Coffee And Conversation--An Intimate Look At Gun Control In California

In anticipation of the upcoming twin kick-off, Unloaded Long Gun Open Carry events being held in both Northern and Southern California, I was honored to be able to sit down recently for some , regarding the Open Carry Movement, the 2nd Amendment, and the state of gun control in California.

Tom admitted that he was relatively new to the topic of gun control and found it curious that a group of Californians would decide to bring unloaded firearms into his community in order to make a political statement.  Suspecting that many of his readers might also share this sentiment, I settled down comfortably with him at the Starbucks in Bayfair Mall to explain the motivations behind the Open Carry Movement and the path that Right-to-Carry advocates have taken to finally settle on a location in San Leandro, California to kick-off the first of a long series of Unloaded Long Gun Open Carry events that will take place throughout the Golden State.
 
Picking up on Tom's initial skepticism regarding how well our protest was going to be received in the eyes of the general public, I explained that members of the Open Carry Movement in California exercise their Right-to-Carry for the purposes of lawful self defense.  For years, in an attempt to halt the overwhelming progress of Right-to-Carry laws sweeping across the entire country, the gun control lobby has been trying to convince the law-abiding members of society that they will almost certainly never live to see themselves or their loved ones become the victims of violent crime.  According to the FBI, 164,133 Californians found out the hard way last year that this blanket generalization didn't apply to them.  1,809 of these Californians paid for this unforgiving lesson with their lives.  To this day, 8,331 women in the Golden State are still picking up the broken pieces of their lives from being forcibly raped.  58,116 members of the general populace struggle with the trauma of being victims of armed robbery, and 95,877 innocent victims learned a very hard-to-swallow lesson in the school of hard knocks by falling prey to the violent crime of aggravated assault.  And these are the figures from one year alone.
 
As many people know, hindsight is 20/20.  Had the innocent and law-abiding majority of these 164,133 violent crime victims in California had the foresight to know that they would fall prey to one form of violent crime or another last year, I will venture to say that they would have taken the effective steps necessary to protect themselves before knowingly stepping into harm's way.  It is precisely for these tens of thousands of model citizens that I, through the non-profit, Right-to-Carry advocacy organization, Responsible Citizens of California, stand up to defend their basic, fundamental, and enumerated civil right to self defense.
 
In light of these statistics, Tom then questioned whether Open Carry was the proper option to employ in bringing this issue to light with the non-gun-owning general public.  In his estimation, Open Carry advocates might be doing more harm than good to the cause by bringing the issue to local communities with such a publicly prominent display of firearms.  To the layman, the Open Carry Movement may appear to be fringe element of the larger 2nd Amendment community at large.  And with the gun control lobby deriding our cause as "extremist" and dismissing our members as a bunch of "gun nuts", one can see how this line of reasoning may appear logical to those unfamiliar with the issue.  However, the fact is, along with finding that support for the 2nd Amendment in the US is at a decades-long high, a June 2010 Harris Poll also indicated that half of all American adults support Open Carry.  This popular upswing in public support for the basic and fundemental civil right to self defense has also been confirmed by successive Gallup, Rasmussen Reports, CNN, and Quinnipiac University polls exploring the subject.

And large numbers of Americans have every reason to be supportive of the Open Carry Movement.  Since this political cause has come to the forefront of public discussion over the past two years, the non-gun-owning general public has seen nothing other than well-organized and peaceful demonstrators exercising their First Amendment Rights in defense of their 2nd Amendment Rights.  Despite all of the gun control lobby rhetoric predicting a bloodbath in the streets, the reality is very simple--the practice of Open Carry has been legal in California since the very founding of our State and even the gun control lobby is forced to admit that not even one single Open Carry advocate in the Golden State has ever committed a violent crime in State's entire 160+ year history.

Meanwhile, our own federal government's US Department of Justice has found that lawful defensive gun uses (DGUs) occur at least 1.5 million times a year in this country (an average of 4,109 times every single day).  And with 43 States that have Open Carry laws on the books and 41 States with "shall-issue" concealed carry laws, Americans are finding out that drops in violent crime are not-so-coincidentally timed with the passage of these Right-to-Carry laws.

As renowned economist, Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., points out in his research, the police are the single most important factor in deterring violent crime in society.  Law enforcement personnel are a critical component in this social endeavor.  However, the same can also be said of a lawfully-armed general populace.  Lott's research clearly indicates that Right-to-Carry laws which recognize every law-abiding citizen's 2nd Amendment Right to be armed in public do also have a statistically significant impact on reducing violent crime and represents the third most important factor in that endeavor. 

Furthermore, Lott's findings on the benefits of Right-to-Carry laws in reducing violent crime in society are not unique in any sense. For instance, in a recent Columbus Dispatch editorial addressing one of his critics, Lott alludes to the majority consensus amongst economists and criminologists who have also published their findings in peer-reviewed academic journals regarding the benefits of Right-to-Carry laws in reducing violent crime in society.

D'Aurora also conveniently ignored the massive amount of work by other researchers during the past 15 years. Among peer-reviewed studies in academic journals by criminologists and economists, 18 studies examining national data found that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime, 10 indicated no discernible effect, and none — absolutely none — found a bad effect from the law.

An example of "the massive amount of work by other researchers during the past 15 years" that anti-gun attorney, Jack D'Aurora, conveniently ignored can be found in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.

The Mauser-Kates Study, "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence", was academically peer-reviewed and then published on Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694).

A few key quotes will clearly demonstrate the point that common, law-abiding citizens who choose to be armed in a public setting do have an effect on violent crime rates in society.

“Whether gun availability be viewed as a cause or as a mere coincidence, the long term macrocosmic evidence is that gun ownership spread widely throughout societies consistently correlates with stable or declining murder rates. This pattern simply cannot be squared with the mantra that more guns = more death and fewer guns = less. Whether causative or not, the consistent international pattern is that more guns = less murder and other violent crime.” (Page 33)

“As of 2006, 40 states have adopted laws under which guns became vastly more available to law abiding, responsible adults, i.e., 3.5 million Americans are legally entitled not just to keep guns in their homes but to carry concealed handguns with them wherever they go. But this has not resulted in more murder or violent crime in these states. Rather adoption of these statutes has been followed by very significant reduction in murder and violence in those states.” (Pages 14-15)

“Over a decade ago University of Washington public health professor Brandon Centerwall undertook an extensive, statistically sophisticated study comparing areas in the U.S. and Canada to determine whether Canada's much more restrictive policies had better contained criminal violence. When he published his results it was with the admonition:

If you are surprised by my findings, so are we. We did not begin this research with any intent to "exonerate" handguns, but there it is -- a negative finding, to be sure, but a negative finding is nevertheless a positive contribution. It directs us where NOT to aim public health resources” (Pages 98-99)

(Study by Brandon Centerwall referenced above is called, “Homicide and the Prevalence of Handguns: Canada and the United States, 1976 to 1980”, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 134 No. 11:1245-1260).

It is with these proven facts in mind that prominent and principled academics throughout the country are standing up and speaking out against the gun control lobby establishment's alarmist rhetoric.  For instance, Dr. Robert J. Cottrol, the Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and Professor of History and Sociology at George Washington University, whose work was cited by US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion in the landmark McDonald vs. Chicago ruling, recently rose to advocate not only his support for Right-to-Carry laws but also to expound upon the possible benefits to society when the whole of the law-abiding general populace plays a critical role as a publicly-armed and modern militia responsible for the security of the entire community and thereby speaking directly to the gun control lobby's use of the prefatory clause in the 2nd Amendment to try and advance their agenda of gun prohibition in America (1:24:35).  Dr. Cottrol then proceeded to publicly dismiss the gun control lobby's claim that the police should be the only ones armed in a public setting for the security of the community (1:31:40).

Recognizing these developments in academia, the benefits of a lawfully-armed general populace are facts that many, if not most, in the law enforcement community recognize, even in California.  For instance, Assemblyman Steve Knight, one of the most vocal and staunch supporters of Right-to-Carry legislation in California, served as an LAPD police officer for 17 years before starting his career in political office.  On a national level, the overwhelming majority of police chiefs do not support additional gun control measures, with 63.1% of the nation's top law enforcement executives going so far as to plainly testify that Right-to-Carry laws do help to reduce violent crime.

If there is a living and breathing example of why common, law-abiding citizens would need to be armed in a public setting, then it is clearly demonstrated by the riots that have spread like wildfire recently in cities all over the UK.  Overwhelmed and outnumbered, the police were spread too thin to protect common, law-abiding English subjects who were being victimized all over the many cities across the country.  Just as the violent criminals had looted homes and businesses, burned buildings and vehicles to the ground, murdered innocent victims in the streets, and assaulted or robbed the common, law-abiding citizens in April of 1992 during the Los Angeles riots, thousands of violent criminals have taken to London and other cities throughout the UK to turn the country upside down. 

The critical difference between these two dire scenarios, however, is that Americans are armed and today's English subjects are not.  Whereas Korean shop owners were able to protect themselves, their families, and their businesses by publicly exercising their 2nd Amendment Rights during the Los Angeles riots in 1992, those completely unarmed and defenseless subjects in the UK had their handguns legislated away in 1997 (to the effect of becoming the nation with the worst violent crime problem in Europe) are now left to fend for themselves against the waves of violent mobs by attempting to buy record numbers of baseball bats online.

It would also be helpful for the non-gun-owning general public to note that, due to the California Budget Crisis, 46,000 convicted felons (450 of which are categorized as fitting a "high risk of violence" profile have already been released and are currently walking the streets) will be released early from prison into society over the next two years during a time when expensive State recidivism programs are failing to reduce the number of criminals who re-offend.  What's worse, according to the Pew Center on the States, California has the second highest recidivism rate in the country at 57.8%, almost 150% higher than the national average recidivism rate of 40%.  According to AB 144's own sponsor, Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, the State's recidivism rate has actually been measured as high as 70%, via the bill analysis for his proposal, AB 219, the California Recidivism Goals Development and Achievement Act.  So not only will the State release these convicted felons before serving out their full sentences but our lawmakers also know, for a fact, that as many as 7 out of every 10 of these criminals on early release will go on to commit crimes against innocent, law-abiding citizens in California and end up right back in prison.

Given the size and scope of the subject matter at hand, the data I've presented here barely scratches the surface of the debate over Right-to-Carry laws and the 2nd Amendment.  However, even with these stark realities in mind, those Californians who are aware of the facts and have seen the evidence regarding the benefits of a lawfully-armed general populace will be out on the streets of San Leandro and San Diego, California on Saturday, October 22, 2011 to stand up and defend their basic and fundamental civil right to self defense as enumerated by the 2nd Amendment.