Jim Wright has changed his mind about gun control.
His earlier position was formed when he was in college in the 1960s, and issues like Vietnam and civil rights were blowing in the wind.
Like many of his fellow students, he became radicalized. ”Or at least,” he says, ”liberalized.”
And although he had grown up in a home with guns and as a boy had used them to hunt and to target shoot, he decided he never wanted to fire a weapon again.
”Part and parcel of the liberal wisdom was that we shouldn`t have guns,” he says. ”I was also very much convinced of the wisdom of gun control in controlling criminal violence.”
Today, he takes a different stand. ”I`ve become an agnostic about gun control,” he says. ”I think the whole matter is much more complicated than the standard liberal view allows for.
”While I still have a basically liberal view on violence, I`m increasingly skeptical that gun control will prove to be a fruitful solution.”
His shift is significant because James D. Wright is one of the country`s leading authorities on guns and violent crime.
He is the author, with Peter H. Rossi, of ”The Armed Criminal in America,” a recent survey of incarcerated hard-core criminals.
It is the second major study on the subject he has conducted since 1978. The first was ”Weapons, Crime and Violence in America,” published in 1983 as a book with the title ”Under the Gun.”
Both studies were made possible through grants from the National Institute of Justice, the principal research arm of the U.S. Justice Department.
Wright, 38, is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and director of research at the university`s Social and Demographic Research Institute.
His is a role that often is overlooked in the drama that is violent crime, which is, in a sense, a big-budget tragedy performed on a national stage.
The protagonist is, of course, the criminal, whose actions compel the involvement of a large supporting cast.
It includes the police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, juries, prison staffs, parole officers and legislators.
Most of us are members of the audience. We are, in general, a rapt and passionate audience because all of us, at one time or another, feel threatened by crime and because many of us occasionally are forced to play the part of victim.
Indeed, a regular sampling by the federal government reveals that 30 percent of American households annually are victims of crime.
The criminologist, too, is one of the players. One of his most important tasks is to provide the objective information that aids an enlightened debate about the best ways to control, if not solve, the crime problem and that can be used by legislators who must make the laws.
The expert in criminology usually is an academician. The conventional script has him removed from the gritty reality of the front lines–the streets, the police stations, the jails, the courtrooms. We see him sitting safely in an office on a university campus or in what we call a think tank, gathering and analyzing data, then arriving at conclusions.
For the most part, Jim Wright fits this picture, although the reality is that he is no more immune than the rest of us from the danger everyone fears. He has been robbed on a sidewalk in New York City, and his house in the relatively crime-free Massacusetts town where he and his family live has been burglarized twice.
By looking at an expert such as Jim Wright from a personal as well as a professional angle; by going beyond the statistics he collects and collates with a necessarily careful, unbiased scientific method; and by asking him about his experiences and his opinions, maybe we can learn something more than the cold facts he draws from the subject that has captured his attention for more than a decade.
A place to begin is with his thoughts about gun control.
”Part of the problem is that the polarization on both sides of the issue –between the advocates of gun control and its opponents–is so extreme that it`s difficult for any moderate position to form,” he says.
”Another part of the problem is that the term gun control means so many different things–from simple registration of firearms to a ban on the manufacture of certain weapons with everything else in between.
”To ask someone if he is in favor of gun control is to ask an ambiguous and largely meaningless question.
”At last count, there were something like 20,000 pieces of gun control legislation on the books, and yet we have more than 30,000 deaths from firearms each year, which is outrageous and a disgrace.
”I have nothing but respect for the concerns of the gun control advocates. I think there`s a certain sense of desperation on their part, which is understandable because the problem is so great. But the question is how can we collectively make it better.
”We need to find a policy that impinges on the people who use guns illegitimately, and we`ve never been able to do that.”
Wright`s studies have convinced him that some gun-control proposals do nothing to correct the problem and may actually make things worse.
One of the findings in his study of convicted felons was that some 80 percent had attained their last weapon not from a retail outlet but from the illegal ”street” market, which is largely supplied by theft from the homes of legitimate gun owners.
This indicates that tightening restrictions on retail gun sales will have little or no effect.
He also opposes a ban on the manufacture and sale of the ”Saturday night special,” generally described as low-caliber, short-barrel, cheap handguns.
”The belief among the gun-control people is that legitimate owners have no use for Saturday night specials but that criminals love them. Now, it seems, this isn`t the case.”
On the contrary, Wright is among a number of criminologists who believe the evidence is that most Saturday night specials are bought for protection by poor people who live in high-crime neighborhoods.
He believes a ban on all handguns is equally counterproductive. ”I don`t think it`s politically realistic, and I also think it`s unwise. My reason is the first law of microeconomics–that demand creates its own supply.
”We learned the force of that law in Prohibition. As long as people wanted to drink, they created an enormously profitable market for organized crime.
So what do we do? Throw up our hands?
”There isn`t cause for great optimism, but there are some things we can do to ameliorate the problem. Clearly our study confirms that firearms stolen from private residences represent a significant share of the supply for criminals.
”Knowing that doesn`t suggest we can shut off the supply but we can try to reduce it. One way is by calling attention to the nature and seriousness of this problem and encouraging people to store their weapons in foolproof ways. ”We may want to offer tax credits for those who buy a theft-proof vault to store firearms or a reduction in insurance rates for those who store weapons so they`re safe from theft.
”It also would be useful to have the crime of gun theft prosecuted as a serious felony. In many jurisdictions, it`s treated as a low grade felony that can be plea-bargained down.
”My own personal feeling is that the National Rifle Association makes a telling point in saying that the way to attack the gun problem is to have mandatory and severe penalties when guns are used in crimes.
”It`s not a cheap tactic. It costs $40,000 to $50,000 a year to keep a criminal in prison, and we already have a problem with prison overcrowding. Building more prisons when you need more schools and roads is a tough choice, but it`s a place to attack the problem.
”I`m certainly not convinced the other approach–attempting to deal with guns through the supply side–will have much effect, if any.
”The gun control people have one salient point: If there were no guns there would be no crimes of violence committed with guns.
”But we know this is politically unrealistic. Guns are part of our culture and history, and an overwhelming majority of gunowners–99 percent or more–never accidentally shoot someone else and never commit crimes with one. Wright`s boyhood is a perfect reflection of this portrait.
He was born and grew up in Logansport, a city of 20,000 in north central Indiana. ”My father always owned handguns, shotguns and rifles,” he says,
”and at an early age, when I was about 10 years old, he took me out in the countryside and taught me how to shoot a .22 rifle.
”Eventually I would target shoot with handguns, but the big day of transition as you got older was to get to shoot a shotgun. I remember the day I got to shoot my father`s .16 gauge shotgun.”
There were days of hunting small game, mostly rabbits and squirrels.
”My experience was universal in my neighborhood,” he says. ”Every boy I grew up with would give you the same biography, and all of us hunted together as kids.”
Perhaps it was the past, too, that played a part in his professional life. After completing graduate school in 1973 and becoming a college professor, it didn`t take him long to be attracted to a familiar subject, even if from a fresh perspective.
”I first published a paper about firearms in 1975,” he says, ”and for the last seven years, I`ve studied this subject to the virtual exclusion of everything else.
”My initial interest was triggered, if you will, as I was wandering through a book and read that 50 percent of all households said they owned a gun. I looked around the scholarly literature and found the amount of sound research and solid, concrete information was minimal. A lot had been written, but most of it was polemical and/or poorly done.”
Even as he has added to a growing body of knowledge with ”Weapons, Crime and Violence in America” and ”The Armed Criminal In America,” Wright has no illusions about the effect of his efforts.
”It`s not that once the results are in, the policy direction is obvious, but this study can help the debate by giving it facts.
”I doubt that there`s a single person in the country whose mind will be changed by our data, but at least the quality of debate will be raised a bit. ”We try to get our findings into the public domain. That`s why I don`t hesitate to talk to reporters because, in the end, it`s the taxpayers who pay for this. They won`t read the papers and reports, so I feel some obligation in getting out what information I can.
”Sometimes I think the crime problem is the price we have to pay for being an open, free, democratic society. It`s a hell of a price, but maybe it`s worth it.”
