The latest report on Americans' tendency to kill each other is out, and it makes grim reading. Even — though it's not obvious on first glance — for advocates of gun control as a panacea for all the violence that ails us.
In 1993, there were 23,271 murders in the United States, according to Justice Department figures, and 39 percent of them were committed by someone whose relationship to the victim couldn't be determined.
The total is not uniquely high; it was more than 24,000 in 1980, and almost reached 25,000 in 1990, with a dip in between to less than 20,000. But the fraction of them that are "stranger murders" is climbing steadily, and most of those murders are never solved.
That's the scary part. I'm not afraid of my family or friends, so I don't feel personally threatened when I read about a murder that's someone else's family affair. But when I read about random violence, someone who dies because he or she is in the wrong place at the wrong time, I think, "that could be me." As small as the risk may really be, I adjust my schedule and my activities and my life to avoid the places and the times that could turn out to be lethally wrong.
That sense of pervasive danger readily translates into the political demand for more controls on guns, but the increase in this category of homicide can't be accounted for simply by an increase in the number of guns owned by Americans — invariably called "a proliferation" by those who want to reduce it.
True, the number of guns is increasing. But the number of domestic homicides isn't increasing accordingly. It's actually lower than it was decades ago, from 3,063 in 1965 to 2,851 in 1992. It could even be that when the potential victims of domestic violence are armed and no longer defenseless it helps to keep things peaceful.
The problem is not that there are more guns: It's that there are more people willing to use them to commit crimes, including murder. Placing obstacles in the way of legal gun ownership and non-criminal use won't necessarily improve that situation.
California proved that, my friend Mark told me when he visited here a couple of weeks ago, when it sold a gun to "a two-week motel resident" named Colin Ferguson.
Mark is by his own description a gun nut — "and proud of it" — and a New Yorker born and bred. His own collection is fully licensed, and he has a business-carry permit.
Ferguson wouldn't have been able to get through the inspection process in New York, Mark said, but California's supposedly tough laws were a snap.
"California should have cleaned up its own act," he said with considerable bitterness, "before telling the rest of the country what to do" in the federal crime bill.
Fewer people would have died on the Long Island Rail Road, Mark believes, if some of the people on the train with Ferguson had been armed when he starting mowing down commuters with his California gun, but Ferguson would have been one of them. Maybe, he said, if Ferguson had known that was the likely outcome, he would never have abandoned letters for bullets.
Mark's no-nonsense attitude toward firearms is shared by at least one California law enforcement officer, Police Chief Eugene Byrd of Isleton in Sacramento County.
Until Attorney General Dan Lungren called a halt, Isleton was issuing concealed-carry permits to county residents for $150 each. The permits were legal, but the fees, Lungren claims, are not. State law limits permit fees to $3.
The fees may count heavily in Isleton's calculations, but so does principle.
"Lungren doesn't know how big this thing is," Byrd said, "because there are a lot of people in this state fed up with crime."
Byrd would seem to have a point, because some 12,000 people called Isleton to find out how they could get in line. Presumably, their desire for a gun permit wasn't prompted by a wish to improve their credentials in a career of crime.
A different attitude is on view in Contra Costa County, where some supervisors are mulling over a proposal to ban home gun dealers, register and fingerprint anyone who buys ammunition and in general to impose more restrictions. The board is set to consider it Nov. 14.
County Sheriff Warren Rupf, to his credit, rejected the politically easy road. He said last month that the new rules would do nothing to stop gun violence. His opposition seems to have taken some of the hot air out of the trial balloon first floated by Supervisor Jim Rogers in January.
The restrictions contemplated by Rogers wouldn't make me feel any safer. I don't see that they would prevent anyone from carrying out felonious intentions, let alone the unknown killers responsible for that 39 percent of homicides that strike victims apparently at random.
But wannabe perps might well hesitate before choosing as their turf a city where a large fraction of the law-abiding population was licensed to carry a gun. Simi Valley, where a lot of cops live, is a well-known example. If a lot of cities were like that, safety could spread.
I think I'd feel safe in Isleton.