Posted on 10/02/2004 11:06:50 PM PDT by neverdem
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
For devoted foes of gun control, September was a banner month. It opened with Congress ignoring pleas from every major national police group to let the hard-won 1994 ban on assault weapons expire, and ended last week with the House approving a loony measure repealing Washington's strict gun laws.
And that's not all. In between reinstating every hunter's sacred Second Amendment right to nail Bambi with an AK-47, and mischievously meddling in local affairs to pass a one-chamber bill to weaken public safety in the nation's capital, the National Rifle Association and its busy-beaver allies quietly scored another legislative coup - this one without even trying. This little-noted achievement - if you can call it that - relates to a glaring omission in the new initiative to prevent youth suicide just approved by the House and Senate, and awaiting President Bush's signature.
Named for Garrett Lee Smith, the 21-year-old son of Senator Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon, who killed himself in his college dorm room a year ago, the measure addresses a serious problem. Some 4,000 young Americans take their own lives each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is impossible not to admire Senator Smith's determination to wring something positive from his terrible personal tragedy by going public with his family's pain, and rallying colleagues on both sides of the aisle to get behind legislation to expand counseling services and other state efforts to identify and help youngsters at risk of killing themselves. There's no question that the $82 million the legislation authorizes over the next three years to improve early-intervention suicide prevention efforts, including on college campuses, will save some lives (albeit fewer than it might have, owing to a parental consent requirement right-wing House Republicans insisted upon that will inevitably deter some troubled kids from getting timely help).
But the bill's positive aspects notwithstanding, it fails to address perhaps the most salient risk factor for troubled young people - the presence of a gun in the home. This avoidance is particularly frustrating given the scant chance that Congress will revisit the teenage suicide issue anytime soon, and the fact that it doesn't take a brain surgeon - just a lowly editorial writer - to see a couple of common sense steps that Congress could have taken to protect kids, and didn't take.
Firearms figure in about half of all youth suicides, and by now it is neither secret nor speculative that having a firearm at home significantly increases the chance of a depressed adolescent ending his or her own life. Nor should it come as a surprise that states with the highest rates of gun ownership also have the highest overall suicide rates.
Perhaps the most obvious way to reduce the deadly toll would be to insist that parents do a better job of locking up guns. Even as Congress was deliberating over fine print of the antisuicide bill, a telling new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Annenberg Public Policy Center appeared in the Aug. 4 Journal of the American Medical Association. This study found an 8.3 percent decrease in suicide rates among 14- to 17-year-olds in 18 states that have enacted some form of child access prevention, or C.A.P., law, making it a crime to store guns carelessly in a way that permits easy access by kids.
Why are there no provisions in the antisuicide bill creating federal incentives to encourage states without C.A.P. laws to adopt them, following the approach successfully used to nudge states to tighten their drunken driving rules? Why does the new legislation omit the simple life-saving step of requiring gun dealers to provide an effective safety lock with every weapon sold?
When I directed these questions to a couple of the measure's supporters, they politely suggested I must be living on another planet. As it was, they had to accept the damaging parental consent language to get the bill through the House. Including the sort of child-protective gun provisions I was talking about would have invited rabid reflexive opposition from the gun lobby, very likely dooming any progress at all on the teenage suicide issue. "The power of the lobby is tremendous, and anything hinting of gun control, however sensible, is radioactive, especially in the House," explained Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, a lead Democratic sponsor of the teenage suicide bill along with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and a strong gun control supporter.
It is hard to quarrel with Senator Dodd's political assessment. But what a grim reflection on the present climate in Washington that small, reasonable steps like mandatory trigger locks cannot be openly raised and debated even in the context of trying to prevent children from committing suicide. Fear of the gun lobby is such, the subject never came up.
Meant to ping y'all here.
Albeit I agree with yer concept that the grabbers are idiots. The 7.62x39 & 30-30 WCF is almost identical and lots of bambis have been taken with the 30-30WCF.
http://www.accuratereloading.com/76239.html
http://www.realguns.com/loads/3030r.htm
I have a old mexican mauser with a shortened action and ultra light buggy whip barrel. It's in 7.62x39 and I have taken mulies, javalina and white tail with it. Very accurate 150yd tool for harvesting game. I reload for it with modern bullet designs and such so the standard warsaw pact issue ammo may be lacking but not too light for deer at all in brush country. Granted I'm not going to make a 300 yard shot with it but then I don't shoot at game beyond a hundred most of the time anyway unless it's sod poodles or coyotes with a proper caliber in a varmint rig.
Agreed it is an okay round but the northern deer tend a bit larger and the more common choice is the .308. The 7.62X39 can be loaded so as to be fine but in treed lots, where most deer hunting takes place up here, a bit peppier load than the mil std east bloc load is generally looked for.
Why don't we just keep "our" guns safely locked up at the local police dept?
We can get them out for approved target practice, so what's the problem?
I wasn't aware "every national police group" did this. But, if so, they deserve kudos. And I thought Congress actually heeded the plea to let the AWB expire.
It is impossible not to admire Senator Smith's determination to wring something positive from his terrible personal tragedy by going public with his family's pain,
I find it possible, but maybe that's just me.
Screw the NRA. Half my family used to be members (mostly the male half). I wont ever be. Their paranoid, and unconscious admission that their position on gun rights is indefensible and the slippery slope is impossible to correct caused them to support, even encourage, the passage of the 1986 FOPA. Despite its being fronted as a clarification of the second amendment (something anyone with a copy of the federalist papers and/or a relevant college history book can do) is actually the largest infringement of citizens second amendment rights, as they were understood by the men who wrote our constitution since… ever. It effectively helps to keep citizens from owning modern, military-quality small arms (excluding semi-auto and bolt action rifles and pistols, but I would not doubt a national .50BMG ban is in the works with these new crazy powers that congress suddenly has according to the FOPA) and basically contributes to the anti-gun/VPC agenda of eroding the second amendment rights of American citizens to nothing.
Neverdem: “Suicide is not a disease, but rather a somewhat particular form of Darwinian natural selection.”
I disagree. Suicide, in some cases, might be caused, in part, by genetic factors, but is for the most part due to environmental (both internal and external) factors. Plus social darwinism is about the furthest thing from the truth on god's green earth. unless the crazy christian-conservatives, lead by the upstanding pat robertson, decide that genetic engineering is not against the will of god (which BTW includes all sorts of insanity if biblical laws are to be believed) evolutionarily the human race is doomed to quasi-stagnation.
How about an even more salient factor:
The presence - or absence - of a PARENT in the home?
good point... i would add one more
legislation to protect one's constitutional rights or to oppress the people
teeman
This is code for "Those dirtybadnasty gunlovers won't let me hitch my gun-controlling agenda to warm fuzzy tear-jerking issues any more."
This guy cares about teen suicide about as much as I care about gay rights, which is zip. He just wants to chew away at gun rights at every opportunity.
CDC cooks their stats on some issues. That is probably one of them. Do 4,000 youngsters use guns to kill themselves? Not clear here, therefore the statement is propaganda and irrelevant to the topic.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
Let them hate us, so long as they fear us.
IF YOU WANT SUCCESS, DON'T MESS WITH THE CONSTITUTION FOR WHICH YOU SWORE TO PROTECT AND DEFEND.
So that's about 2,000 'youth' suicides. Distributed to the 3,142 counties in the U.S., that amounts to 3 persons over a five-year period per county.
Gun-safety leaflets would probably raise safety awareness for some parents and reduce the number of suicides by 'youths' using guns on the spur of the moment, but would it prevent the 'youths' from using other means to kill themselves?
How many spur of the moment suicides by 'youths' are there? Probably nobody knows.
So the gun-grabbers want to pass gun laws which may in fact cause more deaths than they save by limiting the accessiblity and practical use of guns for which they were intended.
I agree. I tried to put Red Davis out in the Peoples Republic of California, it worked, and next election I'll try to terminate the Governator.
unhappy about the .50BMG ban? Dont you know they have been involved in 12 crimes to date? Such a danger to us all...
No, not unhappy, I fully expected that the girly-man would sign it. After all, I live here (60 years) and I am used to a complete disconnect between logic and law in Kalifornia, or more precisely, between logic and anything governmental.
Ahnold was necessary to ensure Red Davis' removal and the ruination of his Presidential aspirations, now he can go, so if I can manage it, he will.
I no longer get emotional about this, I just continually work to eliminate the power or influence of anti-gun ignoramuses.
I think this sad incident may have causes beyond the availability of guns:
A few months ago C-SPAN broadcast an interview with a congressman (whose name unfortunately escapes me right now) that centered on how he balanced time at work and with his family. He recounted a story of how he once needed to leave the floor at the end of the day to be with his wife who was undergoing cancer treatment. A very senior congressman who had been in office for decades chastised him for leaving while they were still working on a bill, even though it was already early evening After he explained his reason for leaving he was surprised when the older man burst into tears, saying: "Maybe if I had spent more time with my family, my wife wouldn't have so many problems and my daughter would not have committed suicide."
So who would you vote for? That conservative guy? I can't remember his name.
California Senator Tom Campbell, the most qualified Californian for the Governorship.
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