The Great American Gun Debate.

• Author: Funk, T. Markus

Gun control is one of those subjects on which virtually everyone has an opinion - usually strongly held. Whether pro- or anti-gun control, those opinions are often founded not on facts but on raw emotions fueled by widely publicized misinformation concerning gun use and misuse. Like few books before it, The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms and Violence, by Don B. Kates Jr. and Gary Kleck, pulls together the paramount sociological and criminological issues involved in this very public debate. The result is a readable, concise, and convincing argument that prohibiting civilian firearms possession is an ineffective - in deed, a counterproductive - means to deal with America's crime problem.

Although those who reflexively oppose any regulations on gun ownership may recoil at the authors' claim that "instant background checks, gun owner licensing, and permit-to-purchase systems seem preferable" to outright prohibition, the authors make an airtight case for the social utility of gun ownership. In fact, The Great American Gun Debate takes its analysis a step further by exploring a related - and under-examined - question: Why is there so large a gap between the media's pervasive harping on the unredeemed dangers of firearm ownership and the stream of recent scholarly studies demonstrating the benefits of civilian gun possession?

Kates is a San Francisco-based civil liberties lawyer and criminologist; Kleck is a criminology professor at Florida State University. They are among the most widely recognized and frequently cited experts on firearms issues. Kates authored a 1983 Michigan Law Review article, still the most widely cited treatment of the Second Amendment, that began the small flood of legal scholarship on the constitutional status of private firearms possession and use. Kleck wrote the authoritative Point Blank (1991) and has conducted re search that has conclusively demonstrated the social benefits of civilian gun owner ship.

Interestingly, the authors can't be easily categorized as libertarian or even conservative. In fact, both are rather "conventional" modern liberals, a predisposition they share with many other anti-gun-control scholars. This may surprise some readers, but it turns out that most academics who oppose gun prohibition are liberal, non-hunting civil libertarians who have no connection to, or interest in, the National Rifle Association and its legislative agenda. Kates and Kleck are quick to point out that this scholarly detachment and intellectual honesty stands in telling contrast to the results-oriented anti-gun research that inevitably dominates the headlines.

They also persuasively argue that legislation sought by the major anti-gun groups has nothing to do with "gun control," and everything to do with the ultimate objective of outright prohibition of guns in private hands (as prohibitionists Jim and Sarah Brady have put it, "no private citizen has any reason or need at any time to possess a gun"). The anti-gun lobby, con tend Kates and Kleck, takes what it can where it can, saying whatever it must say to justify its claims. Kates and Kleck suggest that reasonable controls, such as preventing felons and the insane from possessing firearms, are both constitutional and criminologically sound in light of the current research. But, they maintain, out right prohibition of civilian firearm ownership is neither.

While the...