MYTH 9: "A person in a public place with a gun is looking for trouble."
Gun prohibitionists use this myth to oppose legislative proposals to allow law-abiding citizens to obtain permits to carry concealed firear ms. In spite of this opposition, numerous states have adopted favorable concealed carry laws over the past few years. In each case, anti-gun activists and politicians predicted that allowing law-abiding people to carry firearms would result in more deaths and injuries as people would resort to gunfire to settle minor disputes. Shoot-outs over fender-benders and Wild-West lawlessness were predicted in an effort to stir up public fear of reasonable laws.
This tactic--seeking to frighten people into supporting desired positions--is employed more and more frequently by gun prohibitionists. Prof. Gary Kleck explains the reasoning thusly: "Battered by a decade of research contradicting the central factual premises underlying gun control, advocates have a pparently decided to fight more exclusively on an emotional battlefield, where one terrorizes one's targets into submission rather than honestly persuading them with credible evidence."13
When the concealed carry laws were passed and put into pract ice, the result was completely different from the hysterical claims of the gun prohibitionists. In Florida, since the concealed carry law was changed in 1987, the homicide rate has dropped 21%, while the national rate has risen 12%. Across the nation, sta tes with favorable concealed carry laws have a 33% lower homicide rate overall and 37% lower robbery rate than states that allow little or no concealed carry.
Gun prohibitionists have also acted to penalize and discourage gun ownership by imposing mandatory prison terms on persons carrying or possessing firearms without a license or permit, a license or permit they have also made impossible or very difficult to obtain. Massachusetts' Bartley-Fox Law and New York's Koch-Carey Law are premier exampl es of this "gun control" strategy. Such legislation is detrimental only to peaceful citizens, not to criminals.
By the terms of such a mandatory or increased sentence proposal, the unlicensed carrying of a firearm--no matter how innocent the circum stances--is penalized by a six-to-twelve month jail sentence. It is imposed on otherwise law-abiding citizens although in many areas it is virtually impossible for persons to obtain a carry permit. It is easy to see circumstances in which an otherwise law -abiding person would run afoul of this law: fear of crime, arbitrary denial of authorization, red-tape delay in obtaining official permission to carry a firearm, or misunderstanding of the numerous and vague laws governing the transportation of firearms.
The potential for unknowingly or unwittingly committing a technical violation of a licensing law is enormous. Myriad legal definitions of "carrying" vary from state to state and city to city, including most transportation of firearms--accessible o r not, loaded or not, in a trunk or case. And out-of-state travelers are exceedingly vulnerable because of these various definitions.
One need only examine the first persons arrested under the Massachusetts and New York City "mandatory penalty" law s for proof that such laws are misdirected: an elderly woman passing out religious pamphlets in a dangerous section of Boston and an Ohio truck driver coming to the aid of a woman apparently being kidnapped in New York City.
In New York City--prior to the enactment of the Koch-Carey mandatory sentence for possession law--the bureaucratic logjam in the licensing division, combined with a soaring crime rate, forced law-abiding citizens to obtain guns illegally for self-protection. In effect, citizens admitted that they would rather risk a mandatory penalty for illegally owning a firearm than risk their lives and property at the hands of New York's violent, uncontrolled criminals. Honest citizens feared the streets more than the courtrooms.
By contrast, the city's criminal element faces no similar threat of punishment. A report carried in the March 1, 1984, issue of the New York Times says it all: "Conviction on felony charges is rare. Because of plea-bargaining, the vast majority of those arrested on felony charges are tried on lesser, misdemeanor charges." In one year, according to the Times, there were 106,171 felony arrests in New York City, but only 25,987 cases received felony indictments and only 20,641 resulted in convictions, with impr isonment a rarity. This condition persists, the New York Times reported again on June 23, 1991: in 1990 felony indictments were resolved by plea bargains in over 83% of cases. Only 5.7% of cases ended with a trial verdict, with only 3.8% ending in convict ion. Not surprisingly, with just 3% of the nation's population, in 1992 New York City accounted for 12% of the nation's homicides.
In championing New York's tough Koch-Carey Law, then Mayor Ed Koch said contemptuously of gun owners, "Nice guys who own guns aren't nice guys." No such rancor was expressed about the city's revolving-door criminal justice system where the chances of hardened criminals being arrested on felony charges are one in one hundred. Later, the Police Foundation study of New Yor k's Koch- Carey Law found that it failed to reduce the number of guns on the street and did not reduce gun use in rape, robbery or assault.
Such legislation invites police to routinely stop and frisk people randomly on the street on suspicion of fi rearms possession. In fact, the Police Foundation has called for the random use of metal detectors on the streets to apprehend people carrying firearms without authorization. In disregarding the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy and against unr easonable searches and seizures, police would be empowered under the Police Foundation's blueprint for disarmament to "systematically stop a certain percentage of people on the streets... in business neighborhoods and run the detectors by them, just as yo u do at the airport. If the detectors produce some noise then that might establish probable cause for a search."
While admitting that such "police state" tactics would require "methods... that liberals instinctively dislike," government researchers James Q. Wilson and Mark H. Moore called for more aggressive police patrolling in public places, saying: "To inhibit the carrying of handguns, the police should become more aggressive in stopping suspicious people and, where they have reasonable grounds for their suspicions, frisking (i.e. patting down) those stopped to obtain guns. Hand-held magnetometers, of the sort used by airport security guards, might make the street frisks easier and less obtrusive. All this can be done without changing the law." (The Washington Post, April 1, 1981) Note, they said "people," not criminals.
13 Kleck, "Reasons for Skepticism on the Results from a New Poll on: The Incidence of Gun Violence Among Young People," The Public Perspective, Sept./Oct. 1993.
http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htm
