolchildren turned a mound of toy guns and comics--including Superman and Combat--over to trash collectors. Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward stopped mail-order gun sales after King's assassination; Macy's, Alexander's and Abraham & Straus in New York had quit selling guns even before that. Last week Ohio's J-Mart discount stores gave their entire $20,000 inventory of guns to the Columbus police.
Three leading gunmakers--Remington, Savage and Winchester--urged an end to mail-order sales of rifles and shotguns, proposed a permit system for gun owners and announced sponsorship of a long-range study of behavioral patterns in relation to the use of firearms. In San Francisco, 300 citizens voluntarily turned in weapons after an appeal from Mayor Joseph Alioto, who said that the city might "have them melted down and made into a sculpture honoring Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King." In Chicago, gun owners voluntarily delivered 100 weapons to police stations.
Everett-on-the-Spot. Most significant was the soul-searching among Senators, many of them Western liberals who have long bowed to N.R.A.-generated pressure and opposed effective controls. Washington Democrat Warren Magnuson, who as chairman of the Commerce Committee helped bottle up the Dodd bill after J.F.K.'s assassination, said he would now vote for a ban on the mail-order sale of all guns because of "the violence and terror surging through the streets of every county and every state." Democrats William Proxmire and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, Edmund Muskie of Maine, Mike Monroney of Oklahoma and Republican Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania said that they, too, were preparing to switch.
The Republican congressional leadership indicated that it might abandon its longstanding opposition and accept an Administration bill banning mailorder sales of all guns or even a stronger version by Tydings requiring gun owners to obtain licenses and register their weapons. "Let the testimony show the need," declared Senate G.O.P. Leader Everett M. Dirksen, "and I'll be Johnny-on-the-spot in supporting it."
Even Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a Montanan with a large hunting and shooting constituency, did a turnabout by announcing for Tydings' bill. "Maybe it's a recognition that we've come to the end of an era. It's a new day, a new population, in the cities now. Lots of things are coming together at once, and they are bringing a change in the thinking of the American people."
Glassen on Goebbels. Not all of the people. The N.R.A. is just beginning to mount its counterattack, and most legislators know how fierce that offensive can get. As New York State Democratic Assemblyman Leonard Stavisky, who tangled with the group over a gun bill last month, puts it: "They tell legislators, 'We will terminate from public office anybody who disagrees with us,' and the legislators believe them." As well they should. N.R.A. officials have privately bragged that within 72 hours the organization can produce half a million letters from its members on any gun bill.
As unofficial spokesman for the nation's private-arms industry, N.R.A. provides safety and conservation programs for gun owners--who also benefit by receiving cut-rate surplus weapons and free ammunition, courtesy of the Pentagon. Most of N.R.A.'s members are responsible hunters, target shooters and collectors, scrupulously respectful of their weapons and aware of the need for some control; the outfit likes to boast that John Kennedy was a life member. But some are notorious hotheads, drawn from such ultraright paramilitary outfits as the Minutemen and the California Rangers. After New York Freelance Author Carl Bakal published his celebrated antigun tract, The Right to Bear Arms, N.R.A. members wrote him by the hundreds; among the friendlier salutations were "poltroon," "blatherskite" and "Communist and pervert." Exclaims Bakal: "And these are the people who own guns!"
As sentiment for controls surged, N.R.A. President Harold Glassen, a loose-tongued Lansing, Mich., lawyer, declared: "We see Americans behaving like children, parroting nonsense, accepting unproved theory as fact and reacting as the Germans did in the 1930s as the Goebbels propaganda mill drilled lies into their subconsciousness."
For Social Welfare. Despite N.R.A.'s oft-demonstrated tactics, Glassen insists: "All this talk about the gun lobby is baloney. We have yet to spend a single dollar on lobbying; we have never hired a lobbyist. We don't tell anyone to write his Congressman." In fact, no lobby in Washington--except perhaps the American Medical Association, which came a cropper on Medicare--rivals N.R.A. in effectiveness. Exempt from taxes under the same Internal Revenue Service provision that covers the Volunteer Firemen and the Veterans' Association, the N.R.A. is classified as an organization "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare," with earnings "devoted exclusively to charitable, educational or recreational purposes." The same provision allows it to lobby but without requiring it to register. And lobby the N.R.A. does--in and out of Congress.
At least two dozen Congressmen are members, including Iowa's Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper. N.R.A. has 182 "field representatives" working on legislation, not only in Washington but in 47 state capitals as well. Much of its $5,700,000 budget goes toward promoting such slogans as "Shooting Is Safe." Despite its insistence that it does not directly tell its members to write their Congressmen, astounding numbers of them certainly do--usually sending identically worded messages supplied by the organization's magazine, American Rifleman. Tydings, for example, received thousands of letters with his name misspelled Tidings aftter it appeared that way in the magazine.
Any time a gun bill is introduced anywhere, a number of basic shibboleths are constantly repeated by N.R.A. officials. Among them:
"The constitutional right to bear arms will be infringed."
N.R.A. is fond of quoting the second half of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, but not the first. The full amendment reads: "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." Consistently, federal courts have interpreted the Second Amendment as referring to a collective right, not an individual privilege. The Supreme Court ruled as far back as 1939 that the amendment expressly concerns "the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia." Nevertheless, the major gun magazines endlessly celebrate the majesty and inviolability of the "armed citizen." In a recent issue of the noisy Guns & Ammo magazine, one article is titled: "The American and His Gun--A Tradition the World Envies."
"Guns don't kill people; people kill people."
The N.R.A. points out that autos kill three times as many Americans as guns each year, and asks archly: "Why not ban them?" (One reply: Autos are registered. Why not guns?) N.R.A. officials also cite a study made by University of Pennsylvania Sociologist Marvin E. Wolfgang of 588 criminal homicides committed in Philadelphia over a four-year period. He concluded that, given "sufficient motivation or provocation," it makes no difference whether a gun is handy--if not, the offender "would use a knife to stab or fists to beat his victim to death." But Wolfgang has since modified that view. As Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin puts it: "When people have guns, they use them. A wife gets mad at her husband, and instead of throwing a dish she grabs the gun and kills him." Agrees Psychiatrist Robert Coles: "Every psychiatrist has treated patients who were thankful that guns were not around at one time or another in their lives."
If guns were to be registered, the anticontrol fraternity maintains, so should knives, golf clubs, axes, beer bottles and every other implement occasionally used to kill. (Guns & Ammo facetiously suggests registering the genitals of all American males, since there are so many rapes in the U.S.) Still, nothing else can translate a fleeting murderous impulse into action more efficiently or finally than a gun. There is no need for contact, none of the effort required to stab or bludgeon a human being.
"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."
The N.R.A. argument is that if various categories of guns are prohibited, the law-abiding citizen will be left defenseless while the criminal will ignore the law and steal a gun--"as he usually does anyway." In fact, he usually does not and has no need to, when it is so ludicrously easy to purchase one legitimately. A 1965 study showed that nearly 25% of 4,069 mail-order guns shipped by two Chicago firms went to convicted criminals. In New Jersey, one in every five recipients of mail-order firearms has a criminal record. Massachusetts State Police Captain John Collins notes that of 4,506 guns confiscated from criminals in a recent period, only six had been stolen.
Criminologists wonder just how good an idea it is for Everyman to keep a pistol in the dresser drawer for self-defense. Aside from the moral issue of whether a burglar deserves to be executed for the relatively minor crime of property theft, there is the practical point that if the armed citizen pulls a gun, he is likelier to get shot than is the generally more experienced burglar. Moreover, two-thirds of criminal assaults and three-fourths of homicides result from quarrels among family or friends. U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Ralph Greenson says: "Guns not only fail to resolve aggression, they provoke it."
"First registration, then discrimination, finally confiscation."
The fear that the Government will end all private ownership of firearms underlies the N.R.A.'s opposition to registration of any weapons. The organization's officials argue that once local police were empowered to reject applicants for a permit to own a weapon, they would do so capriciously or on the basis of personal or political prejudice. Not surprisingly, such Negro militants as California's Black Panthers are dead set against gun registration, maintaining that it would be used to disarm them. Similarly, the New Left newspaper, the Guardian, has declared its opposition to "restrictions on weapons which would deprive sections of the population of a means of self-defense" while "the state itself is abundantly armed." In this, the way-out left sounds oddly similar to the way-out right, whose spokesmen claim that if guns were registered, invading Communists would merely have to get the lists from police stations in order to disarm the nation and choke off resistance.
No doubt the antigun advocates, too, sometimes go beyond what is reasonable or at least practical. Some urge complete confiscation. "I see no reason," says University of Chicago Sociologist Morris Janowitz, "why anyone in a democracy should own a weapon."
That solution is probably far too drastic. Some 20 million Americans are hunters, and though accidents kill up to 800 of them each year, few would want their sport circumscribed--or destroyed--by too-stringent gun laws. Thousands of other Americans engage in such pastimes as skeet and trap shooting, muzzle-loading competitions with old-style rifles, and bench-rest shooting, whose enthusiasts weigh their powder, mold their bullets and come close to perfect marksmanship.
In great stretches of the West--notably Montana, Utah, Colorado and Idaho--a standard fixture in most rural homes is the .30-30 in the corner, the universal "thutty-thutty" deer rifle. In the South and Southwest, rare is the farmer who does not keep a rifle in his pickup all the time; Lyndon Johnson used to have a deer rifle clipped under the front seat of his Lincoln while at the ranch. In Alaska, shooting is a way of life--and often of preservation.
If any weapon is likely to be outlawed entirely it is the handgun. The U.S. Mayors Conference last week recommended that its ownership be banned for all but law-enforcement officials. Japan, with 100 million people, allows only 100 of them to own pistols, for shooting matches. Britain authorizes their use on pistol ranges and almost nowhere else. But in the U.S., 70% of shooting deaths are caused by handguns. Often the weapon is a cheap, .22-cal. import. In Houston, where 244 murders were committed in 1967, a tinny .22 known as the "Saturday-night special" figures in a disproportionate number of killings. In Charlotte, N.C., foreign-made light pistols are known as "hand grenades" among police because they are likely to explode in the user's grip. Mass-stamped from light metals, they lose whatever accuracy they have after as few as five shots.
The Equalizer. With all the dangers that guns represent, why are Americans so enamored of them? For the man with a feeling of insecurity or inferiority, a pistol in his pocket is the "equalizer," the "difference." For the gang youth, it is a badge of bravery. Ernest Dichter, director of the Institute for Motivational Research at Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., maintains that "we're just emerging from a brawn culture into a brain culture, and brains are not as dramatic." Guns compensate for that, Dichter adds, by serving as "a virility source. Clyde [of Bonnie and Clyde] is impotent, and he is using his gun to balance that." Indeed, Freudians point out that the gun is an obvious phallic symbol, conferring on its owner a feeling of potency and masculinity.* In a talk with French Novelist Remain Gary two weeks before he died, Robert Kennedy perceptively touched on a related aspect of the gun mystique. "I like Hemingway very much as a writer," said Kennedy, "but he was the founder of a ridiculous and dangerous myth: that of the firearm and the virile beauty of the act of killing."
Quite properly, many observers note that changing gun laws will not help much as long as people yield to the violent impulses that seize them. "Cain and not Abel, is the father of man," notes Chicago Psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim. Half a century ago in The Golden Bough, Anthropologist Sir James Frazer discerned "a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture." To cope with what Sir James described as this "standing menace to civilization," many authorities suggest that a way must be found to control aggression and, as Detroit Psychiatrist Bruce Danto puts it, to "detect in the early years the signs of a guy who is an accident waiting to happen."
Even the Bedouins. Gun controls obviously cannot stop crime or wanton killing, and no one claims that they can. Laws can be circumvented. At the 1957 Apalachin "crime convention," twelve of the 35 New York residents collared by police were "clean" under the provisions of the state's tough Sullivan law--they had pistol permits. Unless an amateur psychiatrist in a gun shop or a police station had recognized him as a paranoid schizophrenic, Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper who killed or wounded 46 people two years ago, would have been able to assemble his lethal armory despite strict gun controls. Sirhan Sirhan violated three California laws in merely possessing the pistol he used to kill Bobby Kennedy, but he still had the weapon. On the other hand, reasonable laws might have prevented Lee Harvey Oswald from committing what Lyndon Johnson called "murder by mail order"; Oswald would also probably have been refused a gun permit because of his background.
To be effective, gun-control legislation should be rational and uniform. Otherwise, as New Jersey's Governor Richard Hughes complained last week, states with strong laws will invariably be "subverted" by those with weak ones. Michigan residents who want to avoid buying a pistol permit--and having their background checked--simply drive across the Ohio border to Toledo, where guns are sold even at the candy counter of a sleazy hamburger stand. Massachusetts police in a ten-year study traced 87% of the guns used in local crimes to purchases in neighboring states where no waiting period or background investigation was required.
High on the list of reforms sought by many gun-control advocates is a system of dual registration, similar to the one for autos. The driver is licensed, and his vehicle is registered separately. The same principle could apply to guns --licensing for the owner, registration for each of his firearms. It would be a nuisance, to be sure, but, given the destructive power of guns, it would hardly be an outrageous imposition in an industrial society that demands registration of cars, businesses, private planes, dogs and marriages, as well as prescriptions for many mild drugs. Even the Bedouins of Jordan, rootless wanderers and fierce individualists all, are required to register their rifles with desert police.
Some authorities have suggested that every firearm sold be "fingerprinted" in advance by test-firing to determine its ballistic pattern. In the age of the computer, such distinctive patterns could be kept on file without too much difficulty. With gun owners carrying a license and a registration card for every weapon, ammunition could also be registered and sold only to those with proper credentials. Such all-embracing registration would aid police in both detection and prevention of crimes. Finally, proponents of gun-law reform argue that, just as prospective drivers must undergo examinations, the applicant for a license to possess a gun should be required to pass a thorough written exam and a proficiency test in handling it. At present, no tests are given --even for eyesight.
Such controls would be costly and undoubtedly irksome. Even so, the point has come when they are essential. The frontier is gone, and its folkways cannot reasonably be condoned in a dense, tension-filled urban society. The time has long passed when a firearm can be allowed to serve as an instrument of individual justice--as it too often is even today.
Intelligent gun legislation, as Lyndon Johnson pointed out, "will not in itself end the violence. But reason and experience tell us that it will slow it down --that it will spare many innocent lives." Whatever the cost, it would be worth it to reduce the risk of killing a Kennedy, a King--or a kid gunned down by an ignorant hunter.
* Though, as Freud himself might have conceded, such may not always be the case. Once, when a colleague told him that his ever-present cigar was a phallic symbol, Freud replied gruffly: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
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