Guns kill people. Sometimes people you know.

I've heard the arguments of NRA-types how letting people carry guns makes things safer. Bullshit. Maybe it's true out in the wide open spaces, but in crowded cities it's an unnecessary, dangerous hazard.

Clyde Haberman's column in today's New York Times, "Statistics, Ballistics and Lunacy" (subscription necessary), tells of the death of a woman in upper Manhattan due to a stray bullet, fired by a guy in an argument. (news story) Two groups of three men decided to end their sidewalk dispute with pistols, in the middle of a crowded shopping district, firing three or four shots. None hit their intended targets. (This assumes that any of the shooters did intend to hit a target--maybe they were just trying to scare off their opponents, or to make a statement. Could they all have been such bad shots that they couldn't hit someone a few feet away?) But one bullet traveled on and hit a woman walking along, minding her own business, a block away.

I knew the woman, at least I did twenty years ago. She wasn't a close friend even then, but I knew her. We had some friends in common, and eventually she joined my group of people who liked to end the work week with a nice TGIF dinner. We'd eat and drink and talk and wind down. She had some, er, unusual ideas about certain things (e.g. wearing a blazer over a lacey dress made it businesswear), but as eccentricites go, she was about par for the course for our ensemble.

But people started getting interested in other things, and the dinners petered out. I last ran into her on a subway platform maybe 15 years ago. We had a very brief conversation and went our different ways. Since then I had no contact with her--though a couple of the friends-in-common did mention her once in a while.

Now she's dead, and though she hasn't been even a small part of my life for a long time, I feel a loss--more of a loss than I would feel if she had just died from natural causes. It's not just the loss of someone from my past. It's the loss of someone, not too unlike myself, who died doing something in my city that I do all the time: she was just walking down the street, at 1:15 in the afternoon, in a crowded shopping area. I feel the loss of my own personal safety.

Why? Because someone was carrying a gun, and used it. Was it carried just for protection? Did the shooter have more sinister motives? We don't know. He hasn't been caught. Haberman listed a number of similar, recent deaths here due to "idiots" with guns. But he also points out the nice, level police statistics on shootings here in New York. Which seems to indicate one thing to me--a higher proportion of the shootings are from stray bullets. Which makes me feel a loss of personal safety even more. There are things I can do to decrease the chances of getting shot by someone shooting at me, but what can I do to minimize the chance of getting shot by someone not shooting at me?

The more guns there are, the easier it is for idiots to get their hands on them. The more idiots have guns, the more stray bullets there will be flying around, killing law-abiding people. Guns don't make things safer for law-abiding people, not in a crowded city. They just kill people.