First Freedom Page 25
Both the Kalashnikov and the M16, two guns that epitomized the great upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century, would evolve over the decades, although the foundational ideas would remain the same. The Soviet gun was soon turned on the Russians as well, as its durability made it the gun of choice for militants of all denominations. The lives of the two inventors, on the other hand, could not have gone much differently. Stoner became a wealthy man, starting up his own company and living his final days in Florida. Kalashnikov, who claimed that he never made a penny from his famous invention, lived in a two-room apartment in Moscow on a pension, just like his neighbors. “Stoner has his own aircraft,” said Kalashnikov, who was unlucky enough to be born in a communist state. “I can’t even afford my own plane ticket.”10
The professional rivalry between the guns and the men outlived the Cold War, though on a personal level on much friendlier terms. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the affable Kalashnikov was allowed to travel and talk about the gun that bore his name. He first met Eugene Stoner in 1990 at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, DC, where both participated in a documentary filmed by the Smithsonian Institution. The duo, both self-taught gunmakers whose designs had come to define small arms in the late twentieth century, spent ten days discussing their inventions, the bureaucratic roadblocks they encountered, and the technical evolution of their ideas.
• • •
In 2006, as Americans struggled against Iraq War insurgents armed with his AK-47, the eighty-six-year-old Kalashnikov noted that “even after lying in a swamp you can pick up this rifle, aim it and shoot. That’s the best job description there is for a gun. Real soldiers know that and understand it.
“In Vietnam,” he continued, “American soldiers threw away their M-16 rifles and used AK-47s from dead Vietnamese soldiers, with bullets they captured. That was because the climate is different to America, where M-16s may work properly.”11
On Kalashnikov’s ninetieth birthday, the Kremlin ceremony was televised live as then-president Dmitry Medvedev decorated him with the Hero of Russia, the highest award in that nation. In 2004 he would license his name to vodka and umbrella brands in Europe.
Kalashnikov, who died at the age of ninety-four in 2013—President Vladimir Putin attended the extravagant funeral—is said to have regretted what happened to his invention. The gun designer had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and was baptized at the age of ninety-one. The year before his death, he wrote a letter to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow expressing deep regret over the success of his rifle.
My spiritual pain is unbearable.
I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people’s lives, then can it be that I . . . a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?
The longer I live, the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man to have the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.12
Kalashnikov’s daughter, Elena, told journalists that she believed a priest had helped her elderly father pen the letter. The spokesman for the Russian patriarch, Cyril Alexander Volkov, told the paper the religious leader had received Kalashnikov’s letter and replied that “when weapons serve to protect the Fatherland,” as the AK-47 had, “the Church supports both its creators and the soldiers” who use it for that purpose. “He designed this rifle to defend his country, not so terrorists could use it in Saudi Arabia.”13
It would have been impossible for either man to know that their guns would be used by evil when they first came to their ideas. Both men were, almost surely, patriots, who fought for their countries and were driven by a desire to see less suffering, not more. A number of the most famous weapon makers—Colt, Gatling, Browning, to name just a few—believed that superior weapons made war less likely. Stoner and Kalashnikov were men of their time, and reacted accordingly. Or as the Russian inventor remarked, “Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer . . .”14
In 1997, Stoner died in his garage while tinkering with guns at the age of seventy-four, a wealthy and content man. The gun he invented would not bear his name, nor would most Americans even know who he was. His AR-15 would be manufactured by dozens of American companies, including major gunmakers like Bushmaster, Remington Arms, and Smith & Wesson. The civilian AR-15, which had a military appearance if not military power, would become increasingly controversial because mass murderers would often use them. Stoner’s family has claimed that the inventor never intended for his famous gun—one of the most popular in America—to fall into civilian hands. This seems unlikely, considering that both ArmaLite and Colt sold the gun directly to the civilian marketplace before they ever agreed on large military contracts. Never once during the many years the gun was sold to Americans is there any evidence that Stoner was troubled by the civilian sales—or his profession, for that matter. Perhaps the inventor had a change of heart. Whatever the case, the inventor of the AR-15 had been pulled into one of the most heated debates in American history.
21
THE GREAT ARGUMENT
“How many have to die before we will give up these dangerous toys?”
—Stephen King
Two men and three women of the Home Defense Unit with guns
In the early morning of January 23, 1911, an unstable Harvard graduate with the theatrical name Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough approached the novelist David Graham Phillips on East Twenty-First Street in Manhattan and proceeded to unload six shots from his .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Goldsborough, who believed the novelist had slandered his sister, then reloaded his gun, put it to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
Goldsborough died instantly, although Phillips lasted into the next day before expiring. The gruesome crime destroyed a number of lives, but none of those affected would change history quite like George Petit le Brun, the man who performed the autopsies on both bodies at the city’s coroner’s office. “I reasoned that the time had come to have legislation passed that would prevent the sale of pistols to irresponsible persons,” he later wrote.1 After two years of imploring local politicians to institute gun control laws, le Brun finally found an ally in Timothy D. Sullivan, the corrupt Tammany Hall operator who was known as “Big Tim” to most New Yorkers.
It is unlikely that Sullivan’s attempt to take guns off the streets of New York was driven first, foremost, or, for that matter, whatsoever by concerns for the public safety. “Cynics,” Sullivan’s biographer Richard F. Welch noted in 2009, “suggested that Big Tim pushed through his law so Tammany could keep their gangster allies under control.” This positioning would hardly be confined to Big Tim, who used the law as a means of disarming gangs that threatened his authority. Restrictionists throughout history have used gun control laws to constrain their political enemies or vulnerable populations. Whatever the case, the result was the nation’s first major gun control legislation, the Sullivan Act.
Since the late 1800s a number of municipalities have attempted to control weapons in areas that featured gambling or drinking. Not one of those laws—or, most often, arbitrarily enforced set of local rules—ever challenged the notion of a law-abiding man owning a firearm. None, certainly, demanded that a man ask permission of the state to own a gun. The Sullivan Act was the first. It required New Yorkers who possessed firearms small enough to be concealed to get a license. People caught owning firearms but no license would face a misdemeanor charge, and carrying them was a felony. In addition to handguns, the law prohibited the possession or carrying of weapons such as brass knuckles, sandbags, blackjacks, bludgeons, and bombs, as well as possessing or carrying a dagger, “dangerous knife,” or razor “with intent to use the same unlawfully.”2 As with almost all gun control laws that followed, criminals would ignore the strictures and, in this case, the Tammany Hall bosses enforced it only when the weapons undermined their political interests. There was no perceptible decline in gang violence or murder in New York in the ensuing decades.
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p; So while gun control was not a wholly new idea by the time the first federal gun control policy, the National Firearms Acts of 1934 and 1938 (NFA), was passed in reaction to the gangsters, bandits, and bootleggers waving around submachine guns, both petrifying and fascinating the population at large.
In the wake of Depression-era criminality, there were calls, mostly from police departments, to do something. Because highly publicized kidnappings, murders, and robberies had sparked a scare among American law enforcement, Roosevelt mounted his “New Deal for Crime.” As all “new deals” would, this one also federalized policy. Reading the debates and quotes of that time makes one imagine it was unlikely many voters understood the precedents the law was setting, or that anyone believed it would be used to challenge the individual right of American citizens to own guns. Even then, the National Rifle Association—still a hobbyist group at the time—protested the initial proposal to create a registry and fingerprint all owners. It did not oppose the idea of guns being taken from criminals.
The law instituted a tax of $200—a large amount during the Depression—on the manufacture or sale of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, and licensing on gun manufacturers and gun dealers. Roosevelt followed this up with the passage of the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1938, which required the licensing of interstate gun dealers, who had to record all their sales. The law prohibited sales to individuals under indictment or convicted of crimes of violence.
There were a number of versions of gun control debated by the Roosevelt administration, but Attorney General Homer Cummings supported the final bill because he believed the taxing power was the best way to ensure the constitutionality of legislation. While even fervent advocates of the NFA never openly made the case that owning a gun was anything but an individual right, Cummings had no compunctions. He admitted that the policy was meant to inhibit law-abiding citizens from owning firearms. “We certainly don’t expect gangsters to come forward to register their weapons and be fingerprinted, and a $200 tax is frankly prohibitive to private citizens,” Cummings contended. It wouldn’t take long after the passage of the NFA for mission creep to begin.
On April 18, 1938, Arkansas and Oklahoma state police pulled over two small-time bank robbers, Jackson “Jack” Miller and Frank Layton. The 240-pound Miller had already spent the majority of his thirty-nine tumultuous years involved in criminality. In 1924, when working as a bouncer, he had killed a court reporter in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, bar. In the mid-1930s he had joined a gang that boasted of having “most of the major bank robberies in the Southwest” under their belts.3 In 1935, Miller flipped on his own gang, helping the authorities put most of them in prison. Yet, by the time state police arrested Miller and his sidekick Layton a few years later, they were in possession of an unregistered short-barreled shotgun in the car and apparently were “making preparation for armed robbery.”4
Miller and Layton were charged with violating the National Firearms Act. If it were up to them, the case would have ended right there, as they both pled guilty. Yet Judge Hiram Ragon, a former congressman, New Deal loyalist, and advocate of the NFA, refused to accept the pleas and assigned them a court-appointed lawyer. The duo demurred. Ragon agreed, throwing out the indictment, claiming the NFA violated the Second Amendment—something he most surely did not believe.5 In the meantime, the two small-time crooks went on the lam. (Miller’s bullet-ridden body would be found by the police in a dry Oklahoma creek later in 1939.)
The case worked its way to the Supreme Court, which many believe is exactly what Ragon had intended. Miller’s lawyers didn’t even file a brief or show up to make oral arguments with the court. And in May 1939 the Supreme Court of the United States issued a terse and muddled nine-page opinion—with very little actual opinion involved—that achieved what Ragon had desired: it affirmed the constitutionality of the NFA. The court found that the Second Amendment did not guarantee an individual the right to keep and bear a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun that was under eighteen inches, which was a weapon commonly used by criminals. “In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” the court found, “we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.”
Today’s media and liberals often bring up the Miller case as a way of bolstering the case for a “collective” theory of gun rights. Yet the court had not offered a broad ruling regarding the Second Amendment. It had found that any person “physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense” could own weapons. The case simply decided whether the government could regulate certain kinds of guns. “Miller stands only for the proposition that the Second Amendment right, whatever its nature, extends only to certain types of weapons,” Justice Antonin Scalia found nearly sixty years later. “It is particularly wrongheaded to read Miller for more than what it said, because the case did not even purport to be a thorough examination of the Second Amendment.” Yet this is exactly what lower courts would do for decades. There would be no other consequential Second Amendment cases in front of the Supreme Court until 2008. In the meantime, gun control advocates gained the upper hand.
• • •
The rise of gun control in the second half of the twentieth century would have everything to do with the prevalence of crime, although the prevalence of crime had very little to do with the number of guns Americans owned. In reality, after a short spurt of gangland violence that precipitated the passage of the NFA—much of it, as we’ve noted, hyped by movies and mythology—there was a quick drop in the crime rate. Violent crime rates had begun falling in the mid-1930s, before the passage of the NFA, and remained historically low until the middle of the 1960s. These low crime rates were enjoyed by everyone, including those in urban centers, despite commonly held perceptions. From 1900 to the late 1950s, for instance, New York City had lower homicide rates than the national average.6
With millions of men returning from the war in 1945–46, there was a temporary but modest spike in violence. Yet during the entirety of the 1940s, despite the fact that millions more military men now owned and knew how to use firearms, the number of homicides using a gun remained steady at around 55 percent. Throughout the 1950s, due to the rise of the middle class, suburbanization, and the better quality of life in general, there was a further reduction of violent crime. From 1948 to 1966, the homicide rate in the United States never exceeded 5 murders per 100,000—lower than it had been in any comparable period during the twentieth century.
Unlike the scare of the 1930s, however, the violent crime spike in the mid-1960s was real, pervasive, and enduring. In 1960, 200 people per 100,000 would experience violent crime. By 1990, the number was more than 700 people per 100,000. Homicide went from fewer than 5 people per 100,000 to more than 10 people. According to the National Crime Victim Survey, there were nearly 11 million violent crimes per year in the United States from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. In many areas, an American had a better chance of experiencing a violent crime than of getting into a car accident during these years.7
The fear and anxiety that crime generated would have great consequences for American life and culture, among them the flight of white Americans to the suburbs and the resulting collapse of inner cities. One yearly survey asked Americans: “Is there any area near where you live—that is, within a mile—where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” In 1965, 34 percent of those polled answered in the affirmative. By 1982, that number had risen to 48 percent—and it would not fall back to 34 percent until the year 2000. “To millions of Americans, few things are more pervasive, more frightening, more real today than violent crime and the fear of being assaulted, mugged, robbed, or raped,” one presidential commission on crime in the late 1960s noted. “The fear of being criminalized has touched us all in some way.”
All these tensions led to th
e Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal law that overtly attempted to diminish firearm ownership in the United States. Among other things, the law prohibited convicted felons, drug users, and the mentally ill from buying firearms. It raised the age to purchase handguns from a federally licensed dealer to twenty-one. It expanded the licensing requirements of gun dealers and set up more detailed government tracking of guns. On the local level, municipalities would be far stricter and more invasive. It was in the aftermath of this law that the modern debate over gun control was born, with the contours of that debate remaining virtually the same ever since.
The divergence among Americans was simple. Many people—especially those who lived in places that did not have a strong tradition of firearm ownership—saw guns in the hands of criminals and believed laws helped get those guns off the streets. Others saw firearms as a way to defend themselves from the rise in lawbreaking. The anxiety of the latter group would begin to bubble up in cultural depictions of urban conflict, most famously in films like Death Wish and the early Dirty Harry movies, which treated vigilantism as a morally complex issue in a world of rampant criminality and lawlessness.
After the 1968 local gun laws began to take hold, cities began to erect bureaucratic barriers that made it increasingly difficult for law-abiding citizens to purchase firearms. Soon enough a problem emerged. Criminals, it turns out, did not adhere to gun laws. Law-abiding citizens, on the other hand, did. Which created a cycle: the more criminals ignored these laws, the more politicians attempted to inhibit gun ownership for everyone, and the more problematic it would become for the average citizen to purchase and own a firearm. When citizens began pointing out that they had a constitutional right to defend themselves, politicians had to reimagine what the Second Amendment meant. This was when the first pro–gun rights movement was born. A movement that had never been necessary before.