Gun control debate rolls into Augusta

The Bangor Daily News story of Jan. 27-28 on gun-control legislation contained inaccurate statements attributed to William Harwood, president of Maine Citizens Against Handgun Violence. BDN reporter Emmet Meara did a good job reporting on gun legislation but much of the information provided to him by Harwood was incorrect.

I have had to follow MCAHV around constantly to correct their inaccurate and misleading statements, so the BDN is not the first to be misled by this anti-gun group. Sometimes I feel like the guy who follows the horses in a parade and scoops up their messes. Eventually, you start to dislike horses. Please allow me to correct two of MCAHV’s most outrageous inaccuracies.

First, Harwood said that at annual auctions of firearms conducted on behalf of state agencies by the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, “there are no background checks before the sales.” That is absolutely wrong. SAM is a licensed federal firearms dealer and conducts background checks on all purchasers of all guns at our auctions. In fact, at one of our auctions last year, the FBI’s National Instant Check system was not functioning and we were unable to give buyers a single gun. We had to return all the guns to our Augusta office, do the background checks the next week, and ask all buyers to return to Augusta to pick up their guns – a terrible inconvenience.

And I want to note that no purchaser of a firearm at any SAM auction has ever been denied by a background check. The fallacy in our entire gun control system is the belief that criminals obey these laws. They don’t bother to fill out the extensive form and stand around while we check them out with the FBI. The bad guys steal their guns — no background check required. It is aggravating to have the president of this anti-gun group giving the media and legislators incorrect information on a matter as important as this.

Meara also reported that Harwood said, “Maine loses an average of 100 residents each year to handgun violence.” On this issue, Harwood has to know better. He may have meant “firearms violence” but even then his statement would be misleading. Last year, Maine had the lowest number of homicides in 30 years – since the state began keeping statistics. Just 11 Mainers were homicide victims. Six of the 11 were killed with firearms. Six of the homicides were related to domestic violence in which three of the victims were women and three were men.

Over that 30-year period, Maine generally averaged 26 homicides a year. Not all homicides are committed with firearms, either. Mainers own more guns than the citizens of almost any other state. We also are blessed with one of the nation’s lowest crime rates. It would be logical to assume that there is a correlation between high gun ownership and a low crime rate.

And we’re getting safer. The crime rate in Maine declined for the third straight year in 1999 (we do not yet have statistics for 2000, but a preliminary report showed another decrease). Domestic violence assaults decreased by 8.7 percent in 1998 and 5.7 percent in 1999. The rate of violent crime in Maine in 1999 was 1.01 offenses per 1,000 people, compared to the national average of 5.6 per 1000 (1998).

We do not have a gun problem in Maine. Subtracting suicides, Maine firearms deaths were only 0.1 percent of Maine deaths in 1999, compared to a national figure of 0.6 percent. We should all be concerned about problems such as domestic violence and youth suicide. These are problems that must be addressed. But guns are not the problem, nor will gun bans or new gun laws be the solutions. It would help to keep gun accidents and deaths in perspective.

For example, only nine Maine people age 25 or younger used a gun to commit suicide in 1999. We mourn each one, but it is unlikely that more gun laws would have prevented those deaths. Of 13 studies examined by Gary Kleck in 1997, only one found a significant association between gun levels and rates of total suicide, and that study used an invalid measure of gun availability.

The pattern of results, according to Kleck, supports the view that where guns are less common, there is a complete substitution of other methods of suicide. Gun levels have no effect on the number of people who die in suicide, according to Kleck.

In the entire period from 1982 to 1996, in the age bracket from birth up to 19 years of age, there were a total of four handgun accidents, 16 handgun suicides, and three handgun assaults. To put that into perspective, in just the five years from 1991 to 1995, 197 kids between birth and age 19 were killed in motor vehicle accidents. Fifteen died in fires and fifteen drowned.

SAM wants our children to be safe. We believe education and safe gun storage are very important. In partnership with the Maine Chiefs of Police Association, we have recently created and printed a Kids and Guns safety poster that emphasizes the importance of safe storage and education. We will be distributing those posters later in February to gun shops and other places. We do not want BDN readers to think we are reactionary naysayers – we want to be part of the solutions to these problems. But it is difficult to work with anti-gun groups like MCAHV because they are paranoid about guns.

One of MCAHV’s legislative bills exposes their real thinking. That bill would require all law enforcement agencies to destroy any handguns that they confiscate. Today many agencies – especially municipal police departments – trade those confiscated handguns in for new guns for their officers. The trade-ins save taxpayers money. These confiscated firearms are a public asset and should not be wasted.

MCAHV’s bill demonstrates their belief that guns are the problem – that if we could just destroy all the guns, we would be safe. hat is naive and shows an astonishing ignorance of history. During the last legislative session it became apparent that none of us had a complete grasp of the statistics on gun accidents and crimes in Maine, so SAM has undertaken a project – led by SAM volunteer George Fogg of Yarmouth – to collect all available facts. It has not been easy but we now have all the statistics that are available.

Our briefing book of gun facts will be provided to legislators and the media soon, prior to the start of debate on gun bills at the Legislature. It is our hope that, once these facts are available to all, we can reach some mutual conclusions and move away from these annual contentious debates about guns in Maine. In the meantime, we hope that spokesmen for MCAHV will stop providing misleading and inaccurate information to the media and legislators.

George A. Smith is executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.