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.