Armed for battle By one count, there are 280 million guns in America, where the notion of guns or butter is largely treated as a false choice and resoundingly rejected. The weapons are spread throughout the 50 states, with many households keeping two or 20; lately, it only seems as if every last one of them was playing a starring role here.
Police on Thanksgiving arrested a Mount Vernon man in connection with a string of deadly, tit-for-tat shootings in New Rochelle. In usually quiet Piermont on Monday, a gunman fired several shots at a parked car, whose owner, police said, was the intended target. A gun battle raged Wednesday at a check-cashing business in Mount Vernon, pitting a better-aiming security guard against a suspected robber, now deceased.
More? Guns figured in the Wednesday stick up of a Valhalla post office, where stamps were taken. Even a gun used in a Norfolk cop killing somehow wound up in Yonkers; it turned up during an arrest in a home Saturday. And, most notably, a gun was the deadly weapon of choice Monday, when a New York City cop was gunned down in Brooklyn.
Clichés vs. crime
Crime has long been on the decline throughout the region and the land, but the recent gun violence causes justifiable fear, outrage and a sense that our violent culture still spins wildly out of control. But we are fighting back, all right, arming ourselves with clichés.
After the police shooting, the one in Brooklyn, Gov. George Pataki renewed his plea for a new death penalty law in New York; the one on the books was ruled unconstitutional last year by our Court of Appeals. He called the death penalty "an appropriate remedy" for cop killers a reasonable position to stake out, albeit an unhelpful one. The police union chief echoed the theme. Patrick Lynch was quoted in The New York Times: "If this case does not speak of the need for a death penalty as a deterrent, none ever has."
Would that the fix were that easy.
Unfortunately for police officers and for liquor-store owners, bodega clerks, 7-Eleven cashiers, others in the wrong place at the wrong time the death-penalty-as-deterrent argument hasn't held up to our experience. Homicides have been on the decline in New York for years, notwithstanding the fact the state never pulls the trigger, so to speak, on anyone; the last execution was in 1976. Conversely, some states with unforgiving death-penalty statutes and juries remain as gun crazy as ever. We doubt that even an active and robust death penalty will keep more people from getting shot, which really is the ultimate aim.
Limits of control
More clichés come from the gun-control lobbies, who press for stiffer gun laws. The groups may be onto something; 280 million guns would seem to be plenty. Pataki has made the same point, though not when he is courting conservative votes for the Republican presidential nomination. To his credit, the governor broke with his party long ago and pressed for tough gun laws in New York. The trouble is, state gun-control laws don't go very far; guns travel from state to state with ease and are sold, without too much fuss, from the rears of trucks and car trunks. For this, some experts, not all of them funded by gun groups, regard state gun-control laws as largely worthless.
Congress could, of course, mandate tighter controls, but it has shown little inclination for even the most rudimentary restrictions while bending over backward to protect gunmakers from lawsuits. The pro-gun lobbies are both resilient and resourceful much better organized to fend off the natural constituency for gun control gun-crime victims, those who live and sometimes die at the center of our gun culture.
An emerging view, not emerging fast enough, is that the pitched battle between lawful owners, who believe the Constitution is on their side, and gun-control advocates, who have a mind of taking guns away, overshadows a more fundamental question: What steps need to be taken to make ours a less violent culture? And make no mistake about it, "ours" really means males teen-age boys and men, lopsidedly the perpetrators of gun violence, and invariably the victims, by a wide margin.
Solve that riddle with all its twists in class, economics, education, inequality and, inextricably, race and the gun culture will change. Ignoring it, while fixating almost exclusively on matters of retribution and hard-to-win gun controls, lets our institutions off the hook and so, too, our elected officials, community leaders, and parents ensuring continued fear, more death and injury, more useless recrimination.
http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051203/OPINION01/512030318/1015*FW Note:...a more fundamental question: What steps need to be taken to make ours a less violent culture? And make no mistake about it, "ours" really means males teen-age boys and men, lopsidedly the perpetrators of gun violence, and invariably the victims, by a wide margin.
According to the DOJ, teenaged boys who had legitimate access to firearms had zero gun crime violations and lower substance abuse and street crimes than other boys.
Male holders of concealed weapons permits have been shown to be the most law abiding of citizens.
So it's not really a struggle to control guns, it's a struggle to control
men.
:roll:
