When Candy Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Drivers in 1980, more than half of all fatal motor vehicle crashes were alcohol-related, and more than a third of all drivers in those crashes were drunk.
In the short span of 15 years, drunken driving became socially stigmatized and criminally punitive. Drunken-driving rates and deaths plummeted by nearly half.
It’s important to note that Lightner, whose 13-year-old daughter was killed by a repeat DWI offender, didn’t target drinking in general. The alcohol in anybody’s cabinet at home or shelf at a bar was not the problem.
The problem was behavioral: drinking too much and then getting behind the wheel.
A key to MADD’s popularity and success was its singular focus: Drunken driving was wrong, it was criminal, and perpetrators needed to be punished more severely.
MADD didn’t stamp out drunken driving, of course, not by a long shot. Every year, nearly 10,000 people still die in alcohol-related traffic accidents, and more than 1.2 million drivers are arrested for DWI or DUI.
But MADD made a huge difference in what had become an epidemic problem.
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Now we need a MADD strategy for another epidemic problem: gun crime.
It’s folly destined for failure to try and blame the guns in anybody’s closet athome for a criminal’s firearm abuse.
Had Lightner launched an alcohol-control effort (Mothers Against Drinking in general), it would have failed more famously than the previous Prohibition.
So instead of trying to make more laws regulating responsible gun owners, a MADD approach to gun crime would focus on behavior and gun abuse.
Here’s what happens if you get pulled over while driving down the road, and register 0.08 blood-alcohol content:
You go to jail. Your license gets suspended. You pay a steep fine. You get signed up for a mandatory class.
You didn’t have to have an accident, or hurt anybody.
Do it again, and the punishments all get stiffer. You have a job? Sorry, you’re going to jail for three days. Need to drive to work? Sorry, find another way.
Society has become intolerant of drunken driving, so much so that we’re fine and dandy with the occasional instances in which innocent people are wrongly accused and punished-even though such occasions can unjustly soil reputations and ruin careers.
Against the cause of the greater good (10,000 deaths and countless injuries prevented annually), it seems a small price to pay.
Reported gun abuse without victims often slips completely through the cracks, but like drunk drivers who are prone to repeat their behavior, people who recklessly use a gun in anysort of criminal activity are much more likely than the average person to ultimately shoot somebody.
A perfect case in point is the Washington Navy Yard shooter, who had two prior firearm-related arrests.
Aaron Alexis reportedly shot the tires of a car during an argument over a parking space in one incident, and fired into the apartment above his in another.
Latest reports are that he lied about his arrest record, but that would have been nearly impossible if he had had a DWI or DUI. Security clearances normally use the NCIC database for background checks, and a drunken-driving arrest would have leapt out.
If we would apply a MADD mentality to gun crimes, so that any abuse of a gun-even in a misdemeanor case-had automatic penalties like DWI, gun abusers couldn’t get away with lying.
Maybe a good acronym would be IGA, Illegal Gun Abuse.
Anybody who gets an IGA goes straight to jail, gets fined, with an indelible stain on their NCIC record. That way no personnel bureaucrat could omit the gun in the report, like was done in Alexis’ case (you can’t take the alcohol out of a DWI arrest record.)
The MADD mindset about guns needs to be this: If you abuse a gun one time, you are likely to do it again, and the degree of your abuse will escalate according to the situation.
Anger-based gun abuse is the reddest of all flags, and once that’s on your record, the law needs to have a zero-tolerance policy (as all states apply to drivers under 21 for alcohol) for any further violations.
Like drunken driving, gun crimes typically involve state laws, and MADD did a good job of using federal carrot-and-stick methodologies to bring uniformity across state lines for things like blood-alcohol levels and legal drinking ages.
People who shoot people rarely start there with gun abuse. Usually they have illegally carried a gun first, maybe pulled it out or brandished it, possibly even discharged it or shot something (like the guy in Paragould this week who shot a car after a fight with his girlfriend).
A columnist reprinted on the editorial page recently complained that we can’t just put people in jail for hearing voices in their heads, and I agree.
We should put them in jail for criminally abusing a gun, especially if they do it more than once.
Guns are too dangerous for society to leniently suffer abusers’ irresponsibility.
What MADD did with drunken driving, we can do with gun crime-if we really want to.
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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 09/27/2013