Born in the USA: Bang, Bang, You're Dead

A day after a wacko with a small arsenal of firearms slaughtered five girls and critically wounded five others in a one-room Amish school house in southeastern Pennsylvania, it was business as usual in the state's capital and elsewhere in gun-addicted America.

In a series of votes, Pennsylvania lawmakers meeting in a special session to ostensibly deal with an upsurge in violence in the commonwealth’s cities, voted down a series of bills to toughen Pennsylvania’s lamentably lax gun laws.

It is probable that no gun law would have prevented Charles Carl Roberts’ rampage on Tuesday near Nickel Mines in Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

Although it is easy to buy every weapon in Roberts’ arsenal – from a 9 millimeter handgun to a 12-guage shotgun -- in Pennsylvania and most other states, Roberts had no criminal record that might have alerted authorities to him. And as experience shows, head cases like him have a way of getting weapons no matter how tough local laws are.

That said, there is a correlation between the availability of guns in a given area and the amount of crime committed using them.

I noted that fact just the other day in an essay exploring why Philadelphia’s murder rate is so much higher than New York City’s.

After years of head banging by gun-control advocates on the federal, state and municipal level, the U.S. remains pretty much one big Wild West town when it comes to the sale, possession and use of guns.

Pro-gun advocates use the Second Amendment (*) to the U.S. Constitution as their fig leaf. What the Constitution doesn't say is that the rights of gun owners trump the rights of everyone else.

It is my view that for all intents and purposes, gun control is dead (pun intended) in America.

* * * * *

Reaction to the Harrisburg votes are a pretty good microcosm of what passes for a debate these days on gun control.

A hard heart by the name of Kim Stolfer, chairman of Firearms Owners Against Crime, hailed the nay votes as a victory for gun owners’ rights:

"I take this as a source of comfort that the legislators still have an open mind and will make decisions based on the facts and not on emotional hyperbole."

At the other end of the spectrum was state Representative Mike Gerber, a Democrat from a Philadelphia suburb, who drew a parallel between the Amish school killings and legislation he supported to limit handgun purchases:

"What if that perpetrator didn't have a gun? What would have happened? Would it have been as easy for him to kill? The obvious answer is no."

Well, maybe.

Even the most reasonable attempt to toughen Pennsylvania’s gun laws failed, a modest proposal to limit gun purchases to one a month. It crashed and burned by a 130-63 vote.

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It's been a while since any national story affected me as deeply as the Nickel Mines Massacre.

Three days later, I still find myself becoming teary eyed when I think of those young innocents, whose faith teaches them to turn the other check, but not to expect the violent world around them to beat a path to their school house door.

Besides which, I take the issue of gun control personal, as they say in Philadelphia street parlance, because I believe the proliferation of guns is a public-health emergency every bit as great as killer obesity or cancer.

The first time I was shot at was while covering the urban riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in April 1968. I got my gun ya-yas out in the Army. But I lived on a farm for many years, and having a gun was a neccessity. (Killing rabid raccoons, putting down sick animals, chasing off paramours lusting after the farmer's daughter. You get the idea.)

I also saw more than my share of what guns can do during a long career in big-city journalism, including what another wacko, John Hinckley, did to Jim Brady, an acquaintance and fellow baseball fanatic who took one for President Reagan. (My thoughts on Brady are here.)

Jim was the inspiration for the Brady Handgun Control Act, widely known as the Brady Bill, the only gun-control bill with any teeth to pass muster in Congress in forever.

Under the bill, prospective buyers of handguns were required to wait for five days and pass a criminal background check before a sale could be approved. Reagan remained close to Brady, but to the eternal shame of president and Republican Party, it was Bill Clinton who finally signed the Brady Bill in 1993.

The five-day waiting period expired in 1998 and was replaced by a computerized criminal background check prior to any firearm purchase from a dealer holding a Federal Firearms License (FFL). Dealers not FFL worthy can do as they please so long as they don’t violate state law, which in Pennsylvania is a joke.

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What do I mean when I say that gun control is dead in America?

Simply this:

In most civilized countries, packing heat is not a right and none of those countries have murder rates remotely as high as the U.S.

But there are many millions of guns out there, and there is no way that is going to change without an authoritarian government. Yes, the Bush administration would seem to qualify, but it is slavishly pro-gun. Oh, well.

It is my view that the National Rifle Association is a terrorist organization. Not as overtly so as Al Qaeda, but the NRA shares responsiblity for the slaughter from guns in America because of its extraordinary power and unflinching unwillingness to consider that the rights of gun owners occasionally have to be subsumed by others -- be they Amish schoolgirls in Pennsylvania, abused wives in rural Nebraska or neighborly folk minding their own business in East Los Angeles.

The only thing for sure is that the carnage will continue.

Guns and gun crime. They're as American as apple pie.

(*) ABOUT THAT SECOND AMENDMENT

The Second Amendment, which is part of the Bill of Rights, declares the necessity for "a well regulated militia" and prohibits infringement of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms."

There is little controversy over the milita provision, while the second provision is at the heart of the debate on gun control. Interpretation of this provision falls into two camps -- "collectivism" and "literal rights."

The collectivists argue that the right to keep and bear arms is held exclusively by members of the militia. If you're not a member of the militia then you're not protected by the Second Amendment.

The individual rights crowd, which has prevailed in most recent court decisions, says the amendment doesn't impose any conditions on who has a right to keep and bear arms for the purposes of self-defense, hunting or any other use. This presumably includes cold-blooded murder.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Brazil has the most gun deaths per capita of any nation. When a referendum on a nationwide gun ban was put on the ballot on 2004, the National Rifle Association and other big money pro-gun groups stepped in and orchestrated a successful scare campaign implying that the government could take away weapons. In fact, Brazilians have no constitutional right to bear arms.