Lando 
Posted on 11/13/2004 2:34:57 PM PST by neverdem
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Nothing kills Democratic candidates' prospects more than guns. If it weren't for guns, President-elect Kerry might now be conferring with incoming Senate Majority Leader Daschle.
Since the Brady Bill took effect in 1994, gun-control efforts have been a catastrophe for Democrats. They have accomplished almost nothing nationally, other than giving a big boost to the Republicans. Mr. Kerry tried to get around the problem by blasting away at small animals, but nervous Red Staters still suspected Democrats of plotting to seize guns.
Moreover, it's clear that in this political climate, further efforts at gun control are a nonstarter. You can talk until you're blue in the face about the 30,000 gun deaths each year, about children who are nine times as likely to die in a gun accident in America as elsewhere in the developed world, about the $17,000 average cost (half directly borne by taxpayers) of treating each gun injury. But nationally, gun control is dead.
So it's time for a fundamentally new approach, emblematic of how Democrats must think in new ways about old issues. The new approach is to accept that handguns are part of the American landscape, but to use a public health approach to try to make them much safer.
The model is automobiles, for a high rate of traffic deaths was once thought to be inevitable. But then we figured out ways to mitigate the harm with seat belts, air bags and collapsible steering columns, and since the 1950's the death rate per mile driven has dropped 80 percent.
Similar steps are feasible in the world of guns.
"You can tell whether a camera is loaded by looking at it, and you should be able to tell whether a gun is loaded by looking at it," said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Professor Hemenway has written "Private Guns, Public Health," a brilliant and clear-eyed primer for the country.
We take safety steps that reduce the risks of everything from chain saws (so they don't kick back and cut off an arm) to refrigerators (so kids can't lock themselves inside). But firearms have been exempt. Companies make cellphones that survive if dropped, but some handguns can fire if they hit the ground.
Professor Hemenway notes that in the 1990's, two children a year, on average, died after locking themselves in car trunks. This was considered unacceptable, so a government agency studied the problem, and General Motors and Ford engineered safety mechanisms to prevent such deaths.
In contrast, 15 children under the age of 5 die annually in fatal gun accidents in the U.S., along with 18 children 5 to 9 years old. We routinely make aspirin bottles childproof, but not guns, even though childproof pistols were sold back in the 19th century - they wouldn't fire unless the shooter put pressure on the handle as well as the trigger.
Aside from making childproof guns, here are other steps we could take:
Require magazine safeties so a gun cannot be fired when the clip is removed (people can forget that a bullet may still be in the chamber and pull the trigger). Many guns already have magazine safeties, but not all.
Finance research to develop "smart guns," which can be fired only by authorized users. If a cellphone can be locked with a PIN, why not a gun? This innovation would protect children - and thwart criminals.
Start public safety campaigns urging families to keep guns locked up in a gun safe or with a trigger lock (now, 12 to 14 percent of gun owners with young children keep loaded and unlocked weapons in their homes).
Encourage doctors to counsel depressed patients not to keep guns, and to advise new parents on storing firearms safely.
Make gun serial numbers harder for criminals to remove.
Create a national database for gun deaths. In a traffic fatality, 120 bits of data are collected, like the positions of the passengers and the local speed limit, so we now understand what works well (air bags, no "right on red") and what doesn't (driver safety courses). Statistics on gun violence are much flimsier, so we don't know what policies would work best, and much of the data hurled by rival camps at each other is inaccurate.
Would these steps fly politically? Maybe. One poll showed that 88 percent of the public favors requiring that guns be childproof. And such measures demonstrate the kind of fresh thinking that can keep alive not only thousands of Americans, but the Democratic Party as well.
Lando
So gun accidents kill 33 children per year. Hmm. What about bottlecaps?
"Sadly, statistics indicate that there are 3,500 additional poisonings of children under age 5 each year".
What about other accidents involving children?
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reports that each year in the United States:
• Residential fires injure about 12,000 children 14 years old or younger. Preschool children die in fires at twice the national rate.
• About 50 children die in crib-related incidents and about a dozen die from choking on toys, balloons and other children's products.
• About 83,000 children 14 years old or younger were treated for burns in hospital emergency rooms (1997 data).
• Poison control centers have responded to about one million calls involving children under five years of age since 1990.
• More than 350 children under five years of age drown in swimming pools; most of these are in home pools. Almost 3,000 young children are seen in hospital emergency rooms because of near-drowning incidents in pools.
• More than 3,000 children age 14 or younger are treated for carbon monoxide poisoning in hospital emergency rooms.
• More than 3,000 children under 10 years of age are treated in hospital emergency rooms for injuries related to inserting objects into electrical outlets.
• About 4,700 children 14 years old and younger are treated in emergency rooms for injuries caused by falls from windows.
• Thousands of children under six years of age are identified with elevated blood lead levels, which may cause damage to a child's developing brain. Nearly 900,000 children are estimated to have elevated blood lead levels.
First Reports Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Violence: Firearms Laws
Methods of suicide among persons aged 10-19 years--United States, 1992-2001.
The only situation I know where such locks are mandatory is in rental housing. Even then, at least in Texas, only that there be a blind deadbolt lock on each exterior door. No law whatsoever that they must be used. That's in contrast to various "lock up your safety" laws.
Still there is a fundamental difference. Locks on your house are not to keep you in, they are to keep others out. You wouldn't have the locks set up so that it took a key to get *out*. Not so with gun locks which are designed to keep everybody out.
Actually he was born in Conn. But he was raised in Texas, around oilmen, and thinks more or less like a Texan. He was educated in Texas through high school, but then went to college up east.
But you'd have to install stiff springs, and maybe some stabilization jacks to avoid flipping the truck over from the recoil, especially the smaller pickups.
Effectively, it's just like CCW, although they had the honesty to call it a tax back then. (Well only because the tax power was the only way the courts would let them do what the Constitution clearly said they could not do. Times have changed) It comes down to begging the government for a license to exercise your Constitutional right.
However things can be set right by increments. To start, eliminate the tax, or at least reduce it to a fee to cover the costs of issuance. Remove the CLEO sign-off requirement, and make it "shall issue" and base it on the same instant background check as for other arms.
'Course, .25 is pretty much the mildest autopistol caliber out there in terms of bang for a buck.
Different days, though, eh?
Start by repealing the 1987 gun-control act in toto. That's a real worm in the apple. Wonder what triggered that ban on production of full-auto weapons for civilian use?
But it needs to be found unconstitutional. A Class III FFL challenged the law in court, but SCOTUS wouldn't give him a hearing -- simply refused cert. They wouldn't do that to an Attorney General of the United States.
Time to get busy. Paging Dr. Emerson, Dr. Timothy Emerson, please!
I doubt if the author could pour water out of a boot, even with the instructions on the heel.
The place I'm in now has one, because the door it's in has a window in it. If the window was broken, a non-keyed lock could easily be reached through the window. However, that's only one of three entrance doors, the other two have non-keyed blind deadbolts.
And his solution seems to be to disguise the message to make it *appear* more palatable. This once again shows that the dems think We The People are dumber than rocks. We aren't.
Since you mention the machine gun ban, I guess you mean the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act? Actually the machine gun ban was about the only bad provision of that act, which removed many of the more abused provisions of the 1968 Gun Control Act (and earlier gun laws as well) and attempted to reign in the BATF. See Hardy. It was a last minute amendment on the floor by Congressman William Hughes of New Jersey, and engendered no debate until the bill went to the Senate, and even that was generally in the nature the "it doesn't change anything", even though the intent of the amendment's author was to do just what has been done, that is to ban new production of machine guns for the civilian market. Why? Because he could. No trigger is required for gun grabbers, although they will make use of various incidents to further their agenda, which is always there.
Thanks for the Hardy link.
El Gato has provided a very interesting link on the 1986 FOPA in comment# 155, IIRC.
The old *bang_list is no more. Use keywords instead. In this case,it's BANGLIST . If that keyword isn't in the list of keywords just add it.
"Shall not be infringed" does not allow the government to be in the gun safety business at all. If these features were so great the police and military would have them already. What is so bad about letting the private sector do this on its own?
Kerry and his band of socialists demise, with regards to firearms, was that they think the 2nd is only about hunting. It's about Enemies , Foreign and Domestic and the individuals right to self defense......
Harvesting game for the table is a secondary use of liberties primary tool.....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.