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Earlier this week 33 people including the shooter were killed in a spectacular shooting spree on the campus of Virginia Tech which drew national and international media attention and still holds it this evening.
Meanwhile murder and gun crime is more anonymously but still dramatically up all over the country including right here in Central Florida where we hit an all time record of 113 murders last year in Orange County of which 49 were in the City of Orlando and we had a dramatic increase in the rate of murders on a population basis as well.
The majority of these murders are gun crimes.
The right wing blogosphere in response to the Virginia Tech shooting is busy spewing the usual right wing mythology trying to contain the damage from their ideological support for unlimited gun rights.
You know what I mean:
"Guns don't kill people, people do"
"We have an unalienable right to bear arms"
"If we make guns illegal only criminals will have guns"
"If everyone else had a gun too, this wouldn't have happened", etc.
Let's address these top four right wing myths one by one:
Myth #1) "Guns don't kill people, people do"
Yeah but PEOPLE don't THROW bullets at other people do they?
Guns are machines that have been expressly engineered to make killing so easy and automatic that "even a caveman" can do it. If gun access was more restrictive there would be less of this nonsense and when it did happen there wouldn't be 15 dead or 30 dead but rather 2 or 3.
Myth #2 - "We have an unalienable right to bear arms"
The notion that gun owner "rights" are enshrined in the 2nd amendment and that there ought to be no limits on your right to "bear arms" is ridiculous on its face.
What if Bill Gates wanted to own a nuclear missile submarine or B52 bomber? He can afford to buy one after all. The Constitution doesn't say what kind of arms either does it? Would you support Bill Gates right to own a nuclear missile sub or a B52?
Furthermore there are plenty of rights which we all have which are NOT literally mentioned in the Bill of Rights, yet we have them under the 9th and 10th amendments to the Constitution which reserve "unenumerated" rights to the people or states.
We regulate driving, and car ownership and flying and aircraft ownership and any number of potentially dangerous activities in spite of these 9th and 10th Amendment protections.
We are the only industrialized western nation in the world with our outrageous level of gun violence and death. We are far more violent than any other G8 country.
Several times as many die from gun violence in country EVERY year as died in 9/11 one time.
The Bush administration has taken all sorts of drastic steps to curtail our civil liberties since then to "protect" us from future 9/11 attacks yet when it comes to guns, nobody is willing to do anything.
The Second Amendment alone is to be treated as sacred while the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th get thrown out the window in the name of protecting us from "tha' terrists".
Personally I'm far more afraid of the homegrown nuts with guns yelling "YEEEEE HAW" than far away ones overseas yelling "JEE HAAD" . We have plenty of homegrown nuts that are more dangerous as a statistical fact than Osama bin Laden ever was.
Myth#3 - "If we make guns illegal, only criminals will have guns"
Alternatively this is the theory that if a gun buyer can't find a legal source to buy he will seek an illegal source. By this argument we should totally discontinue enforcement of all laws because criminals will just break them anyways.
Making something illegal DOES discourage most people from doing it. Illegal drug use is far less prevalent than legal drug use of prescription pills, alchohol, and tobacco simply because it IS illegal.
We shouldn't as a society just throw our hands up and say we are going to go back to the days of the Chicago gangs and everybody having a Thompson submachine gun simply because some people will find a way to break the laws no matter what.
Reasonable gun laws actively enforced along with gun dealers being held to a higher standard against negligent practices would go a long way to solving much of our gun crime problems.
I am, personally, incredulous when I hear the gun dealer who sold the Virginia Tech shooter say he followed the applicable laws and that the sale was "unremarkable". If this is true then we have good cause to worry about current gun sales.
We have since heard numerous news reports of stalking, violent fantasies being written as English class assignments, students and faculty physically afraid of the shooter, visits by the police and mental health professionals - yet the shooter, Cho-Sueng Hui, was somehow "unremarkable" to the gun dealer.
Did the dealer bother to ask for more than Cho-Sueng Hui's driver's license, a perfunctory criminal check and basic paper work?
Did he try to spend more than 1 or 2 minutes with the customer to evaluate Cho-Sueng Hui's behavior?
Did he make any effort at all to gauge Cho-Sueng Hui's state of mind?
Did he ask any of these questions:
Who are you really? - not what is your name but what do you think of yourself as?
How are you doing/How do you feel?
Who are your friends?
Who is your family?
Can I talk to them about you?
Why do you want this gun?
Have you ever thought about suicide or killing someone?
Have you ever owned a gun before?
Who would vouch for you acting responsibly with a loaded gun?
Do you take drugs, have you taken drugs or do you drink excessively?
Would you willing to wait a month or two for this gun?
Asking a few simple questions like these might have stopped the gun dealer from selling the gun to Cho-Sueng Hui - but then the profit motive is all too often too important. The dealer is afraid the would be buyer might find an easier more willing to sell dealer instead.
I for one believe that these dealers and manufacturers ought to fear losing those precious profits by being sued out of existence and being prosecuted for negligent homicide when they fail to balance the public's right to avoid the next nut with a gun situation with their own profits.
Myth#4 - "If everyone else had a gun too, this wouldn't have happened"
This is my favorite myth to bust.
Letting everybody have a gun as the right wing proposes will only makes the problem vastly worse not better.
The nutjobs who do these kinds of attacks have the initiative and the element of surprise in their favor.
Owning or possessing a gun will do you no good. You will get shot anyways and then he (almost all such shooters are young men) will take your gun and then use it to shoot someone else.
Furthermore, when everyone has a gun, it makes it much harder to decide whether you need to be afraid that someone might be going mental today.
Normally if you see someone with a drawn gun who is not clearly a cop, common sense says "run Forrest run"!
It won't be so obvious to do this when everyone has guns.
In 1981, President Reagan was shot along with two other people by another nut with a gun (John Hinckley) in about 2-3 seconds in spite of being professionally protected the best trained and best equipped personal bodyguard force (the Secret Service) in the history of the world and in spite of the fact that they were looking for a shooter and are trained to do so constantly, and are some of the best shots in the world, and in spite of the fact that they outnumbered Mr. Hinckley by 12 to 1 or better.
It is laughable, then, to think that some average Joe with his own gun would be able to "take out the shooter".. especially with a concealed handgun as opposed to a prepositioned sniper rifle. He would be much more likely shoot some innocent bystander or himself by accident than to hit the shooter.
It also would create a great deal of confusion if everyone had guns for someone trying to stop the shooter.
Suppose you DID have a gun and a bunch of other people did too and then someone shot someone.
If you weren't looking directly at the event as it happened, how would you know just who to shoot back at when everybody draws their guns in response?
Let's be realistic here: Odds are you won't be looking at the shooter when he shoots.
Even trained, experienced cops screw up in these shooting situations.
No matter how much you don't want them to - fear, adrenaline and your preconceived notions and subconscious prejudices will manifest themselves unintentionally in a bad split-second decision made by your mid-brain.
You will not make a conscious carefully reasoned thought using your front-brain.
That's what actually happens in reality in these situations as opposed to what you mistakenly believe will happen from what you see in the movies.
I just read a very interesting analysis of the Amadou Diallo shooting in the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell which goes into how split-second decision making actually works and how while sometimes it's a good thing - many times it isn't -such as in gun situations like Mr. Diallo's death.
Do you remember the immigrant black man who got shot 41 times in about 2 seconds flat by 4 undercover cops in NYC with semi-automatic 9mm service pistols after they chased him down a dark alley.
Mr. Diallo thought he was being mugged and reached for his wallet and the cops thought he was reaching for a gun and shot him full of holes before they had any idea that he was reaching for that wallet.
These were trained, exerienced cops but they were still frightened for their lives and highly adrenaline loaded and placed in an unfamiliar situation.
In spite of their training, they misinterpreted what they saw in a split-second mistake because their mid-brains were unconsciously were working off the assumption that Mr. Diallo must be a criminal to be out on the street in that neighborhood at that time of night and then to be running from the police.
Now imagine a situation where someone is the rogue shooter in a classroom and everyone else is armed. Someone shoots when most people are paying attention to the instructor or their notebook.
Are they going to shoot the right guy? In all likelihood:
NO.
Where the one rogue shooter may kill a few, the responding armed citizens will likely kill everyone else including themselves - by mistake.
Worse yet, what if they only THINK someone is going to shoot, like the cops thought Mr. Diallo was going to shoot - and they shoot someone who was not going to shoot in the first place?
Now imagine what happens when the cops show up on the scene. When everybody is packing, how do they know the good guys from the bad guys either?
Answer: THEY DON'T.
Cops hate the "everybody should be carrying" mentality even worse than I do. They would much rather that NO ONE was carrying and that guns were hard to get access to. They have to go into a hostile situation and sort out the good guys from the bad guys on a frequent basis and try not get anymore good guys killed which is hard enough as it is.
This attitude would make the situation a thousand times harder for them.
We already can see what happens in the "everybody carries" situation right now.
The ultimate everybody carries situation already exists in Iraq.
Every house is allowed to keep an AK47 and handguns and the place is truly Wild West.
Is it preventing the violence?
NO.
Is it making the situation worse?
OF COURSE.
Can our soldiers tell the good guys from the bad guys?
NO.
Can they tell a wedding celebration from a firefight?
NOT USUALLY.
WHY?
Because everybody over there is armed.
We don't allow everyone to carry guns everywhere for good reason. We as American citizens put an end to gun-toting of the Wild West at the end of the 19th century BECAUSE of just these types of situations.
Conclusion:
I don't advocate banning gun ownership. I just advocate requiring that gun owners and gun dealers must be as responsible for their actions with guns as I must be as a pilot in operating an aircraft.
Right now the real gun problems are gangs with guns and loner nuts with guns.
Right now the gun laws don't work to stop lone nutjobs like Cho-Sueng Hui or John Hinckley or whoever.
Criminal penalties such as the death penalty are of no consequence to these shooters because they are quite prepared to die and take others with them - they often even WANT to die in some imagined hail of gunfire glory.
The psychological profilers keep saying on TV that they can't draw any conclusions about how to identify a likely nutjob shooter in advance and at some level they are right but I still think it this statement is a cop-out to the problem.
These nuts with guns tend to be generally speaking, white(Cho-Sueng Hui and Malveaux notwithstanding), younger males under 40 who have no criminal record yet but who are loners and borderline or sociopathic personalities.
One day, however, they just snap because of some perceived injustice or because they've been bullied or their girlfriend left them or they got fired or their dog told them to do it or they had a bad stock market loss or whatever.
Instead of being able to deal with their anger and their problems in a more careful constructive way they resort to an easy short cut - an automatic killing machine which makes it easy for them to get even with those who they perceive to have caused these injustices.
My suggested solution to "nuts with guns":
Making people actually have to demonstrate to a gun dealer that they have multiple friends who would trust them with a loaded gun would make it harder for the nuts to get hold of the guns.
In my opinion, there ought to be a requirement that three of your long time friends must personally come and vouch for you with the gun dealer and sign a written statement with civil and criminal penalties that says:
"I know Bob, he's a friend of mine, he's not a nutjob and he won't go wacko and kill anybody"
If Bob then kills someone and then himself, those persons who vouched for Bob and the gun dealer who sold nutty Bob the gun could be charged with negligent homicide and should also be subject to civil lawsuits.
That's the only way I know of to separate the nuts from the guns - from what I can see they tend not to have three close long time friends who would be willing to vouch for them having a loaded gun.
Do you have a better idea?
Let's hear it.
Doug D.
Orlando, FL
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