Coming to Clarity About Guns

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We may be witnessing the beginning of one of those tectonic shifts in our culture and morality: the terror haunting the gun industry is the precedent of tobacco. At some point in the last couple of generations, smoking became disreputable in American life--a sort of moral consensus formed. If juries were to start awarding damages to cities, or to individual gunshot victims, extracting millions from gun manufacturers, or at least forcing them to mount expensive defenses in hundreds of suits, then it is possible that the N.R.A. and other defenders of the gun might abandon their cold-dead-hand absolutism and begin to compromise a little. At least one Brooklyn jury has already issued a warning: last February it ordered three gun companies to pay a young gunshot victim $500,000 after finding that they had engaged in the "negligent distribution" of their product.

If N.R.A. president Charlton Heston had a cannier sense of public relations, he would knock himself out campaigning to stop the sale of semiautomatic weapons, ban armor-piercing bullets and do all possible to keep firearms away from criminals, children and psychotics. He would legitimize his own case by pre-empting the best ideas of the other side.

I live on a farm and own four long guns. I learned to shoot when I was 10 years old, under the tutelage of the N.R.A. It was not a flawless education: when I was 13, I nearly blew a friend's head off, by accident, with his father's .38 revolver. (I was lucky enough to be permitted to learn a lesson the hard way; my friend was plain lucky.) I find that I sympathize with both the gun culture and the anti-gun culture. I do wish the gun culture were a lot more intelligent.