Book Review

The Politics of Gun Control

N Engl J Med 1997; 336:74January 2, 1997

Article

The Politics of Gun Control
By Robert J. Spitzer. 210 pp. Chatham, N.J., Chatham House, 1995. $17.95. ISBN: 1-56643-021-6

Robert Spitzer's The Politics of Gun Control is a balanced and illuminating overview of the gun-control debate as it existed before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: a battle centered on crime and pitting an omnipotent National Rifle Association (NRA) against an isolated gun-control movement.

Chapter 2 stands out as a thoughtful, detailed analysis of the “talismanic” Second Amendment, its history, and the current debate surrounding it. Warning of the deleterious effect of “rights talk” — a term coined by constitutional scholar Mary Ann Glendon to mean “our increasing tendency to speak of what is most important to us in terms of rights, and to frame nearly every social controversy as a clash of rights” — Spitzer decisively illustrates that the Second Amendment places no obstacles in the way of gun control, including bans on handguns. In looking at the small band of writers who churn out the vast majority of individual-rights “scholarship,” Spitzer notes, “This argument is usually supported by plucking key phrases from court cases, colonial or federal debate that emphasize the right of all Americans to carry guns. The first problem with this analysis is that it often relies on supporting quotes pulled out of context.” Spitzer credits much of the success of pro-gun advocates in convincing Americans that the Constitution guarantees their right to own a gun to the “sheer repetition of the claimed existence of such rights in the public press and the general public debate on gun control.” He adds, “When this repetition is paired with the complexity of the full story of the amendment . . . it is not too surprising that the complex truth gets lost.”

Spitzer's review of outside researchers' views on gun control offers some small pleasures for the supporter of gun control. He matter-of-factly reviews and dismisses the work of Florida State University professor Gary Kleck (whose discredited claim that Americans use firearms more than 2 million times a year to stop crimes is routinely cited by the NRA) with the observation that Kleck's “estimates are at odds with national crime data, and suffer from severe methodological problems.” Spitzer notes in the book's preface that “declaratory statements by some [pro-gun] lawyers and academics that they were good liberals, or not members of various gun associations, seemed anxious efforts to protest too much.” But the book also has its minor disappointments. Spitzer commits errors in history (he claims that from “1968 to 1988, no bill to expand gun controls came to a vote on the floor of either house of Congress,” overlooking the 1972 Senate passage of a ban on “Saturday-night specials”) as well as policy (he states that total “disarmament” is “certainly the intent of some proponents of gun control” in spite of the fact that no gun-control organization supports a ban on all guns).

In his conclusion, Spitzer advocates an “arms-control” framework of “bargaining and accommodation” between gun-control advocates and organizations such as the NRA. Yet the debate over gun control has undergone dramatic changes. These include a greater understanding that crime is merely the most recognized aspect of the broad-based public health crisis that gun violence represents, as well as the involvement of new organizations representing affected constituencies (e.g., young people, civil rights advocates, consumers, and women, as well as the medical and public health communities). Accompanying this has been a greater focus on the firearms industry itself and its unique lack of health and safety regulations. In the light of the NRA's political and financial woes in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Spitzer's arms-control analogy may be fitting only in the sense that, like the “evil empire” of the Soviet past, today's NRA is a virtual nation-state fast approaching moral and financial bankruptcy.

Josh Sugarmann
Violence Policy Center, Washington, DC 20036