FIGHTING BACK

Only Guns Can Stop Terrorists
It’s harder to victimize armed citizens.

BY JOHN R. LOTT JR.
Friday, September 28, 2001 12:01 a.m.

President Bush yesterday unveiled a plan to tighten airline security,
ranging from employing the National Guard at airports to place more
marshals on flights. Those are important steps, but they won’t be
enough, especially since no one knows where the terrorists will
strike next. The only adequate response is to encourage more
ordinary, responsible citizens to carry guns, as Israel has done.
Screening at airports, while important, will always be inadequate;
terrorists will always figure some way to circumvent the controls–
for instance, by bribing airport employees. Strengthening cockpit
doors is probably a good idea, but given current airline design it
may create dangerous differences in air pressure between the cockpit
and cabin. In any case, the door must be opened sometime, to allow
pilots to go to the bathroom or get food.

The marshals program is more promising. Empirical research by Bill
Landes at the University of Chicago found that between a third and a
half of the drop in airplane hijackings during the 1970s could be
attributed to the introduction of armed U.S. marshals on planes and
an increased ability to catch and punish hijackers.

But to put just one marshal aboard every daily flight in the U.S.
would require at least 35,000 officers–far more than currently work
for the FBI, Secret Service and U.S. marshals combined (17,000). And
one marshal might not be enough to foil a whole gang of hijackers, of
the kind used by Osama bin Laden. Clearly it will take a long time to
deploy enough marshals.

There are things we can do in the meantime. There are about 600,000
active state and local law enforcement officers in the U.S. today.
They are currently forbidden from bringing their guns on airplanes.
That should change. They should even be given discount fares if they
fly with their guns. Most pilots have also had military experience.
The request of their union to arm pilots should be granted; this is
what El Al has done for a long time.

Fears of having guns on planes are misplaced. The special, high-
velocity handgun ammunition used on planes packs quite a wallop but
is designed not to penetrate the aluminum skin of the plane. Even
with regular bullets, the worst-case outcome would simply be to force
the plane to fly at a lower altitude, where the air pressure is
higher.

The use of guns to stop terrorists shouldn’t be limited to airplanes.
We should encourage off-duty police, and responsible citizens, to
carry guns in most public places. Cops can’t be everywhere.
In Israel, about 10% of Jewish adults have permits to carry concealed
handguns. To reach Israel’s rate of permit holding, Americans would
have to increase the number of permits from 3.5 million to almost 21
million. Thirty-three states currently have “right-to-carry” laws,
which allow the law-abiding to obtain a permit if they are above a
certain age and pay a fee. Half of these states require some
training. We should encourage more states to pass such law, and
possibly even subsidize firearms training.

States that pass concealed handgun laws experience drops in violent
crimes, especially in multiple victim shootings–the type of attack
most associated with terrorism. Bill Landes and I found that deaths
and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell by 80% after
states passed right-to-carry laws.

Passing right-to-carry laws might even deter terrorist attacks. True,
some terrorists are suicidal, but they still want to cause maximum
carnage. They know the “return” on their terrorism would rapidly
diminish to the vanishing point if faced with gun-wielding “victims.”
Mr. Lott is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
and the author of “More Guns, Less Crime” (University of Chicago
Press, 2000).