The April 2 shooting death on the University of Washington campus of UW employee Rebecca Griego at the hands of her ex-boyfriend Jonathan Rowan (who then turned the gun fatally on himself) has sparked intense debate about the immediate and lasting dangers of domestic violence.
The fact that Griego received numerous threats, including death threats, from Rowan - and had consequently tried and failed to have a restraining order imposed on her stalker - has aroused among us a sense of rage, frustration, fear and a sickened kind of futility.
In the aftermath of this shocking murder-suicide, there is a subterranean feeling that Griego's death was not possible but imminent. The reasons for this are complex: There are legal strictures regarding search and seizure, imbalances of power and security between the sexes, as well as the imponderable tenacity of mental illness.
Domestic violence is a plague, and Griego's tragic death has forced us into a crucial and always timely dialogue about its causes and how to prevent or at least protect against it. Let us not ignore, however, another potentially preventable factor in the death of this 26-year-old woman - along with the deaths of more than 30,000 other individuals in this country every year who are victims of homicide, suicide and accidents.
Let us not ignore guns and bullets, or rather let us not once again ignore our pathological culture of guns and bullets - their prevalence, their availability and their lionization.
David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, notes that "defective Firestone tires may have killed 103 people over a number of years, but firearms kill about 85 people every day in this country."
A 1994 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that, in the United States, the rate for gun deaths that year was 14.24 per 100,000 people - the highest among the world's 36 richest nations. The rate for gun deaths in Canada: 4.31 per 100,000 people. Australia: 2.65 per 100,000 people. Sweden: 1.92 per 100,000 people. England and Wales: 0.41 per 100,000. Japan: 0.005 per 100,000.
Anyone failing to see something deeply, deeply wrong and deeply, deeply disturbing in these numbers is living in a fantasy world.
Of course, the National Rifle Association would have you believe that it's not guns that kill people; people kill people. There's really no dispute with the second part of the sentence, unfortunately: People have always killed people. It's just that those proverbial people's odds of killing each other exponentially increase when they can stand 15 feet away and point one at your head.
Gun nuts are just gaga over the Second Amendment, and in their millennial paranoia, they stomp and spit and scream that governmental gun control strikes, unconstitutionally, at the heart of our individual rights. Too bad they fail to read the entirety of that much-ballyhooed amendment.
In any reckoning, it's impossible to see, by any stretch of logic, how Jonathan Rowan constituted any kind of a well-regulated militia.
Rick Levin is editor of the Magnolia News, an associate publication of the Herald-Outlook. He can be reached at
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