Arthur Kellerman, M.D., is in the news again. To refresh the reader's memory, Kellerman is the anti-gun proselyte who has produced a number of so-called studies over the years. The best known is the one that claimed you are 43 times more likely to be killed by a gun in your home than to use it to kill an intruder. Kellerman is not a scientist. He gives no evidence that he has any basic understanding of scientific methodology. Yet, it seems that anything Kellerman releases and calls "research" invariably gets extensive coverage. I don't think the gullibility of the media people and their documented inability to separate legitimate from pseudo-science are sufficient to explain this phenomenon. I have to assume that whatever abilities Kellerman lacks as a scientist, he more than makes up for as a politician. This article is not, however, intended as a speculation on Kellerman's machiavellian skills but rather a simple explanation of why Kellerman's latest "finding" is utterly and completely bogus.

According to the media, Kellerman claims that he has studied young boys and "found" that the overwhelming majority, when put in a room with a gun, will start pulling the trigger. What are we supposed to make of this? Let me say up front that, as I write this, I haven't read Kellerman's actual paper. Nevertheless, based upon my knowledge of his previous work and his reputation (perhaps "notoriety" is a better word), I am extremely skeptical that one can draw any meaningful conclusion from what he claims to have observed. It's pretty clear what we are supposed to conclude: that guns need to be locked away so that young boys can't get at them. After all, they'll start pulling the trigger without thinking and someone will get hurt or killed. Even if we accept that Kellerman had a large enough sample of boys and that there is no selection error (which is already granting Kellerman much more scientific competence than he has heretofore demonstrated), how does this square with the fact, well known among those who study this issue, that the overall rate for gun accidents has been declining for 50 years? We also know that the number of guns, especially pistols, has increased over the past 25 years, so if virtually all boys are totally irresponsible little animals, shouldn't the accident rate be going up?

Since we know the accident rate is not going up, then it means that families that have guns in the house are behaving responsibly, despite what Kellerman would like to have everyone believe. The behavior of the boys described by Kellerman is so irresponsible that Kellerman's sample has to be biased. As it happens, I have been conducting my own research in this area, focusing on gun owners. Unlike Kellerman, I freely admit that my sample is not representative of the U.S. population as a whole (though it probably is fairly representative of gun owners as a subpopulation), and that one cannot draw rigorous scientific conclusions from it. But, what I have found so far is totally at variance with Kellerman: kids who grow up with guns in the home behave very responsibly around guns.

When I have talked to fellow gun owners over the past 8 years - and I'm definitely part of the culture so I've talked to quite a few - I've found that they usually conform to the following pattern:

• If they grew up in a rural area (somewhat loosely defined since I've counted people who grew up just outside the suburbs as rural), they were around guns from the time they were born. They had almost always first fired a gun before age 10, with what seemed a fairly equal distribution among ages 7, 8, and 9 years. The idea of ever playing with a gun was unthinkable to them when they were kids and, most significantly, the guns were always readily accessible. Fathers are almost always the teachers, whether the person who is the gun owner is male or female.
• If they grew up in an urban area (again loosely defined as apartment, or residential home in reasonable proximity to the city core) a few conformed to the rural pattern. A fairly large number grew up around guns but the guns were kept in a way that made them either generally not available or not that much in evidence. These people tended to first fire a gun later - in their teens is not atypical. The remainder, who had not grown up around guns, tended to have first fired a gun fairly late - voting age and above. As with the rural pattern, fathers were almost always the teachers. If there was no father, then an elder male relative substituted.
• If they grew up in a suburban area, the distribution of the types shifted more in the rural direction.

Time and again, as I've talked to people who owned guns grew and grew up around them, the common theme was that daddy's gun was strictly off limits. Once you were old enough to handle the responsibility of a .22 - usually early teens - that was your gun to use, but daddy's home defense gun was still off limits.

One thing we do know from the scientific research is that most gun accidents are associated with people who have severe alcohol problems and are therefore very irresponsible. This should come as no surprise, since alcohol is associated with a majority of violent crime as well as family dysfunction. Another thing we know is that single parent families, particular those headed by women and without a strong family support system (typically inner-city poor), tend to be dysfunctional and potentiate violent and/or irresponsible behavior in the children they rear. We also know that gun owners, absent alcohol and family dysfunction, are exemplary members of society. In fact, there is some evidence (which I've alluded to in a previous article) that when young males legally own a gun (or guns), they are less prone to violence than young males who own no guns at all.

It is axiomatic that teaching kids to be responsible is teaching them to be self-reliant adults. How do you teach responsibility? You teach it by giving it, and the child learns by practicing it. So it is with guns. After a certain age, children who grow up around guns have been taught by their parents and have learned that all games and childishness ends around guns. And contrary to all of the ivory tower education theorists, who wouldn't know an empirical fact it came up and bit them on the behind, kids are capable of much more adult behavior than they think.

The one potential benefit of Kellerman's "research" is that someone probably will attempt to replicate it and, in the process, do it right. It would be very easy to come up with a research design that would select a truly representative sample of kids (both male and female) and then look at how kids' without any adult supervision behaved around guns. There is every reason to expect that kids who grow up around guns will have been taught how to use guns and will behave responsibly around guns that are both loaded and accessible. But, I wouldn't stop there if I were designing the study. I would want to look at a fairly large number of variables and see if there was any correlation between kids who are accorded the opportunity to be responsible around guns and general indicies of maturity.

The attitude that communitarians and other varieties of statists have about armed citizens is a manifestation of a more general view that everyone is a child, except for the bureaucratic elites who are supposed to run things. Citizens can't be trusted to behave responsibly. This view has elements of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the whole educational system is predicated on the idea that children have only a very limited potential to exhibit mature behavior - to be self-governors - or to function intellectually. If children are not given the opportunity to learn and exercise responsibility, then how are they supposed to acquire this trait as adults? Public education stunts both intellectual and emotional growth. It promotes conformity and groupthink and a willingness to delegate responsibility to governmental institutions.

The statists win if they are able to control education. It's as simple as that. You can't teach your 8- or 9-year-old to understand and be responsible around firearms because we're going to make having a loaded gun in your home illegal. We're going to use the public schools to implant the idea that there is something anti-social about self-defense and that the government is benevolent and all-knowing. This may not be an articulated strategy but it flows naturally from institutional control rather than individual family control of the education agenda.

Don't be mislead by institutionalized demagogues into thinking that some radical change occurred in human beings in the last half of the 20^th century so that they can longer be responsible individuals. Bill Clinton said in 1992 the freedoms Americans enjoyed 200 years ago were inappropriate in the modern world - people had too much freedom today. In this, as in so many other areas, Clinton was wrong. He did, however, speak for a large number of people who think that American ideals and virtues are passé. In a very real sense, guns are the last battleground. If Americans can be convinced that they can no longer be responsible owners of guns then they will have entered the final stage of civilization.