Todd Maisel, New York Daily News/New York Daily News
The President could help staunch the flow of guns.
Late last month, on the very day a deranged man with a gun killed a dozen innocent Americans at the Washington Navy Yard, I was in our nation’s capital for the latest in a series of nearly 100 meetings with those interested in curbing the scourge of gun violence that continues to plague our nation.
We sat together — reverends, rabbis, priests, police chiefs, gun owners, gun experts, trauma specialists, political figures and many others — united in search of new answers to what has become a rigid and ideological debate.
The good news: We’re onto one.
Long before these recent massacres, this issue became very personal for me. My own father was shot to death by a young man as he arrived for work in Chicago in 1999. My family and I have lived with the loss and pain, the anger and frustration, generated by that day ever since.
As I became a rabbi and met many other clergy, particularly clergy who serve in inner-city congregations, I learned just how common violent death has become in so many American communities. When we say that 30 Americans are murdered by guns daily, we often lose sight of all that goes with each of those deaths: the grief, the ritual, the emptiness and sense of helplessness in the weeks and months and years that follow.
The temptation to believe that nothing constructive can be done is growing. The mood in Washington is grim.
But we have not conducted these 100 meetings for the exercise. We haven’t been looking for therapy or comfort or lip service. We have been looking for answers. And we have found one.
Our government has the power to persuade major gun manufacturers to make meaningful changes in their distribution of firearms and in the safety and identification technology that goes into their guns.
Approximately 40% of the guns bought every year from manufacturers are purchased by the U.S. government, 25% by the Department of Defense, and 15% by state and local police and sheriffs’ departments. That purchasing power gives the taxpayers enormous leverage. They can and should use that leverage to insist that guns will only be purchased from manufacturers who agree to make some simple and inexpensive changes.
The first would be that manufacturers agree to deal only with those gun dealers who are federally licensed and maintain a track record of cooperation with law enforcement and a commitment to public safety. In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg told a Congressional committee that a majority of guns that show up at crime scenes come from only 1% of gun dealers. That small minority of dealers puts every decent American at risk and should either change their ways or be run out of business.
The second change would be that manufacturers agree to accelerate research and development to create smarter, safer and more traceable firearms and more sophisticated ballistics-tracking methods. The chief of a major city police department, in a city where newspapers runs homicide watches every Monday morning, said to us that bullet micro-stamping would be a “game changer.”
What’s stopping this solution? The Department of Defense and other federal agencies — 25% of the gun market together — need a presidential executive order to get this process moving. The President has recently issued two other orders relating to the issue of gun safety and violence reduction.
If the President leads, it will make sense for local leaders — like New York City’s next mayor — to follow.
The result would almost certainly be fewer random and deadly shootings, fewer bodies in our workplaces, schools and streets, fewer families and communities stunned and grieving, and a renewed sense that our nation has both the will and capacity to act effectively when confronted by a dangerous and complicated threat.
Mosbacher leads a congregation in Mahwah, N.J., and works with the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, a network of citizens’ organizations.
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