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[GUNSHOTS] SPEAKER: The United States is home to an immense private arsenal. No one knows exactly how many guns there are in circulation, but experts put the number at close to 200 million weapons. That means enough guns for virtually every American.

According to the government, each year, in this country, more than 30,000 people die at the muzzle of a gun. Many thousands more are injured. But are the guns at fault or is it the people? This program, narrated by Stephen Smith, examines what it means to be armed in America. Our story begins at police headquarters in Saint Paul.

SPEAKER: I want make a guess and say [INAUDIBLE] I'm going to till it gets busy before I take it home.

SPEAKER: It's downstairs. It's a duplex. So make sure we're going downstairs. And as far as the physical layout--

SPEAKER: You guys have anything on the interior?

SPEAKER: Our snitch never got inside past the door. So approach is totally up to you guys.

SPEAKER: We thought that the best way would be go Selby to Milton, South on Milton, and then make the alley pull in maybe [INAUDIBLE].

SPEAKER: We'll be pulling over and stopping. That's probably going to give me just the right amount of time to get them around and [INAUDIBLE]. One block, guys.

SPEAKER: One block.

SPEAKER: Chatsworth.

SPEAKER : Brace for stop.

STEPHEN SMITH: A dozen Saint Paul Police officers, dressed in camouflage and armed like commandos, prepare to raid a suspected crack house. Members of a heavily armed street gang are believed to be inside.

[LOUD BANGING]

SPEAKER: Police. Get down. Search warrant. Get down. Search warrant. Don't move. Don't move.

SPEAKER: You got this?

SPEAKER: I got this. Keep your hands up where I can see them. Let me see your hands. Let me see your hands.

STEPHEN SMITH: It turns out the police did all the shooting in this raid. They detonated a special noise and light producing grenade called a flashbang in the back yard and lobbed another through the living room window to stun the people inside.

They tore open the locked doors with sledgehammers and a 12-gauge shotgun.

SPEAKER: You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand that?

SPEAKER: Yes, sir.

SPEAKER: Anything you say may be used against you. Do you understand that, Fred?

SPEAKER: Yes, sir.

SPEAKER: OK--

STEPHEN SMITH: Four adults are inside this apartment, and all the signs of heavy drug use are apparent. For one thing, it's a squalid place, garbage wedged between the refrigerator and the wall, a year's worth of spilled food baked to a gritty brown enamel on the stove.

In the next room a 15-year-old girl trembles on a mattress surrounded by an electronic toy and paraphernalia for smoking crack. She keeps her arms in the air, terrified and confused. The child is retarded.

[GROANING]

SPEAKER: It's OK. Is this yours? How do you play it?

STEPHEN SMITH: The only suspect charged is the girl's mother for possession of cocaine, a narcotics investigator explains.

SPEAKER: I think all we came up with was a couple small rocks, probably $5, $10 rocks, some paraphernalia with residue in it, and signs that they've been doing more dealing here but no actual quantities of drugs.

STEPHEN SMITH: Turned out to be pretty small time.

SPEAKER: Most of them are.

STEPHEN SMITH: Well, now the information, the preliminary information, indicated there might be some gang activity and there might be weapons involved.

SPEAKER: Well, the gangs move in and out of these places at will, and that's the way they try to avoid detection. They take up with a user. They give them a rock or two to let them use their place. And so it's not uncommon for us to get in the place and find that they're taken up in another user's house that night.

SPEAKER: What do you want? Are you going to keep--

STEPHEN SMITH: Some two dozen Saint Paul cops spent the evening on this raid, estimated cost to the taxpayer, $1,200. Considering the results, it looked like an absurd use of power, blasting into such a pathetic scene. All out of proportion, like using a forklift to pry loose a nail.

But the police expected guns, as they do in more and more situations like this. The threat of gunfire made what could have been a routine bust read like a commando magazine. If there weren't powerful arsenals on both sides of the battle, the war on drugs wouldn't be a war.

Across the Mississippi in Minneapolis, people who live in the toughest inner city neighborhoods report that guns are becoming an increasingly common item of urban apparel. A man we'll call Joe belongs to a Minneapolis street gang. We've altered Joe's voice at his request to conceal his identity. In our interview, Joe pulls up his sweatshirt to reveal a scarred thin body.

JOE: He took a 9-millimeter slug out of the front of me. I got a 32 slug in the side of me, and I got a 22 slug that runs through the back of me. I'm still carrying some around, you bet.

STEPHEN SMITH: Joe is 40 years old. He says his responsibilities in the gang include distribution of drugs, collection of monies, and enforcement of the gang system. Joe says he uses a 357 Magnum pistol in his work. He carries the weapon the way some business people carry a calculator.

JOE: For one thing, it keeps me alive. I'm a soldier of a war that's lasted in my life for the last 25 years. I've been shot a few times. I've had people attempted to assassinate me a few times. It's protection for me, and then also, it's a weapon that I know if I pop somebody with it, they're not going to get up.

When you talk about 357 or 44 Magnums, you're talking about guns of destruction, guns that can go through an engine block.

STEPHEN SMITH: Research suggests that the victims of gun violence are most often Black. Homicide is the leading cause of death for young Black men. Joe says he's sometimes amazed he lived to be 40 years old. And he warns that inner city Minneapolis will grow even more dangerous for men like him, as the burgeoning gangs battle each other for their share of the drug market.

JOE: In the next five years, Chicago won't have nothing on Minneapolis as far as shootings in the street, bodies in the alleys. It's going to be a thing for control. Right now, everybody's freelancing, but in the next five years, you can believe it won't be like that because the city is getting too big, and it's getting wide open and the name of Minneapolis is spreading all across the country.

[GUNSHOTS]

STEPHEN SMITH: There are criminals like Joe all over the world, of course, and many of them also carry guns. But one historian has said the United States is the only industrialized country to remain so permissive about guns in its culture. Even in neighboring Canada, where the people seem so much like us, they have a completely different attitude about guns.

Doctors in Seattle, Washington and nearby Vancouver, British Columbia recently compared the gun problems in their communities, although making such a comparison is fraught with complications. The doctors found that people in Seattle are far more likely to get shot to death than their Canadian neighbors.

The Central District is one of Seattle's toughest inner city neighborhoods. Children playing on the streets are forced to navigate around drug dealers as they and their families try to make a normal life in an increasingly violent community. Former Seattle policeman Chuck Pillen says that like many American cities, there is growing gang activity in Seattle, and the gang members are too willing to use their guns.

CHUCK: I was 23 years in the quote, "ghettos" of the city of Seattle, and I never had blood on my hands. Now, we've got 10 and 12-year-old kids on our streets with occasionally, their hands on fully automatic weapons, certainly assault weapons, that have no sense of restraint.

They have learned. They have been conditioned to think you've got a gun, you shoot it. Bang, bang, bang.

STEPHEN SMITH: Some people in the Central District are getting guns to protect themselves. A song titled Hip Hop Soldier by a Seattle rap musician was a recent local hit. It offers this advice, stay away from drugs and crime, but buy yourself a gun.

[SIR MIX-A-LOT, "HIP HOP SOLDIER"]

(RAPPING) Now, let's get one thing straight

My weapons are great

You 22 automatic suckers are late

Got a quarter moon clip and a Smith and Wesson

I'm about to give you roody-poos puts a cold gun lesson

I'm the Wizard of mayhem, master of destruction

Got a 44 mag with a blunt instruction

Page one says open

Page two says feel

Page three says cop

Page four says kill

A mini 14, full combat dress

A 30 round clip, and I ain't taking no mess

Cause I'm a rough aggressor, a camouflage dresser

My M-16 has a flash suppressor

STEPHEN SMITH: The musician, known as Sir Mix-a-Lot, says law abiding Black people in the Central District, or CD, must protect themselves against criminals because the police won't do it for them.

MIX-A-LOT: In ghettos all across the USA, not just in the CD and Seattle, which is where I grew up, there's a big problem. If your house is getting robbed and you call the police, they may get there an hour later. If there's no way to defend yourselves, then the criminals just win.

And it's something I feel pretty strongly about. We've been robbed a few times. And since we've had guns in the house, we haven't been robbed.

STEPHEN SMITH: Not everyone in Seattle's Central District, though, is willing to live an armed life. Vonda Rabb says she and many of her neighbors are frightened, especially for their property, because drug abusers often commit theft or burglary to pay for the next pipe full of crack. But Rabb says most people she knows still don't want a gun for protection.

SPEAKER: It's not enough to make a person want to go get a gun. They must feel their lives is in danger or that of their loved ones. For my neighbors and all, they don't want to possess this weapon that may cause additional problems in their lives.

SPEAKER: This is our Remington 870 combo. It's got a rifle sight for shooting slugs, OK? You got big--

STEPHEN SMITH: To buy a handgun in Washington State, the customer must wait five days and pass a background check. Children and many convicted felons are precluded from owning a handgun. One of the busiest gun shops in Seattle is a place called Butcher's Guns.

Store manager Butch Hulett junior says a growing number of his customers want guns for protection. But he says most people buy guns because they enjoy sport shooting.

BUTCH: If you've done any shooting at all, you understand what it feels like to stand there and pop off five, six rounds at your target and just go pop, pop, pop, pop. That was nice and relaxing, and it is. I don't look at it any different than me going playing racquetball as to go down to the gun club and go shooting.

[GUNSHOTS]

STEPHEN SMITH: A three-hour drive North of Seattle in Vancouver, British Columbia, the members of this gun club also enjoy shooting for recreation. But in Canada, gun laws are far more restrictive, especially for handguns. Canadians must first get permission to buy a handgun, which is fairly rare, and then get a permit to transport their guns from home to the shooting range.

Unlike many gun enthusiasts in the United States, Bert Wilson says few of his fellow club members in Vancouver mind the government restrictions. Wilson believes limiting the way people may carry their guns limits the potential for violence.

BERT WILSON: I think that you're asking for trouble when you allow people to carry guns anywhere, any time, any place because we all know there's times when there's too much drinking, there are arguments, and there's confrontations, that these guns can be used in carrying out their emotions.

STEPHEN SMITH: If Bert Wilson wanted to buy a gun without a permit, this is probably the easiest place to find one. The intersection of Cordo and main, this part of East Vancouver is known as one of the roughest urban neighborhoods in all of Canada. It is the hub of Vancouver's drug dealing and prostitution.

Gun violence would be a frightening routine in a similar US neighborhood, but people in East Vancouver say there are very few guns on the street. A police Sergeant, aptly named Bob Law, says Canadian criminals don't much like guns.

BOB LAW: It's tacky. It's improper. You don't need a handgun. Even if you're a crook, at some point in time, you were brainwashed as a kid in this country. Half the criminal element around them don't want anything to do with it.

I'll pedal my drugs. I'll run my girl on the street. I'll do the burglary. But I don't want that gun. I don't want the gun.

STEPHEN SMITH: Vancouver doesn't have the same kind of gang-oriented drug culture as Seattle, but some inner city residents are seeing signs that gang influences are beginning to seep across the border, including guns. Criminologist Neil Boyd of Vancouver's Simon Fraser University says even so, the problem will never reach the proportions it has in the United States. Boyd says there are crucial differences between US and Canadian society that go back to the White settlers.

NEIL: Canada has been founded on a deference to authority, which has its own costs. And I think the American tradition is one of violence. That was what accompanied the birth of America and has been an important part of American culture. We are simply a more civilized country than you are.

STEPHEN SMITH: Without remarking much on cultural differences, the study comparing Seattle and Vancouver found that a resident of Seattle was seven times more likely to be assaulted by someone with a gun than a resident of Vancouver and five times more likely to be murdered with a handgun. The study was published in 1988 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

One of the authors, James Ferris of the University of British Columbia, says from a strict public health standpoint, Seattle needs tougher handgun restrictions.

JAMES: Firearms are inherently the most dangerous weapon available to a criminal. And if you were to abolish the availability of firearms, criminals would still use weapons. But it's much easier medically to treat someone with a stab wound than it is to treat someone with a firearm injury. And I think that's the bottom line.

STEPHEN SMITH: The study and its conclusions were sharply attacked in the United States by the National Rifle Association and other gun control opponents. Criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University, a leading researcher on the gun issue, also disputed the findings.

GARY KLECK: The research was worthless. There isn't a legitimate gun control expert in the country who regarded it as legitimate research. There were only two cities studied, one Canadian, one US. There's literally thousands of differences across cities that could account for violence rates, and these authors just arbitrarily seized on gun levels and gun control levels as being what caused the difference. And it's the sort of research that never should have seen the light of day.

STEPHEN SMITH: Gun control advocates often argue that handguns are designed solely for killing. They say reducing the number of handguns in society will help reduce gun violence. Kleck says, though, his research indicates that few existing gun control laws make any dent in crime or violence.

He studied current laws around the country from citywide handgun bans to tougher penalties for using a gun while committing a crime. Kleck says the only control law that appears to work is a mandatory penalty for illegal carrying of weapons. His research found that kind of law reduces robbery.

GARY KLECK: It indicates that what we're currently doing isn't working. It could lead to either of two opposite conclusions about where we ought to go in the future. We either ought to crank up our enforcement efforts on the current one, maybe that would do some good. Or alternatively, we ought to try something different.

It may be that federal regulations are required, rather than state or local ones. It may be that more stringent regulations are called for. But the current results really don't provide much encouragement for that view.

STEPHEN SMITH: The issue at the center of the handgun debate is whether or not the protection offered by keeping such a deadly weapon around outweighs the risks. Researchers probing the question are at odds.

FRANKLIN ZIMRING: The fact that you're as likely to be killed by a member of your family as you are by a street robber is not something that we either understand or want to appreciate.

STEPHEN SMITH: Franklin Zimring is a national authority on the gun issue. He teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley.

FRANKLIN ZIMRING: We don't want to appreciate it because a lot of us are willing to assume that risk. We think that's really true of other people's families, not our own. We do fear stranger crime, and statistically, there's something to that because the odds are much greater that you and I are going to get robbed by a stranger with a gun than that anybody, whether we know them or we don't know them, is going to shoot us. So that the premiere fear event that is statistically likely is a street robbery by a gun wielding stranger.

STEPHEN SMITH: Whatever the fear event turns out to be, you might guess that the presence of a gun makes any incident inherently more dangerous. Criminologist Gary Kleck believes the opposite. He says the very existence of some 200 million guns in the US actually keeps violence in check.

GARY KLECK: Even if Bob has a gun, and he's going to attack Jack, or if he's getting in an argument with Jack, it's less likely Bob with a gun will attack than if he didn't have a gun. It's like the stakes get too high. It raises the stakes.

Or alternatively, having a gun allows aggressors to get what they want, whether it be to humiliate or frighten their victims without actually attacking them. Or in connection with robbery, it makes it possible for a robber to get the victim's money without physically attacking them.

STEPHEN SMITH: Many professional researchers, regardless of where they stand on gun control, say that independent, scientific information about guns and their effect on society is still incomplete. Most opponents and supporters of gun control appear to base their dogma on pieces of the puzzle, not the full picture.

[GUNSHOTS]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

STEPHEN SMITH: Millions of Americans keep and bear arms for reasons that have little to do with fighting off criminals. Here, at the bar in tiny Nye, Montana, many of the pickups in the parking lot sport a hunting rifle. Game is abundant in the surrounding mountains.

Noel Keogh and many of the other ranchers in this valley say pistols, rifles, and shotguns are like a horse and a pickup, essential tools for ranch work.

NOEL: You're shooting Coyotes off of-- keeping them away from your cows and calves. Well, you get a deer or two to eat every year, whatever the limit allows just basically because it's a good supplement to your beef and it's a good change to have, eat wild game.

I shoot a lot of beef cows, young cows, and we butcher them out and eat them. So it's a necessity. I don't really enjoy shooting. I'm not out target practicing and shooting into the hills all the time. I only shoot when I want to hit something.

STEPHEN SMITH: A cook from a nearby dude ranch introduces herself simply as Arlene. She says she needs a gun, too.

ARLENE: I have a pistol that I use to protect myself from rattlesnakes, Coyotes. I own a handgun for protection from predators, animals.

STEPHEN SMITH: If you decide to bring up the issue of gun control in a place like the bar at Nye, Montana, be prepared to pay for the drinks and to weather a little hostility. A Burly mineworker named Joe Cox leans across the table with an intense expression and bluntly states his views, which are shared in some manner by millions of Americans.

SPEAKER: I have the god-given right to live and support myself. I don't lean on nobody. I take care of myself. I don't live on welfare. I don't ask nobody for nothing. I was born in America.

And this country was established by people just like me. We ran from people that were trying to control us, and we went somewhere else. We found our own place right here in America, and we established it, and we had to establish it with guns.

If I feel that I need a handgun or 50 handguns, which I wouldn't have 50 handguns, maybe one or two, but it's nobody's business what I have in my home because I've paid for it. I've earned it. I've earned the right to have it.

STEPHEN SMITH: Many scholars say the constitution doesn't guarantee the right to keep and bear absolutely all firearms. For example, the Thompson submachine gun or Tommy gun has effectively been banned by federal law since gangster days. Joe Cox says that's not right.

SPEAKER: I'd love to have a Thompson 45 automatic submachine gun. I'd love to have one. It shouldn't be illegal. If I've got the money, if I know how to use it, I should have the right to have it. I deserve that If I want it and if I can afford it.

STEPHEN SMITH: It's possible that Joe Cox and his neighbors would feel differently if gun violence was more of a problem in Nye, Montana. In some ways, the inner cities have replaced the cowboy West as the scene of lawless gun fighting.

But even in Nye, just the weekend before, a distraught young man grabbed a gun from his car, ran inside, and shot up the saloon. No one was hurt. And afterward, no one appeared to the idea of gun control any better, either.

DAVE: You're going to shoot 22 rifles in there. You're going to shoot 22 pistols in there. Now, the rifles are single-shot bolt action, but pistols are going to be semi-automatics.

We're going to teach you how to shoot them. On the other side of that, there's three benches like these. We're going to use those for the larger bore handguns. You're going to get to shoot 38's, 357's, 44 specials, and a big dirty hairy 44 Magnum.

STEPHEN SMITH: Some gun enthusiasts believe the best way to prevent a government crackdown on guns is to teach people how to use them safely and to get more Americans interested in shooting sports. That's what half a dozen state-approved instructors are doing at a firing range South of the Twin Cities.

DAVE: OK, my name is Dave Arnold, and I'm the senior instructor here, and we're a firearm safety group. We're having a ladies day here at the range. It's a firearms familiarization for ladies who want to learn how to shoot or learn to shoot a little bit better.

STEPHEN SMITH: Along the edge of a reedy marsh, some of the students take turns blasting at clay pigeons snapped into the sky by a catapult.

DAVE: There you go.

SPEAKER: I did it. Second time, boy.

STEPHEN SMITH: Some of the women are scared of the guns they're learning to use and surprised at how exciting it is to shoot. Each of them has a different reason for taking the course.

Marian Garrison Marlow of Chaska, Minnesota says she wants to learn how to use the guns her husband keeps around the house, but not for self-defense.

SPEAKER: I would never be able to go hunting, and I really doubt that I could ever shoot anybody under any circumstances. But it's more for the skill of target practicing and learning how to use them.

STEPHEN SMITH: Diane Stockhausen of Saint Paul says when she moved North recently from Missouri, she brought her father's pistol along in a paper bag, and she does want to know how to use it for self-defense.

DIANE: I contemplated owning a gun, and I realized that although I hope I would never have to use it, if I needed it for protection, it would be something that it would be a valuable tool.

STEPHEN SMITH: Some experts suggest that women ultimately hold the deciding votes on gun control. Berkeley Professor Franklin Zimring says surveys show that the majority of households with guns are headed by men. Zimring says a compelling reason men give for keeping guns in the house is so the woman will have protection while the man is away. But will the growing number of women on their own choose to keep a gun?

FRANKLIN ZIMRING: If lots and lots of admirable women living in female-headed households decide that they want and need and are going to have handguns in dresser drawers, then it seems to me any prospects politically for having national handgun policies based on scarcity are just a gone goose.

STEPHEN SMITH: The advocacy groups for and against gun control are so entrenched in their opposing views that some independent observers say the issue has become merely a shouting match, sound and fury illuminating nothing. Florida State University professor Gary Kleck.

GARY KLECK: We have an extreme loony view on the right and an extreme loony view on the left, and there's very little truth to be heard. Indeed, both sides, you can't even balance them out and get the truth and sort of exhume it somewhere in the middle because both sides will frequently avoid certain issues altogether.

STEPHEN SMITH: Kleck and others predict that if there is any movement toward tighter gun controls in this country, it will occur in America's largest cities. Tougher registration systems and required waiting periods are considered possibilities.

A criminologist at the University of Maryland, Colin Loftin, says that using urban violence as evidence of the need for limiting guns actually leads to the opposite.

COLIN LOFTIN: We did a survey in Detroit. We found the very best predictor of whether someone owned a handgun was not just fear of crime, but whether they thought that the police could provide protection for them. The usual argument for gun control is that we have a serious crime problem. We need to do something about it because of all of the serious crime usually drives people to want to hold on to their gun rather than want to pass some sort of law that will restrict availability of guns.

STEPHEN SMITH: Observers predict that gun measures proposed on the state and federal levels will be tough to achieve. In many state capitals and in Congress, the gun lobby has tremendous cloud. In about 2/3 of the states, including Washington, Montana, and Minnesota, gun groups have successfully pushed for laws preventing local communities from adopting tougher gun controls than the state.

Saint Paul Police Chief Bill McCutcheon was once a prominent State Senator and the author of gun control legislation. McCutcheon is pessimistic about how the gun control debate will end.

BILL MCCUTCHEON: It'll end, I think, with more people in the morgue, more family destruction, more tears, more of all those things that fly against what we think is so great about America. And what would the legislative bodies do about it? Wring their hands in anguish and nothing.

STEPHEN SMITH: The Minneapolis gang member we met earlier, Joe, believes this country would be more concerned about controlling guns and gun violence if more victims had white faces. Then he believes fewer people would be armed in America.

JOE: You're talking about people that really, really aren't concerned if a Black man kills another Black man or a Chicano kills another Chicano or an Indian kills another Indian. Hey, as long as guns was to stay in the ghettos and people shoot one another, I think that there would be some concern, don't get me wrong, but I don't think the concern would be if you was out there and he died in Litchfield shooting one another.

I think that the cry to do somebody would be 100 times more full and greater than the cry if it was in the inner city areas, and that's just the way it is.

[GUNSHOTS]

[SIR MIX-A-LOT, "HIP HOP SOLDIER"]

(RAPPING) Be a hip hop soldier

SPEAKER: Armed in America was written, produced, and narrated by Stephen Smith with reporting by Dan Olson and Chris Tetlin. Barbara Narramore provided research assistants. The technical director was John Schur.

[SIR MIX-A-LOT, "HIP HOP SOLDIER"]

(RAPPING) I'm a hip hop soldier

SPEAKER: This program was made possible by a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation. Armed in America is a production of Minnesota Public Radio.

(RAPPING) I'm a hip hop soldier

I'm a hip hop soldier