David Hoppe

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:: Tyranny of the gun

Gun owners have won

By David Hoppe

Ok, I get it now. I really do.

There's nothing we can do about guns.

Never mind that a little over a week ago somebody shot up a car down the block from where I live. Little chunks of glass are still lying in the street, like bits of toxic confetti.

But I understand: guns are not to blame.

I picked up the newspaper on election day. Here's what I found in the local news section: A 17 year-old boy was arrested in connection with the shooting death of another teen on the Near Northside; a 49 year-old man was charged with murder after shooting a man in the 3600 block of Arthington Blvd.; a man was shot and killed at 38 th and Gale; and another teenager was fatally shot before crashing his car at 35th and Keystone.

On the day I am writing this column, there have been 40 homicides in Indianapolis, 30 of them have been shootings.

But guns are not the issue.

I have to admit that for a long time I believed that the way we treat and think about guns in this country was crazy. They're cheap, easy to get and we practically encourage people to own them. And as those recent homicide statistics show, guns are also involved in a disproportionate amount of violent crimes - especially those that end with somebody being killed.

This, I used to think, represented a pattern, a kind of common denominator. If we could control guns or, at least, make them harder to come by, it stood to reason that fewer people would be getting shot.

I'm over that kind of thinking now.

It's not that I think guns have stopped being an anti-social danger, especially in cities where people, many of whom are unhappy, are in each other's faces a lot of the time. No, it's because it has become clear to me that the gun industry, gun owners and the gun lobby have won.

This is how the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, put it not long ago. By the way, almost 30 public school students have been killed by guns in his city this year. "I firmly believe the gun industry is bigger than all the governments combined. It's the only institution that is fully protected by federal law, that you cannot sue them or you can't even question them. You look at the power of the gun industry - it is enormous in the United States."

Daley is right. Just look at what's happening here in Indianapolis. We have a new mayor, Greg Ballard, who says fighting crime is his top priority. Ballard, in turn, appointed Scott Newman, a former prosecutor with a reputation for being tough, chief of public safety. Although gun violence in the city continues, neither man has seen fit to so much as mention that guns might be part of the problem.

So you won't hear me calling for more gun control. You won't hear me questioning anybody's reading of the Second Amendment. Gun owners, you can take a deep breath because nobody here, least of all me, is going to pry anything away from you.

But here's the deal: Since you're in charge, it would be nice to see you take a little responsibility. That put-upon, "everybody's trying to take away our guns," act is stale. It's high time that gun owners and businesses, as the beneficiaries of constitutional protection and lobbying muscle, took the lead in coming up with initiatives to fight crime in high-risk neighborhoods.

And I don't mean handing out flyers promoting gun safety, participating in prayer vigils or, worse, telling everyone to buy a gun so they can defend themselves. This is the moral equivalent of Marie Antoinette telling her starving people to eat cake.

Marie Antoinette, of course, was a tyrant. As queen of France, she had the power to make things better for her country's people, but she was clueless and cut off from reality. She wanted to believe that her behavior affected no one but herself when, in fact, multitudes depended on her. In the end, they cut off her head.

Guns have created a tyranny of fear in neighborhoods throughout this city. It is clear, though, that doing anything to regulate or control guns is the last thing on the minds of the powers-that-be. Gun owners and advocates need to be accountable for the power they command. It's their world - so far, the rest of us are living in it.