Just ask the men and women we elect to run our cities.
When Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley led his city Thursday in filing suit against firearms manufacturers for the financial toll that gun violence has taken on the area, Chicago officially chose a scapegoat for its ills.
But the windy city is not alone. New Orleans did the same thing a couple weeks ago. Plus, Dennis Archer and the mayors of other big, important cities may do likewise, following decisions made during an annual mayoral conference.
The basis of their complaint is this: Much of the cost cities incur because of gun violence - in the forms of police overtime, court costs and medical fees - exists because manufacturers make, advertise and sell guns that are dangerous to the public and that appeal to criminals. Backers of these suits liken the legal action to the product liability suits against tobacco companies. As a completely rational human being, I would tend to believe these supporters of the handgun litigation if they were not, shall we say, dead wrong.
Now, for those of you who don't watch "COPS" regularly, let me fill you in: Handguns have been tearing apart American streets for quite some time. In fact, handguns are the weapon of choice in well over three thousand criminal prosecutions every year.
Remember all the New York parents sending their tiny, helpless progeny to school clad in bullet-proof vests? Remember all the teens mowed down for wearing the wrong colors in the wrong part of town? It's even gotten to the point that many bourgeois suburbanites are scared to drive their Grand Cherokees from their picket-fenced yuppie towns into the hearts of urban cities.
But despite the prevalence of guns in violent crimes, steps have been taken over the last decade or so to improve the situation: Many municipalities have severely tightened licensing protocols and have limited handgun sales. The Brady Law, for instance, imposes a five-day "cooling down" period for handgun purchases, while many state laws make it more difficult than ever to obtain firearms licenses.
If you pay close attention to all of these regulations, however, you'll notice one characteristic common to all of them: None of them in any way regulate the manufacture of handguns. This is because guns, unlike cigarettes, are not inherently dangerous. They only become dangerous when they fall in the hands of the wrong people - usually, these are the same people who shoot other people.
A gun itself has never killed a person, but gun-wielding murderers have actually been known to kill quite a few people. This small segment of the population gives rise to our firearms control problems. Many other people use guns for purposes that do not contribute to gun violence - perfectly respectable purposes like hunting, where you pursue a helpless unarmed bunny rabbit through the woods and pop a cap in his ass for fun.
So, all this tells the reasonable person that gun manufacturers are not responsible for the gun violence ripping at America's cities. No gun maker has ever jacked a kid for his Air Jordans or held up a liquor store.
The mayors contemplating legal action against gun producers would do better to acknowledge the failure of gun control laws and crime prevention programs and then work on revising existing legislation.
Our civil courts are not the correct forum for remedying legislative and law enforcement problems. Expending energy on the lawsuit will not mitigate the problem of handgun crimes nor will it hold accountable the people who are actually responsible for the rampant crimes: the criminals.
The idea of blaming gun manufacturers for the illegal use of a legal product lacks a rational basis. By the same logic, cities should sue Toyota and Chrysler to pay for hit-and-run accidents in this country. Or how about suing Dutch Boy each time some 14-year-old kid dies inhaling paint fumes?
While I truly commend our mayors for taking steps to curb the problem of handgun crimes in cities across the U.S., they must not lay blame in the wrong place. Such empty accusations will not effect safer streets any sooner. Just face it: Gun controls are failing; now fix them. Enforce our laws more strongly. Punish our criminals more harshly. But don't lay our legislative failures on gun manufacturers.
- Scott Hunter can be reached over e-mail at sehunter@umich.edu
Scott
Hunter
Roll Through the Soul