About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

35 Soc. Probs. 1 (1988)
Crime Control through the Private Use of Armed Force

handle is hein.journals/socprob35 and id is 15 raw text is: Crime Control Through the Private Use of Armed Force* GARY KLECK, Florida State University Legal defensive violence by private citizens armed with firearms is a significant form of social control in the United States. Evidence indicates that private gun use against violent criminals and burglars is common and about as frequent as legal actions like arrests, is a more prompt negative consequence of crime than legal punish- ment and is often far more severe. In 1980 about 1,500-2,800 felons were legally killed by gun-wielding civil- ians, about 8,700-16, 000 were nonfatally wounded and guns were used defensively about one million times. Victim resistance with guns is associated with lower rates of both victim injury and crime completion for robber- ies and assaults than any other victim action, including nonresistance. Survey and quasi-experimental evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the private ownership and use of firearms deters criminal behavior. In his 1972 Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association, William Goode argued that because sociologists share a humanistic tradition that denies the importance of physical coercion, they have failed to accurately assess the degree to which social systems rest on force. While affirming his personal dislike for the use of force, Goode urged social analysts to put aside their kindly bias against the effectiveness of threats and punishment and recog- nize the degree to which force is a crucial element in the social structure, in democracies as well as tyrannies, in peacetime as well as in war. He stated that in any civil society . . . everyone is subject to force. All are engaged in it daily, not alone as victims but as perpetra- tors as well . . . We are all potentially dangerous to one another (Goode, 1972:510). This paper addresses the social control effects of private citizens' uses of guns in response to preda- tory criminal behavior, particularly violent crime and residential burglary. The prevalence and defensive use of guns in America are important topics for many research questions, yet they have been almost entirely ignored. For example, the routine activities approach to crime sees criminal incidents as the result of the convergence of likely offenders and suitable targets in the absence of capable guardians (Cohen and Felson, 1979:590). While this view has broadened criminologists' interests beyond the supply of likely offenders, it ignores the extent to which being armed with a deadly weapon would seem to be an important element of capable guardianship. Given that about half of U.S. households and a quarter of retail businesses keep firearms (Crocker, 1982; U.S. Small Business Administration, 1969), gun ownership must surely be considered a very routine aspect of American life and of obvious relevance to the activities of criminals. Victimology is concerned with, among other things, the response of victims to their vic- timization. Yet, despite evidence that people buy guns to defend against becoming victims of crimes (Kleck, 1984), victimology scholars have largely ignored victim gun ownership and use. Similarly, the recent wave of interest in private crime control has been largely limited to either the privatization of police and corrections services and the use of commercial security services by businesses and other large institutions (e.g., Cunningham and Taylor, 1985) or to nonforceful private crime control efforts like neighborhood watch activities (Greenberg et al., 1984). Finally, nearly all of the considerable literature on deterrence of criminal behavior focuses on the effect .of public criminal justice agencies. Conventional definitions of deter rence are often limited to the crime preventive effects of legal punishment, arrest and prosecu- * Correspondence to: School of Criminology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306. SOCIAL PROBLEMS, Vol. 35, No. 1, February 1988

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most