Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [15]
It is a tantalizing fantasy. Who among us hasn’t imagined walking down a dark street, being accosted by a bad guy, and reveling in his surprise as we draw our Dirty Harry Model 29s and blow him away? The myth of self-defense depicts the gun as a foolproof talisman capable of warding off trouble and restoring peace of mind.
But armed self-defense is a far more problematic venture than Quigley and the gun culture would have us all believe.
The NRA’s 911 tape, played by Quigley, was indeed powerful, so compelling the NRA played it at its 1993 annual meeting in Nashville. There is another tape, however, that Quigley could have played just as readily. It is the 911 recording of a ten-year-old Florida boy, Sean Smith, who called the emergency line just after shooting his eight-year-old sister. At first his voice is soft; he pleads for understanding. He could be any little boy trying to explain a breach of household rules.
“I didn’t know my dad’s gun was loaded,” he says.
“Okay,” the operator says.
“And I shot her.” The boy’s voice wavers. “I didn’t mean to. She’s dead.”
Even the dispatcher is startled. He snaps, “She’s dead?”
The boy loses all composure now. “Yes,” he cries, “please, get my mom and dad. Oh my God!”
The act of owning a gun for self-defense forces the gun owner to confront a paradox central to such ownership: to be truly useful for self-defense, a gun must be kept loaded and readily accessible at all times. “In other words,” Quigley wrote in her book, “an unloaded gun that is perfectly safe is perfectly useless.”
But a gun that is accessible to the parent is, by definition, just as accessible to the parent’s children or anyone else who visits the home, be it a jealous boyfriend or drunken spouse. Researchers fear the gun industry’s strategy of pitching handguns to women, particularly professional women and single mothers, will only heighten the risk to children. Even Quigley argues that certain households should not have guns, in particular those with a member who is alcoholic, takes antidepression drugs, or is prone to extreme bursts of temper—a sizable portion of the U.S. population. “If you have children at home,” she warned the Gainesville class, “really think about whether you should have a gun.”
Inherent in this last warning was the notion that women who did not have children should feel free to buy a gun. The warning, however, ignores the potential for collateral disaster that always exists in the presence of a gun. Women who live alone may have nieces, nephews, and grandchildren; their neighbors, friends, and lovers may have kids; the women may teach grade school, operate day-care centers, or baby-sit for friends, sisters, cousins, and colleagues. A study of accidental shooting deaths of children in California highlighted how a momentary lapse of vigilance by gun owners could quickly lead to tragedy, even in households that treated guns with exemplary care. In one case, the study reported, a six-year-old boy shot himself in the head with a handgun he found “in the purse of a houseguest.”
It is widely thought that Sarah Brady, chairperson of Handgun Control Inc., began her crusade against guns immediately after her husband, Jim Brady, was permanently injured in John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. In fact, she told a writer for the New York Times Magazine, the pivotal moment came later, in 1985, when her five-year-old son found a .22 handgun in a pickup owned by a family friend and pointed it at her. At first Brady thought it was a toy, then saw it was real and loaded.
Parents, however, seem all too willing to ignore the risks and to assume that their own kids are responsible enough to recognize the harm guns can do and to learn to “respect” them. A June 1993 Louis Harris survey, also conducted for the Harvard University School of Public Health, found that only 43 percent of parents who owned guns kept those guns under lock and key. Another study found that 10 percent of America’s armed parents