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By Root 1085 0

a family member, or a friend than an intruder. A Pittsburgh psychiatric hospital reported that the mere presence of a gun in the home more than doubles the odds that an adolescent member of the family will commit suicide. In 1987, Dr. Garen Wintemute, a researcher with the University of California at Davis Medical Center, plotted the annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 people for the years 1946 through 1982. On the same graph, he plotted ATF’s estimates of the number of new firearms made available for sale each year. The two lines track each other over the page with the eerie precision of a pair of figure skaters, both peaking around 1974, both dipping in 1976, both rising to another peak, both falling in concert toward 1982. (The rates of both have increased since then.) A 1986 study from the National Institute of Mental Health found similarly striking correlations between the increased proliferation of firearms and the rate of gunshot suicide among people age ten to twenty-four.

One of the foremost researchers in this forbidding territory is Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at Earl Warren Legal Institute of the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the issue since the 1960s. He established that although handguns only account for about a third of the guns owned in America, they are used in more than 75 percent of gunshot homicides and 80 percent of firearm-related robberies. “On average,” Zimring reported, “rifles and shotguns are seven, times less likely than handguns to be used in criminal violence.” In one of his early studies he reviewed records of 16,000 violent assaults in Chicago to see whether the attacker’s choice of knife or gun influenced the outcome. He found, first, that in seven of ten cases where the victim died, the attacker inflicted only one wound. That is, the attacker did not repeatedly stab or shoot the victim to make sure he was dead. The major difference among these attacks was that “an assault with a gun was five times more likely to result in a fatality than an assault with a knife.” Zimring described the heightened danger posed by the attacker’s choice of a gun as an “instrumentality effect” attributable to the inherent lethal character of guns.

In one of the most compelling studies of the impact of firearm proliferation, Dr. Arthur Kellermann, an emergency-medicine physician at Emory University, and associates from the Universities of Washington and British Columbia studied the rates of homicide and assault in Seattle and Vancouver from 1980 through 1986. The cities are close to each other. They have similar economies and similar geophysical locations. Their populations have a similar demographic profile. Presumably they watch the same movies and many of the same TV shows. During the study period, they also had similar assault rates. They differed markedly, however, in the degree to which they regulated access to firearms. Vancouver allowed gun sales only to people who could demonstrate a legitimate reason for having a firearm. Seattle had few regulations. The researchers found that attackers in Seattle were almost eight times more likely to use a handgun than those in Vancouver. Seattle’s homicide rate, moreover, was five times higher, with handgun-related killings accounting for most of the difference.

The proliferation of guns continues, however. In the 1980s gun manufacturers feared they might have sold so many guns to American consumers that they had sated the market. Indeed, slack demand helped cause the failure of Charter Arms and drove Colt’s Manufacturing into bankruptcy. Gunmakers, cheered on by the National Rifle Association, sought to improve their prospects by pitching guns—handguns in particular—as the only sure way to protect ourselves against crime. The Los Angeles riots of 1992 proved a godsend. Millions of TV viewers watched a white truck driver beaten senseless by black marauders. They saw Korean businessmen, the new heroes of American enterprise, brandishing guns to guard their inner-city businesses in scenes that evoked our most favorite Wild West