If Anyone Can Use Your Gun, It Doesn't Make You Safer

I live in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, and the big news around here lately has been the shooting of Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man. NAACP leaders have come to Minneapolis and are meeting the mayor and the governor. Protesters are camped out around a police station. Interlopers used the protest to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at police. 

The demonstrators want video of the incident released, and law enforcement doesn't want to release it yet for fear of contaminating witness statements.

From what we can tell, the following happened: Jamar Clark beat up his girlfriend. Paramedics were called and began to treat her. Clark hassled the paramedics. The cops tried to stop him. He allegedly got his hand on the gun of one of the cops. Then the cops shot him in the head. The demonstrators say Clark was handcuffed, the cops say he wasn't.

The video probably won't clear anything up: it's probably of poor quality, shot from a building surveillance camera with a poor angle.

Now, Jamar Clark wasn't some innocent motorist. He instigated the incident. But the punishment for being a violent idiot shouldn't be the death penalty.

But there is a common thread in most of these shootings of unarmed black men: cops are afraid their own weapons will be used against them. In Ferguson Michael Brown was shot after supposedly trying to take a cop's gun. Last December a cop shot Ezell Ford, a black man who supposedly tried to grab his gun. In 2013 Jonathan Ferrel, a former football player, whose car broke down was killed because the cop said he tried to take his gun.

My guess is that a lot of cops just say this to cover up bad shootings because there's no way to prove it unless there's video. But it does happen, and apparently it happens all the time.

On March 11, a defendant on trial for rape in Atlanta allegedly overpowered a courthouse deputy, took her gun and killed four people, including two law enforcement officers. A little over a month later, a Providence detective was killed with his own weapon while interviewing a suspect at police headquarters.

Police in Augusta, Ga., killed an inmate who fled on April 21 after overpowering a state corrections officer and taking his gun, authorities said. Two days later, a man under arrest in Spring Valley, Ill., wrested away an officer's gun and beat him with it. The suspect then fatally shot himself, police said.

This shows the fallacy of "guns make us safer." If your weapon can be used by anyone who picks it up, it represents a hazard to you and everyone around you.

A gun is like a hand grenade with the pin pulled. Cops run around all day and all night with this armed grenade on their hips, just waiting for it to go off. No wonder they have itchy trigger fingers.

Now, if these cops had guns that only they could fire, how many lives would be saved? And it goes beyond cops: how many kids shoot their little brothers because daddy left his gun where the kiddies could get it? How many teenagers have committed suicide with a stolen weapon? How many people have been shot by their own weapons because they dropped them on the bathroom floor?

The NRA has opposed guns that are keyed to individuals because they're afraid they would malfunction when they're most needed. And I agree that guns activated by a fingerprint reader, or an embedded chip, or some other equally esoteric technology are insufficiently reliable.

Simpler is better. There has to be a simple foolproof unlocking mechanism for a gun. It might be a ring that acts as a key when it's inserted into the grip. It might be some kind of coded safety that takes just a moment to activate while you're aiming (because cops had better damn well be aiming). This would also reduce the number of accidental shootings that occur when cops clean an "empty" gun.

The basic design of police sidearms hasn't really changed in century. It's time to use some of that American exceptionalism to design weapons that really do make us safer.

As long as anyone can shoot a cop's gun, the weapon poses a deadly threat to bystanders, suspects and the cops themselves.