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By Root 1070 0

laws can reduce the incidence of impulsive teenage suicides. The right laws can limit the firepower of street guns and undoubtedly save the lives of a few innocent bystanders. The right laws, moreover, can give even gun buffs a greater appreciation of the dangers inherent in the weapons they buy and demonstrate society’s conviction that owning a gun imparts a monumental responsibility to the owner. The right laws could at last bring firearms into the twentieth century in terms of consumer-product safety. Who knows, someday our firearms manufacturers, so adept at devising ever more lethal weapons and ammunition, may even come up with a childproof gun. My Cuisinart food processor can’t be started without first taking a series of deliberate steps; how nice if the same could be said for the guns sold now to women and men for self-defense. Toughening the buying of a gun will not harm responsible users any more than toughening the licensing of hunters and boaters has harmed them. If anything, toughening the process will improve the fast-diminishing reputation of shooters, dealers, and manufacturers alike by reducing the “gun-nut” aura that now taints even those good souls who take pride in improving their marksmanship or who live in such desperate neighborhoods that gun ownership really is their only hope of self-defense.

Most important, toughening the process will staunch the free flow of weapons to the bad guys and others who simply should not own guns. Sure, some will acquire guns through burglary just as they do now. Others will drive trucks through the front walls of gun dealerships. And no matter how strict dealer licensing is, there will always be renegade dealers willing to sell guns into the black market. Likewise, there will always be gun manufacturers who tailor their designs deliberately to the demands of felons. But street crime typically is a crime of opportunity. So too is juvenile homicide. Kids have always fought and will forever do so, but the ready acquisition of guns by kids is a new phenomenon. Even our increasing suicide rate, according to the studies I cited earlier, may be associated with too-ready access to guns, allowing the despondent to blow their brains out upon the least dark whim.

The firearms industry has resisted regulation, disavowing any responsibility for the widespread costs and harm produced by its wares. But then, it has always been adept at ignoring the paradoxes inherent in the production and marketing of weapons. It develops ever more lethal weapons while at the same time insisting that guns are not inherently dangerous. It claims the moral high ground by describing its wares as tools of salvation for those afraid to leave their homes, but somehow deftly manages to sidestep the fact that one reason most of us are afraid to venture forth is that someone with the same gun is going to leap out from behind a bush and shove the barrel down our throats. And that’s if we are lucky enough to encounter the old-fashioned crook who merely wants our money, not the snappy new model who likes to sneak up behind us and put a bullet in our brains so he can use our credit cards for a couple of hours without fear of interception.

The NRA’s greatest coup has been in constantly bleating that gun controls cannot and will not work, while working feverishly to ensure that indeed whatever regulations are enacted are so full of exceptions and gifts to the downtrodden dealers and manufacturers that they could not possibly have an impact. Notice, please, that wherever possible in this book I have avoided using the phrase gun control, a term the NRA has conflated with paranoid visions of jack-booted agents kicking down the doors of honest gun owners.

If one parts the curtain hung by the NRA, one sees that in fact firearms regulations can and do work, when given half a chance.

South Carolina, as I mentioned earlier, was a primary source of crime guns seized in the Northeast until it passed the nation’s first law limiting sales of handguns to one a month. It quickly fell to the bottom of ATF’s list of states feeding