Guns Won’t Win the War Against Crime

How many times have you lain in bed at night and heard a sound somewhere in the house?

Is that just the wind? Did I lock the sliding door? Is it my imagination?

Then, for a few fleeting moments you think, What if someone’s in the house?

You put that irrational thought out of your mind, because that’s never it. But you also realize that if this is that 1-in-10,000 chance that somebody is in the house, you could be a dead duck.

And you wonder again about getting a gun. And then you wonder if you could use it.

An increasingly unsafe society thrusts these kinds of decisions upon us, forcing us to choose between our abstract theories and real-life applications. In theory, you don’t believe in having guns in the house, but you don’t exactly believe in surrendering your fate to some punk who breaks into your house, either.

So, you continue to play the odds and not get a gun, all the while knowing that it only takes one time in the Punk Sweepstakes to come up a big loser.

Earl Swoap’s number came up on Thanksgiving night, but he didn’t lose. He and his wife were retiring for the night when someone literally kicked the back door of their Anaheim home off its hinges.

Swoap grabbed his shotgun and, according to police, confronted four armed youths in a hallway. He fired three blasts at them. They scrambled out the back door and into their car, with Swoap in pursuit. As they fled in their car, which they had parked in Swoap’s driveway, he fired at least three more times. Swoap killed one teen-ager and wounded two others.

In some quarters, Swoap is something of a hero.

A self-styled law-and-order group in Anaheim known as the Citizens Anti-Crime Taskforce (Citizens ACT) has sent Swoap a letter of congratulations for “the courage and initiative you demonstrated during that critically dangerous period when you decided to confront the armed intruders. . . . “

They said they’d also like to give him a commendation at a future press conference.

The group said Swoap’s actions “help serve notice on criminals as to what they might expect under such circumstances. It also serves as a reminder in this age of escalating criminal violence that citizens must be prepared to act in our own defense under such circumstances, until such time that government is able to adequately perform its most important function--to protect and secure the population.”

Under California law, Swoap was entitled to use deadly force to protect himself and his wife as soon as the armed intruders smashed their way into his house. Although the law doesn’t prescribe the death penalty for either burglary or robbery, it does allow a homeowner to use deadly force if he has reason to believe he’s in danger.

The district attorney’s office said Tuesday that, barring some new information, it isn’t planning to file any charges against Swoap. This case cuts too close to the bone of the average citizen for the D.A. to file charges against Swoap. Indeed, frontier justice is what Swoap exacted, and it will sit well with the public at large.

It’s just that I don’t feel like raising a toast to Earl Swoap, and it has nothing to do with second-guessing him on what he did. Inside his home, with his and his wife’s protection at stake, he did what he had to do. What he did outside--by continuing to fire at them even as they, theoretically, were removing the threat to him--is an iffier proposition.

Once upon a time, “scaring them off” was considered an adequate means of self-defense. Nowadays, that isn’t enough.

It might make nice radio talk show conversation to talk about an armed citizenry, doing to criminals what the police and courts can’t do, but arming the general populace is a scarier proposition to me than sporadic street crime.

What about the next homeowner, this time confronted by youths who aren’t armed? Do you want him running out into the night, firing a shotgun at the getaway car? Do you want your next-door neighbor making decisions on when to shoot, when not to shoot?

Does it represent some victory for society because John Q. Public put a notch in his gun?

Hardly.

Will it slow down the punk parade?

Fat chance.

And that’s what troubles me--the notion that what happened in Earl Swoap’s home represents some kind of meaningful victory for Us against Them. If we think that way, we’re bound to start thinking that if only more of us did what Earl Swoap did, we’d win the battle.

And if the war on crime comes down to shoot-outs between criminals and the guy next door, we’re all gonna lose in the long run.