On Gun Control, the Kid in Us Can Cost Lives

Perhaps it's my inner child, but a part of me secretly cheers the libertarian. Especially those wild and crazy guys at the Cato Institute. The Washington think tank thinks government ought not try to stop people from using whatever drugs they want -- cocaine, heroin, alcohol, cigarettes, you name it -- or from gambling or watching porn online.

And now it's won its argument to let you keep a handgun in your home in the District, one of the most violent cities in the nation.

It's as if Cato took its motto from the Isley Brothers' 1969 hit "It's Your Thing (Do What You Wanna Do)."

Right on, says my inner child; you can't tell me who to sock it to.

In shooting down the city's strict gun control law last week, a three-judge panel agreed with arguments by Cato that the Second Amendment gives us the right to own handguns and that we are not too clumsy and ill-tempered to handle them safely. The libertarian view is: Trust the people more than the government.

Thomas Jefferson once said: "Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1) Those who fear and distrust the people. . . . 2) Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe . . . depository of the public interest."

Catoites, and my inner child, fall into the latter category. But the adult knows better. Several studies have shown that a gun in the home is up to 22 times more likely to be used for suicide or to kill a family member than to fend off a burglar. Surely the Founding Fathers would not have given the right to bear arms to a homegrown militia that was more likely to shoot itself in the foot than stop a British invasion.

Of course, the kid promises never to throw another tantrum and to use his gun only to practice his spin-around quick draw, just in case al Qaeda comes knocking. The adult hopes he doesn't accidentally shoot the neighbor.

Robert A. Levy, a senior fellow at Cato and co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the gun ban case, wrote Monday in The Washington Post: "Anti-gun regulations don't address the deep-rooted causes of violent crime -- such as illegitimacy, unemployment, dysfunctional schools, and drug and alcohol abuse. The cures are complex and protracted. But that doesn't mean we have to become passive prey for criminal predators."

Yeah, listen to that! says the inner child. A poll by MTV in 2001 found that 1 in 25 kids surveyed carried a gun to school because they were afraid they'd have to defend themselves from someone else with a weapon.

But the adult knows where this can lead. As the Bush administration has demonstrated, self-defense can sometimes require "preemptive strikes" -- or murder, as it's called when scared school kids employ the tactic.

It's easy to understand why people would believe that having a gun in the home makes them safe. It's the stuff of television crime shows. The inner child eats it up, too. You hear the footsteps coming up the stairs. The wife is asleep next to you, the kids snoring in the next room. You ease from the bed even as you slide that Sig Sauer .40-caliber semiautomatic from under your pillow, do that quick-draw spin you've been practicing and hit the intruder right between the eyes. You're a hero, and everybody now knows to knock hard before coming into your house.

Except you're more likely to end up like Jennifer Guthrie, a 25-year-old who purchased a gun after someone tried to rob her while walking home in Columbus, Ohio, several years ago. The gun discharged while she was handling it, the bullet punctured her abdomen, and she died a week later. In the District, between 2001 and 2004, police reported 51 homicides attributed to domestic violence, the majority involving guns.

The federal government's National Crime Victimization Survey routinely estimates that each year 100,000 Americans use a firearm to defend themselves. But as David Hemenway of Harvard University's Injury Control Research Center asks, "Who knows what 'self-defense' means?" From interviews that he conducted from 1996 to 1999 involving about 4,500 respondents, Hemenway found that most acknowledged acts of self-defense were, in fact, "hostile gun displays" -- say, a husband pulling a gun on his wife to make her stop yelling at him.

The inner child notes that FBI statistics show that nearly 40 percent of U.S. households reportedly have at least one gun, and the kid figures that this must deter some burglars. But the adult knows that other burglars might be attracted by the prospect of finding a gun in the house and that many firearms end up on the streets after being stolen from someone's home.

Nevertheless, my inner child wants the illusion of power and security, and maybe a 40-ounce cold brew to go with that .44-caliber cold steel. The adult says no way.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com