Lethal Laws.

• Author: Kates, Jr., Don B.

By Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman, & Alan M. Rice. Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1995). 347 Pp.

The thesis of Lethal Laws is that, as a practical matter, governments cannot commit genocide except on effectively disarmed populations. However one appraises the success of the book in developing this theme, one must concede the book's contribution to our knowledge of foreign firearms regulation, which is among the most frequently mentioned, and muddled aspects of our own gun control debate. Pulled together for the first time are lengthy English translations of historical firearm laws from Germany, the USSR, the People's Republic of China, Ottoman Turkey, Guatemala, Uganda and Cambodia--all places in which, during the past 100 years, infamous acts of genocide were perpetrated by agents of the state. There are also facing-page originals of these statutes in their own language. The laws are set in their historical context by brief but illuminating commentaries which often include information on enforcement practices. This commentary, as far as it goes, is balanced.(1) Far from overdramatizing the scale of various genocides, Lethal Laws inclines to settle on the lowest reasonable number of victims.(2) Despite the authors' expressly Jewish connection, they bend over backwards to avoid demonizing the German people for the Holocaust (blaming the rise of Nazism exclusively on adverse world and local economic conditions and on the post-world War I Versailles Treaty, which they appear to consider harsh and unfair to Germany).

Lethal Laws is the second book from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO)(3) to Champion a proposition that is central to the argument against firearms prohibition: that the inclination of sovereign governments to abuse power, including the infliction of geno-politicide upon racial, ethnic and other minorities, constitutes a sound basis for sanctioning an armed population capable of at least rudimentary self-defense.(4) Granting this thesis implicates an extraordinary roster of political sensitivities and cannot judiciously be dismissed out of hand in the closing years of a century that has been the golden age of genocide. Yet it is safe to predict that Lethal Laws will not become the vehicle through which this important public conversation is carried on. The reason for this state of affairs is not to be found in the book but in its authors' inexcusable bad manners, portrayed, for example, in their penchant for renting billboards or placing advertisements in magazines that equate President Clinton, or gun control activists like Sarah Brady, to Hitler.(5) In the best of times this kind of behavior would contribute nothing useful to public debate. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and especially in light of the ensuing press coverage, in which libertarians, firearms hobbyists, members of the National Rifle Association, survivalists, skinheads, and neo-Nazis were all jumbled together as a modem version of the Red Menace, such bombastic comparisons accomplish nothing apart from gravely undermining the credibility of those who are guilty of them. It is unfortunate that this confusion exists because the foreign experience with firearms regulation and armed populations has much to inspire reflection as Americans try to reach some sort of admissible solution for the problem of crime and violence in our society. And on its own merits, Lethal Laws makes a worthwhile contribution to that endeavor.

Arguments about firearms policy often fall back into the fashion of oracular interpretation, in which statistical entrails are examined and pronounced to imply (or not to imply) that gun control laws can lead to lower rates of homicide or suicide or that regional or national differences in patterns of firearms possession explain differences in the incidence of violent crime. The large question that tends to get lost in these minute inquiries is that of the ideal distribution of firearms in a society. Supposing we had a magic spell that allowed us to have whatever world we would like as regards firearms: what world would we choose? No firearms at all? Police and soldiers armed but no one else? Brinks truck drivers also armed? Upon what principles should we draw the line?

The "no firearms at all" option is too swiftly chosen by members of the urban upper-middle and professional classes, for on the one hand, they--that is, we--seldom encounter problems for which firearms would appear an obvious counter; and on the other hand, as we read in the newspapers every day, firearms--handguns and assault rifles especially--have become the vectors of one of the major public health problems of our time. Why then should we behave any differently toward firearms than toward the variola virus, which, thanks to a century of unceasing effort, has been extirpated from the earth?

The analogy is seductive but misleading. Without variola there can be no smallpox, but without firearms there can be plenty of violence. For example, the world before firearms was hardly a pacific place.(6) It is unrealistic to expect criminals to become less predatory once their fear of potentially lethal confrontations with firearms is removed. At a minimum, then, it would seem that one should want a police force with access to firearms and for the same reasons (mutatis mutandis) a soldiery is similarly armed. At this point, one has what might be called (with some imprecision) the European paradigm:(7) an armed government and a disarmed population. The question is whether over the long pull this prototype is inherently more ironic with respect to social violence than one in which firearms are more popularly distributed.

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