Robert J. Spitzer - Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spitzer, Robert J., 1953

Guns across America : reconciling gun rules and rights / Robert J. Spitzer.

pages cm

ISBN 9780190228583 (hardback : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780190228606

1. Gun controlUnited States. 2. Firearms ownershipUnited States. 3. FirearmsLaw and legislationUnited States. I. Title.

HV7436.S677 2015

323.43dc232014041660

To Tess,
You turned my world around, when you held out your hand

CHAPTER 1
Why Do We Have Government?

CHAPTER 2
Our Forefathers Superior Gun Wisdom

CHAPTER 3
What about the Second Amendment?

CHAPTER 4
Stand Your Ground: How Did We Get from Self-Defense to Shoot First?

CHAPTER 5
The Case of New York

I have many people to thank for all manner of assistance, advice, and information. My most sincere thanks to Glenn Altschuler, Cortland County Undersheriff Herb Barnhart, Erik Bitterbaum, Judge Julie Campbell, Gregg Lee Carter, John Colasanto, Saul Cornell, SUNY Cortlands University Police Chief Steven Dangler, Deb Dintino, Julie Easton, John Robert Greene, Herb Haines, Steve Handelman, David Holian, George Jennings Jr., Cortland County Clerk Elizabeth Larkin, D. Bruce Mattingly, Dave Miller, Steve Newman, Hans Noel, Raymond Petersen, Dick Pious, Mark Prus, Grant Reeher, Don Richardson, Cortland Deputy Chief of Police Paul Sandy, Daniel Shea, Henry Steck, Cortland City Police Sergeant Patrick Sweeney, and to the Cortland City Police Department, the Cortland County Clerks Office, Cortland County Sheriffs Department, and the McGraw Sportsmens Club. At Oxford, my special thanks to social sciences editor-in-chief David McBride, and assistant editor Sarah Rosenthal.

I extend my gratitude as well for the opportunity to present my arguments and data at several universities and other venues, including Cazenovia College, Colby College, Fordham University, Georgetown University, Jefferson Community College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Kings College (Britain), Manchester University (Indiana), the Monroe County Bar Association, the Pediatric Grand Rounds at the Upstate Golisano Childrens Hospital (Syracuse, NY), the Sterling (New York) Historical Society, Syracuse University, and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. This research was supported in part by a sabbatical leave from SUNY Cortland. My home institution has treated me well these many years, and I am happy to express my gratitude. Finally, my three gals, Mellissa, Shannon, and Skye, cheer me every day. And everything I do of any worth is dedicated to Tess.

Imagine a country where the government keeps tabs on citizen gun possessionwhat kinds of guns, how many, and their conditionand where the government can confiscate them for offenses ranging from failing to swear an oath of loyalty to the government, to the violation of various hunting restrictions, to the failure to pay an obligatory gun tax. That country is neither a quasi-socialist European nation, nor an authoritarian nation, nor a postmodern, futuristic American leftist utopia. That nation is the American colonies and the early American nation.

The American gun narrative is familiar to most. From the colonial era through the Wild West, men mostly relied on their wits for survival, which included a trusty flintlock or pistol at their side. This heritage was enshrined in the Second Amendments right to bear arms, which played out most famously in the nineteenth-century American West, where stalwart men tamed the West by standing their groundagain, in the grand American traditionagainst outlaws, Indians, and predators. These often repeated and widely accepted shibboleths frame the contemporary gun debate (even if some disagree about how this past should or should not inform modern gun policy) and buttress often successful efforts to make it easier for modern-day John Waynes to arm themselves, and their values, against modern-day predators of both the criminal and political variety.

This narrative, of course, is mostly wrongnot just exaggerated, but wrong. I do not suggest that I am by any means the first to point this out, but in recent years, new and important research and writing have chipped away at old myths to present a more accurate and pertinent sense of our gun past. This is important not only because the truth matters, but also because modern American gun policy, more than most other policy areas, has an indisputably long and direct heritage and lineage dating to the countrys earliest beginnings. That heritage, in turn, frames the modern gun debate to a degree seen in few other areas. As if to ratify the idea that modern gun policy is framed by the past, the Supreme Courts important 2008 case defining (and redefining) gun rights is one of the most history-driven (as opposed to law-driven) decisions in modern times. This past-to-present continuum has had very specific consequences, as it has been key to the concerted contemporary political drive in the last three decades by gun rights groups, and parallel marketing efforts by the gun industry, to roll back gun laws and to press as many guns into as many hands as possible.

This movement has occurred, ironically, at the very time when fewer Americans than ever own guns. This long-term trend arises from profound demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal changes that span many decades. Women, younger people, immigrants, ethnic minorities, urban and suburban dwellers, and political independents Little wonder, then, that the overarching political and financial imperative of gun interests in the last several decades has been an ever-more frantic campaign to wed guns to modern society. This gun frenzy is juxtaposed with a further contradictory trend: a multidecade continuing nationwide decline in crime. This is a welcome trend, to be sure, but it also undercuts a primary justification for gun ownership, since fear of crime is a central reason for gun (specifically handgun) acquisition.

The purpose of this book is to understand both the political framing and trajectory of the modern gun issue by drawing, in part, on newly available data, unexcavated history, and political perspectives for what is at bottom a purely and profoundly political movement. By examining the full history of gun laws in America, the Second Amendment, the stand your ground controversy, and the real world of gun politics and practices (informed, in part, by the authors own experiences in building a gun and seeking a pistol permit) in a seemingly anomalous place where guns are, by American standards, tightly regulatedNew York Statethis book will show that the predicates of modern American gun politics are mostly built on quicksand. One can have a legitimate debate about whether modern America should or should not have tougher (or weaker) gun laws. And that debate need not tether itself unduly to the past. After all, twenty-first-century America is a very different nation from the thirteen Atlantic Coasthugging colonies that banded together to bravely declare their independence from Britain in the eighteenth century. But like it or not, the contemporary gun policy debate is tethered tightly to its origins, and one may not conduct that debate based on an imaginary past.