3. A Dangerous Gun Show

As we listen to the post-Littleton debate on gun control, it's impossible not to notice the enormous gap between the problem gun-control advocates describe and what their proposals can be expected to deliver. Childproof gun locks, requiring instant checks of buyers from licensed dealers at gun shows, holding adults liable for letting children get guns – none of these would have stopped the Littleton murderers, who planned their crime and assembled their arsenal for a year and violated several existing laws in the process. These proposed new laws would make only a marginal difference. The gun controllers' rhetoric, decrying the large number of guns in the United States and pointing out that gun deaths are much lower in countries that ban guns, makes much more sense as an argument for eliminating gun ownership altogether – which many gun controllers would like to do.

This misfit between problem and solution is typical of reformers, mostly liberal but some conservative. Gun-control advocates are not the only reformers whose solutions are tiny next to the problem they address and who ignore the practical difficulties of their unspoken agendas – while remaining uncurious about possible unanticipated consequences.

Consider advocates of the latest campaign finance bill, who decry the importance of money in politics and then propose new laws that will surely be evaded as previous laws have been. The problem is basic: In a big-government democracy, people will want to influence elections, out of idealism as well as self-interest, and they will spend money to do so. And they will be acting on a claim of right: the First Amendment. To which some campaign finance reformers respond: Get rid of the First Amendment. In March 1997, 38 senators voted to amend the First Amendment to allow campaign spending limits. Or as House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt put it: “What we have here is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can't have both.” The Framers disagreed.

There is little evidence that gun-control advocates have given much thought to the practical difficulties of a serious gun ban. For the fact is that while the media lavish attention on marginal changes in federal gun-control laws, the great source of successful reforms in the 1990s is the states, which have been passing laws allowing law-abiding citizens, after a background check, to carry concealed weapons. Today 31 states, with 50 per cent of the nation's population, have such laws. None of the negative consequences predicted by gun controllers has come to pass. Instead, according to the most complete statistical study by University of Chicago economist John Lott, concealed-weapons laws have reduced crime. Citizens stop crimes 2 million times a year by brandishing guns, Lott writes, and criminals are deterred from attacking everybody because they know that a small number of intended victims will be armed. Lott's book, More Guns, Less Crime, presents a strong argument that more gun control would produce more crime.

Even if sweeping gun control did not have that unintended consequence, it would be fiendishly difficult to enforce. There are some 240 million guns in America, most of them owned by people with a claim of right. And not a frivolous claim. The intellectually serious debate is over how far the Second Amendment right extends: Congress can surely ban the possession of nuclear weapons and surely cannot ban all handguns and rifles; the Second Amendment blocks the road somewhere in between. Earlier this month, former members of Congress Abner Mikva and Mickey Edwards, heads of a bipartisan committee, urged caution in pro posing constitutional amendments, and they are surely right in urging avoidance of triviality. What do they have to say to the reformers who would repeal the heart of the First Amendment and ignore the Second?