Can't Control People?
Try Controlling Guns

by Mark Worth
The Free Press

illustration by Dick Lande


From President Clinton to parents in inner-city Seattle, and from street cops to junior high school students, a majority of people throughout this country is finally starting to believe that if you can't control people, maybe the time has come to control guns.

Like abortion, military spending, health care and scads of other divisive social and political issues, gun control is at the forefront of the American consciousness, fully 30 years after President Kennedy's life was ended by an assassin's bullets.

And while there are more than 20,000 federal, state and local gun-control laws on the books today, it wasn't until Nov. 24 of this year that a five-day waiting period to buy a handgun - the Brady Bill - became the law of the land. In states that already have such a waiting period - including Washington - tens of thousands of felons, mentally ill people and others prone to violence have been blocked from legally buying a handgun.

But the evidence has begun to mount that such legislative measures, considered mild by anyone except the most extreme gun advocates, aren't doing much to prevent guns from winding up in the hands of people who shouldn't have them, or from keeping people from walking in fear down their streets, in their schools and even in their homes. Not to mention the thousands of people killed or injured every year in accidental shootings, or instances that appear so.

You don't have to be a social scientist to realize that violence is turning what once was perhaps the world's most livable country - and Seattle, once the country's most livable city - into a shooting gallery. Guns can be found in nearly half the country's households, and they're owned by about 70 million Americans. There are more gun stores nationwide than there are gas stations. And more Americans - 60,000 - die every two years from being shot than who died during the entire Vietnam conflict.

The numbers are so staggering that a three-story, electronic billboard in New York City's Times Square will start to count the number of people killed by guns and the number of guns in circulation. The "Deathclock" will be unveiled on New Year's Eve, when the square will be filled with partiers. And, in Oakland and San Jose, people can trade in their guns for concert tickets.



In King County, as in the entire country, firearms are by far the most popular tool of death (see related story Who We Are and How We Die.) There were more homicide victims in Washington state in 1992 - 118 - than in Canada and Great Britain, which have a combined population 13 times that of our state.

It's no wonder that 95 percent of Americans favor a handgun purchase waiting period and 52 percent support a total ban on handguns. Such a prohibition is in place in several U.S. cities, including the Chicago suburbs of Morton Grove, Wilmette, Oak Park and Evanston. Others cities - most recently Pittsburgh - have banned semi-automatic assault-style weapons. And in Washington, D.C., gun manufacturers and dealers can now be held financially liable for physical injuries inflicted by their products.

NRA's Legislative Fire Power
So why is it that gun laws in our own state of Washington have been held hostage to people like former National Rifle Association president Joe Foss, who once said, "I say all guns are good guns. There are no bad guns. I say the whole nation should be armed. Period."?

Rep. Cal Anderson, a Seattle Democrat who's been pushing for stronger gun control since he was elected in 1987, has a simple answer: "Unfortunately, what it boils down to is a fear of the NRA and its power."

The state's gun-control laws arguably are more slack than in 1968 - the year of the King and Kennedy assassinations - when cities and counties in Washington were allowed to pass their own ordinances regulating gun use and ownership. That all changed in 1985, when the state Legislature passed and the then-Gov. Booth Gardner signed a bill to wipe out all local gun-control measures and substitute instead a state law that took gun control in Washington back 25 years.

Since then, even the most innocuous gun-control reforms - such as requiring gun dealers merely to offer trigger locks to customers and banning plastic firearms - have been stopped in their tracks, most often by NRA-backed lawmakers.

Perhaps the most notorious was former Republican state Sen. Kent Pullen, who's now on the King County Council. As chair of the Law and Justice Committee from 1988-89, Pullen saw to it that his NRA supporters would maintain their grip on the state's gun-control policies.

While a favorite of the NRA, Pullen consistently frustrated lawmakers on both sides of the aisle with his hard-core libertarian stances. When arguing against a ban on assault weapons in 1989, for example, Pullen said: "None of the 15 million Russians murdered by Josef Stalin and the 6 million Jews slaughtered by Adolf Hitler were allowed to posses firearms."

With these kind of arguments being used to justify the virtual free access to firearms in our state, it's no wonder gun-control advocates like Seattle City Councilwoman Margaret Pageler are so frustrated. "This fight is a sobering reality of the way our political system works," Pageler said during the 1993 Washington legislative session, in which reform after reform was shot down by gun-shy lawmakers. (see accompanying chart.)

Everyone knows about the political power wielded by the NRA, which has 3.3 million members nationwide (up 900,000 from last year). And in Washington, where the organization has 75,000 members, it's no different. During the 1990 and 1992 campaign seasons, the NRA gave $21,500 to political candidates, including $15,050 to incumbent state lawmakers. (see The NRA: Loading Up the Campaign Coffers.)

Many of the recipients serve on the Senate and House committees that consider changes to our state's gun-control laws. Among those are Sen. Gary Nelson (R-Edmonds), who, as chair of the Law and Justice Committee in 1990, killed an Anderson-sponsored bill that would have allowed local police departments to take seized firearms out of circulation by destroying them, instead of selling them at a public auction. That same year, Nelson received a $500 donation from the NRA.

"He's a very unpleasant person," Anderson said of Nelson, "and he doesn't do a very good job of representing the people in his district."

The gun-meltdown bill finally passed during last spring's session, but only with a provision sought by the gun lobby - and inserted by Nelson - to require police departments to pay a fee for every gun they destroy into a state fund used to support gun shooting ranges.

"He wanted to punish the city of Seattle," Anderson said of Nelson, who was "offended" that the city's police department was balking at the state law requiring firearms to be auctioned. The defiance kept 2,800 guns from returning to the streets.

Demos Push For Reform
When the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1992, the hopes of gun-control advocates were raised. But little progress was made in 1993. And while no one knows how many of this year's murder victims would be alive today if tough gun-control laws were passed last spring, growing concerns about violence throughout the state has elevated gun control near the top of the 1994 legislative agenda.

"The good news is that the tide is turning a bit," Anderson said. "People are getting so concerned about violence in the streets and the schools that they're willing to stand up to the NRA. I think we have the public's backing."

Expected once again to be leading the fight for tougher gun laws with Anderson is Sen. Phil Talmadge, a Seattle Democrat whose 15 years in Olympia have been, at least in the gun control arena, frustrating to say the least. But that all might change this January.

"When you see the prevalence of firearm violence in this society, you can't help but come away thinking that you have to limit access to firearms. It's nuts," Talmadge said. "The free availability of firearms in our society is a hazard, and I find that virtually everybody in our society is touched by senseless and random violence."

Talmadge told how the day-care center where his 6-year-old goes was shot up about 4 a.m. one morning by someone who mistook the house for one owned by a drug dealer.

"If it had been a couple of hours later, there would have been five or six little kids in the house," he said.

Talmadge said he's anxious to start work on a cavalcade of legislation that's expected to be proposed during the session, including a package of reforms from Gov. Mike Lowry. The governor's Youth Agenda has won early praise for what has been described as a refreshing mix of social and criminal justice solutions to what is being seen as an increasingly complex problem - violence committed by and against young people.

Lowry's gun-control proposals would ban minors from having handguns, ban the sale of ammunition to minors, make it tougher for adults to buy handguns and get concealed-weapons permits, limit access to assault weapons, return to local governments the power pass gun-control laws, and hold adults liable for injuries to kids caused by the unsafe storage of loaded guns.

The governor's program also would expand anger management and conflict resolution curricula in schools and launch a media campaign designed to discourage violence.

Lowry slammed the gun lobby when he publicly released his program. "These people's arguments (on gun rights) are ludicrous. I think we have to be willing to stand up to the NRA."

Also at work are members of the state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, which has begun to look at violence - particularly firearm violence - as a public health problem - a "virus" - and not something that the criminal justice system can or should handle by itself. But why a public health problem? Perhaps because the percent of homicide victims who were killed by total strangers rose from 12 to 28 percent from 1984 and 1992, according to a recent state Department of Health study.

Legislation in the works by committee members would slap a tax on guns and ammunition to help pay for medical bills of uninsured gunshot victims, trace the origins of violence in order to find cures, and establish longer prison sentences for teenage murderers.

Dueling Proposals
With this much legislative energy being devoted to the problem of violence, optimism for change is on the rise.

"We're very hopeful that there will be some significant approaches to controlling violence," said Peter Clarke, an aide to Councilwoman Pageler and a director of Washington Ceasefire, a citizen-based gun control group. "As long as we're not trying to totally disarm the public, I think there is a lot of room for rational gun control."

Clarke said that once NRA members and other gun advocates are convinced that reformers don't want to take all of their guns away, "the possibilities open up quite a bit. They agree that we need to crack down on people who misuse firearms."

Anderson also sees some hope. "There are many members of the NRA who don't think that everyone should have an AK-47. They are responsible hunters and sports people who are beginning to challenge the NRA's rhetoric. I think that's refreshing."

Sensing this cracking up of the once-monolithic NRA, Washington Ceasefire (formerly Washington Citizens for Rational Handgun Control) has put forth a broad package of reforms that is quickly picking up support from lawmakers. The group's agenda would:

"With the rising tide of tragic shootings in Washington, our cause is ever more critical," said Washington Ceasefire president Evelyn Benson. "We have a window of opportunity to make some substantial changes that can help reverse the tide of mindless gun violence."

Not surprisingly, Republicans in Olympia have come up with their own plan to try to stop the spread of violence, and it has law enforcement and criminal justice at its center. Republican Sens. Nelson of Edmonds and Pam Roach of Auburn in November released their "Safe Streets, No Excuses" package, which features law-and-order solutions with virtually no social service or gun control elements.

Like Nelson, Roach has been on the NRA campaign contribution list, having received $450 in 1990 and $200 in 1992. (When a bill calling for an outright ban on guns on school grounds was advancing in last spring's session, Nelson and Roach successfully added an NRA-backed provision to allow parents with concealed weapon permits to carry their guns while picking up or dropping off students.)

Looking Deeper
While Republicans historically have lacked originality in the area of curbing violence, Democrats seem to be getting more creative. For example, can you imagine a tax on television and violent video games to help pay for anti-violence programs? Of even a television buy-back program?

"It's certainly being talked about in the circle I'm in," said James Kelly, director of the Washington State Commission on African-American Affairs and president of the Stop the Violence Committee, which has conducted occasional gun buy-backs.

"I think that this sort of tax can happen because people see the correlation between violence in movies and video games and what's happening on the streets," Kelly said.

In fact, more than 200 major studies have established such a link. And the American Psychological Association told Congress in 1988: "Virtually all independent scholars agree that there is evidence that television can cause aggressive behavior."

The people agree; 72 percent of Americans say there's too much violence on TV and that it breeds crime. It's no wonder. A University of Pennsylvania study found that the average 16-year-old has seen 200,000 acts of violence and 33,000 murders on the tube. But it's taken 41 years - since the first congressional hearing on violence on TV - for policy makers to get serious about a solution.

Still, kids - and adults for that matter - wouldn't be as apt to emulate a TV shootout if guns weren't so readily available. In Vancouver, B.C., and in the whole of Canada, strict gun-ownership laws have helped to keep the national homicide total to about 70 a year, about as many as have been committed so far in Seattle in 1993.

A well-publicized 1988 study showed that in Vancouver - where you can't legally buy a gun for self-defense or carry a concealed weapon - people are nearly five times less likely to be murdered with a handgun than in Seattle. And Seattleites are about eight times more likely to be wounded by gunfire than in Vancouver, where you can't even legally fire a gun unless you're in a licensed shooting club.

But Canada also is known for the massacre of 14 women at Montreal college on Dec. 6, 1989. The subsequent passage of Bill 17 has toughened penalties for gun crimes, banned assault pistols, armor-piercing bullets and other high-powered weaponry, and required gun safety training.

With the help of the stricter laws, guns are found in fewer Canadian households that in the U.S. - 29 percent to 48 percent. And Canada's murder rate in 1992 was about a fifth of the United States - 8.4 per million to 44.6 per million.

Like in the U.S., gun control advocates in Canada come up against the same arguments as their American counterparts - that people need guns to protect themselves.

"They promote guns for safety," Wendy Cukier of the Canadian Coalition for Gun Control told UPI recently. "But you only have to look south of the border to see that doesn't work. If this was the case, then the United States would be the safest place."

But beyond all the statistics and laws and rhetoric is a real feeling that there's something wrong with a country where more and more people are using their index finger to pull a trigger instead of merely pointing at an adversary in disagreement.

"People used to swear. Then they used their fists. Now they use guns" Mayor Norm Rice said at a recent public forum. "Guns are the problem. They are the instruments of murder."

With this kind of talk being thrown around by our politicians, perhaps the catch-phrase of 1994 will be 'Just Say No - To Guns.'

Even academicians are getting into the act.

"There is a discernable groundswell of public opinion building on this issue. I only hope that it is not thwarted before some real, substantive gun-control measures can be achieved," said Hubert Locke, a professor at the UW Graduate School of Public Affairs who specializes in urban policy.

"I think that the climate in 1993 is substantially different than it was in 1968," Locke said. "The wave of assassinations didn't touch the lives of individuals. This time around, violence is touching people, and they are deathly afraid of the level of stranger crimes committed on the streets in major cities.

"We're seeing the disarming of the nation as a key to people's personal safety," Locke said. "We need to get handguns out of the hands of the citizens."



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Contents on this page were published in the December/Jan, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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