In December 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza stole a gun from his mother, Nancy Lanza. He then murdered her in her sleep and drove her car to the local elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, where he murdered 20 children and six adults before shooting himself in the head. A few days earlier, across the country in Clackamas, Oregon, a 22-year-old man named Jacob Tyler Roberts committed a similar crime on a smaller scale. Roberts shot three people at the local shopping mall, killing two of them and seriously wounding the third, before shooting himself.
While it was Lanza's crime that became internationally famous, both had a lot in common with each other and with the steady drumbeat of mass shooting events in the United States: A male perpetrator, a crowded location, victims chosen at random for the purpose of sowing chaos, a suicidal ending. They also shared a feature that is extremely common in shootings, especially when the perpetrators are young: a stolen gun.
“The NRA is always talking about the 'good guys with guns,' but they rarely mention how often the good guys with guns arm the bad guys with guns," John Donohue, a Stanford law professor who has spent more than two decades researching gun safety, told Salon. "There needs to be an effort to examine that a lot more carefully, and to make people who have weapons responsible for those weapons."
In Oregon, there is now an effort to make that happen, led by family members of the two people killed while out shopping in the Clackamas shooting.
"I heard the guy next to me: He had a radio on and said, 'Jesus, there was a shooting at the Clackamas Town Center mall,'" remembers Paul Kemp, a founder of Gun Owners for Responsible Ownership, describing that day more than five years ago. "Two minutes later, my phone rings and it’s my sister. She’s frantic and I’m trying to figure out what she was trying to tell me.”
Kemp's sister was delivering horrific news: Her husband, Steve Forsyth, had become the random victim of another mass shooting in America. As Kemp later discovered, the shooter had spent the night at a friend's house and had stolen the gun from his friend.
“The legal gun owner saw the firearm was missing before he went to work," Kemp said, but he did not call police until he learned about the shooting from national news. "Had he called [the] police before, when he noticed the firearm was gone, it could have prevented the shooting. On top of that, every firearm he had in his home was unlocked and loaded.”
Kemp's group, which also includes the daughter of the other victim of the Clackamas shooting, Cindy Yuille, on the board, is now trying to put a ballot initiative before Oregon voters that would require gun owners to keep their weapons in locked storage when not in use and require them to report lost or stolen guns within 24 hours. A similar bill was introduced in the Oregon legislature in 2017 but failed to pass, so now Kemp and his colleagues are turning to the ballot box.
Massachusetts is currently the only state in the country that requires all firearms to be stored in locked boxes, while 10 other states impose some level of locking requirements. Eleven states and the District of Columbia have reporting requirements for guns that are lost or stolen.
The problem is not just a matter of hardened criminals stealing weapons. Minors who commit violent crime often do so because it's so easy to steal a gun from a friend, neighbor or family member. An estimated 350,000 guns are stolen every year in the United States, and an enormous percentage of those gun thefts are not reported to police. Research by Everytown for Gun Safety shows that half of school shootings by minors involve a gun obtained by a parent, and a 2004 government survey found that two-thirds of violent acts committed by students involved stolen guns.
Failure to lock up guns or keep track of guns also leads to a number of accidental shootings a year. Everytown has recorded 62 incidents of children accidentally shooting themselves or others after accessing an unsecured firearm in the first three months of 2018 alone. There were at least 285 such incidents in 2017. Children under age 4 shoot someone on a weekly basis in this country.
Kemp emphasized that locking guns up is "already recommended by the NRA, firearms manufacturers and gun safety instructors," and that this proposed law simply aims at codifying best practices.
It's true that the NRA's gun safety website recommends keeping guns unloaded when not in use and notes that "dozens of gun storage devices" are available for purchase. But there are reasons to doubt the group's sincerity on this point. For one thing, the NRA lobbying arm insists that it "should remain the responsibility of the individual firearm owner, not the government, to determine how to ensure that guns are safely stored."
Kemp countered by pointing out that his proposed bill does hold gun owners responsible, by ensuring there are consequences for failure to store and keep track of one's gun properly.
Gun owners are simply not behaving responsibly on their own, as evidenced by this April Twitter thread by David Waldman of Daily Kos, who tracked 100 incidents of people leaving guns in bathrooms. He stopped at that point, but could have listed many more.
The NRA's lobby group argues that such laws will render homeowners' guns "useless in a self-defense situation by locking them up."
Kemp replied by saying, “If you can afford a handgun, you can afford a biometric safe," noting that such safes can be opened with a speed adequate to any home defense situation. Videos demonstrating such safes show they open within seconds.
Even more importantly, Donohue said, "Many gun owners miscomprehend risk in a massive way." Research repeatedly shows that gun owners are far more likely to shoot a family member, or be shot by one, than they are to defend themselves against an intruder. Donohue pointed out Nancy Lanza as an example. She had said she bought her guns for self-defense, but in the end was shot four times in the head with one of the guns she believed would keep her safe.
"If your family gets killed because someone has stolen a gun," Donohue said, "it’s not much comfort to know some other guy feels better knowing they’ve got a gun by their bedside."
Kemp, who has been a gun owner most of his life, also emphasized that this safety restriction would help gun owners. He pointed to the young man whose gun was stolen and used to murder people at the Clackamas mall.
“My sister and I wrote a letter to the gun owner, forgiving him, because we know that was not his intention," he said. “If we can prevent things like this from happening for someone like that young man and our family, that’s a win-win for both sides of the issue.”
Shares