We Win Some, We Lose Some...

Tales of Gun-Rights battles from around the country.

Oregon School Administrators Lose Their Minds

SPRINGFIELD, OR - Grownups do the darnedest things. Earlier this month, two students were suspended, for a short time, from Riverbend Elementary School in Springfield. In October, a 9-year-old boy was suspended for two days from Guy Lee Elementary, also in Springfield. And further afield, a little girl was told she would have to remove her favorite pin, and could not bring it to school again. What dangerous deeds did these munchkins commit? What foul actions led to their suspension or dreaded "chat" with the school principal? In the Riverbend case, the two students came to school with tiny plastic guns on their keychains. The boy suspended from Guy Lee had told another boy, "I hate you! I'm going to kill your mother," after the other boy shoved him in the lunch-line and the conflict escalated. In the third example, the little girl's pin depicted a Smith&Wesson revolver.

What on earth were these administrators thinking? Well, they were simply following policy, albeit a bit overzealously. The Eugene, Springfield, and Bethel school districts all prohibit all prohibit the possession of firearms, dangerous weapons, and replicas of dangerous weapons on school property. In the Springfield district, "replica" is redefined to include plastic knives and the teensy-tiny plastic weapons that come with toy action figures. Move over, Kung-Fu Grip GI Joe - Peace 'n' Love Barbie is now more politically correct.

Janet Filips of the Register-Guard, in her article on these school crack-downs (Mon. 16 Nov 98), asked, "When schools confiscate miniature plastic weapons, suspend children for threatening talk and ban kids from drawing nonhistorical war scenes, is it a nutty overreaction and petty meddling with normal kid stuff, or a long-overdue effort against the rising tide of violence washing into schools?"

The answer, it would seem, is quite clear. As we are apparently at a point in our history where a child can be expelled from school for possessing a 3/4-inch plastic ray gun, I have to wonder why Filips even felt the need to ask the question. As Michelle Carter, the mother of the boy who got the boot from Guy Lee, said, "I think it's ridiculous that they're carrying it as far as they are." I concur, and cast my vote for "nutty overreaction and petty meddling."

D.C. Police Kill Citizens

WASHINGTON - Members of the Washington D.C. police force outdo police in other major cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami, in fact doubling the performance of their rivals. In what, you ask? In firing their weapons, usually at people. D.C. police kill a higher proportion of people than do comparable police forces anywhere else in the nation. A Washington Post investigation has shown that D.C. cops killed more of their residents per capita than did cops in any other large U.S. city. Terence Gainer, the executive assistant police chief in the Capitol, told the Post that "We shoot too often, and we shoot too much when we do shoot."

Let us point out that Washington D.C. has a long-standing essential ban on private firearms ownership. The cops shoot, but citizens can't shoot back.

Why Gun-Rights Supporters May Tend Toward School Choice

DURHAM CITY, NC - On Thursday, 14 Sep., a flyer was sent home with school children in the Durham City/County school system. In addition to a number of short "sound-byte" text statements, the flyer displayed an image of a revolver in silhouette, alongside two child-sized handprints. Propagandistic statements in the handout included: "Every two hours a loaded gun kills a child and injures five others" (a statement which falls somewhere between 'blatantly misleading' and 'downright false' on the LDLS - Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics - Scale); "Keeping a gun, especially a handgun, at home poses a very real danger to your family;" and "The safest thing is to not have a gun in your home." The stated purpose of the flyer was to "Get your children involved. . . Encourage them to participate in a TOY GUN BUY-BACK program at this year's CenterFest!" The flyer was distributed by the school system in Durham County, North Carolina, and sponsored by the Coalition to Prevent Firearm Injury.

Since when is it appropriate to send covert political propaganda home with students, in the form of flyers they are required to give to their parents? HCI and its sibling organizations dig their claws deeper into the social fabric every day. "Give me a child unto the age of seven..."

And Now, For Something Completely Different: We Win One

OAKLAND, CA - Our weeks of watching and waiting are over. The high-profile Beretta suit has been decided, and guess what? Not all juries are insane. In 1994, a stupid child of stupid parents found his father's 9mm Beretta while playing with his friend, Berkeley High School freshman Kenzo Dix. Dix's less-than-brilliant buddy removed the semi-auto pistol's magazine, then pointed the gun at Dix and pulled the trigger. Kenzo Dix died tragically at age 15, through no fault of his own.

But where did the fault lie? The obvious answer would seem to point at the torpid teen who actually shot Dix, with perhaps some culpability resting on the parents who left a loaded handgun in a location accessible to their obviously undereducated offspring. But Dix's parents had another story: the blame should rest on the Beretta manufacturing company. Aside from the fact that a major corporation can be sued for greater damages than can a penniless teenager, the Dixes' ostensible reason for suing the company was that Beretta U.S.A. should have incorporated more safety features into the design of the pistol that was used to kill their son. Specifically, Lynn and Griffin Dix claimed that the gun should have been designed to prevent "unauthorized" users from using it, to prevent firing if the magazine was removed, or to alert a user when a live round was in the chamber. They also claimed that the gun "lacked warnings that it should be locked away when not in use."

Unfortunately for the Dix family's money-grubbing lawsuit, none of their accusations held up under fire. The technology to prevent "unauthorized" gun use (which takes the form of a science-fictionesque decoder ring and a recognition device in the gun's grip) is still in the development stages, and barely existed in 1994, when Kenzo Dix was killed. A device to prevent a gun from firing with the magazine ejected could seriously hamper its use in a life-or-death self-defense situation. Virtually all handguns are sold with a warning in the packaging regarding safe use and storage. And a final counterargument, dealing perhaps the most fatal blow to the Dixes' case, is that the targeted corporation stands out among gun manufacturers in its implementation of a safety feature highly pertinent to this case: Beretta has gone to the trouble and expense to include a round indicator, which shows whether or not there is a round in the chamber.

Had the jury voted against Beretta U.S.A., the decision would have tolled the death-knoll of the notion of personal responsibility in our nation, an idea that has already been seriously weakened by other rulings in our over-litigious society. Happily, however, the jury voted against each question that would have found the gunmaker liable, deciding that Beretta was not negligent in the accidental shooting death of Kenzo Dix. For a while, at least, personal responsibility lives.

Kerry Delf, a senior majoring in Psychology and Women's Studies, is an Associate Editor for the Oregon Commentator