THE RIGHT BOOKS

Despite the fury—or perhaps because of it—with which “the Great American Gun War,” as B. Bruce-Briggs called it, has been waged for nearly twenty years, only in the past ten has it produced careful, credible analyses upon which sensible political and bureaucratic policies might find some kind of justifying basis. Thus, as one analyst, writing in 1976, observed, “While the consistent failure of guncontrol proposals to pass Congress has often been blamed on lobbying efforts of the NRA, part of the problem may be that the case for more stringent gun-control regulation has not been made in any scientific fashion.”

Firearms and Violence: Issues of Public Policy (Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research/Ballinger Publishing Company, Cambridge, Mass.; $38; $15.95 paper), edited by Don B. Kates Jr. and with a Foreword by John Kaplan, is both a summation and a furthering of what has been accomplished in the field during the past ten years: an anthology of 12 articles covering such subjects as “Public Opinion and Intellectual Attitudes,” “Gun Ownership as a Cause of Violent Crime,” “Gun Ownership and Crime Deterrence,” “Gun Ownership as a Deterrence to Despotism,” and “Political and Social Aspects of Gun Ownership.” “Frankly,” Kates writes, “I have not asked, and therefore do not know, the positions of the other contributors on particular firearms policy options. It is fair to say that each of them supports the concept of ‘gun control’ in the abstract. But they tend to be skeptical of the extravagant claims that have sometimes been made for the efficacy of certain control mechanisms, and particularly of whether the benefits of moving from control to general prohibition would outweigh the costs.” Nevertheless, and despite the reasonableness and balance of the book, there is no question that, by throwing into doubt so much that has been accepted in certain circles as axiomatic, it tells heavily against the side of the “reformers”—i.e., of the highly ideological wing of the gun-control lobby, which is to say the vast majority of that lobby.

Despite the fury—or perhaps because of it—with which “the Great American Gun War,” as B. Bruce-Briggs called it, has been waged for nearly twenty years, only in the past ten has it produced careful, credible analyses upon which sensible political and bureaucratic policies might find some kind of justifying basis. Thus, as one analyst, writing in 1976, observed, “While the consistent failure of guncontrol proposals to pass Congress has often been blamed on lobbying efforts of the NRA, part of the problem may be that the case for more stringent gun-control regulation has not been made in any scientific fashion.”

Firearms and Violence: Issues of Public Policy (Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research/Ballinger Publishing Company, Cambridge, Mass.; $38; $15.95 paper), edited by Don B. Kates Jr. and with a Foreword by John Kaplan, is both a summation and a furthering of what has been accomplished in the field during the past ten years: an anthology of 12 articles covering such subjects as “Public Opinion and Intellectual Attitudes,” “Gun Ownership as a Cause of Violent Crime,” “Gun Ownership and Crime Deterrence,” “Gun Ownership as a Deterrence to Despotism,” and “Political and Social Aspects of Gun Ownership.” “Frankly,” Kates writes, “I have not asked, and therefore do not know, the positions of the other contributors on particular firearms policy options. It is fair to say that each of them supports the concept of ‘gun control’ in the abstract. But they tend to be skeptical of the extravagant claims that have sometimes been made for the efficacy of certain control mechanisms, and particularly of whether the benefits of moving from control to general prohibition would outweigh the costs.” Nevertheless, and despite the reasonableness and balance of the book, there is no question that, by throwing into doubt so much that has been accepted in certain circles as axiomatic, it tells heavily against the side of the “reformers”—i.e., of the highly ideological wing of the gun-control lobby, which is to say the vast majority of that lobby.