Toilet training, murder rate: What do they have in common?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): There are an estimated 200 million guns in private hands in the United States. Despite the National Rifle Association's assurances that "guns don't kill people; people kill people", the suspicion lingers that this stunning statistic has something to do with the country's remarkably high murder rate. But now new solutions are on offer: safer guns, safer bullets -- and, for the stubborn minority who still want to shoot people, a more relaxed approach to toilet training.

"We're betting the company on this," said Steve Sliwa, president of the company that has been America's most famous gun- maker since the heyday of the Colt .45. Sliwa announced last week that Colt is seeking to patent a system that will stop anybody but the owner from firing a gun. A wristband worn by the owner transmits a coded electronic signal so weak that it only releases a blocking pin in the gun if it is actually in the owner's hand.

Systems under development by Colt's rivals include a device to read the owner's fingerprints, and even a magic encoder ring (sorry, I meant magnetic encoder ring) that sends a signal to a decoder in the gun. It's straight off the back of a cereal box, and grown-up boys who want to go on playing with guns will love it: surveys show that about 30 percent of the Americans who do not already own guns would go out and buy one if it could not be used by their children.

So Colt's innovation isn't likely to put much of a dent in the phenomenon of mass gun ownership -- but at least environmentally safe green bullets' are on the way.

Green bullets are actually white, because they're made of tungsten, a metal about as dense as lead but much harder and a lot less poisonous. They make the International Tungsten Industry Association happy since, as spokesperson Michael Maby pointed out last week, a global demand for 200 million tungsten bullets a year "represents about one-eighth of existing annual consumption" of the metal. So the price of tungsten will rise, and the number of animals being poisoned by spent lead bullets will fall.

The new ammunition is "an environmentally friendly and safer bullet with the same performance, more accuracy, and the same lethality as its lead counterparts," exults the newsletter of the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny Arsenal in northern New Jersey, which developed the tungsten round. Now you can kill as many people as you like without contaminating the environment.

It's like neutron bombs, which "kill the people without destroying the buildings," only better. Tungsten bullets will kill the people without harming the ducks. The only problem is the market -- because if demand for tungsten rises, so will the price.

They used to use tungsten bolts in high-velocity armor- piercing ammunition back in the 70s, because tungsten is harder and heavier than steel. Then the price of tungsten rose, so they switched to a cheaper alloy made with an even denser metal: depleted uranium recycled from nuclear power stations. Unfortunately, the depleted uranium bullets lying around after the battle cause cancer and birth deformities among local civilians, but as someone once said, war is heck.

Now we have tungsten small-arms ammunition. The problem is that if the price of tungsten goes up again -- well, do you think an arms industry that cheerfully put bullets designed to pierce police body armor on the market would balk at pistol ammunition made from depleted uranium?

So we aren't quite out of the woods yet -- but there is good news from Germany. Christian Pfeiffer, director of the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony and a West German, has just gone public with his theory that harsh potty training in Communist East Germany so deformed the character of the little darlings that now, a decade or so later, they roam the streets in skinhead gangs attacking foreigners and anyone else who is different.

East Germans are outraged, but it is true that foreigners are 25 times more likely to be attacked in the former east than in the western parts of the country. It's also true that even now, 10 years after reunification, collective toilet training in the former Communist part of Germany is so obsessive and ritualized that they have a special word for it -- das Toepfen -- that does not even exist in the West.

"As soon as the child is able to sit without help, the teacher can begin with regular potty training," read the old official manual for the creches that most East German children attended from a very early age -- and there they sat, lined up on their potties in regimented rows, until they got it right. This, argues Pfeiffer, turned them into repressed, angry, authoritarian people who become intolerant, aggressive adults.

Mercifully, most of them don't have guns. But is there a clue here that could help solve America's gun problem (or rather, as the NRA might put it, its people problem)? Maybe all those Americans who shoot their relatives, friends and neighbors -- or complete strangers, if necessary -- were potty-trained too early or too harshly.

It might be worth a try: postpone toilet training until high school, and see what happens to the murder rate. Apart from unthinkable measures like serious gun control legislation, nobody seems to have any better ideas.