For saving us from the gun. Nathan had been in day care at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, an outlying Los Angeles community, last Tuesday morning, when Buford O. Furrow Jr.–loner, hater, white supremacist–came through the front door. Armed, authorities say, with an Uzi (he had four other assault weapons back in his van), Furrow opened fire, spraying the day-care center’s lobby with 70 rounds. Five were wounded; as the gunman escaped, he used a Glock 9mm pistol to kill a letter carrier, 39-year-old Joseph Ileto. Once again, the nation asked why–why an armed man had brought sudden death to a place that ought to be safe.
At the end of the century ancient forces (hate, heartbreak, reversals of fortune, inexplicable demons) and newer ones (busy and broken families, Hollywood, the Internet, videogames and music) can, alone or in concert, produce explosions of violence. Few terrible acts like Furrow’s can be traced to a single cause, and as the body count mounts and the country tunes in to a depressing series of shootings-of-the-week, there is plenty of blame to go around. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, majorities blame poor parenting (57 percent) and violence in the media (52 percent). Seventy-two percent believe intense media coverage makes people feel more endangered than they really are. But from Littleton, Colo., to Atlanta to Granada Hills, there has been one common link in the chain of violence: firearms, which are growing ever more lethal.
Madmen will always do mad things; we can never legislate evil out of existence; people kill people with broomsticks and bombs and their bare hands. Yet the facts are inescapable: there are more than 200 million guns in circulation in the United States, and more than a third of American households have one. Though our gun-related death rate has been mercifully falling overall, we still lose an average of 87 people a day to firearms. We lead the industrialized world in the rate at which children die from guns. Three years from now, gunfire may surpass cars to become the leading cause of nonnatural death in the United States.
The debate over fire-arms has been polarized for too long. Millions of law-abiding people own and enjoy guns. But criminals and the disturbed and even confused kids often use firearms, too, to tragic and devastating effect. Reflexive liberals tend to want to ban all guns, and portray their owners as rednecks who don’t seem to care that gangbangers and hatemongers can get their hands on firepower. At the other extreme, entrenched gun lobbyists appear to believe that virtually any regulation is a threat to their constitutional rights. They fear, they say, an eventual “knock at the door” that will bring a government confiscation of their weapons.
America, or at least the sensible center where most of us stand, has had enough–of this senseless violence, and of this circular debate. For more than a generation, we’ve watched as the great and the pedestrian have died in the line of fire. Though it won’t do to act as though, in the emotional aftermath of yet another shooting, a sweeping ban or a single bill will keep more tragedies from happening, it also won’t do to shrug off the deadly role guns play.
So what must be done? It is time, as Franklin Roosevelt said long ago, to try something. The anti-gun movement must accept that the United States realistically will not, and should not have to, abolish handguns or any reasonable sporting weapon. At the same time, the pro-gun forces ought to acknowledge that the Second Amendment is not unconditional and be open to reasonable restrictions. If the warring camps can make that tentative peace, there may be a path out of this bewildering debate.
We must slow the flow of guns into a market that too often seems to serve criminals, who shouldn’t get guns, rather than hunters and hobbyists, who should. Those who cherish their firearms might consider judging every possible regulation by the following standard: is a loss of convenience, of privacy or of a category of gun worth the price if the reform has a chance of keeping a firearm away from somebody–a criminal, or maybe a kid–who shouldn’t have it?
It will be a difficult argument to win; guns are in our blood. For millions of us the whiff of cordite is intermingled with the smells of home and family: of hunting dove, ducks or deer. For others a pistol seems to offer security in a dangerous world. The roots of the culture run deep, back to the Bill of Rights. The Founders believed that the right to bear arms and to form grass-roots militias was a safeguard against another tyrannical government. Hence the Second Amendment: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It was the beginning of an undeniably romantic mythology. Militiamen and minutemen threw off the British yoke; the pioneers settled the frontier with long rifles, and the West was home to towering, gun-toting cowboys.
The truth, however, is more complicated. Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles has shown that from the Revolution to about 1850, no more than a tenth of the population owned guns. So how did guns seep into the culture? Samuel Colt and the Civil War. Colt was an impresario, targeting his company’s firearms at middle-class anxieties about self-defense by giving his guns names like “Equalizer.” Then came the real boom: Fort Sumter. Between 1861 and 1865, guns went into mass production, and both Union and Confederate soldiers kept their weapons after Appomattox. Suddenly there was widespread ownership, and an industry to feed a growing market. If we separate legend from history, guns can be seen not just as inviolate relics of the Revolution but as what they are: products.
And products are something we often need to regulate, be they cars, lawn mowers or pharmaceuticals. It’s time to apply consumer-product safety standards to firearms (Saturday-night specials, for example, ought to have to meet minimum safety requirements). We should always be wary of relying on government, but it’s reasonable to weigh the Second Amendment against the common good and risk more bureaucracy; even property owners have to submit to zoning. “No federal appellate court or the Supreme Court has ever ruled you can’t put some limits on the Second Amendment,” says Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center. Here are proposals that ought to be part of the debate. They are not exhaustive. But each has a reasonable chance of slowing the flow of guns from the law-abiding to the potentially dangerous.
Require background checks on all sales and transfers. The Brady bill requires an instant background check when someone purchases a firearm from a licensed dealer. The law has kept hundreds of thousands of felons and other prohibited purchasers (fugitives, those who were committed to a mental institution by a court, the military’s dishonorably discharged, those with a record of domestic abuse) from buying guns at a legitimate source. More can be done: the country needs to build a reliable database that won’t let felons slip through the system. It’s especially important to pay attention to the “secondary market,” that largely unregulated universe of private sales and gun shows, where, in many cases, guns change hands without a record. By some estimates 40 percent of American firearms transfers take place in the secondary market, and in virtually every state anyone can sell firearms at gun shows or flea markets without conducting a background check on the buyer. (The Glock Furrow used to kill the postal worker, for example, came from this netherworld.) All sales and transfers of guns should require a check. Will that keep one guy from swapping or selling with someone else off the books? No. But this would make it harder for the nefarious to obtain guns openly.
Enforce what’s on the books. Credit the National Rifle Association for pushing this common-sense solution. Born in Richmond, Va., Project Exile encourages police and prosecutors to strictly enforce federal gun laws. Among other things, it’s illegal to carry a gun when you’re in possession of drugs. But for years, authorities didn’t make such gun cases a priority. In Richmond, prosecutors started using these statutes, cracking down on people who are likely to use guns in a crime. It’s worked: Richmond has seized 512 guns and sent 215 violators to jail. Meanwhile, the homicide and robbery rates have fallen about 30 percent each.
Ban assault weapons–for real. We’ve been here before, and the lessons from that battle shed light on the tricky terrain ahead. The Uzi Furrow probably used in Granada Hills can no longer be legally imported to the United States, but was obviously available. Gun control wouldn’t have stopped him. Still, assault weapons have few sporting purposes. With their folding stocks and pistol grips, they resemble their military ancestors, which were designed to lay down a lot of ammunition very quickly over a small field of fire. In 1994, when the federal ban on assault weapons passed, many manufacturers slightly modified their models to get around the law and went back to market. Gun enthusiasts argue that this is cosmetic debate, that we want to ban guns that look sinister when all semiautomatics are deadly in the wrong hands. One answer is to follow California and ban the sale, manufacture and import of semiautomatics with the capacity to hold more than 10 rounds, and prohibit features–like high-capacity magazines, flash suppressors, bayonet lug nuts–that attract the criminal and the irresponsible.
License owners and register all guns. To ears unaccustomed to the nuances of the gun debate, this could sound innocuous, or at worst bureaucratic. But proposals to establish a gun registry, either state by state or nationally, raise gun owners’ most fundamental fears. Still, licensing could operate along the same lines as the DMV: to drive a car, you need to pass a minimal test. There are potential perils; authorities might be distant, or abusive, or inattentive. But licensing could improve gun safety, particularly for beginners.
Registration pushes the most buttons. The gun lobby says the government shouldn’t know who owns a firearm, and on Second Amendment grounds it has a point. Bill Clinton isn’t likely to confiscate guns, but some president in the distant future might. Still, all rights have to be balanced with the need for public order, and registration is one sure-fire way of shutting off a line of supply to criminals. Why? If all sales of firearms have to be logged in a registry, then the typical gun owner who gets his firearm legitimately knows the government has a record of his acquisition. He may then be much more careful about what happens to that gun for fear that crimes committed with it would bring the police to his door. Would it stop underground gun traffic altogether? No, and the NRA says the measure would create “massive civil disobedience.” But registration could help keep guns from slipping, through a careless private sale or swap, into a criminal’s grasp.
On the morning after the shootings in Granada Hills, parents of children at the day camp arrived early, determined not to flinch in the face of hate, or of guns. “We’re not going to let anyone scare us,” one father said. Bringing sanity to the gun wars, and safety to our schools and public places, will take the same flinty courage. The road will be rough and long, the battles pitched and confusing, the compromises difficult and costly. But let us begin.
