By Linda P. Campbell
lcampbell@star-telegram.com
My brother-in-law tried, really tried, one day to talk me into learning to shoot a gun.
But I resisted stubbornly.
Guns are dangerous. And part of me is convinced that as long as I stay away from dangerous things, they'll stay away from me.
Of course that's completely naive reasoning. Life is full of hazards. People get randomly caught in the crossfire of events all the time.
That's not a careless pun -- it's what happened Friday in midtown Manhattan.
A 58-year-old laid-off designer of women's T-shirts went up to a former co-worker with whom he had a long-running feud and shot him dead around 9 in the morning. The gunman then walked calmly around the corner to Fifth Avenue and turned onto 34th Street, where two police officers approached, summoned by a construction worker. The gunman aimed at the officers, and they killed him before he fired a shot.
Nine bystanders were hit by police bullets in the process. The wounded included a receptionist on her way to get coffee, a city tour guide, a 35-year-old North Carolina tourist and an Empire State Building employee, according to news reports.
This wasn't, as initially reported, a maniac indiscriminately shooting people near the iconic skyscraper where in
An Affair to Remember Cary Grant waited at the top for Deborah Kerr, who never came because she was hit by a cab while rushing across the street.
But the shooter's actions surely were lunacy and set off mayhem.
Barely a month ago, my twin 20-year-olds were standing in line at the Empire State Building on a weekday morning. After a summer working in Manhattan, my daughter will be there for her fall semester. A New York pedestrian probably has a better chance of winning the lottery than of getting shot on the street, much less hit by stray police bullets, but a mother worries, you know?
Most distinctly, this incident gave lie to the myth that letting everyone carry their pieces everywhere is the proper response to gunmen who cause terror in public places.
If trained professionals, 15-year NYPD veterans, can't take down an armed man a few feet away from them without injuring nine bystanders, could civilians really expect to do better under this pressure? (And that doesn't even get into the morality of menace in pursuit of right, a philosophical question for another time.)
Apparently during this incident and one Aug. 11, when police killed a man running around Times Square with an Ikea kitchen knife, bystanders started shooting cellphone video and photos. Far better, I say, than having them pull out personal pistols.
But does that settle anything?
Friday's shooter bought his gun legally in Florida two decades ago and learned marksmanship in the Coast Guard,
The New York Times reported (
nyti.ms/Pp6LbM).
And despite news stories lumping episodes of gun violence together, this wasn't like the midnight movie massacre in Aurora, Colo., or the invasion at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis.
It wasn't like the 15-year-old arrested for shooting a 17-year-old fellow student in the back with a shotgun Monday on the first day of fall classes at their Baltimore high school. Nor was it identical to shootings in communities across the country that don't get attention but leave wreckage nonetheless.
I don't believe the Second Amendment guarantees unfettered access to firearms. But even if you believe that, it's important to understand that individual rights have to be balanced against collective ones. Free-speech rights don't let you destroy someone with falsehoods, stand on the street corner and stir a riot, or lie on your income-tax return.
At what point does a freedom cost too much? I don't have an answer. But it's a question we should keep asking.
Linda P. Campbell is a Star-Telegram editorial writer.817-390-7867Twitter: @LindaPCampbell
Looking for comments?
