A gat-goofy nation

STANLEY WALKER

An inquiry into the reasons why the United States leads all the other nations in the total of its annual murders

■ The phrase-coiners of the underworld, the same imaginative boys who learned to say that a prizefighter was "slugnutty" instead of punchdrunk, have invented "gat-goofy" to describe a man who is gun-crazy—that is. a man who has a curious predilection for the use of firearms, who likes to have guns around the house, who likes to fondle them, and, when his anger is aroused, to use them for homicidal purposes.

The phrase is new, but the trait it describes is as old as the American frontier. The most eminent American killers have killed with the gun. They found this method easier, safer and more spectacular than the outworn poisonings and hatchetings of the Old World. And what is true of the great killers of American history is true also of the ordinary American, the peaceful householder and taxpayer, the Caspar Milquetoast who, when crossed, grabs his gat and kills his neighbor.

Public opinion always has been strangely lenient with the man who suddenly loses his head and shoots. Even the more boisterous killers frequently are forgiven because, upon examination, they turn out to be nothing more than great big carefree boys at heart. In his national characteristics the American undoubtedly is good-hearted, and enterprising, and he'll give you his shirt, but he's homicidal. Impugn that thing which he calls his honour and his trigger finger itches. He won't sue but he'll shoot.

The national weapon is the old equalizer, sometimes known as the rod. gat or roscoe. Does your true American, when bent on killing, use a cleaver, a club, a garrote or a deadly phial? Not if he can help it. In exactly sixty-six cases out of 100, the American uses the gun in his slayings. The axe and the knife, as any policeman can tell you, are not the favourite weapons of the old-line American.

■ Now, if statistics mean anything at all, we come to a puzzling figure: our more phlegmatic English-speaking cousins, in England and Wales, who have the same blood as the murderous Yankee, use the gun in only 7.9 per cent of their killings. Why the difference? The best experts agree that there are two explanations: one lies in the customs of the country which date back to border days, when disputes were settled either with the fists or with the gun, and the other lies in the silly, meaningless and haphazard regulations concerning the sale and regulation of firearms in the United States.

It was Thomas Jefferson, planter, aristocrat and demagogue, who first inflamed the American by telling him that all men were created equal. It was Smith & Wesson who made it true; many Americans also have what is known as a Colt or Mauser fixation. Armed with an equalizer, Major Mite, the midget, is fully as deadly as any other man similarly equipped, including Primo Carnera and Gus Sonnenberg.

Thus the American, by common consent. and with row on row of figures to back him, leads all other people in the commission of murder. The others are still in Cain's kindergarten. The American's ferocity is a puzzle alike to the hot-blooded Argentine and the dour man in Nova Scotia.

There are about 12.000 homicides a year in the United States. Dr. Frederick L. Hoffman. who keeps statistics on such matters for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, says that the rate has been fairly constant, with a slight upward tendency, in recent years. His study of thirty-one cities with a total population of 25,000,000 sets the rate at 10.8 killings for each 100.000 of population. The estimated rate for the entire country is slightly less, hut the difference is negligible. In 1900. when the rate was only half of what it is now. the situation was deplorable enough, and President McKinley used to worry about it.

Apologists for the high homicide rate occasionally have tried to explain it on two grounds: (ll that the immigrant, who fails to comprehend American ideals and who forms a sour leaven in the American bloodstream, is the principal killer, (2) that illiteracy, or lack of education, has something to do with it.

Neither explanation makes much sense. Granted that many professional killers, the trigger men for the mobs and the gangs, are immigrants or the sons of immigrants, the fact still remains that the New York homicide rate (New York is notoriously a foreign city I is only about 8 for each 100.000 population— less than the rate for the country as a whole.

The other explanation, that illiteracy has some connection with homicide, hardly holds water. In 1900 the United States spent 8214,964,618 on salaries for school teachers; in 1930 the figure had risen to 82.316,790,384, out of all proportion to the gain in population, and the homicide rate had doubled.

One of the nation's prize exhibits is Memphis, Tennessee. That city always leads all others in killings, though Jacksonville, Florida, is in there trying when the dead are counted. This leader in the Grim Reaper Sweepstakes has a homicide rate of 54.2 for each 100.000 population. The defenders of Memphis say that theirs is a nice town, and that the high rate is to he blamed on the large Negro population. The Negro is famous for being a staunch and even violent defender of the sanctity of the home, a tenet of Americanism which he absorbed very early. Moreover, a great many Negroes from the territory surrounding Memphis, when wounded by razors or baseball bats, are brought to phis hospitals to die. Does it explain anything to say that the Negroes are ignorant? The 1920 census showed an illiteracy rate of 15.6 per cent among Memphis Negroes; in 1930 the rate had been cut to 8.1 per cent. And yet the Negroes, though reading and writing better than ever, kept the gory banner of Memphis at the head of the procession.

New York City is a greater Negro town than Memphis. In Harlem, living in street upon street of old tenements, are the sons and grandsons of Negroes who once worked the Southern cotton patches or cut cane in the West Indies. They are smart people; indeed, the illiteracy rate among New York Negroes is only 2.1 per cent, while the rate for the whole city's population is 4.5 per cent. The New York Negro, for all his suffering and economic distress, ranks among the most literate groups.

The only conclusion to be drawn front the figures is that illiteracy has next to nothing to do with the homicide rate. We may he sure only of the fact that a great many Negroes kill each other. The last census showed that New York City had a population of 6,930,446, of which 327,706 were Negroes. The last annual report of the Police Department showed that in 1932 in New York City the victims of homicides were 364 whites, 109 Negroes and 5 Mongolians, which gives the Negro an astonishingly disproportionate ratio.

■ These figures, whatever they mean, cannot be interpreted to place all the blame for the high American homicide rate upon the Negro, though undoubtedly the congested Negro sections help to boost the rate. The American killings—playful, vengeful, impish, shocking and romantic-—can be explained sensibly only upon the grounds of a national, traditional liking for firearms, coupled with a natural frontier exuberance, and the lack of any effective means of keeping guns out of the hands of potential killers.

Shooting to kill is rooted in the American system. The country itself resembles a sort of outing, where people do things they wouldn't dream of doing at home. A person could make money in a large city by betting even money that the explosions he heard after midnight came from guns and not from the backfire of automobiles. The killer is more fascinating than the statesman. The best funerals are those of murdered gunmen. To die without one's boots on is to die prosaically and with little honour. Almost every week the American newspapers have a fresh, sensational killing with macabre overtones; in England the papers have to dish up the old Crippen case every now and then to remind their readers that there is still such a thing as murder.

The floating population of the United States always has had a habit of going off on strange and pointless adventures-—to hunt the buffalo, to dig gold at Virginia City, to get oil out of the ground, to garner a fortune in prunes in some irrigated valley, or to become robots in the motor factories of Detroit. If a man doesn't like one town he goes somewhere else; he doesn't wait for ivy to grow upon the walls of his house. This pulling oneself up by the roots is sometimes called the pioneer spirit. Perhaps it is. Certainly, front the days of the bloody high jinks at Dodge City and Tombstone, something of this reckless spirit has been the mark of the American.

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With this constant moving about has gone a preoccupation with firearms, a childish delight in hearing things go bang! bang! which has accounted for victims who lie buried in cemeteries front Brooklyn to San Francisco.

Most of the great gun-fighters loved shooting for shooting's sake. Billy the Kid, the New Mexico outlaw, born in New York as William Bonney, was supposed to have killed twenty-one men, most of them out of pique, or in the furtherance of some policy which seemed advisable at the moment. Without his gun he would have been impotent, and what is more to the point, without glamour. Other gunfighters, including such great technical experts as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp, depended upon the gun to gain ascendancy over other men. And they loved it, becoming, in their way, national heroes.

Few of the old-timers, however, were as definitely gun-crazy as the late Frank McErlane of Chicago, the gangster who was killed early in 1933. Policemen and friends alike agreed that McErlane had a fondness for guns amounting almost to insanity. Once, while lying badly wounded on a hospital bed, he had nerve enough to pull a pistol out from under his pillow and repel three enemies who had sneaked in seeking his life. Later, when the spell would come on hint, he had a habit of taking his artillery out into the street and banging away at enemies, some of whom were imaginary. Finally he was shot down as more or less a common nuisance.

From frontier days on, many Western and Southern sheriffs, town marshals and other peace officers, have set an example to other citizens by being incredibly reckless with firearms. They have been known to shoot strangers, Mexicans and Negroes in what seemed to them a sort of sporting spirit. Whether these men, who often are recruited from the ranks of the town loafers, are loose on the trigger because of their liking for exhibitionism, or whether they shoot people to satisfy some obscure inner artistic necessity, Heaven only knows.

The truth appears to be that the American holds human life more cheaply than do the people of other lands, and that public opinion rarely is bitter toward the killer. We have the fact, agreed upon not only by thoughtful police officials but by every one else who has studied the matter, that a man without a gun is less dangerous than a man with a gun. It would seem, then, that a perfectly sound scheme for cutting down homicides would be to disarm the population, leaving the guns to the military and police forces. This suggestion has been made many times, but instantly it is observed that it runsStcounter to the hallowed right of the American citizen to possess arms. Heads of the police departments of the larger cities, frantic over the mounting number of killings and realizing the impossibility of keeping guns out of the hands of slayers, have appealed time and again for the Federal regulation of the sale and possession of guns. It never has done any good. The gun-lobby is against such regulation. The gangster is against it. The taxpayer who would have to foot the bill for enforcement is suspicious of it.

The ordinary citizen, who for some reason appears to believe that he was born with the right to have a gun if he wants it, often regards such a suggestion as one more attack upon his liberty. Therefore, with virtually his whole constituency, except a few police officials and reformers, opposed to the idea, or at least dubious of its wisdom, the Congressman keeps putting off action.

Congress won't even deal with the machine gun problem. It would require considerable imagination to explain how a machine gun has any legitimate place outside of the armed forces of the government, and yet there is no Federal regulation concerning its manufacture and sale. Indeed, few of the States have even tackled the problem. The records of the New York police show that in one year seventy-seven machine guns were sold by a dealer in that city. In the months that followed these guns began to turn up in every part of the country, always in the investigation of some murder or massacre by gangsters.

■ New York, with its Sullivan law which requires a permit to carry or possess a pistol or revolver, has what is in many respects one of the strictest regulations of firearms, with heavy penalties for its violation. The law undoubtedly prevents many killings, but its actual workings are sometimes farcical. For example, there is in New York a gangster who has been suspected of all manner of crimes. He is not the sort of man to whom the New York City police would grant a permit. This man established a legal residence in one of the upstate counties and got a pistol permit front one of the local judges with whom he was on friendly terms. Now this man, regarded by the police as extremely dangerous, is within his legal rights when he carries a gun on the streets of New York City. All the police can do is kick hint around a bit. The late Jack ("Legs") Diamond, who was known as a killer, got his pistol permit in similar fashion.

But even without resorting to such dodges to remain within the law, it is still possible to get a gun in New York City. There are gun-brokers who will rent guns to killers for a certain fee. The killer does his work and, not wanting to run the risk of being found with a gun on him, returns the weapon to the broker. Hotel rooms, offices, loft buildings and all manner of places have been found which were used as caches for gangsters' guns. Moreover, the New York gangster, bent on homicide, can go to New Jersey or some other state where the regulations are not so stringent and return with a gun in a few hours.

New Yorkers, for the most part, are used to the Sullivan law and regard it as about the most sensible legislation that can be had in the circumstances. However, a part of the population resents it in the familiar plaint: "The Sullivan law disarms the honest citizen and the killer will get his gun anyhow." Only the last part of this statement is true, and it isn't always true. The honest citizen can get his permit if he will stand for investigation, which many persons resent. Sportsmen, in particular, are bitter over the provisions of the Sullivan law, and seek each year at the Legislature to have it softened. Their chief complaint has been against the provision requiring the fingerprinting of applicants, which for some reason or another they regard as an insult.

In many states the law forbids only the carrying of concealed weapons, and it is legal for a man to have a gun in the house, in his automobile, strapped to his leg in a holster, or peeking out of his saddlebag. It is always amusing to see the anger of the citizen of one of these states who moves to New York and learns that under the Sullivan law he can't even have a gun in his house without a permit from the police. Members of old Southern families are particularly choleric when informed of this asinine Yankee law.

■ The uniform regulation of firearms, preferably by the Federal government, would seem to be the most direct and effective method of cutting down the homicide rate.

This is not to say that such regulation will make every motley community in the United States as peaceful as an English village; the only contention is that it would improve matters. No matter what happens, the homicidal American may be counted on to hold up his record for a long time. The rate must be high as long as irresponsible floaters find themselves broke and desperate in a strange city; as long as alcohol can be translated into gold; as long as some people think it cute that the Walsh girl wrote, just before the police broke in to get Two-Gun Crowley, the New York cop-killer, that he was a gentleman because he washed her underwear that morning; as long as Negroes, Italians or any other group are herded together under conditions, economic and social, which are impossible; as long as it is regarded as proper for a gunman to tell a householder who has done him a favor, "Thanks. Any time you want anybody bumped off, let me know"; as long as policemen are too craven to go after the really bad men. relying instead on the treachery of the underworld to get the victim, and as long as young halfwit? are fed with the idea that there is something heroic and wonderful about homicide.

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It will be time, after disarmament, to make serious studies of the effect upon the crime rate of overcrowding in the slums, too much freedom in the open spaces, lax police and prosecutors, bad diet, infected teeth, crime pictures, faulty glandular balances and what not, even to carrying out an accurate study of the racial origins of criminals. Take away the weapons first and then we can, at long leisure, ponder the reasons why Zangara shot at President Roosevelt, why Winnie Ruth Judd killed her two girl friends, why Mr. Ippolito killed Mr. Mintz. a stranger, in a New York subway (Ippolito said he simply didn't like Mintz's face), and what obscure impulse caused the late Samoots Amatuna to shoot the laundryman's horse when the laundryman brought Amatuna's shirts hack with the mark of an iron on one of them.

The country is getting to be grown-up now. Maybe it's time to put away the cannon.