The National Rifle Association loves to champion the image of the "responsible gun owner." Presenting itself as an advocate of safe gun use is an important aspect of the NRA's self-reinforced reputation as a group for gun owners, rather than a lobbying organization for the firearms industry. The NRA touts its safety programs, including the Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program for children, and offers short videos on how to buy gun safes or other locked storage units.
But when it comes to substantive efforts to get people to practice gun safety, the NRA sings a different tune. That's been evident this month in Washington state, where the NRA has unleashed a team of lawyers against local governments that try to shore up responsible laws on gun storage and gun safety.
In July, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan signed a law requiring guns to be safely locked up when the owner or an authorized user is not in direct control of them. This was in response to a University of Washington study finding that nearly two-thirds of gun owners in the state don't lock up their guns properly. Other communities in the state began to follow suit, with the city of Edmonds, in the northern suburbs of Seattle, also passing such a law.
As soon as these laws were passed, the NRA filed lawsuits aimed at shutting them down, claiming that Washington state law prohibits local governments from passing their own firearm regulations.
In fact, activists have also been trying to get the relevant state law changed, collecting signatures for a ballot initiative that would make safe storage requirements a statewide policy. The NRA successfully killed that effort as well, convincing a judge to throw out the proposed ballot initiative because the font on the petitions was too small.
“Why would they be opposed to something that is common sense, when we know there’s a risk from unsafely stored firearms?" asked Laura Hitchcock, a volunteer with the North Seattle branch of Moms Demand Action, in an interview with Salon. She pointed to polling by Morning Consult that shows that more than three-quarters of American voters support laws requiring safe gun storage.
"I know we have firearm owners on our street," said Hitchcock, "and I think it’s really important that everyone take responsibility."
This issue has grown in salience since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, when Adam Lanza was able to access his mother's unlocked guns, shoot her in the head and then go on to murder 26 people, mostly children, before killing himself. But mass shootings are only one part of a larger problem that gun safety advocates hope to address.
“There are really four different reasons guns should be locked up," Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director of the Giffords Law Center, told Salon. She said proper storage prevents small children from handling guns and perhaps firing them by accident; prevents teens and young adults from using guns to commit suicide or from stealing them to shoot up schools or commit other crimes; and helps prevent a broader range of accidental or impulsive shootings that can happen when a gun is within easy reach.
Research backs these contentions up. The Seattle ordinance cites research by the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center showing that safe gun storage reduces the risk of accidental firearm injuries and youth suicides by 73 percent. Massachusetts, which has a similar law to the one passed by Seattle, has a youth suicide rate 35 percent below the national average. Other states with similar laws, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, also have lower youth suicide rates.
Then there's the issue of gun theft. More than 350,000 guns are stolen in the United States every year, a situation exacerbated by the widespread practice of leaving guns out on tables or in unlocked glove compartments or drawers, for any burglar or thief to snatch.
Stolen guns are “a major source of black market weapons and a significant threat to public safety," Nichols said.
The NRA puts forward elaborate reasons for objecting to safe storage laws, claiming that they force gun owners "to render their firearms useless in a self-defense situation by locking them up."
Critics of the organization, however, are more skeptical. "The NRA doesn’t believe in responsible gun ownership," said Igor Volsky, the head of Guns Down America. "It believes in promoting an agenda that says, 'Guns everywhere and for everyone.'"
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“The profits of the gun industry are what’s really driving this," said Nichols of the Giffords Law Center, noting that a favorite marketing strategy of the gun industry is to invoke a "Hollywood-style scenario" in which the heroic gun owner "can stop an intruder if they move quickly enough."
"It’s all very much like a video game," Nichols said. "That’s not how these scenarios play out in real life."
Harvard researchers largely agree. Self-defense use of guns is rare, and especially so in the imaginary situation that the NRA likes to invoke in which intruders enter an inhabited house. Most alleged self-defense uses are actually situations where people are engaged in some dispute and the presence of a gun escalates the confrontation into potentially lethal violence. Moreover, guns are far more likely to be used by one family member against another than used to protect a family member from a violent intruder.
But even if the Hollywood-style home invasion is a genuine concern, there are many electronic safes on the market that fit within the Seattle law and can be opened swiftly — which the NRA knows perfectly well, since its website advertises such safes on pages seeking to burnish the group's reputation as a "gun safety" organization.
“If the market shrinks in any way for guns, for them, that’s a problem," Volsky added.
The sad reality is that the selling point for a lot of guns has nothing to do with protection or safety. It's about making the owner feel manly, powerful and intimidating. If your gun is locked safely away instead of displayed in a cabinet, on a coffee table or propped up in a corner, it doesn't quite convey the same exciting image. It's logical to assume the NRA knows this: Gun safety isn't sexy, and it doesn't sell guns. And if any policy threatens to impact gun sales, we can count on the NRA to oppose it.
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