It is a disturbing sign of the times that when federal litigators roar, everyone else listens. Just yesterday Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo, threatened to help some 3,200 public housing authorities file a gigantic class action lawsuit against gun manufacturers unless they yielded in their settlement talks with state and local governments, who have charged them with creating a public nuisance by the reckless distribution of firearms.

Those suits ostensibly seek billions of dollars in damages for the various additional expenses that state and local officials claim follow from an epidemic of gun violence. Yet the ultimate remedy they seek is not damages, but a quasilegislative settlement that would require manufacturers to alter marketing practices (by excluding certain dealers, who target criminals or minors), or require them to incorporate devices such as personalized safety locks.

These suits are misguided on both process and substance. First, they make a parody of the democratic process. In the past generation, Congress, states and local governments have passed thousands of statutes and ordinances designed to clamp down on gun distribution. By all means enforce them. Unfortunately, these champions of the legislative process are at least as eager to enforce the laws that were not passed. Two bites at the apple has become the norm for public officials, who think they hold a sacred license to litigate or legislate at will. No judge should ever sign off on any settlement that seeks to smuggle into law multiple restrictions on gun sales or gun use. Given their bottomless purse, government litigators should be doubly sure of the soundness of their position before threatening suit.

What this threatened suit manifestly lacks is intellectual credibility. First, any HUD-inspired suit would isolate a single variable - guns - to explain the lamentable state of violence in public housing projects. Overlooked in the process is the wretched set of decisions in planning and execution that have made such projects the scourge of their communities. The gun industry does not determine the siting of these projects, does not screen or select tenants, does not run renewal and eviction policies, does not fix elevators, does not provide policing. Orthodox tort theory offers lots of precedent for suits against housing projects themselves for their failure to protect tenants from violent crime. The real question is: Why isn't the proper role of HUD and local authorities as defendants in lawsuits? They shouldn't be able to dump their failings on others.

Next, the federal government acts as though the relationship between the number of guns and the level of gun violence were completely nonproblematic. Mr. Cuomo's one-liner for this occasion: "You have safety caps on aspirin bottles, but not on guns? What's the logic?" Here's the logic. Mr. Cuomo is wrong to assume that safety caps on aspirin bottles make sense. Like so many doctrinaire public officials, he assumes that the only consequences of legislation are those intended by the legislators. Put safety caps on aspirin bottles and fewer children will die of accidental overdose, because the government wishes it so. But he never considers how private responses could negate government initiatives. Some older people find it hard to open these bottles with arthritic fingers, so they transfer them into some unmarked container without safety locks, where they could become more dangerous. Individual users have better knowledge of their circumstances than the government, so patients, not government, should decide what kinds of containers are used for their pills,

Guns, however, differ from aspirin tablets in that they pose dangers to both users and third parties. But as with all security devices, the consequences of regulation are multiple, not singular. There are about a quarter-billion guns in circulation in the U.S., roughly one for every person in the land. If we could eliminate all use of all guns, then we could eliminate all gun deaths, perhaps at the cost of some increase in knife deaths. But it hardly follows that eliminating 10% of the guns would reduce the level of gun fatalities by 10%.

Everything turns on the mix of lawful and unlawful users. Fewer guns in the population could lead to higher rates of gun fatalities if a larger percentage of weapons remain in the hands of criminals. Dreaded mass shootings, such as Columbine, could well increase if potential assailants know that everyone inside a school, restaurant or housing project is unarmed. But if thugs and kids know that even one person possesses a gun for defensive purposes, some tragedies could be averted. Mr. Cuomo's one-liner thus; misses the indirect benefits that: the lawful ownership of guns provides to those who choose not to own guns.

In truth, designing an optimal gun policy requires a sophisticated response to hard trade-offs to which our official crusaders pay no attention. Direct sanctions, against criminal users of guns, have the great virtue of separating the lawful from the unlawful use of weapons. The more successful these direct sanctions, the less the need for any kind of legislative ban or restriction on use. But when direct action against gun users falls short, some legislative ban or program might keep guns out of the hands of destructive individuals, without undermining the capacity of lawful citizens to resist gun violence.

A prophylactic rule that keeps known criminals from purchasing weapons might do some good, even if it is easily evaded. But what is fundamentally wrong with the crusading mindset of our antigun crusaders is their misplaced certitude. They spend so much time congratulating themselves in public and private for their high-minded positions that they are blind to the mischief that their proposals too often create. And it is all no accident. Good political results require sound political processes. It should come as no surprise that improper resort to the judicial process leads to dubious and one-sided public policy.
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Mr. Epstein is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
The wrong target: Lawful gun use prevents crime.