Why U.S. murder rate is high - real men own handguns

Among “rich� nations, the Japanese are clearly the wimps. They suffer only 0.07 gun deaths per 100,000 of population per year. The British are four times more violent at 0.30. Contemplate then, the United States. We record 9.42 such deaths per year. Hartford is a national leader.

A common explanation for all this killing is America’s frontier mentality, rooted in self-defense against bandits and Indians. Also our good old Constitution guaranteed something-or-other about arms to everyone.

The British are gone now, the Indians mostly have been wiped out, and the bandits mostly wear coats and ties. Nonetheless, we still love our weapons. Bumper stickers proclaim that we will only get the owner’s gun by prying it from his cold, dead hand. Murder and accident rates zoom up and down and most of those deaths still come from guns because drive-by poisonings have never really caught on in the United States.

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In Australia, the big crackdown eventually came after a Virginia Tech-style massacre on Tasmania. Australia enacted tough gun laws, and shootings plummeted. No such epiphany has occurred here, however, and the press thrives on the likes of Cho Seung-Hui.

There’s not much danger of such reform yet. Largely, law-abiding gun lovers see to it that our control laws remain loose. Thus, criminals and crackpots retain access to weapons to do their dirty work. (This isn’t a sane society we’re talking about.) Cho simply walked into a gun store and walked out with his weapons of choice. Virginia is not exactly a hotbed of gun-crime prevention laws.

Connecticut is much better. To buy a gun here, you need a permit. The trouble is that the streets are filled with “stolenâ€� guns, which the owners somehow neglected to either “protectâ€� or report. Our Legislature  just cracked down on this gimmick. Other states simply turn a blind eye. The federal government, especially the current one, doesn’t even care.

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Solutions to this violence are politically complex but not administratively challenging. The simplest is to prohibit the private ownership of all handguns. Exceptions would cover inventoried weapons stored at licensed clubs for target shooting.

Short of such a national law, each state might upgrade its licensing apparatus to approximate auto registration. People would have to report all transactions or theft within 72 hours as Connecticut now requires. After a free initial lapse, failure to do so earns you a felony. Experts abound who could create a variety of effective regimens from which states could select.

This suggested state action assumes that presidents and Congress will continue to look upon the gun issue as too hot to handle. That’s partly because massacres may tend to focus on white victims, but day-to-day casualties are mostly black and Latino. This makes good local copy, but fails to excite the network media groundswell needed to shift national public policy.

But shooting is down at nearby local banks. Norwalk has suffered nine bank robberies in recent months, with no shots fired and hardly a weapon shown. Local wags are attributing this  banking non-violence to a new protocol of honor among thieves.

Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn.