Another View: There's only one way to stop gun crime: ban handguns

New Hampshire Union Leader ^ | December 28, 2005 | JENNY PRICE

[Final Authority]

Five years ago an elderly Los Angeles woman who had agreed to move out of her daughter's apartment bought a handgun.

She cleared the background check, passed the safety test and practiced on targets at the local shooting range. Then she shot and killed her daughter and her daughter's fiance - my brother David.

As someone who has lost a member of my family to gun violence, I see the new federal legislation to limit gun manufacturers' liability as unconscionable beyond my ken. But what troubles me most is that the gun control lobby is pouring its resources into battles that probably won't save many lives - and we're losing even those.

In the past decade, states have passed law after law to require safety locks, force gun-purchase waiting periods, trace bullets back to their sources and allow victims to sue manufacturers for negligence. That such measures have produced at best slight decreases in the rate of gun deaths is hardly surprising, because only 3 percent of gun deaths are accidents, and most murderers own their handguns legally and know how to use them safely.

California has passed a raft of such laws in the past five years and is widely praised as one of the most progressive states on gun control. In that same period, the number of handgun-related homicides has fallen and then risen again, with no correlation whatever.

The real problem is not that handguns aren't safe or well-regulated enough, or that you can't sue and try to bankrupt a corrupt manufacturer after someone you love has been killed.

The problem is that 60 million people in the United States own handguns. The gun used to kill my brother was a Glock 19, a light and portable semiautomatic.

These guns are designed to kill people: That's their sole purpose. Nearly 12,000 Americans annually use guns to do just that, and the majority use handguns.

Twelve thousand: that's comparable to the number of AIDS deaths each year in the United States. (Great Britain has about 100 gun deaths each year.) And if the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which leads the gun control crusade, continues to assure us that it won't try to outlaw handguns.

Then new laws to restrict who can buy guns and where they can carry them might reduce the annual toll to 10,000. But that's optimistic. Wouldn't it make more sense to define the ultimate battle as one for a national ban on handguns - the sole gun-control measure that promises to save tens of thousands of lives' With an endgame that can actually achieve the ultimate goal, perhaps we'd acquire the logical and moral authority to win more of the smaller battles.

I can hear the gun lobby scoffing, "Guns don't kill people. People do." This ditty is familiar to all of us. Yes, and bombs and chemical weapons don't kill people either, but they're not sold over the counter to just about anyone without a criminal record who can prove that he or she can use them safely.

Of the 12,000 guns used to kill people every year, 160 are used in legitimate self-defense. Guns in the home are used seven times more often for murder than for self-defense.

I cannot say whether the woman who shot my brother was vicious or insane: I myself no longer understand the exact difference. But we all know that rage, vengefulness and deep alienation are hardly unusual in our society, and a handgun makes it horrifyingly easy for people to express them, on purpose or on impulse, by killing people.

If the National Rifle Association wants to pour its own considerable resources into creating a society ruled by absolute peace and brotherhood, I'm all for it.

But let's stop arming the populace in the meantime, which pro- and anti-gun advocates alike know for certain will create a mountainous death toll. Jenny Price is a writer in Los Angeles.

[Plutarch]

Jennifer Price is a freelance writer and environmental historian, is the author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (1999). She has published in the anthologies Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and The Nature of Nature: New Essays from America's Finest Writers on Nature, and in the L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, American Scholar, and New York Times. She has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and is currently living on Venice Beach and writing a new book about nature in Los Angeles.

This is the Jenny Price that wrote the article. There is a Jenny Price AP reporter based in Wisconsin who I think are two different people.

[Fishrrman]

"Handgun bans and confiscation are an unconstitutional denial of the rights of law-abiding citizens. It is as simple as that."

I believe that - sometime within the next fifty years or so - this issue will in fact come before the United States Supreme Court. The question will be: do individual citizens indeed have an inalienable right to gun ownership granted by the Constitution? And the Court will rule, one way or the other. As Luke Skyfreeper said, the decision will be "as simple as that".

HOWEVER - I wouldn't speculate as to what that decision might be.

Yet I sense that we are approaching a point in American history where we face an issue that divides the nation _almost_ as powerfully as slavery once did.

And - as with the slavery issue - the Court's "2nd Amendment decision" will steer the course of the nation's history as did the Dredd Scott decision of long ago.

- John

[Final Authority]

We agree, mostly. Darwin has been dead for many years now and I don't think he would keep some idiot from killing some innocent person because he was too stupid to shoot himself instead. So, I think training is important, whether it is done the old fashioned way, that is, Grandfather, Uncle, or Father, taught us, or the modern way, you pay a fee or join a club and learn.

As far as being required to carry guns at all times? I think the uncertainty, as long as it is plausible that people all around are carrying because it is legal, is as good as a requirement to do so, as the requirement alone is anti-liberty in nature, and isn't liberty what we are talking about here?

[Plutarch]

This is the Jenny Price , the freelance writer in L.A. who wrote the article, and whose brother was supposedly gunned down by an elderly mother but that didn’t get any news coverage that one can find.

Jennifer price is a freelance writer and environmental historian, is the author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (1999). She has published in the anthologies Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and The Nature of Nature: New Essays from America's Finest Writers on Nature, and in the L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, American Scholar, and New York Times. She has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and is currently living on Venice Beach and writing a new book about nature in Los Angeles.

She is a 2005-6 Guggenheim Fellow and a two-time NEH Fellow, and has been a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women since 1998. She has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University and currently lives in Venice Beach, California.

[mad_as_he$$]

I once knew 135, down to about 27 now. All of which still work I am sure. Your point is great - if it wasn't a gun then knife, sword or fireplace poker.

[mad_as_he$$]

A quick search of LA times and google turned up no stories about such an incident. Could be in surrounding area. My BS detector is at a full 10!

[Churchjack]

I wonder what the relationship between the woman and her daughter's boyfriend was that would cause her to murder her own daughter...

[Plutarch]

A quick search of LA times and google turned up no stories about such an incident. Could be in surrounding area. My BS detector is at a full 10!

I've searched Google, the LA Times, Lexis-Nexis. Zip. Nada.

What is more, from what I can tell this writer hasn't written about this searing tragedy until now.

Chances are very good that her brother, if she has one, is alive and well.

[Final Authority]

That is why I questioned it, but for other purposes this story is illustrative of the effort by the liberals and those who wish to impose their ways on the masses (tyranny by any name) by way of deconstructing the Constitution and preventing the governed from directly consenting to being governed. Gun ownership goes a long way to maintaining the equilibrium of power we have enjoyed and that is why it is the second amendment of our Constitution.

[saganite]

Whoa. Now we're gettin' out there!

[Badray]

I have no right to push my feeling on others.

And without a gun, not much chance of doing it. ;-) Just having fun with you.

I agree with you in principle. I don't have to like what you do in order to see that I have no right to control it (assuming that you aren't hurting anyone).

[metalurgist]

is the left in the US liberal in the old sense of the word or are they totalitarians.

Liberals believe that they are much smarter than you.

Since they are smarter than you they think they should run things.

Liberals believe that their plans for you are for your own good, because they have a grand vision of how things should be.

If you balk and refuse to go along, you are stupid and like an unruly child, you must be forced to comply even if they have to kill you. This will be rationalized as "He was just too stubborn and hateful to see the light and it was his own fault"

The only difference between liberals and Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin dada, and Saddam Insane is that they haven't acquired total power and still have to keep the mask in place.

[FierceDraka]

Tear-jerking anecdotes never amount to good public policy or good law.

They also never mention the fact that handguns are used millions of times annually to DETER crime in the United States. Or that more people die from motor vehicle accidents than from firearms, either.

Call me tacky white trash, but I've got one of those "This house protected by .357 MAGNUM" signs in my front window, a "welcome" mat that says "GO AWAY" on the front porch, AND I tend to dress and carry myself like a thug. Guess what! Nobody bothers me - EVER.

[metalurgist]

These guns are designed to kill people: That's their sole purpose. Nearly 12,000 Americans annually use guns to do just that, and the majority use handguns.

Doctors and medical mistakes kill 100,000 people a year. Maybe doctors and hospitals should be banned.

[Badray]

Don't confuse ideology with the form of government, though it is easy to do.

If you force me to do ______ or deny me the right to do _______ you are totalitarian. If I am free to choose for myself whether or not I do _________, then the government is limited in its powers and the people are free(r).

It doesn't matter so much what _______ is as much as the government's role, or mine, in it.

The scales goes from left to right with the left being more government to the extreme on the far right with no government. Conservatives typically support that darned middle of the road position of limited constitutional government where individual liberty is maximized and rights are protected.

No need to get fancier than that.

[pankot]

Better idea: Confiscate every citizen and ban them.

[metalurgist]

No, only Rich and Connected Registered Democrats would own them

And their body guards. Don't forget about them.

[Paul C. Jesup]

There's only one way to stop teen pregnancy:

Ban Penises.

Just ban ovaries instead.

[FierceDraka]

Guns used for self-defense are rarely reported.

That's EXACTLY RIGHT.

One of my friends owns a gas station here in town. Two of the customers were about to get into a physical altercation over something silly.

Once he saw something was up, B tucked his 1911 Colt .45 into his trousers where it was prominently visible, walked over to the two idiots, and calmly asked them, "Is there a problem here, gentlemen?"

Seeing that big gun at the ready took the fight right out of both of those jacka$$es.

And everyone went about their business - no fight, no cops, no charges filed. Like you said, the incident simply wasn't reported because a gun was near by to keep the peace.

[mad_as_he$$]

I love to catch them lying! Remember that guy about 10 years ago that did "research" on guns in will in the North East? All BS.