Taking guns

Friends and family have a responsibility to firearm safety that government can’t fulfill.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, or so the saying goes. But what happens when that bad guy with a gun is your mother? Or wife? Or your friend or neighbor?

This isn’t some hypothetical. It is a sad recounting of the travesty that struck Katy on June 24 when Christy Sheats, 42, shot dead her two daughters.

Sheats was a proud believer in the right to bear arms — a fact that she routinely touted over social media. She also had a history of mental health problems and had been hospitalized three times after suicide attempts. She suffered from depression, was on medication and was seeing a therapist. Over the past four years, the Sheats family home made more than a dozen calls to 911, including calls after self-harm and verbal altercations.

Sheats had become a threat to herself and, as we learned all too late, a threat to those around her. After years of a national conversation about guns and mental illness, this was clearly a situation where someone should not have had access to firearms. And yet there they were.

It wasn’t just the five-shot, .38-caliber handgun she used on that horrific day — an inheritance from the grandfather she idolized. Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls said there were multiple handguns in the Sheats home.

Congress will continue to debate gun safety regulations, and this editorial board will keep advocating for their passage. But the long arm of the law cannot and should not reach into the privacy of our homes and personal lives. Society can’t rely on government to enforce common sense.

Family, friends and neighbors are the real enforcers of the day-to-day societal codes that keep us all on the right path. This is particularly true with firearms. One of the strongest predictors of gun ownership is whether people live in a pro-gun culture, according to a 2014 study in the journal “Injury Prevention.”

Have family and a social life that involve guns? Well, you probably own one. Travel in a circle that’s firearm-free? Then you’re probably not packing heat.

The United States has more civilian firearms per capita than any other nation — Serbia is in second place — and these close knit, gun-friendly social groups have a duty to ensure that powerful and dangerous weapons are treated with all necessary caution.

Unfortunately, this message isn’t coming from the people who should be delivering it: the National Rifle Association. The NRA has spent millions promoting a paranoid vision of a nation on the precipice of chaos, and, their message goes, the only way to stay safe is with a gun. It is brazen fear-mongering from an organization dedicated not to hunting, sport shooting, civil liberties or personal safety. The NRA exists to sell more guns. It is an industry organization and its reality lies more in corporate profits than the proper mores of gun ownership.

So if the gun laws aren’t likely to change, then the focus has to shift to gun culture. That means recognizing the real risks of owning a firearm. It means taking responsibility not just for yourself, but for your friends and family. Christy Sheats was not in a good place, and like taking car keys away from an impaired driver, someone should have known to take away her guns until she was healthy again. After all, the only thing that can stop a bad gun culture is good gun culture.