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But it is not only victims who are arming themselves. For many citizens of both sexes the mere thought of crime arouses a terror great enough to overcome their onetime revulsion toward firearms. "Cathy," an executive secretary in Danvers, Mass., says she once felt "absolute fear" toward the guns her former husband kept in their house. But word went around her office building of a rape at knifepoint in the parking lot, and a greater fear took hold. "I thought about what happened, and I know I'm no match for a knife," says Cathy. "So I did a lot of thinking about whether I really wanted to carry a gun. Then I did a lot of shopping around about what kind of gun I wanted." She wound up packing a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver in a shoulder holster under her business suit. "I feel safer with my gun," she says. "I feel safer walking out into the parking lot at night."
Is she actually safer? No definitive answer can be given unless someone devises a way to count crimes that are not committed because the would-be perpetrators fear that the potential victims may be armed. Some respectable authorities think the wide dispersion of guns among ordinary citizens does help deter crime. Sociologists James Wright and Peter Rossi conducted in-depth interviews over a three-year period starting in 1982 with more than 1,874 imprisoned felons. Among their findings: 56% of the cons agreed with the statement that "a criminal is not going to mess around with a victim he knows is armed with a gun," and 57% believed that "most criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police." Fully 74% thought that "one reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home is that they fear being shot."
But the great bulk of expert opinion is that owning a gun undermines rather than increases safety: whatever deterrence of burglars or rapists might occur is more than offset by other factors. First come the suicides: in 1986, 18,153 people shot themselves to death. No one knows how many might have lived if they had been unable to pick up a gun and how many might have merely chosen other means to end their lives. But surely the presence of a loaded gun in a bureau drawer must have tempted many, particularly teens, to yield to a black depression that might have lifted had the means to carry out the dark wish not been so readily available.