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Street Roots • April 28-May 4, 2017
Commentary
cousu
our fi
A plea for
I llillS
H
BY MARTHA GIES
hold them hostage while cashing their
checks. Instead, he shot them each twice in
the head. Acremant has schizophrenia. The
e are at the Lloyd Athletic Club,
younger of the two victims was a cousin of
and the conversation turns to new
our friend.
gun legislation introduced in the
The Smith & Wesson .357-caliber
Oregon Senate, when one of the people in
pur group speaks up: “Four of my own revolver was identified as the source of the
stray bullet that shot down Southwest
cousins were shot to death.”
Salmon Street, from Broadway to Second
That gets our attention.
This turns out to be a story that unfolded Avenue, and instantly killed a man who was
walking hand-in-hand with his wife that June
over two decades, involving four different
1997 evening. Five blocks west of the
couple, 18-year-old Daniel Dejesus, in a
branches of the family.
scuffle with rival gang members, had
And the guns? Not one of them should
ever have been in the hands of the shooters snatched that gun from his buddy’s pocket
and fired wildly. He was granted a sentence
in the first place. Not even the NRA would
reduction, thanks to the generosity of the
argue with that.
young widow, who refused to model a
The .357-caliber revolver had been
vengeful spirit to her young children. Yet
stolen, along with a camera, from the home
she was broken-hearted at the loss of her
beloved spouse, who was a cousin of our
had done some remodeling work. Two
friend.
months later, he carried that gun to a
The short-barreled rifle was used
popular Portland bar and music venue on
execution style by Uriah Michael Dean
Southeast Belmont where, by previous
McKinley, who was loaded on
arrangement, his half-sister unlocked the
methamphetamine when he shot a former
door for him after closing time, in the early
employer in the head on Dec. 2, 2013,
hours of March 21, 1995. In the course of
stealing the $500 that lay in the till, he shot having heard the man had come into some
money. The victim, age 30, lived in
and killed the 32-yearold beverage manager
Silverton and was a cousin of our friend.
who had almost finished cleaning up for the
Communities work together to eliminate
night. She was the mother of two young
exposure to lead and asbestos, and
children - and a cousin of our friend.
automobile companies routinely issue safety
The .25-caliber pistol had a homemade
recalls for everything from desiccated air
silencer that Robert James Acremant had
bag inflators to faulty brakes. We are a
made himself. He told Medford police that
he’d had it for years, but only recently came society that cares about safety, especially if
a product, instrument or substance might
up with the idea of killing someone. On
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
■
tililS i
Dec. 4, 1995, he used it to abduct two
women, ages 42 and 53, who ran a Medford
property management firm, thinking to
, v
market. Just this Easter, Target recalled
over half a million Hatch & Grow toys that,
if ingested, could expand inside a child’s
body and cause intestinal obstructions.
Why then, whenever gun control laws are
proposed, do we hear an argument that
goes something like: “With such a glut of
firearms already on the street, there is no
point in trying to regulate gun sales now.”
Why accept this fatalism?
It’s true there is a glut- According to the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives, the number of guns
manufactured in the U.S. each year has
recently almost doubled, from nearly 5.5
million in 2010 to nearly 10.9 million in
2013. Yes, the 300 million guns in this
country - and these figures don’t count
guns bought by the U.S. military - have
become an enormous scourge.
But we would never take a fatalistic
attitude toward salmonella in food, drunken
drivers on the road, or the current spike in
heroin sales. And we won’t reduce gun
deaths if we shrug our shoulders and walk
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