Guns and tools are two different things
In the days since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., we’ve received letters and read commentary that guns – and, specifically, semiautomatic weapons like those used in the Connecticut massacre – are merely “tools,” like a crowbar or a hammer.
Both of those household tools can also kill, the argument goes.
True enough. But neither a crowbar nor a hammer is designed to perform a lethal function. A semiautomatic rifle is designed to kill or wound lots of people very quickly and not much else. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof noted on this page Monday, that’s why military personnel are equipped with this kind of weaponry rather than, say, forks.
Also, for the sake of argument, let’s say James Holmes, the crazed gunman who killed 12 and wounded 58 at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July had burst into the auditorium wielding a crowbar. He might have left a few people cut or bruised, and maybe – just maybe – he might have killed someone had the crowbar landed in just the right spot. But there would have been far fewer casualties. And you have a fighting chance against someone with a hammer or a crowbar, not someone with a loaded assault rifle.
In a related development, the National Rifle Association finally emerged from a week of relative silence last Friday, one week after the massacre in Connecticut. Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the NRA, said his organization “must speak for the safety of our nation’s children.”
That was an unsurprising, bland shred of public-relations-speak. But then, if the tone-deaf comments at his news conference are any indication, he seems to believe that “the safety of our nation’s children” has nothing whatsoever to do with the easy availability of lethal weaponry. He pointed a finger at video games, music videos and, a favorite whipping boy, “the media.”
In a moment of popular-culture cluelessness, he also cited the 2000 movie “American Psycho,” which would be kind of like blaming the rise of Elvis Presley for the killings carried out over a decade later by Charles Manson and his disciples.
LaPierre also remarked that gun-free zones are enticing for the demented (“they tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk”) and armed police officers should be placed “in every single school in the nation” and Congress should “appropriate everything that is necessary” for this endeavor.
It wouldn’t really say much for our society or our priorities if we spared no expense to put armed guards in the hallways of schools while, at the same time, we’re laying off teachers in the classrooms.