Equal protection.

• Author: Polsby, Daniel D.

From Bosnia to the Wild West, the simple notion that more weapons mean more violence is shot full of holes.

By last summer, what was briefly the independent republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina had been reduced to a few besieged enclaves and a seat in the United Nations. In the process, perhaps 200,000 Bosnians had been killed, and 2 million had been driven from their homes. Yet Western leaders were still dithering about whether to lift the two-year-old U.N. arms embargo that had prevented the Bosnian Muslims from effectively defending themselves since the civil war began in early 1992.

"With regard to the lifting of the arms embargo," President Clinton said, "the question obviously there is, if you widen the capacity of people to fight, will that help to get a settlement and bring about peace, or will it lead to more bloodshed?" For two years, the conventional wisdom of the world community has been that international diplomacy, abetted by an arms embargo, could revive the stability that Yugoslavia enjoyed in the years when it was ruled by the Croat strongman Tito, who had tens of thousands of his countrymen murdered to keep himself in power.

The current bloodletting in the central Balkans may be a modest affair compared to that of 50 years ago between the communists and proto-Nazi Ustashi storm troopers. But those massacres occurred out of the world's sight. International conscience follows CNN's minicam crews, which are on the scene to record what war is like when waged between soldiers and civilians.

How did the poorly armed Bosnian Muslims, the chief victims of the war, come to be surrounded by well-armed enemies? Things went quite differently in the initially lethal skirmishes between Serbs and Croats in the north. There, after some fighting, Serbia cut a deal, settling for a relatively small share of Croatia. The Croats' military power was nowhere near enough to conquer the Serbs. It was merely enough to make the Serbs appreciate the advantages of peace. Guns did not so much win a war as avert one.

The Bosnian Muslims were not so fortunate. For the most part they were unarmed, and the arms embargo left them helpless against Croat and Serb enemies who wanted their land. Margaret Thatcher, as usual among the first of the world's politicians to discern the obvious, had warned for several months that the embargo spelled disaster for the Muslim people of Bosnia. Until last winter's "ethnic cleansing" proved her point, respectable opinion was very much against her views. Throughout Europe and in the United States, it had been a bipartisan article of faith that the only hope of peace in the Balkans lay in diplomacy aided by an arms embargo.

In the words of David Clark, the British Labour Party's shadow defense minister, "lift|ing~ the arms embargo to the Muslims...has always seemed to us rather crazy," like trying to "douse a fire with petrol. It never works." President Bush embraced this premise, and President Clinton remains ambivalent.

The result has been gun control, writ large: a scheme aimed at limiting violence that instead encourages predators to take whatever they want. Both the U.N. arms embargo and domestic gun control are based on the notion that the accumulation of weapons as such tends to encourage violence. The chances for peace and security can thus be enhanced by limiting or reducing the total number of weapons.

This weapons-violence hypothesis has been part of the intellectual furniture of progressive politics for most of this century. It found expression as the fourth of President Wilson's 14 Points and appears in almost the same language in the Covenant of the League of Nations, whose Article Eight provided: "The Members of the League recognize that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations."

As the historian Alfred Zimmern pointed out, "The important word in the first paragraph is 'requires.' Peace, it says...cannot be maintained unless armaments are reduced, or, in telegraphic language: 'armaments mean war.'" The covenant was simply reflecting what was even then a superficial dictum of good-government progressivism. The notion that armaments mean war is "a favorite theme on pulpits as well as on platforms," Zimmern wrote. It is also "a mistake which, if allowed to pass uncontradicted, can do infinite damage to the cause of peace."

Modern strategic theory rejects the weapons-violence hypothesis, focusing on stability rather than stockpiles. It starts with the proposition that people tend to pursue the course...