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COMMENTARY: Gun Ownership Debates Hides The Real Failed Policies

By Chris Powell

Gun violence is bad enough, but gun demagoguery may be worse, for it stands in

the way of ever doing something effective about the problem. Indeed, given the

gun demagoguery in Connecticut, it's unlikely that much will be done about gun

violence here soon.

Gun demagoguery begins with the refusal to recognize the most important fact

of the gun problem: that there are probably more than 200 million guns in

private hands in the United States and that most would never be taken away

even with the most punitive confiscation laws, which probably could not be

enacted in any event. Criminals aren't going to give up the tools of their

trade, and many, if not most, law-abiding people would not surrender their

only sure means of self-protection either.

The manufacture and sale of guns, particularly rapid-firing guns, should be

better regulated, but most guns need little maintenance to stay in working

order indefinitely. So this genie is out of the bottle and there will be no

putting him back in. The challenge to public policy then becomes not yielding

to delusions about the abolition of guns but rather learning how to live with

them.

Governor Rowland's recent action on the gun violence problem, his forbidding

state employees outside law enforcement from carrying guns to work, is not

very helpful; it is mainly political posturing. While there may be no great

harm in the governor's order and it might prevent some eruptions of rage on

the job from turning deadly, there seems never to have been any such incident

in state government. The gun violence to which the governor's order reacts,

state lottery employee Matthew Beck's murder of four supervisors at lottery

headquarters in Newington last year, would not have been prevented by it, for

Beck's crime was carefully premeditated.

Of course no one planning revengeful murder of his bosses, as Beck did, will

be deterred by the prospect of losing his job; he already has resolved to lose

his job. As is typical in such things, Beck apparently was resolved to lose

not just his job but his life as well; he shot himself to death as police

closed in.

Now a member of West Hartford's Town Council, John Shulansky, has proposed a

local ordinance outlawing the carrying of guns on town property. "I don't see

any reason why anyone would feel the need to bring a gun to the town hall or

to the skating rink or a park," Shulansky says, as if West Hartford, whose

demographics have fallen steadily in the last two decades, is perfectly free

of the threat of crime against which ordinary people might seek more

protection than the police can provide.

In any case, it's unlikely that people intent on committing crimes like

murder, rape, assault, and robbery, crimes well known even in West Hartford

now, as opposed to those people who are intent on committing only the new

crime of self-defense, would be deterred by the $90 fine West Hartford would

add to the long prison sentence the criminals are already prepared to risk.

The problem with gun regulation like this, which is in fact most gun

regulation, is that it disarms only the law-abiding. Thus it represents not

the solution but an abject capitulation to the problem. This kind of

regulation is popular with politicians because it helps them avoid their own

responsibility for the problem.

For most gun violence today arises from the failure of government policy in

two respects: drugs and mental illness. Both involve public health and so may

be part of the same failed general policy.

Treating drugs as a problem of criminal justice instead of as a problem of

public health has made contraband of drugs and thus put so much money into the

drug trade as to make it irresistible for the urban poor and drive them

outside the law. Pushed outside the law, they use gun violence to protect

their capital and their profits. Drug abuse is more pervasive than ever, the

prices of illegal drugs are lower than ever, the imprisoned and probationary

population is larger than ever, and gun violence arising from the drug trade

is appalling; by any measure the current approach to the drug problem is a

catastrophic failure. But in its failed Puritanism and prohibitionism,

Connecticut refuses to examine its failed policy and still prefers jailing

drug users to eliminating most gun violence.

Councilman Shulansky cites a neo-Nazi's recent shootings at a Jewish day care

center in Los Angeles and his murder of a mail carrier nearby as justification

for the West Hartford ordinance. But the criminal in Los Angeles was

chronically mentally ill more than he was political; he had been hospitalized

for insanity in Washington state and, after slashing himself and threatening

hospital workers with a knife, had told police that he wanted to shoot up a

shopping center, rob a bank, and force police officers to kill him. He should

have been committed to a mental institution permanently. Instead he was

released on probation and urged to take his medicine.

Beck, Connecticut's mass murderer, also long had been known to be mentally ill

and was feared by the people with whom he worked. Many other murders with guns

in the state in recent years have been committed by chronically mentally ill

people who were not institutionalized as they should have been.

But Connecticut's prescription for mental illness is only fresh air; the state

has emptied its mental hospitals onto the streets, preferring more gun

violence to having to abandon the pipe dream that outpatient treatment is

reliable.

Rather than face up to their failures with drugs and mental illness,

Connecticut's politicians increasingly choose to scapegoat law-abiding people

who own guns. Ironically, the more the politicians behave this way, the more

dangerous Connecticut will be and the more its law-abiding residents will have

reason to believe that they need guns.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)