The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
As much as we Americans love our guns, we’re just not very good at using them.
Consider accidental gun deaths, as opposed to murders and suicides. They represent only a small fraction of the 40,000 plus who are killed by guns in the United States each year, but they’re particularly disheartening because they are so preventable.
We’re surprisingly lax about securing our weapons at home or about goofing around with firearms that we think are unloaded. The victims are often children. About a thousand hunters get shot every year. Nothing about these facts suggests competence or responsible gun ownership.
Then there are the issues of marksmanship, judgment and fire discipline. We don’t know when to shoot and how much, and we’re not very good at hitting our targets.
It’s not hard to illustrate this point: Recently eight police officers in Akron, Ohio, fired 94 shots at a fleeing unarmed man, hitting their target, according to The Associated Press, only 46 times. Several years ago in Stockton, Calif., police fired 600 shots at several fleeing suspects, killing a hostage and endangering many bystanders.
In fact, a 2019 study of the Dallas Police Department found that officers hit their targets about 35 percent of the time. Another report from 1990 indicated that New York police hit only 23 percent of their targets. That may help explain why in 1999 four police officers took 41 shots to kill Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, in the vestibule of his apartment in the Bronx.
And these are trained police officers. Put untrained civilians into the mix, and marksmanship, judgment and fire discipline suffer. Just ask Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager who made the mistake of pressing the wrong doorbell in Kansas City recently and was shot in the head and arm by a nervous homeowner.
There’s nothing exceptional about this incident. Even if you factor in the racial component, it exemplifies the sort of irresponsible gun usage that occurs every day in America.
The strange thing is that we think we’re really good with guns. We imagine that nearly anyone — even kids — can pick up a weapon and use it competently with little or no instruction or training.
Our nation suffers from the near-mythical status that firearms have achieved and from the delusion that when a crisis arises we’ll handle our weapons like they do in the movies. But in real life, even before the firing starts, the gun takes on a life of its own, and we regularly overestimate our ability to control it.
When the fear and adrenaline kick in, will you freeze like the law enforcement officers in Uvalde? Or will you empty your magazine as quickly as possible at anything that moves?
And are you certain that in the dark of night you’ll be able to sort out your anxiety sufficiently to discriminate between a home invader and a kid who made the mistake of ringing your doorbell? If you quickly and self-assuredly answer “yes” to any of these questions, you are dangerously overconfident.
You may assume that I wish to repeal the Second Amendment; I do not. For one thing, it’s probably never a good idea to tinker around with the Constitution. More importantly, the right to own a weapon to defend yourself should probably be thought of as a basic natural right that predates the Constitution.
But it’s delusionary to imagine that a gun policy adopted in 1791 to ensure that a limited group of men would have access to muzzle-loaded muskets in order to maintain a “well regulated militia” is sufficient to manage our 400 million American-owned weapons, all of which have a capacity to kill that the Founders could not have imagined.
In modern times the basic right to own a weapon requires more regulation. Until we raise the bar on who can own firearms and require serious training and demonstrated competence in marksmanship, fire discipline, judgment and mental stability, our guns will control us more than we’re able to control them. And thus the carnage will continue.
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