If there could be a “right” to be free of guns, the logical question is then how it should be asserted. The answer may be in zoning. Because gun rights are tied to personal security, there appears to be room for citizens to exclude guns in their immediate surroundings as one means of protecting themselves.
A “Right” to be Free of Guns
The debate that pits gun control advocates against gun rights advocates is marked by a particular feature: people who support gun rights can own guns, whereas people who support gun control cannot “own” not having a gun. This asymmetry is important because, especially in high-crime areas, a reduction in the proliferation of guns is arguably a public good. A resulting collective action problem may thereby contribute to the disparity between the majority support and weak action on the gun control side of American politics.
One way that Americans who desire stricter gun control could express their interests is through the legal right to restrict firearms in their immediate vicinity. While critics may fear a slippery slope that ends in the confiscation of firearms from law-abiding Americans, the intention of designating gun-free zones is to allow people who oppose gun ownership to concentrate into gun-free neighborhoods without threatening the rights of gun owners.
Why Assert a Right to be Free of Guns?
A significant number of geographically-concentrated Americans may be interested in formalizing their preference to live in an area that is free of guns. The political feasibility of establishing this right depends on the reasons Americans support and oppose gun control, which include moral/cultural reasons and practical reasons.
To many Americans, gun ownership is a moral issue. Roughly one-third of Americans own guns, one-third of Americans oppose owning guns, and one-third of Americans do not own guns but are not opposed to them. Urban areas experience higher rates of gun crime and lower rates of gun ownership compared to rural areas, suggesting that the people interested in gun-free neighborhoods may already be relatively concentrated in cities.
There is also a divide among Americans regarding the practicality of regulating guns. Some argue that the proliferation of guns reduces safety, while others argue that gun control laws only affect people who obey the law, disarming law-abiding citizens and not criminals. There is evidence, however, that legal gun owners are more likely to be burglarized because criminals seek guns, inadvertently arming criminals with even legally-purchased firearms. While it is impossible to prove whether gun ownership is the cause or effect of high-crime areas at the neighborhood level, the effects of America’s relationship with firearms become clearer at the macro scale. Compared to other developed countries, America is an outlier both in the number of guns per capita and the rate of gun homicides per capita, indicating that the availability of guns coincides with gun violence.
Based on evidence that national gun proliferation coincides with national gun violence and the tendency of gun control advocates to be concentrated in urban areas, it seems fair to suppose that certain Americans may prefer to live in neighborhoods that are free of guns. While they can choose not to be gun owners, they cannot currently choose to live in areas that are gun-free. If people accept the idea of a right to be free of guns, the subsequent logical question is then how it should be asserted.
How to Assert a Right to be Free of Guns?
Any venture into gun regulations must first consider the interests of gun owners. For many urban dwellers, the decision to possess a gun is a practical response to the surrounding environment. Furthermore, most gun owners feel safer with a gun, even though half cite non-protection reasons for possessing a firearm. However, the most important consideration in restricting the possession of guns is the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Based on this fundamental right, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that private citizens have the right to possess firearms. The basis of this ruling was what Justice Scalia found to be an established precedent for protecting gun ownership as a “natural right” to self-protection. Because gun rights were tied to personal security, there appears to be room for citizens to exclude guns in their immediate surroundings as one means of protecting themselves.
For example, zoning at the neighborhood or even block level could allow people to assert a right to be free from guns. Zoning is a policy tool that courts have upheld even when it clashes with the constitutional rights of individuals, such as freedom of expression and the sale of guns. Such regulations may be upheld under judicial review if they are narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest (such as crime reduction). In other words, gun-free zoning must be carefully constructed to balance the safety interests of citizens with the rights of gun owners.
To avoid imposing a burden on or restricting the rights of existing gun owners, gun-free neighborhood zoning should focus on the micro level, require as much neighborhood consensus as possible, not apply to people driving through the area, and not apply to patrolling or resident law enforcement officers. To further ensure gun owners are not inappropriately targeted, the process could also require a high local crime rate, allow for exceptions, or apply only to residents moving into the neighborhood, grandfathering current residents.
Policy Implications and Proposals
Gun-free neighborhoods offer a variety of interesting policy implications. Because urban residents are more likely own guns for protection than recreation, they may find their safety interests better served through the mutual disarmament of their surrounding area. By implementing gun-free zones through a consensus process at the level of neighborhoods or blocks, areas could disarm gradually as pockets of gun control advocates reduce other residents’ concern about the proliferation of guns in the community. Also, this policy may bring people to self-sort into neighborhoods that share their vision of safety. This could then allow social scientists to better observe the ongoing effects of gun-free versus gun ownership preferences on variables such as crime rates, property values, and relations with police. Some residents may object to the greater police powers created by these neighborhood-specific gun regulations. However, high-crime areas that choose self-protection over greater police involvement in gun-regulation may become pockets of criminal activity.
In order to enact gun-free neighborhood zoning, states would need to modify any laws that preempt localities from restricting gun ownership and then enact enabling legislation that would establish a process for instituting and enforcing gun-free neighborhood zoning laws. In order to institute a gun-free neighborhood, proponents would likely need to gather a certain percentage of resident signatures, allow for public discussion, and set the matter for a vote that requires some level of supermajority to pass. Ideally, enforcement of gun-free zoning laws should be generally light, such as civil forfeiture or forced sale of the firearm, but harsher on violent criminals who possess guns.
Though guns are a divisive issue in American politics, current policy options do not give people who oppose the proliferation of guns a right to not live near them. “Owning” the ability to have a neighborhood that is free of guns may allow people to self-sort geographically based on their views on gun control. Gun-free neighborhood zoning laws would be one method for establishing this privilege.
Photo by Matteo Artizzu via Flickr.
Nathan Witkin is a second-year MPP student who practiced law and served as a mediator for 10 years before enrolling at McCourt to study public policy innovation. His ideas published outside GPPR include the interspersed nation-state system, interest group mediation, dependent advocacy, a police-community partnership model for citizen review boards, a novel framework for sovereignty in a globalizing world, co-resolution, consensus arbitration, executive bargaining, a theory of impact bonds, and an alternative explanation of gravity.
Gun Free Zones are criminal magnets for killing people.
From the Daily Wire:
According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, “gun free zones” (areas where guns are prohibited) have been the target of more than 98% of all mass shootings. This staggering number is why such designated areas are often referred to as “soft targets,” meaning unprotected and vulnerable.
“According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, only a little more than 1% of mass public shootings since 1950 have occurred in places that were not considered to be a gun-free zone,” reports The Blaze. “In fact, as Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott Jr. noted in October 2015, only two mass shootings in the U.S. since 1950 have occurred in an area where citizens were not prohibited from carrying a gun.”
Thanks for the comment, Geoff. While mass public shootings are less than 1% of the firearm homicides and attributing mass shootings happening to gun free zones may be mixing up causation and correlation, I agree with the nature of your argument. You are arguing that some areas (from your perspective, where mass shootings have happened) should be able to have a choice about gun possession. I agree completely. Some areas in which zero “public mass shootings” have occurred are high-crime neighborhoods in which law-abiding citizens may want to increase police power by giving law enforcement officers the ability to confiscate any firearm in the area. These neighborhoods may prove to be safer or unsafer, but we will never know until we give people the ability to choose whether they will live nears guns.
Strange that I keep hearing “Only The Police/Government Should Have Guns!” from the same people from whom I keep hearing “The Police/Government Are Racist Authoritarians!”
You should think carefully about what rights – enumerated in the Constitution – you want the authorities to restrict by increasing the police power because you somehow feel you aren’t ‘safe enough’.
I can almost guarantee that more and more of your rights and liberties will wind up being arbitrarily restricted due to those in government deciding they aren’t safe enough, and by that time, it will be too late and you wind up with the totalitarian police state I hear all too many progressives and liberals purportedly rail against. One or the other is a lie in my estimation.
I get that blanket gun control regulations affect people who want to own guns, but this idea does not intend to take guns from people who want them. It is only suggesting that small pockets of people have the option of using a consensus process to exercise the right to not live near guns. If you lived in the area and wanted guns in the area, then you’d block it.
It sounds like you have classified this article as liberal or progressive, but it is making a more libertarian argument about free choice. Many people want firearms, live in areas where they are unlikely actually shoot another person, but feel a real sense of security from having them and should be able to keep them. However, there may be other areas where people possess firearms as real and imminent protection from other people around them–if these neighborhoods wish to mutually disarm as an alternative approach to safety, why should the government deny them this right?
Just ask the unarmed Jews in Germany in 1938.
More detailed information and a correction on the number of gun-free zones.
https://crimeresearch.org/2018/06/more-misleading-information-from-bloombergs-everytown-for-gun-safety-on-guns-analysis-of-recent-mass-shootings/
Infringements are infringements, no matter what the vehicle.
Why not zone for “no polling” locations, or maybe “no churches” ?
Guns are things. They are no better or worse than the person that uses them. Just like rocks, knives, jet airliners and fertilizer. All of which have been used by bad people to commit mass murder. Crime is an action not a thing. Punishing someone for possession of a weapon based on what he might do is fundamentally no different than punishing someone for being a Muslim based on what he might do.
Worth considering. Criminals (who wouldn’t respect the GFZ zoning laws) would decide whether to ply their trade in the GFZs or the 2AZs. Residents in one or the other would be killed-off or raped and robbed at a higher rate than the other. Residents in one zone type would flee to live in the other zone type. Land owners who subjected themselves to being zoned in one category or the other would loose the equity value in their property. Whichever zone proves to be the looser would be bull-dozed and planted with flowers. Then, peace would rein in the looser zone. Maybe this idea could resolve the gun control/gun rights debate.
Rather than implement via zoning laws, it could be implemented by restrictive covenants. I.e., the owner of a parcel of land could declare his lot to be a GFZ and the buyer of his lot would be obligated to maintain it as a GFZ, along with all subsequent buyers in perpetuity. Neighbors would have a legal cause of action against a land owner who did not adhere to his covenant.
Either we are committed to the Bill of Rights or we are not. It seems to me that zoning and deed restrictions were the preferred course decades ago to allow citizens to be “free” of living next to African-Americans. This proposal is as equally noxious as those old laws. Want to be free of gun violence: try investing in our inner cities to create hope and jobs.
Let’s see here…
“High crime” areas will be a determining factor in making “gun free zones.”
And consequently, all those criminals, thugs, and miscreants within those “high crime” areas who actually make them “high crime” areas will subsequently give up their guns for the good of the neighborhood.
And this, Dear Readers, is the “common sense” of those who want to determine how much freedom and liberty the American citizen gets to have.
The possible restriction of gun-free neighborhoods (GFNs) to high crime areas was only suggestion to address possible criticisms that GFNs would be designated in wealthy, low-crime areas to prevent gun owners from moving in. This suggestion would not need to be included.
Again, this idea is not about affecting people who believe in the right to own guns. This idea is aimed at people who live in areas where the main reason for owning a gun is protection from other people with guns and intends to give them the ability to mutually disarm. Not all or many of these area may choose to do this, but some might take this choice. So this is more choice and therefore more freedom for these neighborhoods without restricting your freedom. I would like you, or anyone else concerned with this proposal restricting their freedom, to explain why you feel your freedom threatened by something that is designed to increase the freedom of others without affecting your freedom.
Whether it is practical is a question for people who may want to use it. Whether it impinges on anyone else’s freedom is a question for everyone else.
Interesting- so just how would this be enforced and what right are we willing to give up, or escalation of government power are we willing to put in place?
First, how do you enforce it among residents? Zoning laws are civil laws, not criminal, and enforced by code enforcement agents via inspection. Are we now going to allow code enforcement agents the power to enter homes are search for guns? Are we going to set up a system where anyone accused of having a gun in violation of zoning must allow code agents a warrantless search?
How are you going to enforce this against non property owners? Such a prohibition in common areas like streets and sidewalks wouldn’t pass Constitutional scrutiny. What kind of enforcement would be allowed against a person visiting another person who lives there from carrying a gun?
It’s totally unenforceable. Unless you also want to give up significant rights of privacy and have a more intruypoloce state enforcing it.
So what you will do is pass this as a feel-good measure. The only people who will comply are the ones who are law abiding gun owners who are not a danger anyway. People already predisposed to misuse firearms won’t give a damm about a zoning law and there will be no way to make them.
So like most gun control it will be a lot of virtue signaling by non gun owners, only really cause the law abiding who don’t misuse guns to comply, and not affect crime one bit.
This experiment has already been tried, with predictable results. We need only compare Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., which all heavily restrict the right to possess the means of self defense, to their much lower crime rate surroundings, which do not. Or, Morton Grove, Illinois, the first town in the nation to enact a gun free zone, to Kennesaw, Georgia, which enacted a (non-enforceable) requirement to possess and carry arms. Morton Grove’s crime rate skyrocketed, Kennesaw’s dropped and is still one of the lowest in the nation. London has both a very high gun crime rate, and now a high knife crime rate.
I’ve heard it argued that these regions have high gun crime rates because of the weak restrictions in surrounding areas, the implication being that guns are smuggled in. Well, of course they are! Criminals are opportunistic predators. As such they aren’t looking for a fight, fair or otherwise. Just as lions will preferentially pursue small antelope over Cape buffalo, human predators look for the easiest prey, in order to obtain what they want or need with the least risk to themselves. Notice that criminals generally don’t commit their violent acts where guns are easy to get, but where they aren’t. “Gun free neighborhoods” will be nothing more than another business opportunity for the lawless.
It’s already been decided in D.C. v. Heller that the possession of a handgun in the home is a Constitutionally-protected right. This scheme would rely on state action to enforce what would be essentially a blanket ban on exercise of that right. Calling it a “zoning rule” versus a local ordinance is a meaningless distinction constitutionally, and I wouldn’t expect it to fare any better than a racially-restrictive covenant would (which could conceivably be empirically and statistically justified as a safety measure at least as validly as a “gun-free zone” could).
Additionally, zoning laws are restrictions on land use and development, and are justified by the principle that some uses of land invariably affect what uses can be made of neighboring parcels and the value of neighboring parcels (it would make no sense to build housing next to a toxic waste plant, for example). I’ve never heard of a zoning rule that tried to impose a blanket ban on possession of a category of personal property inside a private residence (not even a removable fixture to the real property, a category of pure movable personal property). I would expect, even before any constitutional questions were raised, an attempt to do so would probably fail to a challenge asserting such a rule would be effectively ultra vires and outside the scope of most if not all zoning ordinances.