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.
ST,
It is my knowledge that the only way to repeal an amendment is by amendment. You can’t do a legislative, executive or judicial end run around the proper process. That’s at the heart of the very legitimate criticism of the Patriot Act, the NDAA, the kill list, and Presidents Bush and Obama.
shano,
What part of you can be pro-2nd and pro-regulation is escaping you and others here? Besides all of it?
The Scalia quote Blouise brought up is a fact: it is not the job of the courts to nullify your rights including the 2nd. You can’t effectively repeal the 2nd by legislation any more than you can effectively repeal it through judicial or executive fiat. If you want to regulation arms out of existence, you are no better than Bush or Obama in pissing on the Constitution and Constitutional process. It’s not a straw man. If you want to go so far as to effectively ban guns? You will need to use the amendment process or be just as guilty of abusing the Constitution as our domestic war criminals and would be tyrants are.
Both sides of this argument have lost their damn minds.
“Gun ownership is a protected individual right. That is the state of Constitutional law.”
It is my understanding that the Amendments to the Constitution are called Amendments because they are amendments.
“My stand is an accurate reading of the history of tyranny and operational understanding of how modifying the Constitution is supposed to work when not being usurped by the Executive or the Judiciary. Being reasonably apprehensive and cautious in the face of overwhelming historical evidence that tyranny unchecked is tyranny invited is called being prudent in the face of tyranny and oppression – something this country needed to have learned before rolling over for the Patriot Act and the kill list.”
George Carlin America was founded on a double standard
Repealing the 2nd or banning all guns is always the straw man that is pummeled to death whenever any conversation of gun control/rights comes up. We shouldn’t fall for this distraction.
right on Blouise.
Darren, so what about Halliburton or Xe, can they operate in Washington state? It would seem to bar these corporate mercenaries.
Blouise,
And that is your opinion.
Gun ownership is a protected individual right. That is the state of Constitutional law. Feel free to try to change it if you like.
Betty, I don’t appeal to emotion and I’m personally not afraid of jackshit (other than neurological disorders which scare the crap out of me and the prospect of anarchy which should frighten any sane being). Including friends who would run roughshod over a right just because they don’t like some of the attendant costs. I have news for you. I don’t like some of the attendant costs of some rights and not just the 2nd, but I do accept them for the value they provide. My stand is based on history, law and political science. All rights come with duties and costs as well as benefits. If you don’t value the bulwark against tyranny the 2nd provides? That is your choice to make. Valuation in a cost/benefit analysis of this type is individual. My decision to value that aspect of the 2nd is based in reason. We seemed to agree in principle that reasonable restriction was permissible, simply differing on the nature of the right. Apparently your real view is more extreme than that if you think Scalia was wrong in saying “It is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.” And you know how much I absolutely hate having to agree with that jackass, but he’s right as a matter of objective legal principle this time. “Failed” or not? My way is the Constitutional way and if that presents a problem for you? Your agreement is not required.
If you want to try to repeal the 2nd? Be my guest. Because if you disagree with Scalia on this point, you are indeed for judicial nullification of a Constitutional right despite your protestations to the contrary. That’s not a false dilemma. That’s an actual binary choice. For once, Scalia is actually right about something: nullifying parts of the Constitution is not the job of SCOTUS. Interpreting and protecting is though even though he’s done a very spotty job of it himself (at best – seriously, I’m being generous to the old fascist). It’s not the job of anyone or anything other than the amendment process. My stand is an accurate reading of the history of tyranny and operational understanding of how modifying the Constitution is supposed to work when not being usurped by the Executive or the Judiciary. Being reasonably apprehensive and cautious in the face of overwhelming historical evidence that tyranny unchecked is called being prudent in the face of tyranny and oppression – something this country needed to have learned before rolling over for the Patriot Act and the kill list. Your desire for outcome determinism is showing. You are arguing from what you want the law to be, not what it actually is, to get a result you desire.
“45% of mass shooting victims in the U.S. over the past 3 decades were killed btwn 2007-2012. That’s a crisis. http://on.tnr.com/Wjjk8n“
SwM,
I don’t know but let me fire off a quick email to Gov Kasish.
“West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — who has an “A” rating from the NRA and is a lifetime member of the pro-gun rights group — said Monday that it was time to “move beyond rhetoric” on gun control.
“I just came with my family from deer hunting,” Manchin said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I’ve never had more than three shells in a clip. Sometimes you don’t get more than one shot anyway at a deer. It’s common sense. It’s time to move beyond rhetoric. We need to sit down and have a common sense discussion and move in a reasonable way.” Daily Kos, Meanwhile the NRA is not commenting. Good post, nal. Blouise, I wonder where they think the teachers should store their gun or guns.
From Kos at the DailyKos this morning and to me quite persuasive, considering my past positions on the issue in favor of the 2nd Amendment.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/17/1170940/-Some-thoughts-on-the-coming-gun-debate
I served three years in the U.S. Army. I’ve fired bigger guns than the gun fetishists would ever dream of firing—from a .45, to an M-16, to an M-60, to an M-203 grenade launcher, to a .50 caliber, to … one of these. Each time I fired one of those weapons, it was in a controlled environment, with multiple layers of safety wrapped in. During peacetime, that made sense. But things weren’t too much different during wartime. I didn’t deploy, but when pulling guard duty at high-value targets in Germany during the first Gulf War, we weren’t given ammunition. A sergeant kept that tightly controlled. Here we were, a potential terrorist target, the most highly trained military force in the world, and they didn’t trust us with live ammo. And for good reason. Down in Kuwait, those on guard duty were given live ammo, but even then safety barriers were erected to prevent accidental shootings, as former cavalry soldier John Cole recounts:
[I]n the middle of one of the most dangerous regions in the world, even with clear Rules of Engagement, every time I went on gate duty, there was a piece of tape over my ammo clip on my M-16 and M1911 .45. Why? Because the most heavily armed military in the world did not want accidental shootings. If a situation arose, I would have to eject my ammo clip, remove the tape, and reinsert and work the action before I could fire. This was in a combat zone. Yet I have spent the last two f**king days dealing with armchair commandos telling me they need unlimited firepower to be safe in… Connecticut.
And that’s the crux of it—a bunch of civilian gun fetishists who fashion themselves the front lines in the defense of freedom from tyranny of something or other. Black helicopters? The U.N.? Barney Frank? The “tactical” turn is what I want to flag here. It has what I take to be a very specific use-case, but it’s used – liberally – by gun owners outside of the military, outside of law enforcement, outside (if you’ll indulge me) of any conceivable reality-based community: these folks talk in terms of “tactical” weapons, “tactical” scenarios, “tactical applications,” and so on. It’s the lingua franca of gun shops, gun ranges, gun forums, and gun-oriented Youtube videos. (My god, you should see what’s out there on You Tube!) Which begs my question: in precisely which “tactical” scenarios do all of these lunatics imagine that they’re going to use their matte-black, suppressor-fitted, flashlight-ready tactical weapons?
People don’t really buy assault rifles to hunt. If you can’t take down that deer with a single shot, then you have no business hunting. Learn how to f**king aim.
Of course, we can sit here and lambaste this new “tactical” culture all we want, but what can be done about it?
Both England and Australia enacted bans of varying levels after their own spate of gun massacres, and those efforts have paid off. People aren’t getting mass murdered in schools and malls anymore. But those two nations didn’t have anything akin the Second Amendment putting a break on controlling access to weaponry. We, on the other hand, have a culture that fetishizes guns, a gun lobby that has effectively neutered any effort at sensible gun laws, and a Supreme Court that has encroached on the right of cities and states to regulate gun access by ignoring the “well regulated” part of the Second Amendment.
But all the past massacres had a fraction of the impact of Friday’s. There’s is something so viscerally sickening about young children being harmed in any way, that it can’t help but be different. There’s a coming debate, and it’s not going to be good for the gun absolutists. That doesn’t mean they’ll lose. The gun lobby is strong, and they’re about to mount the mother of all defenses. But it means that they’ll be put on the spot in a way that they haven’t been in … forever.
Part of it is their own short-sighted greed. If they were an organization truly focused on self-defense and hunting, there’d be no need to fight tooth-and-nail for high-capacity magazines, or for armor-piercing bullets, or for assault rifle ownership. Let people own their hunting rifles and revolvers. People somehow made do with those for several centuries. But there’s no need for a weapon with a magazine.
Adam Lanza used an assault rifle to shoot his way past a locked door. He then moved quickly to neutralize the administration office before doing his horrible deeds in two classrooms. He only stopped and turned a gun on himself when police arrived. Take away that rifle, and shooting his way past the front door would’ve required a reload. Attacking the administration would require a reload. Attacking the two classrooms would require multiple reloads. Those reloads would’ve been chances for people to try and take him down, or for people to escape. The time he would’ve spent reloading would’ve slowed him down, shortening the number of victims in the attack before first-responders arrived on scene.
[Clarification: Lanza clearly had to reload during his attack. I meant the difference between swapping out a 20-30-round magazine, to reloading individual bullets into a revolver or cartridges in a rifle.]
But no, his idiot “survivalist” mother (how’d that work out for her?) had to purchase her small arsenal, to protect herself against phantom threats on her “freedoms”—urged on by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the gun manufacturers. And instead, she ensured her own untimely doom and that of too many innocents.
So yeah, if I were the benevolent dictator of this country, I’d simply outlaw guns with magazines. That would leave plenty of guns for people to hunt with and defend their homes. As for government tyranny, good luck fighting off government drones with your assault rifle. It hasn’t gone so well for Al Qaida, I hear. Might as well stick to the ballot box. I’d also spend a crap-ton of cash on mental health services. But you’ll never get rid of dangerously crazy people. You can get rid of ways they can inflict the most harm.
Of course, you have a conservative movement and its NRA friends who think that 20 dead kindergarteners is an acceptable price to pay for their “freedom” to own weapons better suited for highly trained security forces. You have have a conservative movement that would fight to its last breath for those 20 when they were fetuses, but can’t bring itself to get outraged once they were born. You have a conservative movement that will now scream about liberals “politicizing a tragedy” to take away their guns—validating every Obama conspiracy theory they’ve held since Day One of his presidency. As if we’d give a sh*t about their stupid guns if innocents weren’t regularly dying because of them.
The gun lobby may yet win this battle, but I don’t think it’s as forgone a conclusion as in the past. There has been a palpable change in the public mood on the issue. And as the political world learned last year—Democrats can win without the gun-fetishists, while Republicans can’t afford to cede more ground in white suburbia—where pro-gun control sentiment runs strong. The NRA can’t wield the electoral card as strongly as it once did.
And note, every person who comes out in favor of the status quo, who fights sensible regulation, will be fighting for a status quo that gave us the Sandy Hook massacre. There are gun laws that could’ve prevented or mitigated the damage done. Let them say that the deaths of those children—and the adults who died trying to save them—was an acceptable price to pay for their supposed “freedoms” to wield whatever arsenal they see fit. There are 20 sets of presents in a small Connecticut town that won’t be opened this Christmas. Let the NRA and their friends shrug that off.
This time, it won’t be the popular—or politically expedient—position to hold.
Nal,
It needed to be said.
Gene,
Now, if we look at the situation from the standpoint I propose which does not involve the Second but, in all honesty gives the right of individual gun ownership a natural right definition and standing, we center the discussion not on the militia/military platform but on the broader, natural right platform. From that platform it is much easier to discus and legislate for on that platform we can consider the natural rights of all the citizens as individuals. Each individual citizen has a right to life that can be measured against the individual’s right to own a gun. From that platform legislation can be sanely debated and drawn.
Gene,
“That’s about 50 years and the logical rational analysis of the language and jurisprudence leading to the Constitution for me.”
Nope, that’s 50 years of irrational analysis led by the gun manufacturers through the NRA that supplanted the 3 decisions from earlier courts who had the the Second properly placed.
Your 50 years is perfectly encapsulated in Scalia’s quote in 2008, “It is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.” (typical emotional hyperbole)
My slightly less than 200 years is the much stronger hand countering your bluff and the Justices on my side run circles around your boy, Scalia.
Oro Lee,
Here is a photo of my baby at the Sheriff’s Department firing range. She wants me to frame one of her targets in a poster frame to hang on the wall. I think just having this picture–or one like it–in a frame on her wall ought to do the trick. (This was at twenty yards with a revolver she had never shot before)
http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt256/otteraylens/e7d9d7dd.jpg
LGM:
So I’m a teacher. According to conservative orthodoxy, I’m a parasite on the public’s dime who is only interested in indoctrinating the precious children of America into communism or atheism or whatever. I can’t be trusted to have any control over the curriculum I teach. I can’t be trusted to fairly and impartially evaluate my students, let alone my colleagues. I can’t be trusted to have collective bargaining rights. I can’t be trusted to have an objective view of governmental policy when it comes to my own profession.
But they’ll trust me to keep a gun in a room filled with children.
Even the cynicism-producing neurons of my prefrontal cortex can’t wrap themselves around this kind of stupid bullshit.
Otteray,
Here’s a more creative way to get back at an abusive husband. This is a true story told to my husband by an Oklahoma man that he once worked with. This man’s father was in the habit of drinking. When he got drunk, he’d often beat this man’s mother. The mother got fed up. One night after her husband passed out on the bed, she sewed him up in the bed sheets, got a broom, and sat by the bed until her husband awoke. Then she beat him with the broom. He couldn’t defend himself. He learned his lesson–never laid a hand on her again.
OS_
My grandmother could light kitchen matches at 20′ off-hand with a .22LR. My daughter is every bit as good a shot as her great grandmother.
Whenever a young man thought about dating my daughter, I would take them to the gun range; thereafter, my daughter was always treated with the upmost respect.
OS:
I imagine he divorced her because he could not endure that psychological stress.
The period leading up to the divorce was probably pretty funny. I wonder how many times he thought someone was watching him and how many times he ducked behind a wall or a tree?
I am laughing just thinking about his mental torment.
She ought to send him a card with cross-hairs on a jacka$$.