Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger
I was struck by a news story earlier this week, not only because of its importance, but because of how little air time it received in the mass media. Earlier this week, the victims of the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona had a chance to speak to the man responsible for those hideous acts. One statement was especially powerful and it was from the husband of Gabby Giffords, now a former Congresswoman from Arizona. I apologize for the length of the following quotations, but I think it is important to read most of what Gabby’s husband said to Mr. Jared Loughner, who perpetrated the crime.
“Mr. Loughner, for the first and last time, you are going to hear directly from Gabby and me about what you took away on January 8th, 2011 and, just as important, what you did not. So pay attention. That bright and chilly Saturday morning, you killed six innocent people. Daughters and sons. Mothers and fathers. Grandparents and friends. They were devoted to their families, their communities, their places of worship.
Gabby would trade her own life to bring back any one of those you savagely murdered on that day. Especially young Christina-Taylor Green, whose high-minded ideas about service and democracy deserved a full life committed to advancing them. Especially 30-year old Gabe Zimmerman, whom Gabby knew well and cherished, and whose love for his family and his fiancee and service to his country were as deep as his loss is tragic. Especially Judge John Roll whom Gabby was honored to call a colleague and friend and from whose interminable dedication to our community and country she gained enormous inspiration. Gabby would give anything to take away the grief you visited upon the Morrises, the Schnecks, and the Stoddards – anything to heal the bodies and psyches of your other victims.
And then there is what you took from Gabby. Her life has been forever changed. Plans she had for our family and her career have been immeasurably altered. Every day is a continuous struggle to do those things she was once so very good at. Gabby is a people person: she exudes kindness, creativity, and compassion. If she were not born with the name – “Gabby” – someone would have given it to her. Now she struggles to deliver each and every sentence. Her gift for language can now only be seen in Internet videos from a more innocent time.
Gabby was an outdoor enthusiast. She was often seen rollerblading with her friend Raoul in Reed Park, hiking in Sabino Canyon, or careening down Rillito Wash Trail on her bike, as she was the night before you tried and failed to murder her. She hasn’t been to any of those places since, and I don’t know when she’ll return. There’s more. Gabby struggles to walk. Her right arm is paralyzed. She is partially blind. Gabby works harder in one minute of an hour – fighting to make each individual moment count for something – than most of us work in an entire day.
Mr. Loughner, by making death and producing tragedy, you sought to extinguish the beauty of life. To diminish potential. To strain love. And to cancel ideas. You tried to create for all of us a world as dark and evil as your own. But know this, and remember it always: You failed. Your decision to commit cold-blooded mass murder also begs of us to look in the mirror. This horrific act warns us to hold our leaders and ourselves responsible for coming up short when we do, for not having the courage to act when it’s hard, even for possessing the wrong values.” CNN
It was hard for me to read the full statement without shedding a tear. Not just for Giffords and her husband, but for all of the families who suffered at the hands of a man who should not have been able to obtain the weapons and the ammunition that he had that fateful day. I am not advocating the rescinding of our Second Amendment rights, but I am pleading for common sense in how we turn a blind eye to the damage guns do, without ever caring about what we need to do to prevent these kinds of weapons and the size of the magazines that allow a mentally disturbed individual like a Jared Loughner, to kill and maim so many innocents.
Mr. Mark Kelly, the former Astronaut who is Gabrielle Gifford’s husband, did not stop with the perpetrator of the violence, he also took all of us to task for allowing our society and our politicians to ignore the violence and death that are brought every day to this country by people carrying guns. “Your decision to commit cold-blooded mass murder also begs of us to look in the mirror. This horrific act warns us to hold our leaders and ourselves responsible for coming up short when we do, for not having the courage to act when it’s hard, even for possessing the wrong values. We are a people who can watch a young man like you spiral into murderous rampage without choosing to intervene before it is too late.
We have a political class that is afraid to do something as simple as have a meaningful debate about our gun laws and how they are being enforced. We have representatives who look at gun violence, not as a problem to solve, but as the white elephant in the room to ignore. As a nation we have repeatedly passed up the opportunity to address this issue. After Columbine; after Virginia Tech; after Tucson and after Aurora we have done nothing.
In this state we have elected officials so feckless in their leadership that they would say, as in the case of Governor Jan Brewer, “I don’t think it has anything to do with the size of the magazine or the caliber of the gun.” She went on and said, “Even if the shooter’s weapon had held fewer bullets, he’d have another gun, maybe. He could have three guns in his pocket” – she said this just one week after a high capacity magazine allowed you to kill six and wound 19 others, before being wrestled to the ground while attempting to reload. Or a state legislature that thought it appropriate to busy itself naming an official Arizona state gun just weeks after this tragedy occurred, instead of doing the work it was elected to do: encourage economic growth, help our returning veterans and fix our education system.” CNN
The idea that any politician of any stripe could downplay the destructive magnitude of these high-capacity magazines and the weapons they feed is disgusting and sad. Without all of us taking a stand against allowing people with mental disorders from owning guns and without all of us saying it is not necessary in our society to allow these high-capacity magazines, how will the violence ever end?
Is it necessary to our Freedom as a society to allow unfettered access to guns and ammunition that is only meant to be used against innocents? Can’t common sense restrictions be put into place without the NRA and politicians crying foul? Recently in Cook County, Illinois which has seen more than its share of gun violence, the President of the County Board recently attempted to stem the gun violence by advocating a tax on bullets. It may not be the best idea, but it was an attempt to find a way to stop our youth from killing each other and her efforts were met with derision and she had to drop her ammo tax idea. Chicago Tribune
It is far past time for our society to wake up and agree that not everyone should have access to guns and high-capacity magazines, isn’t it? How many more killings will our country have to endure before We decide to put an end to it. The NRA and gun manufacturers have made a great living demonizing anyone who might suggest that common sense restrictions on gun ownership are necessary and they have made sure that guns sales are going through the roof. Will it take gun violence impacting our own families before we do anything? What can be done to stem the tide of violence with guns? It is a debate that we must have! Isn’t it? Don’t we owe it to the victims and the victim’s families to finally do something to stop the killings?
Tomorrow may be too late!
back in the 60’s people favored banning handguns…..
in the mid 70’s and 80’s the NRA started becoming a little more overzealous…. so they changed the way people felt about guns….
So, yes, over 40 years… the USA has become more gun crazy than it was 40 years ago…..
Why would it be crazy to think the it could swing BACK the other direction????
I would not advocate for the limiting of their speech…..
I would however, advocate for the government who spends roughly 62 billion a year on treating gun shot victims to counter their claims that are untrue….
Limiting the ownership of ONE type of gun, is not an all out ban on guns….
We limit whether they can be automatic or semiautomatic…. isn’t that a ban as well?????
It is silly to argue that restricting the ownership of a certain type of gun amounts to a ban on GUNS and infringes on your right to bear arms….
JAG,
And if you outlawed the NRA tomorrow, do you know what would change in American culture?
Not a damn thing.
You’re oversimplifying the problem.
JAG,
Wouldn’t limiting access to a certain type of weapon be essentially a ban…..
Elaine,
That site I just posted has a lot of statistics on the issue, but it’s probably grouped into the “other weapons” data and not broken out. My point was that it’s not as rare as you might think. It’s a marginal percentage comparatively to be sure, but it does happen. Just looking at Google showed me it happens a lot more than I would have thought.
Gene,
What are the statistics for deaths caused by bows and arrows as compared to deaths caused by guns? Have there been many mass murderers who used bows and arrows to perpetrate their crimes?
I like my “ugly” gun: a solid black Romanian AKM-47. Her name is Hillary.
Unlike the real Hillary, she never lets me down. 😉
Handguns are used in the majority of violent crime involving weapons. That’s just a statistical fact.
http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/gun-violence/welcome.htm
Banning ONE type of gun…. is NOT a ban on guns…. it really is that simple…. that is NOT prohibiting the ownership of arms…
NOR is it even a ban on handguns….
So now we have justagurlinseattle saying that banning a gun is not banning a gun. And she’s obviously ignored the repeated explanations that so called assault weapons aren’t particularly deadly or powerful and are used in only a tiny fraction of all gun murders.
How many times do we have to keep going down this path. I am beginning to feel like a hamster on a treadmill. Assault rifles are not what those guys used. They are nothing more than semi-automatic rifles with a medium velocity center fire cartridge. The average deer rifle is more powerful than an AK-47. An assault rifle has a “select fire” switch which can make the rifle fully automatic that will shoot as long as the trigger is held down. What the uninformed call “an assault rifle” in common parlance is an ordinary rifle that has been made to look like a military rifle. Ugly on a gun is not illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
Gene,
Let’s give them less tools to play with.
JAG,
“The ONLY way to change this PRO GUN culture that resides in the USA, is to fight the BLATANT disinformation that the gun lobby and the NRA are putting out there…..
EDUCATION is EVERYTHING…..”
That’s a false dichotomy and violates the excluded middle. There is no single solution to the pro gun culture and labelling it as such misses the point. The problem is less the pro-gun culture than it is the pro-violence culture created by our entertainment and sports industries. Violence can be inherently entertaining – from humor to drama it is a part of what constitutes entertainment from antiquity. But it’s lost all context in the modern world in much the same way it lost all context in the Roman world. There’s a big difference between say black comedy, old school Warner Bros. cartoons, and Shakespeare where death is played for laughs and to create dramatic tension and stuff like video games (which as immersive interactive entertainment pose special risks) and “movies” like those torture porn Hostel and Saw garbage. Violence as entertainment can be all well and good as long as there is context and it is required for moving the story along in some way. Another issue is the ever increasingly shallow grip a lot of people have on reality in general. Many people have a problem separating fiction from reality. Education about guns is a good thing. So is an education about what is real and what isn’t. When you see a guy shot in a Western, they always leave the part out about corpses losing control of their bowels and bladder. Do you know why most people with a good martial arts background don’t talk cavalierly about kicking someone’s ass or physically threaten other people? It’s because of their training they know exactly what the very real costs of violence can be.
Violence as entertainment is one thing. If you can discern entertainment from reality.
Violence as a problem solving methodology in reality is usually the wrong methodology.
Some times it can’t be avoided though and that is the hard reality of human nature, but it should be reserved as the very last option. That is why most martial arts training teaches controlling and killing techniques and that when to use them are distinctly different situations.
That’s why I always get a kick out the feebs on the Web who think telling me directly or making veiled references to how they could kick my ass is a reasonable response.
But you won’t make headway until you address the problem for what it is: a tendency to use violence as a problems solving tool instead of other forms of dispute resolution. Guns aren’t intrinsically the problem.
People are.
Guns make killing easy. They are a tool. People make the decision though. Not the tool.
Well… we have the NRA falsely claiming that MILLIONS of guns a year are used to deter crime….
That is NOT the case….
We have the NRA falsely claiming that it is our RIGHT to own any gun….
We have the NRA falsely claiming a lot of things…. and a LOT of misinformation out there….
We now have politicians that want guns more widely available because they say that more guns means less crime.. That is also just not fact…..
The Problem is that the NRA and other Pro Gun lobbying groups push out propaganda at an alarming rate…. They have ONE agenda… sell more guns… sell more memberships….
this is NOT to make the country better or safer…. it is just for more money…..
You can try to blame it on sports and entertainment…. HOWEVER…..
some of the most violent sports is seen at European sporting events… Riots after Footboll games… these people get SERIOUS…
The Irish and English have a massive history of violence…. yet, they have FAR LESS gun violence than the USA….
You can try to blame movies… and yes, I do think that violence is a bit more glorified than I would like…..
BUT, the French are masters at violent movies… even more so than the USA…. same with UK… their crime dramas show far MORE violence and torture than the US movies and TV shows…
Look at Japan… they are also masters at horror and violent movies….
their crime rates are lower then the USA…..
The USA is NOT evolving with the rest of the western world….
You can say that… Oh… it is OK… that is just our culture…. BUT, we are just making excuses….
“You’re dealing w/ white guilt and moral relativism, a horrible cocktail.”
Hooooooooo-weeee. Damn! I nearly choked on my wine!
Thanks a bundle for your valuable insight and razor-like acumen, Dr. Huff N. Puff. You learn that in your Women’s Studies class?
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suppose that you’re not qualified to wipe your own @$$ let alone diagnose my non-existent “guilt” and what morals my relatives may or may not have. {wink-wink}
I toast you with my “horrible cocktail”. Skoal!
Eddie amd Dweeze, You’re dealing w/ white guilt and moral relativism, a horrible cocktail.
Here we go again . . . .
“What I find so troubling is that the Pro Gun people REFUSE to even entertain the idea that commonsense regulation would help….”
Generalize much? I’m “pro-gun”. Whatever that label is supposed to imply. I don’t even belong to the NRA and, after what I saw during my concealed carry class, I was convinced beyond any doubt that some people do not deserve to carry a pocketknife — let alone a firearm.
It should be definitely be harder to carry concealed. Gun at home for personal protection? No problema.
Next hair-brained notion . . . ?
eLAINE:
they dont need to use bows and arrows, they have guns. But if guns were outlawed, then outlaws would use bows.
They could make them too, easily and the arrows. A good English long bow could kill a man at a considerable distance. Granted they would be a little hard to fit in a low rider.
justagurlinseattle-
“What I find so troubling is that the Pro Gun people REFUSE to even entertain the idea that commonsense regulation would help….”
And you refuse to propose anything that is common sense. We have repeatedly explained why most of the ideas here either won’t work or are philosophically objectionable and we keep hearing nothing in return.
“They just want to think that if EVERYBODY is armed and anybody should be able to walk in the store and buy a gun and that it will make the country better… that it will be a safer nation…. and that could not be further from the truth….”
NO ONE wants everyone carrying or owning guns. This is just an outright lie.
Also, you cited numerous works with David Hemenway’s name attached. Understand that he is not the only or final word on the issue. There are researchers that have made findings different from him.
You also claimed that no one here has suggested banning guns. Go back and read all of the responses. You will see repeated calls to ban so called “assault weapons”.
Banning assault weapons is not the same as flat out banning guns…..
The Aurora Shooter used an AR-15…. Isn’t that considered an assault weapon???
Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders* carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii.
—–
Weapons: Of the 139 guns possessed by the killers, more than three quarters were obtained legally.
The arsenal included dozens of assault weapons and semiautomatic handguns. (See charts below.) Just as Jeffrey Weise used a .40-caliber Glock to massacre students in Red Lake, Minnesota, in 2005, so too did James Holmes (along with an AR-15 assault rifle) when blasting away at his victims in a darkened movie theater.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
It seems that these mass shootings, are the ones where an assault weapon is used……
There is a graph on this page that shows how often an assault weapon is used in these types of shootings….
John…. Otteray Scribe…
Who here has suggested prohibition?????
Where the U.S. does rank high in firearm violence
One study published in 2011 confirms this finding. The study, published in the Journal of Trauma — Injury Infection & Critical Care, found that firearm homicide rates were 19.5 times higher in the U.S. than in 23 other “high income” countries studied, using 2003 data. Rates for other types of gun deaths were also higher in the U.S., but by somewhat smaller margins: 5.8 times higher for firearm suicides (even though overall suicide rates were 30 percent lower in the U.S.) and 5.2 times higher for unintentional firearm deaths.
taken from Politifact….
Mr. Spindell,
That’s it, take something out of context and make an issue of it. When confronted, double down.
Your personality (as shown here) is one of the reasons I left social work nearly 30 years ago: too much education backed up by far too little brain. I chose my words deliberately to provoke a reaction, knowing that some over-educated dunderhead would bite. Congratulations, Sparky.
Go back and reread what I wrote, not what you thought I wrote. Until you can tell the difference, discussions such as this will never be more than a source of amusement for me. You are a profoundly unserious person trying futilely to have a serious conversation.
Go right ahead and holler about guns along with your oh-so-enlightened views on race. Nothing you do will have any impact until you take yourself (along with your nonexistent spine) into the areas where the people who use guns live. And then you’re going to need a plan to convince them to put them down. Hint: it has something to do with jobs that pay decently. Hint the Second: a sense of human dignity and self-worth would also be helpful. People who see the value in themselves tend to assume that value in others. Makes it harder to blow someone away. Which is what we’re all after, in the end.
“I chose my words deliberately to provoke a reaction”
So thedweeze you came here for a reaction. Perhaps just another embittered election loser who stupidly thought he was going to have fun provoking “da Libruls”, that of course being synonymous with too much education. Your chosen means to provoke that reaction was blatant racism. You also threw in cowardice to further provoke.
Your gutlessness when called on it was to accuse me of in effect playing the race card. I bet when you’re hanging out with the guys they think you are quite a wit. You are funny dweeze in the sense that you’re someone to laugh at because all you’ have admitted to was being ignorant. In my opinion ignorance is far worse than stupidity. 🙂