[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 6 (Tuesday, February 1, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: February 1, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                          HOMICIDES BY GUNSHOT

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to announce to the Senate 
that in the first 30 days of 1994, there were 93 homicides by gunshot 
in New York City alone; 21 of these occurred between Monday and Sunday 
of last week.
  Mr. President, statistics like these are becoming all too familiar to 
us. It has come to a point in the United States where only the most 
brutal murders get our attention. And this is wrong.
  As Judge Edwin Torres of the New York State Supreme Court has said;

       The slaughter of the innocent marches unabated: subway 
     riders, bodega owners, cab drivers, babies; in laundromats, 
     at cash machines, on elevators, in hallways. * * * This 
     numbness, this near narcoleptic state can diminish the human 
     condition to the level of combat infantryman, who, in 
     protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations 
     seated on the bodies of the fallen, friend and foe alike. A 
     society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to 
     extinction.

  In an article in the American Scholar last year, I wrote that the 
crime level in the United States has been normalized. I called this 
process defining deviancy down. Consider the St. Valentine's Day 
massacre. On February 14, 1929, in Chicago, during Prohibition, four 
gangsters killed seven other gangsters. The Nation was shocked. The 
event became legend. It merits not one but two entries in the World 
Book Encyclopedia. We amended the U.S. Constitution.
  Today, violence has reached a level that induces denial. Prof. James 
Q. Wilson comments that Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. 
Valentine's Day massacre every weekend. Even the most ghastly 
reenactments of such human slaughter produce only moderate responses.
  On the morning after the close of the Democratic National Convention 
in New York City in 1992, there was such an account in the New York 
Times. It was not a big story; bottom of the page, but with a headline 
that got your attention: ``3 Slain in Bronx Apartment, But a Baby Was 
Saved.'' A subhead continued: ``A mother's last act was to hide her 
little girl under the bed.'' The article described a drug execution; 
the now routine blindfolds made from duct tape; a man and a woman and a 
teenager involved. Each had been shot once in the head. The police 
found them a day later. The also found, under a bed, a 3-month-old 
baby, dehydrated but alive. A lieutenant remarked of the mother,

       In her last dying act she protected her baby. She probably 
     knew she was going to die, so she stuffed the baby where she 
     knew it would be safe.

  The matter was left there. The police did their best. But the event 
passed quickly; forgotten by the next day, it would never make the 
World Book.
  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week 
that at the current rate, more Americans will lose their lives to 
gunshots than to automobile accidents by the year 2003. In fact, that 
point has already been reached in New York, the District of Columbia, 
and in five other States.
  In 1991, 43,536 people died in automobile-related accidents, as 
against 38,317 from gunshot wounds. Vehicle-related deaths continue to 
decline as a result of better safety features. Yet violent killings, 
often random, go on unabated. Peaks continue to attract some notice. 
But these are peaks above average levels that 50 years ago would have 
been thought epidemic. In 1943, when I graduated from Benjamin Franklin 
High School in East Harlem, there were exactly 44 homicides by gunshot 
in New York City. In 1992, there were 1,499. Among 15-24-year-olds in 
the United States, deaths from gunshots rose 40 percent between 1985 
and 1991.
  In the early 1960's we made automobile safety a priority. An 
epidemiological approach, using passive devices such as seatbelts, 
highway dividers, and later, airbags, produced an annual decline in 
highway fatalities. Surely this approach can help with handgun 
violence. I have advocated ammunition control: banning some 
particularly deadly rounds, heavily taxing others.
  We can start by not becoming desensitized to the problem. Everyone 
was shocked when a man opened fire with a 9mm handgun and black talon 
bullets on the Long Island Railroad last December 7. But we should not 
accept as routine the less spectacular deaths that occur every day.
  To its credit, Newsday now publishes a daily count of homicides by 
gunshot in New York City. And on January 1, 1994, a New Jersey 
businessman installed a huge death clock on a rooftop above Times 
Square in Manhattan. It ticks off the number of gun killings 
nationwide. Less then 24 hours after the clock was turned on, the tally 
had already reached 85. Perhaps we need this.
  I intend to keep the attention of the Senate focused on this issue 
with a weekly statement on the latest homicides by gunshot. The Nation 
cannot continue to tolerate this level of violence.
  Mr. President, the former New York City Police Commissioner Raymond 
W. Kelly, in an essay entitled ``Toward a New Intolerance,'' addressed 
this point.

       There is an expectation of crime in our lives. We are in 
     danger of becoming captive to that expectation, and to the 
     new tolerance of criminal behavior, not only in regard to 
     violent crime. A number of years ago, there began to appear 
     in the windows of automobiles parked on the streets of 
     American cities signs which read: ``No radio.'' Rather than 
     express outrage, or even annoyance at the possibility of a 
     car break-in people tried to communicate with the potential 
     thief in conciliatory terms. The translation of ``No radio'' 
     is: ``Please break into someone else's car, there's nothing 
     in mine.'' These ``No radio'' signs are flags of urban 
     surrender. They are hand-written capitulations. We need new 
     signs that say ``No surrender.''

  I do not suggest that ammunition control will eliminate gun violence. 
Our efforts in the public health area have not ended disease. Nor have 
highway safety efforts eliminated automobile fatalities. But we have 
made great strides in both fields. In 1966, the National Traffic and 
Motor Vehicle Safety Act became law. That year, with 930 billion 
vehicle miles traveled, 53,041 persons were killed on the Nation's 
highways. In 1992, with 2.2 trillion vehicle miles traveled, that 
number fell to 39,235. In 1992 alone, 5,226 lives were saved by safety 
belts, 268 child safety seats, and 559 by motorcycle helmets.
  Mr. President, we cannot afford to ignore proven methods of 
controlling public health epidemics. Gun violence is a public health 
epidemic. Ammunition control can make a real difference, even if it is 
only a small step. Let us take that step now.

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