Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301100008
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THEY'RE UP IN ARMS ABOUT (UN-AMERICAN) GUN LIMIT
Used to be, it was a cinch to lance some pompous, pious windbag by accusing him or her of having a holier-than-thou attitude.Around our mountains lately, it's all the rage to claim to be Americaner-than-thou.
Franklin County supervisors who support a notion to zone parts of the county are communists.
Montgomery County citizens who agree that Christmas and Easter are not suitable holidays for a multiethnic public school system are the enemy within.
Now it is my turn to play the anti-patriot, the man who would destroy America.
I had the audacity, last week, to suggest that Gov. Doug Wilder's proposal to limit handgun buyers in Virginia to one gun per month has merit.
"It will probably cost you a lot of readers," wrote my new friend Charles, of Roanoke.
Alas, sympathetic Charles was not in the majority.
"The First Amendment is and has been abused to more tragic effect than has the Second. For every gun death there have been thousands of lives lost to expressions of pornography, violence, hedonism, cynicism, materialism, disincentive . . . promulgations of the media," wrote my new friend C.L., of Salem.
"Was your piece a considered exposure of your sincere beliefs, or an effort to please based on personal ambition?" asked my new friend Ralph, of Boones Mill.
"For so long as policemen have guns, I will have one also," continued Ralph. If his lyrics were in an Ice-T rap song, we'd all be spastic.
"What you have written in your column about the right to own guns would be called reason for treason. . . . The media is nothing but a bunch of cowards that don't have enough guts to write the truth," writes my new friend Charles, of Radford.
There have been phone calls. The letters continue.
My favorite: A clip of my gun column, with a small card attached: "Jesus loves you," it says. "Everyone else thinks you're an ---hole," says the next card.
Anyone so brazen to suggest that one gun a month is sufficient tears at the American fabric. So be it.
But my motive isn't personal ambition and it isn't disdain for the Bill of Rights.
Roanoke is not a particularly violent place, though we have some. It isn't a particularly crime-ridden place, though we have plenty.
It is home to fewer than half the people who share this mountain valley.
But in 1992, city police responded to 1,073 emergency calls about gunfire. Five people were dead; there were 60 cases of malicious wounding with a gun, 19 cases of attempted malicious woundings with a gun, 55 cases of shooting into buildings, two cases of shooting within buildings and 29 cases of shooting into vehicles.
One of the most chilling: 902 people called to report sounds of gunfire. Only 103 cases were verified.
What have we done to ourselves that backfires and firecrackers remind us first of gunshots?
Americaner-than-thou?
Sure. I'm the un-American who hates to see his taxes squandered by police officers chasing gunfire 1,073 times a year. I'm the un-American who wants his kids to think first that a walnut has whacked the tin roof; not that a gunshot has once again cracked the night.