Fighting Fire With Fire
by Clayton Cramer
Solve the problem of arson with more fire? Are you crazy? But setting a
firebreak is a reasonable solution to a fire already out of control. Fire
isn't the problem; criminal intent is the problem.
Similarly, if someone suggests the solution to criminals misusing guns is
more guns, people similarly question your sanity; but again, it isn't the
tool, but how it's used. If the recent murders in Killeen, Texas, had been
tried in 1870, or in a number of counties in California today, the results
would have been very different, because one or more of the customers would
have shot the madman dead.
A madman bent on dying, with lots of unwilling company, is not a problem of
too little gun control, but of too much gun control. By the Act of April 12,
1871, Texas became the first American state to deny its citizens the right
of self-defense; the carrying of deadly weapons was prohibited. [1] That
statute remains in effect today -- only a police officer may carry a gun for
self-defense in Texas. There's never a cop when you need one; in Killeen,
Texas, the police arrived, performed admirably, but ten minutes too late.
Laws banning the carrying of deadly weapons are relatively recent.
California had no laws regulating the carrying of deadly weapons until 1917
[2] , even open carry was legal until 1967 (though seldom done in the larger
cities) [3] ; in Minnesota, open carry was legal until 1975. [4] Vermont
still has no statute prohibiting the concealed carry of pistols, unless
"with the intent or avowed purpose of injuring a fellow man." [5] There are
a number of Western states (Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska, most of Nevada)
where it is still legal to openly carry a gun.
In 1764, Cesare Beccaria published On Crimes and Punishments; his
revolutionary ideas included the abolition of torture, and reduced use of
the death penalty. His ideas took both Europe and North America by storm.
[6] Among the many reforms which On Crimes and Punishments promoted, and
which were taken up by the Framers [7] :
False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages
for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from
men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has
no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the
carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who
are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be
supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred
laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less
important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and
impunity and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the
guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the
assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage
than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with
greater confidence than an armed man. [8]
A person who intends suicide after mass murder, will not be deterred by any
law. (In the absence of guns, one man with $1 worth of gasoline successfully
murdered 87 people in New York City two years ago.) A criminal who intends
murder, is unconcerned about the minor punishment of carrying a concealed
weapon. Only the law-abiding person, with no criminal history, is deterred
by such laws.
This is a radical idea -- that law-abiding people should be able to defend
themselves from murderous attack in public. It's not necessary for us to
return to complete laissez-faire, like Vermont; a dramatic expansion of the
number of concealed weapons permits provides an easy way to make
self-defense legal again, while still verifying that a person carrying a gun
isn't mentally ill, a criminal, or incompetent. Oregon [9] , Pennsylvania
[10] , and Florida, have all made dramatic changes to their concealed
weapons statutes in the last few years, and the effect in each has been to
dramatically expand the number of permits. Oregon's murder rate, already
falling, fell again during 1990.
In a society where savages use guns, knives, baseball bats, and gasoline, it
is time for radical rethinking of the right to self-defense.
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Clayton Cramer is a software engineer with a Petaluma manufacturer of
telecommunications equipment. He is currently writing a history of the
Second Amendment.
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1. English v. State, 35 Tex. 473 (1872).
2. Assembly Office of Research, Smoking Gun: The Case For Concealed Weapon
Permit Reform, (Sacramento, State of California: 1986), 5.
3. Assembly Office of Research, 6.
4. Application of Atkinson, Minn., 291 N.W.2d 396, 397 (1980).
5. Vermont Statutes, y 4003.
6. Marcello Maestro, Cesare Beccaria and the Origins of Penal Reform,
(Philadelphia, Temple University Press: 1973), 134-138.
7. Maestro, 141; Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed, (University
of New Mexico Press: 1984); reprinted by The Independent Institute, Oakland:
1984), 35, 209.
8. Cesare Beccaria, trans. by Henry Palolucci, On Crimes And Punishments,
(New York, Bobbs-Merrill Co.: 1963), 87-88.
9. Oregon Revised Statutes (1989), 166.291.
10. Pennsylvania Crimes Code (1989), y 6109.
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