Sensible Gun Ownership

A proposal

On October 1 a gunman walked into a classroom at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon and selectively shot and killed 7 students, an instructor and himself. This is just the most recent occurrence of this kind of shooting. Since the Columbine High School shootings in the Denver area to this shooting in Roseburg, Oregon there have been a total of 262 shootings in schools across the United States. Each of these killings leaves me and others with a sick, often hopeless, sense of unnecessary loss.

That original shooting at Columbine happened in April of 1999. I was teaching at the University of Colorado at Denver and dealt with many students in my classes who had friends at Columbine.
A year earlier a student shot and killed his parents, then went to Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon and killed 2 students, wounding 26 others. One of my high school classmates was involved with the student, trying to help him. I was shocked and deeply saddened by this event.

Now, some 17 years later another tragic shooting in Oregon. My revulsion at this shooting is even greater now. We have done nothing to decrease the frequency and severity of such activity.

I grew up in Oregon, I owned guns and hunted there, I knew kids who hunted and shot guns for recreation. My father, brother and I would go out with rifles and handguns to shoot cans and bottles. A neighbor demonstrated the firepower of a .45 caliber automatic pistol. Guns and firearms were/are a part of life in Oregon, especially rural Oregon as they are throughout the western US.

Firearms are a part of our history, much glorified in story and myth. Before we owned real guns as adults we had cap pistols and holsters where we played cowboys and Indians/ cops and robbers. Guns were a part of our lives and were a “good” thing to own. In other stories I have commented on the feel of a pistol or a rifle. There is something fascinating about them, about their quality of reaching out and busting a jar or can at great distance. Guns kill, that is their sole purpose.

At one time guns were probably helpful in defending home and hearth. Certainly I had grandiose ideas as to how I was going to go into the hills of the McKenzie Valley of Oregon and with my classmates we would fend off the Russians when they invaded this country, much as our ancestors had done against the British in the late 1700s. Such are youth fantasies.

Sixty years later I have very different view of these efforts and of the ownership of guns. I am very concerned with what can happen when an untrained but armed citizenry takes it into their head to take on the government, to redress presumed governmental slights, to defend themselves against an unknown horde out there just waiting for a chance to attack them and take away their property. Oregon, California, Idaho and Montana have enclaves with such individuals.

An armed citizenry will not protect us from these kinds of evils, according to the information we have available to us. All this arming does is contribute to the spate of shootings, increases the likelihood of a child or spouse being killed in a fit of rage and domestic violence. Guns in the household increase the probability of successful suicides.

What if we could eliminate or reduce the numbers of guns that are out there? Why not reduce the chances of mass shootings, of domestic violence by gun, of suicide by gun?

Here is a video that begins to address an alternative to the unfettered availability of guns: I love my guns. The man who made this video states he is a former police officer and a person who loves guns. However, he sees the destructiveness in the wide availability to untrained individuals and suggests reasonable steps that can be taken to reduce that availability.

We are required to license and register our cars, motorcycles, trucks and personal vehicles. We are required to demonstrate that we know how to operate them. We do this routinely with NO FEAR that the federal, state or local government will come and confiscate them. We are also required to have insurance to cover any damage we may cause while operating such vehicles.

What is the objection to registering every firearm that we own? What is the objection to requiring we individually demonstrate that we know how to safely use that firearm? A national registry system would go a long, long way toward reducing the easy availability of weapons and exchange. We can license, register and require certificates that we know how to operate/use a firearm. We can also require that each owner carry liability insurance to cover any damage that may be caused by the misuse of such firearms.

Cars and trucks must have certain safety features – seat belts, airbags, reinforced body structures. Firearms are more lethal than a car, shouldn’t they be required to meet certain safety requirements? Shouldn’t they be locked away where they cannot be inappropriately used?
As the officer in the video states these won’t entirely reduce the killings. We have found ways to kill one another for generations, but regulation can certainly reduce the killings, much as the regulation and safety features of cars have reduced the numbers of deaths on our highways.

Let us each and everyone urge our local, state and federal representatives to create some simple rules to register and make guns safer. These regulations need not infringe on our right to own a gun any more than such regulation of cars infringe our right to own and drive when and where we please.