The black tradition of arms evokes heroic images like Hartman Turnbow repelling Klansmen with rifle fire. The modern orthodoxy responds to the tragic scene of swaggering neighborhood tyrants warring over turf, their gunfire piercing the kitchens and bedrooms of innocent people. These images evoke vastly different reflexes. And that largely explains the appeal of modern orthodoxy.
Supply-control policies at the heart of modern orthodoxy rest on the straightforward logic that no guns equals no gun crime. But fuller consideration raises a litany of questions that reveal the modern orthodoxy as more reflex than considered policy. For example, is the no-guns-equals-no-gun-crime formula realistic in a country that is already saturated with more than 300 million firearms? And what about people who want guns for self-defense? Does the traditional self-defense calculation change when the focus shifts to black-on-black crime? And even granting that modern intraracial violence may resonate differently from the story of Hartman Turnbow, is that enough to turn the tradition of arms on its head? Is it enough to justify, in the name of civil rights, policies like zip code–targeted gun bans that some earnest friends have proposed? These questions trigger wide-ranging intuitions that undergird both the modern orthodoxy and the black tradition of arms. Critical evaluation of these competing approaches requires careful unpacking of the undergirding intuitions and assumptions.
To start, consider the self-defense foundation on which the black tradition of arms rests. Self-defense is a universal exception to the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. State failure drives the self-defense doctrine through the imminence requirement. Private violence is justified where one faces an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to which the government cannot respond. The imminence requirement defines that space where the state, regardless of its motives and ambitions, simply cannot help.
State failure within the window of imminence is a reality for everyone. But one might expect blacks to be particularly sensitive to it. The window of imminence is often larger in black neighborhoods where various challenges stretch public resources. Certainly state failure is less galling today. Under slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow, the state was often just another layer of threat, and reliance on the state for personal security was more obviously an absurd proposition.
Today, the malevolent state is thankfully an anachronism. That makes it easier for those ensconced in government bureaucracies to urge reliance on the state and to ignore the continuing failure of government within the window of imminence. But it is sheer hubris for public officials to ignore the inherent limits on state power and claim that they can protect people within a space where that is impossible as a matter of simple physics.
The odd reticence of modern orthodoxy to acknowledge structural state failure within the window of imminence is highlighted by contrast to the thinking about state failure in the context of other issues on the progressive agenda. For example, progressives have keyed on state failure to support reproductive rights and to expand the range of legitimate violence by abused women. In advocacy for expansion of the battered-woman defense, one school of thought would actually eliminate the imminence requirement in favor of a “no genuine alternatives standard,” wherein state failure would justify self-defense absent an immediate threat of death or injury.1 Here, state failure is urged as the justification for a woman, who endures years of torment, to kill her partner in his sleep. Notice how this feminist advocacy does not depend on any assertion that the state is overtly hostile to the interests of women. It is simply the fact of state failure that would justify a broader range of legitimate self-defense by battered women. Compare now the “things have changed” justification for the modern orthodoxy. It would constrict armed self-defense for black folk on the view that government failure is no longer malicious.
Other progressive arguments invoke state failure to justify the right to abortion. One says that “to whatever degree we fail to create the minimal conditions for a just society, we also have a right, individually and fundamentally, to be shielded from the most dire or simply the most damaging consequences of that failure. . . . We must have the right to opt out of an unjust patriarchal world that visits unequal but unparalleled harms upon women . . . with unwanted pregnancies.”2 The modern orthodoxy defies this reasoning even though the principle resonates at least as strongly in the context of armed self-defense. In a society where physical attack is a real danger (especially in communities where the risk is generally higher) and government is a demonstrably incomplete response, the feminist abortion justification is a solid foundation for a robust right of self-defense using standard civilian technology.
Compared to other progressive critiques, the modern orthodoxy seems not fully thought out on the issue of individual exposure within the window of imminent threats. Of course, the discussion of imminence does not settle things. There are other possible ways to justify the modern orthodoxy.
Some argue that in urban communities where black voters have elected black administrations, gun prohibition should be respected as an exercise of community autonomy. But the critical question is, how much does black electoral success diminish the worries that make self-defense a crucial private resource? Even the best-intentioned administrations must wrestle with practical, fiscal, and political limitations.
What do we say to the young black woman in Detroit who arrived home after midnight to find her front door broken open and waited three hours for police to respond to her 911 call? At some earlier time, in some other place, such a delay might signal overt racist neglect. But here the problem was simply overtaxed resources. We might discount this worry by saying that slow police response is rare. But how to dismiss the black policy chief’s triage approach, focusing only on the worst crimes, letting the others go, and betting that the security bureaucracy can tell the difference?3
From the perspective of the victim, how different is the three-hour police response in Detroit from the situation of Mississippi activist Robert Cooper in 1965? Cooper called the sheriff when a cross burst into flames in front of his home and waited until the next day for someone to show up. One difference is that Cooper had an “automatic shotgun” by the door and used it to let the cross burners “know he was home.”4 So was it a good thing that Cooper was armed? Was it a good thing that the young woman from Detroit was not?
It oversimplifies things to assess policy through particular examples. But the reality is that many in our age think in pictures rather than in words, and examples give us a foothold for conversation. Our young woman from Detroit is an unknown and might therefore resonate lightly. Other, more familiar images threaten as much noise as clarity. That is the worry with Otis McDonald, the seventy-six-year-old black man who challenged Chicago’s gun ban and was celebrated on the cover of the National Rifle Association’s First Freedom magazine. It is also the worry with Shelly Parker, the black community activist who challenged the District of Columbia gun ban and whose white lawyers defended her constitutional right to arms as part of a broader libertarian vision.
But other images give us a cleaner focus on the sober, mature members of the community who want tools to defend themselves against violent threats. Consider Mary Thomas, mother of basketball legend Isaiah Thomas. Most descriptions of Mary Thomas manage to work in her front-door stand, sighting down the barrel of a shotgun. Her battleground was the housing projects of Chicago’s west side. Her nemesis was the gang culture that has captured and destroyed so many black boys. Mary Thomas had her own boys to worry about and she refused to cede the problem or the solution to some local bureaucrat or some far-off federal program. When the thugs came after her boys, they were answered by the dangerous end of Mary’s shotgun and her warning, “There’s only one gang here and that’s the Thomas gang.”5
This image leaves many questions hanging. Why did this tactic work for Mary Thomas? She could not follow her boys everywhere. So there must have been something else going on. And what about the danger of escalating violence?
These sorts of questions demonstrate that decisions about firearms use amidst personal crises are fraught with complexity. And that sharpens the question to this: Does the complexity of interpersonal violence dictate a generic bureaucratic response or does it demand individual choice by people facing perhaps the greatest personal crisis of their lives?
We know, of course, that having, brandishing, or using a gun is no guarantee of a happy outcome. That has never been the case. Nonetheless, the black tradition of arms has consistently exalted individual choice in preparations for dealing with imminent violent threats. The modern orthodoxy, granted its full range, tells people facing violent threats to rely on the generic protections of the state security bureaucracy.
The traditional elevation of private choice on matters of self-defense prompts us to think more critically about the implications of the decision to keep, carry, and use a gun. Consider again the young Detroit woman who waited three hours for the police to come. What if she did have a gun? She might have pulled it, then had it taken and used against her. She might have pulled it and scared off an attacker. She might have fired in self-defense, killing or wounding her assailant. She might have fired and hit or killed an innocent, either with a stray bullet or because she mistook an innocent for an attacker. Even if she lawfully shot a criminal assailant, there is still the trauma of the aftermath and the possibility of being targeted for revenge.
These sorts of concerns drive much of our thinking about whether preparing for armed self-defense is foolish or sound. They reflect our intuitions about the possibilities within a series of future conflicts. Of course we can’t proceed just on intuition. And this launches us into an assessment of the empirical work and social science on which our policy assessments must rest.
But first a caution. Even in the middle of sterile empirical analysis, some part of our thinking is inexorably visceral. The reason is we are not just discussing what has happened and projecting from that what will happen. We are using what has happened to project what will happen to us. And that introduces a dose of irrationality. Because deep down most of us believe that we are special, particularly blessed, insightful, or resilient in some peculiar way. It is why so many of us hand over currency and special numbers to the lottery man. This sense of individual exceptionalism shades our expectations about the future. It also threatens to shade our sense of the risks and utilities of firearms. We must keep that bias in mind as we view and reason from the data about self-defense and crime with guns.
Let’s start with the details of black gun violence, which are fairly captured by this summary.
The disproportionate rates of violent crime found among African Americans have been described in numerous studies and reports. For example, the FBI reports that in 1998, African Americans, who constitute 13 percent of the general population, were overrepresented among persons arrested for murder (53 percent), robbery (55 percent), aggravated assault (30 percent), and assault (34 percent). A significant characteristic of violent crime in the United States is that most violent incidents tend to involve an intraracial victim-offender relationship pattern. That is, individuals who commit acts of violence generally commit these acts against members of their own racial group. For example, in 1998, 94 percent of black murder victims were slain by black offenders. Similarly in 1998, 87 percent of white murder victims were slain by white offenders. . . .
The most revealing data regarding the disproportionate impact that violent crime is having on African Americans, particularly black males, is the data on homicide victimization. According to the FBI, in 1998, black males represented 38 percent of known homicide victims, followed in descending order by white males (35 percent), white females (14 percent) and black females (9 percent). High rates of homicide among African Americans also have been reported in compilations of health statistics. According to data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, black males had a homicide death rate of 52.6 per 100,000 in 1996, whereas white males had a homicide death rate of 4.7 per 100,000.
As a group, violence researchers generally regard individuals in the age range between fifteen and twenty-four as the most murder prone. However, there are significant differences between black and white males of this age in terms of their homicide risk. For example, white males fifteen to twenty-four years of age had a homicide death rate of 6.4 per 100,000 in 1996, whereas black males of this age range had a homicide death rate of 123 per 100,000, nearly twenty times greater than similarly aged white males. Moreover, for every age range, black males have higher rates of homicide death than their white male counterparts of the same ages.
A significant trend in homicide patterns involves the increasing youthfulness of homicide offenders and victims. Young black males experienced dramatic increases in both homicide victimization and offending rates in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, the number of homicide victims in the fifteen to twenty-four age group increased nearly 50 percent between 1975 and 1992. Moreover, in 1987, homicide accounted for 42 percent of all deaths among young black males. Persons between the ages of fifteen and nineteen experienced the greatest increases in the rate of death due to homicide in this period. Since 1991, homicide rates have been declining among all race-sex subgroups in the United States. However it is important to note that in spite of the declining homicide rates among black males, homicide remains the leading cause of death among black males between fifteen and twenty four years of age.6
In the face of this sobering account, the reflex to blame gun proliferation and to wish guns away is natural. The modern orthodoxy translates that reflex into policy with the promise that the right statutory language can solve the problem by dramatically shrinking the gun inventory. Wide endorsement of that approach by the political class implies that it is or should be embraced by anyone who cares about the community. But closer critique reveals both the structural weakness of the supply-control approach and wide diversity within the community about what policy is best.
The no-guns-equals-no-gun-crime logic of supply controls would be compelling if it could be implemented. But that approach was an unworkable policy long before the Supreme Court judged blanket gun bans unconstitutional. It is not as if we are starting from zero and are making a real choice to have guns or not. Americans already own more than 300 million guns and have a deep cultural attachment to them. That simple fact renders supply-side gun controls of the type recently ruled unconstitutional in Washington, DC, and Chicago essentially empty political gestures.
Here is why. International data richly demonstrate how, on average, people defy gun bans at a rate of about 3 to 1. Countries that have registered or banned guns estimate having roughly three illegal guns for every legal one. This is simply the average. In many countries, the defiance ratio is far higher.7 And none of those places had anything approaching the civilian gun inventory or the robust gun culture of the United States. In the few American jurisdictions that have attempted limited gun bans, estimates of noncompliance are dramatically higher than the international average.8
The upshot is that neither the Second Amendment nor weak gun laws are the principle obstacles to successful gun prohibition. The obstacle is that Americans already own nearly half the private firearms on the planet and have an exceptional cultural attachment to them. So the no-guns-equals-no-gun-crime intuition, even if translated into tough statutory language, does not mean guns will disappear. It just means that much, perhaps most, of the existing 300 million–gun inventory would flood into the black market, tilting firearms possession toward the worst people among us. I demonstrated this point in detail in a 2008 analysis titled “Imagining Gun Control in America: Understanding the Remainder Problem.” That work runs many pages. But my assessment is neatly summarized by former New York City police commissioner William Bratton in a Wall Street Journal interview discussing President Obama’s gun-control agenda following the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.
Mr. Bratton likes what he calls the “symbolism” of this agenda, but he’s unsure if its enactment would make a substantive difference. . . . The problem with the gun and ammo bans, he offers, “is that that’s going forward.” They do nothing about the 350 million firearms, including assault weapons, and hundreds of thousands of extended clips already in circulation. “You can’t deal with that retroactively.” As for the practical effect of gun control, he notes that “all the studies that were done about assault weapons after the ban ended after 10 years were pretty much inconclusive.”9
Gun prohibition failed in the District of Columbia and Chicago because anyone who was willing to break the law could get a gun from the leakage out of the hundreds of millions already out there. In practical terms, this core policy of the modern orthodoxy amounted to de jure prohibition but wide de facto gun possession by the criminal microculture. The few places like Washington, DC, and Chicago that followed this policy led the nation in gun crime. These were also places where the Parker/McDonald class was essentially under siege. Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald sought stringent rules against gun possession by the criminal microclass and legal access to guns for noncriminals. That approach channels the long the black tradition of arms.10
Supply-control policies at the heart of the modern orthodoxy actually command a thinner following in the community than one would presume from the overwhelming black political allegiance to Democrats, who, like it or not, are the party of gun control. Recent national polling asked, “What do you think is more important, to protect the right of Americans to own guns, OR to control gun ownership?” Sixty-six percent of blacks said it was more important to control gun ownership.11 On the question whether “States and Localities should be able to pass laws banning handguns,” 64 percent of blacks said yes.12 Mid-sixty-percent majorities are consistent with an intuition that blacks would favor gun control. But this is substantially lower than black allegiance to the Democratic Party and presents an interesting contrast with the black leadership, where Democrats rule.
Pressing into the social science, the picture becomes even more complex. High rates of black victimization from gun crime actually cut two ways. In a population statistically more at risk from violence, one expects to find both a desire to keep guns from criminals and a parallel desire to possess guns for self-defense. This shows up in what researchers call the “fear and loathing” hypothesis, where firearms purchases accelerate on fears of crime, violence, and civil disorder.
Researchers caution against the simplistic findings from limited questions in popular national surveys. We get a richer sense of patterns of black gun ownership and attitudes toward gun regulation in detailed studies focused at the neighborhood level. Targeted research contradicts the national surveys at several levels. In the national surveys, blacks are less likely than whites to report having a gun in the home. But research at the neighborhood level has found the rate of gun ownership between whites and blacks basically the same.
With regard to differential Black and white attitudes about gun regulation, the number of questions and specificity of the questions made important differences. The policy option with the least support among the groups was the confiscation of all weapons except for those of the police. The support for confiscation ranged from high of 26% among blacks in high-risk areas to a low of 10.16 among blacks in low-risk areas. . . .
Support for having the government sell firearms through government owned stores, . . . also varied but Blacks in high-risk neighborhoods were the least supportive—19.4%.
With few exceptions, the survey respondents appeared to be almost evenly divided in their support for and opposition to the regulation of handguns. In most neighborhoods at least 40% of the people questioned supported handgun regulation and at least the same percentage opposed it. . . .
The results of the computed gun regulation index show that urban residents are less overwhelmingly supportive of gun regulation than is suggested by studies that use the one-item indicator.13 [Emphasis added.]
Studies focusing specifically on black attitudes show that a significant cohort of blacks favor gun prohibition or other strong limits on the criminal microculture but disfavor blanket prohibition that would impede self-defense by trustworthy people. One study found that blacks actually disfavored gun bans at higher levels than whites, even though more blacks favored measures like permits and registration. This comports with the intuition that people who fear violence will want guns to protect themselves and also favor laws promising to keep guns from criminals (a policy preference arguably underrepresented by the black political class).14
A tacit assumption undergirding the modern orthodoxy is that the modern rate of black gun crime is an unprecedented variable that basically ends any debate about the contours of contemporary firearms policy. But it turns out that the black tradition of arms has long demanded balancing the self-defense interest of good people against the costs of criminal violence.
A report sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health shows that very high rates of homicide victimization and violent crime among blacks is not new. Data from 1925 drawn from selected cities shows that “victimization rates were higher during that era than they are at present. It was not uncommon to find victimization rates in excess of 100 per 100,000.” Local government responses to these data reflected the times. Memphis, for example, was described in 1930 as the homicide capital of the nation. The city fathers discounted the news, arguing that “most of the murders were of Negroes by Negroes, so the police and government could not be held responsible.”15
The 1925 victimization rate in several other cities exceeded modern rates by substantial measures. The black victimization rate per 100,000 of population in Chicago was 101. In Detroit, it was 102 per 100,000. In Cleveland, it was 113. The rate in Memphis peaked at 129 per 100,000. This was surpassed by peak rates of 189 and 207 per 100,000 in Cincinnati and Miami respectively.16
Similar trends were reported by preeminent criminologist Marvin Wolfgang in his classic work, Patterns in Criminal Homicide. Wolfgang focused primarily on Philadelphia from 1948 through 1952 and surveyed the findings of a variety of earlier studies from around the country. Over the study period, blacks were 18 percent of the population but 73 percent of homicide victims and 75 percent of homicide offenders in Philadelphia.
Then, as now, black males dominated the ranks of victims (77 percent of black victims) and perpetrators (80 percent of black perpetrators). Wolfgang surmised that economic desperation drove the high rates of violence, calculating that 90 to 95 percent of all offenders in the study (black and white) were “in the lower end of the occupational scale.”
The availability of guns did not explain Wolfgang’s findings. The instrument most used by black murderers was the blade, which accounted for the highest percentage (47 percent) of the homicides. It is unclear precisely how much this reflected the national trend, and Wolfgang noted studies from other cities where shooting was the leading cause of black homicide.
Wolfgang lamented the absence of solid, race-specific data prior to 1921 but summarized a variety of studies conducted as data became available. A 1940 assessment of seven sections of the southern United States concluded that the murder and manslaughter rate for blacks was twelve times that of whites. A study of Birmingham, Alabama, from 1937 through 1944 showed that blacks were 85 percent of homicide convictions and 40 percent of the population. In St. Louis from 1949 to 1951, blacks committed 73 percent of homicides and were 18 percent of the population. Wolfgang cautioned that these data are biased by consistently higher conviction rates for blacks than for whites in the southern states surveyed.
Outside the South, Wolfgang’s survey of victimization studies showed a similar trend. Homicide victimization rates per 100,000 during 1920 and 1925 for Pennsylvania were considerably higher for blacks than for whites both in urban and rural areas. In urban areas, whites had a rate of 5.3 per 100,000, compared to 47.1 for blacks. In rural areas, the white rate was 3.4 and the black rate was 45.2. A similar disparity appeared between 1921 and 1930 in a study of 37 upstate New York counties where the homicide victimization rate for whites was 2.8 per 100,000 and 30.4 for blacks.17
While we can embrace the modern orthodoxy on the worry about exceptional rates of black victimization and criminality, we cannot say that this is a new variable that automatically explains abandonment of the black tradition of arms. Historically, high intra-racial homicide rates show that the black tradition of arms long required balancing between the legitimate self-defense interests of good people against the costs imposed by a microculture of black criminals abusing guns.
More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed this microculture the “submerged tenth.”18 In his incomparable exposition of Negro life, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois lamented the rise of “a distinct criminal class” in the urban slums.19 In his sociological study The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois tracked the activity of a black criminal class that in many ways mirrors the modern criminal microculture.20 He reported that life in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward in the late 1890s was “hard, noisy and deadly for too many of the Black people there. On Saturday nights [the neighborhoods] disgorged [the] maimed and murdered. . . . Pushed out of economic opportunities . . . it was not surprising that many Seventh Ward Blacks sought release in drugs and crime or savagely turned on each other out of rage or a sense of hopelessness.”21
Ida B. Wells, the great patron of the Winchester rifle, wrestled with a similarly dispiriting reality. In 1910, she debated a nominally sympathetic white member of the Negro Fellowship League who highlighted the disproportionate level of black crime in Chicago. Facing the difficult reality, Wells said that she could not refute the empirical claims about disproportionate black criminality, “for that is what the figures seem to indicate.” She shifted instead to explain the phenomena. “The statistics,” she said, “do not mean, as it appears to mean, that the Negro race is the most criminal of the various race groups in Chicago. It does mean that ours is the most neglected group. All the other races in the city are welcomed into the settlements, YMCAs, YWCAs, gymnasiums and every other movement for uplift if only their skins are white. . . . Only one social center welcomes the Negro and that is the saloon. Ought we to wonder at the harvest which we have heard enumerated tonight?”22
This is a familiar brand of response to discouraging news. And though it might blunt some of the harsher policy prescriptions by unsympathetic critics, making excuses for black criminality does not answer the immediate security concerns of black victims.
Black victims of intraracial violence were the dominant concern of leaders from the Mississippi Delta Committee for Better Citizenship. They agitated for “greater punishment for Black criminals who committed offenses against Blacks.” The reasoning was summed up by the famously well-armed T. R. M. Howard, who complained that failure to punish black-on-black crime was another manifestation of state malevolence. During a period where racist violence fueled black nightmares, Howard said that the “greatest danger to Negro life in Mississippi is not what white people do to Negroes but what the courts of Mississippi let Negroes of Mississippi do to each other.”23
Roy Wilkins’s 1925 critique of intraracial violence in Kansas City rings similar. Wilkins complained that “getting Kansas City police to enforce the law in black neighborhoods was almost impossible. For a time we ran a murder-a-week campaign . . . to draw attention to the bloodshed that took place at approximately that rate all through the twenties.” Wilkins viewed the failure to pursue black criminals as overt state malevolence and evidence of an attitude that “there’s one more Negro killed—the more of ’em dead, the less to bother us. Don’t spend too much money running down the killer—he may kill another.”24
This phenomenon was actually systematized by Mississippi circuit judge Sidney Fant Davis, under the heading of “Negro Law.” The untutored reader, said Davis, might look at the state civil and criminal codes and conclude that they applied equally to blacks and whites, but “nothing could be farther from the truth.” Negro law, said Davis, “determined that certain crimes might be punished or not depending on the racial context.” Intraracial violence (which dominated black victimization), bigamy, and theft purely between blacks were routinely ignored or treated as minor matters.25
Even black-on-black murder, which as early as 1890 was reportedly the most common form of homicide in Mississippi, passed through a Negro Law filter. Much black-on-black violence was ignored. But where the black victim had some value to or was a favorite of local whites, the prosecution reflected that interest. This was vividly illustrated in the 1911 Sharkey County prosecution of a black man named Judge Collins for the murder of Rube Boyd. The prosecutor argued for the death penalty because “this bad nigger killed a good nigger. The dead nigger was a white man’s nigger, and these bad niggers like to kill that kind.” The black defense attorney for Collins, thoroughly familiar with the nuances of Negro Law, couched his assessment accordingly. “The average white jury,” he explained, “would take it for granted that the killing of a white man’s nigger is a more serious offense than the killing of a plain, everyday black man.”26
Historic rates and treatment of intraracial violence are illuminating. But it is incomplete and ultimately unconvincing to say that exceptional rates of intra-racial violence are nothing new. Full assessment of competing policies requires examination of relative costs and benefits of firearms and value judgments that drive firearms policy.
We have already seen how very high rates of gun violence among blacks are disproportionately attributable to young black men. The tough question is, who are these men? General research shows that most murderers are extreme aberrants with long histories of criminal activity, psychopathology, and violence.27 The aberrance of murderers is so solidly demonstrated that researchers consider it a general “criminological axiom.”28 If the general trend holds true, the exceptional rate of black homicide is mainly attributable to a slim microculture of aberrants who fall at the extremes of various measures of risk.
The modern orthodoxy does not expressly reject the thesis that exceptional black victimization and criminality are attributable to a slim microculture. But blanket gun bans, like those urged as bedrock policy under the modern orthodoxy do carry the implication that the black community at large cannot be trusted with guns. This is an unavoidable implication of proposals for targeted de jure gun bans in black enclaves, which would be deemed unconstitutional everywhere else. Proponents of this approach probably would prefer that no one have guns. But short of that, some seem willing to settle for targeted gun bans just in places with concentrations of black folk. On the long view, this is quite odd.
Under the banner of civil rights, this strand of the modern orthodoxy brands the entire community with a badge of inferiority through a race-coded deprivation of an established prerogative of American citizenship. It rings similar to nineteenth-century claims “that colored men were unfit for citizenship” and rationalizations of Black Code gun restrictions targeting freedmen.29 The results of recently overturned gun prohibition laws in Washington, DC, and Chicago confirmed that this prescription only bars legal guns and does little about the flow of illegal guns to the violent microculture. So for a negligible impact on the real targets, these policies stigmatized entire urban enclaves as untrustworthy and left good people unilaterally disarmed against the criminals in their midst.
The focus on gun control as a response to the exceptional rate of violence among blacks, and especially among young black men, is nonetheless politically appealing because it offers a seemingly straightforward solution to a far deeper problem that really has no easy answer. Consider this summary of the various attempts to explain the exceptional rate of black male violence.
There exists little consensus among criminologists and other crime scholars regarding “the causes” of black male violence. Numerous explanations have been offered, including biological causes (e.g., head injuries); social disorganization and inadequate socialization; poverty and economic inequality; racial oppression and displaced aggression; adherence to the norms of a subculture of violence; joblessness and family disruption; the cheapening of black life as a result of the imposition of lenient sentences against blacks who assault or murder blacks; and involvement in self-destructive lifestyles centered around heavy drinking, drug abuse and drug trafficking and street gangs. . . . Although they represent a minority viewpoint, some criminologists maintain that racial differences in violent crime offending may stem form genetic/non-acquired biological factors.30
This scattered assessment leaves the political class with two choices. One is to focus intently on the criminal microclass while at the same time acknowledging that there is no good, ready diagnosis of their behavior and therefore no easy solution. The alternative is to claim there is a ready solution to the problem—stringent supply-side gun control—but that has failed because of malevolent outsiders who block strong gun laws. On this choice, the appeal of the modern orthodoxy is plain.
The modern orthodoxy has two related advantages that lure the political class. First, it allows one to sidestep difficult conversations about violent self-help. Second, it avoids the stigmatizing class distinctions that come with a hard focus on the microcaste of violent young men.
To the first point, the focus on strict supply controls blunts militant prescriptions for self-help that public officials will naturally find discomforting. That worry is illustrated by the public declaration of Carl Lawrence, president of the New York NAACP, who in the early 1970s urged harsh medicine against the criminal microclass. Lawrence exhorted the “good people” of every harassed community to arm themselves and “take the streets away from the hoodlums.”31
This is uncomfortable territory for everyone, but especially for progressives, whose political coin is the promise of public solutions to a wide array of problems. Even those who privately acknowledge that people are on their own within the window of imminence will be reluctant to say it and loath to build security policy around a theme of violent self-help. The modern orthodoxy, with its simplistic prescription for gun control, allows one to avoid the conversation about state failure and self-help.
The modern orthodoxy also avoids the political risk of stigmatizing the criminal microclass. The nature of this risk becomes apparent when we consider that the young men and boys of this class are also husbands, lovers, fathers, sons, and grandsons of people who may be willing to condemn the criminal down the street, but will go to the mat to defend their own wayward kin. In places with high offender rates, harsh rhetoric and tough policies against the criminal microclass will step on many toes and commit the sin of airing “family” problems in public.32
Careful politicians might navigate this problem by distinguishing between the full population of offenders, which might be relatively high, and the microculture of violent predators, which always has been quite small. But that is a more complicated strategy than the familiar appeal to community victimization and blame-casting onto distant villains.
The modern orthodoxy allows policy leaders to avoid openly choosing between Otis McDonald and the thugs who besieged him. It casts them both as victims of the gun or of the “outsiders” who provided it. It promises to make things safer for everyone by attacking that outside threat. At least that is the script.
But the reality, acknowledged by any serious analysis, is that the success of supply controls depends on taking the gun inventory down toward zero. That is simply impossible in a society that already has nearly as many private firearms as the rest of the world combined. So in practice the modern orthodoxy really does choose between the interests of Otis McDonald and the thugs who besieged him. And perversely, it subordinates McDonald’s self-defense interest and gives the advantage to his tormentors.
On this balance, the modern orthodoxy seems ill advised. More so because it essentially dismisses promising criminological assessments—like this one from one of the most prolific and sensitive researchers in the field, who advises:
There is substantial evidence that much could be learned about black homicide and other aspects of black life in the United States if more careful attention were paid to differences among blacks as well as between black and whites. The incidence of homicide among blacks as among non-blacks is significantly correlated with social class. . . . The study of homicide among blacks may benefit from a within-group as well as a between-group analytical framework.33
But even if blacks are reticent to have this public conversation about the family’s dirty laundry, shouldn’t we at least privilege the interests of innocents and refuse to hand the advantage of arms to their tormentors? Conceding just this much sharpens the remaining analysis in an important way.
Whether it protects innocents like Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald is a crucial gauge of firearms policy. But what really does it mean to protect this class of innocents? What sort of regulatory scheme leaves the Parker/McDonald class better or worse off? Does giving these people the choice of armed self-defense really offer a plausible chance of good results, or is armed self-defense so dangerous that we can justify taking that choice away?
We might dismiss the self-defense interest of the Parker/McDonald class by saying that their desire for defensive firearms is simply misguided; that armed self-defense is ineffective, uncommon, or counterproductive. This conclusion might rest on a variety of assumptions that, if sound, could leave us confident that, black tradition of arms notwithstanding, the modern orthodoxy represents the clearly better contemporary policy. Those assumptions require careful attention.
Although it has long been debunked, one of the early and sometimes still-repeated claims about gun use is that you are 44 times more likely to hurt yourself or someone you love than to use the gun for self-defense. This conjures images of June Cleaver mistakenly shooting Ward when he pops home early from a business trip. The image is false. It is rooted in a study counting gun deaths, most of which were suicides, and ignoring the vast majority of defensive gun uses where no one is shot and the gun is not even fired.34 The point is underscored by the actual data on the June-shoots-Ward incidents. It turns out that “fewer than 2 percent of fatal gun accidents (FGAs) involve a person accidentally shooting someone mistaken for an intruder.”35
But even if it turns out that people rarely accidently shoot their loved ones, there is still the objection that armed self-defense really doesn’t work. The data say otherwise. Survey data show that Americans defend themselves with guns at a startling rate. There have been fourteen major surveys of defensive gun use (DGU), with results ranging as high as 2 million DGUs per year. The figure is contested. But even skeptics who conducted their own surveys obtained similar results. This has led to a variety of other speculations by incredulous critics. Accounting for the various criticisms, the National Opinion Research Center puts DGUs in the range of 256,500 to 1,210,000, per year.36 These DGUs do not garner headlines because in the vast majority of cases no shots are fired. There is no indication that this phenomenon excludes blacks.37
What about the risk that you will have your gun taken and used against you? This concern is generally at odds with the DGU data, and textured research shows explicitly that people actually are better off resisting than submitting. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) show that a victim’s weapon is taken in about 1 percent of cases. The NCVS and other sources also conclude that there is no sound empirical evidence that resistance provokes fatal attacks.38 In a study of all of the NCVS data on robberies from 1979 through 1985, the firearm offered the most effective form of resistance. Resistance with a gun was the method most likely to thwart the crime and most likely to prevent injury to the victim.39 The NCVS data show that “the use of a gun by the victim significantly reduces her chance of being injured in situations when a robber is armed with a non-gun weapon.”40
Another worry about armed self-defense is that you will hurt yourself or have an accident. The most compelling rendition of this is the image of children who find the family gun and shoot themselves or a playmate. This scenario triggers our most powerful protective instincts. These intuitions about the risk of accidental gun death may be the most exaggerated aspect of the firearms debate. In one telling example, a group of elite New York lawyers was asked to estimate the number of children under the age of fourteen killed in firearms accidents each year. Essentially everyone in the room of several hundred guessed more than 10,000 per year. Roughly half the room said 50,000 per year. The trend continued, with some saying 100,000 and a few guessing even more.41
The National Safety Council reports that for children under the age of fourteen, the death rate from firearms accidents has generally been below 100 deaths per year.42 This does nothing to diminish the tragedy for the families involved. But it puts things in perspective to note that swimming-pool accidents account for more deaths of minors than all forms of death by firearm (accident, homicide, and suicide).43
All this said, it is still hard to shake the draw of supply controls, even though we know they are mainly symbolic. The appeal of the “no guns” logic presses through in the intuition that any sort of incremental reduction in the firearm supply will push gun crime proportionately downward. The modern orthodoxy advances this logic through the contention that easier access to guns explains the exceptional rate of homicide in black communities.
The data say otherwise. This is demonstrated by the fact that urban areas where disproportionate black murder rates now center generally have stricter gun laws, fewer guns, and more gun crime than rural areas where there are far more guns, easier access to guns, and less gun crime. Among young black males, the gun homicide and victimization rate is higher in urban areas (where gun regulation is stricter and gun ownership is lower) than in rural areas (where gun regulation is looser and gun ownership is higher). But despite the fact that rural blacks own more guns and have easier access to guns, the modern murder rate for young urban blacks has been as much as 600 percent higher than that of their rural counterparts.44 Overall, blacks own guns at no greater rate than whites, and some surveys say that blacks own fewer guns. A study published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy summarizes the data this way:
Preventing law-abiding, responsible African-Americans from owning guns does nothing at all to reduce murderers, because they are not the ones who are doing the killing. The murderers are a small minority of extreme antisocial aberrants who manage to obtain guns whatever the level of gun ownership in the African-American community.
Indeed, murderers generally fall into a group some criminologists have called “violent predators,” sharply differentiating them not only from the overall population but from other criminals as well. Surveys of imprisoned felons indicate that when not imprisoned the ordinary felon averages perhaps 12 crimes per year. In contrast, “violent predators” spend much or most of their time committing crimes, averaging at least 5 assaults, 63 robberies, and 172 burglaries annually. A National Institute of Justice survey of 2,000 felons in 10 state prisons, which focused on gun crime, said of these types of respondents: “[T]he men we have labeled Predators were clearly omnibus felons . . . [committing] more or less any crime they had the opportunity to commit. . . . Thus, when we talk about ‘controlling crime’ in the United States today, we are talking largely about controlling the behavior of these men.”
The point is not just that demographic patterns of homicide and gun ownership in the African-American community do not support the more guns equal more death mantra. More importantly, those patterns refute the logic of fewer guns equal less death. The reason fewer guns among ordinary African-Americans does not lead to fewer murders is because that paucity does not translate to fewer guns for the aberrant minority who do murder. The correlation of very high murder rates with low gun ownership in African-American communities simply does not bear out the notion that disarming the populace as a whole will disarm and prevent murder by potential murderers.45
The general data on violent crime and the gun inventory also refute the instinct that incremental decreases in the gun supply will reduce gun crime. The telling point here is that the overall gun inventory and gun crime have split in dramatically different directions. Over the last seventy-five years, the number of guns per 100,000 of population has grown from about 34,000 per 100,000 to roughly 100,000 per 100,000. Yes, we have enough guns literally to arm every man, woman, and child in the nation. But an interesting thing has happened as the gun inventory has grown to this record level.
The more-guns-equals-more-gun-crime assumption has not turned out. While the inventory of civilian firearms has grown steadily, the overall gun homicide rate has oscillated from around three per 100,000 to highs of around six per 100,000. In recent years, the gun crime rate and violent crime rate (even among blacks) have declined even while the number of guns has risen sharply. Gun homicides have trended down over recent decades from highs of around 14,000 per year to the current rate of around 8,000 per year. Over this same period, the number of guns in the civilian inventory has continued to grow to its now-record level of more than 325 million firearms. (This estimate is in the middle of a range that includes William Bratton’s 350-million-guns estimate on the high end and lower estimates toward 300 million.) Not only have more guns not equaled more crime, both violent crime and gun crime have sharply declined while the gun stock has accelerated to record levels.46
One might still respond that at least stringent supply controls can’t hurt. But this assumes that guns produce no benefits that would be lost under restrictive policies. And that is a difficult assumption to sustain. Several measures show various benefits of firearms ownership. A national study of gun use against burglaries conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated 1,900,000 annual episodes where someone in the home retrieved a firearm in response to a suspected illegal entry. There were roughly half a million instances where the armed householder confronted and chased off the intruder.47
A study of active burglars found that one of the greatest risks faced by residential burglars is being injured or killed by occupants of a targeted dwelling. Many reported that this was their greatest fear and a far greater worry than being caught by police.48 The data bear out the instinct. Home invaders in the United States are more at risk of being shot in the act than of going to prison.49 Because burglars do not know which homes have a gun, people who do not own guns enjoy free-rider benefits because of the deterrent effect of others owning guns.50
In a survey of convicted felons conducted for the National Institute of Justice, 34 percent of them reported being “scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim.” Nearly 40 percent had refrained from attempting a crime because they worried the target was armed. Fifty-six percent said that they would not attack someone they knew was armed and 74 percent agreed that “one reason burglars avoid houses where people are at home is that they fear being shot.”
The National Institute of Justice study concluded, “The highest concern about confronting an armed victim was registered by felons from states with the greatest relative number of privately owned firearms. . . . The major effects of partial or total handgun bans would fall more on the shoulders of the ordinary gun-owning public than on the felonious gun abuser of the sort studied here. . . . It is therefore also possible that one side consequence of such measures would be some loss of the crime-thwarting effects of civilian firearms ownership.”51
Comparative assessments are instructive. Only around 13 percent of US residential burglaries are “hot” burglaries, meaning the attempt is made on an occupied residence.52 This relatively low incidence of hot burglaries is generally attributed to criminals’ fear of confronting an armed resident.53 Home invaders in the United Kingdom seem to operate under different incentives. Compared to the United States, the United Kingdom has far more hot burglaries, nearly half of the total in one counting period. The chances of encountering an armed homeowner are far lower in the United Kingdom. This actually seems to fuel a preference for striking when occupants are home and alarms and locks are disengaged. Because hot burglaries pose higher risks of assault, one estimate says that UK-style gun restrictions in the United States would increase assaults by more than half a million per year, raising the overall American violent crime rate by almost 10 percent.54
There is intriguing anecdotal evidence of firearms benefits in the consequences of targeted firearms policies. In the period before Florida adopted its “shall issue” concealed-carry laws, the Orlando Police Department conducted a widely advertised program of firearms training for women. The program was started in response to reports that women in the city were buying guns at an increased rate after an uptick in sexual assaults.
The program aimed to help women gun owners become safe and proficient. Over the next year, rape declined by 88 percent. Burglary fell by 25 percent. Nationally these rates were increasing and no other city with a population over 100,000 experienced similar decreases during the period.55 Rape increased by 7 percent nationally and by 5 percent elsewhere in Florida.56
There is a related lesson in the policies surrounding the concealed carry of firearms. The shift here has been revolutionary. Over the past thirty years, state after state has adopted nondiscretionary (“shall issue”) licensing, which allows people who pass objective filters of trustworthiness to carry concealed firearms in public. This movement started as a reaction against the old discretionary systems that often were afflicted by cronyism, and, historically, by overt racism. Shall issue licensing is now the national norm.
At the start, many claimed that vetting people for trustworthiness and then allowing them to carry guns would lead to blood in the street. The gun, it was argued, was a powerful catalyst that would turn ordinary people into murderers. By any estimate, that fear did not turn out. With millions of concealed-carry permit holders nationally, the objections that concealed-carry laws would lead to carnage as ordinary people transformed into murderers have been tested and refuted.
The dispute now centers on studies concluding that concealed-carry laws cause reductions in crime and yield billions of dollars of benefits in avoided costs. This assessment matches the intuition that making criminal activity more risky also makes it less likely. These claims have drawn criticisms and rebuttals. In 2005, a National Research Council panel evaluated the literature on both sides. The majority of the panel concluded that the data were inadequate to say whether right-to-carry laws increased or decreased crime. One panel member, political scientist James Q. Wilson, filed a dissent. Wilson had supported gun-control measures in the past and gained fame as the originator of the “Broken Windows” theory of crime control. Wilson concluded that “the best evidence we have is that [right-to-carry laws] impose no costs but may confer benefits.” While the debate continues, the striking thing is that the more-guns-equals-more-crime/blood-in-the-streets thesis is not seriously on the table.57
Much of the social science on the costs and benefits of private firearms proceeds on broad measures that do not specify distinct racial trends. But some studies have focused specifically on blacks. One study started with data sets about black homicides and then tracked the stories of victims and offenders. Researchers interviewed people familiar with the episode, the parties involved, and people who knew them.
In a sample from selected American cities, the study found that “robbery homicide” was the most frequent type of stranger homicide. But the next finding is surprising. “Young adult black men who are robbery-homicide victims are more often persons described as the robber than the robbed. This pattern appears to prevail in each of the primary sample cities.”
In thinking about what is best for the Parker/McDonald class, the next assessment is vital. “Given the higher percentage of robber homicide victimizations in the early years of the interval, one might assume that targets posing a higher homicide risk for the offender were abandoned in favor of safer targets.” Note that the idea of hardening targets against the aggressive microculture is the core theme of arguments that armed citizens are a disincentive to crime. Researchers concluded that over a six-year period, robbery homicide was nearly as likely to result in the death of the robber as the robbed and that “the deterrent efficiency of those who are successful in thwarting a robbery attempt probably exceeds that of the criminal justice system.”
This is difficult territory. It is easy to see why policy makers might not embrace these data or design rules exploiting this trend. But from the perspective of the Parker/McDonald class—people living in the midst of clear threats and state failure—these data are a welcome affirmation of the benefits of private firearms in the hands of good people. One study underscores that message with this summary.
The previous evidence illustrating the riskiness of becoming a victim if choosing to engage in robbery is a point seldom made. One must exhibit caution not to overstate the case, considering the low clearance rate for this offense. Yet it appears that robbers are indeed sensitive to the risks associated with the choice of robber targets. . . . Young black males who are insensitive to the risks associated with the choice of a robbery target clearly increase the probability that they will become homicide victims.58
The idea that firearms policy in the black community should privilege the Parker/McDonald class of innocents is open to at least two additional objections. Besides the Parker/McDonald class, there is another important class of innocents who are put at risk by firearms externalities— that is, crossfire, stray shots, and accidents for which self-defense is no clear answer. This group actually overlaps with the Parker/McDonald class. But treating it separately gives maximum credit to this interest as a counterweight.
Balancing these interests prompts comparisons between defensive gun uses and accidents and a variety of other balances. The DGU numbers range perhaps into the millions. The accidental death numbers are in the hundreds. People will contest exactly how these inputs should be weighted. And some will suggest other types of comparisons. It is also relevant that these data are drawn from the general population. It may turn out that particular black communities are exceptional in ways that are not reflected in the general data.
Also, one of the negative externalities of even a virtuous armed citizenry is that some percentage of guns owned by good people leak into the black market. Some of these guns are stolen. Others are shared-access guns, legally owned but taken and used by some untrustworthy member of the household. These risks are not fully quantified and are open for debate. They raise arguments for a sharper focus on safe storage, theft reporting, and innovations like frangible ammunition. The government interest in those things might be stronger in some places than in others.
Overall, the social science fairly suggests three important things. First, the problem of intraracial gun violence among blacks is attributable mainly to a distinct criminal microculture. Second, that criminal microclass responds to disincentives that make violent crime more risky. Third, guns in the hands of the Parker/McDonald class are among those disincentives.
Caution is certainly warranted here. The social science on these questions is vast, diverse, and incomplete. And a healthy cycle of criticism, rebuttal, and response is ongoing. It would be a mistake to anoint any particular empirical claim as the last word. Indeed, it is best to think about social-science claims as simply working theories. Still, there is a strong case that arms in the hands of the Parker/McDonald class generate results that compete easily with the modern orthodoxy’s combination of promising symbolism and practical failure.
This brings us full circle, back to choice. Empirically it is far from obvious that the Parker/McDonald class is better off disarmed. So it seems fair to give them the option. But choice also resonates beyond cold empirical assessment. As a matter of long practice and policy, the black tradition of arms respected, indeed, exalted, the self-defense interest of individual black people. Though the stakes were tremendous, individuals were never asked to surrender their self-defense interest to advance group goals. The danger that self-defense would spill over into political violence was substantial, putting the entire movement, the freedom of an entire people, at risk. On that measure, the historic risks of the black tradition of arms were just as great or greater than the risks of firearms today. Despite that historic risk, black folk from the leadership to the grassroots upheld individual choice on the question of armed self-defense.
As a broader principle of liberty, the coalition from which the modern orthodoxy grows also has exalted choice as a bedrock principle driving policy on some of the most critical issues within the progressive agenda. It is hard to improve on the Supreme Court’s articulation of the principle:
Matters involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under the compulsion of the state.59
The values and autonomy the court elevates here are easily reduced further. More basic than defining one’s own concept of existence is the core interest in preserving one’s existence against deadly threats. Personal security is the bedrock on which other popular autonomy claims rest. If choice on those matters is central to liberty, how do we deny people some fair measure of choice in circumstances where their lives hang in the balance?