Bullet points

By Lisa Bloom

Thirty thousand people lose their lives to gun violence in the United States each year. People like 81-year-old Dr. Joseph Dillard, a gun collector himself, who came home from running errands one afternoon, surprised a burglar, and was killed. We're currently covering his trial on Court TV News. Or teacher Barry Grunow, shot and killed by his 13-year-old student, Nathaniel Brazill, who got angry and got his granddad's gun from a dresser drawer and took it to school one day.

The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 33% to 40% of American households own guns, and surely most gun owners choose them for protection. Yet the facts belie this belief. A gun kept in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting, a homicide, or a suicide, than in self-defense. In homes with guns, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports, they are used defensively in less than 2% of home invasions.

These statistics are widely known, and have been for decades. I can remember gun control being debated as one of the great social issues of the '70s and '80s, along with smoking bans, sexual harassment laws and environmental protection. Decades later, cigarettes are outlawed in nearly every indoor space, sexual harassment is patently illegal, and most Americans insist on clean air and clean water.

Whatever happened to gun control?

Is it the Second Amendment? Were gun control laws found to be unconstitutional?

No, that never happened. Ever. The Second Amendment's oddly ungrammatical language, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," has been repeatedly interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court and many lower courts as protecting gun ownership only in connection with militias. Here is exactly what the Supreme Court said on the subject in 1939 and again in 1980: "The Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia."

As former Chief Justice Warren Burger said, "[The Second Amendment] has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

So, it's not our Constitution's fault, I am pleased to report, because I rather like our founding legal document, once we saw fit to amend it to abolish slavery and give nonwhites and women the right to vote. As it stands, other than the glaring omission of an Equal Rights Amendment, it's an impressive document, what with limiting the power of presidents and insisting on fair trials, freedom of speech and religion, and protecting everyone's right to privacy.

No, the reason why children and lunatics and angry spouses can so readily get their hands on guns in America is because the political will to get rid of guns seems to have fizzled out. Surely the NRA is not more powerful than Big Tobacco, and Americans sick of cancer deaths have largely prevailed in that fight. (My kids are amazed to learn that those underground, funky-looking antismoking ads are funded by cigarette companies as part of lawsuit settlements. I never thought I'd see the day, but it is here.)

I always think of the Beatles. A crazed fan went after John Lennon in the gun-toting United States, and shot and killed him. A crazed fan went after George Harrison in gun-controlled Great Britain, and stabbed him with a knife. George Harrison fought off his attacker and survived.

It really is that simple. Without a gun culture and with strict firearm control laws — even Britain's Olympic shooting team must train outside the country — Britain has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. Its population of more than 60 million suffers less than 1.3 homicides per 100,000 residents. By comparison, in 2000, police in the United States reported 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 population.

In the last few years, New York City has received the delightful news that our murder rate has declined dramatically because of better policing. Yet it's still eight times that of London, a city comparable in size and culture.

Last Easter Sunday, here in New York City, two men stared each other down. One ran inside, grabbed his handy 9 mm pistol and fired at the other, killing a nearby 2-year-old toddler strapped into his car seat for protection. And I had to check the facts before writing that sentence, to make sure I got the right recent toddler shooting death in my city. I wouldn't want to confuse it with, for example, the 3-year-old girl in Brooklyn who was just accidentally shot and killed by a drunken family member. Brother John Losasso said to 200 mourners at the former's funeral, "God is sick and tired of our weapons. He's sick and tired of our guns and our foolishness."

I wouldn't claim God is on my side, just reason and statistics. Just like decreasing smoking decreases cancer deaths, decreasing guns decreases homicides. Sure, there will still be cancer from other sources, and murderers will sometimes find other ways to kill, but cutting down on the most efficient death-delivery systems necessarily means significantly fewer grieving mothers at heartbreaking funerals, not to mention smaller numbers of people locked up for life, reduced costs for police, the criminal justice system, hospitals and emergency medical care.

Why did we give up on gun control?