Do More Guns Really Make You Feel Safer?

When people hear this story, they tend to say: “You’re lucky.”

That may be true, even if I didn’t win the lottery. My friend Kyrstin and I are lucky because we didn’t get seriously hurt. Just a few scratches.

“You could have been killed,” some people say.

This happened a couple of weeks ago, when my car was in the shop and I needed a ride downtown. Kyrstin was driving in the far left lane on the southbound Pasadena Freeway as it passes through Elysian Hills. For some reason, I was looking out the passenger window.

It sounded like a shotgun blast. The car shuddered and I turned to see that the windshield was now a concave web of shattered glass. A blizzard of tiny shards coated us from the shoulders down.

It took a few seconds to realize what had happened. Between the windshield wipers was a hunk of red brick. Kyrstin calmly took the Hill Street exit into Chinatown.

*

This was my closest encounter to date with random urban menace. Los Angeles is a landscape of fear, some of it legitimate, some blown out of proportion. Police will tell you that, yes, violent crime has gone up in recent years. But the perception of the threat has expanded exponentially. The question is, how do we respond?

I wonder. . . should I have been packing a gun that day? Should I have hopped the fence and gone hunting for justice?

The thought really hadn’t occurred to me until I read Wednesday that the city of Los Angeles, under terms of a settlement with gun advocates, has agreed to start issuing more concealed weapons permits.

Are you feeling safer yet?

A gun advocacy group that cleverly calls itself California Organization for Public Safety (COPS) recorded this victory. During the last two decades, the Los Angeles Police Commission had only issued one concealed weapons permit--to Chief Willie L. Williams before his certification as a California peace officer.

The lawsuit, supported by the National Rifle Assn. and other groups, contends that the Police Commission was violating state law in its virtual ban on such licenses. As part of the settlement, 16 people involved in the case will be issued permits and the power for issuing them will shift from the Police Commission to the chief of police.

Part of me says: big deal. Guns are so common that most people who would seek such a permit were probably packing anyway. If you’re that scared, why let legal niceties get in the way?

But J. Neil Schulman, a spokesman for COPS, says California needs to have a much better-armed, better-prepared citizenry.

“It’s a fundamental error in society to expect an elite group of professionals to provide public safety. In my view, public safety is everybody’s job.” To Schulman, society would be much safer if responsible, properly trained adults carried guns wherever they go.

So goes the COPS line. Now hear one cop’s response.

Los Angeles police Lt. John Dunkin, one of those elite professionals of whom Schulman speaks, has trouble stomaching the more-guns-is-better theory.

Where Schulman tells of the police class he took at Rio Hondo College, Dunkin speaks from many years of law enforcement experience. People who buy guns for personal and home protection, he says, often have an exaggerated fear that leads to unspeakable tragedy.

Dunkin, who now heads the LAPD’s press relations office, tells a familiar story that guns purchased for home protection end up killing loved ones. Children find them and can’t help but pull the trigger. Parents fire on a “burglar” climbing in a window--only to discover that it’s their teen-age son sneaking home from a night of partying. A domestic dispute turns tragic.

Dunkin never read these stories in the National Rifle Assn. magazine. He was “a lifelong member” of the NRA but noticed that the powerful gun group’s magazine tended to ignore such stories while celebrating the occasional tale of the gun owner who heroically defended family and home.

Two years ago, Dunkin left the NRA.

“It was just a matter of conscience over an issue that came up over assault weapons and ammunition. As a homicide detective, I’ve been to enough autopsies so that I realize what the huge number of guns in this community are doing.”

*

They say you can’t find a cop when you need one--which is, gun fans might say, another reason to pack a gun. But as it happened, a cop was right in front of us as we exited on to Hill Street. We had flagged the officer to report the crime, not that there was much chance of anybody catching the culprit.

This time it was a brick. I wonder what it might be next time. Stray gunfire, perhaps?