CITYSCAPES
"GLOCK SHOCK"
by Gary Reid
January 28 - February 14 2000
Every once in a while I see or hear something on the subject of guns that startles me.
A couple of years ago, I attended a seminar that featured an American lawyer who had given up his land based life to spend the next 18 years sailing his boat up and down the east coast of North and South America. During the question period, the matter of having firearms on the boat was raised. The speaker kept a gun on board, but he admitted that it would be useless to defend against determined, well-armed pirates. It was there to wave around at drunks who might accidentally stumble aboard in an alcoholic haze.
Would a person so drunk be capable of recognizing his peril and be suitably intimidated? How could anyone contemplate shooting a person whose only fault was being drunk in the wrong place?
While watching the television coverage of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado last spring, I nearly fell out my chair. A parent of one of the students who had escaped told a reporter that the real problem in Colorado was that students were not allowed to carry guns in the school and therefore there was no one in the classrooms who could shoot it out with the killers.
Only in America, I thought. I have teenage children in school. They are God's most unreasoning and unreasonable creatures: they were sent to punish decent people who in moments of inexplicable weakness thought it might be fun to be parents. My flesh crawls at the image of my 15-year-old son slipping a double-action .45 calibre Glock into his shoulder holster before hoisting his backpack and tramping off to school.
Recently, a sad and unfortunate event in Toronto brought the gun issue to the fore and prompted another, but quite different, head-scratching pronouncement. On New Year's day, a man holding a pellet gun in a hospital incident was shot to death by the police. Media reports indicated that the man was seeking medical attention for his sick child. The pellet gun was designed to look like a real gun.
Very soon thereafter we heard from an organization calling itself the "The Coalition for Gun Control", some small pressure group that has had an influence in shaping the current draconian gun laws in Canada. It called for the banning of mock guns. The police echoed that refrain.
I am sorry, but even a reasonable gun control guy like me is not clear why imitation guns should be banned.
Police forces here and in the United States kill many individuals who are holding all sorts of faux weapons: clubs, knives, saws, hammers, etc. Nobody suggests these objects should be banned.
In New York City last year, a man resembling a wanted suspect reached for something weapon-like and was mowed down by the police. Four officers fired 41 bullets. The man took 11 in the legs, 7 in the torso, and one in the arm. When the smoke blew away the "weapon" was found to be a cell phone. Now I can think of a lot of reasons why cell phones should be abolished, but being mistakenly shot by the police while holding one is not high on my list.
Banning something is not the same as controlling it - if it does not exist, it cannot be controlled. I suspect the Coalition's name is misleading; its real agenda is likely the abolition of private gun ownership, not the control of it.
Mock guns, by definition, are not real guns. They are imitations purchased in the main for the aesthetic pleasure they give their owners. One could argue that they satisfy needs that might otherwise only be satiated by owning real guns. If that were so, why would we want to suppress them? It is a form of vicarious gun ownership that, except in unusual circumstances like those on New Year's day, provides harmless entertainment. If the Coalition intends to target these, it should change its name to the "Coalition for Fun Control".
And what is the actual problem that is crying out for a remedy? The danger is not that the individual possessing the imitation gun is going to kill anyone with it. The problem is the police mistake the weapon and kill the person holding it.
It is understandable that a policeman or policewoman who shoots a perpetrator in the mistaken belief that such a person was threatening with a real gun would be upset to find that the weapon was not lethal. It must be traumatizing, especially in the circumstances of the New Year's day encounter.
But realistically, how many times does this kind of thing happen? A Toronto Star story on the 34-year history of Toronto's Emergency Task Force indicated that, before the New Year's day shooting, there had only been seven other occasions in which the ETF fired its guns--and those were instances when the perpetrators had real weapons. In fact, I would guess they have fired fewer bullets in an entire generation than the New York cops did in the one shooting.
One argument made for abolishing imitation guns is that they may be used by criminals to rob people.
Speaking as a potential robbery victim, I think I would much rather be robbed by a person with a fake gun than by one with a real gun, or a knife, or a sharpened stick. Better to lose your money and your dignity, than lose your money and your life.
I am dubious that a person with a "robbing personality" gets out of bed, decides to go out to rob somebody, hunts around for an imitation gun; and, failing to find one handy, chooses to crack a beer, stay home and watch Oprah instead. This just does not happen when there are so many sharpened sticks readily available.
Gun control is an emotional issue, and we need to be careful about shaping public policy out of knee-jerk reactions to isolated, bizarre and random incidents. Extending gun control rhetoric to imitation guns seems to be off the mark in the absence of any hard evidence of a major societal problem.
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