Dr. Robert Spitzer has made his career by pushing for gun control. His name pops up all the time along those lines, including in a couple of books on the topic.
To say he's hostile toward the right to keep and bear arms is putting it mildly.
Recently, he published a piece that starts off by getting into the Alex Pretti thing, which I'm sick of talking about, but then uses that to pivot into a different point that he wants to explore.
That's fine. Starting a piece can be difficult, so finding something relevant to use as framing is something I think most of us who write for a living do. But the problem is that Spitzer seems to see there being some collision between gun rights and public safety, based on the Pretti situation, and oh boy, does he get into the weeds of nonsense.
On the one hand, civilian gun carry is indeed a right under the Second Amendment according to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Bruen case where the high court said that individuals have a “right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” The court proposed no exception for doing so in a public gathering.
On the other hand, the consequences of such action are clear. Public gun carrying, especially in the context of a public demonstration or similar gathering is, no matter the intentions of the carrier, a terrible idea.
Now, here, I can almost agree with Spitzer in that carrying a gun to a protest is probably not the wisest activity one can engage in, at least so far as when the intention is to interfere with armed law enforcement officers. There's a time and a place for every purpose under Heaven, of course, and carrying guns at a protest makes sense in certain contexts, too.
This just wasn't one of them.
However, as you can see, Spitzer thinks carrying a gun at all is an issue.
Even though most of those who acquire guns for self-defense say that they feel safer having them, when the public is polled on the matter, the response is fear. For example, when asked in a Gallup poll how safe they would feel in a “public place” that allowed the concealed carry of firearms, 65% of the public said less safe, 25% more safe, and 8% no difference.When asked who they thought should be allowed to carry concealed firearms in a public place, 44% said only “safety officials,” 26% said only those with a “clear need,” and 27% said private citizens.
Public impressions aside, numerous studies spanning disciplines from psychology to criminology make clear that the presence of guns in the presence of others inflames aggression and makes violence more, not less, likely. For example, a study of over 30,000 public demonstrations from 2020 to 2021 found that violence was more than six times more likely to break out when guns were present.
A study from Stanford University of four decades of data found that states that adopted more liberal gun carry laws, and therefore more civilian gun carrying, saw an increase in violent crime of from 13% to 15%. Numerous studies of states that have adopted broad “stand your ground” laws (meaning that people when confronted with a perceived threat in public had no duty to retreat) and that also have liberal gun carry policies have seen significantly higher rates of gun killings. A study of intimate partner violence found that such violence was three times more likely when guns were present. In short, more guns lead to more crime.
Except that every one of those studies, including the Stanford study, failed to account for any other factors that might account for the higher crime rate. Further, literally none of those studies tried to differentiate between lawful carry and criminal carry, which is important because even constitutional carry states have limits on who can carry. Felons, for example, still can't carry guns no matter what, and that's something that keeps being left out.
Weird, ain't it?
And that's true of most of the studies. We've gone over, time and again, the problem with the vast majority of these studies. Even the left-leaning RAND, which is also anti-gun, has admitted that the research on these topics has been less than stellar. If they, a think-tank that favors gun control, can't bring itself to support the research Spitzer is citing, why should anyone accept it.
Honestly, I'm not interested in public perceptions. Someone's irrational fear shouldn't dictate what rights I get to enjoy and which are stripped from me. If that were the case, people with wild-colored hair and septum rings wouldn't be allowed to vote.
The truth of the matter is that there are far more defensive gun uses than offensive shootings, particularly by lawful gun owners. Good guys with guns protect themselves and others all the time. Just looking at the raw numbers will show that, especially if you're not trying to filter that through anti-gun researchers dedicated to eradicating the right to keep and bear arms.
Finally, the link between civilian gun carrying in society and mayhem was well understood by our ancestors. From the 1600s to the start of the twentieth century, every state in the country enacted laws that restricted concealed weapons carrying, and three-fourths of the states had laws restricting open weapons carrying.
The Supreme Court has carved out a new right pertaining to gun carrying.
And here we see that yes, you can get a PhD while suffering from profound developmental disabilities.
Concealed carry was restricted, sure, but open carry was common and permitted. Over time, due to the comfort of others, it became more polite to carry concealed rather than open. If Spitzer would like for us to all go back to open carry without any permits at all, Bruen's history, text, and tradition standard would likely support that.
But that's not the premise of his piece, now is it? He's clearly equating the two in this particular passage, while ignoring how common open carry actually was throughout most of that time period.
There's no collision between rights and public safety, except in the small minds of those who oppose the right and will manipulate the data to make it seem as if public safety is impacted.
