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.
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”).
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
