‘Gundemic’

MEDIUM RARE

It was the shot heard around the world. Right on cue Anderson Cooper compared America’s so-called “gunslinging” culture with Japan’s strict gun control laws, a fact that did not help former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe escape an assassin’s bullet during a campaign stop last week.

In America, reported Anderson, it’s 120 guns for every 100 Americans: more guns than people. In Japan, Abe’s killer had to make his own gun, a crude weapon that was deadly just the same. The assassin was overpowered by Abe’s security detail without the use of guns.

In Manila, DILG Secretary Benhur Abalos has called for an “intensified” drug war while cautioning policemen and drug agents to “be careful,” the truth being that PNP and PDEA agents haven’t been spared as casualties. How to intensify a war without incurring more deaths?

The obvious answer lies in retraining the lawmen to shoot but not kill. A gun is designed to stop its target permanently or momentarily, not necessarily to leave him permanently dead but to disable him from firing back. Among Japan’s gun ownership laws is one requiring an accuracy test once every three years.

Days after the latest mass shooting in the US, a July 4 parade in Chicago, I was reading a book by fictionist Elizabeth George when this sentence nearly jumped out of the page at me: “She’d said it fiercely, ‘This is not supposed to happen here, God damn it’. . . The provenance of this was America, not England.” The character doing the talking is referring to the fatal shooting of the wife of a New Scotland Yard detective by a serial killer somewhere in London.

Comparing US and UK detectives as portrayed in movies, the audience sees how the former are armed even when they’re just sitting, drinking coffee in the office while their British counterparts who are on a mission need to call for backup by cops who are especially trained to shoot.

In the Philippines, shooting deaths of “small-time” drug couriers were headline stuff during the early days of the drug war while big-time lords were seemingly invisible to lawmen and bullet-proofed. Now, with their body-cams and a spot of retraining – shoot and disable, don’t kill – our enforcers should succeed without reaping the whirlwind.