Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [16]
Debbie Collins, a sixth-grade teacher who took Paxton Quigley’s course at the Cherokee Gun Club, has a daughter and a Smith & Wesson revolver (she doesn’t know the caliber). When we spoke late in 1992, her daughter was one and a half years old. Collins had been carrying a gun for about five years. During the workweek she locked her revolver in the glove compartment of her car in the school parking lot. While at home, she stored it loaded on top of the refrigerator. Her husband kept a loaded handgun at their bedside during the night.
Keeping her daughter safe from the family’s guns, Collins said, “is a real fear for me.” But Quigley’s course, she added, made her more confident. “I’m more aware now of where [the gun] is all the time. And making sure it’s in a safe place all the time.”
But would she always know exactly where it was?
“I’m sure gonna try. I can’t say that I’ll always, but since that course I’ve been very aware of it. I like to feel like I’ll always be aware of it.” Once, however, she left the gun in her car, with the car unlocked but in the garage. “That kind of frightened me.”
When her daughter is older, Collins said, “we’re going to take her out, show her how it works and what it can cause, and that way make her less curious about it—I think that’s why a lot of children use them, out of curiosity.” She thought she might follow Paxton Quigley’s suggestion of bringing along a melon to demonstrate the damage a handgun can do to the human head, an idea that evokes the practice sessions of the would-be assassin in Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal. In Armed & Female Quigley wrote, “Once a child understands how a gun operates and has heard the sound of a gunshot and witnessed the potential damage, he or she will have a different view of a gun and will gain respect for it.”
Dr. Kellermann, the Emory University researcher, called this idea “well-intended but hopelessly naive.” Parents overestimate the good sense of their children and their ability to resist outside pressures, he said. “Teaching a child respect for a gun doesn’t change the child’s willingness to use it if he’s depressed, if he just failed a test that he felt the rest of his life depended on, or just broke up with his girlfriend or he’s mad at his best friend. Tragedies of this kind are played out in this country on almost a daily basis.”
Others, however, including the NRA and Quigley, argue that the low annual death toll from accidental shootings proves how safe gun ownership is in America. A 1991 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that in 1988 there were 1,501 unintentional shooting deaths; 277 of the victims were children fifteen years old or younger. This is tragic, the gun camp concedes, but not a bad showing considering that half of America’s households are thought to possess one or more guns.
Proponents of this view neglect to mention the number of nonfatal injuries that occur in accidental shootings. The GAO began studying firearms accidents in order to gauge how many lives could be saved each year if guns were required by law to include loading indicators, magazine safeties, and other safety devices currently not routinely installed on guns. (A loading indicator provides a visual warning that a cartridge is positioned in front of the firing pin and ready to fire. A magazine safety disables an auto-loading pistol the moment you pull the ammunition magazine from the base of the grip. Mechanical logic might lead you to assume that when you remove the magazine from a pistol, you unload the gun and render it safe; in fact, a cartridge may be left in the chamber.) Faced with the dearth of information on nonfatal gunshot injuries, the GAO’s investigators