| At the fall 2001 Social Science History
Association convention in Chicago, the Crime and Justice network sponsored a
forum on the history of gun ownership, gun use, and gun violence in the United
States. Our purpose was to consider how social science history might contribute
to the public debate over gun control and gun rights. To date, we have had
little impact on that debate. It has been dominated by mainstream social
scientists and historians, especially scholars such as Gary Kleck, John Lott,
and Michael Bellesiles, whose work, despite profound flaws, is politically
congenial to either opponents or proponents of gun control. Kleck and Mark
Gertz, for instance, argue on the basis of their widely cited survey that gun
owners prevent numerous crimes each year in the Untied states by using firearms
to defend themselves and their property. If their survey respondents are to be
believed, American gun owners shot 100,000 criminals in 1994 in self-defense—a
preposterous number. Lott claims on the basis of his statistical analysis of
recent crime rates that laws allowing private individuals to carry concealed
firearms to deter murders, rapes, and robberies, because criminals are afraid to
attack potentially armed victims. However, he biases his results by confining
his analysis to the year between 1977 and 1992, when violent crime rates had
peaked and varied little from year to year. He reports only regression models
that support his thesis and neglects to mention that each of those models find a
positive relationship between violent crime and real income, and inverse
relationship between violent crime and unemployment. Contrary to Kleck and Lott, Bellesiles insists that guns and America's "gun culture" are responsible for America's high rate of murder. In Belleville's opinion, relatively few Americans owned guns before the 1850s or know how to use, maintain, or repair them. As a result, he says, guns contributed little to the homicide rate, especially among Whites, which was low everywhere, even in the South and on the frontier, where historians once assumed gun and murder went hand in hand. According to Bellesiles, these patterns changed dramatically after the Mexican War and especially after the Civil War, when gun ownership became widespread and cultural changes encouraged the use of handguns to command respect and resolve personal and political disputes. The result was an unprecedented wave of gun-related homicides that never truly abated. To this day, the United States has the highest homicide rate of any industrial democracy. Bellesile's low estimates of gun ownership in early America conflict, however, with those of every historian who has previously studied the subject and has thus far proven irreproducible. Every homicide statistic he presents is either misleading or wrong. Given the influence of Kleck, Lott, Bellesiles and other partisan scholars on the debate over gun control and gun rights, we felt a need to pull together what social science historians have learned to date about the history of gun ownership and gun violence in America, and to consider what research methods and projects might increase our knowledge in the near future. |