Collegiate Times

Philip J. Cook, the ITT/Sanford Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, and co-author of "Gun Violence: The Real Costs," gave two talks Monday at Tech. The first, "The new Second Amendment -- evaluating gun control in the new regime," was an academic lecture for faculty and graduate students. The second, "The real costs of gun violence," was presented for a popular audience and focused on the emotional and social costs of guns in a community. Before his talks, Cook sat down with the Collegiate Times.

Q: What doesn't America understand about gun control today?

A: I think one thing is that people haven't understood the extent to which the regulation of guns helps law enforcement. The two alternative ways of taking on the problem of gun violence actually compliment each other. If you have a police investigation of a shooting, it's very helpful if you have a registration system for guns for tracking down the owner of the gun. If you have some kind of system of ballistics imaging in place you can help to match up different kinds of crime scenes. The registration system that is imposed on manufacturers, distributors, and dealers, all of that turns out to be an important part of police investigations and it could be more so.

California, for example, has just imposed a requirement on pistols that there be a microstamp on the hammer, on the firing plate, that is going to greatly facilitate ballistics investigation. It will also increase the price of a pistol by not much, maybe $15, and there's also going to be a need for more record keeping, but it's going to facilitate investigations and more murderers being brought to justice.

I get tired of hearing the argument that, "we have enough laws in place all we should do is enforce the existing laws." It misses an important piece of the picture: Police need gun regulation.

Q: You put a number on the amount of money that gun violence costs the United States every year -- $1 billion. This number has gotten kicked around a bit. Could you talk about where you could put gun control in terms of national priorities and would you stand by that number in the face of those who say it is inflated?

A: I think that the important thing about the study that we did was to try to change the nature of the conversation about the costs of gun violence which I thought had been going in the wrong direction and missing most of what was important about gun violence. There's one way of thinking about gun violence and that is thinking all about the victims, that its about their medical costs and about their lost earnings and about the disability and death, and of course that is important and gives you a particular image of the problem as being young males who often have criminal records and who are often minorities and that then can lead you to say, "Well this is an issue of social justice" or it can lead you in quite the opposite direction depending on your politics and your conscience.

But I think it really just misses what's really going on. But the most important effects of gun violence are that they become important issues to the community -- these are concerns about safety and whether people feel comfortable living in a particular place. Hearing gunshots every night and there's drive by shootings and they feel they have to bring their children in at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and they have to sleep in the bathroom so the stray bullets won't take them out ... if that happens, you're going to have a community that is never going to thrive. The people living there are going to be traumatized and the folks that can afford to live somewhere else will live somewhere else and relocate their business somewhere else. It becomes an issue of community development and economic development.

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