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The N.R.A. argument is that if various categories of guns are prohibited, the law-abiding citizen will be left defenseless while the criminal will ignore the law and steal a gun—"as he usually does anyway." In fact, he usually does not and has no need to, when it is so ludicrously easy to purchase one legitimately. A 1965 study showed that nearly 25% of 4,069 mail-order guns shipped by two Chicago firms went to convicted criminals. In New Jersey, one in every five recipients of mail-order firearms has a criminal record. Massachusetts State Police Captain John Collins notes that of 4,506 guns confiscated from criminals in a recent period, only six had been stolen.
Criminologists wonder just how good an idea it is for Everyman to keep a pistol in the dresser drawer for self-defense. Aside from the moral issue of whether a burglar deserves to be executed for the relatively minor crime of property theft, there is the practical point that if the armed citizen pulls a gun, he is likelier to get shot than is the generally more experienced burglar. Moreover, two-thirds of criminal assaults and three-fourths of homicides result from quarrels among family or friends. U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Ralph Greenson says: "Guns not only fail to resolve aggression, they provoke it."
"First registration, then discrimination, finally confiscation."
The fear that the Government will end all private ownership of firearms underlies the N.R.A.'s opposition to registration of any weapons. The organization's officials argue that once local police were empowered to reject applicants for a permit to own a weapon, they would do so capriciously or on the basis of personal or political prejudice. Not surprisingly, such Negro militants as California's Black Panthers are dead set against gun registration, maintaining that it would be used to disarm them. Similarly, the New Left newspaper, the Guardian, has declared its opposition to "restrictions on weapons which would deprive sections of the population of a means of self-defense" while "the state itself is abundantly armed." In this, the way-out left sounds oddly similar to the way-out right, whose spokesmen claim that if guns were registered, invading Communists would merely have to get the lists from police stations in order to disarm the nation and choke off resistance.
No doubt the antigun advocates, too, sometimes go beyond what is reasonable or at least practical. Some urge complete confiscation. "I see no reason," says University of Chicago Sociologist Morris Janowitz, "why anyone in a democracy should own a weapon."
That solution is probably far too drastic. Some 20 million Americans are hunters, and though accidents kill up to 800 of them each year, few would want their sport circumscribed—or destroyed—by too-stringent gun laws. Thousands of other Americans engage in such pastimes as skeet and trap shooting, muzzle-loading competitions with old-style rifles, and bench-rest shooting, whose enthusiasts weigh their powder, mold their bullets and come close to perfect marksmanship.