Editorials

An old reprobate, a heavy-drinking veteran of many barroom brawls, once told me why he favored knives over guns when he needed to get out of a tight spot. Anyone who knows how to use knives, he said, knows that you can always put your thumb half-way up the blade, so you can just stick the guy, not kill him by accident. 

This story always comes to mind when we hear about yet another person dying on our city streets. There was such a tragedy on a corner near the UC campus on Sunday morning. One of Berkeley’s golden children, a young woman full of joy and promise, was killed while she was out for an evening with her girlfriends. As of this writing the killer has not been identified, nor is his motive understood. What is known, however, is that he used a gun, from some distance away.  

Anger, jealousy, greed, revenge—the motivations for quarrels among human beings haven’t changed since biblical times. But what’s different in the United States in the third millennium is the ease with which emotion translates into death. Only guns can kill swiftly, anonymously, at a distance. And here, now, guns are easily purchased, ready to wreak havoc in a single unguarded moment. The impulse which could give rise to a slap or a punch is quickly fatal—no time for reflection, no time to pull back as you could with a knife. 

There’s a new counter-trend among some leftists which says that gun control is not a winning issue these days, so it should be downplayed. Winning back red-staters, some say, means not challenging their right, indeed their need, to strap those rifles onto their pickups (forgetting the children in rural areas who have turned these guns on each other).  

Women who fear being victims imagine that possession of firearms will make them safe. And urbanites whose lives are controlled by their fears believe that guns in their homes will protect them, oblivious of the statistics that say that guns in homes are most often used against family and friends, not strangers.  

There are tactical discussions about tradeoffs in the political area—let’s ban Saturday night specials, not shotguns, gun shows, not gun dealers. But the central inescapable fact about guns, all guns, is that they make it possible, indeed easy, for humans to kill other humans on a whim, without reflection, with no chance to say no to anger. Death can be dealt from a distance, so that the person pulling the trigger does not even have to touch the victim. Guns provide an all-to-easy way for humans to dodge the checks and balances inserted by evolution and culture between our murderous tendencies and our actions. 

For the determined murderer, there are plenty of tools available without the need for guns. Humans in the 20th century engaged in mass slaughter of other humans with machetes, gas chambers, explosives, as well as with guns. But for the impulse killer, the ready availability of guns is the lynchpin which changes a quarrel into a tragedy, often for both shooter and victim. When they find the young man who was seen to have fired the shot which killed our Berkeley child at the corner of Dwight and College on Sunday morning—and they will find him—chances are that he also will prove to be someone’s beloved boy, born into high hopes and expectations, brought down because a gun in his hand turned him into a quick and easy killer. Without that gun he might have paused and changed his mind, and Meleia Willis-Starbuck would still be alive. Instead, today Berkeley mourns her. 

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