Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The Third Gun Control Article: My Personal Take

In my previous two articles, most of my discussion focused on statistics, policies, and laws, and at times I may have taken a sort of devil's advocate position to fully explore those aspects of the gun control issue. In this, the final part of the series, my focus will be on my own personal experiences related to guns. Through examining my own personal gun microcosm, I'll lead into what I've decided would be the most reasonable way to handle the regulation of gun ownership and use in the United States, in a way that would satisfy at least my own sensibilities.

Not surprisingly, my first experiences as a kid with anything resembling a gun probably alternated between madly squirting people with a squirt gun and my own fantasy gun battles I staged using my cap guns. I loved westerns, especially the TV show Wild Wild West, so I had to always be in possession of at least one cap gun, preferably the type with the paper rolls of caps. In fact, one of the earliest extant photos of me shows me wearing my cowboy hat, sporting a two-holster gun belt, and brandishing a toy gun with a mesmerized look on my face. I'm about a year and a half old in that photo.

When I got a little older, I joined the neighborhood boys in a game that we called simply "Guns." The game involved splitting into teams and then fanning out throughout the neighborhood or the forest, or wherever we happened to be, and attacking each other by shooting with cap guns, water guns, smoke bombs, firecrackers, etc. Here and there, there may have been a BB or two, or one of those guns that shot the little yellow rubber pellets. The supposed goal was to capture the other team members and win, but most of us were just happy to be shooting things, blowing things up, and running around, not really caring about who won.

Part of the Tradition

From TV and my neighborhood activities, I was very positively disposed toward guns. No one in my immediate or extended family hunted at the time, and I wasn't aware of any of them having any guns from the past or for any sort of protection, but I did know a lot of kids whose families were hunters by tradition. I'd say at least a quarter of the kids I knew had family members who were active hunters at the time, and several of the kids hunted, too.

In Vermont it was a very normal thing to hunt, for family members to hunt together, and for older family members to introduce their kids to hunting. The tradition was so established that there was even a special camp in the winter every year, which several of my friends attended sometime between the ages of 8 and 15 or so, that was solely for children to learn gun safety, broader hunting safety, and I'm not sure what else, but probably reasonable hunting-related things. I'm pretty sure the camp was run by the Fish and Game Department, and this was kind, gentle Vermont, so I only heard good things about it. The goal was to produce safe, considerate hunters rather than rapacious killers.

One of my many friends named Chris, hopefully that's anonymous enough, had been brought up in a hunting family, so by the time he hit his teens, he already owned a few hunting rifles—I think they were a 30-30, a 30-ought-6, and a 22, to be specific—and was a good shot and a knowledgeable hunter. I was actually there when he received the 30-30 as a present (or was it the 30-ought-6?), and his father took us to the field out back to demonstrate it to us by shooting a milk jug filled with blue water on the other side of the field.

I wasn't super interested in hunting, though I loved nature, but I thought guns were just dandy, so I was happy when Chris asked me if I'd like to go shoot some cans and bottles, using his 22, in the shooting range he'd set up in the woods off to the side of the field. As expected, it was really fun, and I turned out to be a pretty good shot, so I maintained my enthusiasm. At later opportunities, I embraced the chance to shoot BB guns and sling shots, as well, and I always wished I had a BB gun, but I never had the desire to own a "real gun"—I'm not sure why exactly. Probably because I was already a hippie and didn't know it.

Once we entered our teens and had other priorities, guns and hunting weren't quite so interesting anymore, and it ended up being years before I had any further direct contact with guns. However, in the meantime, I did get to know some hunters a little better, and the ones I met came from very different backgrounds.

Running the Gamut

As a late teenager and in my early 20s, I worked for the Vermont Highway Department during the summer. As a result, I was driven and drove myself all over the state, to some of the most obscure, rural places you can find there. My coworkers were mostly native Vermonters of many generations, blue collar, and lower middle class (as was my family, although we lived in a "city"). Since family and local connections were pretty strong in those days, in our travels we would stop by and visit folks in those obscure places, and it was then that I got to see some of the more hidden rural poverty in Vermont. That tied in with hunting because some of these people were poor enough that it was really important for them to be able to get their allotted one or two deer a year just so they could put some meat on the table. And often all the males in the family would hunt to improve the odds that they'd be able to feed the family.

At the same time, I got to know a back-to-the-lander who had voluntarily adopted a low-impact lifestyle that sometimes included hunting. He didn't have to hunt to survive, in a way, but to maintain that lifestyle it was helpful for him to do so. That said, at times he struggled with it—and discussed his struggle—from the standpoint of not wanting to take the life of another living creature. But ultimately he decided that if done respectfully and from a standpoint of stewardship and sustainability, he could continue to hunt.

So, in keeping with my earlier experiences, I remained positively disposed toward hunting and agreed that guns were perfectly fine tools for that activity.

A few years later, I came home to visit my mother, and stuck on the refrigerator was a photo of a beautiful coyote…lying dead in the back of a pickup truck. I was shocked. It turned out that her boyfriend at the time had gone coyote hunting and had shot that beautiful animal himself, and he was very proud of his accomplishment. At the time, I was still relatively "pro-hunting," but I had—and have—little tolerance for killing for sport or for whatever other reason when you're not even going to eat the animal whose life you've taken away.

Not long afterward, on that visit or another one, I came home to find a pistol lying on the staircase to the second floor of my mother's condo. It was there in full view, just four feet from an often-unlocked clear glass door to the outside, where anyone could A) see it, and B) step in and grab it. At the time, I wasn't even thinking of those two elements, though. What had my attention was the realization of how ridiculously powerful that tiny thing—a 9 mm pistol not much bigger than my wallet—could be. I was a bit stunned. Something that small could be used to kill 10 people, with the wrong person holding it. How could such a thing be made and then sold to people? What could justify that?

I wasn't happy with either of those gun-related experiences, and, perhaps needless to say, I was happy when my mother moved on to someone else.

Beyond Feeding Your Family

Based on my life, I'm used to thinking of guns as something you use for hunting an animal you intend to eat. Sure, as a kid I accepted their use in the lawless days of the Wild West, and in wars for the past few hundred years, to "hunt" people, as well, but these days I'm certain that the people involved in those things would've been far better off if they hadn't had guns, and didn't have them now in current wars. I would rather that police officers, too, didn't have to use guns—I was always enamored of how British police didn't carry guns—and I bet you that in some ways police here would be better off without them, as well. However, I realize that it can be important for the person doing the policing to—if possible—have more physical power/firepower than the people they're trying to control.

Once you've covered those four uses, I guess the next use that would come up would be "self-defense." A certain vocal minority of people talk about having the right to protect their family and their property. Others claim that allowing the public to own concealed weapons acts as a deterrent for would-be criminals. And still others claim they have the right to keep arms in case the government no longer serves the public needs, and then they'll be equipped to overthrow the government—yeah, right. More problematically, some people live in very dangerous areas where it's not safe to be out on the street at night, even if you have no choice.

When I think about the self-defense use, I have to admit I feel the least comfortable about this type of reasoning for people to be able to own guns. My discomfort is not that I feel their reasons are totally unjustified, however. It's natural to want to protect yourself, the ones you love, and things you've earned and built. What disturbs me is the knowledge that this kind of ownership is what has lead, and is continuing to lead, perhaps in an accelerating way, to the general proliferation of guns.

A lot of things are going on in that area. First of all, the more guns that are made, the more guns that will be available for killing people. It's a simple fact. Second, and connected to the first, the more guns that "law-abiding" citizens own, the more guns criminals are going to own after stealing them from the law-abiding citizens. Third, the more guns that are around, the more likely situations are going to escalate into people being shot and killed, when the same situation before this proliferation might have led to far less serious consequences or even no consequences at all.

We Want Your Guns

The argument of being able to protect "you and yours" rests on your being with them and all of your guns at the time someone becomes a menace. The simple fact is, though, most criminals aren't that stupid or that menacing. The majority of criminals don't really care about you or your family and probably don't want to hurt you at all; they just want your stuff. And if they want your stuff, they'll watch for when you're away from your house, they'll break in, and they'll steal it. If you have a handgun you carry with you and a bunch of more powerful weapons that you keep in the house, well, you now had a bunch of more powerful weapons.

It's quite common for criminals to break into houses specifically because they're looking for guns. They're a priority because it's very easy to sell them, they're easier to carry than TV sets, and you can get a good amount of money for them. Not to mention you also can use them to increase your criminal capabilities. After a successful gun theft, the criminals will have more of your powerful weapons than you will.

Actually, one of the times that my back-to-the-land friend stopped hunting for a while was when someone broke into his house and stole all of his guns. All it took was a few minutes, and a law-abiding person with guns no longer had any guns, and a criminal had several.

So many guns are stolen that there must be piles of them in some places, car trunks full of them. I've heard—and perhaps this is old news—that so many criminals in England have guns now that the police have had to resort to carrying them, too. I wouldn't doubt a goodly number of those criminals' guns came from the houses of "law-abiding" American gun owners and got shipped to England under the radar.

And let's say someone does break into your house while you're there. You come out with a gun and start shooting. If that criminal is still alive and has a gun, too, he or she is going to shoot back. Are you going to assume there's no chance a stray bullet might hit you, your spouse, your kid, your dog? You might just scare off the criminal, but if you don't, you're putting your own life and the lives of others at risk by having that gun in your hand. That goes for when you're out in public, too, where the danger of someone getting hit by a stray bullet might be even greater.

It's risks like these that have convinced me that the best thing for all of us is to reduce the number of guns available, the types of guns available, and the number of people allowed to carry guns to the lowest amount possible.

Laying Down the Law

If I were to make a set of laws that would give me peace of mind, here's what they would look like. And all of these would be retroactive—nationwide—with no grandfather clauses allowed.

  1. Ban the sale of guns for personal protection.
  2. All owners with a license to carry a gun for any reason other than hunting would be required to turn in their guns and would be reimbursed at a "used" price, but only if they could demonstrate that they acquired them legitimately.
  3. Ban the manufacture and sale of semi-automatic, automatic, and similar guns and large capacity magazines.
  4. Dismantle and recycle or repurpose for police use all guns recovered from criminals and criminal ventures.
  5. Require one-time licensing and periodic eyesight and sanity checks—at no or very low cost—for those who wish to own a gun. Background and medical record checks for all.
  6. Require registration for all guns. With every gun registration, include two copies of a transfer of title for when the gun might be sold to another person who has gotten a gun license. One copy would go to the new owner, and the other would be mailed by the old owner to the registrar with the new owner's information. The new owner would have to register the gun within a week of the registrar's receiving the form or would be visited by the police to either relinquish the gun or register it with them along with paying a penalty fee.
  7. Continue to allow the sale of guns for hunting. Hunting rifles would be allowed, along with a limited number and type of handguns. (Some hunters carry a handgun for certain situations; for example, when they are able to shoot a deer with their rifle but find that it is still alive and suffering when they get to it.)
  8. Require a greater amount of hunter safety training before anyone can get a license to purchase a hunting rifle and hunt with it. Hunters will no longer be exempt from gun licensing.
  9. Require proof of living in or visiting an area that allows hunting, having the intention to hunt or a history of hunting, and having a license to hunt before being allowed to purchase any gun.
  10. Require all guns to be kept securely locked when not in use.
  11. Require practice or learning of hunting skills by children to be actively supervised by a licensed adult gun owner at all times.
  12. Except when removed from a locked area or mount using heavy tools or other unpreventable destructive means, all gun owners will be at least partially legally and financially liable for any accident or crime that occurs using a weapon that they own.
  13. All guns must be stored unloaded and away from the cartridges used in them.
  14. If accidents or crimes that occur using licensed gun owners' guns stay at a very low level, then these storage laws should suffice. If not, police will begin random unannounced checks of owners' gun storage areas and will fine owners or confiscate the guns if they're not stored securely or are stored loaded.
  15. Allow restricted use of non-hunting guns, including legacy outlawed guns, for recreation at specially licensed gun ranges that maintain possession of all weapons with strict security. These would be open to use by anyone 18 or older, or minors when accompanied by a parent, after a brief mechanical/safety training session. All firing sessions would be observed/supervised by trained employees.
  16. Biathletes would be allowed to purchase the sport's specially designed rifles and use them for competitions after meeting licensing/background requirements similar to what hunters need to meet.

It would take time, but applying such strict measures would gradually pull more and more guns off the street, without enough new ones being made or sold to replace them. Eventually, far fewer criminals would have guns, the police would have plenty of guns, accidental shootings would decrease, hunters would be safer and more effective, and the people of this country would be much safer. A lot of people might not be thrilled with my proposal, but I think in the long run it would be quite effective.

So concludes this trilogy of articles. Stay tuned for more on this topic and others as the situation develops…or, more likely, fizzles.

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