The Right Kind Of Law
The telephone woke me up. The call was from a neighbor who said, "Did you hear the gunshots? Someone just emptied their gun and it sounded like it was close by." I hadn't heard a thing because this old lady was sleeping on the only ear that still works well. My husband went to the front door and didn't see or hear anything amiss. My neighbor had reported the incident, and the NYPD was now in charge, so I went back to sleep.
I've always lived in neighborhoods where deadly popping noises have become commonplace, so perhaps my perspective on gun control is different from that of the elite pundits in New York City and from celebrities who can afford armed bodyguards. For all our tough gun control laws, chances are the gun fired that night was an illegal one. Last summer, police arrested a man for a DUI and discovered weapons in his car. A search of his home uncovered a huge stash of weapons ranging from pistols to assault weapons. This man lived just up the street from my house.
I have the choice of spending sleepless nights worrying about a gunman invading my home and slaughtering my family, which includes five darling grandchildren, or of rallying with our mayor for stricter gun control legislation and harsher penalties for gun manufacturers. Instead, I choose to ask God to keep my family safe, because the other options just don't work.
No matter how many tough laws against guns are enacted, the bad will get their hands on them. They will buy them on the black market from either licensed dealers or thieves who've broken into armories. Down the street from where I live, there's a car parked in a driveway with a bumper sticker that reads " Vietnam POW." I have no idea if it's the truth, but I'll bet the owner has a gun in the house. There are just as many homes on Staten Island with Colt .45 "Beware the owner" signs as there are those showing installed alarm systems. These people have no intention of being sitting ducks in a no-gun zone like the students at Virginia Tech. Good for them.
I came to that epiphany about the futility of sleepless nights in 2003, when I had encountered the dangerous element up close and personal. An ex-boyfriend of my daughter-in-law firebombed my son's truck in my driveway, and even though he had violated more than 20 orders of protection, he always managed to be out on bail issuing death threats. After a plea deal, he was sentenced to three years for kidnapping and assault. The firebombing was downgraded to criminal mischief. He served only two years, and I would cringe whenever I read about a woman being killed by an ex-husband or boyfriend despite an order of protection.
When Daniel Donovan took the office of Staten Island district attorney in 2004, he worked tirelessly to keep my daughter-in-law safe, but his hands were tied by weak stalking laws. My daughter-in-law has a pink piece of paper as her only defense. Mr. Donovan may have another solution.
He has proposed using Global Positioning System technology to put real protection behind that order of protection. Federal authorities and several states have used GPS monitoring systems as a condition of bail and as an alternative to incarceration during criminal proceedings. The jurisdictions using this technology outfit the defendant at the time of release with a GPS ankle bracelet. That bracelet is then matched to a monitoring system maintained by local law enforcement. Defendants can be tracked nearly anywhere in the world with GPS, which can pinpoint their location within a matter of feet.
Some jurisdictions have taken the additional step of giving alleged victims or witnesses pagers that would be used to signal alerts of a possible violation of the order. This is what's brilliant about the plan. The victim can be alerted immediately when the predator has entered the area designated as protected, and the police will be notified at the same time. There is no cost to the taxpayer, because the defendant pays the daily fee for monitoring.
"Modern technology allows us to grant orders of protection strength beyond simple paper," Mr. Donovan told me. "The only thing we need is our legislators to give prosecutors and courts the ability to do so."
Rather than more ineffective gun control laws what we really need in New York City is criminal control. Albany, are you listening?
