NEWTOWN, Conn. » A
shooting at a
Connecticut elementary school today left
27 people dead, including 18
children, an official said.
The official spoke on condition
of anonymity because the investigation was still under way. Another
official, speaking on condition of anonymity for the same reason, said
the gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown was killed and apparently
had two guns.
The shooting appeared to be the nation's second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007.
The gunman,
identified as
Ryan Lanza, 24, was also found dead at the
scene, a federal law enforcement official said. Lanza is the son of a
kindergarten teacher at the school, reported WNBC's Jonathan Dienst.
One of his parents was later found dead at a home in New Jersey.
*** [12/17/12]
As lawmakers continue to grapple with the aftermath of last week's
mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., a handful of pro-gun Democrats are
beginning to speak out in favor of
stricter gun laws - but Republicans
remain all but silent on the matter.
Amid
national attempts to piece together a coherent picture of what led
20-year-old Adam Lanza to allegedly open fire on an elementary school
last Friday morning, a number of liberal Democrats are resuming
longstanding calls for the tightening of gun laws.
On
Monday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced legislation to
restore the Assault Weapons Ban, which expired in 2004; Sen. Frank
Lautenberg, D-N.J., meanwhile, announced plans to reintroduce a
high-capacity magazine ban. President Obama, too, signaled a renewed
commitment to strengthening gun-related laws in remarks last night
honoring the victims of the massacre.
Perhaps more significant, however, is a new sense of openness to
tighten laws among some pro-gun and moderate Democrats, few of whom have
previously expressed an eagerness to take on the famously powerful
pro-gun lobby.
Earlier today, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.,
the National Rifle Association-backed hunting enthusiast and
conservative Democrat, expressed the need for a "common sense"
discussion about gun laws with groups like the NRA.
"I
want to call all our friends in the NRA, sit down and have this - bring
them into it. They have to be at the table. We all have to," he said.
"This has changed the dialogue and it should move beyond dialogue -- we
need action."
A series of similar calls have since trickled in from pro-gun
Democrats: In remarks on the Senate floor today, Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has a "B" rating from the NRA and is generally
considered pro-gun rights, called for Congress to engage in a
"meaningful conversation and thoughtful debate about how to change laws
and culture that allows violence to continue to grow."
"I think part of the healing process will require Congress to examine what can be done to prevent more tragedies," he said.
"Enough is enough," added Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., in an
interview with
Richmond, Va., CBS affiliate WTVR. Noting his own "A" grade from the
NRA, he added: "I think most of us realize that there are ways to get to
rational gun control. There are ways to grapple with the obvious
challenges of mental illness."
Still, passing new legislation through Congress promises to be a
major challenge for advocates. Republicans have for the most part
remained silent on the subject, and have shown little willingness to
take a stand against the gun lobby.
In remarks on the
Senate floor today, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., expressed
sorrow over the shootings and lauded Mr. Obama's remarks about the
"singularity of parental love," but declined to reference the
possibility of legislative action. When asked shortly thereafter if he
thinks it's time to debate gun laws, McConnell ignored CNN reporter Lisa
Desjardins, who recorded and
posted his non-response online.
NBC's
David Gregory faced similar troubles this weekend, when trying to book
pro-gun senators for his show, "Meet the Press": All 31 senators on
record as pro-gun rights refused to appear.
"We reached
out to all 31 pro-gun rights senators in the new Congress to invite them
on the program to share their views on the subject this morning," he
said. "We had no takers."
***
Had Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung kept a gun
in her office, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas,
argued today, the Newtown,
Conn., shooting Friday that left 20 students and six faculty members
dead would have had a far less tragic result.
"I
wish to God she had had an M4 [carbine rifle] in her office locked up
and so when she heard gunshots... she takes his head off before he can
hurt those kids," Gohmert said of Hochsprung - who was among those
killed - on FOX News Sunday. The alleged gunman, Adam Lanza, murdered
his mother at home before driving to the school and killing 27 more,
including himself.
"Every mass killing of more than three people in recent history has
been in a place where guns were prohibited," he continued. "They choose
this place, they know no one will be armed."
A
vocal leader in the right-wing tea party movement, Gohmert stands out
among conservatives who have been lying low since President Obama on
Friday suggested the tragedy will give way to "meaningful action" on the
gun issue; Gohmert and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, were the only
pro-gun lawmakers or advocates to accept the networks' requests for
interviews on the Sunday political shows.
Republican
congressional leadership, like House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have been silent on the
issue since Friday, while the airwaves have been flooded with pro-gun
control supporters, rendering Gohmert and Chaffetz the de facto
spokesmen for congressional Republicans today.
***
I remember reading something about gun control in Freakonomics. Let me
take a look.
Debates on this subject are rarely coolheaded. Gun advocates believe
that gun laws are too strict; opponents believe exactly the opposite.
How can intelligent people view the world so differently? Because a gun
raises a complex set of issues that change according to one factor:
whose hand happens to be holding the gun.
It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask a rudimentary
question: what is a gun? It’s a tool that can be used to kill someone,
of course, but more significantly, a gun is a great disrupter of the
natural order.
A gun scrambles the outcome of any dispute. Let’s say that a
tough guy and a not-so-tough guy exchange words in a bar, which leads to
a fight. It’s pretty obvious to the not-so-tough guy that he’ll be
beaten, so why bother fighting? The pecking order remains intact. But if
the not-so-tough guy happens to have a gun, he stands a good chance of
winning. In this scenario, the introduction of a gun may well lead to
more violence.
Now instead of the tough guy and the not-so-tough guy, picture a
high-school girl out for a nighttime stroll when she is suddenly set
upon by a mugger. What if only the mugger is armed? What if only the
girl is armed? What if both are armed? A gun opponent might argue that
the gun has to be kept out of the mugger’s hands in the first place. A
gun advocate might argue that the high-school girl needs to have a gun
to disrupt what has become the natural order: it’s the bad guys that
have the guns. (If the girl scares off the mugger, then the introduction
of a gun in this case may lead to less violence.) Any mugger with even a
little initiative is bound to be armed, for in a country like the
United States, with a thriving black market in guns, anyone can get hold
of one.
There are enough guns in the United States that if you gave one
to every adult, you would run out of adults before you ran out of guns.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. homicides involve a gun, a far greater
fraction than in other industrialized countries. Our homicide rate is
also much higher than in those countries. It would therefore seem likely
that our homicide rate is so high in part because guns are so easily
available. Research indeed shows this to be true.
But guns are not the whole story. In Switzerland, every adult
male is issued an assault rifle for militia duty and is allowed to keep
the gun at home. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms
than just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest
places in the world. In other words, guns do not cause crime.
... One deterrent that has proven moderately effective is a stiff increase
in prison time for anyone caught in possession of an illegal gun. But
there is plenty of room for improvement. Not that this is likely, but if
the death penalty were assessed to anyone carrying an illegal gun, and
if the penalty were actually enforced, gun crimes would surely plunge.
... Then there is an opposite argument—that we need more guns on the street,
but in the hands of the right people (like the high-school girl above,
instead of her mugger). The economist John R. Lott Jr. is the main
champion of this idea. His calling card is the book More Guns, Less
Crime, in which he argues that violent crime has decreased in areas
where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons. His
theory might be surprising, but it is sensible. If a criminal thinks his
potential victim may be armed, he may be deterred from committing the
crime.
Handgun opponents call Lott a pro-gun ideologue, and Lott let
himself become a lightning rod for gun controversy. ... Then there was the troubling
allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that
support his more-guns/less-crime theory. Regardless of whether the data
were faked, Lott’s admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn’t seem to be
true. When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they
found that right-to-carry laws simply don’t bring down crime.
*** [12/24/12]
After a weeklong silence, the
National Rifle Association
announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school
in the country. It pointed the finger at violent video games, the news
media and lax law enforcement — not guns — as culprits in the recent
rash of mass shootings.
“
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a
gun,” Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. vice president, said at a media event
that was interrupted by protesters. One held up a banner saying, “N.R.A.
Killing Our Kids.”
LaPierre said that the NRA is calling on Congress to put armed security guards in every school. The NRA
has set up a website to advance the cause.
"The only way —
the only way — to stop a monster
from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a
plan for protection," LaPierre said. He added that gun-free zones "tells
every killer that schools are the safest place" to go and carry out
mass shootings.
The N.R.A.’s plan for countering school shootings, coming a week after the massacre at
Sandy Hook Elementary School
in Newtown, Conn., was met with widespread
derision from school
administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians, with some
critics calling it “delusional” and “paranoid.” Gov. Chris Christie of
New Jersey, a Republican, said arming schools would not make them safer.
***
But having armed security on-site failed to prevent the deadliest mass shooting at an American high school.
In 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 15 people and wounded
23 more at Columbine High School. The destruction occurred despite the
fact that there was an armed security officer at the school and another
one nearby -- exactly what LaPierre argued on Friday was the answer to
stopping "a bad guy with a gun."
***
Leaders of the National Rifle Association
said Sunday that they would fight any
new gun restrictions introduced
in Congress, and they made clear that they were not interested in
working with President Barack Obama to help develop a broad response to
the Connecticut school massacre.
During an appearance on the NBC
News program "Meet the Press," Wayne LaPierre, vice president of the
powerful gun lobby, was openly dismissive of a task force established by
Obama and led by Vice President Joe Biden that is examining ways to
reduce gun violence.
"If it's a panel that's just going to be made
up of a bunch of people that, for the last 20 years, have been trying
to destroy the Second Amendment, I'm not interested in sitting on that
panel," LaPierre said, adding that the "NRA is not going to let people
lose the Second Amendment in this country, which is supported by the
overwhelming majority of the American people."
At a widely watched news briefing Friday,
LaPierre said the NRA's solution to prevent mass shootings like those
that have occurred in the past few years — several of them on school
campuses — was to put armed guards in schools nationwide.
***
OK, call it peace on Earth, goodwill toward men, or whatever … but I
have to say the president’s words in his speech in Newtown, Conn., two
days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary school were right on:
We really have to do better, especially in
four specific areas:
1) Accessability of automatic weapons designed for military combat
with oversized ammunition magazines that combined can kill scores of
people in seconds.
2) A legal system that makes it nearly impossible to temporarily
institutionalize proven mentally disturbed individuals until, through
appropriate medication and rehabilitation, they can be introduced back
into society and pose a minimal threat.
3) An “entertainment” culture (TV, movies, music, video games) that
too often glorifies violence, especially killing, to the point that
human beings are simply objectified to the point that “sanctity of life”
is no more than an alien concept.
4) The continuing secularization of our society, which dismisses the
concept of “evil,” where the Ten Commandments are considered an affront
to too many among us (“Thou shalt not kill!”), and where even the
slightest suggestion of “God” is being scoured from our governmental and
educational institutions, our commercial enterprises and our
communities, mostly in the name of “civil rights.”
-- Jerry Coffee, Midweek, 12/26/12
***
in modern America mentally unstable young men can possess
high-powered military weapons with clips that allow them to shoot at
least 30 times or more before reloading, and that can be done in the
blink of an eye.
Here’s what the Second Amendment, ratified in December 1791 along
with the rest of the Bill of Rights, actually says: “A well regulated
militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of
the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be
infringed.”
Banning the sale of certain combat weapons does not infringe upon this right.
Neither does banning the sale of clips that hold more than a few rounds.
Nor does banning the sale of hollow-point bullets that penetrate, tumble and explode, inflicting maximum injury.
Nor does requiring more stringent background checks on would-be gun buyers.
Statistics can be twisted, but these are straightforward: The 20
children killed in Connecticut are among the 6,000 American children who
annually die from gunshot wounds. And last week Bloomberg News reported
that deaths from guns in the United States are roughly equal to deaths
from automobile crashes – slightly more than 30,000 – and that by 2015
the number of deaths from guns is expected to exceed those from car
crashes.
This is a civilized culture? This is
American exceptionalism? This is as good – and safe – as America can be?
Clearly, something needs to be done. And as Jerry Coffee writes so
eloquently on Pages 14-15, smarter gun laws need to be part of a package
that includes better mental health care and supervision.
The tide seems to have turned on this issue, better late than never, and we need to hold the president and Congress accountable.
-- Don Chapman, MidWeek, 12/26/12
***
Regarding editor Don Chapman’s column on guns: You can’t have our
guns. Never. The first instinct of totalitarians is to throw away a
constitution and confiscate guns. Chapman is a
fascist, and I hold him
in high disregard.
Michael Boutte, Honolulu,
MidWeek, Letters to the Editor, 1/9/13
[2/20/13] Joe Biden's advice for self-protection?
Buy a shotgun.
[2/24/13] Only 10 percent of Hawaii’s households own a firearm, the least of
any of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Hawaii also boasts
the lowest rate of gun violence among the 50 states: 3.2 incidents per
100,000.
There would appear to be
a correlation between strict gun laws, limited gun ownership and little gun violence.
