You're up, gun owners

There’s just too much left to say about the shooting a week ago this morning in Newtown, Conn., and it’s hard to know where to begin. After most mass shootings (and isn’t that a telling, sad thing to write), there are clearly drawn sides on either pole of the gun control debate. One tiny silver lining in the aftermath of this shooting has been that its severity, and particularly the targeting of small children, has seemingly prompted a more serious reflection. At least in my experience – I can’t tell you how may times in the last week I’ve heard my most conservative friends and co-workers complain that assault weapons are too easy to come by in the U.S. The normally silent majority finally seems to be willing to drown out the pontificating of our corporate lobby-funded elected officials to say that there IS a happy medium between you owning a rifle or handgun and some nutcase owning an assault rifle, and it’s high time we found it.

I feel like the people in charge of our public policy on this issue only acknowledge that there’s no one solution when they’re looking for an excuse not to do anything at all. As in, banning semi-auto weapons/X type of ammo/all guns EVER won’t stop criminals from getting their hands on illegal weapons, so let’s not make any new gun control laws at all. (Which is the equivalent of saying that we should do away with highway speed limits because of how I drive every morning.)

But in this case I think it’s become clear that preventing the next tragedy isn’t about making one single policy change. That’s not a cop-out. Connecticut has an assault weapons ban; Adam Lanza’s mother purchased her guns legally (thus becoming part of the statistic that gun owners risk being killed by their own weapons). While the U.S. far outpaces the rest of the world in firearm ownership, we’re not exactly the only place in the world where lots of people own guns. We’re looking at a health care system with fewer resources for the mentally ill, and a culture that offers too many role models to an angry, pathetic person who can only make a name for himself by hurting others.

“Guns” as a concept in and of themselves don’t automatically turn their owners into killers. But it’s also true that killers tend to go forguns. In 2007, over 31,000 people died from being shot, the majority being suicides – which still leaves about 11,000 gun-related homicides in the U.S. in any given year. Meanwhile, another 75,000+ are injured by guns, either deliberately or accidentally. By comparison, between 10,000 and 11,000 people die in car accidents caused by drunk drivers in the U.S. each year. Where’s the MADD-style public awareness campaign about the dangers of guns in the wrong hands?

Which brings me to what should be an obvious point: When I have a cold and want to buy too large a box of cold medicine, someone at the drug store takes down my personal information. They do this so that, if I go across town and try to buy another economy-size box of Sudafed, law enforcement will know about it. Ok, I have a “right” to buy a legal and regulated product, but thanks to the meth labs of the world I can no longer do so in unlimited quantities. I have to wear a seatbelt. But no one keeps track of how many bullets you buy online (like the Aurora shooter did). If I buy a beer for a 20-and-three-quarters year-old, I go to jail; if I buy an assault rifle for a 10-year-old, I’m cool.

Even in a free society, we take for granted that there are stupid, sometimes even evil people in the world and we have to work around them as best we can. Except when it comes to guns. Too many people are making too much money making gun ownership and use a “culture war” issue for us to be able to rely on our political leadership to ever tell us what we need to hear, vs. what we want to hear.

And I put the blame for that on the NRA, which today unleashed its “meaningful contribution” to the debate: putting armed guards in all schools pronto. (Oh, okay. We spent five years debating the 1994 assault weapons ban, but we should rush armed guards into kindergarten next week.) Never mind that an armed, trained guard at Columbine High barely slowed up those shooters. Never mind that communities across the U.S. can barely maintain the police forces they already have. Who’s going to pay for this isn’t the NRA’s concern. They haven’t been about policy, or about advocating for actual gun owners, for some time. Take a look at the donors to the NRA’s foundation. They exist to convince people to buy more guns and bullets, that’s all.

If the NRA actually cared about sustaining the tradition of responsible gun ownership in this country, they’d be doing everything possible to distance Adam Lanza and his ilk from the rural hunter who takes his kids out twice a year. They’d take a hard look at what happened to the tobaccoindustry, who dug in their heels until public opinion turned so violently against them that the largest companies were forced to pay hundreds of millions into a fund that, among other things, pays for those annoying “don’t smoke or you’ll die” TV commercials. It’s not going to take too many more days like last Friday to convince a critical mass of Americans that guns run amok are a public health issue.

Because the one thing that I haven’t heard said in the last week is this: while the mass shootings get the press because they’re so indiscriminate (the “it could happen to you” factor”), something like 80 Americans are killed by guns each day on average. That’s more than three Sandy Hooks every day. You just don’t hear about them.

So I have something to say to all the gun owners out there. You know who you are. You’re the ones whose instinctive response when you learn about 20 6-year-olds being mown down in their classroom is to run to Facebook to remind us that “guns don’t kill people! People kill people!!” If you want to make sure that your kids and grandkids can buy handguns or shotguns if they want, then it’s up to you to figure this out. Right now you’re not drawing any distinction between military-style guns and “cop-killer” bullets and that shotgun in my dad’s closet. There are weapons that civilians should have access to, and those that they shouldn’t.

So y’all figure this out. National registration database? Limit on bullet purchases? Close the gun-show loophole on background checks? Required training to buy weapons over a certain firing capacity? Annual licensure? It’s up to you at this point. But right now most Americans see you as the people who put your hobby above the lives of American children, and that means that your window to police your own community is closing. If you all don’t come up with a solution, then people who know less about your tools and how you use them will gladly do so – and you most likely won’t like the result.

What happened last week doesn’t happen outside America, at least not with the regularity it does here. We will always have disturbed, inadequate types who will lash out at others. But they don’t always have to have such easy access to weapons, any more than a meth cooker has unfettered access to cold meds. A change is coming, and the people who think of themselves as the good guys need to be leading the way – not fighting for the right of the next Lanza to kill.