PERSPECTIVE ON GUN CONTROL : Tilt the Odds: Deputize John and Jane Public

Guns kill 30,000 people a year in America. Congressman Mel Reynolds (D-Ill.) is trying to do something about it. He has introduced a bill that would hold firearms manufacturers legally liable for the improper use of their guns. Someone shot in a gas station stickup could collect damages from Smith & Wesson.

Assigning such liability can give companies incentives to make their products safer from foreseeable accidents or misuse. But you can’t design a gun to make it “safe” from being stolen or abused. So strict liability in the case of firearms wouldn’t result in safer weapons, just more expensive ones. Gun-makers would simply reprice their product to include the premium for an insurance policy against their potential misuse.

Making weapons more expensive is the whole point. “More expensive” is the economic equivalent of scarcer, and gun-controllers operate on the theory that the scarcer firearms become, the less violence in society there will be.

It is a fine theory. Too bad it’s wrong. Gun violence is not “caused” by high absolute levels of guns in private hands, and fewer guns in society would not necessarily make for less violence.

One important cause of aggression is perceived differences in people’s ability to meet force with force. The strong prey upon the weak, not each other. Criminals seldom try to mug police officers. Internecine warfare among gangbangers is conducted by sneak attack and ambush. Only unarmed civilians are openly confronted by criminals.

This is no coincidence. When everybody is about equally armed, predators will find it more difficult to follow their vocation. But if you lower the cost of predation relative to the cost of defending against it, the rate of predatory behavior will go up. You’ll get more violence, even if you have fewer guns.

Modern gun-control proponents are right to believe that if you make guns more expensive in legitimate retail stores, you will also make them more expensive on the black market. Raise the price of weapons in either market and fewer transactions will occur, which should mean, after a long time, fewer guns in circulation.

But it’s a mistake to assume that the good guys and the bad guys will similarly curtail their buying in response to increases in weapons’ price. There is no evidence that they will and it’s very unlikely that they would. Here is why:

Good guys and bad guys both want guns for the same purpose--to get tactical dominance over a transaction with another person. Bad guys know for certain that they’ll need their guns. Good guys know that they’ll need their guns only in the event they are confronted by a bad guy. So even if good guys and bad guys assign the identical value to dominating a hostile encounter, bad guys will still value guns more and pay more for them, because they will be more certain of having such encounters.

So what will happen is this: Good guys will have fewer guns and bad guys will have the same number. That will make for more violence, not less, even though there may be fewer guns in circulation.

To make a dent in violent crime would require a huge influx of new police officers. The budgetary facts of life in big cities rule this out. Another possibility--what we typically do when government can’t deliver the goods--is to privatize.

How? One way would be to find people with the same statistical reliability as police officers; according to U.S. Justice Department crime statistics, almost everybody over 40 with a clean criminal record and no history of substance abuse would qualify.

Call these citizens “auxiliary peace officers.” Pay them some modest amount, say $50 a month, to pack a handgun wherever they go. Insist that APOs receive the same modest firing- range instruction that police officers get and the same classroom schooling about when it is proper to use a gun. But commission enough APOs so that bad guys would have to fear the presence of one or more of them on every bus, shop, street and public space in the city. We know we can’t flood the street with police officers; we should try to flood it with APOs.

Ever since President Kennedy was murdered 30 years ago, Americans have been playing the same tired variations on the gun-control theme over and over again. We have nothing worthwhile to show for it except an ever-stronger body of evidence that we’re approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

What we ought to be doing is trying to restore an equilibrium of arms to the streets, not chasing the delusion that with tighter restrictions we can get bad guys to give up their arms.