Up in Arms

By NANCY GIBBS

When the shooting began, Esther Confino says, "I got down as low as I could and covered my head with my handbag and just prayed." Perhaps a prayer can stop a Black Talon. But a pocketbook probably will not. The bullet is designed to unsheathe its claws once inside the victim's body and tear it to pieces. That's what Colin Ferguson was firing, to the right, then the left, as he walked backward through the third car of the 5:33 train to Hicksville, New York, last Tuesday night. And the passengers who crushed toward the exits or dove under their seats or tried to hide behind their handbags did not stand much of a chance. By the time it was over, Confino told reporters, her purse was soaked with the blood of a fellow passenger.

About 90 commuters were trapped on the car with the madman. The first ones to die were three men sitting reading their newspapers when Ferguson shot them in the head. The last one, Maria Magtoto, was shot in the back as she tried to make it out of the car. Ferguson watched the panicking passengers screaming for the doors to open. "I'm going to get you," he told them.

But when he ran out of bullets and had to reload his 9-mm semiautomatic Ruger for a second time, the passengers saw their chance. Two men huddled in the doorway looked at each other, looked at the killer and said, "Let's get him." A third joined in as they sprinted down the aisle, lunged forward and pinned Ferguson back against a seat, then ripped the gun away. By the time the death train pulled into the station at Garden City, Long Island, passengers were caring for one another, turning neckties into tourniquets. The killer was subdued. "I did a bad thing," he said.

You can't let fear control your life. You can't let fear control your life. You can't . . . Over and over they said it like a catechism, the survivors who made it safely home with bloodstains on their raincoats and gun smoke in their noses and screams still slicing through their ears. They knew they had to get on the train again the next morning, ride into Manhattan and get on with their jobs and their Christmas shopping and the rest of their lives. But they will never again sleep on the ride home.

The slaughter produced a national shudder, the kind that follows any awful crime that bleeds into unexpected corners -- the toddler caught in cross fire during a trip to the Denver zoo, eight people gunned down in a swanky San Francisco law firm, and now five dead and 18 wounded by the gunman on the commuter train. These are the crimes that seem impossible to prevent, to avoid or to forget. And they have a way of focusing the mind.

This latest spasm has produced what educators call a "teachable moment," when students -- in this case the entire citizenry -- may be ready to learn a new lesson about an old problem. Among activists who for years have fought for tighter gun laws, the current wave of terror presents a perfect opportunity to turn the fear of violence into a rejection of guns. Violence is out of control, they argue; guns cause much of the violence, therefore it is time to get serious about controlling the guns. President Clinton used the shooting to renew his call for tougher laws and licensing and a ban on assault weapons. In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Clinton said the nation must fight "violence with values," and mentioned the well-publicized abduction and death of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in California as well as the commuter-train slaughter as examples of violence that "has left Americans insecure on our streets, in our schools, even in our homes."

In city and country, on the left and the right, comes a shared sense of despair at the carnage. "There's an absolutely solid, growing sense that we've got to do something about all those guns," says sociologist Stephen Klineberg of Rice University in Houston. "Most Americans are against taking away the rights of individuals to own a gun. But what they're increasingly demanding is rational control over guns."

It is exactly at a moment such as this, in the aftermath of a searing crime, that gun-control advocates run into a dilemma. For each person watching the mayhem on the 5:33 who came away thinking it is time to take the guns away from the madmen, someone else was thinking it might be time to go out and buy a gun. A lot of people, in fact, may be thinking both at once.

Here is the paradox of America's bursting debate over guns and violence: fear of crime has become both a cause and an effect. A nation saturated with weapons is a terrifying place -- where people feel safer if they own a gun. The ambivalence shows up over and over. A TIME/CNN poll this month found that 70% of Americans favor gun control and 78% favor mandatory registration of all guns. Yet 74% oppose a ban on handguns, up 10% in the past two months alone.

As much as they may dream of an innocent and gun-free state of nature, the majority of Americans have only limited faith in gun control. A complete ban, many fear, would leave them defenseless against criminals who will always be able to buy a gun on the black market. Less than half of all Americans -- down from 68% since just last March -- believe that stricter gun control would have any impact on violent crime. "There is absolutely no way the legislation is going to stop the bad guys from getting guns," argues Sergeant Robin Cook, a 14-year veteran of the Forest Heights, Maryland, police force. "With a lot of breaking and enterings, that's exactly what they're going for. They lift up the mattresses, they go through the closets, they're looking for handguns." Even a total ban on handguns wouldn't solve the problem, since there are already 67 million handguns (a total of 200 million guns of all types) in circulation. "What are you going to do?" Cook asks. "Conduct house-to-house searches?"

That leaves many frightened people wondering whether safety resides with the other extreme: arm everyone, and scare the criminals as much as the citizenry. In his essay "A Nation of Cowards" in The Public Interest, lawyer Jeffrey Snyder argues that individual dignity depends on a willingness to fight back against crime. Owning a gun, and mastering its use, becomes a duty of citizenship; an armed society becomes a safer one. In a community like Wichita, Kansas, where drive-by shootings hit a record high this year and local legislators are debating tighter gun laws, pro-gun activists argue that instead they should make it easier for citizens to carry a concealed weapon -- the deterrent approach. The District of Columbia has enacted a handgun ban -- but some residents think that may bring new dangers. "I live close to D.C.," says Rafael Escalera, 24, as he buys more bullets for his 9-mm Taurus, "and I've heard people say they would rather rob someone in D.C. than in Maryland because they don't have weapons."

Over the past generation, a clear pattern emerged: out of a terrible crime comes both a furious demand for gun control and a furious demand for guns. Rage over the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy prompted Congress to pass the Gun Control Act of 1968 -- which banned mail-order gun sales and regulated the interstate transportation of firearms but also produced the largest spike in gun sales recorded in American history. Sales of handguns doubled just before the new law took effect.

The current move toward tighter laws has produced the same response. California has some of the strictest in the country; Senator Dianne Feinstein is leading the charge to outlaw assault weapons and semiautomatics. A series of polls last June indicated that 45% of Californians favor a handgun ban. Meanwhile, in the month after the Los Angeles riots, gun sales jumped 45% over the previous year.

"1993 was a banner year for the gun industry, especially for handguns and self-defense shotguns," says Cameron Hopkins, editor in chief of Firearms Marketing Group in San Diego. "The Rodney King beating and Hurricane Andrew really awakened a lot of Americans to the fact that in catastrophic times, the police won't be there to protect you." Since gun-control legislation has been in the news in the past 16 months, the National Rifle Association says, it has been adding 1,500 members a day: membership has jumped from fewer than 2.5 million in 1991 to almost 3.3 million today.

After Congress passed the Brady Bill three weeks ago, mandating a five-day waiting period on handgun sales, gun shops saw their business jump dramatically. Semiautomatic weapons with large magazines are selling especially fast in anticipation of expanded congressional restrictions. "Brady law? It's a piece of trash," says Lyle Teague, a self-styled arms merchant at the Saxet Gun Show in San Antonio, Texas. "But you want to know something? It's doing wonders for my business." Dealers at the vast Texas flea market posted signs warning, LAST CHANCE TO STOCK UP and THESE GUNS ARE IN THE SENATE BILL -- BUY NOW BEFORE THEY'RE GONE. Black Talon bullets have doubled in price, to $20, since Winchester announced it was suspending manufacture after Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan threatened a 10,000% tax hike on hollow-point cartridges.

The buying frenzy suggests that people see the Brady Bill and the semiautomatic ban as being tougher than they actually are. California's laws are far more stringent, requiring a 15-day waiting period, but they could not prevent Ferguson from buying his gun perfectly legally. Many people sense, however, that the legislative momentum will grow. "People fear, 'Will they be coming to my home to get the guns?' " says Houston gun-store owner Judy Chmiel. "They're afraid that if they ban some rifles now, the government will come banging on their door at night." Many of her customers are "first-time victims. It's self-defense buying."

There is a growing breed of shopper in gun stores and on the shooting range that fits a very different profile from the traditional sportsman. More and more are women: Smith & Wesson reports that sales of its Lady Smith line of rosewood-grip guns doubled last year. That troubles Barbara Shaw, executive director of the Illinois Council for the Prevention of Violence. "Women are being encouraged to buy guns to protect themselves," she observes. "That's the hardest argument to deal with because the fear can be very real. The gun can create an aura of control. But in reality, that isn't the case."

What does it take to persuade someone who hates and fears guns to go out and buy one? Sociologists talk of a sense of being abandoned by both the right and the left, by an N.R.A. that fights to protect even the most deadly weapons and cop-killer bullets, and by the left that seems to care more about criminals than about crime. "The frustrations of citizens and police have reached a point of no confidence in a system that repeatedly puts dangerous felons back on the street," Salt Lake City police chief Ruben Ortega told Bill Clinton last week.

Gun-control advocates are trying to head off first-time buyers by warning them of the new risks they will be running. "We must teach our citizens that guns are dangerous consumer products," said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala in a speech last Thursday before the American Trauma Society. She points to studies that have found that having a gun in the home makes it five times as likely that someone in the household will commit suicide, and three times as likely that someone will be murdered. Salt Lake City Mayor DeeDee Corradini recalls a young mother she met during Salt Lake City's gun amnesty and buyback program: "A mother with four young children in tow came. She said, 'This gun has been used once. My husband committed suicide with it. Take it.' "

Even some gun dealers try to restrain shoppers. When fearful souls come searching for a gun at Dick's Sporting Goods in Moberly, Missouri, store owner Dick Boots sometimes turns them down. "Occasionally," Boots says, "there will be a little old lady who is scared and comes in looking for a gun for protection. Generally, I'll suggest a spray can of pepper Mace rather than a firearm. "

In the past week the crime issue has reached critical mass in Washington. Politicians have got the message from constituents that battling violence should be at the top of their agenda, right beside jobs and the economy. "When Congress returns in January, they can once again expect to see me wheeling through the halls," said Jim Brady, the White House press secretary shot by a gunman aiming at President Ronald Reagan in 1981, "a rolling reminder that we must continue to work together to make America safer."

Though scarcely visible in the fight for the crime bill, the Brady Bill and the assault-weapons ban, Clinton got the message last week. The President threw out a blizzard of proposals: banning gun ownership by children, requiring tighter licensing and training of gun owners, an amnesty program to collect illegal weapons. Cabinet members chimed in as well. Attorney General Janet Reno talked of limiting the number of weapons an individual could own. Secretary Shalala said gun violence should be considered "a public-health crisis that requires public-health solutions," like polio in the 1950s and AIDS today. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders asked Americans not to buy toy guns for children this Christmas. "We know that toy guns were used to commit 30,000 robberies in the last five years," she said, "and many times our children feel that real guns are just like toys."

The crusade extends well beyond Washington, embracing local politicians and pundits and moral authorities across the country. Much of the attention is directed at kids, because gun violence among school-age children is skyrocketing, and because it is easier to form a consensus about the problem. The rate of gunshot wounds in children under 16 doubled in just three years, between 1987 and 1990. A survey about kids and guns by Harvard's School of Public Health yielded some stunning results. One parent in 6 knew a child who was found playing with a gun that was loaded. One in 7 knew a child who was wounded or killed by an adult with a gun.

As in past reform campaigns against drugs, smoking, pollution and drunken driving, an informal alliance of opinion leaders sees a chance to break gridlock and bad habits and reopen a national debate. While denying any move toward censorship, such radio stations as WBLS in New York City have stopped playing songs that might encourage violence and misogyny. Others have banned the inflammatory music of the Gangsta Rappers. Last week manufacturers of video games agreed to place voluntary warning labels on packages that would rate the violent content.

MTV began airing Generation Under the Gun, a documentary in which kids talk to host Tabitha Soren about the realities of living with guns. From Omaha to New Orleans to Brooklyn, many say that having a gun for protection is a fact of life -- and that getting one is easier than getting an education. The channel is also showing a new violence-prevention rock video called 99 Ways to Die by the group Megadeth.

Several television shows with young audiences, like Beverly Hills 90210 and Blossom, have run episodes on gun violence this year. Dr. Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health is working with producers and directors to develop programs with an anti-gun message. The goal, says Winsten, is to change kids' attitudes on the streets so they think it's "cool and smart" to walk away from a fight. The target is not the young drug dealers or gang members but the average kid from a rough neighborhood.

That is a tough audience to reach. "Guns are a status symbol," explains University of Pennsylvania sociologist Elijah Anderson, who has just finished a study on codes of sex and violence in the inner city. "If you have a new, powerful one, you get a certain amount of juice, of respect, and people are afraid of you."

Those are the same kids Jesse Jackson is addressing in his "Stop the Violence, Save the Children" campaign in the suburbs and the inner cities. He has cast the debate as a fundamental civil-rights issue -- the right to go to school without being molested and without being shot. Drive-by shootings and similar assaults, he tells them, have claimed more lives than all the lynchings since the Civil War. He urges students not only to renounce guns but also to turn in to the cops anyone who refuses to do so.

The movement is finding aggressive new allies in the medical profession. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called for a total gun ban; the American Medical Association wants to ban hollow-point bullets and raise taxes on gun sales. "Surgeons have been removing bullets since the invention of gunpowder," observes Franklin Zimring, a professor of law and director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, "but this is the first time you find a professional constituency like that involved in changing policy toward guns."

Faced with the gathering storm, the leadership of the N.R.A. is trying to shift the spotlight back to the larger problem of crime. "The whole debate over gun control is a public fraud in terms of doing anything in the world that affects violent criminals," says N.R.A. executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. "What's missing from this whole debate is what we all know works: confronting violent criminals and taking them off the street. That's what politicians don't have the will to do, but that's what the American public is demanding."

Actually, the President's own rhetoric portrays gun control only as a necessary first step in a far more arduous journey. In his speeches last week, and especially in his powerful sermon in a Memphis, Tennessee, church last month, Clinton has cast violence as a moral crisis, with its roots in the breakdown of family and community. Every initiative, from welfare reform to health care to job training, becomes a means of fighting crime. "There are a lot of things we have to do in this country to get the violence under control that relate to rebuilding our communities and healing across racial lines and economic lines," he said, "but we need to start with public safety." Otherwise, Clinton runs the risk that the public will continue to take its safety into its own hands -- in which case no one will be safe.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports}]CAPTION: U.S. HANDGUN MURDERS

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Sources: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; National Center for Health Statistics; FBI Uniform Crime Reports; Journal of the American Medical Association; U.S. Justice Dept.}]CAPTION: Handguns in U.S. owned by private citizens:

Handguns made in U.S. in 1992:

Violent crimes committed with handguns annually:

Annual hospital costs for treating firearm injuries:

Estimated total cost to U.S. economy of firearm injuries:

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 500 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on Dec. 2 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4.5%.

CAPTION: Do you favor stricter gun-control laws?

Do you favor mandatory registration of all guns?

Do you favor a law which would make it illegal for any private citizen to own a handgun for any purpose?

Do you have any guns of any type in your home?

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Richard Woodbury/San Antonio