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records of 16,000 violent assaults in Chicago to see whether the attacker’s choice of knife or gun influenced the outcome. He found, first, that in seven of ten cases where the victim died, the attacker inflicted only one wound. That is, the attacker did not repeatedly stab or shoot the victim to make sure he was dead. The major difference among these attacks was that “an assault with a gun was five times more likely to result in a fatality than an assault with a knife.” Zimring described the heightened danger posed by the attacker’s choice of a gun as an “instrumentality effect” attributable to the inherent lethal character of guns.
    In one of the most compelling studies of the impact of firearm proliferation, Dr. Arthur Kellermann, an emergency-medicine physician at Emory University, and associates from the Universities of Washington and British Columbia studied the rates of homicide and assault in Seattle and Vancouver from 1980 through 1986. The cities are close to each other. They have similar economies and similar geophysical locations. Their populations have a similar demographic profile. Presumably they watch the same movies and many of the same TV shows. During the study period, they also had similar assault rates. They differed markedly, however, in the degree to which they regulated access to firearms. Vancouver allowed gun sales only to people who could demonstrate a legitimate reason for having a firearm. Seattle had few regulations. The researchers found that attackers in Seattle were almost eight times more likely to use a handgun than those in Vancouver. Seattle’s homicide rate, moreover, was five times higher, with handgun-related killings accounting for most of the difference.
    The proliferation of guns continues, however. In the 1980s gunmanufacturers feared they might have sold so many guns to American consumers that they had sated the market. Indeed, slack demand helped cause the failure of Charter Arms and drove Colt’s Manufacturing into bankruptcy. Gunmakers, cheered on by the National Rifle Association, sought to improve their prospects by pitching guns—handguns in particular—as the only sure way to protect ourselves against crime. The Los Angeles riots of 1992 proved a godsend. Millions of TV viewers watched a white truck driver beaten senseless by black marauders. They saw Korean businessmen, the new heroes of American enterprise, brandishing guns to guard their inner-city businesses in scenes that evoked our most favorite Wild West myths: a good man standing alone, gun drawn and squinting into the setting sun, waiting for nightfall and the next attack of the barbaric hordes, be they Indians, cattle rustlers, train robbers, or, in this modern transmogrification, black gang-bangers in the ghetto. The most striking images and the most beneficial to the gun marketers were those scenes played over and over again of a group of L.A.’s Finest retreating posthaste to their police cars and leaving the good settlers of Indian country to their own devices.
    The NRA was quick to extract the obvious message of the riots: you better get a gun because no one else is going to protect you. A 1992 recruitment ad for the NRA featured blocks of text against photographs of looting, burning, and destruction. “ WHAT WILL IT TAKE ?” the ad asked. “Must your glass be shattered? Must your flesh and blood be maimed? Must your livelihood be looted? Must all you’ve built be torn down? Must your once-proud nation surrender to more gun-control experimentation while its citizens tremble behind deadbolts and barred windows? … What will it take before you stand up with the one group that will stand for no more? … We warned gun laws would fail, and they have. We said gun control is wrong, and L.A . PROVES IT .”
    The newest targets for this sales pitch are women, considered especially receptive, the argument goes, because so many now are single heads of households and increasingly hold important