HISTORY'S MOST SUCCESSFUL BAN ON GUNS

The one society in history that successfully gave up firearms was Japan in the 17th century, as detailed in Noel Perrin's superb book "Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword 1543-1879". An isolated island with a totalitarian dictatorship, Japan was able to get rid of the guns. Historian Stephen Turnbull summarizes the result:

[The dictator] Hideyoshi's resources were such that the edict was carried out to the letter. The growing social mobility of peasants was thus flung suddenly into reverse. The ikki, the warrior-monks, became figures of the past . . . Hideyoshi had deprived the peasants of their weapons. I�yasu [the next ruler] now began to deprive them of their self respect. If a peasant offended a samurai he might be cut down on the spot by the samurai's sword. [The Samurai: A Military History (New York: Macmillan, 1977).]

The inferior status of the peasantry having been affirmed by civil disarmament, the Samurai enjoyed kiri-sute gomen, permission to kill and depart. Any disrespectful member of the lower class could be executed by a Samurai's sword. The Japanese disarmament laws helped mold the culture of submission to authority which facilitated Japan's domination by an imperialist military dictatorship in the 1930s, which led the nation into a disastrous world war.

In short, the one country that created a truly gun-free society created a society of harsh class oppression, in which the strongmen of the upper class could kill the lower classes with impunity. When a racist, militarist, imperialist government took power, there was no effective means of resistance. The gun-free world of Japan turned into just the opposite of the gentle, egalitarian utopia of John Lennon's song "Imagine."

Instead of imagining a world without a particular technology, what about imagining a world in which the human heart grows gentler, and people treat each other decently? This is part of the vision of many of the world's great religions. Although we have a long way to go, there is no denying that hundreds of millions of lives have changed for the better because people came to believe what these religions teach.

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SAN FRANCISCO GUN BAN PROPOSAL FLIES IN THE FACE OF FACTS

San Francisco political leaders recently proposed a complete ban on private gun ownership in addition to a city ordinance prohibiting gun-related activities such as gun shows. This anti-gun move is a result of the city's high homicide rate, according to officials. Yet, there are many crime experts who believe San Francisco's zeal for disarming law-abiding citizens is based on a myth: that gun ownership causes violent crime.

When the FBI's annual crime report -- the Uniform Crime Report or UCR -- revealed that only 26% of violent crimes involved a firearm, the naysayers in the news media and anti-gun lobby denigrated the statistics and continued their opposition to citizen gun ownership. Yet the US Department of Justice's annual crime survey appears to confirm the FBI's findings. In fact, the DoJ's figures were even lower for gun-related violence than the FBI's. The FBI Uniform Crime Report is based on voluntary reports obtained from local police agencies, while the National Crime Victimization Survey is based on interviews with actual crime victims.

Estimates from the DoJ's National Crime Victimization Survey indicate that between 1993 and 2001 approximately 26% of the average annual 8.9 million violent victimizations were committed by offenders armed with a weapon. About 10%, or 846,950 victimizations each year, involved a firearm. From 1993 through 2001 violent crime declined 54%; weapon violence went down 59%; and firearm violence, 63%. Males, blacks and Hispanics, the young, and those with the lowest annual household income were more vulnerable to weapon violence in general and firearm violence in particular than their respective counterparts.

For the 9-year period beginning with 1993, 23% of white victims of violence and 36% of black victims were victims of violence involving an offender armed with a weapon. About 7% of white victims and 17% of black victims were involved in incidents in which an offender was armed with a gun. Forty-five percent of all violence with a weapon involved victims between ages 25 and 49, and 38% involved victims between ages 15 and 24. Blacks were about 9 times more likely than whites to be victims of gun-related homicides (25 per 100,000 blacks age 12 or older versus 3 per 100,000 whites.)

While victimizations involving knives comprised 6% of all violent crimes resulting in an injury, these victimizations accounted for about 24% of all serious injuries experienced by crime victims.

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