ISSUE
: “WHY I want to be a lawyer?!?!”
RULE: The purpose of this blog is to encourage discussion. I am totally aware that my opinions usually vacillate between the cynical and the idealistic, and this is my attempt, before I take the bar, to “come clean.” Thus I subject myself to you for debate. Don’t hold back.

HOLDINGS:

Saturday, January 19, 2013

A Call to Spend Time with Your Neighbor, and Your State Representatives -A Delayed Response to Guns/Mental Health


           I was in the middle of finals when the Sandy Hook tragedy occurred. So, in addition to ignoring my sister in her time of need (she was struggling with a difficult relationship), I also made a list of the articles rittling Facebook about Sandyhook so I could come back and seriously reflect later.

On “National Tragedy” and Public v. Private Grief

            I feel a bit of personal investment and the need to speak. My family, friends, and loved ones fall all across the political/social spectrum re: the compound issues involved here. But first, as a tangential "victim" of September 11th, I am highly sensitive to what I find to be a strange cultural phenomenon -a variation of "rubbernecking" where people are inherently drawn to tragedy that is not theirs. I agree with one of the lines of thinking streaming from Sandy Hook -that tragedies like this happen at least in part because perpetrators are emboldened by the infamy achieved by their predecessors.[1] I think we would all do a lot of good in preventing future victims, if we really cared, as we say we do, by exercising a little self control and stepping on the gas instead of slowing down and causing a traffic jam just so we could get our little piece of the tragedy pie. Sorry if this sounds harsh and callous.[2] But just like there's some human strain that likes to watch horror movies (I learned at some point in philosophy class that this is because we want a controlled atmosphere to exercise our fears), I can't help but believe that the public voyeurism that occurs in the wake of tragedies like this comes a little bit from a "thank [insert personal savior here] it wasn't me" mentality -we can exercise our fears of the worst of human behavior without actually being part of them.

            Though we say we are. Things like this are often called a "national tragedy" -as September 11th was -which in a sense confuses me. As most of you who will probably read this know -my father passed away when I was 17. I recognize that my grieving process differed in a significant way than my mother and my sister -and from the way that many people-grieve. It would be interesting if anyone knows of a study of the percentage of people who grieve publicly v. privately. While my mother and my sister were and continue to be very public in their grief (I've witnessed my sister only need to sit down at the bar with someone for 10 minutes before she's telling them about our father's death), I have always considered it perhaps the most personal aspect about me. It took me a long time to even be able to talk about it with my friends. My mother criticized me about this, and still does somewhat -mostly because she was worried that I was losing my mind going through it alone. But what I have learned is -whether public or private, grieving is a personal process and so I will be the last one to criticize people's personal journeys, and the first to defend the often bizarre and unpredictable behaviors of those in grief. So my comments here are just offered for what they are -my own personal perspective -and I guess I shouldn't passive-aggressively deny they are critical. But while I maintain a critical viewpoint -in part in a protective stance over my family -the actual victims of September 11th -I also understand that my viewpoint is just that -and other people have other ones -and so with my criticism I don't mean to alienate you if you happen to fall more on the public-grief side. I want to engage you to explore what that means -because for all the grief I have experienced in my life, grief and death still remain one of the biggest mysteries to me.
           
            What I am trying to understand is what seems like a phenomenon to me -that of people trying their damnedest to latch on to the tragedies of others. If you think I am the only lunatic to think in such a harsh way, see the Onion article, mentioned in note 2, for backup. The crudest of reasons why they do it is that people want others to feel sorry for them -and latching on to another's tragedy -especially one as grave as September 11th or Sandyhook -creates some aura of reverence around the storyteller. If this is true: people –check yourselves. Perhaps equally bad is the rubbernecking syndrome -human beings seem to have a satiety for voyeurism of tragedy -I'm not going to explore this now, but if this is you: also –stop.

            A third reason is similar to the horror movie phenomenon -things like this are so astronomically horrific that we want to get as much of it as we can in a distilled format (i.e. -sensationalized news reports) because for whatever weird wiring-of-the-human-brain reason, it helps us calm down a little bit. Desensitizes us? How many times have we seen the planes crashing into the towers? The first 100 times elicited a response not often felt by human beings -reserved for the trenches of war. I can best describe it as a cue-Twilight-zone-soundtrack, literal blinking in disbelief, I-can't-even-comprehend numbers that go over $1 million -type feeling. No, I am not talking about our emotional reactions -the ones that arise seemingly involuntarily -and that we perhaps chase by creating scenes that might evoke them. I'm talking about that numb feeling we have in the dawn of a tragedy -where we literally chase our mind around like jelly-trying to press it into reality -but it slips away like so much water through our fingers. But the plane/tower video, for me, and I'm assuming for most of us, has traveled through a trajectory of numbness -realness -back to numbness. Where now I believe it, have experience it as real, felt it, and become desensitized. The physical numbness sensation is relatively the same -but the reason is different. The media has killed the humanness the towers image invokes. And I surmise, when on day 20 after the Sandy Hook incident, or sometime nearby, Americans across the country had their local news on in the background -they were able to tune it out and go about their business. It became background noise. And thus we were effectively numbed.

            Not everyone. But I wanted to dispel of the three worst reasons I think we make these things national  tragedies -because I think they are (relatively) fixable, before I get into the more difficult ones. I also offer a perhaps-too-lengthy disclaimer. I said I have a personal investment and need to speak. So does everyone. And I offer a warning -even to myself -that we should all seriously consider quelling this need to speak, need to be a part of the tragedy -for the sake of not building these things up in infamy and further encouraging future perpetrators. My response is delayed in part because of law school and in part because I have seriously considered not writing it. I signed into the blog today thinking I was just going to post the best articles I read, for posterity, and not comment at all, since the best of what can be said probably has been said already. But then I just started writing...so, forgive me if I am becoming part of the problem.

            But I also wanted to distinguish my personal investment and need to speak. I want to be clear on what is personal and what is professional. I refuse to at all personalize the Sandy Hook tragedy. I have no idea what the victim's family's experiences are, and I don't feel any right to pry or surmise. I feel an obligation to give them their privacy. However, I believe –and I welcome you to argue against me –that those of us who have experienced death of a close loved one share a unique insight in instances like this. Something akin to a need to warn you all rises, insurmountable, in me at times like this. The spirits of the otherworld will not rest until I give your our message: life and love trump all. So my personal investment extends as far as this –a call to all human beings to realize this, if they haven’t experienced it already. I want to protect the rest of you from experiencing unnecessary death. One Aurora victim’s father said “only people who have lost someone to gun violence are qualified to understand. "Nobody, unless you're in that club, should talk. It's the worst club in the world, and it has the highest dues."[3]

            Professionally: being in law school, for me, incurs many types of debt. One is public service. I am a beneficiary of infinite blessings that have allowed me to make it this far. And in part because of reasons such as that finals made me shirk my sister in her time of need, made me create lists of Sandy Hook articles instead of participating in the conversation as it unravelled, and other ways law school makes me a less-than-admirable human being in my own eyes, I feel I have a duty to do good when I can. And so I write.

            My Constitutional Law professor, for whom my intellectual crush flowed over into a generalized-category one, happened to be a HUGE Second Amendment rights proponent. A large portion of our class focused on the Second Amendment. And might I mention that his blog is the top conservative blog read by the Supreme Court Justices?[4] And that he has participated in/submitted amicus briefs for numerous Supreme Court cases? How have I been so fortunate to benefit from his tutelage? Both he and his wife went to DU, they met in Denver on a public bus. So not only does his heart perhaps belong to Denver, but he felt his own sense of duty to come and give back to DU. For this opportunity in particular, I feel a need to write. Perhaps I write to him. What was amazing about our class was Professor Kopel is so intelligent, so respectable, so passionate and dedicated to his work, so kind and humorous, that even among my flaming-liberal circle, we could not help but love him. I wish our classroom environment was the forum for our country. Where we could strip all our political discussions down to the merits -identify when our perspectives were based on personal experience to flag them -and hash it out in search of truth. And so I encourage you to do just that with this blog. I only want to learn the truth, and also to protect my own life, the life of those I love, and to ensure that others can do the same.

On Guns and Grief

            I realize the quixoticity bordering on hubris of attempting to take on the nation’s top constitutional scholars, but perhaps I do so only to elucidate my perspective for a proper response. No matter what argument I hear, I can’t stop myself from responding “death trumps.” So here goes.  I’ll start out by saying that I think we need to send out special forces and collect all the guns in the United States, and melt them down into something else. (Maybe this should be in our budget proposals.) I don’t care what kind of merit gun advocates’ arguments have –NONE of them even come close to the merit of, say, Emilie Parker’s father[5], who’s little girl is gone every day for the rest of his life. (I just want to note, it is only because it has taken me so long to write this blog, that I didn’t say this before President Obama said essentially the same thing.[6]) I’ll offer up a few arguments being made just to demonstrate my point.

            Randall Collins points out that “[w]hat can be said analytically is that banning guns is trying to manipulate a variable that is a very weak predictor of mass homicides. It resembles TSA procedures of searching everyone who enters an airport gate area; airplane terrorists are also extremely rare, and thus the vast majority of the persons who are searched are innocent.[7]” Yet we did enact TSA procedures. Perhaps this is because we have an easier time hating on terrorists, Muslims, foreigners, -“the other”- than we do on toxic elements of our own culture. If we all still have to line up, take off our shoes, throw out our plane snacks, and have the TSA agents look at us naked, to foil a comparably small number of terrorist attacks, why can’t we do the same with guns?

            The Volokh Conspiracy, on why it would be hard to enact stricter gun laws, states “it’s still hard to see how you can stop them from getting guns on the black market.[8]” Correct. But the wrong approach. There are many similar arguments along the lines of “nothing we can do will be enough, so we shouldn’t do anything.”  In my view, we can enact a whole slew of legislation, dispatch teams of protectors –in other words, be as exorbitant as can be imagined (with perhaps, the limit of money) –if the result will be preventing even one person from getting a gun they would use wrongly. Sure, some would still be able to get guns on the black market. But it must be a statistical certainty that some, at least one, would be thwarted by stricter gun laws. Measures could, and inevitably would include, in my perspective, restricting people who would use guns “rightly.” I want to know how many gun advocates have lost a son or daughter, or other family member to gun violence, especially an innocent party.[9] The same author states in another post “always keep in mind that mass shootings in public places should not be the main focus in the gun debate, whether for gun control or gun decontrol: they on average account for much less than 1% of all homicides in the U.S.” [10] How unbelievably heartless! Would your perspective be different if that 1% included your daughter? The entire Second Amendment debate appears farcical compared to a father’s loss of a child. Are we really going to march on the government in today’s world? Why, alternatively, if the Second Amendment is for self-defense, do we need assault[11] weapons? Last time I checked defense and offense were opposing sides of a game. Hunting –really? For the sake of a hobby, you’re going to subject another human being to the loss of a loved one? You’re going to subject that person to lose the incredible gift of life that anyone with any sense values more than anything? There are lots of other hobbies that are just as much fun and will make you look just as manly (or womanly, though I’ve personally never seen or met a woman hunter[12]).

            I share the Aurora father’s perspective. No one that has not experienced death should be making decisions regarding it. Perhaps we should start there. Death is not a thing that can be understood objectively. It is a force, a thing of its own. The Grim Reaper comes and harvests unimaginable dues from the souls of the survivors. And people who have wrestled with him and made it out whole unlock an otherworldly insight.[13] We, as a country that does not “do” death, need to give these people the proper reverence. Priests of the otherworld, guardians of life on earth, only they can make policies that can protect the rest of us from death’s creeping hand. As far as getting rid of guns in this country, there is nothing more, academically, I can say. It has all been said. We know what has to be done. Yet those in power prefer their power to the lives of 6-year-old children. It makes me nauseous.

On Mental Health

            What we need to do with regard to mental health is not as clear. As a passive consumer of what the media has put out re: mental illness, I feel I have absolutely no place to make my own assessment. I only want to point out to those I know and love that the conversation is deeply divided. A number of studies show that there is no correlation between mental health and gun violence.[14] Those of the “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” line see Sandy Hook and other mass-murders as a call for better mental health policies. Yet there is another line of thinking, and as you may be able to tell from the above sections, I tend to agree with perspectives that call for an exercise in self-restraint, so this line of thinking is most intriguing to me. As Ashley F. Miller argues, yes, mental health care reform is necessary, but we should NOT be connecting advocacy for it with mass murder.[15] Marc Siegel, medical correspondant for Sirius radio states

[O]ne of my most important roles is to analyze medical news but stop short of giving diagnoses over the TV or radio. Unfortunately, in coverage of the killer in the tragic Sandy Hook school shootings, this need for restraint has been violated repeatedly by others in the news media.

The diagnoses and explanations and motives that have been bandied around have been speculative and mostly hearsay. Experts have cited everything from Asperger’s to personality disorder to sociopathy to psychopathy. These armchair diagnoses are not only irresponsible—showering people with information they don’t fully understand—they also completely obscure the fact that none of the commentators or analysts actually know the first thing about who Adam Lanza actually was or what he suffered from.[16]

            So let’s talk about something else. The New York Times profiles Adam Lanza, in part by interviewing his former peers.

[One of Adam Lanza’s classmates, Olivia DeVivo, reflected] “I think that maybe he wasn’t given the right kind of attention or help. I think he went so unnoticed that people didn’t even stop to realize that maybe there’s actually something else going on here — that maybe he needs to be talking or getting some kind of mental help. In high school, no one really takes the time to look and think, ‘Why is he acting this way?’ ”

Ms. DeVivo remembered Mr. Lanza from sixth grade and earlier, talking about aliens and “blowing things up,” but she chalked this up to the typical talk of prepubescent boys. Still, after hearing of the news on Friday, Ms. DeVivo reconnected with friends from Newtown, and the consensus was stark. “They weren’t surprised,” she said. “They said he always seemed like he was someone who was capable of that because he just didn’t really connect with our high school, and didn’t really connect with our town.”

She added: “I never saw him with anyone. I can’t even think of one person that was associated with him.”

            And on James Holmes, the Aurora shooter:

Those who worked side by side with him saw an amiable if intensely shy student with a quick smile and a laconic air, whose quirky sense of humor surfaced in goofy jokes—"Take that to the bank," he said while giving a presentation about an enzyme known as A.T.M.—and wry one-liners. There was no question that he was intelligent. "James is really smart," one graduate student whispered to another after a first-semester class. Yet he floated apart, locked inside a private world they could neither share nor penetrate. ...

Sometime in the spring, he stopped smiling and no longer made jokes during class presentations, his behavior shifting, though the meaning of the changes remained unclear. Packages began arriving at his apartment and at the school, containing thousands of rounds of ammunition bought online, the police say.[17]

In a text to a fellow grad student a few weeks before the shooting, Holmes appeared to suggest that he was suffering from a form of bipolar disorder known as dysphoric mania.[18]

Prosecutors say that Holmes had told a fellow grad student back in March that he wanted to kill people "when his life was over." Two months later, he reportedly showed another student a Glock semiautomatic pistol, although he said then that it was only "for protection."[19]

            I did the Peace Corps in Senegal from 2007-2009. There was one girl in the village I lived in who had meningitis as a kid and was mentally disabled. Other than that, there were sporadic, but extremely rare, incidents of mental health issues that I witnessed, and none of them went “untreated”. A typical scene would start with an angry person having an outburst, and within seconds anyone within hearing distance, and within hearing distance of those within in hearing distance, rushed to the scene and held the person’s arms and body –speaking softly to them, coaxing and reasoning with them. I have suffered from depression since I was a teenager, and definitely experienced periods of intense depression while relatively isolated from everything I had formerly known in a dusty West African village. I was never alone –I spent a good part of every day and every evening into night sitting out and talking with my family. We talked about religion, politics, family life, development ideas, our respective cultures. One thing I could never quite convey to them was my experience with depression. They were also, understandably, extremely confused by my recounts of high school and the prevalence of eating disorders. Any time mental illness came up (and it does quite frequently when talking about the American experience), they got a little lost. There was one conversation where I finally understood the cultural difference. In a Senegalese village, no one slips through the cracks. Don’t get me wrong –there are tons of detriments to the closeness of village life (those of us who had a high school graduating class of 10 can understand) –everyone is in everyone else’s business, individual freedom is inhibited by public nosiness, intrapersonal politics run deep –but the informal mental health network is something we should look to in “developing” our own. No one is alone in the village for more than an hour. No one goes through a day without someone checking in –and this is an understatement. The core of Senegalese village culture is sitting under a tree during the day, sipping tea and chatting, and then laying out under the stars at night doing the same. It is virtually impossible for anyone to not get the mental and emotional care they need. And so, mental health is not really an issue in the village.

            My concern with American culture is we are essentially the opposite. At any given moment, one only need to look up from one’s own computer to see (if you do happen to be sharing the same space as others) everyone else attached to their own ball and chain-to-the-wall, plugged in and tuned out. Think about this scene multiplied everywhere across our country. We spend most of our time alone. We are isolated in our problems and our questions.[20] I am not the first to say this. But my own experience with grief showed me a dark and ugly side of our culture: we don’t have time to talk about death and other real things, and so we are forgetting how to do so. And so people with troubles fall off the grid and can so easily never plug back in. People, not only with mental illness, but with garden-variety sadness, can disappear and emerge as Adam Lanzas. People who could otherwise recover with a little community support spiral into a rut they never get out of. I consistently express my disenchantment with “development” work for exactly this reason –who are we developing? The right platform is instead “exchange” work –and while we’re around the world teaching farmers how to farm, teaching ancient civilizations how to be civilized, I think we should take some time, for ourselves, for the victims of Sandy Hook, Aurora, and the 62 other mass-shootings[21] stoked by our piss-poor social mental-health network, to learn how to take care of each other and make sure no one is slipping through the cracks, sitting isolated in their room or alone in a crowd. We can do much better than, as a society, letting tragedies like Sandy Hook happen.

            Sandy Hook is a national tragedy not because we all share in the victim’s grief, but because we all share in the perpetrator’s dirty hands. And before you close this page and start campaigning for the government to dedicate more money and effort to our mental health care system (which is also important) I implore you to make a personal commitment to open your eyes to the people that are isolated in your life (and you will see, there are many), and do something about it. If you pass them on the street, smile, genuinely, if you sit near them at work, stop by their desk and chat (even if it doesn’t go well), if you know them in your personal life, for f’s sake, do something. I’m not chastising parents or loved ones of the mentally ill –we all know most of them are trying their damndest to make due in an adverse system, but the rest of us, who have a cousin, a classmate, a neighbor, do something to help them and their families out. If your kid bullies someone in school, find a creative way to teach them how wrong this is –make them wear an ugly outfit, don’t let them go to the biggest party of the year, invite that person over for dinner and make your child realize the commonalities they share with their fellow student. Randall Collins, in a sociology-based article on mass-murders, states “the movie-theatre mass rampage killing resembles school shootings, where the killer is attacking his own institution and its members-- the scenario of the rejected member…rampage killers are persons who have been personally humiliated. What they want is to reverse the scenario that has dominated their lives-- being looked down upon by others in that institution; the habitually dominated seek a moment of dominating others. This fills their horizon; the rampage killer rarely plans what happens next. In all his elaborate planning, he has made no plans for escape. The mass killing is the final, overwhelming symbolic event of his life.[22]  It takes a village to raise a child. As we witness every day, and especially during tragedies like Sandy Hook, the U.S. is really just a very large village. What happens in a small town in Connecticut affects us all. And we are not all pulling our weight in raising our children.

            Don’t dismiss what I am saying by recognizing that it is just a tiny part of the solution. I know that. But I am arguing that it is a way bigger part than we have credited it. And its something we can do instead of watching the news, feeling anxious for our children, blaming others, and feeling some artificial sense of sadness for other people’s loss. Instead of processing Sandy Hook through our TVs and the Internet, we can process it in our own communities by all being vigilant over our families, friends, neighbors, coworkers, peers. Faced with the reality of our country’s political and economic situation –it’s the best, and the most, we can do right now.

Masculism

            This section is largely a bookmark for something that I often profess and would like to spend some time studying –that is, the counterpart to feminism. Most mass-murders are committed by white males. We have woefully rejected the male experience –for good cause at the onset –but I don’t think a balanced world can be achieved when we promote feminism, women’s rights, women’s sex-ed, etc. without a counterpart for males. Feminists might say that human history has been recorded from the male perspective –this is true. But I think instances like these show that we cannot move forward without maintaining a balance. The type of research and scholarship on the male psyche that we need in order to understand what drives white males, the supposed top of the social hierarchy, to do things like mass-murder, is fatally missing.[23]

One Final Note

            Having spent the last month reading every article I could find about mass-murder and the various suggested responses, I am well aware of the arguments that “nothing short of a ban is going to do much good.  And America is not going to ban guns”[24]; and that times like these lead us to exclaim “Something must be done!” –but since nothing can be done that makes sense, we do something that doesn’t make sense, mess things up even more, and then live in a false sense of security. I know this. And yet I cannot believe that proponents of this argument actually believe we need to just digest the fact that more 6 year olds will be shot, and Americans need to be comfortable with that as a byproduct of our way of life. If they are comfortable, I am not, and I hope the majority of Americans are not. No matter what ray of the political, ideological spectrum we come from, I believe we all love our children and our loved ones in a way that is common to us as human beings. And in an instance like this, I am calling on all of us to put that above everything else. You can watch the news and pretend to care about what happened at Sandy Hook, while subconsciously thanking the powers that be that it wasn’t your kid or loved one. Yet articles like Megan McArdle’s should send a chill down your spine –its not over yet, and as we stand, Americans –you and me –have accepted that next time it could be us, and we are ok with that because we value the American way of life over our loved ones, over our own life? I don’t believe that we would accept that –yet that is what we are doing. Hug your children tight tonight because your complacency has voiced your concern to those that make the rules –you are ok with the fact that your kid can go to school tomorrow and get shot.

            If you’re not –let’s do something radical that life –our own life and those that we love –calls for. This is a battle cry. We need a constitutional convention. McArdle says “Since Heller, a ban would now take a constitutional amendment to implement.  A constitutional amendment would take either a constitutional convention, or 38 states to ratify.  You need only look at a map of the United States to see that you will never get enough votes at the state level. I doubt you would even get to 25.  A constitutional convention is even more unlikely.[25]” Will we accept this as the state of our nation? If you are watching the news, blotting your eyes, holding your hand over your mouth and feeling oh-so-sorry for the victims of Sandy Hook, yet you have not done anything –you are a hypocrite. Make yourself aware of that every time you do it. I am equally aware of the cliché problem-solver –“call/write to your Senator.” So I won’t say that (though I think you should do it). Try to meet with your Senator. Organize your friends and neighbors and have a conference with your Senator. Harass the sh*t out of any public officer who has any reason to listen to you until they break out of the box of politics as usual.

            I recognize that this is highly unlikely. And that makes me fear for our country, for all of us. Why do we let these things happen? Why do we take our doses of grief in distilled form, leeching off the grief of others –until they happen to us? Why are we so complacent with our life and the lives of our loved ones? Why don’t we order our values? Please, take it from someone who has lost someone –I will allow you to leech off of my grief only for this –nothing else matters. Defend your life and the lives of those you love. And to me –that means taking every action to ban guns in this country.

APPENDIX 1
Archives

Here are some articles I suggest, that are otherwise not cited in this blog post:

1.     Emily Dugan, Heroic Sandy Hook Staff Saved Many Lives As the Killer Struck, The Independent, 2012, available here.
2.     Benedict Carey, Tips for Talking to Children About the Shooting, The New York Times, 2012, available here.
3.     James Fallows, The Certainty of More Shootings, The Atlantic, 2012, available here.[26]

And here are some noteworthy quotes:

We identified and analyzed 62 [mass shootings], and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. And in other recent (but less lethal) rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, those civilians not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed.[27]

After the Aurora, Colo. shootings, the air was thick with calls to avoid “politicizing” the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for “don’t talk about reforming our gun control laws.” Let’s be clear: That is a form of politicization. When political actors construct a political argument that threatens political consequences if other political actors pursue a certain political outcome, that is, almost by definition, a politicization of the issue. It’s just a form of politicization favoring those who prefer the status quo to stricter gun control laws.[28]

Loughner had displayed signs of serious mental illness, including outbursts during his high school classes and complaints about voices in his head. Nevertheless, he was able to stroll into a Sportsmen's Warehouse in Tucson and purchase a weapon and ammunition legally.[29]

Mass shootings generate sensational media coverage, yet most media have failed to connect the dots with regard to mental health.[30]

[The Aurora victims’ families] will push for:
·  criminal-background checks in private gun sales — ones that take place online or through newspaper ads. While gun stores are required to run such checks, private citizens are not.
·  They also want stricter laws barring the dangerously mentally ill from buying guns. In most states, including Colorado, only people who have been adjudicated as mentally ill in court are prohibited from purchasing guns. Tougher laws could require psychiatrists, for example, to report people who should not have guns.
·  [They also] wants Congress to ban assault-style weapons.[31]



[1] See, e.g., David Kopel, Don’t Turn the Aurora Killer into a Celebrity, USA Today (2012) available at http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-07-20/aurora-colorado-batman-movie-murder/56376566/1.
[2] I’m not the only one with this perspective. See, e.g. Sarah Kendzior, Want the Truth Behind “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”? Read Her Blog, Sarah Kendzior blog, (Dec. 16, 2012), available at http://sarahkendzior.com/2012/12/16/want-the-truth-behind-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-read-her-blog/ (with an update: “Quit gawking and do something useful — donate to a Newtown charity.”); and an Onion article that came out around the 10th Anniversary of September 11th, which I can’t for the life of me, find anywhere (with a title somewhere along the lines of “10th Anniversary of September 11th –another Opportunity for the Nation to Exploit the Grief of the Victims’ Families”).
[3] Id.
[4] The Volokh Conspiracy, http://www.volokh.com/.
[5] Russell Lewis, A Father Humbled By the Too-Short Life of His Daughter, NPR, 2012, available at http://www.npr.org/2012/12/16/167374500/shooting-victim-remebered-as-a-mentor-to-sisters.
[6] See, e.g. US Gun Debate: Obama Unveils Gun Control Proposals, BBC News US & Canada, 2012, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21049942 (quoting President Obama as saying: "If there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there is even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try.").
[7] Randall Collins, Clues to Mass Rampage Killers: Deep Backstage, Hidden Arsenal, Clandestine Excitement, The Sociological Eye blog, (Sept. 1, 2012), available at http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2012/09/clues-to-mass-rampage-killers-deep.html (Mentioning this point does not mean that I disagree with Randall’s thesis –that we should look more into the sociological elements of mass-murder. Randall’s article is an important read).
[8] Eugene Volokh, Why It’s Hard to Prevent Mass Shootings, The Volokh Conspiracy, (Dec. 18, 2012, 2:54 PM), available at http://www.volokh.com/2012/12/18/why-its-hard-to-prevent-mass-shootings/.
[9] I don’t mean this facetiously, I know they exist, and if anyone knows information on this, I would love to see it.
[10] Volokh, supra note 8.
[11] Black’s Law Dictionary, 130 (9th ed. 2009) defines assault as “the threat or use of force on another that causes that person to have a reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact.”
[12] I know they’re out there, but based on my personal statistical data, and I have been an avid hiker for 9 years, they are rare. I would also be interested in any type of research done on women gun-rights advocates, who are NOT married to a man that is also a gun-rights advocate.
[13] I am not trying to make myself sound awesome here. It is a burden I carry that I would do anything to give back. I just don’t want any of you to have to carry it as well, unnecessarily.
[14] See, e.g., Richard Florida, The Geography of Gun Deaths, The Atlantic, 2011, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-geography-of-gun-deaths/69354/.
[15] Kate Donovan, When You Tie Shootings to Mental Illness, freethoughtsblogs, (Dec. 14, 2012), available at http://freethoughtblogs.com/ashleymiller/2012/12/14/when-you-tie-shootings-to-mental-illness/.
[16]Marc Siegel, Will We Ever Know What Was Wrong With Adam Lanza? Even if we do, it won’t help, Slate, 2012, available at http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2012/12/mental_illness_in_the_connecticut_school_shootings_we_may_never_have_a_diagnosis.html.
[17]Josh Voorhees, “He Floated Apart, Locked Inside a Private World They Could Neither Share Nor Penetrate,” Slate, The Slatest, (Aug. 27, 2012, 8:40 AM), available at http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/08/27/james_holmes_dysphoric_mania_new_york_times_profiles_aurora_shooter_with_detail_rich_profile_.html.
[18] Id.
[19] Id.
[20] For an informative article on this topic, see, e.g. Stephen Marche, Is Facebook Making Us Lonely, The Atlantic, 2012, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/ (stating that “in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant;” and “[a]s of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring”).
[21] Mark Follman et al., A Guide to Mass Shootings in America, Mother Jones, 2012, available at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map?page=2.
[22] Collins, supra note 11.
[23] The only article I found on this topic is Jeff Sparrow, ‘When the Burning Moment Breaks’: Gun Control and Rage Massacres, Overland Progressive Culture Since 1954, (Aug. 6, 2012), available at http://overland.org.au/blogs/new-words/2012/08/when-the-burning-moment-breaks-gun-control-and-rage-massacres/.
[24] Megan McArdle, There’s Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre, The Daily Beast, (Dec. 17, 2012, 3:00 PM), available at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/17/there-s-little-we-can-do-to-prevent-another-massacre.html.
[25] Id.
[26] I intentionally didn’t include the I Am Adam Lanza's Mother article because of Kendzoir, supra note 2, and this.
[27] Mark Follman, More Guns, More Mass Shootings –Coincidence?, Mother Jones , 2012, available at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/mass-shootings-investigation. For the reverse argument, see Eugene Volokh, Do Civilians Armed With Guns Ever Capture, Kill, or Otherwise Stop Mass Shooters?, The Volokh Conspiracy, (Dec. 14, 2012, 3:32 PM), available at http://www.volokh.com/2012/12/14/do-civilians-armed-with-guns-ever-capture-kill-or-otherwise-stop-mass-shooters/.
[28]Ezra Klein, Twelve Facts About Guns and Mass Shootings in the United States, The Washington Post, Wonkblog, (Dec. 14, 2012, 2:07 PM), available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/nine-facts-about-guns-and-mass-shootings-in-the-united-states/.
[29] Mark Follman, Mass Shootings: Maybe What We Need Is Better Mental-Health Policy, Mother Jones, 2012, available at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/jared-loughner-mass-shootings-mental-illness.
[30] Id.
[31] Jennifer Brown & Colleen O’Connor, Gun Law Debate Intensifies; Shooting Victims’ Families Unite, The Denver Post, 2012, available at http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_22197113/gun-law-debate-intensifies-shooting-victims-families-unite#ixzz2HhMBY9fx.