And Now, A War on Guns
You’re probably thinking: Well, I know who’s going to win that one. After all, they’ve got all the firepower!
But of course, the whole point is to reduce the firepower. That’s reduce, not eliminate. If Americans have learned anything from the War on Drugs or the War on Terror, it surely must be that preventing terrible things from happening cannot be achieved by violating civil liberties, employing “zero tolerance” or “maximum suspicion,” or underestimating the economic and cultural forces encouraging everyday people to engage in harmful behavior. We have also learned that eliminating terrible things like drug overdoses or domestic terrorism attacks is impossible, but that reducing them is an achievable goal. Planning a winning strategy begins by examining supply-and-demand dynamics, with careful attention to the cultural norms underlying the harmful behaviors.
Why are guns like drugs? To begin with, there are so many of them. Laws banning either guns or drugs will be resisted mightily and gleefully flouted, and even if some people who otherwise would have possessed them follow the law, it will not put a dent in the overall volume of illegal goods still available. Second, guns are like drugs because so many people want them even though the result could be death. They fulfill deep but poorly understood cultural needs, and users perceive their benefits as much greater than the risk of dying. Third, they cost a lot of money, and an extremely lucrative market economy prospers and supplies them to users.
Why are guns not like drugs? Because they are not addictive, and users don’t need to connect regularly and repeatedly to their dealer to get them. Gun users, therefore, are less visible to family, friends, and the police who might try to get them to stop. Furthermore, guns have legal supporters. Guns have the National Rifle Association to…pardon me for this…shoot down any proposed gun control legislation in any state. Guns also have the Second Amendment and a Supreme Court that has produced some remarkably twisted caselaw on it.
But things may be changing on the legal front. The N.R.A. has recently been hit by a deep scandal in which its executive director, Wayne LaPierre, along with many top officials in the organization who allegedly lived lavish lifestyles on the organization’s dimes were removed from office for financial malfeasance. The N.R.A’s membership is dropping and its knee-jerk rejection of any kind of gun regulation at all — even laws banning ownership of assault rifles of the type used in multiple mass shootings — is becoming unpopular among middle-of-the-road handgun owners and hunters. As for the Second Amendment, a case now pending in the Supreme Court addresses whether states may prohibit handgun owners from carrying the weapons in public. Because that case and others like it cover handguns, not assault rifles, and the caselaw on which it will be decided protects ownership of handguns for personal protection at home, there is a chance that a narrowly crafted decision would exclude protections on assault rifles and even, possibly though not probably, carrying weapons in public. In short, the national conversation about gun ownership and control is ongoing not only in state legislatures, but in the courts, and it is far from static.
But what of the federal government? Can Washington do anything meaningful in stopping the recent wave of deaths in cities and towns all over America? Again, think back to the War on Drugs. The feds cannot do much on the streets of these cities and towns, because local officials and communities have jurisdiction there. But federal action in disrupting supply chains of illegal manufacturing and smuggling can be powerful, and federal money to support state and local actions in stopping young people from shooting each other would be extremely welcome. This two-prong approach is the classic model of suppressing both supply and demand, and that is how the War on Drugs was fought. But that “war” was ill-conceived and racially unjust in its emphasis on harsh punishments that affected communities of color much more strongly than it affected wealthier communities. Applying the same approach to a War on Guns is likely to produce the same bad outcomes. The worst injustices of the War on Drugs were perpetrated by local law enforcement and elected officials as they invaded impoverished neighborhoods in the name of broken windows and zero tolerance. By contrast, federal money sent to localities in the War on Guns has already been earmarked to support local groups of Violence Interruptors, rather than police.
The Biden Administration has announced its two-prong strategy to mount a War on Guns. To shrink the supply, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI will steeply increase their investigations and interdiction of gun smuggling across state lines. This won’t vacuum up all the loose guns out there, but it will suppress illegal supply and thus raise the price on the firearms still in circulation. As for the demand, $350 billion of pandemic relief funding has been set aside to support programs in impoverished neighborhoods where young people have been shooting each other at alarming rates over the past year. These programs come in two flavors: the Operation Ceasefire model of focused deterrence, and the Violence Interruptors model of supporting credible messengers from the community, usually people who were once involved in street violence themselves but have dedicated themselves to stopping it. Debating the relative merits of each is not the topic here. The point is that federal pandemic relief money will be routed to local police departments to hire officers for addressing gun violence, but only under a Community Violence Interruption model in which police must partner with neighborhood CVI groups.
CBS News recently interviewed Corniki Bornds, whose only child was killed by gunfire in 2017 in a Chicago neighborhood. “There was a police officer sitting on the corner when my son was shot,” Bornds said. “I don’t see the benefit of it. But if you get in front of it and try to keep bad guys from wanting to kill each other, I think that’s a better place to send resources than to the police.”
Will the post-pandemic police let the violence interrupters take the lead, or will they revert to previous invasive practices? As we embark on the War on Guns, there is some hope that police and residents might be able to work together better if we remember the lessons of what went wrong in the War on Drugs.
