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  magine
the world without guns" was a bumper sticker that began making
the rounds after the murder of ex-Beatle John Lennon on December
18, 1980. Last year, Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, followed up on that
sentiment by announcing she would become a spokeswoman for Handgun
Control, Inc. (which later changed its name to the Brady Campaign
to Prevent Gun Violence, and which was previously named the National
Council to Control Handguns).
So let's try
hard to imagine what a world without guns would look like. It isn't
hard to do. But be forewarned: It's not a pretty picture.
The way to
get to a gun-free world, the gun-prohibition groups tell us, is
to pass laws banning them. We can begin by imagining the enactment
of laws which ban all non-government possession of firearms.
It's not likely
that local bans will do the job. Take, for example, New York's 1911
Sullivan Law, which imposed an exceedingly restrictive handgun-licensing
scheme on New York City. In recent decades, administrative abuses
have turned the licensing statute into what amounts to prohibition,
except for tenacious people who navigate a deliberately obstructive
licensing system.
Laws affect
mainly those willing to obey them. And where there's an unfulfilled
need — and money to be made — there's usually a way around
the law. Enter the black market, which flourishes all the more vigorously
with ever-increasing restrictions and prohibitions. In TV commercials
that aired last August, New York City Republican (sort of) mayoral
candidate Mike Bloomberg informed voters that "in 1993, there
were as many as 2 million illegal guns on the street." The
insinuation was that all those guns were in the hands of criminals,
and the implication was that confiscating the guns would make the
city a safer place. What Bloomberg never explained was how he planned
to shut down the black market.
So let's imagine,
instead, a nationwide gun ban, or maybe even a worldwide ban.
Then again,
heroin and cocaine have been illegal in the United States, and most
of the world, for nearly a century. Huge resources have been devoted
to suppressing their production, sale, and use, and many innocent
people have been sacrificed in the crossfire of the "drug war."
Yet heroin and cocaine are readily available on the streets of almost
all large American cities, and at prices that today are lower than
in previous decades.
Perhaps a global
prohibition law isn't good enough. Maybe imposing the harshest penalty
possible for violation of such a law will give it real teeth: mandatory
life in prison for possession of a gun, or even for possession of
a single bullet. (We won't imagine the death penalty, since the
Yoko crowd doesn't like the death penalty.)
On second thought,
Jamaica's Gun Court Act of 1974 contained just such a penalty, and
even that wasn't sufficient. On August 18, 2001, Jamaican Melville
Cooke observed
that today, "the only people who do not have an illegal firearm
[in this country], are those who do not want one." Violent
crime in Jamaica is
worse than ever, as gangsters and trigger-happy police commit
homicides with impunity, and only the law-abiding are disarmed.
Yet the Jamaican
government wants to globalize its failed policy. In July 2001, Burchell
Whiteman, Jamaica's Minister of Education, Youth and Culture spoke
at the U.N. Disarmament Conference to demand
the "implementation of measures that would limit the production
of weapons to levels that meet the needs for defence and national
security."
And as long
as governments are allowed to have guns, there will be gun factories
to steal from. Some of these factories might have adequate security
measures to prevent theft, including theft by employees. But in
a world with about 200 nations, most of them governed
by kleptocracies, it's preposterous to imagine that some of
those "government-only" factories won't become suppliers
for the black market. Alternatively, corrupt military and police
could supply firearms to the black market.
We'd better
revise our strategy. Rather than wishing for laws (which cannot,
even imaginably, create a gun-free world), let's be more ambitious,
and imagine that all guns vanish. Even guns possessed by government
agents. And let's close all the gun factories, too. That ought to
put the black market out of business.
Voilà!
Instant peace!
Back to the Drawing Board
Then again.....it's not very difficult to make a workable firearm.
As J. David Truby points out in his book Zips, Pipes, and Pens:
Arsenal of Improvised Weapons, "Today, all of the improvised/modified
designs [of firearms] remain well within the accomplishment of the
mechanically unskilled citizen who does not have access to firearms
through other means."
In the article
"Gun-Making
as a Cottage Industry," Charles Chandler observed that
Americans "have a reputation as ardent hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers,
building everything from ship models to home improvements."
The one area they have not been very active in is that of firearm
construction. And that, Chandler explained, is only because "well-designed
and well-made firearms are generally available as items of commerce."
A complete
gun ban, or highly restrictive licensing amounting to near-ban,
would create a real incentive for gun making to become a "cottage
industry".
It's already
happening in Great Britain, a consequence of the complete ban on
civilian possession of handguns imposed by the Firearms Act of 1997.
Not only are the Brits swamped today with illegally imported firearms,
but local, makeshift gun factories have sprung up to compete.
British police
already know about some of them. Officers from Scotland Yard's Metropolitan
Police Serious Crime Group South recently recovered 12 handgun replicas
which were converted
to working models. An auto repair shop in London served as the
front for the novel illegal gun factory. Police even found some
enterprising gun-makers turning screwdrivers into workable firearms,
and producing firearms disguised
as ordinary key rings.
In short, closing
the Winchester Repeating Arms factory — and all the others
— will not spell the end of the firearm business.
Just take the
case of Bougainville, the largest island in the South Pacific's
Solomon Islands chain. Bougainville was the site of a bloody, decade-long
secessionist
uprising against domination by the government of Papua New Guinea,
aided and abetted by the Australian government. The conflict there
was the longest-running confrontation in the Pacific since the end
of World War II, and caused the deaths of 15,000 to 20,000 islanders.
During the
hostilities, which included a military blockade of the island, one
of the goals was to deprive the Bougainville Revolutionary Army
(BRA) of its supply of arms. The tactic failed: the BRA simply learned
how to make its own guns using materiel and ammunition left over
from the War.
In fact, at
the United Nations Asia Pacific Regional Disarmament Conference
held in Spring 2001, it was quietly admitted that the BRA, within
ten years of its formation, had managed to manufacture a production
copy of the M16 automatic rifle and other machine guns. (That makes
one question the real intent behind the U.N. Conference on the Illicit
Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All its Aspects, which
followed several months later: the U.N. leadership can't be so daft
as to fail to recognize the implications for world disarmament after
learning of the success of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army.)
If this single
island of Bougainville can produce its own weapons, the Philippine
Islands have long had a thriving cottage industry to manufacture
firearms — despite very restrictive gun laws imposed by the
Marcos dictatorship and some other regimes.
It looks like
we'll need to revisit our fantasy, yet again.
Okay. By proclamation
of Kopel, Gallant, and Eisen, not only do all firearms — every
last one of them — vanish instantly, but there shall be no
further remanufacturing.
That last part's
a bit tricky. Auto repair shops, hobbyists, revolutionaries —
everyone with decent machine shop skills — can make a gun from
something. This takes us down the same road as drug prohibition:
With primary anti-drug laws having proven themselves unenforceable,
secondary laws have been added to prohibit possession of items which
could be used to manufacture drugs. Even making suspicious purchases
at a gardening store can earn one a "dynamic entry" visit
from the local SWAT team.
But laws proscribing
the possession of gun-manufacturing items would have to be even
broader than laws against possession of drug-manufacturing items,
because there are so many tools which can be used to make guns,
or be made into guns. What we'd really have to do is carefully control
every possible step in the gun-making process. That means the registration
of all machine tools, and the federal licensing of plumbers (similar
to current federal licensure of pharmacies), auto mechanics, and
all those handymen with their screwdrivers. And we'd need to stamp
a serial number on pipes (potential gun barrels) in every bathroom
and automobile — and everywhere else one finds pipes —
and place all the serial numbers in a federal registry.
Today, the
antigun lobbies who claim they don't want to ban all guns still
insist that registration of every single gun and licensing of every
gun owner is essential to keep guns from falling into the wrong
hands. If so, it's hard to argue that licensing and registration
of gun manufacturing items would not be essential to prevent illicit
production of guns.
Thus, we would
have to control every part of the manufacturing process. That would
add up to a very expensive, complicated proposition. Even a 1% noncompliance
rate with the "Firearms Precursors Control Act" would
leave an immense supply of materials available for black-market
gun making.
In order to
ensure total conformity with the act, it's difficult to imagine
leaving most existing constitutional protections in place. The mind
boggles at the kinds of search and seizure laws required to make
certain that people do not possess unregistered metal pipes or screwdrivers!
For example,
just to enforce a ban on actual guns (not gun precursors), the Jamaican
government needed to wipe out many common law controls on police
searches, and many common law guarantees of fair trials. We'd have
to trash the Constitution in order to completely prevent a black
market in gun precursors from taking hold. Still, as the gun-prohibition
lobby always says, if it saves just one life, it would be worth
it.
But, what if,
despite these extreme measures, the black market still functioned
— as it almost always does, when there is sufficient demand?
It's time to
seriously revisit our strategy for a gun-free world. Maybe there's
a shortcut around all of this.
Okay. We're
going to make a truly radical, no-holds-barred proposal this time,
take a quantum leap in science, and go where no man has gone before.
There may be those who scoff at our proposal, but it can succeed
where all other strategies have failed.
We, Kopel,
Gallant, and Eisen, hereby imagine that, from this day forth, the
laws of chemical combustion are revoked. We hereby imagine that
gunpowder — and all similar compounds — no longer have
the capacity to burn and release the gases necessary to propel a
bullet.
Peace
for Our Time
Finally, for the first time, a gun-free world is truly within our
grasp — and it's time to see what man hath wrought. And for
that, all we have to do is take a look back at the kind of world
our ancestors lived in.
To say that
life in the pre-gunpowder world was violent would be an understatement.
Land travel, especially over long distances, was fraught with danger
from murderers, robbers, and other criminals. Most women couldn't
protect themselves from rape, except by granting unlimited sexual
access to one male in exchange for protection from other males.
Back then,
weapons depended on muscle power. Advances in weaponry primarily
magnified the effect of muscle power. The stronger one is, the better
one's prospects for fighting up close with an edged weapon like
a sword or a knife, or at a distance with a bow or a javelin (both
of which require strong arms). The superb ability of such "old-fashioned"
edged weapons to inflict carnage on innocents was graphically demonstrated
by the stabbing deaths of eight second graders on June 8, 2001,
by former school clerk Mamoru Takuma in gun-free Osaka, Japan.
When it comes
to muscle power, young
men usually win over women, children, and the elderly. It was
warriors who dominated society in gun-free feudal Europe, and a
weak man usually had to resign himself to settle
on a life of toil and obedience in exchange for a place within
the castle walls when evil was afoot.
And what of
the women? According to the custom of jus primae noctis,
a lord had the right to sleep with the bride of a newly married
serf on the first night — a necessary price for the serf to
pay — in exchange for the promise of safety and security (does
that ring a bell?). Not uncommonly, this arrangement didn't end
with the wedding night, since one's lord had the practical power
to take any woman, any time. Regardless of whether jus primae
noctis was formally observed in a region, rich, strong men had
little besides their conscience to stop them from having their way
with women who weren't protected by another wealthy strongman.
But there's
yet another problem with imagining gunpowder out of existence: We
get rid of firearms, but we don't get rid of guns. With the advent
of the blow gun some 40,000 years ago, man discovered the efficacy
of a tube for concentrating air power and aiming a missile, making
the eventual appearance of airguns inevitable. So gunpowder or no
gunpowder, all we've been doing, thus far, amounts to quibbling
over the means for propelling something out of a tube.
Airguns date
back to somewhere around the beginning of the 17th century. And
we don't mean airguns like the puny Daisy Red Ryder BB Gun with
a compass in the stock, longed for by Ralphie in Jean Shepard's
1984 classic A
Christmas Story ("No, Ralphie, you can't have a BB
gun — you'll shoot your eye out!").
No, we're talking
serious lethality here. The kind of powder-free gun that can hurl
a 7.4 oz. projectile with a muzzle energy of 1,082 foot-pounds.
Compare that to the 500 foot-pounds of muzzle energy from a typical
.357 Magnum round! Even greater projectile energies are achievable
using gases like nitrogen or helium, which create higher pressures
than air does.
Before the
advent of self-contained powder cartridge guns, airguns were considered
serious weapons. In fact, three hundred years ago, air-powered guns
were among the most powerful and accurate large-bore rifles around.
While their biggest disadvantages were cost and intricacy of manufacture,
they were more dependable and could be fired more rapidly than firearms
of the same period. A butt-reservoir .31
airgun was carried by Lewis and Clark on their historic expedition,
and used successfully for taking game. [See Robert D. Beeman, "Proceeding
On to the Lewis & Clark Airgun," Airgun Revue 6
(2000): 13-33.] Airguns even saw duty in military engagements more
than 200 years ago.
Today, fully
automatic M-16-style airguns are a reality. It was only because
of greater cost relative to powder guns, and the greater convenience
afforded by powder arms, that airgun technology was never pushed
to its lethal limits.
Other non-powder
weapon systems have competed for man's attention, as well. The 20th
century was the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. And
while firearms were used for killing (for
example, with machine guns arranged to create interlocking fields
of fire in the trench warfare of World War I), they were hardly
essential. By far, the
greatest number of deliberate killings occurred during the genocides
and democides perpetrated by governments against disarmed populations.
The instruments of death ranged from Zyklon B gas to machetes to
starvation.
Imagine No Claws
To imagine a world with no guns is to imagine a world in which the
strong rule the weak, in which women are dominated by men, and in
which minorities are easily abused or mass-murdered by majorities.
Practically speaking, a firearm is the only weapon that allows a
weaker person to defend himself from a larger, stronger group of
attackers, and to do so at a distance. As George Orwell observed,
a weapon like a rifle "gives claws to the weak."
The failure
of imagination among people who yearn for a gun-free world is their
naive assumption that getting rid of claws will get rid of the desire
to dominate and kill. They fail to acknowledge the undeniable fact
that when the weak are deprived of claws (or firearms), the strong
will have access to other weapons, including sheer muscle power.
A gun-free world would be much more dangerous for women, and much
safer for brutes and tyrants.
The one society
in history that successfully gave up firearms was Japan in the 17th
century, as detailed in Noel Perrin's superb book Giving Up the
Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword 1543-1879. An isolated island
with a totalitarian dictatorship, Japan was able to get rid of the
guns. Historian Stephen Turnbull summarizes the result:
[The dictator]
Hidéyoshi's resources were such that the edict was carried
out to the letter. The growing social mobility of peasants was
thus flung suddenly into reverse. The ikki, the warrior-monks,
became figures of the past . . . Hidéyoshi had deprived
the peasants of their weapons. Iéyasu [the next ruler]
now began to deprive them of their self respect. If a peasant
offended a samurai he might be cut down on the spot by the samurai's
sword. [The
Samurai: A Military History (New York: Macmillan, 1977).]
The inferior
status of the peasantry having been affirmed by civil disarmament,
the Samurai enjoyed kiri-sute gomen, permission to kill and
depart. Any disrespectful member of the lower class could be executed
by a Samurai's sword.
The Japanese
disarmament laws helped mold the culture of submission to authority
which facilitated Japan's domination by an imperialist military
dictatorship in the 1930s, which led the nation into a disastrous
world war.
In short, the
one country that created a truly gun-free society created a society
of harsh class oppression, in which the strongmen of the upper class
could kill the lower classes with impunity. When a racist, militarist,
imperialist government took power, there was no effective means
of resistance. The gun-free world of Japan turned into just the
opposite of the gentle, egalitarian utopia of John Lennon's song
"Imagine."
Instead of
imagining a world without a particular technology, what about imagining
a world in which the human heart grows gentler, and people treat
each other decently? This is part of the vision of many of the world's
great religions. Although we have a long way to go, there is no
denying that hundreds of millions of lives have changed for the
better because people came to believe what these religions teach.
If a truly
peaceful world is attainable — or, even if unattainable, worth
striving for — there is nothing to be gained from the futile
attempt to eliminate all guns. A more worthwhile result can flow
from the changing of human hearts, one soul at a time.
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