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Editorial: Taking aim at safety in gun case
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, April 5, 2008
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B6
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a key case involving guns. In it, gun owners are challenging a District of Columbia ordinance that bars applicants from registering guns in the district and requires that guns kept at home be unloaded and either disassembled or locked. Opponents argue that the ordinance violates their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
If they prevail, the impact will reach far beyond D.C. If the court rules the ordinance unconstitutional, it would severely weaken the authority of all local governments to fashion gun laws necessary to protect public safety.
Since the ordinance was enacted in 1976, gun homicides dropped 25 percent; gun suicides dropped 23 percent. In "Guns, Fear, the Constitution and the Public's Health," an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine this month, UC Davis Medical Center emergency room physician Dr. Garen Wintemute concedes that that homicide rates in the district rebounded with the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s but that "today the district's gun suicide rate is the lowest of any state."
Wintemute, a leading researcher of gun violence, documents the increased risk of violence, injury and death that the mere presence of a gun in a home poses. The statistics are striking and alarming. "Living in a home where there are guns increases the risk of homicide 40 to 170 percent," Wintemute says. The risk of suicide jumps even more, up by 90 to 460 percent. These risks exist not just for gun owners but for everyone in the home.
Reasonable handgun ownership restrictions in New York and Chicago, Wintemute writes, have resulted in fewer homicides in those cities in 2007 than at any time since the 1960s. No wonder, given all this, that so many cities have local laws restricting gun ownership. If gun owners prevail in the Washington, D.C., case, cities across the nation will lose the power they need to place reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, and public safety will suffer.
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