Law and Policy Quarterly
Issue on Firearms and Firearms Regulation:
Old Premises, New Research
vol. 5, no. 3, 1983: 325.
Posted for Educational use only. The printed edition remains canonical. For citational use please visit the local law library or obtain a back issue.
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SAGECRAFT IN THE DEBATE OVER GUN CONTROL
WILLIAM R. TONSO
University of Evansville
This article is not about the gun control issue per se; instead, it considers the way in which this issue has been treated by social scientists. The article points to some of the shortcomings in what is commonly referred to as the conventional social scientific approach to controversial social matters. While the subject examined in the article is gun control, other equally controversial issues, such as school busing or the legalization of marijuana, could have been used as well to make the same points.
This article is not about the gun control issue per se; it focuses on the more publicized social scientific treatments of the gun control issue--those passed on to college students through social problems texts, anthologies, and monographs, and to the general public through magazine articles and the published findings of various social-science-assisted federal commissions on crime, violence, and civil disturbances. The article's objective is to point out some of the shortcomings of what will be referred to as the conventional social scientific approach to controversial social issues and social problems.
While the controversial issue examined here is gun control, other examples could conceivably have been used to make the same points--issues such as school busing, pornography, or the legalization of marijuana, or social problems such as discrimination, pollution, poverty, unemployment, or crime. There is a missionary aspect to the conven- [Page 326] tional social scientific approach to such issues and problems in that it often goes beyond analysis to lend--subtly or otherwise--supposedly scientifically based support to one means or other of coping with these phenomena, support that can be ignored only at the risk of being considered unenlightened. It will be argued, therefore, that the conventional social scientific treatments of controversial social phenomena often have much more in common with the work of those to whom Florian Znaniecki referred as "sages" than they have with social science, and consequently, that such treatments obscure more than they reveal about the issues or problems with which they are dealing. The first part of the article describes the conventional social scientific treatment of the gun issue, places this treatment into social-cultural context, and finally links it to Znaniecki's comments on the social role of the sage. The second part of the article points out, through a critique of the conventional treatment of the gun issue, how the concerns of the sage affect the social scientific enterprise, here defined broadly enough to include social history.
SOCIAL SCIENCE OR SAGECRAFT?
It seems to be generally accepted that the civilian possession of firearms in the United States is widespread, but whether or not this state of affairs is desirable has been the subject of much controversy since the early part of the 20th century (see Kennett and Anderson, 1975: chap. 7). The side of the controversy that has received the most publicity through the media, however, has it that this widespread possession constitutes, if not a social problem unto itself, a major contributing factor to other social problems such as crime, violence, and civil disorder. It is hardly surprising, then, that efforts to bring the civilian possession of firearms under strict control and to reduce the number of firearms in civilian hands have also received a great deal of publicity through the media. A perusal of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature's "Firearms Laws and Regulations" section can give one some indication of the magnitude of this media support for gun controls. Since the latest major push for controls got under way in the early 1960s, most articles on the subject in such news and general interest magazines as Time, Newsweek, Reader's Digest, and The New Republic, have strongly supported gun controls, with only the outdoor, gun, and politically libertarian maga- [Page 327] zines consistently taking an anticontrol stand. The national television networks have also supported controls through various documentaries on the subject as well as through such television favorites as the "soaps" of the present and of the past. The leading urban newspapers have all editorialized in favor of controls, the Washington Post once doing so for 77 straight days (Kennett and Anderson, 1975: 239, 312), as have many medium- and small-town newspapers and the syndicated columnists and political cartoonists appearing in them--Ann Landers, Art Buchwald, Jack Anderson, and Herblock, among others. Newspapers and magazines have also helped publicize the works of such procontrol authors as Carl Bakal (1966) and Robert Sherrill (1973). Even comic strips such as "Tank McNamara" and "Doonesbury" have supported gun controls by ridiculing the anticontrol position.
While those responsible for the various newspaper editorials, columns, magazine articles, and TV documentaries that have over the years argued for controls have often looked to the "experts" on man and society--psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists--for assistance, by the middle 1960s the social sciences were starting to get more directly involved in the controversy. In response to the political assassinations and civil disturbances of the period, a number of commissions aimed at discovering and eradicating the causes of crime, violence, and civil disturbances were established, and these commissions were invariably assisted by social scientists. The commissions also invariably ended up recommending that strict gun controls be enacted as one means of reducing the amount of crime, violence, and civil disorder.
Beginning with the federal commissions, social scientific involvement with the gun control issue has extended increasingly to monographs, textbooks, and anthologies that deal with various social problems. Based on commission reports and the treatment that the gun issue has received in the various publications that have dealt with it, the sentiments concerning civilian firearms possession and gun control that have been transmitted through these various social science sources can be summarized as follows (see Newton and Zimring, 1969; Hofstadter, 1970; Hofstadter and Wallace, 1970: 24-26; Etzioni, 1971: 739-740; Julian, 1973: 481-482; Empey, 1974: 295-296; Wolfgang, 1974: 246; Hollon, 1974: chap. 6; Scarpitti, 1974: 431; Shostak, 1974: 278-292; President's Commission, 1975:171-177; Stark, 1975: 226-227; McCaghy, 1976: 125-129, 1980: 112-115; Barlow, 1978: 115-116; Boskin, 1978: 43-48; Glaser, 1978: 201, 260-264; Haskell and Yablonsky, 1978: 340-[Page 328] 341, 752; Sloshberg, 1978: 420; Harrington, 1979: 255-259; Reiman, 1979: 29-31, 192-193; and Light and Keller, 1982: 254):
1. When the United States was being transformed from a raw wilderness to a modern, urban, industrial nation, passing through a rural, agricultural stage along the way, private citizens often had use for firearms if they were to provide themselves with food and/or protection.
2. The United States no longer has a frontier, and in fact, it is now primarily urban and industrial rather than rural and agricultural. Consequently, the large number of firearms that have gotten and continue to get into civilian hands no longer serve any useful purpose, and are more trouble than they are worth. They no longer contribute to the establishment of law and order, but actually undermine efforts to establish order, as the high rate of firearms-related crime shows.
3. The United States is the only modern, urban, industrial nation that does not strictly regulate the civilian possession of firearms. The effectiveness of such controls is demonstrated by the fact that other modern, urban, industrial nations, all of which have them, have violent crime rates far lower than those of the United States.
4. It is obvious, therefore, that the United States is badly in need of strict gun controls that at a minimum would require the registration of all privately owned firearms, and licenses and identification cards for all firearms owners, plus a drastic reduction of the number of privately owned handguns.
5. The pollsters have shown that considerably more than half of the populace supports all of these measures and that as much as three fourths supports some of them.
6. The only reason that such regulations have not been enacted into law is that the domestic firearms industry and the National Rifle Association have, through well-organized lobbying efforts, been able to take advantage of the weaknesses of the federal system of government to block such legislation.
7. This opposition to obviously needed firearms regulations, though thus far effective, is self-serving, irresponsible, irrational, unenlightened, reactionary, uninformed, and so on.
The impression given by these sentiments is that through historical research, cross-cultural comparisons of crime rates, and the scientific analysis of public opinion, social scientists have been able to establish definitely that the United States would benefit significantly from gun controls, that the majority of Americans want such controls, and consequently, that opposition to such controls is self-serving or unreasonable. [Page 329]
However, there are things about the conventional social scientific analysis of the gun control issue that make one wonder about the impartiality of those engaged in it.
To begin, it should be noted that the conventional social science position on gun control summarized above is identical to the position that procontrollers have taken for years without social scientific assistance. In fact, it is not uncommon for nonsocial scientific, nonscholarly, procontrol, anti-gun polemics such as The Right to Bear Arms, by irate citizen Carl Bakal, and Saturday Night Special, by "investigative reporter" Robert Sherrill, to be cited in social science textbook analyses of the gun issue (see Hofstadter and Wallace, 1970: 26; Barlow, 1978: 143; Glaser, 1978: 213, 261-263; Haskell and Yablonsky, 1978: 340). When such sources are cited, no mention is made of the acknowledged procontrol, anti-gun sentiments of their authors. A second interesting aspect of the conventional social scientific treatment of the gun issue is that qualification of the material presented on the subject is rare to nonexistent. Poll findings are accepted at face value, although there is good social scientific cause to do otherwise (see President's Commission, 1975: 174; Glaser, 1978: 261-262; Shostak, 1974: 292; McCaghy, 1976: 126; and Harrington, 1979: 257). Similarly, cross-cultural comparisons of firearms-related crime rates are made with no consideration given to factors having little or nothing to do with gun controls that might help account for cross-cultural differences between such rates (see Newton and Zimring, 1969: 119-128; Hofstadter, 1970: 82; Hofstadter and Wallace, 1970: 26; Etzioni, 1971: 740; Empey, 1974: 295-296; Hollon 1974: 122; Stark, 1975: 226; Haskell and Yablonsky, 1978: 340-341). Finally, the conventional social scientific treatment of the gun issue makes no attempt to put the gun control controversy into social, cultural, and historical perspective in order to foster nonjudgmental understanding of the sentiments and vested interests of both those who support controls and those who oppose them. True, occasional attempts are made to present the anticontrol position (Shostak, 1974: 287-292; McCaghy, 1976: 124-129), but no effort is made to get at the vested interests of the people who subscribe to these conflicting views of controls, and one is not left in doubt concerning which position is the most sophisticated, informed, and logical. Similarly, the gun's place in American history is sometimes examined by conventional social scientists (Hofstadter, 1970; Hollon, 1974: chap. 6), but its survival is obviously viewed as unfortunate and explained in terms of cultural lag. [Page 330]
In other words, the conventional social scientific treatment of gun control leaves much to be desired if its goal is the scientific illumination of this controversial issue. Why? To answer this question it is helpful to put both the issue and those studying it into social-cultural context; although no heretofore published work has attempted to accomplish this task, a few writers have provided a framework for its accomplishment. Taking their lead from a 1972 Wall Street Journal article dealing with gun control, social historians Lee Kennett and James LaVerne Anderson (1975: 254) have argued that the gun control controversy is best seen "as a skirmish in the larger battle over the nation's cultural values, a battle in which 'cosmopolitan America' is pitted against 'bedrock America.'" Another historian, B. Bruce-Briggs, has followed up on this culture conflict theme. On one side of the conflict, Bruce-Briggs (1976) found those who correspond to Kennett and Anderson's cosmopolitans, people
who take bourgeois Europe as a model of a civilized society: a society just, equitable, and democratic; but well ordered, with the lines of responsibility and authority clearly drawn, and with decisions made rationally and correctly by intelligent men for the entire nation. To such people, hunting is atavistic, personal violence is shameful, and uncontrolled gun ownership is a blot upon civilization [1976: 61].
Corresponding to Kennett and Anderson's bedrockers are those people on the other side
who do not tend to be especially articulate or literate, and whose world view is rarely expressed in print. Their model is that of the independent frontiersman who takes care of himself and his family with no interference from the state. They are "conservative" in the sense that they cling to America's unique pre-modern tradition--a non-feudal society with a sort of medieval liberty writ large for everyman. To these people, "sociological" is an epithet. Life is tough and competitive. Manhood means responsibility and caring for your own 1976: 61].
From what Bruce-Briggs and Kennett and Anderson have written about the ongoing culture conflict between these two Americas, one gets the impression that the purest cosmopolitans are likely to be urban or urban oriented, college educated, philosophically and politically liberal, upper-middle class, and unfamiliar with guns, while the purest bed- [Page 331] rockers are likely to be rural or small-town oriented, high-school educated, philosophically and politically conservative, lower-middle or working class, and familiar with guns. If this is the case, at the very core of cosmopolitan America, along with those who control the nation's media--or at least the national television networks, large circulation metropolitan newspapers, general interest periodicals, and major publishing houses--are the American intellectual elite. And of course, that elite includes not only the nation's top writers, journalists, and other such literary folk, but its top educators, scholars, and scientists (social and otherwise) as well. Cosmopolitan America, therefore, is not only generally more adept at articulating its views than is bedrock America; it also possesses the means to place its views before bedrock as well as cosmopolitan America--Reader's Digest and TV for the former, The New Republic and college social science courses for the latter. Through its scholarly and scientific connections, cosmopolitan America can also at these views with a thick veneer of what passes for impartial scientific authority.
That the media, the scholarly-intellectual community, and even the social scientific subcommunity of the latter are, for the most part, part and parcel of what the Wall Street Journal and Kennett and Anderson have referred to as cosmopolitan America, rather than impartial observers and interpreters of and reporters on the passing scene, has been noted by a number of maverick social scientists. Sociologist, Catholic priest, and columnist Andrew Greeley (1970: chap. 10), himself a strong supporter of strict gun controls, has claimed that the intellectual community--social scientists not excluded--has all of the characteristics of an ethnic group, including divisive factions and an ethnocentrism that encourages it to look down upon rather than attempt to understand the nonintellectual "masses." Michael Lerner (1969: 608), while a graduate student in political science and psychology at Yale, claimed in an even more scathing polemic that the "upper classes" are extremely prejudiced against the lower-middle class and that "one of the strongest supports for this upper-class, 'respectable' bigotry lies in the academic field of psychology." Clearly including social scientists, sociologist Stanislav Andrzejewski (1954: 13-14) has noted that liberal intellectuals are not as tolerant as they think they are when it comes to dealing with those who do not subscribe to their liberal-humanitarian religion or participate in their "supranational culture. " Sociologist Peter Berger has written about the rising "New Class" of knowledge producers, symbol- rather than thing-manipulators, who have vested interests [Page 332] of their own. According to Berger (1978: 7), "institutionally, prestige universities and other centers of knowledge production (such as think tanks) are centers of New Class power, while publishing houses, periodicals, and foundations serve as distributing agencies." He goes on to point out that the New Class has a vested interest in government intervention because the greater part of its livelihood is derived "from public-sector employment. . . . Because government interventions have to be legitimated in terms of social ills, the New Class has a vested interest in portraying American society as a whole, and specific aspects of that society, in negative terms" (1978: 10).
In other words, to these critics and analysts of the knowledge producing and disseminating class to which they themselves belong, knowledge producers and disseminators in general tend to be so bound up with the world views, lifestyles, values and vested interests of their own urban, upper-middle class, degreed, liberal, sophisticated, cosmopolitan lives that their analyses of various controversial social issues and problems might be expected to be somewhat one sided and aimed at promoting their own cosmopolitan interests. If this is the case, such knowledge producers and disseminators are involved in what might be called "sagecraft" in behalf of the cosmopolitan America of which they are not only an integral but a central part. "The original status of the sage lies within his party," according to Florian Znaniecki (1968: 72-73), "and his original function consists in rationalizing and justifying intellectually the collective tendencies of his party. It is his duty to 'prove' by 'scientific' arguments that his party is right and its opponents are wrong." In order to perform his duty, the sage must demonstrate that his or her party's position is right because it is based on truth, and that the opposition's stand is wrong because it is based on error. "There is no doubt but that he can perform this task to the satisfaction of himself and his adherents," says Znaniecki, "for in the vast multiplicity of diverse, cultural data it is always possible to find facts which, "properly' interpreted, prove that the generalizations he accepts as true are true and that those he rejects as false are false" (1968: 75). Of course, the sage is likely to be opposed by the sages of the other side. Unless opposition sages can be silenced, the sage must call their reasoning and/or facts into question.
That sagecraft, purposeful or the inadvertent product of cosmopolitan tan ethnocentrism, helps account for the superficial way that conventional social scientists have treated the gun control issue, is suggested by statements made by two prominent sociologists associated with a commission headed by Milton Eisenhower. In spite of the fact that his own [Page 333] research ten years earlier had found no correlation between the availability of guns and the incidence of gun crime, one of these sociologists, Marvin E. Wolfgang (1968: 6), stated in a letter to the editor of Time magazine: "My personal choice for legislation is to remove all guns from private possession. I would favor statutory provisions that require all guns to be turned in to public authorities." The other sociologist, Morris Janowitz (Time Magazine, 1968:17), is in complete agreement: "I see no reason ... why anyone in a democracy should own a weapon."
Inadvertent or otherwise, a sage orientation results in social scientific analysis that is social scientific in name only. Social scientists who are primarily concerned with "rationalizing and justifying intellectually the collective tendencies of [their] party," rather than with shedding as much light as possible on a complex social phenomenon, is quite limited. They are not likely to consider their own positions as part of the phenomenon they are studying, or to recognize how their ideological positions restrict their vision.
SAGECRAFT AND THE SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC ENTERPRISE
It would not be surprising to find that most of those social scientists assisting various commissions or passing information concerning the gun issue to students through textbooks actually feel that they are letting the facts--crime rates, poll results, and the like--speak for themselves. The point being made is that such social scientists have been inclined to take too much for granted about the gun issue--possibly due to their own cosmopolitan world views, lifestyles, values, and vested interests--and in doing so they have provided "scientific" support (sage fashion) for the cosmopolitan tendencies that they not only share but help to create. A few examples should suffice to demonstrate how such cosmopolitan ethnocentrism and the sage orientation it encourages can affect the social scientific enterprise.
Consider the late Richard Hofstadter's attempt to explain the widespread civilian possession of firearms in the United States. Along the way, as he attempted to discredit the "frontier past" explanation for a state of affairs that he clearly considered to be deplorable, Hofstadter noted that the American frontier experience could not account for the persistence of what he referred to as the "American gun culture," since the frontier faded away several generations ago. "Why," Hofstadter [Page 334] asked (1970: 82), "did the United States alone among industrial societies cling to the idea that a substantially unregulated supply of guns among its city populations is a safe and acceptable thing?" Canada and Australia have had frontiers, and Japan has had a violent past, he reminds us, yet the gun homicide, suicide, and accident rates for these nations are far lower than those for the United States. Hofstadter credits the "rigorous gun laws" that Japan (the land of harakiri) has adopted as it has modernized with producing that country's extremely low gun homicide and suicide rates. "In sum," he stated (1970: 82), "other societies, in the course of industrial and urban development, have succeeded in modifying their old gun habits, and we have not."
The preceding is typical of the conventional social scientific use of cross-cultural comparisons to support gun controls. The facts have apparently been allowed to speak for themselves. However, these authors never tell us anything about the "old gun habits" of other nations that gun controls have supposedly modified. In fact, they show no sign that they are familiar with these old gun habits or that they have made any attempt to become so. Hofstadter, for example, simply assumed that Japan's old gun habits were similar to ours because of that nation's tradition of feudal and military violence, and that Australia's and Canada's were similar to ours because both nations have had frontiers. However, the works of various scholars who have not involved themselves with the gun control controversy-firearms historians, students of Japanese history, and those who have compared frontiers-give us no reason to believe that the old gun habits of these nations were anything like ours.
With respect to Japan, if we are to accept what other scholars have written on the subject, firearms were used extensively in the feudal wars after having been brought to Japan by the Portuguese toward the middle of the 16th century, but the populace as a whole never seems to have become familiar with them (see Perrin, 1979). The sword remained the most respected weapon through the 250 years of relatively peaceful Tokugawa rule down to rather recent times. During this period, partly due to traditional concerns and partly due to official policy, little or no effort was made to improve firearms, and when Perry "reopened" Japan to the rest of the world in the middle of the 19th century, the Japanese were still using matchlock guns of the same basic variety as those to which they had been introduced by the Portuguese 300 years earlier. What old gun habits did the Japanese have to modify as they became urban and industrial? Why should "rigorous gun laws" that came with [Page 335] "modernization" be credited with producing a low gun-related homicide rate when, prior to modernization, tradition-bound Japan had relegated the gun to the status of plaything of the wealthy and had shown little or no concern for developing it as a weapon? Similarly, how can such laws be credited with producing a low gun-related suicide rate in a tradition-bound land, where the honored way to commit harakiri is with a knife?
With regard to Canada and Australia, scholars who have taken the trouble to compare them have found many differences between the Canadian and Australian frontiers and our own--differences that may account for dissimilar patterns of firearms use between our frontier and the others. Except for the trouble that the French experienced with the Iroquois Confederacy in eastern Canada during the 18th century, for instance, neither Canadian nor Australian frontiersmen encountered the formidable aboriginal opposition that Americans encountered on the fringes of settlement for some 250 years of "recurring pioneering experience" (Preston and Wise, 1970: 165-166; Billington, 1968: 79). In fact, neither the Canadian nor the Australian frontier experience could even be described as recurring. Part of the Canadian east was simply transported west after the railroads penetrated the Laurentian Shield in the late 19th century, and in Australia pioneer expansion was stopped short in the mid-19th century by the uninhabitable interior deserts (Billington, 1968: 79). Centralized police forces, for another example, were reasonably effective in Canada (Lipset, 1968: 70; Sharp, 1955: 110) and Australia, though hardly popular in the latter (Allen, 1959: 103; Ward, 1958: 144), while "law and order" was often brought to American frontier communities through vigilante action (Brown, 1975), a phenomenon hardly known on the other two frontiers. In short, it would seem that American frontiersmen over a period of approximately 250 years were required to rely more heavily on their firearms for their own protection than were their Canadian and Australian counterparts.
Hofstadter not only showed no awareness of differences between frontiers that might have produced dissimilar old gun habits in these various exfrontier nations; he also overlooked differences that developed behind the frontiers in these nations--differences that also might have had some bearing on the forms these habits took and on their preservation. To compare modern firearms-related crime rates of formerly frontier nations without considering the differences in the magnitude of the transformations that these nations have experienced is to stack the deck sage-fashion in favor of one's own cause rather than to [Page 336] attempt to foster understanding. When one considers that the United States--3,615,122 square miles in area, compared to Canada's 3,851,809 and Australia's 2,967,909--has almost five times the population, and over eight times the gross national product of Canada and Australia combined, it is obvious that much more has occurred behind the frontier here than in either of the other nations. Also, it seems generally agreed that this American transformation generated much more social disruption and civil strife than has resulted from the lesser transformations in Canada and Australia. What were the Canadian or Australian equivalents of our Revolutionary and Civil Wars, for example--conflicts that set neighbor against neighbor and lasted at that level long after the battlefields had grown silent? When did either Canada or Australia have racial, ethnic, and/ or labor wars to approach those that Americans have waged against each other behind the frontier? In other words, the passing of the frontier in the United States did not appreciably reduce the risk to life and limb that Americans have created for each other; so, given the political nature of law enforcement that conflict theorists take such delight in exploring, why is it surprising that many Americans continue to look to the gun for protection as well as for recreation? How can Canadian and Australian gun laws be credited with producing lower gun-related crime rates than ours by modifying old gun habits assumed to have been similar to ours, when there seems to be good reason to believe that neither their frontiers nor what came afterward actually produced old gun habits like ours?
Another example of the selective perception that scholarly supporters of gun controls carry into their cross-cultural comparisons of crime rates is provided by a social-science-assisted staff report submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, headed by Milton Eisenhower. This report, directed by George D. Newton and Franklin E. Zimring (1969: 124) pointed out that of the 4 homicides per 100,000 persons recorded in England and Wales in 1967, only 1 out of each 4 involved the use of a firearm. In the United States during the same period, 61 crimes of this sort were recorded per 100,000 persons, with 38 of each 61 involving the use of firearms. Similarly, in England and Wales, 97 robberies per 100,000 persons were recorded with only 6 of each 97 involving firearms, while in the United States 1020 robberies per 100,000 persons were recorded with 373 out of each 1020 involving the use of firearms.
To the extent that one is inclined to take statistics at face value, these figures are interesting. Suppose that no American citizen had possessed [Page 337] a firearm in 1967, and let us assume that none of the crimes in which firearms were used that year would have been committed if a firearm had not been available--a questionable assumption, to say the least. Subtracting the firearms-related crimes from the others, we find that the United States still would have led England and Wales in homicides 23 to 4 per 100,000 (5.8 to 1) and in robberies 648 to 97 per 100,000 (6.7 to 1). One might wonder, then, if it is gun laws or other differences between English and American societies that are responsible for the lower rate of firearms-related crime in England and Wales. Newton and Zimring acknowledge this possibility, but do not dwell on it. One might also point out that the passing of the frontier has not, according to these figures, removed from the United States the sort of threats that humans create for one another (and these threatening conditions have continued not simply because of the absence of strong firearms regulations). A procontrol sage would hardly be expected to consider seriously either of these issues, but Newton and Zimring and the social scientists who assisted them were credited with searching for "truths" upon which to base policy recommendations (1969: iii). One of these social scientists was Marvin Wolfgang, whose strong procontrol sentiments have been mentioned previously.
As the conventional have been inclined to take too much for granted about firearms use, past and present, in other parts of the world, they have also been inclined to accept uncritically and pass on Gallup and Harris poll results that invariably show that there is a great deal of public support for various gun control measures. Sociologist Rodney Stark (1975: 227), for example, wrote the following in his college-level social problems text:
The failure of national, state, and local governments to enact strict gun-control legislation offers considerable insight into the American political process. For decades a dedicated minority has had its will over an apathetic majority. What does the majority believe?
Looking to the public opinion polls for the answer to his question, Stark noted that 84% of those polled on gun control by Gallup in 1983 believed that "all owners of pistols and revolvers should be required to register with the Government;" that 75% of those polled in 1959 "(and 65 percent of gun owners) believed no one should be permitted to buy a gun without a police permit;" and that "no poll conducted in the United States has ever found that more than a third of those polled opposed [Page 338] tough gun controls" (1975: 227). This same message, as has been noted, can be found in other social problems texts and anthology readings, always presented in a matter-of-fact manner as if the poll findings are indisputable and self-interpreting. However, poll findings are not indisputable or self-interpreting, as anyone familiar with the measurement and interpretation problems encountered by survey researchers is likely to be aware.
To claim that an "apathetic majority" believes that we should have "tough gun controls" of some type or other seems to imply (1) that we know that the people forming that majority are familiar with the existing controls; (2) that after seriously considering these controls, they have found them lacking; (3) that after seriously considering stricter controls and their probable impact on the noncriminal as well as the criminal use of firearms, they have taken a stand in favor of these stricter controls; but (4) that they have been unwilling to put forth the effort required to get these stricter controls enacted into law. Yet we have no good reason to assume any of the above. The public has not shown itself to be particularly well informed concerning existing firearms regulations, and according to a poll conducted by Decision Making Information (DMI), a reputable organization whose findings have generally been ignored by the conventional because the poll was commissioned by the anticontrol National Rifle Association, few Americans seem particularly concerned about gun controls. According to the DMI poll (American Rifleman 1976: 16), only 11% of its respondents spontaneously mentioned gun control when asked simply "what should be done to reduce crime?" These findings are surely more in keeping with the inaction of the majority than are the findings of Gallup and Harris--polls commissioned by the media, which are far from neutral concerning gun controls. In fact, given the media's overwhelming support for tough gun controls, some portion of the support Gallup and Harris register for such measures might well be accounted for by what survey researchers call "social desirability" responses--respondents providing pollsters with what the respondents believe to be the socially acceptable responses (see Mauss and Rokeach, 1977: 48-51).
However, even if we take their findings at face value, due to their imprecise wording, Gallup and Harris questions on gun control present us with interpretation problems. We have no way of knowing what a respondent means when he or she registers support for tough gun laws (tough compared to what?), or even for police permits for firearms purchase, which are almost impossible to get in New York, but easy to [Page 339] get in Illinois if a person has a clean record (Kates, 1979: 27-28). Given what appears to be an American, or at least a bedrock, tendency to view crime in terms of "us good guys" against "those bad guys," many firearms owners who register support for "stricter gun controls" or police permits may not consider the possibility that they themselves may be adversely affected by such laws. As William J. Helmer (1982: 182), who was once associated with the procontrol National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, has written:
Polls leave no doubt that everybody fears crime and violence and everybody wants strict gun controls. For everybody else. A more meaningful survey question would be: "Do you think that the government should have the power to prohibit you from keeping a gun in your home or place of business?"
Helmer's insights might help to explain the resounding voter rejections of gun control initiatives in liberal Massachusetts in 1976 and California in 1982. While those responsible for these initiatives wanted to limit everyone's access to handguns, many voters may have wanted only to limit the "bad guy's" access to handguns. At any rate, it should be obvious from the preceding that the conventional social scientific approach to the gun control issue does not encourage a critical examination of Gallup and Harris polls showing widespread support for such controls. The conventional also seem unwilling to acknowledge that opposing factions can attempt to use modern public opinion polling on controversial issues as much, if not more, to shape public opinion as to measure it (Bordua, 1983).
The conventional have also been reluctant to treat the gun issue as some of their number have treated other controversial social issues. Edwin M. Schur (1965) for example, has claimed that categories of victimless crimes have been created through the outlawing of abortion, homosexuality, and the use of certain drugs. He has argued that such laws are unenforceable, and that they may have unwelcome side effects--the establishment of "the economic basis for black-market operations," or the production of "situations in which police efficiency is impaired and police corruption encouraged" (1965: 6). If this argument holds for laws against the use of certain drugs, for example, does it not also hold for attempts to regulate firearms possession? Those who do not register their guns when registration is required, or who do not turn in their handguns when handgun possession is banned, become classify- [Page 340] able as criminal even though they have not misused firearms or committed other acts classifiable as serious crimes. How would gun control affect police efficiency? The more difficult it becomes to acquire firearms legally, the more valuable supposedly confidential firearms registration and owner registration lists become to professional burglars who wish to locate firearms for illegal sale; hence more temptation is placed in the way of those officials charged with guarding such records. If an attempt is made to disarm the populace, the guns that the police are able to confiscate become valuable items. How many will be filtered back into private hands via the black market? How could gun controls not foster official and police corruption? When laws are difficult to enforce, as attorney Don B. Kates, Jr., has noted (1977: 21), "enforcement becomes progressively more haphazard until at last the laws are used only against those who are unpopular with the police." How could gun control not lead to selective enforcement and discrimination against minorities and the poor? It would seem that labeling theorists would be in a position to recognize that if the argument concerning the creation of victimless crime categories and their side effects holds for any attempts to regulate any behavior not likely to produce a complainant, it holds as well for gun control. But even Schur (1969: 143, 237) has indicated, if only briefly, that he believes gun controls could play a significant part in reducing violence and civil disorder.
SUMMARY
Using the gun control issue as a case in point, this article has argued that the conventional social scientific treatment of controversial social phenomena often has much more in common with sagecraft than it does with social science. The social scientific treatment of the gun issue passed on to the general public through magazine articles, the published findings of various social-science-assisted commissions, and social science textbooks, is generally identical to the pro-gun control argument accepted by that segment of American society with which the more prominent social scientists are more likely to identify--namely urban, college educated, philosophically and politically liberal, upper-middle class, or cosmopolitan America. It would appear that cosmopolitan ethnocentrism and the sage orientation that it fosters do little to encourage the intellectual curiosity and skepticism so vital to the social scientific enterprise. [Page 341]
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WILLIAM R. TONSO, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Evansville, received his B.S. in industrial education, his M.S. in business administration, and his Ph.D. in sociology from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research interests are primarily focused on the study of deviance, ethnicity, ethnic interaction and popular culture. Dr. Tonso is the author of Gun and Society: The Social and Existential Roots of the American Attachment to Firearms (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982).
SOURCE: This article is adapted for publication, with permission, from a chapter in the forthcoming book, Firearms and Violence: Issues of Public Policy, edited by Don B. Kates, Jr. (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research and Ballinger, 1983).