During his law enforcement career, including 15 years as San Jose police chief, Hoover Institution research fellow Joseph McNamara was well known for his staunch advocacy of gun-control measures. In combination with his broader public profile (he also writes detective novels), his outspoken views led to sharp clashes with the National Rifle Association.
McNamara’s beat cop experience began as a New York patrolman in Harlem, where he famously chased, tackled and handcuffed a much larger man who had just stabbed someone. He eventually obtained a doctorate in public administration at Harvard before returning to police work. He was police chief in Kansas City, Mo., before taking over in San Jose in 1976. When he left for Stanford, a 1991 editorial in the San Jose Mercury News commended him for a variety of achievements including his gun-control stance, saying “somebody’s got to fight for it.”
Amid current debates over so-called assault weapons and possible new federal gun-control legislation, Stanford sat down with McNamara for a question-and-answer session, challenging him to explain and defend his positions on a variety of issues. This edited transcript is a fuller version of the interview that appeared in print.
Would any additional gun control make a significant difference in reducing crime and violence?
I think so. There’s no panacea; there’s no law that passes that will totally eliminate the massacres that we’re disturbed with, or will eliminate gun crime. But at the same time, there’s a lot of unnecessary violence with guns in our country. There’s a good deal of evidence that when you bring a gun into the home, it’s more likely to be used against a member of that family or household than against the stranger who’s endangering the people inside the home.
There are plenty of instances where mentally disturbed people have access to a weapon and use it, when if that weapon was not present the moment would pass and that they might well go on, live the rest of their lives and not hurt anyone else. So I think there’s a whole climate affecting the use of guns in our country that would be changed from the picture that the pro-gunners create, which is so defiant of common sense that it’s sometimes hard to understand why it has lasted this long. And some of their slogans illustrate, I think, the emptiness of their arguments. For example, one of their chief spokesmen said the only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. If you think about that for a moment, what in the world are they really suggesting? That the United States of America go back to the days of Dodge City and the shootout at OK Corral? That for us to be safe each of us has to turn into a gunslinger, that we have to have our children armed with guns? That we have to have armed people in all the schools and that we have to adapt to a kind of culture where we’re constantly in danger because someone next to us is carrying a firearm?
The pro-gunners like to argue that guns don’t kill, people kill. And that shows again the emptiness of their arguments, because while it’s true that the gun by itself will not kill anyone, a person with a gun can kill a lot more easily and can kill a lot of people. Whereas some reasonable limitations on the type of firearm that you have can really make a significant difference in the danger to other people.
Isn’t the counter-argument, that with so many guns already in circulation, the determined criminal or the psychologically unstable person would never be able to be really deterred from getting ahold of a gun—and that the answer therefore is a good guy with a gun?
No one’s arguing in favor of gun control by saying that it will never happen that a criminal or a deranged person will get a gun and kill other people if we just pass this law. But the pro-gunners raise that as if we have, this straw man argument, when in fact we’re not proposing anything like that. We’re proposing some common sense.
For example, why not argue that a rifle-propelled grenade is a good weapon to defend your family? In a sense, it’s a firearm, it’s dispensed through a rifle. Well, because it just would kill a lot of people, and it’s not appropriate. When we’re talking about gun control, we’re talking about things that people overwhelmingly approve as a wide majority: that convicted felons and people who have been convicted of violent crimes, people who are drug addicts, people who are insane, should not have firearms. And people of a certain age should not have firearms. We have those kinds of restrictions on people driving automobiles and in other parts of our society because it’s recognized that, in the public good, you have to have some balance. We do infringe on people’s rights to drive cars, but we do it because we don’t want a lot of people getting killed unnecesarily. And that’s a pretty established principle.
Which brings us to the subject of the Constitution and the Second Amendment. The recent decision of District of Columbia v. Heller [a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting individual gun ownership] reversed a couple of hundred years of law in that the consensus of federal lower court opinions was that the Second Amendment language explicitly referred to a militia. Let me just read it [the Second Amendment] to be completely clear: ‘A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’ That had been interpreted by the lower courts to mean that this was not an individual right to bear arms, that it had to do, as it was written at the time, with the necessity of having militias because we did not have a standing army in our country.
And we should keep in mind too that today the pro-gunners raise the hunting issue, a sports issue. But at the time the Second Amendment was written, hunting was not a sport. For a lot of people, it was a way of providing meals and food for their families. The idea of firearms as sport was not incorporated in the Second Amendment, and I don’t think it really has any place in this discussion. I have nothing against weapons that are appropriate for hunting being legal and I don’t think that the responsible people for gun control argue that hunting weapons should be excluded. In fact, we raise the issue that, why would you need a weapon with the firepower of an assault weapon to go hunting?
Years ago, Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican candidate for president, who was a member of the NRA, said on this issue [that] any SOB who takes an assault rifle into the woods shouldn’t be allowed to hunt. I think that’s the way most responsible hunters feel. The pro-gun argument is, well, yeah, but if we yield on that point, the next step will be [to] take all of our guns away. And I think that’s an argument that really has to be dealt with, open and out front . . . it’s not just crazy people who have that attitude. There’s a lot of distrust of government in our country. I often write about some distrust that I have over the police use of SWAT teams that has resulted in unnecessary civilian deaths, because we have this silly idea to use these military-type invasions of people’s homes just simply to enforce a drug search warrant, which is obtained in secret and often on very skimpy evidence that would not stand up to anything but this ex-parte kind of legal process.
The fear that we have of government is part of our DNA, and indeed the Constitution reflects that fear because it pits the three branches of government against each other. That’s why my prediction [is] that the [Supreme] Court will not sustain Heller very long, because the [re-elected] administration within the next four years will undoubtedly appoint at least one justice, and Heller was a 5-4 decision on really unprecedented grounds. One of the four dissenting judges said that it created a totally new constitutional right based on very specious arguments. So the Supreme Court will go back and forth, and I think that is something that has worked well for the United States. . . . in the sense that we’re the most powerful country in the world with, I think, the most freedom and economic freedom and highest standard of living of any civilization in the world. (I’m) not saying that we don’t have plenty of problems that need solving, we do. But at the same time we should recognize that, as Winston Churchill once said, democracies aren’t great but there’s nothing in second place.
What kind of additional gun control do you think would be most helpful? Is the issue the assault weapons?
Yes, and the difficulty here is the other side is really quite skilled at masking the real issue. They raise the issue of, well, how do you define an assault weapon, and there’s really no such thing; and you would call them military weapons and they’re not really military weapons, they’re civilian weapons. But the key issue here is . . . the capacity for the weapon to fire a lot of rounds in a very short period of time. That’s what law enforcement is concerned about and that is what many of the pro-gun-control people are concerned about. If someone has a six-shot revolver, yes, they can kill people. And then they have to reload to put six more bullets in. That takes time. Whereas someone who has what we call an assault weapon can, for example, fire a 36-round clip within, say, a half second if it’s fully automatic and perhaps two and a half seconds if it’s semiautomatic. So the argument over whether a weapon is automatic—which is a machine-gun type weapon, one pull of the trigger will dispatch all the rounds of ammunition, as opposed to a [semiautomatic] single pull of the trigger for each round—is meaningless. It’s only a matter of a couple of seconds, so the fire is almost continuous. And it’s that fire that can kill a lot of people, keep law enforcement SWAT teams and law enforcement officers at bay so that they cannot get in to rescue hostages.
California police chiefs took the position of limiting the weapon to seven rounds. Others take the position of limiting the weapon to 10 rounds. But [the clip] can be prevented.
What about contentions like the one in a recent Wall Street Journal article that any gun can be modified to take a clip of size?
Yes, any weapon can be modified. However, by making [certain modifications] against the law [such as a full conversion from semiautomatic to automatic], we’ve taken a very important symbolic stand that this kind of weapon is improper, that it has no place in a civilized society, and that it is a serious crime to do so. I have no doubt, given my 35-year experience in law enforcement, that the overwhelming majority of people in this country support that kind of law; and that gradually public opinion will solidify; and that people who are found to be in possession of weapons that have been modified will be dealt with severely under the law, as they should be. And that eventually, in a gradual process, that law will become the law of the land, and people [will] turn in their weapons.
The trouble with buyback programs now is that [the payouts are] used to obtain weapons with more firepower. So they have never worked anywhere to reduce homicide, and it’s really a stupid idea that wastes the public money and ends up with a better-armed criminal. The idea that they just sell their weapon and never get another one may happen occasionally, but we know it probably doesn’t happen as much as people saying, ‘Gee, I’ve been looking to get a new assault weapon and here’s my chance.’ . . . But if you had buyback programs and it was rigidly against the law to buy a weapon with a magazine and the capacity for magazines, then they might buy another weapon that was reasonable for their own protection.
I personally am not opposed to people having weapons. I wrote my first book a long time ago, in 1984, called Safe and Sane. It was a crime prevention book, and I said to people, if you think you need a firearm to protect your home, that usually is OK—you shouldn’t be required to get a license, but you should be aware that there’s a lot of danger there and that proper use of a firearm is not something you can just assume, like a toaster. . . . There’s a lot of educationinvolved there and tragedies that we have seen happen. Most of the police officers I know would tell you they have seen many more gun accidents than actual cases where someone, a criminal, has been shot invading a home.
Where is the evidence that the now-expired federal ban on assault weapons worked in any way? Hasn’t violent crime decreased since the law expired?
We all know as researchers that the methodology that you adapt can often determine the outcome. When you look at crime statistics, you should keep in mind that in the annual FBI release of crime statistics, Crime in the United States, every year it warns against drawing generalizations from homicide and other statistics like that. Now, I could argue. . . [that] the latest statistics show homicides are up throughout the United States and that’s since [2008]. I don’t make that argument because I feel as an ethical researcher that I couldn’t really in good conscience interpret those crime statistics on a single notion that it had to do with gun control. There are so many variables in analyzing this.
There’s also the argument that better than any gun control would be harsher gun-sentencing laws.
I think harsh gun sentencing is in place in many areas, and I think it has reduced crime. Many people, criminologists, will argue that it’s the mandatory sentencing that has caused crime to go down. So mandatory sentencing for gun crimes, seeing that the laws that we have are enforced now, might work very well.
Sometimes the pro-gunners argue that instead of inventing new laws, we should use the laws we have. I agree with that. But I would point out that they’re playing a very double-sided game, because they know that we lack good data on guns and gun violence. One of the primary reasons that we lack this data is that the pro-gun forces have, through intimidating congressmen, ensured that the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms department has been cut back, so that they cannot enforce the laws that are on the books. They cannot do inspections of gun deals; they cannot ensure that those guns are transferred and sold according to the law. They’ve also been stripped of the ability to analyze gun crime, and the Centers for Disease Control has been denied funding to do it. This is part of a very skilled lobby with hundreds of millions of dollars to play with every year to manipulate the lobbying system that plagues our political structure.
The only department that I know that is making major efforts to trace guns used in crime is the NYPD, and they feel it’s extremely important to find out, when a gun is used in a murder, ‘well, how’d that gun come into circulation?’
When attorney general [John] Ashcroft was in office, he blocked the effort of the FBI to obtain the gun history of some 1,500 people that his department had ordered rounded up as suspected terrorists. This was after the attack on the World Trade Center, and the country was rightfully concerned about terrorism. But how can you take the position that you should round these people up, that they are viable suspects of being terrorists, and not be at all interested whether they ever purchased firearms in the United States? He forbade the FBI to do that investigation.
So I find it very hard to understand the level of almost fanaticism in terms of any effort to get to the bottom of this and lay out it out. Let the American people decide, let the Supreme Court rule as it will rule.
When you say the most important thing is to lay everything out fully, do you not think that’s happening in the current debate?
There’s a great deal of emotion flowing back and forth, and polarization. However, whatever laws are passed, I would like to see incorporated in that law something that [pro-gunners] have criticized: that there’s a lack of data to support gun control. So the elected officials, the Congress passing new legislation, [should build] into the law an analysis by ATF, by the Centers for Disease Control and by other government organizations, to evaluate over a couple of years the impact of the new laws and what they achieved or did not achieve. That’s reasonable for both sides.
