Gun Control

The Politics of Gun Control,
Book by Roberst J. Spitzer
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Introduction
THE furor over gun control has raged across the American landscape for decades, with a sustained intensity and intractability found among few other issues. Despite all that has been written on the subject, no comprehensive political and policy analysis on gun control exists, even though the gun debate is precisely a political dispute over the proper scope and consequences of government policy.

At its heart, the gun debate is a question about the relationship between the citizen, the state's power to regulate, and the maintenance of public order. All these relationships come together under the public policy umbrella and are thus amenable to a policy analysis that has as its central question: should gun possession and use be significantly regulated? In raising this question, I am not primarily concerned with the efficacy of each and every regulatory alternative, although most receive treatment here, but with the regulation principle as it applies to the gun issue. This is no esoteric exercise; every political dispute over some new effort to regulate guns invokes broader questions of government regulation.

The regulatory question is given coherence and context within a larger framework of policy analysis. Far from being an idiosyncratic issue that defies generalized analysis, the gun issue fits into a broader policy pattern, labeled social regulatory policy, that provides considerable predictive and explanatory power for the observed political trends.
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I come from a State where half the folks have hunting and fishing licenses. I can still remember the first day when I was a little boy out in the country putting a can on top of a fencepost and shooting a .22 at it. I can still remember the first time I pulled a trigger on a .410 shotgun because I was too little to hold a .12 gauge.... This is part of the culture of a big part of America.... I live in a place where we still close schools and plants on the first day of deer season, nobody is going to show up anyway.... We have taken this important part of the life of millions of Americans and turned it into an instrument of maintaining madness. It is crazy.

-- President Bill Clinton, comments at 30 November 1993 signing ceremony for the "Brady bill"

1. Policy Definition and Gun Control
THE controversy over gun control revolves around two related questions of government authority: does the government have the right to impose regulations; and, assuming the existence of such a right, should the government regulate guns? It is perfectly obvious that numerous gun control regulations already exist, from the national to the local level. Indeed, gun control opponents are quick to point out that thousands of gun laws exist throughout the country, a fact usually quoted to underscore their belief that such regulation is futile. A pamphlet produced by the National Rifle Association (NRA) mentions "an estimated 20,000 local, state, and federal firearms laws," the vast majority of which are local codes. 1 Gun control opponents also argue that further gun restrictions could impinge on constitutional rights and the innate rights of the citizenry in a free nation. Before proceeding with these key questions, we must begin with the role and purpose of government regulation.

Regulation, Public Order, and Public Policy
The fundamental purpose of government--indeed, its first purpose--is to establish and maintain order. As many political thinkers have noted, human existence before the establishment of governments was chaotic and anarchic. Writing in the seventeenth century, the British political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan noted that life in such a "state of nature" was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The only "law" in this situation was that of self-preservation, when one could expect only the "war" of "every man, against every man." To stave off such an anarchic condition, people formed governments, to which citizens traded some of their freedom, including the "freedom" to kill or be killed, in exchange for the order of civil society. In such a "civil state," according to Hobbes, "there is a power set up to constrain those that would otherwise violate their faith."

Writing several decades after Hobbes, the British political thinker John Locke in his Of Civil Government concurred, noting that "God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men. I easily grant that civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature." That we in America largely take the value of order for granted is a testament to the remarkable stability of American life. 2 Order is not the only priority for government, of course, since democratic nations value freedom and the protection of basic rights as well and must continually strive to strike an appropriate balance between these values. 3 Nevertheless, order is the first purpose of government because without order there can be no freedom in society (aside from the "freedom" of anarchy to which Hobbes and Locke referred). As the political scientist Samuel Huntington once noted, "men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order." 4 And, as James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, "It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the government have too much or too little power."

The maintenance of public order by governments occurs through public policy, defined most simply as "whatever governments choose to do or not to do." 5 The close link between order and public policy is underscored by the interesting semantic fact that "policy" has the same linguistic root as "police." 6 Note the link between the two in this definition of public policy offered by the British constitutionalist William Blackstone in 1769: "the due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom, whereby the inhabitants of the State, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighborhood, and good manners, and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations."
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The techniques or tools of public policy take many forms, from the dispensing of benefits to strict regulation of individual conduct. Yet basic questions of public order usually involve direct regulation--power exercised by the government "for the protection of the health, safety, and morals of their citizens." 7 Beyond the simple maintenance of order, "government is the guarantor of the public good. Ideally, this is achieved as government regulates private functions to maximize public welfare." 8 The regulation of individual conduct may include that considered harmful to others, such as driving under the influence of alcohol, or conduct considered immoral, such as gambling or prostitution. 9

This returns us to the question of the regulation of firearms. (In this analysis, "guns" and "firearms" are treated as synonymous.) The fierce and protracted debate over gun control raises a variety of issues about individual behavior and the role of the government. Nevertheless, the gun debate at its core turns on a single, central question of public policy as it relates to both order and personal conduct: should gun possession and use be significantly regulated? This central question of public policy guides the organization of this book.

Guns and Regulation
Why has gun control been such a difficult, controversial, and intractable issue in American politics? The first answer is because of the nature of regulation. Whenever the government seeks to apply its coercive powers directly to shape individual conduct, the prospect of controversy is great, especially in a nation with a long tradition of individualism. According to the policy analyst Theodore J. Lowi, when the likelihood of government coercion 10 is immediate--that is, when the behavior of individual citizens is directly affected, as in the case of regulation--the prospect of controversy is high. When the likelihood of government coercion is remote--that is, when the primary purpose of the policy in question is, say, to provide benefits rather than regulate individual conduct--the prospect of controversy is low. Examples of policies where government coercion is low include public works projects (construction of roads, harbors, buildings, etc.) and subsidies to farmers (labeled "distributive"; see figure 1.1, p. 4). Government can influence behavior by providing these benefits, but the primary emphasis is on the awarding of benefits, not the shaping of conduct.

In addition to immediate coercion, regulatory policy shares a characteristic that fans the flames of political controversy: it seeks to control individual conduct. When the government imposes highway safety regulations, pure food and drug requirements, cable television rates, criminal laws, or laws regulating abortions, it is regulating the conduct of individuals (not only individual citizens, but individual companies or other entities). Because of these direct consequences to individuals, regulatory policies are more controversial than policies that seek to shape the "environment of conduct," such as fiscal and monetary policy, the progressive income tax, and welfare programs.
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