Remembering Howard Unruh

By Ed Veit

Remember Howard Unruh?  I am in my seventies now, but that was the first mass gunning down of innocent people that I remember—it was 1949 and Unruh walked his neighborhood in South Camden, New Jersey with a rifle and shot and killed thirteen people when they came into view or after he entered their home.  Since that time nothing has changed except that the weapons that the NRA protects have become more efficient.  They kill better, faster, and uglier.  Yet the NRA claims we need to protect the manufacturers, the gun stores, and the gun shows that distribute these weapons because it comes under the Second Amendment.  Actually it comes under the heading, “we want money.”

So now the rifle, assault weapon, glock, and other weapon enthusiasts rain praise on our forefathers because of the individual protections they placed in the Constitution particularly the Second Amendment.     To be sure our forefathers were neither infallible nor farsighted.

There is a need of a forefather review.  First, according to our forefathers, only white male landowners over the age of 21 should be allowed to vote.  And then according to our forefathers, slavery should continue; they refused to listen to Ben Franklin, the spokesman for the Quakers as he urged our forefathers to free all black people.  In fact, our forefathers had the wisdom to table the entire slavery question for 50 years. Like voting, they forwarded the question to the next generation. Our forefathers enjoyed duels—legally murdering one another—but it didn’t make Alexander Hamilton happy.  Our forefathers thought it was necessary to eliminate the entire Native American population.  And as our forefathers enacted the Second Amendment, they had yet to experience an upset individual with a muzzle-loading flintlock mowing down innocent people in a shopping mall or in a school or at a college or in a theater or at a fire.  Our forefathers failed to experience the proliferation of illegal death-dealing drugs, which brought about drive-by shootings and the killing of children in the streets.  And our forefathers failed to fore see millions of people in our cities armed with “Saturday night specials.”

We too experienced the age of assassinations with the killing of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers.  The response of the NRA to these instances of gun violence remains the closing down of a block of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, the closing of 15^th Street NW,; ballplayers can no longer use the diamonds on the Ellipse.  The Capitol parking lot has been closed to the public. This is to keep the Congress safe. Metal detectors are everywhere schools and airports, government buildings and banks, courthouses and train stations and these machines have been successful at finding nail clips and titanium knees, penknives and metal bra stays.   But finding rifles and revolvers, howitzers and hand grenades,  machine guns and AK-47s has at best a limited success.   

But this generation can do something no generation has done since the enactment of the Second Amendment.  We can make rules that govern the possession of firearms.  Here are some suggestions:

1. The tax on the purchase of firearms could make it prohibitive to purchase one.  (It was done to cigarettes.)
2. Make the purchasing of a weapon that holds more than six bullets illegal.
3. Those that have a weapons permit must reapply annually and be subject to another background check, also, the owner must display the weapon at the time the permit is issued.
4. Make all military weapons illegal—switchblade knives, knives with long blades, and sawed off shotguns are illegal.
5. Take policemen out of cars and place them back on walking beats.  There was a time when the police owned and controlled the streets (police had colors,

They were armed, they had a clubhouse).  There was not a need to have police patrol in cars.  The major job of a riding policeman at present time is to make insurance reports; a walking policeman prevents crime.

1. Decriminalize illegal drugs and do to gun addicts what was done to drug addicts—jail them.
2. No more gun shows.

After enacting any of these rules, it will take at least a generation for gun controls to see some headway.  And maybe by 2050 there will be fewer Howard Unruhs, Richard Specks, Charles Whitmans, Seung-Hui Chos, Ted Bundys, Andrew Kehoes, Charles Starkweathers, John Allen Muhammands, and Adam Lanzas, or many others.

It’s time for the NRA  members to stop thinking they’re Clint Eastwood and John Wayne.  For the NRA’s Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre, to extol the merits of the NRA in a press conference within twenty-four hours of the Newtown killings was insensitive.  The cure for school shootings according to LaPierre, arm the teachers.  Just how many people has Wayne LaPierre shot?