Customer Reviews

The Great American Gun Debate

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What is lost on many reviewers is the political history of the two authors which would cause some to assume that they would be viciously anti-gun. Well, they were, at one time.

Don Kates is a former "Criminologist of the Year" award winner, as is Florida State University's Gary Kleck. Kates is lawyer specializing in civil rights, and was instrumental in writing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Part of Kate's life experience that shapes his views today were the violent attacks on the civil rights workers by roving bands of KKK. The local police would not come to their aid, so Kates found himself standing armed guard around the homes of NAACP officials. The KKK wisely kept clear. Even given this, Kates had fallen for the gun controlers ruse, "Saturday Night Special" (SNS) which are claimed to be disproportionately used by criminals. Kates later researched the subject and found that the term got its start in the post Civil War south. The original term was actually "Niggertown Saturday Night Special." It was used to villify inexpensive firearms (the only ones the newly freed slaves could afford) and resulted in only well-made and expensive guns being legal. Viola! Blacks were slowly disarmed and easily attacked by the newly formed KKK. Kates discovered that criminals actually prefer high quality firearms (just like the rest of us) and wonders, if the SNS theory is true, what the benefit would be to arm criminals with more expensive weapons the didn't "blow up, jam, or were more accurate."

Kleck is another self-described liberal Democrat. He is a member of ACLU, Common Cause, and Amnesty International. He was so firmly anti-gun that his original study was admittedly started to show that guns in the hands of peaceful citizens were not used very often to stop crime. His final study found that they were indeed used at least 2.5 million times per year in face to face confrontations to thwart crime. For this work he won the Hindelang award (most significant work by a criminologist in several years).

Despite their pro-gun data, Kleck and Kates still think that "gun control" and "registration" is a good thing in general. I don't. To find out why, look into Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. It was founded by holocaust survivors who saw Hitler confiscate Jewish firearms using registration data just before he killed six million of them.

Don Kates, Gary Kleck and numerous other contributing researchers have produced a well documented and scholarly but highly readable examination of a hazy issue which unfortunately has become an emotionally driven, ideological litmus test in our society.

Not only do the authors exhaustively and convincingly argue of the positive social utility of lawful, privately owned firearms, they effectively demolish or refocus many long-held assumptions that we in the US and overseas often have about firearms misuse, crime, criminals, crime statistics and the means by which we try to define and "combat" crime. In turn, they effectively rebut many scholarly critics of the "right to keep and bear arms" by looking at the 2nd Amendment not as an isolated aberration. Rather, they view it as a keystone of a closely interwoven Constitutional philosophy well grounded in English history and common law as well as in the political theory of George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not to mention the philosophy of John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and others.

The most fascinating part of the book is the writers' detailed exposure of the disturbing attitudes and behavior of many of those calling for ever-tighter gun controls if not for complete abolition of their ownership by private citizens. Among these are the relentless character assassination, crude ad hominem attacks, heavy editorial bias, routine scaremongering and bigoted stereotypy directed by anti-gun members of the mainstream news media, the clergy and intelligentsia (ordinarily so self-congratulatory about their presumably unassailable sense of objectivity, tolerance, fairness, balance and impartiality) toward law abiding firearms owners. Whether one is pro or anti-gun or none of the above, this phenomenon alone is a cause for serious concern.

Kates and Kleck present a reasoned discussion of the possession, control and use of guns and their impact on violence and crime in the US.

The book is a refreshing change from the pre-programmed argumentation that characterizes most of the "gun debate". As a gun owner, I dislike the lack of intellectual honesty that is endemic in the anti-gun literature but I also recognize the repetitive, almost ritual pro-gun prose.

Kates and Kleck address the traditional guns'n crime issues but also say that some types of gun control are desireable (ones aimed at disarming or disabling people who've demonstrated membership in the "criminal class").

They address in some detail the intellectual dishonesty behind much of anti-gun "science" and the biases in much of the press coverage of the "gun debate".

It's a very informative and readable book. I recommend it highly.

...the last 1/3 of it got bogged down in too much technical detail and repeated information that had been previously stated. That is too bad because the first 2/3 was well-written and informative.

This really is an interesting book - one that should burst some bubbles of the anti-gun crowd. The writers painstakingly analyze the statistics and the motivations of some of America's biggest gun control lobbies, including the Centers for Disease Control (did you know that they use bogus data to label handguns as a public health threat? They quote FBI data that literally does not exist - they cite the document but it does not have the statistics that they use as a justification to lobby against guns. The document doesn't even report that type of statistic!)

Don't let my comments about the last 1/3 of the book deter you from reading the rest of it - it really was worth the time and effort and firmly completed my swing from being anti-gun to being anti-gun control.

This is a factual, well documented text. And that's just what it is: A text fit for an honest, college level sociology course. I found it very informative, especially the final chapter on Constitutional issues. However, I found the chapter dealing with the Fourth Estate, the press, a little curious. It seems that Kates bent over backwards giving excuses for the press's behavior, but went on to reveal a clear case of premeditated libel. Oh well, I didn't let that color my judgement of this well balanced presentation. I highly recommend this book because of the revealing statistics and their erudite presentation. A highly reliable book.

A careful, dispassionate, and scholarly treatment, yet accessible for the general reader. An excellent contribution to the literature.