Sunday, July 19, 1998

Where do the kids get the guns in the first place?

Editorial by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A bill before Congress would require all gun owners to be responsible for them -- and the damage they do in the hands of children.

This bill calls for a year in jail and a $10,000 fine for gun owners whose weapons fall into the hands of children who use them to kill or injure anyone. It has bipartisan sponsorship in the Senate from Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and John Chafee, R-R.I.

Although it would be just a commonsense law -- lock up weapons that can and are easily used to destroy lives -- the National Rifle Association objects because universal, mandatory storage might be required in order to comply with the bill. As it should be. The NRA argues that if a robber is in the bedroom upstairs and the gun cabinet is in the family room downstairs, the besieged homeowner would have to scramble to put his hands on his gun. By that time, it could be too late.

There's no arguing such a situation would hamstring a homeowner who wants to fight crime on his or her own turf. But there are other, real-world alternatives (if less appealing to psyches that harbor the macho-man/victim dichotomy), like burglar alarms.

And the NRA had best not try to sell that argument to the parents of 3-year-old Mark Mahan of Manchester, Mo., who was killed by an 11-year-old who got his hands on a sawed-off shotgun. Nor to plead with the mothers and fathers of children murdered and maimed at schools in Oregon or Arkansas or Kentucky or Mississippi or Pennsylvania by other children with guns.

Last week, Suzann Wilson, a mother from Jonesboro, Ark., was standing behind President Clinton, listening to him say that too many guns in the hands of too many troubled children can be traced to irresponsible adults who didn't have the sense to lock up guns.

Further, the president said, "We simply cannot allow easy access to weapons that kill. ... We can't shrug our shoulders and say, 'Well, accidents will happen,' or 'Some kids are just beyond hope.' "

Mrs. Wilson's 12-year-old daughter, Britthney Varner, was murdered by two boys at her school in Jonesboro on March 24. And if she were confronted by the NRA and its arguments, she'd no doubt have a thing or two to say.

The Durbin-Chafee legislation isn't the perfect solution. It's really just a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. The good thing about it, however, is that it cannot be regarded as draconian. But in a political environment in which good sense is regularly doomed by arguments swaddled in emotion, the law's chance of passage are about as good as the prospects for killing a rhino with a .22 at 300 yards.

So let us employ an emotion-draped argument of our own. Who among us would want his or her son or daughter to be killed or to kill someone else with a gun? What sane gun owner could bear the pain of knowing, forever, that his or her weapon was the reason for a child's lifelong burden of wearing the title murderer -- or for a child's death?

All of us who care about our children should show our support of this bill. And we should sit down and reflect on the lesson writ in red in school hallways and in schoolyard dust. That lesson is simple: Guns, easily acquired and largely unregulated, are a menace.

As a nation, we must confront our romantic entanglement with them. And we must reckon with the fact that, even as we grow older as a people, the age of those killing and maiming each other with firearms is growing younger, younger and younger.

Our children are trying to tell us something. The United States, along with other civilized nations, must regulate strictly all firearms in private hands. And it must regulate them now.

Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service