Thursday, April 22, 1999

John Velleco, spokesman for the Gun Owners of America, was live online Thursday to discuss this week's shootings at a Colorado high school.

A lobbying organization focusing on the second amendment and citizens' right to own firearms, Gun Owners of America monitors gun legislation and regulations. The group also provides legal aid to gun owners engaged in lawsuits against the federal government.

Read the transcript below.

washingtonpost.com: Good afternoon, Mr. Velleco, and welcome. To start off with, at times like this, organizations like yours come under severe criticism. How do you handle such attacks? Do you think the tragedy in Colorado will end up signficantly changing current gun laws?

John Velleco: We do find ourselves under attack, and I think it's a shame that politicians and others will climb over the bodies of the victims to further a gun control agenda. We'd point out that these shootings have occurred at a time when we've never had more gun control in this country. In fact, in 1996, President Clinton and Congress passed the so-called gun-free school zones act, which bans possession of a firearm within 1,000 feet of every school in the country. It's interesting to know that all of these recent school shootings have occurred since that law was passed. The point is that gun control is a proven failure when it comes to reducing crime and protecting citizens in this country.

Firearms access has never been more limited than it is right now in this country. If access to guns was a contributing factor to these crimes, then that would indicate that we should have had more crime when access to guns was virtually unrestricted, which was the case until 1968. But I don't think anyone would argue that we are more safe now than we were when these thousands of gun control laws were put on the books.

Fayetteville, N.C.: Brian Morton of HCI stated that handguns murdered 9,290 person in 1996. That is only .003% of the population. Seems to me more people die from automobiles each year then guns. How do we address the discrepenciay in the media between vehicles and weapons?

John Velleco: The reader is absolutely correct. In terms of death rates in this country, firearms actually rate very low, especially in terms of accidents. Whenever there's an accident with a firearm, it get a lot of attention in the media. But you actually have 10 times greater a chance dying in an accidental fall than from an accidental gunshot. The folks that would seek to use statistics to deny citizens' right to self-defense are completely ignoring the benefit to society of firearms owners. That benefit is, in excess of two million times a year, decent citizens use guns successfully to defend themselves. And those citizens are making this country safer than it would be otherwise for everyone -- even those who support gun control because the criminal has to make a determination whether a person has a gun or not.

Metairie, La.: I am in the NRA and am really tired of being blamed for the outrages of these low-life creep outlaws and their do-nothing parents. Hollywood has how-to-kill movies coming out all the time. How do we save our gun rights with all this destructive chaos around us?

John Velleco: That's a great point, and it goes to the much deeper issues of why are some children turning into homicidal and suicidal maniacs. The high court in this land has told us that we can't display the Ten Commandments on the walls of our schools because some children might actually follow them. Parents are told they shouldn't spank their children, or they might be taken away from them. Children are not taught the difference between right and wrong, and when children do wrong, very often there are no consequences that rise to the level of the wrong they commit. For example, last year in Richmond, Va., a student (an older teenager) shot a principal and a teacher. This person right now is out on probation. In a few years, the two boys in the Jonesboro, Ark., shooting are going to be out. What kind of message does this send to the young people in this country? There really are very little consequences for crimes committed. It's no wonder children have no moral compass today.

Oakton, Va.: In your opinion, what does the term 'well regulated' mean in the context of the Second Amendment?

John Velleco: We have to get back to the terminology and the definitions as the founders would have understood them. And comparing the Second Amendment to other early documents, "well regulated" simply meant well prepared, well trained and well armed. The last thing the founders envisioned is that the militia be controlled by the government. And in fact, the same Congress that ratified the Second Amendment also passed the Militia Act in 1792, which stated that the militia be comprised of all free males within a certain age bracket. And in no way was it ever suggested that this militia be controlled by the government.

Richmond, Va.: How can our society possibly think that our right to bear arms is more important than our right to life? I don't understand why the gun lobby wastes so much time and money on defending guns which are responsible for approximately 10,000 deaths in America every year.

John Velleco: I am pro-life, and I am pro-choice. My choice is to own a firearm to protect not only my life, but the life of my family and the life of any other person who might find themselves in an unfortunate circumstance where they're under attack. Thankfully, millions of people in this country don't agree with the questioner, who, it seems, would make mandatory victims out of the citizens of this country by civilian disarmament policies, which would in fact lead to many more deaths because our streets would be safe zones for criminals.

Grinnell, Iowa: Why on earth are people so focused upon gun legislation? When someone enters a public facility and is planning to die, no laws, rules or back-ground checks are going to protect you. Hasn't this been proven? It's time to quit looking at this as a legislative issue and take control of our and our children's safety. If there was armed security in that school, many more children would be home with their parents today.

John Velleco: I certainly agree in part that no law is going to stop a deranged citizen who has absolutely no regard for the lives of others, or in this case for the life of himself. So in that case, gun control law proposals, as have already proposed by Janet Reno, President Clinton, [Calif. Sen.] Dianne Feinstein, etc., are an attempt to put a political band-aid on a severed extremity. What we need to do as a society is look at the deeper issues involved here and ask what is driving these children to this point. One example: As opposed to constantly focusing on gun laws, let's look at another area of society. Today, one out of every two marriages will end in divorce, and where does that leave the children? And maybe we as a society -- by that I mean churches, communities and individuals, not the government -- should spend a lot more time trying to keep families together.

Arlington, Va.: What is your stand on mandatory trigger locks to prevent kids from accidently shooting a gun?

John Velleco: Mandatory trigger lock proposals are actually better termed "lock up your safety laws." When a citizen needs a gun for self-defense, he or she needs it immediately, and because trigger locks can cause a citizen to take more time in getting access to the gun, these proposals will actually lead to more deaths than they're trying to prevent in the first place. That said, we're not opposed to trigger locks per se, but that should be a market decision a consumer chooses, not something forced on us by the government.

Gray, Tenn.: What percentage of legal owners of firearms ever use their guns to commit a crime?

John Velleco: I can come at this from the perspective of the gun. There are approximately 150,000 illegal uses of firearms in this country every year. If we assume that each of those illegal acts were committed with a different gun, which is highly unlikely, that works out to less than one-half of 1% of all guns in this country will ever be used in a crime. So immediately we see that any gun control law starts out looking for a needle in a haystack. On the other hand, it's a proven fact that roughly 70% of the crime in this country is committed by 7% of the criminal element. And if we were to focus our law enforcement efforts not on the entire civilian population but on criminal activity, then we would see a much greater decrease in crime.

Columbia, MO: As a teacher in a Medical School, I have some familiarity with infectious disease. Most people would be startled to realize that the biggest increase in public health came about not from improvements in treatment but from prevention. If a microbe in the water supply were causing deaths at the rate of handguns, we wouldn't just teach people to wash their hands better, we would also treat the water system to make sure that the public wouldn't come into contact with it. In defending more guns, you are defending a killer - would you have defended cholera in the same way?

John Velleco: I would ask the questioner, how many lives have been saved by infectious diseases, and how many lives have been saved with guns? If someone breaks into my house to rape my wife, I'm not going to throw a glassful of cholera at them.

London (US citizen): While I support the Second Amendment, it says nothing about making it easy for citizen to get weapons. It is obvious from many similar incidents that guns are just too easy to get. Current rules are ignored. Don't we need new ways of controlling access to firearms?

John Velleco: The founders of this country would not distinguish between the right to keep and bear arms and the right to acquire and possess those arms. And that's one of the reasons why we're not wearing red coats and sipping tea in this country.

Washington, D.C.: Why shouldn't the U.S. ban guns as England did? Are we not civilized enough? Their government doesn't seem to be "taken over" since the ban. People who enjoy guns as a hobby can find a different, less dangerous way to spend their time.

John Velleco: The questioner is living in a government experiment of a total gun ban, and I don't think it's working too well. Washington, D.C. has had a gun ban since 1976. That being the case, at the scene of most crimes, the only person with a firearm is the criminal, and that's an unfair advantage to the criminal.

It's also interesting to note that in this country we have a higher murder rate without firearms than England, Japan and most other industrialized countries have combined (with firearms and without). So we are simply a more violent society, and we're killing each other with hands and fists and knives and baseball bats than those other countries are. We don't hear any calls for banning for hands and fists and knives and baseball bats.

Alexandria, Va.: Why is the NRA so afraid of gun control? Gun control will not infringe on people's right to own a gun, but will add common sense to having that right. How do you explain the staggering comparisons concerning U.S. gun violence compared to other developed countries such as Sweden, Germany and France.

John Velleco: In this country we are very much a melting pot, whereas other countries like Japan are 90% homogenous. So if we want to be like other countries, we need to consider all of the implications of that.

Gun control does infringe on the right to own guns. If the government of Virginia says you can buy only one handgun per month, what's to stop them from saying you can only buy one per year? Or what's to stop them from saying one per 10 years or one per person? You cannot separate being able to buy and acquire guns from being able to possess them. If the government can control one, they can end up controlling the other.

Poconos, Penn.: If gun control made getting weapons more difficult, and that difficulty stopped just one murder, wouldn't it be worth the control? Even though criminals usually obtain their guns illegally, if we could stop one such incident as these, it would be worth it in my book.

John Velleco: What if the homicide that was prevented was the justifiable homicide of a criminal who was in the process of killing one of your children? We have to always get back to the benefits of gun ownership. Gun owners save lives in this country. There are roughly 18,000 firearms-related homicides per year in this country. There are over two million successful self-defense uses of firearms. And, as you point out, if the criminals get their guns illegally anyway, whose guns are you talking about taking away? The good guys.

Alexandria, Va.: So, your solution is more firearms? When does it stop? The fact is that your organization has opposed all firearm regulations which would have made firearms safer and ensured that criminals wouldn't have access to them. Yet, you accuse people interested in a safer country of "crawling over bodies?"

John Velleco: A study of every county in this country, done by John Lott, a professor at the University of Chicago, has shown that the easier it is for law-abiding citizens to carry firearms, the lower the crime rate. He found no exception, which led him to the title of his book: "More Guns -- Less Crime."

The criminal in this society will always have access to a gun. We tried prohibition in this country. It didn't work with alcohol, it's not working with drugs and it sure won't work with firearms. Because a criminal needs a gun. What we need to do as a society is to raise the price of committing a crime for the criminal. And we do that primarily in two ways. One is to punish criminals when they're caught and convicted for their ctimes. The other is to increase in their minds the chances that they're going to run into a victim who may be armed.

Harrisonburg, Va.: There was an armed deputy in the building during the killings. He exchanged fire with one of the suspects but was unable to hit him. So, having armed security in the school didn't really help, did it? Can you explain to the families whose children were shot execution style why it is so necessary to have guns?

John Velleco: With deepest heartfelt sympathy, I would say that there is no gun control law on the books now or being proposed that could have stopped those boys.

Cambridge, Mass.: I'm undecided on gun control, but it does seem that Western democracies that have very strict gun laws also have amazingly low rates of violent crime. That seems to me a pretty clear cause and effect. How can you dispute this evidence?

John Velleco: As I said in a previous answer, we do have more violence than some of these other countries, but we have it even without the guns. If we stop blaming guns and start blaming people and holding them responsible for their actions, then we too can see a dramatic drop in crime.

Texas had the highest crime rate in the country throughout the 1980s. Throughout the course of four years in the early '90s, they tripled their prison capacity and they tightened up their parole system. Their crime rate dropped over 30% during that time.

Clarksville, Md.: Based upon your responses, it appears that your organization's opinion is that the free availability of firearms had little, if anything to do with this tragedy, and that perhaps the best way to prevent a similar event is to ensure that we're all armed. Is that in fact your position?

John Velleco: No, that's not my opinion. There are any number of people in this country who have demonstrated by their actions that they have forfeited their right to own guns. So we don't think that every person should be allowed to own a gun. If we live in a free society, or any other society, there are certain risks that we run. And you simply cannot pass laws that will eliminate every risk. If we have cars in this country, most people will use them lawfully; a few people will use them unlawfully. Should we go back to the horse and carriage? The same is true for guns. The overwhelming majority of people use guns lawfully, and we shouldn't pass laws that are blaming everybody else's guns that have nothing to do with the crime problem.

Sterling, Va.: You say that gun control laws are failing to stop crime. What kind of laws do you think will help to prevent this type of incident in the future? Or do we just have to accept that as a free society bad things will happen, and there is little we can do about it?

John Velleco: To take the last point first, in any society, bad things will happen.

We have all kinds of laws that the two alleged perpetrators of this crime broke, not the least of which is murder. Laws don't prevent crimes. Laws are intended to punish people who commit crimes, and secondly, to act as a deterrent to those who are contemplating a crime. But laws don't change the heart of a person. For example, there are laws against child abuse in this country, and yet child abuse is a horrific problem. If it were simply a matter of passing laws, we wouldn't have any problems like that.

Manassas, Va.: I'm interested in your thoughts on why this debate is even about guns. It seems that kids today don't understand that some things are morally wrong, not just illegal. Discussing the educational system's role in teaching common morality seems more reasonable. Certainly going after the tools of destruction is easier, but shouldn't we think long-term?

John Velleco: I agree absolutely, and wish that we did not have to be in this debate at all. Because it's not about guns; it's about people. Unfortunately, there are many who will try to use this tragedy to take away even more of the people's liberty. And we are forced by these people to enter into this debate and to defend the Constitution and the Second Amendment.

washingtonpost.com: Thank you, Mr. Velleco, and thank you all for your questions. Our next discussion will take place at 2 p.m., with Stephen P. Teret, director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, joining us for an hour.

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