A nation’s sad, brutal obsession with guns
WASHINGTON— Just before Barack Obama got choked up on national TV, Jennifer Longdon got choked up in front of him.
She was sitting in the Green Room of the White House. Obama walked in. Almost everybody rose.
Longdon is an outspoken and able gun control activist. She will remind you that she is by no means “confined to” her wheelchair. But she can’t stand. The president of the United States was walking toward her, minutes from taking his boldest leap in support of her life’s work, and that is what was on her mind.
“I shook his hand, and I said, ‘Mr. President, I’m so sad that I cannot honour you by standing up,’ ” she said, emotional again, from her home in Arizona. “Because that’s all I could think of in that moment. My God, the president’s in the room and I cannot stand up.”
On Tuesday morning, stationed behind Obama’s right shoulder as he spoke and cried, Longdon was surrounded by people who lost loved ones in mass shootings known worldwide: Newtown, Charleston, Tucson, Virginia Tech.
Such rampages fuel the U.S. gun debate. They produce a tiny fraction, less than 2 per cent, of America’s gun deaths and injuries. The wealthy world’s runaway leader in shooting casualties has earned its place of shame one little-noticed local news story at a time.
“It is a stain on our country, it is horrific, that we can allow this carnage to privately, quietly, unacknowledged, pile up like this,” Longdon said.
Longdon, still a gun owner herself, has been threatened and spat on by extremists who oppose her vocal work to tighten gun laws. She has been hospitalized on at least 20 occasions with the infections, fractures and assorted other ailments that come with being shot and paralyzed.
Obama moved her, but she is not a big fan of gun control done through easily reversible presidential orders. She wants Congress to make lasting legislative change, and soon.
She believes her next infection will kill her. By the time her young-adult son has kids of his own, she said, she’ll be “long dead.”
“I just want to leave him a legacy that he can be proud of when he tells his children about their grandmother,” she said, teary once more. “I want him to have something to say.”
Dorothy Paugh’s father shot himself dead in Maryland in1965. Her son shot himself dead in Maryland in 2012.
Peter was 25, a witty environmental scientist with a girlfriend of five years and a new house in the Baltimore suburbs. He had shown no obvious sign of deep distress.
After he died, Paugh, a Navy veteran and former gun owner, began trying to educate herself on how gun suicide can be prevented. She was startled by what she discovered on the websites of gun safety organizations: nearly nothing.
“I almost did not find the word ‘suicide,’ ” she said. “And I’m thinking, how can you address this issue and leave that out? I was like, I can’t believe it.”
U.S. gun homicide gets almost all of the public attention. Gun suicide, shrouded in stigma, is far more common. Of the 32,000 gun deaths per year in the U.S., about two-thirds, more than 20,000, are from people shooting themselves. When Obama mentioned this, Paugh, 59, teared up before he did — thrilled that gun suicide was finally on the radar, mournful of the “tremendous cost in lives it took to get us to this hopeful point.”
Much of the American public believes the people who kill themselves by gun would find another way to die if guns weren’t available. Most experts say this is not true. Suicidal impulses are often temporary, and other methods are far less likely to succeed. The Israeli military cut its suicide rate by 40 per cent between 2005 and 2008 simply by forbidding many soldiers from taking their guns home with them on weekends.
While the issue is complicated, there appears to be a link between gun ownership and suicide. Suicide rates are highest in the states with the highest levels of gun ownership and lowest in the states with the lowest levels of gun ownership. Wyoming, for example, has both the highest ownership rate and the highest suicide rate.
Dale Volker, 53, a Wyoming country club manager and gifted multi-sport athlete with no history of depression, had a shotgun for skeet shooting. In 2013, prescribed a cocktail of drugs after a series of surgeries on his knee and spine, he shot himself dead with no warning. His wife of 18 years, Paula, believes he was upset about the possibility of losing his athleticism for good.
“I think it was a very quick, rash decision, and there was the shotgun in the house,” Paula Volker, 50, said Saturday. “I really, honestly think that if there hadn’t been a gun in the home, he would have had more time to think about it, he’d have had to go find one elsewhere, and maybe he’d still be here.”
There is virtually no chance Wyoming will tighten its gun laws; change will only come via Congress. Maryland already has strict gun laws, and Paugh doesn’t know if any legislation would have stopped Peter from legally buying one. But she believes mandatory background checks and purchase waiting periods could prevent thousands of other deaths.
“It’s not really about him,” she said. “When I was brought to my knees with losing him, I said something has to be done. Whether it would have helped him or not, I know for a fact, based on the evidence, that it will help some other mother’s son.”
There are groups across America with names like Parents of Murdered Children. Barbara O’Neal founded one she called Mothers of Murdered Sons. In Savannah, Ga., she could have been even more specific: Mothers of Murdered Black Sons.
Her son, Alan O’Neal Jr., was a junior church deacon, youth football coach and technical college student studying welding and barbering. Fresh out of jail in 2011, Levi Marshall needed money to get his car out of an impound lot. He saw O’Neal, a 20-year-old whose father is a pastor, as an easy mark for a robbery. He ended up shooting O’Neal to death.
Mass shootings make all Americans seem vulnerable to gun crime. Black Americans face far more danger than anybody else. In 2010, the gun homicide rate for white people was 1.9 deaths per 100,000 people, far more than any other wealthy country. The rate for black people was 14.6 deaths per 100,000, nearly the rate of South Africa.
Violence between members of urban gangs, the culprit identified by some pro-gun whites, is part of the disparity. But only part. There are thousands of dead black men like Alan O’Neal Jr., shot for being in the wrong place or looking at the wrong person or being too sweet. “He always come hug me and kiss me and tell me he loved me, and he did that night,” said Barbara O’Neal, 54. “And I was on the phone with one of my church members, and he told her he loved her. And the next thing I know, my baby was gone.”
Her neighbour knocked on her door to let her know he had been shot. Four years later, this Thanksgiving, that neighbour’s own son was shot to death.
Georgia, like much of the South, has lax gun laws. Savannah had nearly 60 homicides last year, the most in 25 years. The solution isn’t as simple as strengthening regulations on gun purchases: most of the crime guns recovered by local police were stolen.
O’Neal, who supports mandatory background checks and “smart gun” authentication technology, agrees with gun-rights advocates who say many criminals would find a way to get a gun no matter what the law says.
“I think that’s true,” she said. “But make it tougher.”
Mothers of Murdered Sons holds meetings every three months in a restaurant or a house. They start with prayers. Then the floor is opened, and 10 to 30 women talk about the aches few others seem to understand. Her eyes filled with tears this week, she said, when she realized her president felt her pain too.