Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301120156
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A `GRIM REAPER' STATE?
Guns are everywhere in Virginia. They sneak up the state's spine on Interstate 95. In fields and hollows, farmhouses bristle with hunting rifles and shotguns. Urban neighborhood nights snap with handgun fire. And even the toniest suburbs can sport more pistols than Porsches.Virginians love their lead-spitting guarantors of freedom, but the statistical price for such handy armament is extravagant:
Guns killed 991 Virginians in 1991 - almost seven for each of the 146 Americans who died in combat in the Persian Gulf war.
Among the state's unnatural causes of death, only motor vehicle accidents take more lives than guns - just barely.
The old capital of the Confederacy also is the murder capital of the South: Richmond ranked fourth in the nation for homicides per capita during the first half of 1992, behind Gary, Ind.; Washington, D.C.; and Detroit.
Most of Richmond's killings last year - 102 of 120 as of Dec. 30 - were committed with firearms. Statewide, about seven of every 10 murders involve firearms.
Experts agree that two things about guns - like them or hate them - keep murder rates high: their availability and their deadliness.
"How many of those murders were committed in the heat of the moment when a gun just happened to be available?" wonders Kim Hunt, head statistician for the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. The answer, according to annual state crime reports, is that almost half of Virginia murders result from arguments, while 15 percent in 1990 were committed in the course of another crime.
Lash out with a gun in a fit of anger, Hunt said, and what could have been an assault often ends up murder. A shot from a gun is about five times more likely to kill someone than a stab from a knife.
But beyond that logic lies a more fearful factor: a culture of violence and cheap life that has sent Virginia's overall rate of violent crime soaring. Lawbreakers statewide actually are less likely to commit crimes against property - theft, burglary and larceny - than they were 10 years ago. They are more likely to commit crimes against people - murder, rape, robbery and assault.
Within this culture, the criminals are getting younger, the young are getting more vicious and the Virginia traditions of the thrill of the hunt and the right to bear arms have become deadly.
"The types of guns we're seeing out in the communities are not the guns used for hunting," said Lt. Oscar T. Clarke of the Richmond police. "You don't hunt with an Uzi. You don't hunt with a Mac-10. You don't hunt with an AK-47, unless you're hunting human beings.
"That's what's killing these people. . . . It's a survival-of-the-fittest kind of thing - my gun's got to be bigger than your gun. We've got a mini-arms race going on here in the urban cities."
And it's not confined to the cities.
Across Virginia, communities of every description must confront the spreading blight of firearms abuse. In Northern Virginia, parents in the bedroom community of Lake Ridge have been stunned to find that their children, for the most part privileged achievers, consider pistols the coolest of status symbols.
In Emporia, a gritty Southside city of 5,340 at the conflux of Interstate 95 and U.S. 58, police must deal with a guns-and-drugs trade so robust that their little community has the third-highest crime rate in the state.
If there is a place apart from all the madness, it could be Craig County, just west of Roanoke. Though the local deer-stalking populace is as heavily armed and camouflaged as a SWAT team, there is so little crime that most every door is unlocked and car keys stay in the ignition all night long.
But even in Craig, amid such place names as Happy Hollow and Peaceful Valley, the residents look east and wonder how long until the misery overtakes them.
"The violence problem and the gun problem feed on each other," said Hunt, the Criminal Justice Department statistician. "We would still have a violence problem without any guns, but the fact that we do have so many guns makes our violence problem that much worse."