Guns (Kindle Single)

a crazed drug addict, you couldn’t shoot her with a burglar alarm.
    Exactly this sort of accident took the life of Sacramento
resident Desire Miller in October 2012, when she was mistaken for a home invader
by her boyfriend and fatally shot in the stomach. In the same month, retired
Chicago policeman James Griffith mistook his son Michael for a burglar and
killed him with a shot to the head. In New Orleans, a month earlier, Charles
Williams was shot to death by his wife, who mistook him for a burglar.
    These are three of hundreds in the last four years.
    Those who stand firmly, even hysterically, against any kind
of gun control love their neighbors and their communities, but harbor a
distrust of the federal government so deep it borders on paranoia (and in some
cases passes that border without so much as a howdy-do at the checkpoint). They
see any control at all imposed on the sale and possession of firearms as
the first move in a sinister plot to disarm the American public and render it
defenseless to a government takeover; accidental shooting deaths, they argue,
are just part of the price we pay for freedom … and besides, that sort of thing
would never happen to me; I’m too cool-headed. These guys and gals
actually believe that dictatorship will follow disarmament, with tanks in the
streets of Topeka and armed security guards in metro airports. (Oops, forgot —
we already have those, and most gun advocates are in favor.) “Take away the
people’s right to bear arms and totalitarianism follows!” these Jeremiahs cry.
“Look what happened in Germany!”
    No, no, no, no.
    It’s true there were strict gun laws in Germany immediately
following the end of World War I because, ahem, they lost . German gun
laws had been relaxed considerably ten years after the war ended. By 1938, when
Hitler was riding high, those laws were pretty much the same as American gun
laws today (although I will admit American gun laws vary wildly from state to
state): you needed a permit to acquire and carry a handgun, but you could have
as many rifles as you wanted. Unless you were a Jew, of course, but that was
the annoying thing about the Nazis, wasn’t it? They killed lots of Jews, and
they didn’t need restrictive gun legislation to do it; it was the government
that armed the killers.
    Guys, gals, now hear this: No one wants to take away your
hunting rifles. No one wants to take away your shotguns. No one wants to take
away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as
long as said pistols hold no more than ten rounds. If you can’t kill a home
invader (or your wife, up in the middle of the night to get a snack from the
fridge) with ten shots, you need to go back to the local shooting range.
    Men (it’s always men) who go postal and take out as many
innocents as they can may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. They
don’t arrive at the scenes of their proposed slaughters armed with single-shot
.22s or old-style six-round revolvers of the sort Jimmy Cagney was waving around
at the end of Public Enemy ; they bring heavy artillery to the gig. Some
back down, but when they don’t, carnage follows, the kind that gives cops and
EMTs nightmares for years afterward. One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA
board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would
be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood,
the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of
half-digested food that were some innocent bystander’s last meal.
    Jeff Cox — one of those who had a moment of clarity and
backed down — was carrying a .223 assault rifle, probably a Daewoo with a
thirty-round capacity.
    Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, carried a Glock 19
with a mag capacity of fifteen rounds. He had nineteen clips for it. In
addition, he carried a Walther P22 with a ten-shot mag. In all, he was carrying
four hundred rounds of ammo. He killed thirty-two students and wounded
seventeen more before killing himself.
    Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters, carried an
Intratec DC9M machine-pistol, more commonly called a Tec-9. With an extended
box-type magazine, the Tec-9 can fire up to fifty rounds without reloading.
Harris and Klebold killed thirteen and wounded twenty-one.
    Like Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner carried a Glock 19. He
killed six, including a child of 9, and wounded fourteen. According to one
witness to the event