Armed and Potentially Dangerous

By STEPHANIE SIMON

April 11, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

KIRKWOOD, Mo. —

The loaded gun is a comfort. It’s jammed between the mattress and the box springs. Or tucked inside a gym bag on the floor. It’s on the night stand, in a dresser, in a briefcase in the closet. Handy.

There are more than 30 million loaded, unlocked guns in American homes, the Justice Department estimates.

To many, that’s incomprehensible. Especially now, when child after child in town after town has gotten hold of a family gun and turned it on classmates.

Appalled by the schoolyard carnage, prosecutors around the nation are pressing charges against gun owners who fail to secure their weapons. In the last month alone, gun owners in Indianapolis, Philadelphia and St. Paul, Minn., have been hit with criminal charges for leaving loaded firearms in reach of kids. A Michigan man who stashed his pistol by his bed is serving up to 15 years in prison; a first-grader used the gun to kill a classmate.

But prosecutors are up against a fundamental disconnect: Many gun owners do not think of their firearms as dangerous. To the contrary, they consider a loaded, accessible gun a safety device, like a seat belt or a smoke detector.

One family physician in Indianapolis even urges his patients--those he deems responsible--to consider buying firearms for protection. To him, it’s a common-sense precaution. Exercise, eat well, own a gun.

“You only need to need it once,” says Paul Ferguson, a molecular biologist in Jackson, Mich. He keeps his semiautomatic in a drawer under his bed.

“My attitude is, it’s better to own a handgun and never need it than to wish you had one,” adds Greg Block, a firearms instructor in Southern California who trains up to 1,500 civilians in self-defense each year.

“I don’t call myself paranoid,” Block says. “I call myself prepared.”

Gun Ownership Trend Is ‘Absolutely Up’

Such convictions echo loud across America. One in four U.S. households keeps a gun for self-defense. And Block has seen a recent surge of Californians arming themselves against the prospect that rolling blackouts will spark riots. The trend is “absolutely up, absolutely,” says Bill Poole of the National Rifle Assn. He points to the NRA’s new book on armed self-protection: In its first month on the market, 5,000 copies sold.

Just how often guns are actually used for self-defense is an open--and hotly contested--question. The federal government estimates there are fewer than 100,000 defensive gun uses a year.

But Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, contends that guns are mentioned, brandished or fired in self-defense 2.5 million times a year. That would mean armed self-defense is up to five times more common than armed crime. Kleck’s research also concludes that victims who put up armed resistance are less likely to suffer injury or lose property than those who struggle, yell for help or give in.

“Armed self-protection,” he says, “is what works best.”

Count Donald and Crystal Witkowski as true believers.

Crystal, 21, was sexually assaulted a few years ago in her college dorm. Her husband now keeps a handgun under their bed at night, either his Taurus .357 or his .45-caliber Glock. “The best thing that could happen is that my pistols grow old and rusty and are never used,” he said. “But if I need a gun, I have it.”

For her part, Crystal says just knowing the gun’s there gives her “a little Superman boost.”

“It would be, what’s the word,” she says, thinking aloud, “. . . an out.”

There are other ways to protect life and home: a burglar alarm, say, or a watchdog. There’s pepper spray or that old standby, the baseball bat by the bed. Some gun owners try all of the above. Still, the loaded firearm offers special reassurance.

It’s much more menacing, from much farther away, than a can of Mace on a key chain. In an otherwise uneven matchup, it’s an equalizer. Just the sight of it could scare away an intruder. Or it could hold him at bay until help arrives.

An analogy crops up, over and over, when gun owners discuss their weapons. You don’t expect your house to catch on fire, they say. And chances are good it won’t. But you still have a smoke detector, right? It’s a sensible precaution. So is owning a gun.

That’s the argument Clarence Martindell makes as he sits amid the teddy bears and family photos that clutter his living room in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood.

It’s a sturdy, middle-class-and-up town, with an old-time village square and an Amtrak station that draws kids from all over to wave at passing trains. The police hotline lists all the crimes committed here each week: shoplifting, speeding, a stolen purse, mailboxes damaged in the Sugar Creek Ridge subdivision.

It’s a sweet, safe town. Yet Clarence Martindell owns a handgun. So does his wife, Fritzi.

Fritzi has never used hers. Clarence has pulled his from its hiding place only once in 31 years, when he noticed a police officer across the street struggling to collar three thugs. He thought of helping. Then the cop’s backup arrived. That’s as close as his gun has come to action. The one time the Martindells were burglarized, years ago, they weren’t home to offer up defense.

Still, Martindell--at 70 a school crossing guard, great-grandpa and activist for racial unity--considers his gun essential.

“I use my gun the same number of times I’ve used my fire detector, my smoke detector, my fire insurance, my earthquake insurance,” he says. Which is to say, never--and always.

There is, of course, an enormous difference between a smoke detector and a gun. Guns are meant to kill, and do.

Nearly 1,000 people died of accidental gunshot wounds in the United States in 1997, according to the most recent statistics available from the National Safety Council. Twenty of the victims were children younger than 5. An additional 122 were younger than 15.

The stories behind those numbers wrench the soul. The young mother in Laguna Niguel who grabbed her gun when she thought she heard a prowler--and accidentally shot her baby son in the head. The 6-year-old boy in Lake Park, Fla., who killed his 5-year-old brother with the shotgun he found under his grandparents’ bed.

Public service advertisements from the National Crime Prevention Council bring the horror home. Based on real-life tragedies, they show children’s crayon drawings and bewildered words of pain: “This is my brother Omar. There was a hole in his tummy. A bullet hit him. I saw red grass. A gun was in the garage. I didn’t mean to shoot daddy’s gun.” The tag line: “An unlocked gun could be the death of your family.”

Gun owners respond with the NRA mantra. On the buffed cul-de-sacs of upscale suburbs and in the smoky bars of tired farm towns, they repeat it like a talisman: Guns don’t kill, people do. “How many times have you seen a gun jump off a shelf and shoot someone?” demands Mark Kneipert, 37, a supervisor at a rice processing plant in rural Arkansas.

60% in Survey Feel Safer Owning a Gun

It’s not easy access to guns, they insist, that causes school shootings, teen suicides, accidental deaths. It’s bad parenting. Or lax discipline. Bad kids. Dumb mistakes. Cars are just as lethal as guns if driven recklessly. Household cleaning supplies can be as deadly to a toddler as a Glock.

Kleck goes so far as to argue that the risk of a child being shot by the family gun is “a fictional issue,” hoked up by gun control zealots. “It’s like a bolt of lightning striking you on a sunny day,” he said. “It is possible, but reasonable people don’t take it seriously.”

In a Gallup Poll taken last summer, nearly 60% of gun owners said a firearm makes a house safer. (Less than 30% of nongun owners agreed.) Over and over, they insist: Their kids know better than to mess around with firearms. Their guns are hidden so the little ones can’t find them. Their children have been exposed to guns so often that there’s no alluring mystique to the weapons, no reason to pick one up for fun.

“It hasn’t been a problem,” says Ferguson, the molecular biologist, who has a daughter in high school, a son in college and a .40-caliber semiautomatic under the bed.

Pete Pressly, a Michigan police officer, is less sanguine. He worries that friends of his two young children might one day fool around with his gun.

Still, he keeps it loaded, under his mattress, the butt sticking out so he could grab it quick. He wishes he didn’t need it. But he feels he does, in case.

To ward off accidents, he has taught his children not to touch the gun, not to even discuss it. “This works,” he says, “for now.”

Some gun owners with children do lock their weapons; one popular option is a $90 steel safe that bolts to the wall and can be opened in two seconds by punching a three-digit code on a keypad. But the Justice Department estimates less than half of all privately owned firearms are locked. And the rest are not necessarily secure.

The guns used in school shootings in Jonesboro, Ark., and West Paducah, Ky., were stolen from adults who had locked them up--then hung the key on a nearby nail. The revolver used in the Santee, Calif., school shooting was locked, police said. Andy Williams knew where his father kept the key.

All those unsecured weapons tempt not only teens and toddlers but also thieves. Half a million guns are stolen each year from private homes. And some academics argue that, while armed households might deter some crime, the benefits to society are canceled out by the danger of criminals running amok with stolen guns.

Cpl. Craig Graydon, a police officer in Kennesaw, Ga., would politely disagree.

Kennesaw, a once-rural outpost of Atlanta, passed an ordinance in 1982 requiring every head of household to own a gun. To pass legal muster, the city later added an out: Anyone who objects is exempt. Still, Graydon estimates at least half of Kennesaw’s households are armed.

The town’s violent crime rate dropped by 27% the year after the law passed. It’s crept up since then, as the population has nearly tripled, but nonetheless, violent crime remains far less frequent in Kennesaw than in Georgia or the U.S. overall. Graydon credits the law--and worldwide publicity about it.

“It makes people think twice about coming to commit a crime in our area,” he said. “It seems to really be helping, just the knowledge that quite a few citizens are armed.”

Or as Kleck once wrote in praise of armed self-defense: “Much social order in America may precariously depend on the fact that millions of people are armed and dangerous to each other.”

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American Gun Owners

According to a Gallup Poll in August 2000, 39% of American households have guns. Those households average four guns per household, with 65% reporting that they have them to protect against crime. Other studies:

Kinds of Guns

According to a 1994 survey from the National Institute of Justice, 192 million guns are in private hands. Here’s the breakdown:

65 million handguns

48% revolvers

40% semiautomatics

12% some other type

70 million rifles

49 million shotguns

8 million other long guns

Reasons People Own Guns

46% Self-defense

18% Hunting