EDITORIAL BY HUGH DOWNS:
I realize that what I am about to say may alienate people who think they know
where I stand on issues. But I want to take a somewhat different look at the gun
issue:
Everyone seems to agree that we have a terrible problem with guns in this
country. There are headlines as well as statistics to prove this. Few, however,
agree on the causes of the problem, or what to do about it.
Among the theories about the origin of this mess is one that says our frontier
heritage cast into our culture a belief that because we got out from under the
tyranny of England's George III with a shooting revolution, that implementing
justice, redressing grievances, and correcting wrongs of any kind are all best
handled with guns. The good guy--the guy on the proper side of the law--wins in
a throw-down because he is faster on the draw. This is demonstrated by every B
Western movie and a thousand pulp fiction novels. (And the genre of Western
Fiction is not a passing fad. It is our Iliad and Odyssey and it's here to
stay.) The theory is that deep in our collective psyche is the feeling that a
gun is a social tool and an indispensable prop of American Civilization.
Another theory cites a drug policy in this country that lacks sanity. Because we
have put a monster drug traffic outside the law--we have outlawed drugs instead
of regulating them--we have started with a medical problem and managed to turn
it into a crime problem--and so we lost control of the situation, and the flow
of guns into the streets and even the schools is a result of this.
I subscribe to both these theories.
But whatever other causes may be operative, the problem has little to do with
the number of guns per capita. Israeli citizens are far more heavily armed than
we are and there is less street crime there than in the US. In Switzerland, with
its compulsory military service, every home has a gun in it--often a machine
pistol--and they can boast the lowest gun-death rate of any industrialized
country.
Gun aficionados are fond of saying "Guns don't kill people--people kill
people." Well, they are right.
A firearm is a potent weapon that can provide action-at-a-distance--that can be
lethal fairly far away from the person wielding it. There is a very real
question whether humans have progressed socially and psychologically enough to
deal, not just with atomic bombs, but with small calibre firearms. But these
things are here to stay. They are with us, and we can't un-ring that bell. It
might seem that it would be nice if no such things existed--if there were no
instruments to send pellets of metal tearing through flesh--but when there were
no guns people impaled each other on spears and hacked each other to pieces with
swords, so the difficulty is not guns, but human nature. And we aren't going to
solve that problem with simple prohibitions.
Abolishing guns in not in the cards. [Sensible regulation is.] I sympathize with
people who want to ban guns, but I can't agree with them. We have to be careful
that in our zeal to abolish guns we don't wind up pushing counter-productive
legislation that will leave armed only those people most likely to do harm with
the weapons.
We have probably 200 million firearms in the United States, owned by 65 million
Americans. About 25% of us are gun owners. (In Switzerland it's closer to 100%).
More than 98% of U.S. guns are never involved in crimes. The headlines, of
course go to those that are involved.
When the magnitude of the gun problem dawned on the American Public, the
reaction was two-fold: one faction sought to ban guns, or to put in place
controls so stringent as to be unworkable; and the other decided to arm
themselves individually. Both responses were in the main inappropriate. Outright
bans are counter-productive; and untrained civilians carrying firearms are
dangerous--to themselves and others.
I have reservations about mass arming of everyone--the potential for increased
incident of accident and crimes of passion looms as a great worry. But here is
where well-thought-out regulation can play a part. Taking courses in the proper
and safe use, transport and storage of firearms can go a long way to keeping
accidents, etc., down. Waiting periods and qualifications for licensing for each
type of weapon are in order.
As for training in gun use and gun safety, the dreaded National Rifle
Association has actually been in the lead on safety and proper use of firearms.
Their image has been besmirched, probably unjustly, by zealotry in the ranks
(and in management), which gave the appearance at times of wanting 9-year-olds
to be able to walk into a gun shop and buy armor-piercing bullets. This was
nonsense, and the organization is not as irresponsible as many think. (This
statement is a little like George Bernard Shaw's when he was a music critic and
said "Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds."). But in fairness,
the NRA has a point about the inadvisability of simply taking guns away from the
populace. If that were possible, it would not disarm that small percentage of
the populace willing to break the law, and the social environment. It would, in
effect, disarm the honest bulk of the population.
A narrow 1986 study, appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine stated
that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an
intruder. A breakdown of that number is instructive: First of all, 37 of those
43 deaths are suicides. And banning guns does not ban suicide. When Canada
enacted strict gun controls in 1976 psychiatrists noticed that jumping off
bridges replaced suicides previously committed with guns. In Japan, where they
have tried to ban all guns, the suicide rate is consistently and dramatically
higher than here in the U.S.
And home defense by force of arms is not simply a matter of shooting intruders.
There are cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by
the use or display of a firearm, and cases in which would-be intruders may have
purposely avoided a house known to be armed.
By and large, burglars, robbers, and muggers use guns because they assume their
victims are unarmed and afraid of guns. They want control. They do not seek to
have a shoot-out with their victims. Training in gun use deals with when to
display a firearm and when to turn over your cash and jewelry.
The total number of deaths attributed to firearms is between 25,000 and 30,000 a
year. This includes suicides, homicides, the so-called justifiable homicides
(mostly self-defense) and accidents. Even at the 30,000 figure it is far less
than are killed by automobiles. Would we be justified in seeking to ban
automobiles? American adults use many things that are dangerous, and we live
with the risks.
Most of America's 65 million gun owners collect and use their firearms
responsibly. Punishing people who obey the law is backward thinking.
It's true that there are many armed crimes in this country, but our collective
delusion about firearms, obscures the real reason for almost all of that crime.
It is the so-called War on Drugs, recently again called a failure by legislators
who see the folly of our policy. Having abandoned our jurisdiction by putting
drug traffic outside the law--outlawing substances that can be abused--we have
created a situation where gang members and drug dealers buy guns on a black
market where guns are cheap, untraceable and require no waiting period, and then
overflow onto the streets and show up in the hands of school-children.
We need to get that straightened out. In the meantime, let's not commit the
folly of prohibition on yet another dangerous thing. We did it with liquor, and
things got better when we woke up and brought liquor under the law and got rid
of prohibition. We may yet display some common sense in the drug problem by
replacing prohibition with regulation, and we have time to avoid the mistake
with guns.
- Hugh Downs, ABC Reporter, in a 1995 Editorial