People With Guns Kill People

 

 

This Friday the nation was shocked by a horrifying crime. Those of you who have read this column for any length of time know that I am an adamant advocate of serious gun control. This despite the fact that for 20 odd years I was a Federal Firearms license holder for the distribution of weaponry and explosives and have been a gun owner all my life.

 

Now we are, once again, faced, with an atrocity beyond all imagination, the tool of which was a gun or guns. The pundits and the politicians are all bursting forth with opinions and solutions but very few, seem to have a grasp of just how complicated a problem we face and just how complicated the solution, if there is one, will have to be.

 

This morning, George Will, a man whose politics I often despise, but whose intelligence I always admire, tried to put the difficulty of a solution in perspective, when he laid out the multiple problems necessary to solve, in order to achieve any kind of significant solution to our national love/hate relationship with guns and violence.

 

The first part of the problem, and the easiest to deal with from an intellectual perspective, is the proliferation of guns and the ease with which to identify guns that should be permissible under the second amendment and those that shouldn’t.

 

In order to deal with this part of the problem, I think it is necessary to understand that practically speaking we will never ban all guns from this country, just as we will never completely eliminate the kind of event that transpired this weekend in Newtown, CT. Our goal, in this mission, should be to seriously reduce both. There is a way to start that process and it is through both legislation and enforcement. Despite denials by the NRA, both are lacking at this time.

 

I believe in hunting and sport shooting, but neither activity supports the ownership or use of automatic, or semi-automatic weapons, either handguns or long guns. Any would-be-hunter, who cannot down his prey with a single shot rifle, needs to go back to the range until he brings his skill level up to the task. There is no real place for multi-fire long guns in hunting and very little except for certain specialized handguns in target shooting.

 

The argument that if we arm everyone we will have a way to deter evildoers is so specious that it isn’t even worth pursuing but I will give just one example of why it is ludicrous.  In a recent stickup of a convenience store in Florida, two armed gunmen got up the dander of a senior citizen who was, himself armed. He drew his gun and fired seven shots wounding two bystanders and missing everything else, especially the robbers. Can you imagine the damage he could have done in a crowded theatre? This is why a ban on all such weaponry, is necessary and not in conflict with the second amendment.

 

That’s the legislation part of the problem. The enforcement part has to do with the will of not just the people, but also the government agencies tasked with doing the job legislated by the congress.  In 2011, background checks were made on 1,454,951 applicants for gun permits. Of those, .48%, less than ½ of 1% were refused a permit because of those background checks. Really? Does anyone actually believe that less than ½ one percent of those who wish to own guns are all that are mentally not up to snuff or don’t have criminal records. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. Lack of enforcement.

 

Enforcement sucks. The biggest leak is at gun shows. No one should be issued a permit to run a gun show unless an ATF officer is on the premises checking backgrounds and permits, and that officer should be paid by the gun show contractor in the form of fees, not our tax dollars.

 

But legislation and enforcement is only part of the solution. Just as big, if not bigger is our treatment in this country of our mentally ill, because most if not all of these multiple killings are committed by people who should, long ago, have been treated for whatever demons are driving them to these horrible deeds.

 

Sometime after 1950 we began closing our mental hospitals in this country, in many cases just dumping the patients onto the street. In the early 1980’s I worked on a film that used a former mental hospital in upstate New York as a location. I asked a worker who was still at the hospital what had become of the patients? He drove me to a park in the center of the town and there, lounging and sleeping on benches, were over a dozen people.

“They all used to be our patients,” he told me.

“Who takes care of them now,” I asked.

“There are outpatient facilities,” he informed me. “That’s where they get their drugs.”

“And what if they don’t take them,” I asked.

He just shrugged and that’s what our national healthcare has been doing for the last forty or fifty years; shrugging. Big message, guys. Shrugging just won’t get it done. Sane people don’t walk into grammar schools and kill twenty toddlers. The guy who did the shooting in Newtown had been an emotional and stability problem for years. Despite that, no one seemed to have any interest in treating him except his gun-hoarding mother. Maybe of someone had, those 20 babies would be alive today.

 

Okay, so we’ve identified two big drivers of a very complicated problem. That wasn’t so difficult. The difficulty and the complications come from getting those problems solved.

 

The solutions from the mental health side of the ledger are much easier from a conceptual point of view. Everyone is for mental health. No one is against treating sick people. The problem comes from the financial side. A proper mental health program for the entire nation would have astronomical costs and right now there is huge opposition to shelling out the money to treat something as deadly and easily detected as cancer. So how much is your kid’s life worth? Especially when there really is no immanent danger.  See how a simple problem, gets complicated fast. With all the opposition to an undeniable good like the Affordable Care Act how easy do you think it’s going to be to get even more money for mental health care? But at least this part of the problem is easy to define, if not to solve. Its about money.

 

Limiting the guns is a much more complicated issue. It doesn’t seem like it should be. Guns are the tools that kill children… and lots of others. It looks simple,  it’s anything but, especially in this political climate and when I say this political climate, it has nothing to do with right and left.

 

A recent poll shows that 47% of the people in this country have a gun in their home. We have to accept that there is a 2^nd Amendment but we also have to accept that it doesn’t cover every weapon ever designed by man. Just because some guy wants to collect assault weapons is no reason to let him. If he wanted to collect atom bombs would we let him? And don’t get on your high horse. The difference is only one of degree. Both violate the safety of others.

 

One of the biggest problems, with the taking of any gun, has always gone back to the reason for the 2^ndAmendment.  This country was founded by men, who rebelled against an oppressive monarch, and they did it with guns.

 

One of the hallmarks of this nation has always been that it stood for the freedom of the individual. Now, in a climate of terrorism and cowardice, faced with a government that continually seeks to limit our freedoms and privacy, some feel that we are heading to a place where we will soon lose our remaining freedoms and without their weapons, they will have no defense of their liberty. There are many who view this as a paranoid stance but if one looks around one sees legislation like the NDAA, phone tapping, the treatment of whistleblowers like Bradley Manning, internet intrusions, etc., as examples of the kind of government stances that lead to totalitarianism. It’s hard to argue with that. Never in our history have we been so much under government control, all under the guise of providing us with security from terrorists.

 

It is this thought process, brought on by intrusions on our freedoms by the government that will be the biggest impediment to eliminating certain guns and limiting others. That’s why it’s complicated. It isn’t just dealing with the realities of the situation like certain guns and a universal lack of mental health care, it’s also about dealing with the perceptions of the various realities, perceptions that are so strong, that they far outweigh any logical arguments.

 

But perception becomes reality when we have to deal with it, and so it behooves our government to take another look at its massive security program as well as its need to fight the gun lobby and our huge need for additional mental health treatment because they are all of a thing when it comes to solving the problem that we are now well past facing. If we don’t care enough about the murders of tiny children to get off our comfort spot and do something about it then we really aren’t a nation or a people worth saving.

 

David Frum, among a lot of stupid statements on the problem, came up with one serious gem, when he suggested that the gun control part of the problem would best be solved, not by government decree, which might be impossible to attain, but by an overwhelming wave of support of the American people much the same as was done by Mothers against Drunk Drivers, a private groundswell that changed the entire outlook of the country. I can still remember when guys would walk into the local store for coffee on any given morning and brag that they were so drunk the night before that they could barely get the car home. In case you haven’t noticed, nobody does that anymore.

 

Maybe, just maybe, if the macho value of owning an automatic rifle became the disgrace of needing one, because you were not a good enough shot to hit what you were aiming at without one, we would be one stop further along the road to insuring the safety of our children.