By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
The horrific events in Newtown, Connecticut have left us all with a sense of shock and helplessness. Twenty elementary school children dead, six educators slaughtered, and a place we all like to think of as a safe haven from the misery of the world polluted by horrific violence wrought by weapons more properly used on a battlefield. Politicians from President Obama to New York Mayor Bloomberg have called for “meaningful action” to combat gun violence which is endemic to America.
But does this mass murder of innocents present the right case to support effective gun control? From what we know now the answer is “no.” The shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, was a troubled teen who suffered from either Asperger’s syndrome or a personality disorder according to the New York Daily News. One family friend described the young man, saying, “This was a deeply disturbed kid. He certainly had major issues. He was subject to outbursts from what I recall.”
Lanza also had strange permutation of the syndrome in that he was impervious to normal stimuli. Another “longtime” family friend said Lanza had a condition “where he couldn’t feel pain. A few years ago when he was on the baseball team, everyone had to be careful that he didn’t fall because he could get hurt and not feel it.”
Asperger’s syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) which allows the sufferer to maintain high academic and cognitive functioning but handicaps social interaction. It is the classic high school brainiac who is unable to ask a member of the opposite sex out on a date. The cause is unknown but certain genetic markers may be present to suggest that is its origin. Thus, Lanza may have acted from a motivation he had little control over and which no amount of gun control or mental health legislation could control.
Additionally, the guns used in the slayings were purchased legally by Lanza’s apparent first victim, his mother, Nancy. Lanza stole the weapons — a .223 Bushmaster assault weapon*, and two semi-automatic handguns, a 9 mm Sig Sauer, and a 9 mm Glock — after murdering his mother and thus began his rampage. The simple fact is that no gun control measures either on the books or reasonably under consideration could have stopped such a disturbed person from acquiring these weapons if he was willing to kill to get them.
As much as many of us would like to see guns regulated at least as much as cars or liquor, the facts here do not present the best case to achieve this goal. The American love affair with guns is seemingly getting stronger with sales of firearms setting new records. Gun manufacturers and their minions at the NRA have succeeded in scaring many Americans into believing that Obama and the Democratic Party have a secret agenda to disarm the public.
In fact, the public’s support for gun control has been on a steady decline according to polling conducted by Pew Research. Even the school mass murder at Columbine registered only a bump of support which quickly vanished. The chart below (from the Huffington Post) graphically demonstrates the public’s attitude about guns in an era of distrust with government and the political process.
It would take a paradigm shift in the culture to create the political will to take on the Second Amendment. It is a telling — and perhaps damning — fact that even the death of 20 children under age 10 is simply not enough.
Source: CNN; New York DailyNews; Huffington Post
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
PSs:
Our good friend, slartibartfast, has provided a link on the effectiveness of the federal ban on assault weapons. It’s good reading. Here it is: Did the federal ban on assault weapons matter?
*Also commenter, Roman Berry, (9:19 am) has provided some context for the term “assault weapon.”
Thanks, guys.
Bob, my former brother in law was a serious competitive skeet shooter. He shot so much over his lifetime that he is now hearing impaired. A couple of his shotguns are seriously expensive. I am not sure of the make, but I think it is Swedish and cost him close to twenty thousand dollars.
English made Purdy shotguns run into six figures.
OS,
I’m actually looking into purchasing a Remington 1100 in 20 gauge and getting back into skeet shooting so all this talk about banning ‘all semi-automatic guns’ is particularly annoying.
OS,
The only way the gun owners will give them up is for realistic value. How did Australia get hundreds of thousands of guns? Besides, I have been laughed at before.
Bob,
Emotion is just a small part of my argument. The best way to prevent 30 more school shootings is for our society to realize that some of these weapons are not necessary to protect themselves and that the mentally ill need to be helped and kept from owning guns.
I have to hit the hay now. Great article Mespo!
raff, we do not travel in the same social circles due to geography. A buyback program would be met with peals of laughter at my house. If you walked down the main street of our town and asked people at random if they would be willing to turn in their firearms, one of several things would happen. You might be slugged. You would be greeted by side-splitting laughter, or possibly be arrested for trying to start a riot. Besides, do you really think any government agency is going to offer to buy back privately owned firearms at their true value? Have you priced a top quality semi-auto hunting rifle lately? Or handgun for that matter. My Browning Buckmark is definitely not for sale at any price.
Make not mistake Raff, I’m all for preventing the killing of children. I simply find more utility in pointing out and preventing imminent danger rather than doing the equivalent using appeal to emotion for laws about as rationally related to a legitimate purpose as leash laws for unicorns.
Bob, first of all, I am outraged about the drone killings, but I can also be outraged about 30 school shootings since Columbine. At least I am arguing for preventing further loss of life, no matter where it occurs. The question is, why aren’t you Bob?
This is what ran through my head during Obama’s speech tonight:
“As regards civilian casualties, on August 11, 2011 a report of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism said, “The Guardian published some of the pictures, we have obtained…as many as 168 children have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan during the past seven years.” While rejecting the CIA’s false claim, the report disclosed, “It is a bleak view: more people killed than previously thought.”
Besides, a report of the New America Foundation revealed that President Obama has “authorised 193 drone strikes in Pakistan, more than four times the number of attacks that President Bush authorised during his two terms.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/killing-civilians-obamas-drone-war-in-pakistan/5315661
OS,
The Australia buy back plan mentioned above was very successful. It will be harder if we don’t start somewhere and sometime.
Raff: “But we have to put society’s health first.”
This is where liberalism leaves reality and enters science fiction; e.g. everyone is one with the body of Landrew, etc.
Raff: “It will take a sea change in society, but I do not see teeny six and seven year olds as an insignificant number of useless deaths. Since when do actuaries come into play on an issue like this, Bob? I think the mothers and fathers of those twenty angels think just one life was significant enough!”
And there you go; arguing from emotion rather than principle.
If you’re truly concerned about the fates of little angels, then why aren’t you more than outraged about the drone strikes?
That’s not only 170 plus “little angels” dead by deliberate policy, but countless others being lined up right now, as a matter of certainty, to die in the near future.
In the heat of the moment you seem to have lost your sense of perspective & capacity for reason; i.e. attending to “little angels” that may be killed in some improbable future rather than screaming to stop killing “little angels” that are destined to be killed in the near future deliberately.
I sure hope your sense of morality isn’t based on nationality or geography. Little angels are little angels regardless of nationality; right Raff?
Elaine,
If it was my child, he or she would be enough.
Justagurl,
Gene’s comment about free and available mental health would be part of the solution. It may be easier to get a gun than to get mental health care.
rafflaw,
“I think the mothers and fathers of those twenty angels think just one life was significant enough!”
Those dead children are just a blip on an actuary’s statistical graph. Nothing significant. Be rational, will you?!
Gene H.
1, November 11, 2012 at 3:59 pm
You can’t legislate away the fact that Mitch McConnell making a good case for retroactive abortions is funny if you possess a sense of humor either.
Argument by non-sequtur. You can legislate against crazy people doing harm but they are crazy so you can’t enforce it with anything approaching 100% efficacy. That isn’t the Nirvana fallacy, it’s simply recognizing the nature of the crazy beast inhibits predictive solutions. Creating such an enforcement regime would require a massive retooling of the mental healthcare systems in this country and a massive rewrite of our privacy protections under the 14th Amendment vis a vis healthcare, e.g. more erosion of civil rights in the name of “security”. Crazy people with always find ways to harm others and themselves even if you turned the whole nation into a pscyh ward.
———————————————————-
That was YOUR comment on the other gun topic…..
and here you said…..
I’m even for the idea of a mental health check and a “blind” database where mental health workers can list people they think are dangerous to themselves or others to restrict sales. Concurrently though I am for free quality public mental health care. There are actually quite a few areas I’m willing to talk restrictions and other mitigations.
However, banning semi-automatic weapons of any sort is simply going too far. 1) It would shift the balance of power too far to the government in what is already a unfair fight should it break out, 2) banning would only result in a black market and the attendant crime that goes with black markets 3) a prohibition would be ineffective as guns of all sort are fairly easy to make from scratch as a fabrication issue, and 4) there are many legitimate self-defense and sporting reasons to prefer a semi-automatic over a revolver or manual loading design.
——————
and to address the last part of your argument….
Then WHY is it that gun deaths DROPPED HEAVILY after gun restrictions in Australia… and in the UK.???
I sure do not see many guns in my country here… of course many have LONG guns…. just NOT handguns….
Hunting is quite popular here….. people do own handguns… they are just not easy to get…..
we also do NOT have a BUNCH of innocents being shot like ducks in a
barrel…
Fact is… here in Sweden, it is the outlaws who have guns… and YET…
we do not see HALF the victims that the USA does…..
in fact…. per 100,000 people…..
USA is about 2.4
Sweden is about .41
all of EU is about .60
and if you take ALL of the EU…. it would be around .60 rounding HIGH….
and that is with TWICE the amount of citizens…..
the USA has about 350 million…..
EU has around 700 million……
NO MATTER how you cut it…. The outlaws are NOT running around leading the innocent to slaughter….
NO major shootouts….. NO homemade guns….
How Our Nation Can Protect Children, Not Guns
By Marian Wright Edelman.
President, Children’s Defense Fund
Posted: 03/30/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/how-our-nation-can-protec_b_1392551.html
Excerpt:
As a nation we need to protect children from guns, support common-sense gun safety measures, and pass stronger federal, state, and local laws that would save many lives. We could start by closing the gun show loophole. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act requires federally licensed gun dealers to conduct background checks on every gun sale, but a loophole in the law allows private dealers to sell guns without a license and avoid the required background checks. This loophole accounts for a large share of all gun sales. It’s estimated that over 40 percent of all guns in our country are sold by unlicensed private sellers to buyers who did not have to pass a background check. Congress must require criminal background checks on anyone who attempts to purchase a gun.
Congress should reinstitute the ban on assault weapons. The federal Assault Weapons Ban, signed into law in 1994, prohibited the manufacture and sale of 19 types of semi-automatic military style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines that contained more than 10 rounds of ammunition, but it expired in 2004. Legislation pending in Congress would reinstitute the ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines that were used in the mass shootings in Tucson, Arizona and at Virginia Tech. Congress must restore the ban on both high-capacity clips and assault weapons. These deadly assault weapons that cause multiple deaths at a time have nothing to do with hunting animals. As James Alan Fox, professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, said right after the Tucson murders: “Notwithstanding the worn-out slogan that ‘guns don’t kill, people do,’ guns do make it easier for people to commit murder. And semi-automatic guns, like the Tucson assailant’s out-of-the-box spanking-new Glock, make it easier to commit mass murder.”
OS,
One at a time. I never said it would be easy. Besides, I like challenges! 🙂
Gene,
I will go the amendment route, but I do not see an impediment to the ban. That doesn’t mean it will be easy or be done quickly. But we have to put society’s health first. It will take a sea change in society, but I do not see teeny six and seven year olds as an insignificant number of useless deaths. Since when do actuaries come into play on an issue like this, Bob? I think the mothers and fathers of those twenty angels think just one life was significant enough!
raff, there are an estimated 230 million firearms in private hands in the US. Many of them are not registered anywhere, having been handed down for years in the family, or bought on the private market. I estimate about two thirds of those are semi-automatics. How do you propose to remove two million firearms from private citizens? Go door to door and tell people you have come for their guns? Good luck on that.
raff,
” I think banning semi-automatic rifles can be done within the borders of the expansive 2nd Amendment. ”
I’m with Bob on that one. It would require amendment.
Maybe you shouldn’t shout so much, JAG. It’s often hard to hear what you mean beneath the hyperbole and TYPING IN ALL CAPS WHICH IS SHOUTING ON THE INTERNET.
Bob,
Pipe dreams to you, but needed reality to others. I don’t have all the answers on how to get meaningful restrictions on the mentally ill, but the Japan model is a start. Besides, if we never start the discussion, you will never prevent more loss of life. I think banning semi-automatic rifles can be done within the borders of the expansive 2nd Amendment. The founders never imagined a semi automatic rifle so under Scalia’s originalist reasoning,it should be OK to limit the weapons allowed, iMHO.