Guns Prove to Be Poor Choice for Self-Defense : Case in point is Panorama City girl who took pistol to school
Guns for home defense: now there’s a contradiction in terms. One of our latest examples comes from Panorama City by way of Venice.
A certain Glock semiautomatic pistol, purchased no doubt for personal safety and home defense, didn’t save or protect anyone. In fact, it has become a problem of nightmarish proportions for its most recent owner.
First, it was stolen from a Venice home in February. That’s hardly a rare occurrence: Guns are certainly on the preferred list of booty for many burglars. Once they are stolen, they are usually used to perpetrate other crimes.
Well, it was subsequently alleged that a Panorama City woman somehow had come into possession of the same Glock that had been stolen from Venice. Per usual, it is alleged, the pistol was then stashed in a drawer . . . no doubt for home defense. It is also claimed that the woman’s 9-year-old daughter, weary of being hassled by gang members on her way to school, decided that she needed the gun more than her mother did. The girl then took the gun to school. She apparently remembered to remove the bullet clip but was unaware that a round was already in the gun’s firing chamber.
The girl then fired the weapon in front of a 7-year-old boy, scaring the starch out of both of them. Fortunately, the boy escaped injury; the bullet passed through the fabric of his jacket.
The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District voted 6 to 0 to expel the girl from the school she had been attending. She cannot apply for readmission until early 1996. It gets worse: Her mother has become the first local woman charged with violating the 1991 Children’s Firearms Accident Prevention Act. The Los Angeles city attorney’s office says that the mother left the gun in a place “readily accessible to the youngster.” She has pleaded not guilty, but that’s not all either.
The mother could get a $1,000 fine and a year in prison for that, and another year and another $1,000 fine for receiving stolen property (the gun).
It’s a tragic situation, but not as tragic as it could have been--had a child been killed.
In fact, statistics show that the mother and daughter in this case are very lucky, even if a conviction is gained and the heaviest sentence is meted out.
Consider, for example, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine of a six-year period in King County, Wash. During that time, more than 53% of the 743 firearm-related deaths there occurred in homes in which a gun was kept. Of those 398 fatalities, there were only two instances in which the gun owner managed to shoot the intruder. Accidental deaths from those guns were nearly three times more common. Getting killed while trying to use those guns in self-defense was five times more common; suicides with those guns was more than 18 times more common.
You want facts on how criminals get their guns? Well, the U.S. Justice Department answers the question this way: more than 217,000 a year from household burglaries; more than 108,000 more annually from personal and household thefts; add 6,700 more a year as unexpected booty from motor vehicle thefts, and nearly 8,000 more stolen annually in the commission of violent crimes.
The risks to young people are also easily and brutally noted. Using the most recent statistics available, for example, the National Center for Maternal and Child Health notes that nearly 5,000 youths age 19 and under were killed by gun violence in one year. Nearly 540 involved accidental shootings. The same group also says that guns are now used in about 60% of all teen-age suicides.
Having a gun at home often does nothing to increase safety. It often adds a very deadly risk factor.