Swarens: Extremists on either side of gun issue aren’t stopping the killing

The plates had been cleared from the table and the breakfast crowd had given way to the lunch rush at Café Patachou in Downtown, but the passionate, at times contentious, conversation about guns, constitutional rights and the violence that bloodies this city’s streets continued.

Jim Lucas was frustrated with me, and I by him. But that’s natural when the issues are so complex and the stakes so high.

Smart and intense, Lucas is beginning his second term as a Republican state representative from Seymour. He also is as close to an absolutist on Second Amendment rights as I’ve encountered, and I’ve talked to a lot of gun-rights advocates over the years.

Lucas, for example, helped push legislation through the General Assembly that allows people licensed to carry a concealed weapon to keep their guns locked in their vehicles while visiting a school. I asked Lucas, somewhat cheekily, about the logic of telling people concerned about self-defense that they must leave their guns in their cars. What good would that do in an emergency?

His reply likely would startle some. If it were up to him, Lucas would let parents keep their pistols strapped to their sides while visiting their children’s homerooms or watching a basketball game.

And, just to get it all out there, Lucas also questions both the value and the constitutionality of requiring a license to carry a gun in public in the first place. "Should we license journalists, too?" he asked.

Extreme? Probably. But hear him out.

The first barrel of Lucas’ argument is that gun laws often make criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Is the person licensed to carry a handgun really a danger to society for simply forgetting to leave the weapon behind at home when picking up the kids from school? Hence, the keep the gun locked in the car while dropping by the science fair law.

The second barrel is an old favorite of gun-rights advocates. Criminals aren’t going to obey the law anyway. So laws designed to prevent gun violence are futile.

In fairness to Lucas, let me make three points in his defense before digging into why I find his position frustrating.

First, we have a lot of dangerous people roaming the streets of Indy carrying guns without a legal right to do so. Another law on the books isn’t likely to stop them

Second, Lucas is not nearly as far outside the mainstream as some might think. A Pew Research poll released this week showed that two years after the atrocities at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., more people now support gun rights than gun control. Nearly 60 percent of Americans, according to the poll, say owning a gun does more to protect people from violence than it does to endanger their safety. And, as Lucas noted, there’s been a surge in recent years in both gun sales and in applications for concealed carry licenses.

Third, gun control advocates have undermined their own arguments by majoring in the minors. For example, in the wake of Newtown, a mother from Zionsville, Shannon Watts, launched Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. The goal ostensibly was to help prevent future Sandy Hook type tragedies. But two years on, Moms Demand’s highest-profile campaign focuses on trying to pressure the Kroger grocery chain into banning the open carry of guns in their stores. In a year when more than 140 people have been murdered in this city alone, with most of them shot to death, why is Moms Demand wasting time, money and energy on the handful of inconsiderate but largely law-abiding people who openly carry guns into the dairy aisle?

Which brings me to my point of frustration with Lucas, and others like him.

This has been another awful year for gun violence in Indianapolis. We’ve averaged almost three homicides a week, and hundreds of other people have been wounded, and sometimes permanently disabled, by gunfire.

And please don’t fool yourself into thinking that only drug dealers and other criminals are at risk. This year, we lost a young father-to-be who was shot to death while he walked through his neighborhood. A grandmother was hit by a stray bullet as she sat on her front porch. Seven people out for a night on the town were wounded on a busy Broad Ripple street early one July morning. And later that same day, a police officer, Perry Renn, was strafed by bullets from an AK-47 as he responded to a shots-fired call. He became the third Indianapolis police officer shot to death in the line of duty in four years.

Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, and any contextual reading of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights makes clear, that individual Americans have a right to own guns. But with rights come responsibilities. And far too often gun-rights advocates take both a “not my problem” and “there’s nothing we can do about it” approach to urban gun violence.

Any honest read on the violence that plagues this city and others has to include the admission that we have far too many violence-prone, short-tempered, immature people running around with guns. And that reality takes a horrible toll year after year after year.

Changing that is a daunting, complex task. And we need everyone, including lawmakers from Seymour and mothers from Zionsville, to set aside their talking points and predetermined agendas to work on solutions to reducing the carnage.

Too many people are being shot. Too many are dying. Too little is being done to stop it.

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @tswarens.

Source http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/tim-swarens/2014/12/12/swarens-extremists-either-side-gun-issue-stopping-killing/20269981/