After the Marysville-Pilchuk school shooting last week, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat wrote a column calling for criminal penalties for adult gun owners who leave a gun unsecured, if a child under sixteen harms someone with the gun.
Of course he caused a storm of emotion on both “sides” of the gun argument. This morning there are 559 comments on his article, most passionate, angry and one-sided.
Each time a child finds a gun and shoots someone, whether accidentally or intentionally, both sides go to the media and yell at each other. The gun rights camp usually argues that responsible gun owners don’t leave their guns around, their kids know damn well not to touch them without adult supervision and the real crime would be punishing responsible gun owners for the stupidity of a few bad parents. The gun safety crowd has multiple arguments about sensible regulation, which boil down to “…if one person can be saved by a new law, it will be worth it.”
It’s hard to know if one person can be saved by a change in the law. The gun lobby has effectively used this lack of certainty to argue that nothing should be done.
In my opinion, the decision to adopt reasonable regulation should be less about proof and statistics–which can be manipulated by both sides–and more about common sense and life experience.
My experience as a mom showed me that even the most ardent anti-gun parents can’t control what their children encounter. When our kids were little, there were no guns in our home and we gave plenty of lectures about gun safety. Imagine my surprise when I found a handgun on a closet shelf in my fourth-grader’s room. Turns out a little buddy of his snuck a BB gun into a backpack for a sleepover at our house and forgot to bring it home with him. As my parental inquiry went deeper, I learned that, unbeknownst to me, the kids had been shooting at boxes at the friend’s house during after-school play dates.
Boys, right?
Nope. Girls disobey their parents too. Kids get things in their heads that adults can’t predict or understand. And it doesn’t matter if you hate guns or own them.
I grew up in Montana, where everyone had guns. My dad and brother were hunters. There were rifles on racks in the basement and in my brother’s bedroom. My dad kept a gun in his bedside drawer, just in case. I remember waking up one night and seeing my dad creeping from one curtained window to another, peering into the darkness, gun pointed upwards as if he was ready to blow God out of the sky. My dad was a little paranoid.
One day when I was in fifth grade, I stayed home from school with a sore throat and fever. My mom had to go to work that morning, getting bills out for the family business. She gave me aspirin, a hot water bottle, and a pile of books, and told me to call if I needed anything.
By mid-morning I was growing restless, and the aspirin was wearing off. Just then I heard a soft knocking on our front door. Then it stopped. A few moments later it started again, louder this time.
Again and again, someone knocked on the door, stopped for awhile and then knocked again. There was no way to see who was at the door without being seen by the intruder. I imagined a one-legged killer, kicking the door with his bloody stump, then circling the house, looking for a way in before he resumed his incessant knocking.
I was hysterical with fear. I couldn’t use the phone because I thought the killer would overhear. I couldn’t leave the house. He was Out There. In desperation, I went to my father’s nightstand. I was under strict orders never to touch a gun under threat of the strap. But this was a decision between murder and a spanking. The choice was obvious.
I picked up the gun, which felt cold and ready to strike, like a rattlesnake. I positioned myself in the middle of the living room floor, where I had a view of our front and back doors, and where I couldn’t be seen from outside. I curled around the loaded gun and lay there, crying silently until I fell into a feverish sleep.
The sound of my mom’s car in the driveway woke me up. Quickly I put the gun back in the nightstand. I sobbed uncontrollably when she got into the house while she briskly put me to bed, with more aspirin and comforting hugs. She explained the knocking: our dog was sleeping on the front door mat. He had a good case of fleas and every time he scratched himself, his leg knocked against the door.
My parents never found out I had curled my eleven-year-old body around a loaded firearm and fallen asleep on the floor.
Whether you hate guns or you’re an enthusiast, you cannot predict what kids will do and you can’t know everything they’ve already done. No preparation, no house rules, and no law can prevent all tragedy.
To me, it seems the best we can do is have common-sense regulation on gun ownership and use, just as we do with cars. You can’t stop an unlicensed kid from driving (I did that too, a few years later, but the cops pulled me over before I killed someone.) The crucial point is that the law regulates cars and drivers but doesn’t prevent responsible, licensed drivers from driving. Society can step in before a tragedy occurs.
Sensible regulation won’t stop every gun crime or accident. But if we do nothing, nothing will change.
The background checks required by I-594 wouldn’t have stopped me from taking my dad’s gun, and it wouldn’t have stopped most of the recent mass shooters. But Westneat’s suggestion–which he says is the law in Texas–might go a long way in pushing adult gun owners to secure their guns, which could have prevented some school shootings, including the heartbreakingĀ 2012 shooting in Bremerton.
The most effective way to address the problem is to listen to each other, with a sincere interest in finding solutions—not simply yell talking points into cyberspace. I haven’t met anyone yet who is in favor of people getting injured or killed by guns, regardless of what “side” he or she is on. That is a crucial starting point if we’re ever going to do something about the increasing number of these tragedies.
In the meantime, I’m voting for I-594, and against I-591.
You make your usual rational, thoughtful, compassionate case for finding the middle ground we can all agree on. I voted the same way, for the same reasons. You gotta start somewhere.