I OFTEN defend the habitat of species I care for deeply: grizzly bears, wild trout and birds of all kinds. But, like most people, I care even more about preserving the quality of my own habitat, my neighborhood and community. Within that habitat, we not only worry about pollution and disease, we are concerned with human predators (i.e. criminals).

This concern has recently resurfaced in a vigorous debate about the merits of gun control and its impact on crime. Is it wise to support gun control? This is a difficult question, one worthy of careful attention.

National Public Radio, The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly exemplify progressive thinking on many matters of social policy. Hence it is revealing that they have recently featured articles challenging the conventional view that citizens' access to handguns should be severely constrained. In these articles, Daniel Polsby of Northwestern University's School of Law and James Q. Wilson of UCLA argue that this sort of policy is likely to be ineffective and indeed counterproductive.

In Polsby and Wilson's view, handguns are tools that give their owners an advantage when bargaining or interacting with others.

For example, I am a healthy, athletic, 6-foot, 190-pound male - a difficult mark for an unarmed person. However, if I left my neighborhood cash machine some evening and a 97-pound weakling with an Uzi demanded my money, he would surely get it. The Uzi gives my assailant the upper hand.

If guns are tools they are subject to the laws of economics. Using economic logic, we can ask: Who will give up their guns if an aggressive program of handgun control is enacted?

People who expect to use guns frequently, such as criminals, find them very valuable. They are unlikely to easily relinquish their guns. People who value guns very little, perhaps professors who live and work in safe neighborhoods, are most likely to relinquish them. Thus gun control will have the most impact on those least likely to commit crimes. Should gun control succeed, the habitat of once-safe communities will degrade as still more armed criminals confront an increasingly vulnerable (i.e. unarmed) populace.

Consider a lesson from the Montana ranch my wife and I own. For many years, we ran sheep on rangeland between our low-lying fields and the higher-elevation timberlands. Although the area is beautiful, it is also burdened with an abundance of predators. We suffered losses from bears, coyotes and an occasional mountain lion. Late summer, when coyote pups learn to hunt, was the worst time. They wounded many sheep while learning to kill. Tending wounded sheep was wrenching and most unpleasant because the cuts are hidden under the wool, where they often become infected and maggot infested. But we felt an obligation to care for and protect them.

In the late 1970s we adopted an ancient strategy to defend our stock: guard dogs. Long before the invention of guns, steel traps and poison, Europeans trained guard dogs to stay with livestock to protect it from wolves, bears and human raiders. Though hardly perfect, this strategy works quite well. Guard dogs very rarely kill predators, even when two 100-pound dogs confront a 25-pound coyote and her pups. And because our dogs, a Komondor and a Sharplenenitz, are big and white and look much like sheep from a distance, the predators cannot easily know when the dogs are nearby and when they are not. The dogs raise the cost of predation by "arming" the sheep. They make our stock too risky a target for most coyotes, cougars and bears.

An armed household is like a herd of sheep protected by guard dogs. A serious human predator, a career criminal, is reticent about striking a residence if its occupants are likely to be armed. However, if a criminal knows that a house is unarmed, the dangers are less and the pickings are easier. It is as if the sheep have no guard dogs.

In the short run, we can do little about the presence of guns in our town, neighborhood or city. About the only thing we can do is make sure that our houses contain no weapons. I am not at all sure that people would disarm themselves if they realized that by going unarmed, and letting everyone know it, they were making life easier for criminals. Yet this is exactly what conventional gun control seeks to do. The consequences are clear if my ranch analogy holds.

Ask yourself, would I like to have this sign and display it on my house? If you would, let me know; I would be happy to sell you one and donate the proceeds to charity. But if not, perhaps you agree with the economic argument that guns in the hands of honest citizens raise the costs of crime and make crime less likely.