'We Know How to Cut Into Gun Violence'

In the dark aftermath of the weekend’s slaughter in Texasand Ohio, I had lunch with two former Baltimore police and a former deputystate’s attorney. Between them, they have roughly a hundred years of lawenforcement experience, which means a century’s worth of dealing with guns andkilling and our great national frustration.

They have a word for people who write our laws and can’tfigure out a way to slow the American gunfire. The word is “idiots.” We can addanother word: “sell-outs.” But we’ll get to our cowardly political leaders in amoment.

Not only do we know how to cut into the gunfire — we knowthat the overwhelming percentage of Americans want their lawmakers to do it.

By large measure, Americans want background checks beforethe sale of guns and ammunition. They want to end all sales of military-styleweapons. They want to end sales to people with criminal backgrounds, to thosewith domestic violence in their backgrounds, or mental illness. They want agerestrictions. They want lawsuits against gun manufacturers.

What Americans don’t talk about — not in any serious way — isany sort of gun roundups. You know, the kind the National Rifle Associationalways talks about when they’re serving up scare tactics. Watch out, the NRAsays, they’re coming for your guns.

No, they’re not.

Nobody’s coming for anybody’s guns. Nobody talks about sucha thing except the NRA when they’re trying to raise money to bribe congress. Sanepeople know it’s an impossible task. There are roughly 300 million guns in the UnitedStates, nearly one gun for every person. Right, go round up 300 million guns.

At lunch with these retired Baltimore law enforcementpeople, we all remembered an effort, years ago, when the former city policecommissioner, Donald Pomerleau, managed to raise enough money for a municipalbuy-back of guns.

It was a feel-good gesture envisioned by Pomerleau. Paypeople for their weapons, and maybe it would cut down on violence. The effortwas well-intended, but it flopped. The only people who turned in their gunswere law-abiders looking to get rid of old, useless, out-dated weaponry.

The NRA hated even that pipsqueak little gesture. Because,to the NRA, this isn’t about the Second Amendment, it’s about money. As long astheir lobbyists keep putting money into the hands of sell-out legislators —those lawmakers who worry more about funding their campaigns and keeping theirseats than they do about the slaughter on our streets —common-sense laws on guncontrol go nowhere.

At last week’s Democratic debates, Sen. Amy Klobuchar saidshe’d met with President Donald Trump, who told her “nine different times” hewould fight for background checks. And, the next day, Trump “met with the NRApeople and folded.”

Here’s a little hope. There are recent reports of NRAfinancial trouble, of legal troubles, of falling revenue. The NRA’shigh-profile Wayne LaPierre, who makes $1.4 million a year, is under scrutinyfor billing the organization $275,000, which he spent at a luxury men’s wearboutique in Beverly Hills.

So maybe the NRA won’t have money to keep buying offpoliticians. Maybe sanity will one day prevail and we’ll get some serious lawswritten.

In the meantime, we’ve got 20 innocent people dead in ElPaso, Texas, and nine more in Dayton, Ohio.

And we haven’t even touched on the hateful language that spews out of the White House every day, and encourages the gunplay and enlivens the dangerous national antagonism.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).