The erroneous shootings of innocent civilians by the Los
Angeles Police Department this week were a perfect example of why more firearms
are precisely the wrong solution to the problem of thousands of annual gun
fatalities in this country.
The NRA asserts that in order to avoid future mass killings
such as the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut last December, we need
more armed guards and teachers carrying firearms in elementary schools -- and
more armed civilians in general.
The LAPD showed us this week why that’s NOT the answer.
On Tuesday morning at about 5:30 a.m., during a manhunt for
a former Navy Reservist and Los Angeles police officer named Christopher
Dorner, LAPD officers shot two Hispanic women who were delivering newspapers in
a Torrance housing tract. Dorner is an African-American male.
Four days before, Dorner had shot two people in Irvine as
part of what he termed a campaign of “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare”
on the Los Angeles Police Department for wrongfully terminating him. Very early
on Tuesday morning, he had been spotted in Riverside and shot two officers in
their marked patrol car; one died, the other was critically wounded but
survived.
In their defense, the police could assert that they
were on high alert to protect high-ranking officers of the LAPD. The women
delivering newspapers were driving with their headlights off, and had reportedly stopped
outside the home of such a high-ranking officer.
Still, the police gave no warning before firing and had no
idea who might be in the truck. Witnesses heard as many as 20 shots. The
victims were 47-year-old Maggie Carranza and her 71-year-old mother, Emma
Hernandez. They were driving a light-blue Toyota Tacoma, while the police were
looking for Dorner’s dark grey Nissan Titan. A neighbor said the women
customarily delivered papers with their headlights off so as not to disturb
sleeping residents.
Shortly after LAPD officers wounded Carranza in the back and
Hernandez in the hand, Torrance Police rammed a similar truck nearby and shot
at the driver. He was also not involved in any way, and fortunately, no one was
injured in this incident. The women will survive; and as of this writing,
Dorner remains at large. His burned-out Nissan Titan was found later Tuesday on
a remote fire trail near Big Bear Lake, about 80 miles from Los Angeles.
But what these mishaps show is that even well-trained
professionals injure and kill fellow human beings in the heat of the moment. I
am sure the number of innocent deaths would only increase if there are even more,
lesser-trained Americans running around with concealed weapons.
Think back to the mass shootings of the past year: the April
2 killing of 7 at Oikos University in Oakland, California . . . the July 20
killing of 12, with 59 wounded, at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in
Aurora, Colorado . . . the August 5 killing of 7 at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek,
Wisconsin . . . the killing of 5 at the Accent Signage Systems manufacturing
plant in Minneapolis by a terminated coworker on Sept. 27 . . . and finally Newtown
on Dec. 14, leaving 27 dead, most of them children.
All these incidents took place in fairly crowded public spaces:
workplaces, schools, and shopping malls. Imagine the chaos, confusion, and
potentially greater numbers of dead and wounded if more people at each location
had been armed and started firing away. People who advocate for more citizens
carrying guns everywhere seem to be living in a Hollywood movie, where the bad
guys usually miss and the good guys always are on target. Real life doesn’t work
that way.
In these massacres, other armed civilians might have gotten
the killer sooner . . . but the odds are greater that they would have missed,
or mistaken OTHER armed civilians for the threat and shot THEM. Policemen who
have been in high-tension, high-energy situations before, and who have trained
heavily in the use of their firearms, still miss, still commit errors in
judgment, still injure and kill innocent people. Why should civilians be
expected to do any better?
The incident that happened in my city three days before
Sandy Hook -- the Clackamas Town Center mall shooting -- resulted in two deaths
and an injury. The shooter’s AR-15 semiautomatic rifle jammed for a time, and a nearby man with a concealed carry permit drew his Glock 22 and aimed it at the killer. But the man didn’t fire because there were other people around.
He made a good decision -- one that will be easier for him
to live with than if he had fired and wounded or killed somebody other than the
shooter. The killer had already done all the shooting he was going to do that day, save for committing suicide.
Yesterday I attended a small rally for gun control sponsored
by the brand-new, local chapter of One Million Moms for Gun Control. The new mayor
of Portland, a state legislator, and a lifelong gun owner who supports sensible
gun control legislation all spoke and discussed what we need to do.
The national organization of One Million Moms is only six
weeks old. We are determined and growing. The time for action is now, and I’m
sure I will be writing more on this blog about what to do, and why, in the
coming weeks.
Posts
I come from a family of gun owners. Brother, Sisters and Parents all own guns and use them responsibly. I, however, do not own any firearms and I would agree with you that the time has come for more comprehensive gun control. There is no need for the general public to own military style weapons with large capacity clips. There should be a more comprehensive screening process for gun ownership. My beliefs puts me at odds with my entire family. So be it. It seems to me the evidence is over overwhelming that arming more people is not the answer.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment, Robert. I will have much more to say about various aspects of this subject in the weeks to come.
ReplyDelete"People who advocate for more citizens carrying guns everywhere seem to be living in a Hollywood movie, where the bad guys usually miss and the good guys always are on target."
ReplyDeleteAs I began to read that sentence, I thought it would conclude "...where the bad guys wear black and the good guys wear white." Determining withing seconds who is a threat and who is an innocent is so difficult in life-or-death stress situations that making a correct decision is very very difficult. I applaud the man who drew but did not fire.
Here is a nice little study that Harvard did. Very good read but kind of long...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
Here is an excerpt from their findings:
"This Article has reviewed a significant amount of evidence from a wide variety of international sources. Each individual portion of evidence is subject to cavil—at the very least the general objection that the persuasiveness of social scientific evidence cannot remotely approach the persuasiveness of conclusions in the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the burden of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially since they argue public policy ought to be based on that mantra. To bear that burden would at the very least require showing that a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that have imposed stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world."