Bleeding Out – An Important Book.
Want to read the latest attempt by a liberal social
scientist to tell us what we need to do about gun violence? Try Thomas Abt’s Bleeding
Out, the sub-title proclaiming this book to be a “bold new plan for
peace in the streets.” And what Abt believes we can accomplish if we
follow his bold plan is an annual 10% drop in homicide every year in cities
with high homicide rates. If the 20 cities with populations of 50,000 or more
which register the highest rates of fatal violence all initiated Abt’s plan
this year, the result would save 12,132 lives over the next eight years.
The author’s focus isn’t on gun violence per se,
but he realizes that no significant reduction in urban violence will ever occur
without doing something about guns. With reference to the usual suspects
(Hemenway, et. al.) he makes the argument that we suffer from such a high rate
of fatal violence because we have too many guns. But there’s nothing wrong with
the existence of guns per se, it’s when the guns get into the wrong hands
of young men who use them in a violent way.
Abt believes there are three categories of wrong-handed
gun owners (‘owning’ as in access to a gun, not necessarily legally owned)
whose behavior needs to be regulated in order for his bold plan to work. These
categories are:
Would-be shooters – individuals who
view using a gun as a way to be accepted within their social milieu.Legacy shooters – individuals who
grew up in families that are “entrenched in criminal violence.”Wounded shooters – individuals who
were subject to extreme trauma (beatings, molestations) during childhood.
Abt’s grand plan for dealing with
these individuals relies on a mixture of effective policing, even-handed
justice, community-level outreach and behavior modification. Sounds
interesting, it’s certainly a new and different approach, but I happen to
disagree.
Want to know why most kids in the
inner-city carry guns? They carry them for the exact, same reason that the
middle-class guy in my town walks into my shop to buy a gun – for
self-protection. The difference, of course, is that the guy who comes into my
shop, plunks down six hundred bucks and walks out with a Glock, has about as much
chance of ever needing to use that gun to protect himself as I have a chance to
lose the next 20 pounds that my internist has been hocking me to lose
for the last ten years.
Having created a portrait of
inner-city gun users which may or may not have any connection to reality, Abt
then shifts his focus back to where he believes the primary responsibility for
reducing gun violence should rest, namely, reducing the demand for guns
amongst the at-risk kids and young adults. The whole point of Abt’s approach to
gun violence is to move the discussion away from various supply-side schemes to
reduce the flow of guns, substituting instead his grand plan that will, he
claims, wean people away from their desire to carry and use guns.
Like every other liberal-mined
scholar who wants to reduce gun violence, Abt makes a point of explicitly
stating that none of his policies would in any way prevent law-abiding citizens
from safely owning guns. What we have is yet another attempt to somehow get rid
of the results of guns but allow the guns themselves to remain. This country
has gun violence for one reason: we allow private ownership of what Antonin
Scalia calls ‘weapons of war,’ which just happen to be the handguns made by
Glock, Sig, Smith & Wesson, etc., all initially designed and used as
military guns.
Everybody keeps telling me it would be next to impossible to forge a national political consensus around the idea that some types of guns are simply too lethal to be owned. Think it would be easier to get hundreds of relevant organizations in 20 large cities to do something which has never been done in even one urban site?
By the way, I liked the book.
