A Gun Never Killed Anybody

A Gun Never Killed Anybody

- Rodney Demery

But drug policy isn’t the only law enforcement issue I’ve seen that needs more attention. So does our gun policy. We go through periods — often after we’ve experienced a mass shooting somewhere in this country — where we vehemently argue for the creation of new gun laws. We don’t realize this isn’t really the answer to gun violence.

It’s difficult for me to remember a person I have arrested on a violent gun charge and that person legally owned the gun he or she used. For that reason, I find it troubling and actually question the sanity of anyone who believes gun laws for the law-abiding citizen will do anything to stop, slow down, or have any effect upon gun violence. Dancing around the issue and wishing to take away the law-abiding citizens’ rights is insane. Criminals break the law. Enacting a new law won’t take away their criminal nature. After all, we have other examples where laws have not taken away the criminal natures of those choosing to go against those laws: Cocaine is illegal, too, so how well has that law worked? Drinking and driving is illegal, yet it continues to be a problem. Prostitution and domestic violence are both illegal. Yet, people commit these crimes. So enacting a new gun law to punish law-abiding citizens isn’t really where we should focus. Law-abiding people aren’t the ones breaking these laws. Criminals are.

That is why I believe we get it wrong with our gun policy. Our answer to gun violence seems to be the desire to pile more and more laws and restrictions on law-abiding people — the people who are not committing the crimes.

We’ve had several high-profile shootings in recent years, and those are always emotionally charged. While I am always saddened to see anyone lose his or her life as the result of gun violence, I do believe in the right to own a firearm. And in the rights of law-abiding citizens.

In fact, the idea or the thought that guns are the problem is ridiculous. The problem is that people are lawless. There are several different ways to approach gun violence. The first is that gun violence is not the gun’s fault … just as any other concept, everyone in the United States can agree that we don’t want people killed by guns. But we part ways when we start talking about what should be illegal. No one approach can eradicate gun violence.

One debate following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of December 2012 in which 20 students and six staff members were shot revolved around the use of high capacity firearms. But the debate missed the point. I don’t agree that you should ban assault weapons because they are not responsible for 94 percent of crimes. But I understand the ability to kill a large number of people at one time is a concern; however, that is not the problem. The person who has the firearm is the problem.

You can have a fully automatic weapon in your possession, but that doesn’t mean you are going to kill somebody. You can have a handgun in your possession and you just may end someone’s life. So let’s not get confused about what the real issues are when we talk about gun control. The issues always relate to the people, not the firearms. 

Gun control debate means discussing people behind the violence One case that happened in the summer of 2013 illustrates this point.

In the case of this “thrill killing,” three teenagers were looking for trouble on an August day. They got in a car and followed a young, 22-year-old Australian baseball player who was jogging, shooting him in the back and leaving him to die. Their motivation? They were bored and wanted to see somebody die. That’s it.

And no amount of new gun control legislation would have deterred those guys for one simple reason: It wasn’t about the firearm. It was about the person holding the firearm. After all, those teenagers weren’t legally allowed to have a firearm anyway. So they disobeyed the law prohibiting them from having a firearm. Why would they obey any other gun control law?

That is why I believe it’s important to look at the people behind the firearms, and not overreact and look only at banning, limiting, or doing away with certain firearms.

Some people kill in the heat of passion. Some kill with cold deliberation. Others kill with no discernible reason. Others kill because of mental illness or some identifiable disturbance.

One of the good things coming out of this discussion is the talk about mental health. There is also talk about the culture of violence in the media and even in video games. There are many aspects to this and you have to attack gun violence from those angles. Addressing firearms in the wrong hands is important. A mentally ill person doesn’t need a firearm. But not everyone should be punished and refused firearms based on the actions on one mentally ill person.

In my 25 years of law enforcement experience, a firearm, whether legal or illegal, and regardless of size or capacity, has absolutely nothing to do with the murder. A five-shot 22 pistol can kill you just as dead as an AK-47 with 100 rounds in it.

Banning legal firearms from qualified citizens is nothing more than dividing people who agree on the same issue. Surely all life that is struck down by gunfire is a tragic loss. Children of any age lost to gunfire is tragic. But only certain instances seem to spark our outrage. The instance of multiple children gunned down in a suburban school is cause for us all to positively ache with grief. But seeing one poor, inner city child slain due to gun violence should also raise our concern. Yet we’ve become desensitized to some crime because of where it happens or to whom. As I’ve said elsewhere in this book, life is life. And all life has value.

Again, in the spirit of this book, we must look to leadership, if we are to have a real, meaningful discussion of gun control that results in better policies. Politicians must be willing to make the unpopular proposals about gun control related to more closely examining mental health and privacy, as they relate to this debate. That may be an unpopular position, especially for a politician who is bold enough to say the gun control issue isn’t about the gun, but who holds the gun.  PERSPECTIVE POINT: People have strong opinions about guns and gun control. Do you believe we need more laws that limit the use and possession of firearms? If so, what new limitations do you believe we need and why? If not, please explain why you feel we do not need more gun laws.

Demery, Rodney. 'No Place for Race' (The Demery Group. Kindle Edition)

About the Author Rodney L. Demery is a longtime lawman. He has been in law enforcement more than 25 years, and has investigated a range of criminal acts, including drug-related crimes and homicides. He is a homicide detective for the Shreveport Police Department in Shreveport, Louisiana.

He also is the author of Things My Daughters Need to Know: A Cop and Father’s View of Sex, Relationships and Happiness and speaks on law enforcement, leadership, and relationships.

Visit his website at www.roddemery.com.

No Place for Race Paperback Rodney Demery RootSky Books ISBN: 978-0615908700

...Be it remembered that the peoples who suffered by these hideous massacres, who saw their women violated and their children tortured, were actually enjoying all the benefits of "disarmament." Otherwise they would not have been massacred; for if the Jews in Russia and the Armenians in Turkey had been armed, and had been efficient in the use of their arms, no mob would have meddled with them.

Yet amiable but fatuous persons, with all these facts before their eyes, pass resolutions demanding universal arbitration for everything, and the disarmament of the free civilized powers and their abandonment of their armed forces; or else they write well-meaning, solemn little books, or pamphlets or editorials, and articles in magazines or newspapers, to show that it is "an illusion" to believe that war ever pays, because it is expensive. This is precisely like arguing that we should disband the police and devote our sole attention to persuading criminals that it is "an illusion" to suppose that burglary, highway robbery and white slavery are profitable.

It is almost useless to attempt to argue with these well-intentioned persons, because they are suffering under an obsession and are not open to reason. They go wrong at the outset, for they lay all the emphasis on peace and none at all on righteousness. They are not all of them physically timid men; but they are usually men of soft life; and they rarely possess a high sense of honor or a keen patriotism. They rarely try to prevent their fellow countrymen from insulting or wronging the people of other nations; but they always ardently advocate that we, in our turn, shall tamely submit to wrong and insult from other nations. As Americans their folly is peculiarly scandalous, because if the principles they now uphold are right, it means that it would have been better that Americans should never have achieved their independence, and better that, in 1861, they should have peacefully submitted to seeing their country split into half a dozen jangling confederacies and slavery made perpetual.

If unwilling to learn from their own history, let those who think that it is an "illusion" to believe that a war ever benefits a nation look at the difference between China and Japan. China has neither a fleet nor an efficient army. It is a huge civilized empire, one of the most populous on the globe; and it has been the helpless prey of outsiders because it does not possess the power to fight. Japan stands on a footing of equality with European and American nations because it does possess this power. China now sees Japan, Russia, Germany, England and France in possession of fragments of her empire, and has twice within the lifetime of the present generation seen her capital in the hands of allied invaders, because she in very fact realizes the ideals of the persons who wish the United States to disarm, and then trust that our helplessness will secure us a contemptuous immunity from attack by outside nations.

The chief trouble comes from the entire inability of these worthy people to understand that they are demanding things that are mutually incompatible when they demand peace at any price, and also justice and righteousness. I remember one representative of their number, who used to write little sonnets on behalf of the Mahdi and the Sudanese, these sonnets setting forth the need that the Sudan should be both independent and peaceful. As a matter of fact, the Sudan valued independence only because it desired to war against all Christians and to carry on an unlimited slave trade.

Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography