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.Wendy Kaminer makes this point clear in her discussions of the left s use ofidentity politics:  Politics of Identity, American Prospect 12 (24 September 2001): 32.30.Scarry is not expressly arguing that everyone in the United States should buya gun.Nor did she make this point in defense of NRA policy.She is in fact conduct­ing an interpretive analysis of the language of the Constitution and exploring theoriginal intent of the Framers vis-à-vis the right to bear arms.Eventually consider­ing the issue of presidential authority to deploy nuclear arms, she argues that themeans of force must be distributed within the widest possible expanse of any givenpopulation in which the means of force exist.She logically points out that if armsare selectively restricted, parties without access to arms cannot enter into a bindingsocial contract without inherently begging the question of whether or not they werecoerced into doing so.Scarry also suggests through her analysis some of the sameconclusions I have drawn regarding access to the means of force (and the ability tobear arms in the militia context) with full rights and citizenship within any given po­litical body.See Elaine Scarry,  War and the Social Contract: Nuclear Policy, Distri­bution, and the Right to Bear Arms, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 139, no.5 (1991): 1257 1316; this quote comes from 1269 1270.31.Peter Squires makes this point succinctly in relation to public health argumentsfor gun control: Gun Control or Gun Culture?, 90 92.Katha Pollitt also makes it Moms to NRA: Grow Up! The Nation (12 June).32.Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest.33.The Western, and U.S., fixation with science and rationality as a prevailing par­adigm for understanding social reality is well-documented by social scientists.See,for example, Richard C.Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (NewYork: HarperPerennial, 1993).34.When gun control supporters make scientific arguments about risks, evenwhen they rely on methodologically sound research, they presume that everyone is198 notes to pages 140 146using the same risk framework or that everybody is measuring the same risks in thesame way that they do.As social scientists and anthropologists have long demon­strated, different people employ different frameworks for assessing risks.The risk ofkilling a family member is the most worrisome to gun controllers.The risk of en­countering an attacker is the most worrisome to gun owners.This basic differenceillustrates that these two groups use different frameworks for conceptualizing greater risk.This is yet one more area in which there is unlikely to ever be muchagreement.For a discussion of the cultural construction of risk, see Mary Douglasand Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1982);Lupton,  Risk as Moral Danger.35.See Dizard et al., introduction to Guns: A Reader.36.Personal e-mail communication between Richard Slotkin and the author, 19September 1999.37.See, for example, Daniel S.Claster, Bad Guys and Good Guys: Moral Polariza­tion and Crime (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992); and Ester Madriz, NothingBad Happens to Good Girls: Fear of Crime in Women s Lives (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1997).38.Robert Fisk,  My Beating by Refugees Is a Symbol of the Hatred and Fury ofThis Filthy War, The Independent, 10 December 2001, 1.39.Richard Landes describes this kind of left-wing description of social events as masochistic omnipotence syndrome, which he defines as a  narcissistic focus onthe self, to the exclusion of the other. He elaborates:  We are guilty for everythingwrong, and if we could only make ourselves perfect, then everything would be alright[sic]. Landes also argues, and I concur, that a radical unconscious racism under­scores this kind of thinking because ultimately it suggests that victimized  subalternpeoples should not and cannot be held to the same moral standard as their abusers,which renders them as  incapable of moral reasoning as animals. See Landes,  TheQuestion of Rationality: A Response to Joel Kovel, Tikkun 18, no.3 (2003): 54 57.40.This point has been thoroughly established by social scientists.See, for exam­ple, Jeffery Fagan and Deanna L.Wilkinson,  Guns, Youth Violence, and Social Iden­tity in the Inner Cities, Crime and Justice 24 (1998): 105 188; David M.Kennedy,Anne M.Piehl, and Anthony A.Braga,  Youth Violence in Boston: Gun Markets, Se­rious Youth Offenders, and a Use-Reduction Strategy, Law and Contemporary Prob­lems 59 (1996): 147 196; Frank E.Zimring,  Kids, Guns, and Homicide: Policy Noteson an Age-Specific Epidemic, Law and Contemporary Problems 59 (1996): 25 38.41.See Kleck and Gertz,  Armed Resistance to Crime.42.One of the constant charges made by criminologists against the public healthliterature is that it does not concede any legitimacy or validity to defensive gun use.In some cases, some researchers argue, public health officials deliberately mislead thepublic about defensive gun use.See Don B.Kates,  Guns and Public Health: Epi­demic of Violence, or Pandemic of Propaganda? in Armed, 31 106, for an overviewof this assertion.notes to pages 147 155 19943.Otis Dudley Duncan raises similar questions and issues in his critique of thestatistics war in the defensive gun use debate:  Gun Use Surveys: in Numbers WeTrust? Criminologist 25, no.1 (2000): 1 7.44.See Cook and Ludwig, Gun Violence: The Real Costs, 36 39.45.In fact, Cook and Ludwig argue that the NCVS, or National Crime Victimiza­tion Survey, provides a much lower estimate than what Kleck and Gertz estimate be­cause the NCVS more effectively reduces false positives.However, Kleck provides aconvincing rationale for why Kleck s and Gertz s is in fact a more accurate estimateand why the NCVS numbers are too low.One reason is that when gun owners useguns defensively, they often do so under quasi-illegal circumstances: they are carry­ing a firearm without a permit, or they are unsure if they are legally allowed to carry.They therefore are unwilling to report that experience to NCVS officials, who aregovernment representatives who interview people in their homes to collect data.Thus, the NCVS numbers are too low with respect to defensive gun use.The Kleckand Gertz study was an anonymous survey conducted over the phone and thereforeless subject to that particular underreporting problem.As Kleck also points out, theproblems of telescoping (believing things that happened years ago actually occurredmore recently) and false positives are probably cancelled out by people who have for­gotten incidents of defensive gun use as well.Kleck defends the Kleck and Gertzstudy effectively in  The Frequency of Defensive Gun Use: Evidence and Disinfor­mation, in Kleck and Kates, Armed, 213 284.46.See Kleck,  The Frequency of Defensive Gun Use, 213 284.47.Kates,   Poisoning the Well for Gun Control, 107 128.48.Jacobs, Can Gun Control Work?49.Supporters for licensing and registration include William J.Vizzard, Shots inthe Dark; and Cook and Ludwig, Gun Violence.50.See Vizzard, Shots in the Dark.51.Ibid.52.See David B.Kopel,  Background Checks and Waiting Periods, In Guns: WhoShould Have Them? D.Kopel, ed.(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995), 53 126, 122 n.124.Kopel notes several occasions when registration led to confiscation, and howthat process occurred.53.See Cheryl W.Thompson,  Ashcroft Graces NRA Cover, Washington Post, 24July 2001, A19.54.Chris Mondics,  Attack on Gun Makers Losing Steam, Philadelphia Inquirer,26 August 2001, City-D section, A08.Mondics notes that suits in New York and Cal­ifornia were dismissed.Some states are prohibiting the suits wholesale [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]