In real life terms, County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas was asked about the meaning of this morning’s gun buyback press conference, where victorious braying was the single theme.
At the height of the national hysteria demanding immediate control of most, if not all, guns, aren’t the ballyhooed gun buybacks mainly for show? Intended to mollify a hungry public by showing that the city is doing something, even if it isn’t terribly meaningful?
More symbolic than pragmatic?
“You need a lot of symbols in order to engage in this effort to reduce the level of violence in our nation and in our communities,” Mr. Ridley-Thomas told the newspaper after the press conference.
“You need to have substantive programs, stronger enforcement of law, that is, to take the bad guys off the streets, to penetrate the underground market, and to induce otherwise good citizens to get these guns out of their homes because they are a problem.”
Earlier, Mr. Ridley-Thomas had told the large media conference at LAPD headquarters that “every gun is a threat to human life.”
He said the gun buybacks were not a matter of “transactions so much as they represented transformations” in the way many people are now thinking – after Newtown.
Implying strong criticism of security positions recently laid down by the National Rifle Assn., he called the notion of arming teachers “madness.”
Mr. Ridley-Thomas said the national conversation “is about a matter of physics – what goes up must come down.”
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck says a bullet is traveling 700 miles an hour when it leaves a gun, “and it comes down even faster.”
Returning to the County Supervisor and the public worth of gun buybacks, he was asked if he agreed that “the overwhelming value of buybacks was symbolic.”
“It could mean that,” said Mr. Ridley-Thomas, “but I don’t reduce the significance of symbolism.”
