Thirty thousand people lose their lives to gun violence in the United States each year.  People like 81 year old Dr. Joseph Dillard, a gun collector himself, who came home from running errands one afternoon, surprised a burglar, and was killed.  We’re currently covering his trial on Court TV News.  Or teacher Barry Grunow, shot and killed by his 13 year old student, Nathaniel Brazill, who got angry and got his granddad’s gun from a dresser drawer and took it to school one day.

 

The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 33-40% of American households own guns, and surely most gun owners choose them for protection.  Yet the facts belie this belief.  A gun kept in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting, a homicide, or a suicide, than in self defense.  In homes with guns, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports, they are used defensively in less than 2% of home invasions.

 

These statistics are widely known, and have been for decades.  I can remember gun control being debated as one of the great social issues of the ‘70s and ‘80s, along with smoking bans, sexual harassment laws, and environmental protection.  Decades later, cigarettes are outlawed in nearly every indoor space, sexual harassment is patently illegal, and most Americans insist on clean air and clean water.

 

Whatever happened to gun control?

 

Is it the Second Amendment?  Were gun control laws found to be unconstitutional?

 

No, that never happened.  Ever.  The Second Amendment’s oddly ungrammatical language, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” has been repeatedly interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court and many lower courts as protecting gun ownership only in connection with militias.  Here is exactly what the Supreme Court said on the subject, in 1939 and again in 1980:  “the Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.”

 

As former Chief Justice Warren Burger said, "[The Second Amendment] has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

 

So, it’s not our constitution’s fault, I am pleased to report, because I rather like our founding legal document, once we saw fit to amend it to abolish slavery and give nonwhites and women the right to vote.  As it stands, other the glaring omission of an Equal Rights Amendment, it’s an impressive document, what with limiting the power of presidents and insisting on fair trials, freedom of speech and religion and protecting everyone’s right to privacy.

 

No, the reason why children and lunatics and angry spouses can so readily get their hands on guns in America is because the political will to get rid of guns seems to have fizzled out.  Surely the NRA is not more powerful than Big Tobacco, and Americans sick of cancer deaths have largely prevailed in that fight.  (My kids are amazed to learn that those underground, funky-looking antismoking ads are funded by cigarette companies as part of lawsuit settlements.  I never thought I’d see the day, but it is here.)

 

I always think of the Beatles.  A crazed fan went after John Lennon in the gun-toting United States, and shot and killed him.  A crazed fan went after George Harrison in gun-controlled Great Britain, and stabbed him with a knife.  George Harrison fought off his attacker and survived. 

 

It really is that simple.  Without a gun culture and with strict firearm control laws – even Britain’s Olympic shooting team must train outside the country – Britain has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.   Its population of more than 60 million suffers less than 1.3 homicides per 100,000 residents.  By comparison, in 2000, police in the United States reported 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 population.

 

In the last few years, New York City has gotten the delightful news that our murder rate has declined dramatically due to better policing.  Yet it’s still eight times that of London, a city comparable in size and culture.

 

Last Easter Sunday, here in New York City, two men stared each other down.  One ran inside, grabbed his handy 9mm pistol, and fired at the other, killing a nearby two-year-old toddler strapped into his car seat for protection.  And I had to check the facts before writing that sentence, to make sure I got the right recent toddler shooting death in my city.  I wouldn’t want to confuse it with, for example, the three year old girl in Brooklyn who was just accidentally shot and killed by a drunken family member.  Brother John Losasso said to 200 mourners at the former’s funeral, “God is sick and tired of our weapons. He's sick and tired of our guns and our foolishness."

 

I wouldn’t claim God is on my side, just reason and statistics.  Just like decreasing smoking decreases cancer deaths, decreasing guns decreases homicides.  Sure, there will still be cancer from other sources, and murderers will sometimes find other ways to kill, but cutting down on the most efficient death delivery systems necessarily means significantly fewer grieving mothers at heartbreaking funerals, not to mention smaller numbers of people locked up for life, reduced costs for police, the criminal justice system, hospitals and emergency medical care. 

 

Why did we give up on gun control?

 

As it is, she doesn't stand a chance.

Running from one undisclosed location to another, staying with different friends every night, the woman who says she was brutally gang-raped by three Duke lacrosse players is afraid to tell even her own parents where she is, according to Essence.com. Furtively, she calls them, blurts out "I'm OK, Mama," then hangs up. She drives by their home, but when she sees a reporter inside, she drives off, her children in tow.

Is her fear warranted?

It is. Kobe Bryant's accuser was the victim of constant, terrifying death threats, resulting in criminal convictions of three men, their sentences ranging from four months to three years. One harasser alone left 69 threatening phone messages for the 19-year-old hotel clerk. She was unable to stay in college, or hold a job, because whenever she settled in, media hordes and defense investigators camped out front, questioning, begging, and relentlessly pursuing anyone who came in contact with her. "What's she like?" "Does she seem crazy to you?" "Is she a druggie?" "Did she ever lie to you?" "Who's she had sex with?" What school or employer would tolerate that kind of circus? So that high-profile alleged rape victim ran from state to state — four states in all in six months — before she finally threw in the towel in her criminal case, intimidated and exhausted.

Was she raped? We'll never know. Was she intimidated? Of that, we can be sure.

The single mother of two and college student — and yes, stripper — at the center of the Duke rape case has endured similar threats to her parents as well as herself in the one month since the story broke. Possible KKK literature with the words "WE WILL KILL YOU" have been strewn across her parents' yard, according to Essence.com.

The lacrosse players have expensive, high-profile defense attorneys strategically taking to the microphones, leaking information helpful to their side, and most recently, filing court papers raising questions about the woman's mental health and history of drug and alcohol use. The prosecution has not leaked any information to the media in the last three weeks of fast and furious media coverage of this explosive case. Yet the DA has endured nightly attacks from commentators urging him to drop the case, based on unseen evidence the defense claims to have, and based on statements from witnesses who have not uttered one word of testimony in court, much less been subject to cross-examination.

My calls to not prejudge the case, given the one-sided leaks, and given that not a shred of evidence has yet been presented in court, are routinely shouted down on the cable news shows on which I appear.

This is the kind of logic I get hit with:

The second dancer has a criminal record for embezzlement! Shouldn't the DA drop the case?

You're right, I say, exhausted. No woman should be able to bring a rape charge if she has a coworker with a criminal record.

The accuser appeared to be drunk! Shouldn't the DA drop the case?

You got me again, I say. Drunk women can't be raped. Certainly not a drunk stripper in a room full of drunken, angry men, many of whom already have criminal records for flouting local law. Couldn't happen! (And incidentally, sarcasm aside, rape trauma often appears to the untrained eye like intoxication.)

Whether the accuser is telling the truth or lying, she does not deserve the frightened, furtive life she is now leading, and certainly her children shouldn't be suffering. She has twice suggested to family members that she cannot take the pressure, and she wants to drop the charges.

Money buys a lot in our system. It buys dogged investigators to dig up dirt on opponents; it buys media-savvy PR people and attorneys willing to fully devote themselves to feeding the media beast their best spin on the evidence. The accuser has none of this. She needs an experienced feminist or victims' rights attorney immediately, yes, but she and her children also need protection, so that the facts of this case can be resolved where they should be, in court.

We need a system we'd encourage our daughters to use if, God forbid, they were a rape victim in a high-profile case. Making it to trial should not be only for the strong and well-funded. If the law is to protect even women with criminal records, low incomes and complicated histories from rape, then the system needs to step up and protect women like the Duke accuser, who, after all, did only what we tell sexual assault victims we want them to do: Report immediately, have the rape kit done at the hospital, and don't grant any media interviews before trial.

Without that, commentators are now asking openly how much longer she can hang on. Weeks? Days? Until the next defense leak designed to humiliate her?

Is that any way for a legal system to resolve rape cases?

I just spent a week looking at 10 American colleges with my daughter, a high school junior. Having just read Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons," a brilliant, chilling novel about a sweet young coed's corruption by a dumbed-down, boozy, orgiastic culture at a fictional modern college that out-Dukes Duke, I was leery about what I might find. I took some comfort in the multitude of reviewers who tsk-tsked Wolfe for going overboard, being so extreme in his depiction of drunken, sexually predatory lacrosse players. Come on, they said collectively, don't be ridiculous.

He researched the novel for two years, observing nuances of teenage lingo (read: unimaginative profanities grossly outnumbering actual communicative words, what Wolfe calls the "F* Patois") and absorbing the realities of debased campus life. At a book party a few months ago, I teased Wolfe, "You're the opposite of James Frey. You write the truth and call it fiction." He couldn't disagree. I playfully thanked him for ruining the college application process for me as I go through it with my daughter.

Our school tours sometimes reinforced Wolfe's critical view. When schools start their prospective student presentations with, "If you don't bleed blue and gold, you don't belong here," and then launch into every detail of their hotshot Division One teams, it's obvious what their priorities are. (School colors have been changed to protect the guilty.) Few words were wasted on academic programs. There was one mention of a champion women's sports team.

"Students have a separate gym," we're told warmly on several tours. "Separate from what?" I ask. "Oh, you know, so they don't have to share the gym with the athletes." Ah. So the star athletes don't have to share a gym with the great unwashed — that is, the students who actually pay tuition, study and go to classes.

Being nosy, I asked some random students at the big sports schools if they ever had a class with the athletes. "Oh, no!" they giggled. "They don't take classes with us!" I went to UCLA a hundred years ago, and I never saw any of our star basketball players in class either, even the enormous freshman lectures. But with all the athlete scandals in the intervening years, I thought there might be a pretense that the jocks and the lesser mortals went to the same school. Apparently not.

"Some kids sleep outside for 24 hours to get tickets to our basketball games!" enthused one tour guide. Stunning that she'd think any parents would consider that a positive. Alcohol on campus? "Well, if they want it, they're going to get it," we were told at another prestigious university.

This was all just as the Duke rape scandal story was starting to break. Last night I did a talk show with a Duke alumnus who said the lacrosse players were probably just "victims of their own success," and if anything, it was their parents' fault. A sports psychologist blamed the alcohol. "These are the cream of the crop," I was told. They probably went to all-white prep schools and just didn't know any better, went the argument.

Didn't know better than to anally and vaginally gang rape a woman? This is just "getting a little carried away"? The rape, of course, is only an accusation at this point, but the wagons have already begun to circle to protect the elite.

The alleged victim is an "exotic dancer" who attends the public, mostly African-American college, NCCU, across town, literally, and on the other side of the tracks, figuratively. Why isn't she the cream of the crop? Because she's a stripper?

In 2006, her best short-term economic option to fund her college tuition, as it is for many young women, is to strip. In her case, this meant being sexually provocative in an obviously dangerous environment, amidst a mob of drunken, privileged athletes.

Have we come a long way, baby?

Also in the news this month, some college admissions officers now acknowledge that they are routinely accepting male applicants with lower grades and SATs than their female counterparts. If they simply admitted the best candidates, colleges would tip 2/3 female, and for some reason, we can't have that. (When I went to law school in the 1980's, my school was 2/3 male, and no one was concerned about "balance.")

One of the accused Duke lacrosse players sent around an e-mail right after the alleged gang rape, wanting to know which of his teammates was "in" to watch him sexually thrill to the killing and skinning of some strippers that night. Tom Wolfe's imagination on overdrive couldn't dream up that level of degradation. But it fits right in with mainstream culture now.

Witness the lyrics of this year's Oscar-winning song from the repulsively misogynist film "Hustle and Flow," whose protagonist verbally abuses and slaps the young prostitutes he pushes to turn tricks to fund his rapper dreams. "It's hard out here for a pimp ... because a whole lot of bitches talking sh---."

Millions of hard-working high school girls hit the books, excel in their own underfunded sports, are leaders of student groups, and play by the rules, all to achieve that dream, of getting into elite colleges.

Is this what they have to look forward to?