"The Most Natural Defense of a Free Country"

Virginia Tech. Columbine. Jonesboro. These names need no elaboration; they instantly evoke images of fleeing students and body bags strewn across hillsides, and their syllables echo with screams of terror, and the roar of pistol-fire. These names seem to pronounce a prophetic doom over our society, and like any good oracle, a fierce debate rages over their meaning. Teens steal guns from home, construct bombs, and scheme to slaughter an entire public high school—what must we do?

The gun control movement, led by organizations such as the Brady Campaign and Handgun Control, offers one response, essentially seeking to sever the supply chain that enables public shootings, by sharply curtailing average citizens’ rights to own weapons. With ever-more stringent background checks, waiting periods (thought to prevent “crimes of passion”), and “gun-free zones,” gun-control advocates envision a relatively weaponless, and therefore (they reason) relatively peaceful, society. By this argument, if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had not had access to high-powered weapons in their parents’ house, then the thirteen victims of the Columbine massacre would not have died.

University of Chicago economist John Lott has offered a powerful critique of this notion. Restricting the supply of a good principally drives the price up, creating powerful incentives for vendors to find ways to deal illegally. Gun control laws, he insists, have had this effect. Lott argues, “Concealed handguns by permit holders are virtually never involved in the commission of crime, let alone murder”; rather, almost all criminal use guns they purchased illegally on the street. As government officials have found in the case of alcohol, narcotics, and now firearms, trying to stamp out a trade rich with profit opportunities inevitably devolves into a national game of Whack-a-Mole.

Lott defends the notion that to prevent violent crime, particularly public shootings such as Virginia Tech, we must shrink the demand—we must make attempting such slaughter prohibitively risky, so that the killers will choose to stay home. In his view, the best approach to this end is to pass right-to-carry legislation that would allow “law-abiding citizens with no history of serious mental illness” (he might have said “virtuous and healthy,” a crucial point that bears meditation) to carry concealed arms. Consider—if only 5% of the country had concealed weapons permits, then the likelihood of someone in a crowded public area (a school, a restaurant, a park) being able to respond to an attacker with force is virtually certain.

The often-untold history of multiple shootings defends this theory. When a teen stabbed his mother, stole a rifle, and began to terrorize a high school in Pearl, Mississippi, an assistant principal retrieved a gun from his car, and wounded the shooter. In a similar incident, a restaurant owner held a school-shooter at bay with a shotgun, ending the killing nearly ten minutes before the police arrived. Even more telling, public shootings were commonplace in Israel, until after an expansion of right-to-carry laws, when terrorists found civilians returning fire. Indeed, Lott found that states with right-to-carry laws saw an average decline of 89% in murders per 100,000 people within the first year, while states without such laws consistently account for almost 90% of multiple-shootings.

Now, Lott acknowledged the limitations of his theory: “The deterrent effect depends on how many potential offenders are close enough to the margin so that the passage of a shall issue law changes the net benefit from positive to negative.” In other words, such economic modeling only works with people exercising the rational faculty of cost-benefit analysis, people with enough of a stake in a the normal social sphere to be deterred by the thought of resistance and imminent death. Lott’s theory accounts for the vast reduction in multiple shootings: most potential killers now stay home, having calculated the odds and found them slim.

However, the killings that continue to occur involve a different kind of person, one indifferent to Lott’s models. In an article on Slate.com, Dave Cullen described the Columbine killers: Klebold was “depressive and suicidal,” and Harris a malevolent sociopath, devoid of conscience. Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 33 during his rampage at Virginia Tech, was treated for severe anxiety and speech impediments throughout his adolescence, and wrote such graphically violent poetry for a class that the teacher threatened to quit if he were not removed. Mitchell Johnson, one of the twelve year-olds involved in the Jonesboro killing, had a history of sexual abuse as a child. Indeed, Lott observed, “Half of 100 multiple-victim public murderers had received formal diagnosis of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia.”

Lott’s economic model of deterrence works only in a society of virtuous, decent, courageous citizens, a society where public killings remain a horrific novelty, a society where average men and women would risk their lives for strangers. Ultimately, the issue of public killings devolves principally to citizen-virtue, not gun control. The government can insure that the “demand” for public killings stays low by cultivating those virtues, whether by honoring in its tax codes the family structure that stewards it, offering affordable psychiatric treatment to the wounded children who could wield tomorrow’s guns, or educating parents to identify the signs of serious emotional disturbance. Alexander Hamilton thought armed civilians “the most natural defense of a free country”; we ought only to restrict gun ownership when we cannot trust the average citizen to use them wisely and courageously.