For Texas youngsters not too many years ago — usually boys, occasionally girls — a gun represented a more common rite of passage. Graduating at a tender age from leather-holstered cap pistols and backyard shoot-outs with black-hatted bad guys astride broomstick horses, a kid anticipated the next step: a long, narrow package under the Christmas tree signaling that Santa had dropped in with a Daisy Red Ryder BB rifle in his gift arsenal. Daisy was, and is, the BB gun manufacturer. Red Ryder was a popular comic strip character, who, with his Native American sidekick Little Beaver, rode the range and kept the peace in the 1890s, Red astride his mighty steed Thunder, Little Beaver trying to keep up on a pony called Papoose.
Back then, a few years firing BBs at tin cans or birds (or another kid’s rear end) might lead during the early teen years to a real gun — a .410 shotgun for dove or quail hunting with dad, maybe at some point a .22 rifle for deer hunting, almost always accompanied by strict instructions about gun safety.
The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump by a young man barely out of his teens is the latest horrific example that things have changed drastically in this country since Red Ryder and his pal rode off into the sunset. Too many youngsters around the country seem to be skipping the BB guns phase and, with various levels of parental acquiescence, graduating to weapons of war designed not just to kill human beings, but to pulverize them. These days, birds and squirrels are relatively safe; humans are the hunted.
We live with that fatalistic reality, a reality so disturbing that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a first-ever advisory last month declaring gun violence a national public health crisis. Murthy recommended that we start taking firearm violence as seriously as the alarming statistics: Since 2020, for example, firearm-related injury has been the leading cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents, ages 1 to 19. Here’s another statistic that underscores how our national gun obsession warps everyday life: In 2021,gun deaths hit a three-decade high, driven by increases in homicides and suicides.
The 20-year-old shooter at the Trump rally July 13 used an AR-15 his father had bought a dozen or so years ago and apparently kept around the house. Firing his military weapon from about 450 feet away, the shooter reportedly came within a quarter of an inch of killing a once and perhaps future president. Incidentally, USA Today reported that the brand of the rifle, DPMS, is now owned by the parent of South Carolina-based Palmetto State armory, which Trump visited just last year on the campaign trail, snapping photos with the owner and admiring the grip of a Glock engraved with his face.
Although the would-be assassin’s weapon of choice has been used to destroy human beings in schools, movie theaters, churches and grocery stores, it had never been used to try to assassinate a former president. Until that Saturday.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump last Thursday told a Republican National Convention crowd that stood riveted, some in tears, as he recounted the shooting.
“Yes you are!” the crowd chanted back.
“Thank you, but I’m not,” Trump responded. “And I’ll tell you, I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.”
One of the rally attendees didn’t survive.
Corey Comperatore, a small-town firefighter and engineer, died trying to shield his family. Two other people suffered critical injuries but Trump said they were on the mend.
The Pennsylvania shooter, shot and killed by law enforcement after he fired at Trump, appears to have taken advantage of family inattention or irresponsibility in obtaining his father’s weapon. He’s not the first. An uncle, perhaps unwittingly, drove the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter to the gun store to buy the AR-15 he used to slaughter 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in May 2022.
After a 19-year-old fatally shot seven people at a Fourth of July parade in suburban Chicago, also in 2022, his father, Robert Crimo Jr., initially faced several felony counts of reckless conduct. Prosecutors said he helped his son acquire the guns despite warnings that he could be a public safety risk.
As far back as 2012, Nancy Lanza, the mother of a 21-year-old who killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, collected powerful weapons and began taking her deeply troubled son to shooting ranges to practice using her guns together. Her son used her .22-caliber Savage Mark II rifle to kill her first.
Earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley of Michigan became the first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for ignoring signs that their 15-year-old son was a danger to himself and others. For Christmas one year, his parents had bought him a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun. In 2021, he took the gun to school and murdered four of his classmates, injuring seven more.
So, this is the world we live in — or, rather, this is the nation we live in, a nation where approximately 400 million guns are in circulation, including some 20 million of the AR-15 military-style rifles; where more than 1,500 school shootings have occurred since 1997, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Tens of thousands of gun deaths every year are a uniquely American phenomenon. Other nations have dealt with outbursts of gun violence by taking swift and effective action; Australia and New Zealand come to mind. In this country, courts, Congress and state legislatures, not to mention well-funded lobbying organizations, make it almost impossible to take sensible action. We choose to live with the threat, or, more precisely, to die with it.
Just last week, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota’s ban preventing residents ages 18 to 20 from carrying handguns in public is unconstitutional. It was merely the latest of numerous gun laws overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision last month that said gun laws must align with “history and tradition.” If Trump returns to the White House, sensible gun-safety measures will likely become history (despite his own brush with dying at the hands of a shooter).
If a nation has to acquiesce to gun ubiquity, there has to be another way to protect ourselves. Surgeon General Murthy’s recommendation is a long-range proposal designed to support research and apply science to the gun-violence crisis. Under the rubric “national crisis,” institutions and experts will collect data, develop and test prevention strategies and endorse programs found to be effective. (We might find out, for example, whether holding parents responsible for their children’s actions is an effective technique.) Declaring gun violence a public-health crisis, Murthy hopes, will lead eventually to reforms similar to those that brought about drastic reductions in deaths and injuries from tobacco and from motor-vehicle crashes.
“I want people to understand the full impact of firearm violence in our country, and I want them to see it as a public health issue,” Murthy said in a Washington Post interview. “I know it’s been polarizing, and I know it’s been politicized, but if we can see it as a public health issue, we can come together and implement a public health solution.”
Once upon a time, Americans smoked on airplanes and in restaurants and theaters; smokers some years back died of cancer at alarming levels. Once upon a time, motorists entrusted their lives to vehicles “unsafe at any speed.” Over time, we managed to implement life-saving reforms. In the face of our gun obsession, those efforts seem almost as quaint as Red Ryder and his buddy, Little Beaver (who, by the way, relied on a bow and arrow to help subdue the bad guys).
Gun-safety advocates may feel like they’re astride Little Beaver’s pony Papoose in their daunting battle with the gun lobby, but they must not surrender. Labeling gun violence a crisis is the least they can do — and, these days, probably the most.
Houston Chronicle
