Gun Violence

I HAVE NEVER owned a gun. I haven't fired a gun since I was a boy. Having a gun in my home would terrify me.I dislike guns, not just because of what they do to the people who get shot, but because of what they can do to the people who shoot them. At the same time, I have friends who own guns, and I can understand what motivates people to buy them. So, my views about guns and my emotions about people who own them are complicated.I've listened to my share of Second Amendment debates and, barring a new and insightful interpretation, I think the gun control folks have the better argument.

AS THE gun battles continue to rage in the schools, on the streets and in the fractious House of Representatives, something is missing.Amid all the emotional rancor, something has gotten lost in the controversy.In a bygone era, they used to call it horse sense. Today, in the absence of any sense whatsoever, all that's left is the artful dodge.Throughout the debate so far, reason has been trumped by strident hyperbole. But it need not be this way.It would be helpful to approach the issue of gun mortality from a more clinical perspective, taking a cue from the medical community, which deals with death and morbidity all the time.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Kicking off the biggest legal test yet for the gun industry, a lawyer for seven New York families shattered by violence delivered her opening statement here yesterday in a closely watched civil lawsuit against 30 of America's firearms manufacturers.Elisa Barnes, who operates from a cluttered Greenwich Village office, told a jury of 10 women and two men that gun makers have created a public nuisance nationwide by saturating some areas with more handguns than they can reasonably expect to sell to law-abiding purchasers.

This is an edited excerpt of an editorial from the San Francisco Examiner, which was published Friday.THE SPECTER of a federal lawsuit should help turn up the heat on the gun industry to adhere to responsible manufacturing and distribution practices.A growing group of cities has been building a good case for a lawsuit that alleges that elements within the gun industry are well aware that their business practices are encouraging the flow of guns to criminals.For example, gun manufacturers get around certain states' tough gun laws by saturating nearby markets with more permissive regulations or channeling weapons through the tough-to-track gun shows, telemarketers or so-called "kitchen-table dealers."

At least two states are strongly considering whether to file lawsuits against the nation's leading firearms manufacturers, a move that could bring the same legal firepower to the municipal war against handguns that is leading the fight against cigarettes.The attorneys general in New York and Connecticut have senior aides working on strategies and draft complaints that would seek to recover many of the medical costs of treating gunshot victims, according to interviews with one attorney general, gun industry sources, and lawyers in both states.

WASHINGTON -- While President Clinton was playing host at his conference on youth violence Monday, saying he and his guests were "not here to place blame, but to shoulder responsibility," the uninvited National Rifle Association was holding a news conference of its own several blocks away.Its executive director, Wayne LaPierre, did not mince words about the White House conference and the NRA's exclusion. He called talk about new legislation to curb gun ownership and use "dishonest" and "phony."

IT RAINED on Parris Glendening's parade last week; the governor can blame Attorney General J. Joseph Curran.Up until then, Mr. Glendening had been receiving waves of positive publicity for his proposal to require gun manufacturers to devise a new technology making it impossible for anyone to fire a handgun except the owner.It looked like a slam-dunk proposal -- even though the technology for making "smart" guns may be a few years off. On the scale of handgun legislation, this is a proposition gun lobbyists might grudgingly swallow in some amended form.

NEW crime reports from federal and Maryland authorities report encouraging reductions in some crimes, but not in Baltimore's continuing frenzy of gunplay. The random nature of the shooting means everyone -- not just criminals and drug users -- is at risk.As both candidates for mayor have said, crime drives residents and businesses from the city. David F. Tufaro, the Republican, and Councilman Martin O'Malley, the Democrat, disagree on how to combat the problem.But they don't dispute the problem's critical importance and persistence.

A group seen as Baltimore's next generation of hard-core criminals swaggered into a city elementary school rimmed with armed officers and quietly listened to an effort by police to use words to stop violence.The young men and handful of women, all convicted on drug and gun charges, went to the Wednesday night "gang call-in" because their parole terms required it. They sat in stoic silence, forbidden from talking or asking questions. They stared at mug shots of their friends.It was the third such session police have held since last year in different parts of the city -- one of several strategies they are trying to bring down a murder rate that made Baltimore one of the deadliest cities in the nation last year.

NEW YORK -- Joining a nationwide legal assault intended to strictly limit how guns are sold in America, the NAACP will announce today plans to file a federal lawsuit accusing dozens of handgun manufacturers and distributors of negligence.The lawsuit, which the NAACP expects to file in a Brooklyn, N.Y., court this week, would put the full force of the country's oldest and largest civil rights group behind a move to hold the gun industry accountable for crime.The suit follows the lead of 23 cities and counties -- including Chicago, San Francisco and Miami-Dade -- that have taken the gun industry to court.

Ten years ago this spring, two teenagers in Colorado gunned down fellow students and teachers in a killing spree that left 15 dead, 24 injured, and a nation horrified that such carnage could unfold at an American high school. In the decade since, there have been a million gun casualties in the United States. After the Columbine tragedy, I issued a report, "A Farewell to Arms," calling for the country finally to address gun violence head on. I recommended a number of measures: closing the gun show loophole, harnessing new technologies to make guns safer, allowing law enforcement to use body wires to catch straw purchasers, to name a few. I further proposed that while hunting and other recreational uses of firearms should remain unfettered, our long-term goal should be an end to unrestricted handgun ownership.

Gun enthusiasts feel a need to keep arguing for their right to bear as many firearms as possible when, as noted in this column recently, the battle is over, with the all-guns-at-all-costs crowd victorious. Their achievement is an estimated 280 million firearms in a nation of about 307 million people, a stunning ratio that guarantees continued gun violence well beyond the bloody spring we're having this year. That connection is what seems to set the enthusiasts off - that the all-guns-at-all-costs lobby is somehow responsible for all the American bloodshed.

Every so often I find myself stepping into the minefield that is public discussion of guns, gun violence, gun control and how these things relate to the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Because of misleading public statements by the president of the United States and his secretary of state, it's now time to do so again. President Barack Obama said on April 16 that 90 percent of Mexico's recovered crime guns came from the United States. The comment came during a joint press conference with Mexican President Felipe Calderon addressing the raging violence south of the border, as Mexican drug gangs battle each other and the government in gruesome fashion.

Americans have been killing each other for a long time - thousands upon thousands of men, women and children lying in the cold, cold ground from decades of homicidal violence, the bulk of it inflicted with guns. There are street killings here, bedroom killings there - single victims scattered across the daily news. (I saw my first victim 33 years ago this month, a woman shot to death by her estranged husband as she walked across a parking lot.) And then there are the mass killings, a squall of them this spring, with 57 dead within the last month or so, in a handful of incidents from California to New York.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon was back in Annapolis yesterday, trying to persuade legislators to tighten laws on illegal gun possession. Too often, she says, people convicted of possessing illegal guns spend little time in jail. A review of 2008 District Court cases by the mayor's staff found that judges gave suspended sentences to 86 percent of gun offenders who were convicted. That's not a punishment, it's a pass. What's more troubling is that many of these same offenders go on to commit more serious - and violent - crimes with a gun in hand.

Thousands of citizens in Baltimore and other American cities have died in recent years in an epidemic of gun violence. The contagion is carried by a flood of weapons, legal and illegal, that presents a frustrating challenge to police, prosecutors and politicians attempting to calm the cities. Yesterday, the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court significantly complicated that effort to control violence with a 5-4 decision that struck down a Washington, D.C., law that bans private ownership of handguns in that city.

It's often hard to know or predict how the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will vote on critical cases, but anyone concerned about the level of gun violence in America has to hope that a majority will uphold the reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that have long been in effect in Washington, D.C. Those restrictions - and a serious challenge to them - were the subject of a spirited debate before the court yesterday, with pointed questions directed...

When federal policy got in his way, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg found a way around it to combat illegal guns in his city. Mayor Sheila Dixon has learned a thing or two from Mr. Bloomberg. And now they're joining forces to better track the sources of illegal guns that drive much of the crime in their cities. It may seem like an odd pairing, but federal limitations on this critical data and the ease with which illegal guns move from state to state require a double-team approach. The cities would share gun trace information that is collected by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and that until last year had been closely held by the federal agency.

Mayors from as many as a dozen cities, including New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, will visit Baltimore today to discuss ways that cities can reduce crime by fighting the illegal gun trade. Combating illegal guns and arresting those who use them has become a defining theme of Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration in recent months, and the summit of city leaders, which will take place at City Hall, could solidify her credentials on the issue. Baltimore leaders are not expected to announce any major shift in policy today, but Dixon's administration already has been active on the issue.

Homicides increased in Baltimore and in many other parts of the state during 2007. Appropriately, Baltimore officials have made getting illegal guns off the streets a priority, and the city Police Department's Gun Task Force has been recovering guns from criminals and investigating people suspected of supplying guns to criminals. But these new efforts to hold gun traffickers accountable for supplying criminals with guns are being hampered by legal loopholes. These loopholes could be fixed easily with little cost to law-abiding gun owners.