Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Our view: Too many guns

The Spokesman-Review

Like those creepy broom scenes in Disney’s “Fantasia,” American kids just keep appearing with guns in their hands.

On the streets and at gun shows around the country, violence-prone young people find easy ways to buy them.

Another student showed up at school with a gun last week. Eighteen-year-old Douglas Chanthabouly is accused of carrying a 9 mm handgun into a Tacoma high school. A generation or two ago, a similar kid might have simply picked a fistfight with his adversary.

Bruises might have healed. But 17-year-old Sam Kok never will. He died that day. And he left an all-too-familiar scene of grieving family and friends behind him.

The rest of us need to ask questions about where the gun came from. Tacoma police have said it was stolen during a home burglary in 1999. We don’t know how it wound up in the hands of a student who was known for buying and selling guns, who suffers, it appears, from schizophrenia.

This much is clear: The sheer availability of guns in this country leads to these fiery murders. Kids swipe them from their parents’ nightstands, steal one from a neighbor or find a shady gun dealer.

The Washington Legislature now has a chance to stem one possible source. Rep. Brendan Williams, D-Olympia, is sponsoring a bill to require gun show dealers to be licensed and to perform background checks on buyers. Retail gun dealers already have these requirements.

The law, he points out, shouldn’t worry his fellow law-abiding gun owners. It’s designed to keep guns away from criminals of all kinds – whether they’re sex offenders, potential terrorists, high school kids or the mentally ill.

In Washington and Idaho, gun laws contain way too many loopholes. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence gives Washington’s gun laws a D+, Idaho’s an F+. And Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has joined the call for tighter gun restrictions, such as the bill before the Washington Legislature.

It wouldn’t prevent legitimate hunters from pursuing their sport.

But it would be a good law with the potential to help keep victims like Sam Kok alive.

At the same time, all of us should deeply consider the wisdom of keeping guns and ammunition in our homes without properly securing them. Too often they wind up associated not with hunting or self-defense, but with tragedy. Certainly that was the case when a student brought a gun to Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane in 2003.

As individuals, and as a society, we have no good reason for making guns so easily available to troubled kids. Without stricter laws, nightmares far more terrifying than Disney’s water-bucket-bearing brooms will continue.