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Members of the Santa Rosa City Council:

In most cities that have adopted bans on sale of low priced, low-quality "Saturday Night Specials," the reasoning goes, "These guns are so inaccurate, unreliable, and underpowered that they are only suitable for criminal purposes." This is incorrect. A gun doesn't have to be accurate, reliable, or powerful to be useful for self-defense.

There have been more than a dozen surveys that measure how often guns are used in self-defense in the U.S., ranging from as few as 108,000 per year (the NCVS estimate) to as much as 2.45 million uses per year (the Kleck and Gertz study).[1] It is clear that in the vast majority of defensive gun uses, the gun is not even fired -- the mere sight of it causes violent criminals to submit or leave. The criminal can't determine if the gun aimed at him is high quality or junk. He only knows that the chances of dying are high enough that he needs to submit to arrest, or run. Even a "Saturday Night Special" is sufficient for the purpose of threatening a criminal's life, thus protecting his victim from rape, robbery, murder, or aggravated assault.

Is there a value in keeping Saturday Night Specials off the market, in the hopes of preventing criminals from using them? Keep in mind that it is already a felony for convicted felons to possess guns of any sort. It is already a misdemeanor to transfer a firearm without a background check and waiting period to anyone but a family member here in California. It is already a crime to transfer a handgun to anyone under 21 in California. Banning sale of cheap handguns in the hopes of disarming criminals is a waste of time; a local ban on sale is far less restrictive than the existing laws that apply to all guns.

Just for sake of argument, let's assume that such a ban on cheap handguns actually worked -- that is to say, made it more difficult for criminals to purchase unreliable, inaccurate, and underpowered handguns. Do we really want criminals switching to better made guns? If someone intends to shoot at me, I want them to use the lowest powered, least accurate, and least reliable handgun possible.

Finally, let me mention that there is a great danger that the focus on gun control laws will prevent us from looking at the cultural problems that are the cause of much of the violence that afflicts American society with not only guns, but knives, fists, and feet. My fifth book, to be published next year by Greenwood Publishing Group, is a history of gun control in the United States before 1850. Georgia, for example, banned the sale of concealable handguns in 1837. The Georgia Supreme Court struck down the law in 1846 for violating the Second Amendment. A number of other Southern states passed concealed weapon laws at around the same time hoping to stop young men from killing each other over the most trivial of disputes.

These laws failed to solve the problem. What did bring the murder problem under control was a cultural change. After 1840, evangelical Christianity became the dominant religion of the upland parts of South, replacing a culture of dueling, brawling, and eye-gouging. Gun and knife control laws then were an attempt to fix serious cultural problems on the cheap -- and there is no reason to believe that they will work any better now than they did then.

Thank you.

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Notes

1. See Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, (Washington: National Institute of Justice, 1997), 8-9.