Samuel C. Damren
As a former prosecutor, I side with the vast majority of American police chiefs that support stricter gun control laws, including an assault weapons ban. My personal support is of little notice to the national debate. However, a critical analysis of recent arguments by an entrenched gun lobby might be of value.
Anti-gun control ideologues recently asserted that as opposed to banning assault styled weapons, such as the Bushmaster ACR (Adaptive Combat Rifle, if you didn’t know the acronym), we should instead require school principals to maintain them in their offices to protect school children. The criminal justice community roll their eyes at this scenario. Let me point out a few reasons why. First, let’s assess logistics. Where is the principal’s office? How far is it from each classroom? Is the principal always in the office? Is the principal’s weapon under lock and key, or does the principal habitually have it slung over his or her shoulder?
Second, assuming the principal can get to the class with a loaded Bushmaster ACR in time to save lives, let’s next handicap the chances for a favorable outcome. How good a shot is the principal? How good a shot is the “bad guy?” How close are students to the “bad guy” when the firefight starts? Does the principal have experience shooting an Adaptive Combat Rifle at someone who is shooting back? What happens if the “bad guy” holds a gun to a kid’s head and demands that the principal drop the Bushmaster ACR? What happens if the “bad guy” wins the firefight instead of the principal?
Third, for those schools where no “bad guy” is on campus killing children, what are the risks to schoolchildren, teachers and others who would be associated with the every day storage and carrying of Bushmaster ACRs by thousands of school principals across America? Merely to ask this question, answers it.
We should recognize this “hero with a machine gun” scenario for what it is. It is a juvenile male violence fantasy promoted by men who long ago should have let go of such grotesquerie. Adolescent visions of “Rambo Diehard Commandos to the rescue” have no place in a serious discussion of gun control.
Another recent argument focuses on methods to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. You can almost see its proponents well up with joy over the prospects of the mental health community wringing their hands about intrusions into patient privacy. Or, about the inability of health care professionals to accurately predict, even from among those being treated for mental illness, who might show up next at a school with a gun. Spending time in those “rabbit holes” will delay and distract the national debate. Just what the entrenched gun lobby wants. But, since the issue has been raised, there is an overlap of mental health issues and the American culture of easy access to firearms worthy of attention in this debate: suicide. Last year, 38,000 Americans committed suicide; 19,000 used firearms.
Easy access to guns is a major contributor to these shocking figures. That is because unlike other methods of suicide where victims often attempt, fail and then have a chance to seek help, suicides with a gun are 99percent effective on the first try. Gun suicides generally occur at night with the victim alone in despair, but with a firearm in reach to end life in an instant of impulse that they can’t take back. The guns are usually found in the home, whether or not owned by the victim.
Any serious discussion over gun control must also include an assessment of whether owning a gun actually makes a family safer or places family members at greater risk. 19,000 families in America probably feel otherwise this year than they did last year about their previous calculation of this risk. But, like the gun suicide victims, they can’t take it back.
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Samuel C. Damren is a Detroit lawyer. He was an assistant Wayne County Prosecutor from 1975–78 and an assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 1978-81.
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