Silly stats and anecdotes for those who love them

Gun nuts and gun-control nuts — like abortion nuts and anti-abortion nuts — are fond of meaningless statistics, so here’s one: Of the four Long Beach homicides the Herald has covered since 2003, only one involved a gun. But lawmakers don’t pay attention to meaningless stats; they pay attention to meaningless anecdotes. So here are a few of those:
Two weeks ago, a young man stood at the gun counter at Dick’s Sporting Goods in the Roosevelt Field Mall, returning a weapon he had apparently just bought. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and an annoyed look. His annoyance was aimed at the woman with him, who looked to be his mother. They hardly spoke, but when they did, it was in something Baltic-sounding.
If the son’s demeanor was that of an assimilated young American — picture a lot of eye-rolling — his mother was anything but. Dressed frumpily and wringing her hands, she was clearly in distress with the way he was dressed, his dismissive tone and, most of all, the gun. Clearly, its mere presence had turned her home upside down, and she wouldn’t relax until it was gone.
Another anecdote: A day or two later, The New York Times ran an exhaustive account of state police efforts to catch fugitive accused murderer Bucky Phillips up in Chautauqua County, a mostly wooded part of western New York. Phillips had evolved from petty thief to folk hero with his daring escape from a local lockup. His daughter had lost custody of her children and he busted out, local gossip had it, to help her get her kids back.
Then Phillips killed a cop. Suddenly he lost his folksy cachet, and the cheeseburger named for him (“available only to go,” the waitress had told the Times with a wink) stopped selling. A local grocer summed up the community’s mood shift, saying, “He’s a dead man walking. Everyone around here has guns. If anybody sees him, they’re going to shoot him.” Phillips, perhaps crazy but apparently not stupid, surrendered the next day.
Meanwhile, last week a suburban South Shore couple — that would be my wife and I — stopped in a sporting goods store outside Plattsburgh en route to a camping trip near Montreal. Compared with Dick’s in Roosevelt Field, this store was an armory: rows and rows of rifles, shotguns and pistols of every size and caliber. Among the rifles, one stood out. It was half as long as the rest, and painted bright pink.
There was the rifle, and below it our 2-year-old daughter played on the floor with her Polly Pocket doll. Can you imagine? we asked each other on the way to the parking lot. We enjoyed our moment of enlightenment as we left, thinking, This is just how this part of the world is.
When we got to Montreal, it was no longer part of that world, as the city was picking itself up after its third school-shooting rampage since 1989. On Sept. 13, Kimveer Gill, a 25-year-old Goth, stormed the campus of a college he had never attended and started shooting, killing 18-year-old Anastasia DeSousa and wounding 19 others before killing himself.
Gill’s weapon was a Beretta CX4 Storm, which he apparently bought legally in Canada. It’s an assault weapon, currently legal in both the U.S. and Canada with the right permits. Gill, who was a member of a Montreal gun club, had “passed all government safety tests and qualified for a firearms license,” the Toronto Star reported, not without a hint of indignation.
No doubt by the time the ink dries on this Herald, a Montreal M.P. will have drafted legislation outlawing the CX4 and weapons like it, perhaps calling it “Ana’s Law.” The Star and newspapers like it will endorse it, and it will no doubt pass. But it won’t matter to Anastasia’s parents. And it won’t stop the next guy, who will find a way to do whatever he is driven to do, whatever it takes.
DeSousa will have died for nothing if the sum of her legacy is as the girl who inspired the latest, toothless gun ban. Most gun owners are like the good people of Plattsburgh and Chautauqua, and most murders are unpreventable.
And most parents are not as apparently clueless as Gill’s mother. CTV.com reported that she was taken aback by her son’s antisocial behavior: “She says she had no idea her son was harbouring such dark thoughts,” the Web site reported. If there is a solution to any of this, it starts with parents being like that woman at Dick’s, whose use of Old World parenting techniques led her son to do the right thing.
Back to our own meaningless statistic, the use of a gun in only one of the last four Long Beach homicides. The other weapons were a kitchen knife, a pickup truck and the lethal combination of frying pan and staircase. Incidentally, the driver of the pickup had at one point also “passed all government safety tests” and had a valid driver’s license. But the 15 or so drinks he had that night provoked their own unimaginably dark thoughts.