Larry BellContributor
The senseless shootings that tragically took the lives of 27 people, including 20 school children, in the Newtown, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School are an incomprehensible, haunting horror. How could such a monstrous thing have happened? How can we prevent such occurrences in the future? We all want answers…preferably simple ones. Unfortunately, there are none.
Yet unsurprisingly, many people, including some lawmakers, are calling for stricter gun- control laws, including bans upon so-called “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines. Leading the call, President Obama has announced that Vice President Biden will head a new task force to develop comprehensive proposals to address gun violence no later than next month. It should be noted here that Biden is a long-time gun-control supporter. He was a major architect of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 which included major curbs on assault weapons, not only barring the manufacturing of 19 different brands of firearms, but also outlawing the possession of newly manufactured high-capacity magazines. That law expired in 2004, and so far, efforts at re-introduction have failed. Biden also voted against a law that prohibits lawsuits designed to bankrupt law-abiding firearm manufacturers.
Some anti-gun Democrats on Capitol Hill required no prompting. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) have said that they will bring up a bill to reinstate the lapsed assault weapons ban on the first day of the next Congress. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has called upon House Republicans to bring up a vote on high-capacity magazines.
And just what, exactly, are assault weapons as addressed in such legislation? In answering this, let’s first understand what they are not. We are expressly not speaking here of automatic military weapons which rapid-fire lots of bullets with a single trigger pull. Those have been illegal for domestic sale since 1986 under the “machine gun ban” signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, and can be owned only by those who have acquired a very special Class III permit.
No, instead, we are referring to a special class of semi-automatic weapons, meaning… one trigger pull…one “bang”. Under the 1994 law, these included semi-automatic versions of rifles that accepted detachable magazines and possessed at least two other characteristics, such as a protruding pistol grip, flash suppressor (or a threaded barrel to accept one), or a folding or telescoping stock.
Today, most handguns in America are semi-automatic, as are many long guns. And while some of the latter may look like automatic “machine guns”, they do not function in that manner…an important distinction which is typically ignored by gun-control proponents, including the mainstream media.
It is true that one of the guns used by Adam Lanza in his grotesquely evil and tragic Sandy Hook shooting rampage was a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle with high-capacity magazines, a gun which had been legally purchased by his mother. It’s also relevant to understand that in order for someone to purchase an AR-15 in the U.S., or any other firearm, the store must first get permission for the sale from the FBI or its state counterpart. That permission will be denied if the intended buyer falls into one of nine categories of “prohibited persons”, including felons, someone found guilty of domestic violence misdemeanors, or a person who has been adjudicated mentally ill or alcoholic.
Although tighter gun laws to prevent purchases by mentally ill people would not have prevented the Newtown tragedy, Vice President Biden’s task force is certain to carefully consider this matter…as well they should. At the same time, it’s also important to consider some very complex implications if Congress decides to deny gun possession rights to all people determined at some point in their lives to have had mental health issues. As John Velleco, a spokesman for Gun Owners of America, observed: “Do we put any person who’s ever taken a psychoactive drug into the FBI database and disarm them forever?”
As Robert Leider, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law points out in a Wall Street Journal opinion article, a federal law which generally prohibits the possession or acquisition of a firearm by a person who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution is both under- and over-inclusive. “It is under-inclusive because plenty of people with severe mental illness escape the [existing] ban on possessing firearms…provided, for example, they have managed not to be formally committed to a mental institution, or found by a court to be incompetent or insane. The ban is over-inclusive because many people recover from mental illness and lead healthy and productive lives.”
Having said this, Leider believes there is plenty of room to compromise and work out a meaningful agreement on this issue. One priority is to update the “National Instant Check System” which enables gun dealers to vet purchasers before transferring firearms. Unfortunately, despite passage of a federal law in 2007 requiring states to report individuals who should be barred from firearm possession due to mental illness, many states are lagging behind in making such records available.
In any case, even if 20-year-old Adam Lanza had attempted to purchase a gun, there would have been no mental health prohibition preventing him from doing so. While it now appears that his mother planned to have him institutionalized for such problems, and there is speculation that his knowledge of this may have contributed to triggering his deadly rampage, there is no evidence that he had ever publicly exhibited mentally-unhinged or dangerous behavior.
According to Richard Novia, former director of security at Newtown School District who knew Lanza as a student in 2007, “At that point in his life, he posed no threat to anyone else. We were worried about him being a victim or that he would hurt himself.” As a teenager, he evoked feelings of sympathy, not fear, from teachers and the few classmates that even noticed him.
While at this time Adam Lanza’s psychiatric diagnosis isn’t known, nor is whether he was being treated, published accounts of his behavior suggest that he fits into the autism spectrum which sometimes requires medications to control socially-unacceptable behavior. It is known, however, that Connecticut is one of only six states that doesn’t have a law permitting court-ordered “assisted outpatient treatment”.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 7.7 million Americans currently qualify as severely mentally disordered. Of these, 3.5 million never receive any treatment. About 10% of these untreated individuals (350,000 people) comprise one-third of the homeless population, one-fifth of the inmates in jails and prisons, and cause at least 10% of all U.S. homicides. Yet over the past half-century, the availability of public U.S. psychiatric beds has decreased from 559,000 to 43,000, despite an increasing population of those who need them.
Do America’s mental health policies influence mass violence? As reported by E. Fuller Torrey and Doris A. Fuller in the Wall Street Journal, the obvious answer is “yes”. Seung-Hu Cho, who killed 32 at Virginia Tech; Howard Unruh, who killed 13 in Camden, N.J.; and Jiverly Wong who killed 13 in Birmingham, N.Y., all had untreated schizophrenia. John Holmes, who killed 12 in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, almost certainly was severely mentally ill (although clinical information hasn’t been released). George Hennard who killed 23 in a Killeen, Texas cafeteria, had definite paranoid thinking. Patrick Sherill, who killed 14 in an Edmond, Oklahoma post office was known as “crazy Pat” by his neighbors, but was never formally diagnosed.
In addition to mental illness, many mass murderers share another psychological characteristic…an obsessive fascination with violent video games. Reports now available indicate that Lanza spent large amounts of time in a windowless basement room playing “Call of Duty” which contains so much gore that Britain has banned its advertising during daytime hours. Call of Duty players wearing battle fatigues score points for gunning down 3D human figures whose blood spatters the computer screen.
Andres Behring, who mowed down 77 people in Norway, rehearsed his massacre playing Call of Duty and other video games up to 16 hours per day. Jacob Roberts who recently fired randomly at innocent victims in an Oregon mall food court killing two adults and wounding a 15-year-old girl before killing himself, liked to play violent video games. James Holmes who slaughtered 12 in the Colorado theater, was addicted to them also. Jared Louhner reportedly spent most of his time playing violent computer games before gunning down six, including a U.S. judge and Congresswoman Gabby Gifford outside an Arizona Safeway.
During a Sunday evening prayer vigil for those slaughtered innocents in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama appropriately said, “These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.” Yes, there can be no question that some big changes are warranted.
For one thing, let’s seriously rethink the our policies that led to emptying our mental treatment facilities a half-century ago and leaving millions of severely disordered people untreated. And certainly, without question, let’s do everything possible to ensure that the National Instant Check System is updated to prevent people with mental disorders from purchasing firearms.
Let’s redirect blame for gun violence away from responsible citizens who demand their Second Amendment rights, and target our scorn upon Hollywood and violent game manufacturers for their roles in glamorizing bloody violence as entertainment. If the highly graphic movies aren’t bad enough, interactive features make video game players pseudo- predators. The Army uses these same games to break down recruit’s inhibition to kill enemies in war. Yet few retailers enforce the industry’s recommended age restrictions, anyone can buy the games online, and last year the Supreme Court ruled that computer and video games are protected speech.
This leaves parents to exert responsible guidance roles. But then again, wasn’t it supposed to be that way all along… before we put government in charge?
James Madison warned that in establishing a free government, “the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Thomas Jefferson had some good insights about this challenge as well. He warned that “free government is founded in jealously, and not in confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”
We can all agree that the horror which occurred in the Sandy Hook Elementary School is an intolerable affront upon everything freedom-loving Americans hold sacred. But more government restrictions on those freedoms aren’t the answer. For example, that approach didn’t stop 52 public school students from being fatally shot during the 2009-11 school years in heavily gun-controlled Chicago. If anything, the government controls far too much already.
This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/12/23/despite-outrage-and-grief-irrational-gun-rights-restrictions-wont-prevent-senseless-violence/
