Guns, Part 2: Concealed Carry Fantasyland

Gun enthusiasts apparently see themselves and law-abiding folks in general as being in mortal danger at all times, and they see an armed citizenry as the way to keep that danger at bay. If criminals think you are armed, the thinking goes, they are less likely to act. That is undoubtedly true, and so, as a remedy for gun crime, has a certain surface plausibility. The problem: Stemming the predatory behavior of criminals won’t have much of an effect on the overall problem of death and dismemberment by firearm, because relatively little of it actually happens that way. The model – criminal accosting innocent person in situation that would be prevented or ameliorated by the victim’s possible or actual possession of weaponry – is a relatively rare circumstance. 

The sad reality is that most gun tragedies are not perpetrated by armed predators who make a practice of hunting down victims with pre-meditated intent to rob or rape them at gunpoint and injure or kill them if necessary -- the only class of people who might logically be expected to be cowed by the possibility that their would-be victims are “carrying.”  On the contrary, most gun tragedies are perpetrated by people we don’t think of or classify as criminals – people whose acts of violence would not have been affected one way or the other by the foreknowledge that their about-to-be victims might be armed.  That being the case, the most likely outcome of more guns in the possession of citizens is more gun violence, not less.

We saw a pretty good cross-section on a news magazine show some years ago which reported on a week’s worth of gun-related violence involving young people across the U.S.  Not a formal study, true, but nevertheless illuminating. The report included several suicides, several accidental shootings, a “desperation” shooting (a 16-year-old ran away from home and ended up killing a young policeman in rural Kansas), one involving a fight between a boy and his girlfriend, one in which a woman previously convicted of firearms violations shot and killed her 3-year-old child, and some gang-related incidents…thirty-five in all.

In exactly three of them, the fact that the victim was or was not armed clearly mattered.  In two cases, a store clerk shot a holdup man.  In the other, a store clerk was shot by a holdup man. In a fourth incident, a man was killed in his car and was thought to have been a robbery victim. Giving that last one the benefit of the doubt, that’s four out of almost three dozen, about 11 percent, in which any rational reading would conclude that gun possession by the victim – or the perception of gun possession by all possible victims -- could have either prevented the incident from happening or changed its outcome for the better.  (The gang-related shootings are a good example:  The shooters undoubtedly would have had a reasonable presumption that their victims were armed, yet they weren’t deterred.  And, if the victims had been armed, there’s some likelihood that the violence would have been exacerbated, not stemmed.)

Recent example (October 2015): A woman with a concealed carry permit pulled her piece and squeezed off a few rounds at a purported shoplifter fleeing from an Auburn Hills, Michigan Home Depot.  If a bystander had been hit by way of this incredibly reckless act, that person would have been injured or killed and the woman would have ended up in prison.  That’s how the use of a concealed gun is more likely to play out:  Not good-guy-takes-out-bad-guy, but Barney Fife-like pretend sheriff sprays bullets at innocent people.  Other examples – children getting accidentally shot (often by other children), people shooting other people in bar fights, people waving and discharging guns in disputes over who cut off who on the road – abound. An armed citizenry will almost certainly mean a hundred of these kinds of incidents for every one in which our hero saves the day by stopping an evildoer.  It will also mean – already does mean – guns being stolen from the good guys by the bad guys.  It’s estimated that 1.4 million guns were stolen in household burglaries and other property crimes between 2005 and 2010, and gun thefts from vehicles has become a bigger problem than ever. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) has said this: “Lost and stolen firearms pose a substantial threat to public safety and to law enforcement. Those that steal firearms commit violent crimes with stolen guns, transfer stolen firearms to others who commit crimes, and create an unregulated secondary market for firearms, including a market for those who are prohibited by law from possessing a gun.”

The elephant in the room when it comes to concealed carry – and for that matter, hand gun ownership in general -- is that the need for it is less real than it is rooted in a Clint Eastwoodesque fantasy.  Or, more accurately, a small but powerful collection of go-ahead-make-my-day fantasy scenarios: (1) A bad person invades my home and I bravely defend it by shooting the rotten bastard; (2) I am accosted on a dimly-lit street by an armed robber, and much to his shock and amazement, I turn the tables on him by pulling my own gun, shooting the scumbag through the heart; (3) There is a crazed shooter in a public place, and I save the day by cutting him down with my pistol.

The likelihood that any individual will live out his life without ever encountering any of these scenarios, or any other scenario in which possession of a hand gun resolves the problem successfully, is near 100-percent.  When such things do happen, they are big news and generally treated as man-bites-dog stories, reinforcing not how frequently these things occur but how rarely they do. If you own a hand gun, what you should step up to is this: it’s not to defend yourself and your family from an actual meaningful threat. If you own a handgun (or a rifle that looks like an AR-15, an Uzi, or a grease gun), it’s because you like to imagine using it.

Guns, Part 1:The Slaughter of Innocents

Clearly, the gun people will say anything to steer the conversation away from any action that would prevent anyone, anywhere from having a gun. So, we get this exquisitely irrational plan: To prevent mass shootings by mentally ill people, instead of focusing on keeping guns out of their hands, the thing to do is focus on treating mental illness. Or, to put it another way, it’s important to protect the 2nd amendment rights of the unhinged to keep a dozen or so firearms and a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition in the trunks of their cars and to use them to carry out their revenge fantasies on people in classrooms and movie theaters, while we search for the cure for mental illness. Same thing with, say, airline pilots, I guess: The remedy for keeping a mentally ill person from flying an airliner full of people into the ocean isn’t to keep the delusional out of the cockpit. The remedy is to cure mental illness. A few hundred people may die while we’re doing that, but, oh well. In the gun discussion, it would seem the one thing everyone could agree on is the need to keep guns and the mentally ill separate. But apparently not. In the nonsensical words of Gov. Chris Christie, we must, instead “get tough” on mental illness.

So, let's be clear. The way to prevent mentally ill people from shooting up movie theaters isn’t to cure mental illness, as laudable a goal as that is. It is to not let them have guns. End of story. And it is not unreasonable to say that anyone who would commit an act like those committed by Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Gerald Loughner, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof, et. al. – and now Chris Harper Mercer -- is by definition mentally ill. At the very least, the act itself is prima facie evidence of thought processes gone haywire.

Like day follows night, the discussion of “red flags” follows these shootings. And there is never any shortage of flags, nor is there any shortage of theories about why they were ignored or misunderstood or went unseen – why the dots weren’t connected. Heeding the flags and connecting the dots -- identifying people who shouldn’t have access to guns and then denying them that access – seems like the most productive area of concentration in the effort to stem the tide of gun deaths, because it’s both narrowly focused and politically possible. It won’t stop gun crime or gun accidents or gang shootings or suicides. But it should make the slaughter of innocents by the mentally deranged a considerably less regular occurrence, and that would be a huge accomplishment.

Yes, there are obstacles. It’s not an easy thing to do for a variety of reasons involving the difficulty of determining the mental health status of a given individual, privacy considerations (and laws), the indifference of gun manufacturers and, especially, gun sellers, and the sheer numbers of guns out there. But there has to be a way to prevent the Chris Harper Mercers of the world from getting their hands on guns and ammo. Never was the cliché more apt: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But it’s important to avoid getting distracted by blue-sky remedies like curing mental illness or, on the anti-gun side, ridding the country of guns altogether or banning them by law, neither of which is ever going to happen. Keeping guns and mentally ill people apart isn’t everything. But it’s a lot. Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.