THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503040650
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 130 lines
I own a handgun and I know how to use it, which, I suppose, makes me something of a minority among modern-day newspaper reporters.
Mine is a Walther PPK/S .380 semiautomatic. I keep it in a box on a night stand in my bedroom, well-oiled and loaded, seven rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. The slide is racked, but the safety is on.
I keep it in this condition - there are no children in my home - because if somebody comes up the steps from my living room in the dead of night, intent on doing harm, I don't want to be fumbling around trying to load it. You can jam a semiautomatic if you're shaky while you're loading it and racking the slide, and I suppose I'd be pretty nervous if I was about to shoot somebody. (I've never shot at anybody, but I've been shot at. I think the two actions would be equally frightening. I know I was frightened to death when I was fired upon by a man who'd lost his temper and had a gun handy. I was young then, and could duck faster than he could aim.)
But if I were certain that the intruder in my home was a foe, I would not hesitate to shoot.
All this ugly bravado is a way of giving myself license to say that the General Assembly's decision to allow just about any adult Virginian to walk around packing a concealed weapon is sad and shameful. The law, as rewritten by our honorables, would require judges to grant a concealed-weapon permit to virtually any adult who has not been convicted of a felony or treated recently for mental illness. It is supported by a governor whose office is decorated in pelts, hooves and antlers.
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Gun control ranks with abortion and affirmative action among the most volatile of public issues. The voices on both sides are so strident that all logic is lost in each side's effort to outshout the other.
If the most strident of gun-control advocates were to prevail, I would be proscribed from keeping that loaded Walther in my bedroom. If the most strident of gun advocates are to be believed, we will somehow curb gun violence in our society by allowing thousands of people to walk around with loaded handguns in their pockets.
H.L. Mencken once wrote, ``For every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's usually wrong.'' That seems to fit here. Saying you can curb gun violence by letting more people carry guns is like saying that the best way to fight a fire in your kitchen is to set fire to your garage.
The editor who asked me to write this piece encouraged me to ``put some numbers in it,'' certain that statistics would lend authority to the argument. Not so in this case. The numbers are well known by both sides; each has been shredding the other's statistics for years, and no one entrenched on either side will be swayed.
Gun-control activists point to dismal murder statistics in pushing for the strongest of controls. The truth is there are more bad people carrying guns than good people carrying them, and the good people seem eager to even the odds. But the question here is whether arming more good people will turn the tide of violence. I'm willing to bet my Walther that it won't.
The new law assumes that adults with no felony record are worthy risks for a concealed handgun. But consider this: A study of men charged with murder in New York City two years ago showed that 70 percent of them had no felony record at the time of their arrest. Each of them would have been legally entitled to pack a pistol in Virginia.
From the other side, pro-gunners tout a statistic that says 2 million Americans every year successfully use a gun to protect themselves from marauders. This number has been repeated so frequently that its origin is murky, although it is accepted as gospel.
If you play with that number on a calculator for a couple of minutes, it starts to unravel. If these incidents of successful defense occurred evenly across the population of the United States, then a region the size of Hampton Roads would have some 7,500 such cases a year, or about 20 a day. (Accept a U.S. population of 265 million and a regional population of roughly 1 million. If 2 million events occur, Hampton Roads would host 1/265th of them, or 7,547, or 20.67 per day.)
But we hear of only a handful of such cases. When they occur, they are news. If this happened 20 times a day, every day, every year, we would be awash in stories of victory over the criminal element. The darkest conspiracy thinkers will tell you that the liberal media is engaged in a cover-up here, unwilling to publicize the merits of weaponry.
Nothing would get between a reporter and a good story, though, and there are enough conservative publications and radio talk shows that these stories, if true, could not possibly be covered up. Twenty a day. Every day.
If neither side in this debate trusts the other's numbers, then the debate should fall back on common sense at some point - unless that point is the state Capitol, where common sense can be trammeled by anybody with a personal interest to protect and liberal access to campaign funds.
It would be common sense to suppose that if crime will be lessened by allowing everybody to carry a hidden gun, then police and prosecutors, who have a vested personal interest in reducing crime, would stand up and cheer. Instead, they have stood up and screamed bloody murder.
That puts gun owners in an awkward position, as we purport to support our local police, and our local police are nervous as hell at the prospect of thousands of wanna-be John Waynes walking around packing heat. Crime control, the cops believe, is no place for amateurs.
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The move to loosen Virginia's concealed-weapons law is a reaction to a legitimate complaint, that judges in some regions are too stingy in granting permits. There are citizens who have a legitimate reason to carry a concealed weapon, and a lot of them have been denied that right, according to news reports, for no good reason. But the General Assembly's reaction is, if you'll pardon the pun, overkill. Rather than work out a reasonable set of standards and force judges to abide by them, the legislature opted to drop standards altogether. It was a cheap capitulation to a whiny political pressure group.
It was surrender.
The law will make handguns more readily available in volatile situations that might otherwise fizzle with no harm done. Not long ago, in Virginia Beach, a man with no felony record - a righteous pistol-packer under the new law - got into a beef in a supermarket checkout line. He pulled a gun from his belt and blew away a guy who had done nothing more than crack a bad joke. Result: one man dead, another in prison.
It's hard to imagine that the situation would have been better had the victim, or other shoppers, been armed. Could one of them have out-drawn the attacker, Clint Eastwood-style? Would we have been better off having bullets flying from several directions at a crowded supermarket checkout?
The legislature's primary test - lack of a felony record - is no test at all of the temperament it takes to be a responsible gun owner.
Though my own temper has chilled considerably with age, it still crawls out of its box from time to time. There have been a moment or two in my life that I fear what might have happened had my gun been in my jacket and not at home in my bedroom.
The Walther should not be a handy way to settle a heated argument or chase off a petty thief; it should remain a last line of defense when there's no place to run, no place left to hide.
That's why it's staying at home on the night stand, where it belongs. ILLUSTRATION: JOHN CORBITT/Staff
by CNB