3C Article n°12

Our Firearms Problems Just Keep Piling Up

Gail Collins

5 The New York Times, 14 April 2021

“Lock them up. There are things that you can do,” a Houston assistant police chief said last
week after a 3-year-old boy fatally shot his 8-month-old baby brother in the family home.

The assistant chief was talking about guns, not the 3-year-old. Obviously. Although in some
10 parts of the country, the idea of putting kids in prison seems to elicit (= susciter) more
enthusiasm than the idea of locking away the weapons.

This kind of disaster happens way, way, way too much. Last year at least 371 children
stumbled across (= tomber sur fig.) a loaded gun and fired, causing 143 deaths and 243
injuries. In one case, a 3-year-old shot himself to death with a pistol that had fallen out of the
15 pocket of a member of his family — apparently while the adults were playing cards.

None of this has led to any significant change in the national attitude toward deadly
weapons. Many Americans like to arm themselves to the teeth as protection from crime —
and bleep over the danger that comes with all that hardware, especially in the hands of
people who aren’t really equipped to use it.

20 “Research shows that 39 percent of gun owners have no safety training,” reports Everytown
for Gun Safety, which thinks a lot about this sort of thing. Another survey found only 14
percent of the people living with gun owners had any formal instruction.

Now handling a gun properly, being capable of aiming it accurately, and following the
guidelines for safe storage isn’t easy. Kudos (= félicitations, bravo) to the people who make
25 the effort. But even they aren’t necessarily going to be able to keep their cool in some sort
of shooting crisis. You have to worry how many overoptimistically imagine that they can.

And what some of them will do in quieter moments. A majority of all gun deaths are suicides.
One study found that in 2018, an average of 67 Americans shot themselves to death every
day.

30 Given the deep downside (= inconvénient) of gun proliferation, it’s remarkably easy to buy
one legally. But some gun enthusiasts — oh, heck, let’s just call them the gun crazies — seem
to regard any rules whatsoever as a betrayal of the founding fathers.

“Who do you think you are — to disarm Americans and leave them vulnerable?” our old
friend Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado asked the House, as members prepared
35 to pass — by a narrow margin — two bills (= projet de loi) making very modest adjustments
in our current, wildly inadequate, gun safety laws. Both are on their way to the Senate, where
 3C Article n°12

supporters are girding for (= se préparer à) battle, with approximately as much optimism as
the Baltimore Orioles1.

“I have to believe there’s hope. Otherwise I’d have trouble coming to work in the morning,”
40 said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

Connecticut legislators have been among the nation’s most dedicated gun safety crusaders,
especially since 2012, when a disturbed 20-year-old killed his mother, grabbed the
household assault rifle and two pistols, then marched off to Sandy Hook Elementary School
in Newtown, where he killed 26 people, 20 of them children.

45 I can remember exactly where I was sitting at The Times when I heard the news. Way at the
beginning of my career I was a part-time reporter for The Newtown Bee. The relationship
was infinitesimal, but the memory still haunts me.

We’ve had a lot of tragic gun-related headlines (= gros titres) lately. The story of the baby’s
death was overshadowed (= éclipsée) by a crisis in Minnesota, where an officer yelling
50 “Taser! Taser!” pulled the trigger on a man she’d stopped for expired tags (= plaques
d’immatriculation). And, as the whole nation now knows, the Taser was actually a loaded
gun.

“Holy shit!” the officer shouted in horror after she realized what she’d done. How many
Americans do you think muttered (= marmonner) the same thing when they first heard the
55 story? We are thinking about this tragedy in terms of race, and police relations with minority
communities. As well we should.

1
American professional baseball team based in Baltimore.