Mar/Apr 99

City Suits Bring Blizzard of Challenges
By Peggy Tartaro, Editor

From The Editor:

I live in a city famous—or infamous—for weather and a penultimately cursed football team. I assure you that there is quite a bit more to the City of Buffalo than blizzards and the Bills, and I have never had a visitor, even in the worst weather, who didn’t find something to enjoy here on his or her stay.

But my purpose here is not to sing the praises of a specific city, but to talk about cities in general especially in light of the announced intentions of New Orleans and Chicago to sue firearms manufacturers. Details of those suits, and the likely additions of at least six others, are detailed in a news story on Page 8 of this issue. That story also carries details of the Second Amendment Foundation’s (which publishes W&G) response to the proposed suits. Karen MacNutt, discusses the implications of such suits from her legal perspective.

When I heard about the suits, I was reminded of a story of weather and city politics, which I hope is instructive. In January of 1977, something later and forever known as "The Blizzard of ’77" struck Western New York on a Friday afternoon. "Blizzards" are by meteorological definition, a fierce combination of snow, wind and extremely cold temperatures. This particular "weather event" met all those criteria, although blizzards, like ducks, are easily recognizable to those in the midst of them, whether or not the wind gusts at 50 MPH.

At the time, I worked in a three-person office and I was the only one who made it to work that day, even though the weather that morning was not especially dreadful, nor had there been a lot of warning about this particular storm. By noon, it was apparent that things were getting bad, and my father, who worked nearby, picked me up. We set off to pick up my aunt who worked further downtown, about three miles away. So bad was the weather, that it took over three hours to complete that trip, with only a stop for my aunt and one at a corner deli to buy milk, bread and soup (residents in these parts have pretty well-stocked pantries in the winter months, so there wasn’t a need to load up).

I won’t bore you with a lot of details. Suffice it to say that the events of that weekend are etched on people’s minds, and 21 years later it’s not uncommon to share a Blizzard of ’77 story with a new acquaintance.

Most of these are nice stories. They revolve around pride in a can-do spirit, awe at the power of nature and the need to carry spare socks.

At the time it seemed to most of us like a great adventure, and with typical American sensibilities, that’s how it is remembered.

Also with typical American sensibilities, what grousing was heard then, and is sometimes still heard today, it involves how the government (actually various governments from federal to local) dealt with the problem.

Did anyone complain about the US Army helicopters used to ferry people to area hospitals? Of course not. Was their hand wringing because other cities and towns far from Buffalo sent assistance in the form of plows, workers and the like? No, not a peep. Did we even mind that the ritual of releasing federal money in the form of disaster aid was not accomplished until after the President had sent someone to "feel our pain"? Again, no, and we didn’t even mind that the representative was, if memory serves, Chip Carter, and not the man himself.

This is what people expect of government—the means and ability to rise to our defense in extraordinary times. Sure, people expect other things as well, but you get the idea.

Well, what, "frosted" people about the Blizzard of ’77 was not the two feet of snow that fell in less than 24 hours, but the two feet that was already on the ground. Frozen massive piles of ice that had been there for a month and that city crews could not ever seem to keep up with, leaving main streets sloppy and many side streets downright impassible. When the Blizzard came it made things worse—a lot worse. In an attempt to solve the problem, the city enacted a driving ban, which was fine, except that the cars that couldn’t be driven had to be somewhere—usually parked on the clogged side streets, so that plows could not get down them, a sort of frigid Catch-22. (A note to anyone who doesn’t live in a Northeastern city: none of our lovely residential streets were ever built to accommodate the increasing numbers of cars that "live" on them, many in front of houses without driveways.)

So many people’s memories of the Blizzard of ’77, including my own, include an entire block’s worth of people hand shoveling the street, after one-by-one unearthing (un-snowing?) cars.

What does this have to do with cities, at the direction of their mayors, suing gun manufacturers? Well, the main casualty of the Blizzard of ’77 was the mayor, who was turned out by voters the following November, even as that season’s snow began to fly.

Mayor Makowski had been reasonably well-liked and a pretty common example of a "machine candidate," a product of a rise-from-the-ranks career in the Democratic Party which has been in power for nearly a century here, and the heir to another popular Democratic Party machine mayor.

But, when voters (who are overwhelmingly affiliated with the Democratic Party in the City of Buffalo) stepped up to the polls eight months later, they remembered his administration’s ineptitude and they punished him for it.

Our current mayor’s fate in the next election cycle may hang on an extremely unpopular "user-fee" on garbage collection. Not the stuff of political legend, I grant you, but certainly the stuff of political reality, as demonstrated time and time again when government gets anywhere near people’s lives. In the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections two years ago, the hottest button to push with voters involved…car insurance. Again, not exactly world peace, but a sensible reaction of voters who knew long before Tip O’Neill uttered the phrase, that, "All politics is local."

There are certainly times when larger issues come into view and voters react accordingly, but more often than not it is simple, everyday issues that cause hands to pull levers in voting booths.

Sometimes the pundits frame this hominess as "voting their pocketbook," other times it’s called "kitchen table issues," denoting the place where pundits assume all family decisions are made. The pundits, whose track records get more abysmal with each political event, often sneer at this notion, as if everyone should only be concerned about things as far away from them as possible. Nonsense!

I think this kind of sensible, personal interest voting will probably be instructive in the long run to Mayor Marc Morial of New Orleans and Richard Daley, Jr. of Chicago, as well as to other mayors who may join them in their foolish pursuits.

Tell people it will cost a dollar more to buy a pack of cigarettes, and most, including smokers, will shrug and ante up. Tell them you’re going to start billing them for a service (like garbage pick up) that they heretofore got for "free," and you’re going to here from them.

Messing with people’s ability to buy the means of personal protection, even under the guise of some bogus notion of community safety, is not going to sit well with them. SAF staffers who have already done a slew of media interviews about the subject have not heard many callers express solidarity with their mayors. Even anti-gun newspapers have weighed in saying the suits are ridiculous and ill-advised.

It remains to be seen how these latter-day Sheriffs of Nottingham, Morial and Daley and others of their ilk, will fare at the hands of city dwellers, sick of being treated like living ATMs.

As usual in this debate, the facts and even the philosophical reasonableness are on our side. (It will be, for example, interesting to see the mayors defend the notion that guns are bad—except for the guns owned by the city police force, the city municipal housing authority, the city animal control department, etc.) But ever-vigilant gun owners might do well to remember the slogans that these guys are so fond of using when campaigning, and use them to advantage this time around.