Struggling Over Gun Control
by Adelaide Eldridge adelaidee@justice.com
One day when I was dusting in my parent’s house, I found my dad’s
revolver in a nightstand. Like Curious George, I took it out for a closer
inspection. Cloistered in our crime-free suburban community, I had learned to
associate guns with the seedy, crime-infested street life that seemed to exist
on another planet from the one where I lived. So, the danger associated with my
dad’s one and only secret house weapon had given it its infamous distinction.
Rather wisely, I thought, in case of an accidental firing, I went into the
backyard with it. By this time, my baby sister was standing beside me. She
pleaded with me to put it away. But I had been slowly cocking the hammer,
hoping each time that the action of pulling it back would release its tension
and that it would return it to its original and inert position. It did
not.
I had also seen in movies that guns
can backfire, so with each cock of the gun, I held the weapon as far to the
right of my head as my arms would reach. After several cocks, a realization
began to dawn on me. Only one thing was going to return that hammer to its
original state. Holding the gun off to the side, I squeezed my eyes shut as
hard as I could, cocked the trigger back the rest of the way and fired into the
back woods. I was twelve.
The school shootings in Paducah, Springfield, Littleton, Conyers
and Columbine fired national debate over the issue of how to reduce the
likelihood of children getting their hands on guns. Public sentiment seemed to
side with antigun proponents who believe that introducing a gun into situations
were children’s tempers flare, whether on school grounds or in streets gangs,
increases the likelihood that someone could die. Legislators responded, pushing
for stricter handgun laws such as safe storage laws and gun safety locks,
intending to thwart a child from firing a gun. For example, if guns had a gun
safety lock in the form of a computer code known only to the owner, no one,
including a curious child who might find it, could fire it, as I did.
But it could be that what is intended to thwart children might
work to a criminal’s advantage. For example, what if the owner not only had a
code on her gun, but also conscientiously kept it out of her children’s reach?
And what if one day her teenaged-daughter found herself facing a rapist, but
didn’t know the code? Did the gun, safely stored as required by law, or the gun
code, also required by law, provide safety for her? In fact, weren’t they the
very reasons that the young woman found herself without the defense that the
gun could have provided? Legalist Gary Kleck has found that according to some
national polls, guns are used defensively between a quarter-of-a-million and a
half million times per year, and Dr. John Lott of Yale Law School found that
“storage requirements appears to impair peoples’ ability to use guns
defensively.” In that same study,
conducted in 1996, which stated that between the years 1979 and 1989, data from
the Department of Justice National Crime indicates that risk from serious
injury from an attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance
than for women resisting with a gun.
But in her article, Why Handguns Must be Outlawed, Nan
Desuka asks, “what of the child who has killed himself or a playmate … or the
storekeeper, trying to protect himself during a robbery who inadvertently
shoots an innocent customer?” Are these people criminals?
Statistical data compiled from the Texas Department of Health in
1998 reports that 15 times as many
American children were killed by gunshots than in the countries of Japan, Great
Britain, Germany, France and Canada combined. While children may have
perpetrated not all of these, at least some were. The school shootings were not
only intentional, children did perpetrate them. What is obviously clear is that
deaths resulted from bullets propelled from guns. If guns had not have been on
those scenes, all those dead would not have been the victims of those gunshots.
Can we conscionably call these child gunmen, criminals? If not, then who was?
If adults were held criminally
responsible for accidental or intentional shootings, which are perpetrated by
children, adults would keep stricter control of their weapons. Perhaps rethink
whether or not they should mix weapons in the same household were children
live. There would be far less public clamoring to get the government to enforce
gun safety or to require more gunlocks.
Nevertheless, antigun
control advocates, like the National Rifle Association (NRA) like to claim that
guns don’t kill people, criminals do. Yeah right, a six-year-old who shot his
playmate is a criminal. It is mystifying that in spite of the earlier mentioned
fact that the United States has more childhood deaths from gun shootings than several
other nations, combined, that J. Warren Cassidy, ex-executive vice President
for the NRA, would still claim that those who kill are criminals.
So the question of how to keep guns out of the hands of children
seems to really be one of how much are we willing to pursue prophylactic
measures to ensure it. Since guns can kill, we must look at the likelihood of
murders committed by them. D. B. Kates wrote in her article, Against Civil
Disarming, “about 30 percent of murders are committed by robbers or
rapists.” We would well be within reason to ask if that means that the
overwhelming majority, 70 percent, of murders are committed by noncriminals. In
1985 the FBI reported, “over 60 percent of murders are caused by guns, and handguns are
involved in more than 70 percent.”
Desuka presents us with familiar perceptions on these facts. She suggests that many victims are women killed by husbands or lovers, the result of a drunken brawl, disgruntled employees, innocent bystanders or children.
The NRA’s answer to the problem of guns in the hands of children
is to let them go ahead and have them. Moreover, teach children how to
handle a firearm. Children could continue firearm safety education throughout
their lives, and the NRA has spent millions in developing youth programs. Many elementary schools have the “Eddie
Eagle” program to teach young children that firearms are not toys. After
completion of that program, older kids can continue with learning firearm safety
in hunter training programs or firearm safety education camps.
Adults giving children handguns? And when a kid kills someone, we
blame who?
There are over fifty gun-related bills before the 106th
Congress in either the US Senate or House of Representatives such as the Gun
Show Accountability Act. Nevertheless, we all know that not all laws are
created to protect the general welfare. Rather they are the resultant
acquiescent homage we pay the most well-funded lobby effort.
In spite of the law, remember some of these ingredients –
Angry students have used them to murder their classmates.
Your four-year-old could shoot himself or a playmate.
In a desperate situation, a rapist could wrest a gun away from a
struggling victim and use it on them.
A drunken, enraged husband could use it on his wife. Ninety-two
percent of domestic violence incidents are crimes committed by men against
women, according to the US department of Justice and 30 percent of murdered
women were slain by their husbands or boyfriends – and that was back in 1996,
according to the FBI.
I wonder if firearm education includes anger management because
one day, you may well be the murdered victim of a disgruntled employee, the
killed victim in a drunken brawl, the murdered victim in a jealous situation or
just an innocent bystander.
After weighing just some of these, the final decision rests with
our collective and individual conscience. One thing is clear. Guns are tools
made for one purpose, to kill.
I suppose my mother was not the only parent who has developed a
case of angina over finding that their child played with the house gun, but I
have always wondered how many parents spend the mental energy to determine who
was really at fault. Was it the child for exercising the natural curiosity of
reaching for the forbidden fruit or the irresponsible parent for placing the
temptation within the child’s reach? Now that I am a parent and know that
hundreds of American children are murdered by handguns each year, I also wonder
what if our house had have been burgled. Since the gun was in so accessible of
a location, the nightstand for pity sakes, the burglar could easily have lifted
it, adding to the grotesque number of illegal weapons already on the street
used in gang violence and other crimes.
America, how much more evidence do you need?