Do Guns or People Kill People?

America has some grand old traditions: neighbor helping neighbor; bootstraps; baseball; volunteering; universal education; guns. Guns? Well, not every grand old tradition is healthy. Take racism. It still abounds, too, but at least the laws against it are reasonably well accepted.

Not so with guns. Guns facilitate murder and mayhem, but by golly no one’s going to take mine away from me. They’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hand...and so forth. Our granddaddies needed them to fight off Indians, foreign invaders, wild beasts, Yankees, Rebs, rustlers and each other. Even the Constitution gives us the right to own them. OK, so maybe you’re supposed to be in the National Guard — which many say is the modern equivalent for the "well-regulated militia" that the Constitution mentions — but you get the idea.

The trouble is that the years have taken their toll on Indians, invaders, rustlers and wild beasts. Most of us no longer feel the need to pack heat to defend ourselves.

But some traditions die hard. Many folk still fantasize that one day that ubiquitous serial killer will show up at the door, or an ethnic mob, or the pinkos. They don’t want to be caught short.

In practice, however, the real victims of bullets tend to be poor urban folks, gunned down, either accidentally or with malice, in moments of emotional heat or criminal chill. New Haven runs about 25 such deaths per year, Cincinnati - 80, Oakland — 150, Philadelphia — 400, Los Angeles — 450, New York — 550, etc.

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Numbers like these have understandably led to lots of laws. Mostly you have to have a permit to own or carry a gun, and all guns need to be registered. That rule should make sure we could track down the owner of any weapon used in a naughty way. Right? Well, no. A positively phenomenal number of suspect guns are alleged by their owners to have been stolen from them. Often long ago. They just never bothered to report the loss. Why, even former president William Howard Taft had one purloined from his collection that was later used in 10 murders.

That was back in 1920, but things haven’t improved much since. Owners are shocked—shocked!—to be told by police that one of their precious toys has been used in a crime. "Gee, maybe I should have reported that it was gone!"

Maybe so, but the laws governing that are not uniformly strict. In California, you have only 48 hours. Some places have no rules at all. The same goes for ownership controls. New York is strict, but most of the crimes there feature guns bought or stolen in other states.

Total numbers of available weaponry are a mystery too. Guns, after all, don’t rot. Like enemies, they accumulate. One East Windsor couple lately was found to have 88, with thousands of rounds of ammunition. Luckily, the guy was only a chiropractor. Suppose he’d been a member of the Taliban?

And lest you fear that there might be a growing weapon shortage, Hoffman’s Gun Center in Newington has a great sale on Smith & Wesson steel pistols with Melonite slide and barrel and a Zytel polymer frame. Only $400. The fiber model is a mere $200. Such a deal.

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Plainly, the macho, the fearful and the dealers constitute a potent lobby. Far from prohibiting handguns, Congress and our General Assembly can’t even pass serious control legislation. Many crooks do get pinched for gun law violations, but by then it’s too late. They already used them. The sources of this social disaster are the respectable makers, dealers and owners who want to fend off any curtailing of their God-given right.

The common result of this fixation is tragedy. In the end, guns don’t kill people ... gun lobbyists do.