David Michael Miller
One night in late January, Dane Gallion, 29, of Renton, Washington ate a pizza and downed a 22-ounce beer, grabbed his jacket and his handgun and went to a movie.
About 15 minutes into The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Gallion’s gun went off accidentally, injuring the woman sitting in front of him. Why was Gallion packing heat at a movie? Well, he was concerned about the spate of theater shootings and apparently decided to heed the NRA’s call to be a “good guy with a gun.”
This kind of Barney Fife incident is probably more common than the very rare incidences in which a gun is used to thwart a crime. Of the more than 30,000 Americans killed with guns each year, most die by their own hand in suicides, some are killed in homicides, a few die accidentally, and a sliver are “bad guys” shot by “good guys.”
So, it’s strange that some folks feel that the latest homicide in Madison could have been prevented if the victim had been carrying a gun. Caroline Nosal was gunned down in the parking lot of her workplace by a disgruntled former co-worker who blamed her for his firing. He was waiting for her. She was killed in cold blood, and there’s no way she could have responded had she been carrying a firearm. Moreover, her parents say that she just wasn’t the kind of a person who would want to carry a gun.
And that gets to the root of this problem. Not only is there no evidence that concealed carry prevents crimes, but most of us, like Caroline Nosal, have the good sense not to want to carry a loaded gun in public. There’s little chance we’d be able to protect ourselves in the remote event of a crime. We’re far more likely to end up like Dane Gallion, lucky that we didn’t accidentally kill somebody else.
The real answer is to keep guns out of the hands of the bad guys. Nosal’s killer bought a gun legally despite a history of mental instability. To make matters worse, thanks to a recent action by the Legislature and Gov. Scott Walker, he didn’t even have to wait a couple of days to buy his weapon. Walker and legislative Republicans recently repealed the state’s 48-hour waiting period to buy a handgun.
Now, Nosal’s parents plan to lead an effort to restore that waiting period. But we shouldn’t stop there. Caroline Nosal’s killer was a “law-abiding citizen” exercising his Second Amendment rights right up until he pulled the trigger. Clearly, the NRA’s argument that we have enough gun laws if they were just properly enforced is false.
So, for one thing, there’s nothing magic about 48 hours. Asking people to take a week or a month to wait for their handgun would better protect public safety while not touching a hair on the Second Amendment. Nobody needs a handgun tomorrow (or the day after), and anybody who says he does is raising red flags that law enforcement should respond to. And actually, in a perfect world, we’d ban handguns altogether. They simply have no place in a civil society at all.
The answer to gun violence isn’t more good guys with guns accidentally shooting up theaters, and the answer isn’t asking young women to arm themselves even if they have the good sense not to want to carry a loaded weapon. The answer is fewer guns altogether.
