| Chapter
11
Guns and Gun Control
By David J. Krajicek
Introduction
During my time as a crime reporter at the New York Daily News, I kept at hand on my desk at One Police Plaza a dog-eared copy of Gun Digest, the self-described “World’s Greatest Gun Book.”
When I wrote about a 9mm Luger used to kill a cop or an Intratec Tec-9 submachine used in a gang shooting, I wanted to see that model of the gun—to read its specs, to learn where it was manufactured, to understand how it operated.
I may have been obsessive.
But reporters often are accurately accused by gun buffs of getting nearly every detail wrong when writing about firearms—everything from confusing a shotgun gauge with a rifle caliber to failing to know the difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic.
Before the Internet, there was a paucity of information immediately available to help reporters write smartly and accurately about guns. Gun Digest helped, and I still recommend that every crime reporter have his or her own copy (less than $10 at amazon.com).
This backgrounder should help, as well.
It begins with my essay about America’s “gun culture” and our complicated relationship with firearms. Subsequent chapters provide basic information about guns, including how many there are in America; thumbnails of some of the country’s seminal gun crimes and gun laws; background on and analyses of the Second Amendment; profiles of some of the organizations that are key players in the gun debate, and a list of story suggestions and resources for journalists.
I hope reporters and editors find the information useful.
David J. Krajicek
June 2007
Red Falls, New York
The American Gun Conundrum
“The United States is the only modern industrial urban nation that persists in maintaining a gun culture. It is the only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population.
“It is the only such nation that has been impelled in recent years to agonize at length about its own disposition toward violence and to set up a commission to examine it, the only nation so attached to the supposed ’right’ to bear arms that its laws abet assassins, professional criminals, berserk murderers, and political terrorists at the expense of the orderly population—and yet it remains, and is apparently determined to remain, the most passive of all the major countries in the matter of gun control.
“Many otherwise intelligent Americans cling with pathetic stubbornness to the notion that the people’s right to bear arms is the greatest protection of their individual rights and a firm safeguard of democracy.”
It has been nearly 40 years since Richard Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, published his famous (or infamous, depending upon your firearms point of view) lament about our national “gun culture” in American Heritage magazine.
As he wrote those words in 1970, America had just endured a decade that was book-ended by firearms assassinations—President John Kennedy in 1963, civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy a few months apart in 1968. Roughly midway between those events, in August 1966, an alienated young man ascended a tower at the University of Texas in Austin and fired indiscriminately at pedestrians below, killing 15 and wounding 31.
It was a trying time—not least because the violence attracted international scorn that cast a shadow on a nation that regarded itself as peerless.
Hofstadter wrote that after the King and Kennedy slayings in ’68, “There was an almost touching national revulsion against our own gun culture, and for once the protesting correspondence on the subject reaching senators and representatives outweighed letters stirred up by the extraordinarily efficient lobby of the National Rifle Association.”
But the soul-searching soon withered.
Alas, Hofstadter wrote, “It seems clear now that the strategic moment for gun controls has passed and that the United States will continue to endure an armed populace…A nation that could not devise a system on gun control after its experiences of the 1960s, and at a moment of profound popular revulsion against guns, is not likely to get such a system in the calculable future. One must wonder how grave a domestic gun catastrophe would have to be in order to persuade us. How far must things go?”
The main points in Hofstadter’s jeremiad have become familiar in the decades since he wrote the piece: that common sense dictates the need for control of access to guns, particularly handguns, in modern society.
Why, this camp wonders, does America make it so easy for every nut with a chip on his shoulder to go out in a muzzle-flashing, news-making blaze?
The 1980s brought fresh examples for the gun control portfolio: the wounding of President Reagan in 1981 by a deranged gunman; the murder of 21 at a San Diego fast-food shop by a disaffected security guard armed with an Uzi; the 1986 “going postal” rampage in Oklahoma when a Postal Service employee killed 14 colleagues and himself, and the 1989 shooting at a Stockton, Calif., schoolyard by a disturbed drifter with an assault rifle that left five kids dead and 30 wounded.
The following decade provided more stinging examples. In 1991 a suicidal man drove his truck into a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and began shooting, killing 24 and wounding 20. And in April 1999, two alienated teenagers went on a suicidal rampage at Columbine High School near Denver, killing 13 and wounding 24.
The Killeen killing was an American firearms-murder record until April 16, 2007—the day that yet another disaffected man killed 32 and wounded 61 at Virginia Tech University.
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