Giving up guns for the country’s good
Two days after the nation’s latest — and worst — mass shooting by a single gunman, Matthew Frieswyk called the Baltimore County 911 Communications Center in Towson. He used the non-emergency line.
“I have a firearm that I no longer wish to own,” he told the person who answered the call. “I’d like to surrender it to the police.”
About a half hour later, a young officer, Kyle Feeley, came to the apartment complex where Frieswyk lives in Catonsville.
From a closet, Frieswyk took the Marlin Model 60, a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle he purchased second-hand for $100 from Continental Arms in Cockeysville six years ago.
The rifle has a tubular magazine with an 18-round capacity. It fires as fast as you can squeeze the trigger. While it has not been the weapon of choice for America’s mass shooters, it most certainly can kill.
“It’s not the biggest, scariest rifle,” Frieswyk says. “But, still, I don’t have to stop and reload for 18 rounds.”
The manufacturer claims the Model 60 is the most popular .22 in the world: “Since it was introduced in 1960, it has continuously represented one of America’s finest rimfire values.”
Frieswyk, who grew up in Harford County, bought the rifle when he was 23 years old — mostly because he could.
He had not come from a family of gun owners. He did not aspire to be a hunter. He had not been thinking about self-defense.
“I was young,” Frieswyk says, and he considered owning a gun part of the passage to “red-blooded American manhood.”
But that quickly lost its appeal.
“I took it to the gun range once after buying it,” he says. “But mostly it just sat in my closet.”
There have been many mass shootings since he bought the rifle — Aurora, Sandy Hook, the Washington Navy Yard, Charleston, San Bernardino, to name a few.
Because of all that carnage, Frieswyk had been thinking about giving up his gun, perhaps to one of the periodic, government-sponsored buy-back programs.
One less gun. One less gun in a country awash in guns. But the rifle stayed in Frieswyk’s closet. Then came Orlando, and 49 people killed, 53 wounded in the Pulse nightclub by a lone gunman with the kind of military-style, high-powered weapon that has no place in civilian life and a civilized society.
“I’m a musician as well as in tech support,” Frieswyk says, “and I have a lot of friends in the LGBT community, and it hit me hard.”
Frieswyk thought about Australia and what happened there after the April 1996 mass shooting at Port Arthur that left 35 people dead and 23 wounded: In less than a year, the country enacted laws that restricted assaultstyle weapons. Australians relinquished hundreds of thousands of guns to the government in a comprehensive buy-back program.
While there had been 13 mass shootings in Australia before Port Arthur, there have been none since. That’s according to the John Howard, who, as prime minister, fought for the new laws credited with making his country safer. Studies by researchers at the University of Sydney have confirmed annual, accelerated decreases in gun deaths across Australia.
So, Frieswyk thought about people giving up their guns for the good of their country. He heard the comedian Samantha Bee, outraged by the killings in Orlando and the killer’s easy access to guns, cite a passage from the New Testament on her TBS show: “Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
So Frieswyk asked Baltimore County police to take his gun away and destroy it. One less gun. One less gun in a country bristling with them.
Frieswyk let his friends know of his decision on Facebook: “In light of recent events in Orlando, ‘because I can’ no longer felt like a good enough reason to own it. I would encourage other gun owners to also consider whether it is truly necessary in today’s society to own a firearm. When there are more guns in America than citizens, how many are enough? How many more must suffer and die for us to finally stand up and say no to weapons meant for war? …
“Friends, we live in troubling times, but let us not create the conditions for more bloodshed.”
On Tuesday evening, a little after 6 o’clock, Feeley arrived at Frieswyk’s apartment. Frieswyk brought the rifle out in its case. Feeley said he could take the rifle, but not the case.
He told Frieswyk he’d never been dispatched to accept a gun from a citizen before.
The two men talked about the horror in Orlando for a few minutes. Frieswyk said Orlando was the reason he was done with the gun, and done with guns.
The officer suggested that Frieswyk keep the trigger lock: Maybe he would need it for another rifle in the future.
Frieswyk said, “Not likely.”