Shaky Aim
Reviewing Shots in the Dark.

By Dave Kopel, research director, and Paul Blackman, research coordinator, National Rifle Association
November 3-4, 2001

Shots in the Dark: The Policy, Politics, and Symbolism of Gun Control, by William J. Vizzard (Rowman & Littlefield, 288 pages, $19.95).

ormer Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agent William Vizzard has authored one of the better books ever written by a gun-control advocate. Now a professor at Cal State University (Sacramento), Vizzard presents a stronger case for gun registration than any previous writer. He offers the best defense ever of the ATF. Unfortunately, the book is extremely careless, in matters large and small, and so the book makes much less of a contribution than it could.

The Strategy

Vizzard pursues two main strategies: First, using political-science tools to look at the history of gun control in the 20th century; and second, offering his own law-enforcement perspective on the realities of gun control.

The book starts with an effort to put the pro- and antigun movements into a general political-science context. The most important perspective, one discovers in subsequent chapters, is the "sovereignty" frame — the idea that the firearms issue is ultimately about whether the American people are sovereign, or whether the government is the master and not the servant. The sovereignty view, Vizzard acknowledges later in the book, stands as a potent obstacle to his proposed gun-control laws.

Vizzard then summarizes the gun debate regarding issues such as gun violence, self defense, gun-market trends, the sources of criminal guns, and strategies for gun control — including restrictions on carrying and use, access, selective prohibition, and cracking down on criminal misuse of guns. Vizzard also sums up existing federal and state laws.

Although Vizzard generally favors greater gun control, and dislikes the NRA, he is not dogmatic, and frequently debunks gun-control myths. He disputes the claim that the NRA is a front group for gun manufacturers, noting that the NRA consistently sides with consumers whenever their interests conflict with manufacturers. Likewise, the Clinton ATF said that because a small percentage of licensed gun dealers account for a huge percentage of crime-gun traces, there must be very large illegal gun trafficking by certain dealers. Vizzard explains out that the majority of licensed gun dealers sell very few guns. Accordingly, it would be expected that big stores in high-crime areas would inevitably be associated with a large number of traces.

Unfortunately, Vizzard's analytical technique sometimes amounts to summarizing the literature on each side of an issue, and then announcing which side he favors. Readers who want to see more of the sociological and criminological evidence for themselves, rather than relying on the author's conclusions, would be better off with Gary Kleck's Targeting Guns.

Vizzard next turns to the public and interest-group opinion and activities, and how the politics of the issues have changed — particularly over the past decade — with controversies such as militias, kids, and litigation.

In the middle section of the book, Vizzard backtracks somewhat, summarizing the 20th-century history of gun control and its enforcement by an evolving ATF. He covers the National Firearms Act of 1934 (and how the NRA stopped the Roosevelt administration from trying to ban handguns), the development of the Gun Control Act of 1968, the 1986 Firearms Owners' Protection Act (which reformed the 1968 law), the failed "handgun freeze" initiative in California in 1982, the Brady Act, the "assault weapon" ban, and other controversies.

This middle section is the strongest part of the book, thanks to Vizzard's wealth of knowledge about federal gun laws and their development. How many people know, for example, that the main reason that President Richard Nixon elevated the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from its lesser status as the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the Internal Revenue Service was to create a job for John Caulfield? Caulfield, by the way, happened to be the father of the Watergate scandal. John Erlichman explained:

Well there was an ex-cop named John Caulfield who had been one of Richard Nixon's bodyguards when he lived in New York and came to Washington, worked at the Treasury Department after Nixon became President. Caulfield very much wanted to get into the private detective business. The security business. And so at some point, as we were approaching the '72 election, he came to me with a plan for the development of an intelligence operation. And I looked at it. It was done up in a little folder and so on. And did nothing with it. I didn't see that it was germane to anything that I knew anything about that was going to happen in connection with the '72 election, so I just tossed it into the to-be-filed basket. It developed later that Caulfield took this to Gordon Liddy and other people at the Committee to Re-elect The President. And it probably was the seminal origin of all that business of Gordon Liddy and the Operation Gemstone and eventually the break-in at the Democratic headquarters. But it sort of bears the relationship to the Mississippi River that, I mean that Watergate, that one of those little lakes in Minnesota has to the Mississippi River. It's kind of up there at the headwater someplace.

After the Watergate break-in, Caulfield carried out White House counsel John Dean's orders to convey numerous offers of executive clemency to Watergate burglar James McCord, if McCord would stay quiet. Clearly unqualified to run ATF, Caulfield was instead appointed assistant director for enforcement, but after the Watergate cover-up unraveled, he had to leave ATF.

Vizzard has a good eye for the dominance of symbolism over substance in much of the gun-control debate. As he points out, the National Rifle Association was technically correct in fighting against proposals to ban "cop-killer bullets" and "plastic guns" (because neither really existed), but the fights were political disasters for the NRA. The issues had been invented mainly as tools to drive a wedge between the NRA and the police, and the phony issues did their job quite effectively.

Regarding the Brady Bill, Vizzard points out that the bill's real-world effects were overshadowed by the vast political battle over the bill.

The final section of Shots in the Dark concludes with Vizzard's policy recommendations, and his explanation for why they will never be adopted. First, Vizzard would greatly simplify the nation's extremely complex firearms laws, making them easier for ordinary citizens to understand and thus obey. So he supports statewide "preemption" laws which prohibit local governments from enacting gun controls. He would use federal grants and other incentives for states to fit their laws into a federal model. Given that handguns are made to be carried, he finds it illogical for laws to forbid lawful handgun owners from carrying their guns in public places.

Vizzard's major proposal for additional gun control is a comprehensive system of licensing for every gun owner, and registration for every gun. Vizzard's most important contribution is not the proposal, but his argument for it. He explains that the main benefit of licensing and registration laws would be to assist the prosecution of cases involving gun possession by felons. For example, if the police raid a house in which a convicted felon lives with his girlfriend, and a gun is found, the girlfriend (who has a clean record) may claim that the gun belongs to her; thus, she protects her boyfriend from major prison time for illegally owning a gun. With Vizzard's registration and licensing system in place, if the woman claimed that she owned the gun, she could be prosecuted for violating the licensing and registration law. The threat of prosecution would dissuade her, Vizzard hopes, from falsely claiming that the gun belongs to her.

Vizzard acknowledges that his proposal has little chance of being adopted. His plan for simplifying all laws, repealing the symbolic ones, and imposing a licensing and registration system is based on pragmatic logical analysis (at least as Vizzard sees things). But logic has virtually nothing to do with the gun-policy debate, Vizzard points out. With a very few exceptions, politicians and their staffs in Congress and in California (the state the Vizzard knows best) are blissfully ignorant of current gun laws, gun-law enforcement, and gun-policy facts. Instead, their views, whether for or against control, are almost entirely based on political calculation.

The NRA resists any new controls, no matter how innocuous, Vizzard argues. Meanwhile, Handgun Control, Inc. (renamed "the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence" after Vizzard's book was published) pursues an utterly illogical and opportunistic agenda, pushing whatever control du jour looks politically feasible, with no coherent vision of long-term policy (except, Vizzard admits, possibly satisfying many of its supporters' desire to ban gun ownership over the long term). Thus, there is no political force to promote logic-based gun policy, Vizzard concludes.

While the registration proposal (more on this below) makes an original contribution to the gun-policy debate, Shots in the Dark falls far short of its potential.

Weak Defense

With 27 years of experience as an agent, manager, and supervisor for ATF, Vizzard might be expected to defend ATF. But his defenses are too often wrong on crucial facts, or incomplete.

For example, he explains the key role of the 1971 Kenyon Ballew raid (extensively and repeatedly reported in the gun press, including in the NRA's The American Rifleman) in building sentiment for what eventually became the 1986 Firearms Owners' Protection Act. ATF agents violently broke in to the apartment of Kenyon Ballew (Vizzard spells it "Bellew") one night in Silver Spring, Maryland (Vizzard calls it "Silver Springs"), under the mistaken belief that Ballew possessed live hand grenades. Ballew was naked; his partner near naked; she screamed for the police; he grabbed a gun, and was promptly shot and crippled for life. Nothing unlawful was found in the search.

In Vizzard's version, the police identified themselves before breaking in, and does not mention that the Ballews dispute this assertion. Vizzard fails to mention that most of the ATF and accompanying Montgomery County officers were in undercover attire; omits the fact that there was a similar raid in another apartment where nothing was found; and says that, except for empty grenade hulls "no other illegal firearms were found." In fact, nothing illegal was found. There is no law against owning empty grenade hulls (which are used as paperweights and novelty items).

One of Vizzard's complaints against the NRA and others in the pro-gun movement who complain about gun-law-enforcement abuses is that the complaints are exclusively directed at ATF without comparison to other law-enforcement abuses, specifically those in the war on drugs, which Vizzard, accurately, says far outweigh gun-law abuses. This is a fair point, but pointing out that the Drug Enforcement Agency violates civil rights much more broadly than does the ATF does not excuse the ATF.

He cites our book No More Wacos: What's Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It, as an example of that one-sidedness. But as we detail in our book, the drug war has made ATF even more violent and militaristic, as it has many other law-enforcement agencies (including the FBI, which we analyze in detail). We hope that one day Vizzard will join former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara (a vigorous gun-control advocate) in advocating comprehensive drug-law reform — especially, defederalizing the issue — in order to reduce overall law enforcement violence and militarization.

In 1978, Congress overwhelmingly defunded a computerized gun-registration proposal which ATF had pushed at the behest of the Carter White House. Dealer sales records would have been reportedly quarterly to ATF. In the proposal, buyer names would not be reported, although once the registration system was in place, ATF would have been able to write its own regulation to start requiring buyer names to be reported. Vizzard notes that the congressional defeat humiliated ATF, and made the bureau very cautious about not offending Congress.

Vizzard sees no reason for the NRA to have fought ATF under the Carter administration, which Vizzard characterizes as too frightened to push for real gun control. Yet at the start of the Carter administration, Carter's top aide, Hamilton Jordan, promised that Carter would take on the gun lobby and "get those bastards." So why shouldn't the NRA fight when the Carter administration challenged it? Wouldn't it be reasonable for the NRA to expect that if it caved in to the Carter/ATF plan in round one, there would be a round two of worse laws or regulations?

Despite Vizzard's self-proclaimed expertise in firearms and understanding of the gun community (he has more real expertise on the former than the latter), he never notes the irrationality of ATF's "factoring criteria" for determining whether imported handguns have sporting purposes. Anyone familiar with firearms as Vizzard is would know that the most commonly used competitive handgun is the .22, which the factoring criteria discriminate against.

Vizzard faults the congressional Republicans for investigating Waco rather than the "militia" movement after Timothy McVeigh's terrorist attack in Oklahoma City, even though, as Vizzard admits, McVeigh was not part of the militia movement, having attended a couple meetings of one militia, and there being unwelcomed because of his extremism. Moreover, congressional oversight of executive-branch agencies who are exercising authority granted by Congress is one of the legislature's prime responsibilities. Congressional investigations of private groups which hold controversial political views could interfere with the exercise of First Amendment rights.

Consistent with current ATF public relations, Vizzard asserts that gun shows are a problem without citing any evidence. He says that gun shows are a potential source for medium- and large-capacity magazines — which also are not part of the crime problem. He does not mention that these same magazines are also available via gun publications and in gun stores.

Next: Litany of Errors