Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 13, 1993 TAG: 9403180044
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EDWARD H. PEEPLES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
These vehicles were lightweight and traveled at little more than 15 miles per hour, producing perhaps some unwanted noise, smoke and distraction. But because they were so few in number and their mass so limited, at first they were seen as posing no real problems for the life and things in their path.
But as years passed and these iron buggies got bigger, faster and much more numerous, the curiosity and amusement devolved into annoyance and fright. They were crashing into fences, knocking over gas lamps, scattering the chickens, stampeding the cow, smashing into each other, and mowing down dogs and pedestrians alike.
As a consequence, the states came to view the systematic nationwide registration and regulation of autos and drivers as essential measures to preserve life, limb, property and the public order.
Each state instituted a labyrinth of laws governing who could own or operate a motor vehicle; how the car could be sold or ownership or possession changed; what mechanical condition it must be in; where, how and at what times it could be operated or parked; who would assume financial and other responsibilities when the vehicle figured in death, personal injury or property loss; and how severe would be the penalties for failing to heed these laws or lying about required information.
They even went so far as to mandate that each car have its own unique identification number displayed prominently, and that the operator be able to immediately produce evidence of driving competence, mechanical soundness of the machine and ability to face disasters involving the vehicle.
While there was some protest against this encroachment on the "freedom" of unrestricted ownership, operation and sale of these machines, we now take for granted the trade-off between strict regulation and the prospect of facing a motor vehicle free-for-all on the nation's roadways.
Today we are at the place with firearms where we were at the beginning of the century with autos. Guns, through homicide, suicide and accidents, now kill and injure a number that exceeds the magnitude of motor-vehicle crash victims. And like autos many years ago, the number of guns, their increasing capacity for mass mutilation and the dramatic escalation in their deliberate misuse, create a whole new peril for American life.
But unlike automobiles, firearms have another whole dimension of destruction beyond their direct ability to kill and maim. They create a ubiquitous epiphenomenon of terror and intimidation. This pervasive anxiety about guns at every turn results in direct restrictions on our freedom of movement, increases our taxes, lessens our property values, erodes confidence in our commerce, and leaves us with a sickening sense of impotency about controlling our lives and the future of our communities.
Hence, we have arrived at the time where it is imperative, perhaps even essential to save our civilization, that we create a thoughtful weave of laws and regulations that preserve some firearm ownership and use for those who obey the law, but collars offenders, if not on the first prohibition, then on the next.
We are not speaking here of a just few piecemeal remedies, such as adding a few days wait for a search in some limited local or regional data base, after which the law is trashed for failing to prevent some given murder. We are talking about implementing a comprehensive national system that addresses gun distribution at each and every point where a gun changes hands. We want a thicket of criminal and liability laws that hang over gun offenders for every imaginable aspect of firearm and ammunition sales, possession and use.
As for sportsmen and collectors, they are going to have to help us.
Whatever right to gun ownership and use that once may have been claimed as absolute is now in direct conflict with the greater public good. Few of us are any longer willing to subsidize the macabre hobby of the few with the tens of thousands of deaths and mutilations each year, the reign of fear, the ravaging of our economy, and the numbing river of heartbreak brought on by America's 200 million guns sitting around like they were just so many after dinner mints.
Possessing and using a firearm is now, more clearly than ever before, a privilege in which the state and the general public has a monumental stake - not unlike the one that arose over the emergence of automobiles some eight decades ago. The gun traffic we see in our country today is a menace to our national security greater than any ever posed by our most powerful foreign enemies.
We as a public have the fundamental right to know where every gun is located in the United States, what kind of person owns or possesses it, and who will be responsible for the consequences when it is misused. If owners or users can demonstrate that they are legitimate and they divulge accurately all information which is needed by the public to protect itself, then they will have nothing to worry about. But for those who refuse to comply with the public's right to freedom from private sources of armed terror and oppression, then enforcement should be as good as we can afford and the penalties should be severe, certain, uniform and swift.
Surely no one can argue anymore that motor vehicles are in need of more regulation than firearms. Our wide-open frontier past may have once allowed for a cult of gunslinging, but our crowded future leaves little room for any more stray bullets.
Edward H. Peeples is associate professor of preventive medicine at Medical College of Virginia and project director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Violence Prevention Project.
by CNB