Heather Martens: It's simply safer to regulate guns

As the Supreme Court considers whether to overturn nearly 70 years of legal precedent allowing gun regulation in this country, it should recognize the cost of doing so. Clark Neily's arguments ("The District of Columbia: No guns, still deadly," March 17) neither stand up to scrutiny nor mention the costs.

Neily argues that the Washington, D.C., handgun ban violates a personal right to any kind of firearm for the purpose of self-defense -- a new take on the Second Amendment that dismisses the idea that firearms should be "well-regulated."

Neily's argument redefines self-defense in a way that looks merely semantic but isn't. Under current law, we are entitled to self-defense as an exception to the laws against murder. Self-defense doesn't appear in the Bill of Rights, but it does fall under a basic right in our law -- the right to life. State laws have done a good job of allowing for the defense of the oneself and others. Nobody is in jail for self-defense. But some states have substituted their idea of the "right to self-defense" for the "right to life" under "shoot first" laws, and the problems are becoming evident. Under these laws, when someone kills, the prosecution must prove, along with everything else, that the killer did not feel threatened. This change yields an unintended boon for sociopaths -- a potent new tool for getting away with murder.

Neily's next argument is that the ability to defend oneself requires, specifically, a handgun. He implies that handguns would make D.C. residents safer, but he doesn't mention that the people getting shot are often the same people who carry handguns. He also fails to mention the dearth of cases of D.C. homeowners being killed by burglars for lack of a handgun. Being killed by a burglar is rarer than being struck by lightning, and even when faced with a burglar, there is no evidence that it's better to have a handgun than a stick, a flashlight or a shotgun.

Neily also ignores the fact that gun deaths in this country rise and fall with gun ownership, and that keeping unsecured guns around carries tremendous risk to homeowners, their families and the public.

Every year in the United States, about half a million guns are stolen, largely from homes and cars. These guns feed the illegal gun trade that arms criminals. Unsecured firearms also contribute to suicide, which accounts for about half of the gun deaths in the United States. Washington, D.C., has the lowest gun suicide rate in the country.

Meanwhile, the promise of increased safety through handguns has been an empty one. The 2004 National Academy of Sciences report on firearms examined all the U.S. research data and found that there is no evidence that loose pistol-carrying laws reduce crime. On the other hand, it did find that laws governing gun access had successfully shut down some illegal gun-supply chains. It called for better data-gathering and pointed out that acts of Congress hamper study of the issue. Congress even forbids federal sharing of certain crime gun trace data with local police.

Despite Congress' tendency to favor ignorance and inaction, reality cannot be ignored. The Brady background-check law enacted in 1994 has prevented nearly 1.5 million gun transfers to prohibited purchasers and was followed by a decade of declining violent crime. Meanwhile, the states that are laboratories for loose gun regulation -- Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, South Carolina and Tennessee -- topped all the states' violent-crime rates in 2006.

Foreign data consistently show that countries that pay attention to gun access do not suffer from the astronomical rates of gun death that the United States does (80 people a day), even when their rates of violent crime are very similar. This is true of Canada, which had 184 gun homicides in 2004, the year the United States had 11,344. Canada strictly regulates handguns, much the way the United States regulates machine guns.

Most Americans believe, as I do, that gun ownership is part of the landscape here. Most Americans also believe that gun ownership is about responsibilities, not just rights. Keeping guns out of the wrong hands is a basic responsibility.

We could save lives by focusing our efforts where we agree. Background checks for all gun sales, for example, are supported by 82 percent of Minnesotans -- but they are still only required when a gun sale is made through a federally licensed dealer. This country must decide through the democratic process how to address our gun-violence crisis. Opening a legal challenge to every gun law in the county by discovering new rights without responsibilities will only lead to more needless death.

Heather Martens is president of Citizens for a Safer Minnesota, www.endgunviolence.com.