Dayton Daily News

Our firearms problems still piling up while we do little

- Gail Collins Gail Collins writes for the New York Times.

“Lock them up. There are things that you can do,” a Houston assistant police chief said last week after a 3-year-old boy fatally shot his 8-monthold baby brother in the family home.

The assistant chief was talking about guns, not the 3-year-old. Although in some parts of the country, the idea of putting kids in prison seems to elicit more enthusiasm than the idea of locking away the weapons.

This kind of disaster happens way too much. Last year at least 371 children stumbled across a loaded gun and fired, causing 143 deaths and

243 injuries. In one case, a 3-year-old shot himself to death with a pistol that had fallen out of the pocket of a member of his family — while the adults were playing cards.

None of this has led to any significan­t change in the national attitude toward deadly weapons. Many Americans like to arm themselves to the teeth as protection from crime — and bleep over the danger that comes with all that hardware, especially in the hands of people who aren’t really equipped to use it.

“Research shows that 39% of gun owners have no safety training,” reports Everytown for Gun Safety. Another survey found only 14% of the people living with gun owners had any formal instructio­n.

Now handling a gun properly, being capable of aiming it accurately, and following the guidelines for safe storage isn’t easy. Kudos to the people who make the effort. But even they aren’t necessaril­y going to be able to keep their cool in some sort of shooting crisis.

A majority of all gun deaths are suicides. One study found that in 2018, an average of 67 Americans shot themselves to death every day.

Given the deep downside of gun proliferat­ion, it’s remarkably easy to buy one legally. But some gun enthusiast­s — oh, heck, let’s just call them the gun crazies — seem to regard any rules whatsoever as a betrayal of the Founding Fathers.

“Who do you think you are — to disarm Americans and leave them vulnerable?” our old friend Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado asked the House as members prepared to pass — by a narrow margin — two bills making modest adjustment­s in our current, wildly inadequate, gun safety laws.

“I have to believe there’s hope. Otherwise I’d have trouble coming to work in the morning,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticu­t.

We’ve had a lot of tragic gun-related headlines lately. The story of the baby’s death was overshadow­ed by a crisis in Minnesota, where an officer yelling “Taser! Taser!” pulled the trigger on a man she’d stopped for expired tags. And, as the whole nation now knows, the Taser was actually a loaded gun.

We are thinking about this tragedy in terms of race, and police relations with minority communitie­s. As well we should.

One partial answer to the problem of police shootings is regular, intensive instructio­n on how to handle a gun in a crisis.

Given that there are close to 400 million guns in the land, many of them loaded, it should be clear that our greatest domestic security challenge is carving the number down and making sure the people who possess them are responsibl­e citizens.

It’s a heavy lift, given the power of the gun lobby. “The government is never going to know what weapons I own,” declaimed Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas. “We have a Godgiven right to defend our families, defend our state, and defend ourselves, and we will do that.”

Yeah, blame God.

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