Democrats still silent on gun control
AS SENATE majority leader Harry Reid bares his fangs on President Bush and Iraq, he betrays how toothless the Democrats are on guns at home.
Reid said last week of Iraq, "This war is lost," partially because of "the extreme violence." On Monday, he said that Bush is in a "state of denial" about American casualties and the trauma to Iraqi children. Reid said, "What a shame that after five-and-a-half years, so many lost lives and so much treasure depleted, President Bush hasn't budged from the shoot-first, talk-never style."
That is fine for Reid to say about Iraq, where 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in violence last year, according to the United Nations. But what about our streets, where 29,569 Americans died from firearms in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control? Iraq Body Count estimates that between 62,000 and 68,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the invasion of 2003. In that same time period, at least 116,000 Americans have died from gunfire.
Last week's massacre at Virginia Tech that claimed 33 lives has done little to reignite the gun-control debate. One expects nothing from the Bush administration and the Republicans, who beginning with the 2000 elections have received 92 percent of the $9.1 million in campaign contributions from gun-rights organizations, according to the Center for Responsible Politics.
The Democrats, not officially beholden to the National Rifle Association, have been cowards more concerned about reelection in centrist districts than the trauma to American children. The same Reid who bemoans the loss of life over a failed Iraq war said about Virginia Tech, "I hope there's not a rush to do anything. We need to take a deep breath." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ignored a question by a reporter on whether Virginia Tech would inspire Democrats to revisit gun control. All she said was, "the mood in Congress is one of mourning, sadness, and the inadequacy of our words or our actions to console the families and the children who were affected there."
"Inadequacy of our words or our actions" was a Freudian slip. None of the home pages on the websites of Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards says anything about guns in relation to Virginia Tech. This is despite the fact that the US public arsenal, according to the Small Arms Survey, an independent research group based in Switzerland, "is comparable or even greater than the total firearms of all the armed forces in the entire world."
This week, Massachusetts Representative Michael Capuano told the Globe "we know we're going to lose" on any serious push for gun control because "the NRA has this place wrapped up." With defeatism like that, who needs a Democratic majority?
The paralysis can end by looking not to the power of the NRA but to the facts. This week, researchers in Australia published a study that found that the national gun buyback program, which was instituted after the 1996 Tasmania massacre where one man shot dead 35 people, is working. Between 1,000 and 2,500 lives were saved in the first eight years of the buyback, according to paper coauthor Andrew Leigh, an economist at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Gun ownership in Australia had been sliced in half, from 20 percent of households in 1989 to 10 percent by 2000, according to a Swiss study. It is the largest known percentage decline in the developed world. The United States has also seen a decline, but only from 46 percent of households to 32 percent of households.
"It really was the buyback," Leigh said this week over the telephone. "The biggest benefit comes down on the suicide side. We think the buyback reduces suicides by 250 people a year."
Leigh estimates that if Australia's buyback was done on an American scale, it would cost about $7 billion to $8 billion. It might save up to 3,900 lives a year. Australia has not had a mass killing since 1996.
Leigh said the reaction against the massacre in Australia has led to the quiet survival of individual children who would have shot themselves or adults who would have shot their partners in domestic disputes. "We're a policy laboratory for the world," Leigh said. Asked what kind of massacre it might take for the United States to become a laboratory of its own, Leigh said : "That's a terrible thing to consider. Maybe in the US you'd have to have a killing of 100 victims. "
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
