COLUMN: Who or What Kills People?

From Andrew Wanliss-Orlebar's "Think or Thwim," Winter '94 From Andrew Wanliss-Orlebar's "Think or Thwim," Winter '94So guns don't kill people. Well, people with guns kill over twelve thousand people a year in the United States. It is certainly true that I have yet to see an M-11 get up on its barrel and start showering bullets but the catch in this nifty National Rifle Association slogan is that it fails to make association between the availability of guns and the amount of victims that are killed by "people". Surely it is no mystery that if guns are around and legally sold (in a booming market), people will be killed; short of being Bruce Lee, it is fairly difficult to massacre a whole Californian classroom or transform that 5:33 LIRR train into a mobile morgue unless one has a potent weapon. Taking guns away from people won't make anyone less likely to get angry, but it certainly makes it considerably less likely that others will lose their life in the process. These weapons are, however, available to all, including children and teenagers. In fact, sixty percent of students interviewed in a survey of high schools said they knew exactly where to get a gun if they needed one. With the popularity of the "real" video shoot-out game in Houston Hall, one can only imagine how much more thrilling real life fights might seem for teenagers who measure power by the capacity of a gun magazine. It should be a surprise to no one then that students are held up by armed ten year-olds outside Houston Hall in mid-afternoon. As important as it may be for citizens to be protected, the free sale of constantly improved killing machines is only making more vulnerable those who had until now always been the most protected in this society, the young. One has to believe that the twentieth century has invented no better form of entertainment than putting holes in little cardboard squares and occasionally going for real flesh. One has to believe that life is out of fashion, that keeping your VCR is more important than keeping someone alive. It seems rather hard to conceive that anything could be placed above a human life. Life itself is the premise to any further reasoning, or to anything at all for that matter. The fact is politicians are haggling about how many days of waiting should be required to buy a gun. How seriously can we take the claims of people crying about the violation of their constitutional rights because they can now only purchase fifty-two guns a year? Handgun possession should be banned. Now. There are of course some arguments to raise in opposition. How are good, honest citizens supposed to defend themselves? Many people claim they have guns to fill-in for an ineffective police. But this is not a case of taking the law into one's hands. When law-abiding citizens kill in self-defense they are pushing the very boundaries of the laws they pledge to abide by. With the recurrence of late night accidental murders of husbands and wives walking about the house, you might well ask who the good citizens are defending themselves against. As for fighting back, that is usually the one course of action that the police advise not to take. Other countries seem to be doing just fine without thousands of youths ambling the streets with sawn-off shotguns. There were 26 handgun murders in Great Britain in 1992. As long as the N.R.A. continues to advocate to a frightened and impressionable America that guns are the only way to be protected from crime, the ongoing disintegration of communities and perhaps this society as a whole will only get worse. As it is, we seem to be returning to some kind of Wild West. I was inclined to think that we had come rather a long way since those days when carrying a gun might actually have been necessary. Nothing that kills over ten thousand people a year can be called necessary and it should not take a wheelchaired White House press secretary for anyone to work that out. Nothing that kills over ten thousand people a year can be legitimately defended by any political lobby. If this crisis is to generate any kind of political action, it should come in the form of emergency measures from the government rather than the helpless and disparate efforts of distraught communities. Of course, as much as the latest wave has brought the suggestion of regulation to the mouths of many, most Americans are opposed to a complete ban on handguns. Some claim it is unconstitutional. It is simply nonsensical though to let this massacre continue. The law must go through, popular or not, or we shall have to consider that laws can only be passed if they reflect exactly what people want and do. And, after all, people do kill people. Andrew Wanliss-Orlebar is a senior Communications major from Paris, France. Think or Thwim appears alternate Tuesdays.