Something <i> Can</i> Be Done
The killing of 21-year-old actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who was shot dead in the doorway of her Fairfax District apartment building last week, is one of those terrible contemporary tragedies that leaves people wringing their hands and saying that nothing can be done.
In fact, something can be done, even if, as police and prosecutors allege, Miss Schaeffer’s assailant was a disturbed young man whose fan’s crush on a young actress somehow mutated into a murderous obsession.
The deviant and the deranged always have been with us. Their presence is an unavoidable fact of life. The presence of cheap, easily obtainable, easily concealable handguns is not. It is an artifact of human folly. Or, rather, it is a peculiarly American folly, born of the fact that across this country craven lawmakers persist in behaving as if the legislative bodies to which they were elected are subsidiaries of the National Rifle Assn.
Crimes such as that committed against Miss Schaeffer attract public sympathy and revulsionbecause the victims are well-known. But weekly, young people in South and East Los Angeles and in poor and working-class communities all over America are gunned down in the streets by people wielding firearms a sane society long ago would have jerked from their hands. There are no film records or glossy publicity photos to mark their brief lives. There are only the fading snapshots in family albums and the memories in the minds of their grieving parents.
If they were given the opportunity to speak, they might echo Danna Schaeffer, Rebecca’s mother, who said Thursday that while she harbors no animosity toward her daughter’s alleged killer, she is “angry at the system that allows things like this to happen, that allows a deranged person to get his hands on a deadly weapon.”
Opponents of rational handgun regulation must not be allowed to turn the Second Amendment into a blood-stained abstraction. They must not be allowed to draw the rest of us into a conspiracy to countenance the murder of other people’s children.