Guns

V. From My Cold Dead Hands

When I think of the politically conservative gun enthusiasts who are opposed to any form of gun control, no matter how many innocents die in acts of gun violence, I remember something a Democratic member of the House of Representatives is reputed to have said about Gerald Ford: “If he saw a hungry child as he walked to work, he would give that child his bag lunch without hesitation, then go ahead and vote against school lunch subsidies without ever seeing the contradiction.”

Most anti-control firearms enthusiasts have similarly split personalities, and the slogan you sometimes see pasted to the bumpers of their station wagons, campers, and SUVs — YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS — does not make them bad people. It only makes them walking contradictions, and which of us does not have a few contradictions in our personalities?

Most Americans who insist upon their right to own as many guns (and of as many types) as they want see themselves as independent folk who stand on their own two feet; they may send food or clothes to the victims of a natural disaster, but they sure-God don’t want charity themselves. They are, by and large, decent citizens who help their neighbors, do volunteer work in the community, and would not hesitate to stop and help a stranger broke down by the side of the road. They are more apt to vote for increasing law enforcement funds than they are for increasing school improvement funds, reasoning (and not without some logic) that keeping kids safe is more important than getting them new desks. They have no problem with drug and alcohol recovery centers … as long as they are in someone else’s neighborhood. They can weep for the dead children and bereft parents of Sandy Hook, then wipe their eyes and write their congressmen and women about the importance of preserving the right to bear arms.

They declare they must keep those arms — not excluding those of the semi-automatic type — for home defense. They’re plenty worried about home defense. They see the world as a fundamentally dangerous place and their homes as castles that crazy people of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre type may try to invade at any time. Ask them if they have ever actually been a victim of a home invasion, and most will say no. And yet all of them know of someone who has been thus victimized. If only they’d had a gun, they’re apt to mourn.

Sometimes they do. In late 1959, two drifters, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, invaded the Kansas home of farmer Herbert Clutter, looking for money they believed Clutter kept in a safe. They killed Clutter, his wife, and the two Clutter children still living at home. Clutter had guns, but was unable to get to them; so far as we know, he never even tried. Most home invasion victims with arms find themselves in Herbert Clutter’s position: surprised and overwhelmed. Unless you sleep with your .45 auto fully loaded and under your pillow, you’re apt to find yourself in the same position if the bad guys ever should show up in your bedroom, enquiring as to the location of your safe.

I guess the question is, how paranoid do you want to be? How many guns does it take to make you feel safe? And how do you simultaneously keep them loaded and close at hand, but still out of reach of your inquisitive children or grandchildren? Are you sure you wouldn’t do better with a really good burglar alarm? It’s true you have to remember to set the darn thing before you go to bed, but think of this — if you happened to mistake your wife or live-in partner for a crazed drug addict, you couldn’t shoot her with a burglar alarm.

Exactly this sort of accident took the life of Sacramento resident Desire Miller in October 2012, when she was mistaken for a home invader by her boyfriend and fatally shot in the stomach. In the same month, retired Chicago policeman James Griffith mistook his son Michael for a burglar and killed him with a shot to the head. In New Orleans, a month earlier, Charles Williams was shot to death by his wife, who mistook him for a burglar.

These are three of hundreds in the last four years.

Those who stand firmly, even hysterically, against any kind of gun control love their neighbors and their communities, but harbor a distrust of the federal government so deep it borders on paranoia (and in some cases passes that border without so much as a howdy-do at the checkpoint). They see any control at all imposed on the sale and possession of firearms as the first move in a sinister plot to disarm the American public and render it defenseless to a government takeover; accidental shooting deaths, they argue, are just part of the price we pay for freedom … and besides, that sort of thing would never happen to me; I’m too cool-headed. These guys and gals actually believe that dictatorship will follow disarmament, with tanks in the streets of Topeka and armed security guards in metro airports. (Oops, forgot — we already have those, and most gun advocates are in favor.) “Take away the people’s right to bear arms and totalitarianism follows!” these Jeremiahs cry. “Look what happened in Germany!”

No, no, no, no.

It’s true there were strict gun laws in Germany immediately following the end of World War I because, ahem, they lost. German gun laws had been relaxed considerably ten years after the war ended. By 1938, when Hitler was riding high, those laws were pretty much the same as American gun laws today (although I will admit American gun laws vary wildly from state to state): you needed a permit to acquire and carry a handgun, but you could have as many rifles as you wanted. Unless you were a Jew, of course, but that was the annoying thing about the Nazis, wasn’t it? They killed lots of Jews, and they didn’t need restrictive gun legislation to do it; it was the government that armed the killers.

Guys, gals, now hear this: No one wants to take away your hunting rifles. No one wants to take away your shotguns. No one wants to take away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as long as said pistols hold no more than ten rounds. If you can’t kill a home invader (or your wife, up in the middle of the night to get a snack from the fridge) with ten shots, you need to go back to the local shooting range.

Men (it’s always men) who go postal and take out as many innocents as they can may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. They don’t arrive at the scenes of their proposed slaughters armed with single-shot .22s or old-style six-round revolvers of the sort Jimmy Cagney was waving around at the end of Public Enemy; they bring heavy artillery to the gig. Some back down, but when they don’t, carnage follows, the kind that gives cops and EMTs nightmares for years afterward. One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander’s last meal.

Jeff Cox — one of those who had a moment of clarity and backed down — was carrying a .223 assault rifle, probably a Daewoo with a thirty-round capacity.

Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, carried a Glock 19 with a mag capacity of fifteen rounds. He had nineteen clips for it. In addition, he carried a Walther P22 with a ten-shot mag. In all, he was carrying four hundred rounds of ammo. He killed thirty-two students and wounded seventeen more before killing himself.

Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters, carried an Intratec DC9M machine-pistol, more commonly called a Tec-9. With an extended box-type magazine, the Tec-9 can fire up to fifty rounds without reloading. Harris and Klebold killed thirteen and wounded twenty-one.

Like Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner carried a Glock 19. He killed six, including a child of 9, and wounded fourteen. According to one witness to the event that seriously wounded Congressman Gabby Giffords, Loughner was able to fire so fast that the killing was over before many of the horrified onlookers realized what was happening and opened their mouths to scream.

James Holmes, who killed twelve and wounded fifty-eight in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, was carrying an M-16 rifle (thirty-round capacity) and a .40 caliber Glock, with a clip that can hold up to seventeen rounds.

In addition to the Glock 10 Adam Lanza used to kill himself, he carried a Bushmaster AR-15, a light, easily handled, pistol-gripped semiautomatic rifle that can fire thirty rounds in under a minute. In his war against the first grade, Lanza fired multiple thirty-round clips.

As for the Glock: it was pried from his cold dead hands.