Dali Llama say here be whining of yet another bleeding heart... :twisted: :evil: :x
Lethal blow for gun control?
November 28, 2004
BY STEPHEN YOUNG
On the morning of Nov. 18 my lawyer called with a message I've waited a long time to hear. ''I'm sorry Steve, but I have bad news. The Illinois Supreme Court has rejected our claims in their entirety.''
My heart sank. The decision ended a six-year legal effort to hold the gun industry to its share of the responsibility for the 1996 shooting death of my son Andrew, and the deaths of many others from guns. But this isn't the end of the struggle; it's only the closing of a chapter. The fight will go on.
It may take a generation for victims and activists to bring American gun policies in line with the rest of the civilized world, but it will eventually happen. The timid courts, the knee-jerk conservative legislators will not be able to stop the inevitable. It will get done because young people understand the problem.
I have spoken about gun violence to students ranging from grammar school to graduate school. I always begin with the same question: ''How many know someone who has been shot?'' In inner-city classrooms, more than half of third-graders have raised their hands. Even at DePaul and Northwestern universities, a number of students have personal experience with gun violence.
Take any major American city -- Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia -- and statistics reveal that annually, more people get killed by handguns in any one of these cities than all of Europe combined. Why is that?
American gun laws are the byproduct of a lobbying machine called the National Rifle Association. The gun control movement has accomplished a few minor victories, but the vast majority of modern American gun law is the work of the NRA. Compare their results to the rest of the world and you'd have to say their work is a failure. American kids are 20-plus times more likely to die of gun violence than European, Japanese, Canadian or Australian children.
Foreign governments keep guns off their streets. They don't allow gun industry lobbyists to write their firearms laws. The safety of their citizens comes first.
I was astounded when I read the Supreme Court decision on the victims' and City of Chicago's lawsuits against gun manufacturers and dealers. One paragraph said: ''Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate any wrongdoing on the part of defendants.''
Evidence included a sworn deposition in which a convicted gun trafficker admitted he brought a felon into the retail gun store to buy the handgun used in my son's murder. The dealer knew this man was a felon, yet still sold him the gun, using the gun trafficker, not yet convicted, as his background-check front. In 1998 the Chicago Police Department conducted an undercover investigation called ''Operation Gun Smoke.'' Mountains of evidence documenting and videotaping illegal transactions facilitated by profit-driven gun dealers was gathered for the public and courts.
And still the Illinois Supreme Court says we didn't present any ''evidence of wrongdoing''? What do they need? A signed confession from the entire industry?
I'm not a lawyer. This isn't an essay about what's wrong with the legal profession. The attorneys who represented me and the other victims are heroes. They worked selflessly for justice and the little people who are losing their children to the guns.
I'm a father. I live in the real world of love and fear and the terrible pain of losing a son. What world do these judges live in? Are they so lost in interpreting the letter of the law that they have forgotten its intent? The law exists to protect us -- not the gun industry.
Five of the seven justices wrote an unusual addendum to their decision, stating that if these conditions alleged by plaintiffs really did exist, then it implored the Legislature to address them. If these conditions ''really exist''? Your honors, pick up today's newspaper and read the metro section. I guarantee there will be stories about cabdrivers, high school kids, ordinary people being shot to death in our streets.
Every cop, every prosecutor, every street-smart teenager knows what's going on and where the guns are coming from. The Illinois Supreme Court doesn't understand this? ''If these allegations are true,'' then turn the problem over to the Legislature?
Of the millions of consumer products available to the American public, only two are exempt from safety oversight by the Consumer Regulatory Commission: guns and ammunition. That says plenty about the character of legislators.
This past week the Illinois Supreme Court had an opportunity to cut the flow of guns into our streets. Fewer guns would mean fewer people being shot, fewer families ripped apart by the violent death of a child.
They have failed us.
Stephen Young is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. He was the principal plaintiff in the case decided by the Illinois Supreme Court.
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