This past spring the local office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) held a three-month after-school program at Amazing Grace Lutheran Church. The program had the immediate effect of keeping kids off of the sometimes mean East Baltimore streets for a few hours, but its long-term goal was to teach these fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders how to manage the pressures of their young lives by offering them alternatives to conflict. Snack times and drawing sessions were alternated with serious discussions and instructional periods. It was during one such period that AFSC's Lorrie Schoettler gathered the kids around an easel with a large pad of paper and said, "Let's talk about what you do when you hear a gun."

As the kids called out answers, Schoettler wrote them down: "Get down." "Get in your house or a safe place." "Give them your stuff." "Get an adult you trust." "Don't play with it--guns are not toys." "Don't touch it or pick it up." She divided the list into categories headed "when you hear a gun" and "when you see a gun."

When, not if, you see or hear a gun. We now assume, properly, that city 6-year-olds will encounter guns in the course of daily life. And even if they never do, we've planted the thought in their 6-year-old brains.

It's only one of the indications that Americans have become resigned to the existence of guns in their lives. There are myriad others, from the omnipresence of metal detectors to the handgun ads that target women and children to the changed language of the gun-rights debate, which is now more likely to focus on safety devices and waiting periods than philosophical questions about the right and need to own a firearm. That resignation can be seen in the upsurge of interest in a public-health approach to the issue of gun violence, in consumer-safety experts' concentration on making guns mistake-proof rather than making people gun-proof. It can be seen in the career of William Modzeleski, whose very job--head of the federal Department of Education's Safe and Drug-Free School Program--carries with it the implication that school violence is a permanent condition. It's in the response to the recent shootings at the Capitol, which prompted members of Congress to propose an underground "visitors' center" to screen people entering the building. Our senators and representatives don't expect this to be an isolated incident.

Americans are learning to live with guns. For better or worse, most of us accept them--at least on an unspoken level--and have come to live our lives either with them or around them. They've become a part of the culture.

This wasn't always the case. Only a decade ago Marylanders were engaged in a fierce debate about the right to bear arms. In 1988 the General Assembly passed legislation setting up a state board to determine which guns could be made and sold in Maryland. The law was designed to keep so-called "Saturday-Night specials"--small, cheap, poorly made handguns favored by criminals--out of the state. The National Rifle Association (NRA) mounted a campaign against the measure, amassing signatures to take what it called the "gun ban" to a referendum; then--Gov. William Donald Schaefer mounted a campaign to preserve it. The two camps were well-defined. When a referendum was held later that year, Marylanders voted by a wide margin to preserve the law.

In the 10 years since the antigun forces handed the NRA its collective hat, the fierce battles over gun control have dwindled to infrequent skirmishes. The biggest national gunfight--over the Brady Bill and its five-day waiting period for arms purchases--had little impact in Maryland, which has enforced a seven-day waiting period since 1966. And the political landscape changed dramatically when the progun Republican Party took control of Congress in 1994. Also, at times the continued, unmitigated presence of gun violence made the antigun movement's hard-won victories seem pointless.

The movement itself changed, shifting its focus from getting rid of guns to limiting their impact. In 1989 the National Coalition to Ban Handguns changed its name to the more genial Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. The group was actually expanding, not scrapping, its mission, deciding to move beyond handguns to pursue restrictions on owning all firearms. But the renaming represented a movementwide decision to reframe the argument.

The changes in language might seem subtle, but the effect is not. Try to imagine Newt Gingrich announcing he is not against abortion itself, but that he wants to make the procedure safer so that fewer women will die while undergoing it. Insisting the goal is to reduce or eliminate gun violence begs the question: Wouldn't getting rid of guns be the best way to stop gun violence?

"It is never our intent to ban all handguns in Maryland," says Nancy Fenton, executive director of Marylanders Against Handgun Abuse (MAHA). "That's not a realistic goal. So our emphasis is on reducing the violence. We want to promote responsible gun use."

If Fenton's realism is surprising, consider this: Like many of those most active in the antigun movement, her involvement in the issue is personal. Fenton's husband Matthew was shot in the head in the early 1980s. He survived, and during his recovery he began reaching out to other survivors of gun violence, including Lois Hess, who lost her son to the epidemic. Under their tutelage MAHA was born in 1986 as a grass-roots organization with three goals: to push for stronger gun-control legislation, to educate the public about gun violence, and to advocate on behalf of its victims.

For Fenton the most practical way to pursue those goals is to avoid the inevitable Second Amendment debate that erupts whenever the issue of gun control comes up.

"The reality is, people have a right to own a firearm," she says. "In Maryland, there are 1.3 million legal guns. That's one gun in every five households. All sorts of people own firearms."

MAHA operates from the premise that, as Fenton says, "The majority of Marylanders support reasonable handgun control." That means supporting child-safety locks--which Baltimore City residents are required to buy with every handgun--and state legislation passed in 1996 that limits gun purchases to one a month.

Rage for Peace, a two-month-old anti-gun-violence organization, takes a similar tack. Like Fenton, the group's two founders came to the movement after great personal loss.

J. Matthew Newton, the group's coexecutive director, was preparing to go to law school and was working as a manager at an Owings Mills restaurant when he was shot in the head at point-blank range during a robbery at the eatery. Left for dead, Newton wasn't found until the next morning. The shooting left him almost completely paralyzed on his left side. He now walks with a cane.

Newton's colleague, George Rice Jr., spent 10 years as a special agent with the U.S. Department of Justice's Drug Enforcement Administration. "I've looked down the barrel of a gun too many times," he says of those years. His worst experience with gun violence wasn't on the job though; in 1997, Rice's wife took her life with a handgun in what he characterizes as an impulse suicide. "Tracey left us too soon, not knowing how much she would be missed," Rice writes in his group's literature.

The two men joined forces with the Pax Network of Organizations, a national group founded in February of this year by Talmage Cooley and Dan Gross, whose brother was critically injured in a shooting last year at the Empire State Building. Pax hopes "to rally a national movement against gun violence, using communications and the media, and to create a national infrastructure for grass-roots movements," says Talmage Cooley, its executive director. "We build alliances for local groups."

Locally Rage for Peace pursues that goal by arranging and publicizing events to promote awareness of gun violence. In June the group held a benefit for the Children's Memorial Museum, an East Baltimore project to honor children lost to gun violence. On the national level Pax hosted a benefit concert in May at Radio City Music Hall with Mariah Carey, Paula Cole, and others. Along with entertainment these events include speeches, and literature on the realities of gun violence is available.

Pax and Rage for Peace bill themselves as "communications organizations" seeking to "raise awareness." Neither engages in an argument on the right to bear arms. "Our position is that as an organization, we do not advocate a ban on guns," Pax's Cooley says. "We are here to solve the problem of gun violence."

None of these activists would elaborate on the record about their insistence on addressing gun violence rather than guns. But if their reasons aren't clear, the effect is: They avoid the thorny Second Amendment argument and stay out of the way of big guns such as the NRA. They pick battles they believe they can win and concentrate their efforts there.

But this diplomacy means giving up the chance to frame the argument. Handgun Control Inc. (HCI), the largest and best-known voice in the national gun-control movement, has abdicated its position as a promoter of gun control. In its literature HCI takes pains to describe itself as "represent[ing] the moderate position on gun safety. . . . We Are NOT 'Gun Banners'--and never have been. . . . Money and a well-organized campaign by a small group of extremists have sufficiently poisoned the debate. Moderate voices of reason such as Handgun Control Inc. are drowned out."

HCI's defining of its positions--support of safety devices and legislation requiring waiting periods--as "moderate" carries the implication that attempts to gain further gun control are immoderate, unreasonable. That angers Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Washington, D.C.--based Violence Policy Center.

Like many of its movement's brethren, the center approaches guns as a public-health issue in the hope of reducing injuries and deaths, but it arrives at a more extreme solution. Unlike many prominent gun-control organizations, Sugarmann and his colleagues promote a ban on handguns. In the changing climate of gun politics, Sugarmann says he has begun to see putatively sympathetic groups such as HCI as opponents.

"There are two battles taking place. The one battle is between the gun-control movement and the progun lobby and industry. The second battle is within the gun-control movement itself," he says. That second battle "is between those of us who want to keep this movement a gun-control movement and the rest who want to devolve into a 'gun-safety movement' that really has abandoned our primary issue."

Apart from the political ramifications for all parties involved in the gun issue, this softening of the argument has the side effect of making the general populace more complacent about guns, AFSC's Laurie Schoettler argues. "If someone isn't saying 'no guns,'" she says, "it never gets said."

Although her group's nonprofit status prevents her from lobbying for handgun legislation, Schoettler says she takes her views into communities where she works on poverty and social-justice issues."I never hide my agenda," she says. "I tell people, 'I am committed to helping your children not kill each other.'"

Schoettler says her experiences in Baltimore communities such as Reservoir Hill have made her aware of a cycle of fear that perpetuates the presence of guns in our lives. If everyone else has a gun, you need one to level the playing field. In such an atmosphere, she says, language should be very important in the gun-control movement. It's already an enormous part of the progun argument.

"It's about the definition of the word 'security,'" Schoettler says. "Security has been militarized; we talk of peacekeeping as something we do with weapons. Too often, 'personal security' is believed to mean carrying a gun."

The gun debate's tenor hasn't changed only in political and semantic terms. Much of the redirection comes from the efforts by some in the public-health field to shift emphasis from gun politics to consumer safety. They do not get involved in discussions of whether guns have a place in American lives. Rather, working from a model in which handguns are just another consumer product, akin to children's toys or electronic equipment, they hope to hold guns to the same standards of safety and usefulness.

Jon Vernick, a lawyer turned associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, works on the issue of gun safety at the center. Vernick compares his work to the car-safety makeover that has been underway since the 1960s. Using legislation, litigation, and public-awareness campaigns, consumer advocates such as Ralph Nader joined forces with public-health specialists to get unsafe cars off of the market and to mandate safety improvements in those that remained. According to Vernick, each time you reach for your seat belt it's a victory for the public-health community.

The same methods are now being applied to efforts to make handguns safer--to reduce suicides and accidental deaths, to make it harder to steal a gun or take one from a law-enforcement officer. Vernick and Steve Teret at the Hopkins center, and colleagues elsewhere, are using the time-tested methods that proved so successful with cars to force gun manufacturers and the public to use new technology available to improve gun safety. The Hopkins center's carefully worded report "Personalized Guns: Reducing Gun Deaths Through Design Changes" argues that "modifying the design of products in addition to modifying behavior is an effective way to prevent injury and death."

Making guns safer is not a new concept. In 1884, Smith and Wesson designed a gun with a grip safety, an additional lever on the handgun's grip. In order to discharge the weapon, the shooter needed to press that lever. Smith and Wesson said "no ordinary child under 8 can possibly discharge it" according to "Personalized Guns." The report says the grip safety enjoyed a half-century of popularity--Smith and Wesson produced nearly half a million guns with the safety between 1886 and 1940--but today very few handguns have grip safeties.

Other safety devices have become more common of late. The trigger lock--which Baltimore City requires for guns in households with minors--attaches to an unloaded gun and requires a key or the correct combination to be opened (its use with a loaded weapon is not recommended--the gun could discharge during installation). The gun cannot be fired while the device is in place. Trigger locks are inexpensive ($9 to $20) and can be installed on revolvers, semiautomatic handguns, and most shotguns.

Baltimore is not the only place where trigger locks are mandatory. Prince George's and Montgomery counties require child-safety locks on all guns, and so do Massachusetts and Connecticut. The federal Hatch Amendment, passed last year, requires that such safety locks be available for purchase in gun stores, but does not require consumers to buy them.

Unlike the brouhaha that accompanies virtually any tinkering with gun laws, trigger-lock requirements have stirred little controversy. Both gun-control and child-safety advocates love them, and even Charlton Heston, the NRA's newly elected president, spoke in favor of them recently on Meet the Press. But Heston delivered a caveat echoed by progun forces: "You've got to take the ammunition out of the gun before you put the trigger lock on, and then you don't need the trigger lock, because it's empty, right?"

Another safety device is the Saf T Lok, a push-button combination lock installed on the handle of the gun. The correct combination must be entered to fire the gun, and advertisements promise that the owner can disable the lock in less than five seconds. According to the Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, the Saf T Lok is "relatively new on the market but gaining in popularity."

The dust-covered Saf T Lok display at Valley Gunshop in Baltimore County belies this claim. Manager Patrick Loughlin says he has "never sold a single one" in the months he's been offering the device for sale, and he wouldn't recommend the Saf T Lok to a customer. "It's $60--$70 to purchase and another $60--$70 for a gunsmith to install," Loughlin says.

Loughlin also questions claims by gun makers and gun-control advocates that it takes little time and effort to disable the lock. "In a stressful situation, the first thing to go are your fine motor skills," he says. "Three seconds is a long time when someone is coming at you."

When his patrons do ask for safety tips, Loughlin recommends a training course, and he says most customers follow his advice. When it comes to securing the gun, Loughlin is less enthusiastic.

"For protection, guns should be kept loaded," he says. To keep a loaded gun safe, he adds, "Lockboxes are a workable solution, but they can't be flimsy--something you could pry open or walk away with." As for devices added to the gun itself, Loughlin says, "We are never against any kind of safety addition, but don't get a false sense of security."

Stephen Teret of the Johns Hopkins Center for Guns and Policy Research champions the idea of "personalized" guns, which take advantage of technological advances to make safety features a part of the gun itself, rather than devices installed after purchase and manipulated by the user. Teret's colleague Vernick defines a personalized gun as "one that will fire only for an authorized user." The center's report cites a 1984 patent for a "personalized safety method and apparatus for a hand-held weapon." The device, part of the gun, recognizes the palm or fingerprint of one or more authorized users; the gun won't fire if the print doesn't match.

Sandia National Laboratories completed extensive research on personalized guns in 1996, focusing primarily on police officers, whose needs differ greatly from those of the average home-protecting gun owner. Besides the "touch memory system," which involves palm- and fingerprints, Sandia explored a radio-frequency identification system which would require the gun operator to wear a ring coded with a radio frequency the gun would recognize. Using this technology the gun manufacturer Colt has created prototypes it hopes to offer for use by police officers.

Teret hopes guns with such identification technologies will soon become available to consumers. The "Personalized Guns" report offers advice on using legislation, litigation, and education to get these products on the market and available at a reasonable cost.

Such technological advances have won the hearts of many gun-control advocates, including MAHA's Nancy Fenton, J. Matthew Newton and George Rice at Rage for Peace, and the activists at AFSC. But some in the gun-control movement worry that so-called safer guns could increase the number of guns in the United States, since their perceived safety might encourage ownership among people who would not otherwise consider buying arms. Just as air bags were initially opposed by the automobile industry but are now used by car manufacturers to promote their products, those who favor restrictive gun control fear gun makers will promote safety features to reach consumers previously uninterested in buying or unwilling to buy a gun.

"If what you do as an organization will end up selling guns, that's not gun control," the Violence Policy Center's Josh Sugarmann protests. "We feel guns should be held to the same health and safety standards as all other consumer products. The rule is that if the harm outweighs the good, you modify the product and make it safe. If it cannot be made safe, you take it off the market." Since the purpose of a handgun is to harm or threaten someone or something, he argues, there's no way it can be made "safe."

AFSC's Gary Gillespie dreams of an entire world without guns, but that doesn't mean he won't support each of the steps along the way there. "We think safer guns are a major step," he says. "A Zen teacher said that when you see a child in the road, you get the child out of the road; you don't start arguing about the oncoming truck."

Gillespie's coworker, Lorrie Schoettler, feels the same way. That's why Schoettler, also an advocate of a gun-free world, talks frankly with kids about guns. Often, she doesn't have any choice.

"We'll do a training that's not focused on guns," she says, "and guns come up."

So she talks about them, tells children how to live with the weapons and not be lost to them. It's easy with the small children who have lost relatives and friends to gun violence. They tell stories about the people they knew and they admit they're afraid of guns.

But as the kids get older, it gets harder.

"Guns become cool as kids make the transition to middle school," Schoettler says. "These children don't expect to live past a certain age, so at 11 or 12, there becomes a detachment."

Even the kids who aren't detached often become resigned to their fate. Some even try to look on the bright side.

"We talk to them about helping their community, and one of them will say, 'I can do more for my community as an angel,'" Gillespie says.

But Schoettler and Gillespie work for what they call "a radical organization," so their workshops don't stop at teaching how to act around a gun. They try to instruct kids how to create a world in which guns and violence aren't factors. They encourage children and their parents to learn better communications skills, to become capable of nonviolent confrontation, to find alternative ways to solve their communities' problems. Perhaps most important, Schoettler says, she and Gillespie encourage them to never be resigned to their situation.

"We don't want to train kids and adults to be safe in a war zone," Schoettler says. "We don't want them to accept the war zone."

Comment on this article

If you are a Citypaper.com member, please enter your username and password.
If you don't want to join our site right now, click the GUESTS tab.

• MEMBERS
• GUESTS

User:
Password:
Don't have an account? Sign up now. Already have an account? Log in now.

Choose a display name
Your email address: