The gun-control debate fell from the national stage to Old Bridge with the Pathmark shooting last summer, and it hasn’t ended there.
“I would begin by saying we have a problem, a huge problem, with gun violence in America,” U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) said at a March 27 roundtable, held at the Old Bridge Municipal Complex. “We don’t have good data [on instances of gun violence]. There’s a lot we don’t know, and yet we are making policy in Washington even now.” He added that gun-control policy has been guided as much by the emotions of legislators as by facts.
The national gun control debate typically cites the shooting rampages at a school in Newtown, Conn., a movie theater in Aurora, Col., and the campus of Virginia Tech.
But the local community recalls another tragic incident of gun violence — the murders of two Old Bridge residents who were gunned down while working the nightshift at the Pathmark on Route 9. The Aug. 31 homicide, an apparently random attack by a coworker who also took his own life, weighed heavily on the minds of local mayors and law enforcement officers who took part in the roundtable discussion with Holt on preventing gun violence across the country.
Old Bridge Mayor Owen Henry agreed with Holt’s sentiment.
“I believe actions to date have failed at the federal and state level, [even though] New Jersey has some of the toughest gun laws in the country. … We need mental health needs to be addressed here,” Henry said.
Bill Wolfe, a veteran of the Vietnam War and a former hunter, suggested that violent crime is a result of mental instability, and not the tools that are used to carry out such incidents.
Describing his life in rural upstate New York, he said, “Everyone had guns, and in the 21 years that I lived there, there was never any violent crime [involving guns]. Virtually every household had some sort of firearm. Everybody went hunting in the fall for some sort of wild game. There was exactly one murder in the entire time I lived up there, and that was a fairly predictable case with a person who had severe alcohol problems.”
Union County Sheriff Ralph Froehlich, who said he had carried a weapon more than half his life, vocalized his support for an assault weapons ban, which he said could prevent another tragedy like the one in Newtown.
“I’m angry over this whole discussion and the lack of involvement by so many people,” he said.
Froehlich said that neither hunters nor gun enthusiasts looking to teach their children to shoot, nor those looking to protect their homes, need an assault weapon with a 30-round magazine to accomplish their goals.
Harry Pryde, father of Julia Pryde, one of the 32 victims of the April 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, was also present at the roundtable.
“Virtually anyone can see that society needs some constraints,” Pryde said. “There are many constraints that we accept — why not something [like gun control] that has such a high casualty toll?”
Holt responded to the issues raised during the discussion by saying that there are many ideas swirling across the country, and different organizations and individuals focus on different aspects, from assaultweapon bans to background checks to mental health screenings.
“What is common, I would say, in all of this legislation and in much of the debate that you’re hearing in America, is ignorance,” Holt said. “Most of the policy makers, most of my colleagues in Congress, don’t really know much in detail about the problem. … There is really no commonly accepted basis for discussion.”
To find common ground in the debate, Holt suggested understanding gun violence as a public health issue.
“If you look at it as a public health issue, you can learn an awful lot; some things really jump out at you,” he said. “If we can find out how many deaths there are among hunters, how many in urban areas, or how many deaths result from handguns rather than rifles, we could make much better policy.”
Holt said arriving at definite statistics in these areas is complicated by the fact that as a federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is prohibited from advocating gun-control policy.
“The chilling affect this has had is to prevent the CDC from collecting and analyzing data on guns and gun violence as a public health issue,” Holt said.
Holt is a member of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force and a contributor to Vice President Joe Biden’s anti-gun violence task force. As such, he has authored a federal bill that would mirror New Jersey law requiring licensing and registration of all handguns across the U.S. He co-sponsored six additional gun-control bills, two of which would ban the sale of magazines that carry more than 10 rounds and impose record-keeping requirements on gun-show operators.
In closing, Henry said that in response to the school massacre in Newtown, the Old Bridge Township Council entered into a shared-service agreement with the Board of Education in January to ensure that the township’s district of 17 schools would be monitored by a minimum of three school resource officers and an undisclosed number of special police officers.