Slaughterhouse of Civilization

Slaughterhouse of Civilization

by Richard North Patterson

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1020-05.htm

Published on Monday, October 20, 2003 by the Los Angeles Times

We Americans tend to think of gun violence in terms of some traumatic
event: Columbine or Martin Luther King Jr. or Robert Kennedy, rather
than as a daily fact of American life. All of us know that every
assassination of an American president was committed with a gun. All of
us who were alive remember the terrible day when John F. Kennedy was
murdered. But too few of us know that, since that day, more Americans
have died from gunshot wounds here at home than died in all the wars of
the 20th century, the bloodiest 100 years in world history.

And as horrific as was the carnage at the World Trade Center, it would
take Osama bin Laden nine more such attacks to equal what we Americans
do to ourselves every year with guns.

By trade, I’m a fiction writer, a creator of the imaginary. But in my
latest novel, I chose fiction to expose a real-life American tragedy:
the state of law and politics that has allowed the gun lobby to turn our
country into the slaughterhouse of the civilized world. That’s not a
rhetorical flourish I’ve invented to sell books; it’s a truth we’ve
tolerated for far too long.

The facts regarding guns and children are particularly appalling. Our
passing shock at Columbine merely obscured an epidemic: 12 kids a day
die in murders, suicides and accidents involving guns.

Only in the United States do surgeons prepare for combat duty by
training at urban hospitals. But then, only in the United States do we
protect the right to make and own bullets designed solely to tear apart
the internal organs of their victims.

The problem is not that Americans value children less than unfettered
access to every conceivable weapon by virtually any adult. Fully 80% of
us favor common-sense measures to make our country safer for our
families and our children.

Nor is the Bill of Rights a bar: The notion that James Madison wrote the
2nd Amendment — with its reference to a "well-regulated militia" — so
that racists, sociopaths and madmen could access weapons undreamt of 200
years ago is, as the late chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court,
Warren Burger, observed, "a fraud on the American public."

Rather, the problem is a well-funded gun lobby backed by a single-minded
minority which has, through misinformation, stealth and political
contributions, frustrated even minimal efforts to stem the tide of
violence.

Let me be clear: I believe that every law-abiding adult has the right to
own a gun for any lawful purpose, whether for sporting use or
self-protection. No one I know wants to confiscate guns. The gun safety
movement has two simple goals: First, to prevent murder and injuries by
keeping violent criminals, spousal abusers, drug abusers and the
mentally ill from buying weapons. Second, to prevent accidents and
suicides by making guns safer.

That is simply common sense. And it is shared by millions of responsible
gun owners across the nation. They are not to blame for the carnage. The
problem is an extremist gun lobby that perpetuates its power by
trumpeting a paranoid fantasy that a liberal elite is out to rip the
weapons away from every gun owner in the United States.

In this debate, it is the National Rifle Assn. that is the true purveyor
of fiction. In its paranoid world, any measure to make you safer is the
first step on the slippery slope to taking away its members’ rights: It
supports the sale of assault weapons and "cop-killer" bullets. It
opposes closing loopholes that allow criminals, wife-beaters,
terrorists, drug addicts and the insane to acquire firearms. It has
blocked the Consumer Safety Product Commission from regulating guns to
make them safer, so the commission now can regulate only toy guns, not
the real ones. It has opposed measures specifically designed to protect
kids, including requiring safety locks or putting indicators on guns to
signal that they’re still loaded.

The NRA has claimed that all we need to do is enforce existing laws. But
then it has riddled those laws with loopholes and gutted the agency
charged with enforcing them, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms.

And it has fought to keep Americans from knowing the facts by barring
the Centers for Disease Control from investigating the costs and causes
of gun violence. Now it is very close to winning Senate passage of
legislation that would ban the victims of the D.C. snipers from seeking
civil recovery via lawsuits against the rifle manufacturer, whose
weapons are so well suited to sniping, and the dealer who somehow
allowed the alleged shooters — a spousal abuser and a juvenile — to
acquire a deadly weapon they never should have had.

In return for all of this, the NRA has nothing to offer us but more
tragedy and death. The supposed "solution" favored by the NRA — heavier
sentences for those committing crimes with guns — will do little to save
lives. Punishment is not the same as prevention; however we feel about
capital punishment, it does not resurrect the victim.

In fiction and in life, the true essence of a tragedy is that it is
preventable. This one is.

I believe that, someday, those who own guns and those who don’t will
unite to create a new reality: a country in which our grandchildren will
hear of the deaths we suffer today with the disbelief and wonder we now
preserve for fantasy.

Richard North Patterson’s latest novel is "Balance of Power"
(Ballantine, 2003). He is on the board of the Brady Campaign to Prevent
Gun Violence.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times