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Debating guns
Glosser is president of the Rosenberg Institute for Peace and Justice and volunteer executive director of Pennsylvanians Against Handgun Violence. Lott, whose op-ed articles often appear in the Trib, is a University of Chicago professor, American Enterprise Institute fellow and author of "More Guns Less Crime."
I talked with each by telephone this week, asking the same questions in a debate preview:
Q: What's your basic position on guns and gun ownership in a free society?
Lott: Guns make it easier for bad things to happen, but guns also make it easier for people to protect themselves and prevent bad things from happening. The question that concerns everybody is the net impact: What impact does it have on violent crimes like murder, rape and robbery?
We all want to take guns away from criminals. The problem is that often when we pass different laws, it's the law-abiding citizens who are most likely to obey those laws. And the problem that you face is that if you pass laws that, no matter how unintentionally, tend to disarm law-abiding citizens relative to criminals, you can actually see increases in violent crime rather than drops.
Glosser: Guns are extremely dangerous weapons that must be treated with the utmost of respect. I have no problem with responsible gun ownership. What I have a problem with is the nearly unfettered access that criminals, children and the mentally ill who pose a threat to themselves or others seem to enjoy.
Q: What's the worst thing you can say about guns?
Lott: Guns ... make it possible that you can have accidents or make it easier for you to go and kill somebody than it would otherwise.
Glosser: I was once a gun owner. I no longer am, because I recognized the fact that I was more at risk with a gun than without one. I will say they are fun to shoot. I've shot rifles, I've shot handguns, and target practice is fun.
Q: What does the Second Amendment mean to you? How do you read it?
Lott: I'm not a lawyer. I try to approach these problems by looking at the impact that guns have in terms of our safety. To me, that's the bottom line, though I understand a lot of people's concerns about the right to self-defense and the notions of freedom and liberty. My guess is that a lot of people interpret these things in terms of whether they think guns are already good or bad.
Glosser: We agreed not to go into the Second Amendment for the debate, and I'm not sure I really want to address that.
Q: What laws should there be to restrict or regulate gun ownership, gun sales, gun education, etc.?
Lott: I think there should be a lot fewer laws than what we have. Rather than going and talking about what new laws we might have, a lot of the debate would be better served if we talked about removing or eliminating a lot of the laws.
The amazing thing is that when you go through the academic literature, you can't find one academic study that is published in a refereed journal that goes and shows that things like waiting periods or one-gun-a-month rules or safe-storage laws, the Brady Act -- a whole range of different gun laws -- have reduced violent crime rates. There's evidence that many of those laws increase violent crime.
Glosser: In the broadest sense, anything we can do legislatively to keep guns out of the hands of children, criminals and the mentally ill who pose a threat to themselves or others should be done.
We absolutely need to extend and strengthen the assault weapons ban, because assault weapons are nothing but killing tools.
We, in Pennsylvania, need a child-access prevention law, which would make it a crime for the gun owner if a child accesses an improperly stored firearm and commits a crime with it.
We need to license handgun owners, by which I mean they need to be trained; I don't mean they need to be registered. And we need nationally to close the gun show loophole. One important method of criminals getting guns comes through the 38 states in which guns can be purchased without a background check at gun shows. Criminals, the mentally ill and even minors can purchase guns without going through a background check. Also, there are many documented cases of terrorists buying guns at gun shows.
Q: What are the net benefits to society of widespread gun ownership?
Lott: An important benefit is safety. Just as you can deter criminals with higher arrest rates or higher conviction rates, the fact that would-be victims might be able to defend themselves can also deter criminals from attacking. And having a gun is by far the safest course of action for someone to take when they're having to confront a criminal by themselves.
Q: What are the costs to society of widespread gun ownership?
Glosser: I can say that Cook & Ludwig in 2000 published a study which shows that the economic costs to society are in excess of $100 billion a year. Human costs are approximately 30,000 people who are killed by guns every year, around 11,000 of those in homicides.
The further cost is the culture of fear that gun violence has perpetuated in this country. We live in a country where people are afraid to go into certain neighborhoods for fear of violence. We live in a country where people take extraordinary measures to protect themselves from violence, measures that in most other industrial countries are unnecessary.
Q: What would happen if the your opponents got everything they wanted?
Lott: I think crime would go up. Deterrence matters. Deterrence keeps criminals from attacking. And having a gun is also the safest source of action for people to take.
Glosser: They have a lot of what they want already, and the result is a bloodbath. If the gun-rights lobby were to get everything it wanted -- I presume the end of all regulations on guns -- I think we would see the gun homicide rate soar. We would see even greater costs to society in terms of fear, in terms of measures taken to make people safe. And I think we would see people leaving the country out of fear for personal safety.
