| Chapter
11
Guns and Gun Control
By David J. Krajicek
Second Opinion
For some Americans, the Virginia Tech shooting reprised what Hofstadter called the “national revulsion” against guns in 1968.
But as always with guns, there was another point of view.
The NRA suggested that more firearms, not fewer, could have saved lives in Blacksburg, Va. Had students or teachers been allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus, someone might have been able to take out the killer.
That idea is either patently absurd or counter-intuitively wise, depending upon your firearms predisposition. And it represents America’s gun conundrum in a nutshell, or shotgun shell.
Since the late ‘60s, guns and abortion have been our most contentious political issues. And as with the abortion debate, the opponents rarely agree.
Gun control supporters regard the NRA and the gun lobby not as hunters and sportsmen but as cynical toadies to America’s $2 billion gun industry.
For its part, the NRA sees a “secret agenda” to ban guns by its ideological mirror, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Many in the pro-gun camp object to condescension by anti-gunners who use phrases like Hofstadter’s to describe them: “otherwise intelligent Americans” who “cling with pathetic stubbornness” to archaic notions about firearms.
On this much the two sides must agree: There are many guns in America, and some of them are used for human carnage.
The number of firearms is believed to be approaching 300 million, or about 1 ½ guns for every adult citizen.
Great Britain, where guns must be licensed, has a very precise figure on private gun ownership—1,936,160 firearms in England, Scotland and Wales in 2005.
But America’s gun count is a fuzzy statistic. The gun lobby opposes precise firearms inventories by the government because it sees such a count as a prelude to registration.
Another statistic is vaguely more reliable: Each year, about 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds in this country, slightly more than half from suicide.
Since 1900, when the last embers of the Old West campfire went cold and America entered modernity, roughly 2 million Americans have died from firearm wounds. (The number excludes war deaths.)
That’s the population of Houston, or of Dallas and Detroit combined.
About 900,000 of those deaths, 44 percent, were from suicides committed with guns. Nearly 400,000, or 19 percent, were from accidental shootings. Roughly 700,000, or 36 percent, were homicides.
Non-fatal gun injuries since 1900 number as high as 5 million.
Even these numbers are remarkably incomplete.
In 1999, the public policy faculty at Harvard University began calling for institution of a uniform national system for reporting firearms injuries, including suicides—something akin to the nation’s longstanding collection of automobile fatality data.
The result, the National Violent Death Reporting System, is administered by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Web link: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/nviss/)
Gun Heritage
Amid all the American gun mayhem, the NRA plays the bad-guy role to those who believe that reining in firearms ownership can stanch the bloodshed.
But America has had many opportunities to change laws, to oust pro-gun politicians, to turn its back on the NRA agenda--after the Kennedy assassinations, after Reagan was shot, after Killeen, Texas, after Columbine, after Virginia Tech.
Generally speaking, we have chosen not to. We obviously really like our guns.
In 1968, Congress held a series of hearings to address the “national gun problem.”
One of those who testified was Franklin Orth, an NRA executive. He gave a nifty riff on the fetishist link that some of us feel with those hunks of blued steel.
"There is a very special relationship between a man and his gun,” said Orth, “an atavistic relation with its deep roots in prehistory, when the primitive man's personal weapon, so often his only effective defense and food provider, was nearly as precious to him as his own limbs."
For generations, scholars have cogitated over the “militia/frontier ethos” and “hunting/sporting ethos” that are generally cited as the genesis of America’s voluminous gun ownership.
I can’t say that I feel a special brotherhood with the four guns I own—two rifles, two shotguns, no handguns.
I grew up hunting pheasants in Nebraska. After nine gun-less years living in New York City, I now again live in a rural environment and enjoy pursuing upland game birds with Labrador retrievers that I trained to hunt.
Ownership of those guns has never prompted me to regard myself as part of the gun culture, the NRA or the Second Amendment protection league.
Some years ago, the New York Daily News sent me to Georgia to report on gun trafficking. Enterprising New Yorkers were going south to buy cheap guns, then selling them in the city to miscreants, including members of Jamaican “posses,” in the popular word of the day.
Although I was a gun-owner, the trip to Georgia was my first real experience inside the American gun culture.
A Daily News photographer took my picture as I fired an Uzi submachine gun at an indoor firing range, part of a Macon gun shop. It was thrilling, I must admit, to feel the weapon dance in my grip as round after round struck a paper target (picturing Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, as I recall) 100 feet away.
The gun shop owner, suspicious of me as a journalist and New Yorker, saw the grin on my face as the machine gun belted out its rat-tat-tat cadence.
When I removed my ear protection, he shook my hand and said, “You’re as sick as the rest of us gun nuts.”
In other words, Welcome to the club.
Before I left Georgia, I stopped in Atlanta to interview a regional official of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He surprised me by saying that violence in New York was not necessarily a concern in Georgia.
He said, “Why should people down here care if a bunch of Jamaicans in New York are shooting themselves up? Why should law-abiding citizens give up their ability to buy firearms because one posse shoots another posse in Brooklyn with a gun somebody happened to buy in Georgia?”
His argument was from the NRA talking-points template.
Not long after that trip, the federal government’s firearms role worked its way onto front pages after the disastrous raids on the property of white separatist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and on the Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas, in 1993.
In 1995, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre sent a fundraising letter to supporters that referred to ATF agents as “jackbooted government thugs” in "Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms" who "harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens."
He was referring to the Waco and Ruby Ridge tragedies. He later apologized, but the letter resonated with the association’s acolytes, conditioned to see the ATF as sworn enemy of the Second Amendment.
That fall during deer-hunting season, I got into a discussion about the NRA with a group of sportsmen friends in upstate New York.
Some of us felt LaPierre’s letter was a shameless attempt to capitalize on human loss. Some thought it was a fair reaction to Ruby Ridge and Waco.
One friend said, “All I can say is that when they come for my guns, they’d better bring an army. They’re gonna need ‘em.”
The man speaking was about 50 years old and a lifelong denizen of the rural Catskill Mountains. He was smart, well-read and worldly—in the condescending phrase of Richard Hofstadter, he was an “otherwise intelligent American.”
I asked him, “What in the world makes you think the ATF or anyone else is going to come and take your guns away?”
He said, “I don’t know, but they’d better bring an army if they do.”
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