my friend lisa bloom wrote this a few years ago.
i think it warrants re-reading.
moby
Bullet Points
Thirty thousand people lose their lives to gun violence in the United
States each year. People like 81 year old Dr. Joseph Dillard, a gun
collector himself, who came home from running errands one afternoon,
surprised a burglar, and was killed. We’re currently covering his trial
on Court TV News. Or teacher Barry Grunow, shot and killed by his 13
year old student, Nathaniel Brazill, who got angry and got his
granddad’s gun from a dresser drawer and took it to school one day.
The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 33-40% of American
households own guns, and surely most gun owners choose them for
protection. Yet the facts belie this belief. A gun kept in the home is
22 times more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting, a
homicide, or a suicide, than in self defense. In homes with guns, the
Journal of the American Medical Association reports, they are used
defensively in less than 2% of home invasions.
These statistics are widely known, and have been for decades. I can
remember gun control being debated as one of the great social issues of
the ’70s and ’80s, along with smoking bans, sexual harassment laws, and
environmental protection. Decades later, cigarettes are outlawed in
nearly every indoor space, sexual harassment is patently illegal, and
most Americans insist on clean air and clean water.
Whatever happened to gun control?
Is it the Second Amendment? Were gun control laws found to be
unconstitutional?
No, that never happened. Ever. The Second Amendment’s oddly
ungrammatical language, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to
the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear
Arms, shall not be infringed,” has been repeatedly interpreted by the
U.S. Supreme Court and many lower courts as protecting gun ownership
only in connection with militias. Here is exactly what the Supreme
Court said on the subject, in 1939 and again in 1980: “the Second
Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not
have some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a
well regulated militia.”
As former Chief Justice Warren Burger said, “[The Second Amendment] has
been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, repeat the word
‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have
ever seen in my lifetime.”
So, it’s not our constitution’s fault, I am pleased to report, because I
rather like our founding legal document, once we saw fit to amend it to
abolish slavery and give nonwhites and women the right to vote. As it
stands, other the glaring omission of an Equal Rights Amendment, it’s an
impressive document, what with limiting the power of presidents and
insisting on fair trials, freedom of speech and religion and protecting
everyone’s right to privacy.
No, the reason why children and lunatics and angry spouses can so
readily get their hands on guns in America is because the political will
to get rid of guns seems to have fizzled out. Surely the NRA is not
more powerful than Big Tobacco, and Americans sick of cancer deaths have
largely prevailed in that fight. (My kids are amazed to learn that
those underground, funky-looking antismoking ads are funded by cigarette
companies as part of lawsuit settlements. I never thought I’d see the
day, but it is here.)
I always think of the Beatles. A crazed fan went after John Lennon in
the gun-toting United States, and shot and killed him. A crazed fan
went after George Harrison in gun-controlled Great Britain, and stabbed
him with a knife. George Harrison fought off his attacker and survived.
It really is that simple. Without a gun culture and with strict firearm
control laws – even Britain’s Olympic shooting team must train outside
the country – Britain has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.
Its population of more than 60 million suffers less than 1.3 homicides
per 100,000 residents. By comparison, in 2000, police in the United
States reported 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 population.
In the last few years, New York City has gotten the delightful news that
our murder rate has declined dramatically due to better policing. Yet
it’s still eight times that of London, a city comparable in size and
culture.
Last Easter Sunday, here in New York City, two men stared each other
down. One ran inside, grabbed his handy 9mm pistol, and fired at the
other, killing a nearby two-year-old toddler strapped into his car seat
for protection. And I had to check the facts before writing that
sentence, to make sure I got the right recent toddler shooting death in
my city. I wouldn’t want to confuse it with, for example, the three
year old girl in Brooklyn who was just accidentally shot and killed by a
drunken family member. Brother John Losasso said to 200 mourners at the
former’s funeral, “God is sick and tired of our weapons. He’s sick and
tired of our guns and our foolishness.”
I wouldn’t claim God is on my side, just reason and statistics. Just
like decreasing smoking decreases cancer deaths, decreasing guns
decreases homicides. Sure, there will still be cancer from other
sources, and murderers will sometimes find other ways to kill, but
cutting down on the most efficient death delivery systems necessarily
means significantly fewer grieving mothers at heartbreaking funerals,
not to mention smaller numbers of people locked up for life, reduced
costs for police, the criminal justice system, hospitals and emergency
medical care.
Why did we give up on gun control?
-Lisa Bloom, esq.