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San Diego this week suffered yet another mass murder tragedy when two young men, one apparently still legally a boy and the other legally an adult, murdered three people at a local Islamic center and mosque before taking their own lives. It is a terrible history that this city has at least three times has been thrust into the national spotlight for this sort of violence; Brenda Spencer in 1979 when she opened fire on an elementary school, killing two adults, injuring eight children, and a police officer, James Huberty in July 1984 when he killed 22 and injured another 19 at a McDonald’s, and now this act of brutality.
Early reports, and it should always be kept in mind that early reports are often erroneous and littered with mistakes, indicate that the firearms were taken from the parents of one of the cowardly killers. This week’s attack is not the first in which the perpetrators obtained their weaponry from others who legally possessed the firearms. The unsecured nature of the firearms is in these particular cases a crucial element in the chain that led to murderous disaster.
Gun safety advocates often attempt to pass laws that would require firearms in the home to be secured in a gun safe to prevent theft and misuse while gun rights enthusiasts dispute such proposals usually upon the lines that rapid access to firearms is necessary for self-defense in the home and that the expense of gun safes is in effect a tax with the purpose to depress ownership rather than any actual and practical safety concern.
Should firearm owners who do not secure their firearms in a manner that precludes easy theft or use by an unauthorized person face either criminal or civil accountability?
In criminal law there is the doctrine of felony murder which stipulates that anyone who participates in a felony crime can be held legally responsible for murders that are committed in the commission of that offense even if the person did not actively participate in the killing directly. A getaway driver outside of the bank being robbed is equally guilty of murder as the man who gunned-down the security guard inside the bank.
It is clear that felony murder doesn’t apply to people who have had their firearms taken without their consent or with no knowledge of the crime that is about to be committed with them. Any criminal liability would have to come from new legislation passed with that clear intent. Is such a course wise?
Perhaps.
It is clear from the sheer number of unsecured firearms in homes across the nation that to rely on the inherent responsibility of their owners is a fool’s errand. It is also clear that such proposals would face fierce opposition from the gun rights community. There was a township in the state of Georgia that passed a local ordinance making it a crime to leave a firearm in an unlocked motor vehicle. That’s it, if you left a gun in your car you had to lock the car. The conservative state government in the next session amended their supremacy laws to make such a local ordinance void. It is hard to imagine a more benign restriction of firearms possession but even that proved to be a bridge too far. I doubt any such legislation as required firearms be secured and that the owners would share in some criminal liability for unsecured guns used in crimes could ever see the light of day.
Civil liability has a better shot at viability but that requires private civil actions that incur expensive legal actions and to be honest, civil penalties carry not the weight and fear that criminal ones do.
In the short term there is no solution to this nation’s gun death troubles, of which about half are suicides but being self-inflicted doesn’t make those deaths any less tragic or any less worthy of prevention. The truth of the matter is that this is. deep cultural infection and one that has hounded our nation for generations and will likely carry on for generations more.
