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Please, I'd Like to Stop Writing about Innocents Killed by Guns
Another day, another massacre—this time two, in just 13 hours.
Aug 05, 2019
I'm sitting here typing away at the dining room table in the home of friends a few miles along the road from Newtown, Connecticut. In a span of just thirteen hours, there have been mass killings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Many more are wounded.
Lone, young white gunmen have murdered more than thirty men, women and children. In Texas, the dead were shopping for back-to-school sale bargains at Wal-Mart. In Ohio, they were enjoying a weekend evening out.
Each assailant legally obtained his weapon. The killer in Dayton's AR-15-style rifle used a double drum magazine that holds 100 rounds of ammo for non-stop shooting. You can order it online for $129.95.
I sat at this same table less than seven years ago during the weekend of the 27 murders at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School and wrote, "As many as 100 bullets were fired in Newtown; last year, a total of 85 were fired at people by the police in all of Germany and 49 of them were warning shots. We will hear all these and other statistics in the days ahead, and in a week or so they will fade until the next time. Unless this time we stand up and say no."
There have been, of course, too many next times. And so far, as hard as we try, every time it happens again we apparently have not stood up in sufficient numbers or shouted loud enough to make the massacres stop. What does it take? The story keeps repeating.
July 2012: In the wake of the killings at a Colorado movie theater, my colleague Bill Moyers and I wrote, "We are fooling ourselves. Fooling ourselves that the law could allow even an inflamed lunatic to easily acquire murderous weapons and not expect murderous consequences. Fooling ourselves that the Second Amendment's guarantee of a 'well-regulated militia' be construed as a God-given right to purchase and own just about any weapon of destruction you like, a license for murder and mayhem. A great fraud has entered our history."
January 2013: Less than a month after the Newtown murders, we wrote, "Naturally, in a country where even life and death are measured by the profit margin, the cure for gun violence is, yes, more guns! Bigger profits."
October 2017: After 57 were killed in Las Vegas, I said, "To claim as a constitutional right the possession of firearms intended for nothing less than brutal, gruesome warfare strains credulity. These are killing machines with no purpose other than to maim and destroy. Of course, we've said this time and again and will doubtless say it again because the foolish cycle remains unchanging."
February 2018: I wrote, "An AR-15 is what 19-year old Nikolas Cruz bought for his rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland [Florida]... These are not sports weapons and they sure as hell don't belong in the hands of any civilian, much less the mentally disturbed."
And so it goes. A pizzeria owner who was at the murder scene in Dayton tells The New York Times he had watched the news from El Paso earlier in the day but thought it was, "just another mass shooting that we hear about all the time, and you never think it's going to hit home."
Is that what needs to happen? Must every community endure a tragedy of its own to understand that gun violence not only slays individuals but also kills us as a society?
Rather than face the truth, our elected leaders try to cover it all up, pointing fingers at everyone but themselves and blaming the gun deaths on video games and mental problems. When their hands are not fraudulently folded in prayer, they greedily reach out for more and more campaign cash from the National Rifle Association.
Here's a truth for you. This is domestic terrorism. Here's another: According to the NRA Campaign Spending Tracker run by The Trace, an independent news organization that investigates guns in the United States, "In the 2018 election cycle, the NRA... spent $5,362,861 supporting 265 candidates... and $4,369,083 opposing 71 candidates... in congressional races across 44 states." Over the past decade, they've spent more than $100 million.
The NRA donated $30.3 million to Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Where it all came from remains a secret. Keep that cash in mind; then remember how he incites white supremacist crowds at his rallies. Never forget all the vicious things Donald Trump has said about people of color, the constant anti-immigrant rhetoric, much of it in the past few days leading up to the shootings.
In characteristic cover-his-ass mode, he now lies and tells the public, "Hate has no place in our country," and that when it comes to guns, "We have done much more than most administrations. That's not talked about very much. But we've done actually a lot. But perhaps more has to be done." Perhaps?
Monday morning, Trump, bowing to pressure, called for "strong background checks," but naturally then blamed the media for the problem--"Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years," he tweeted--as ever, misleading and trying to divert the blame away from the leading offender, himself.
Yet he's just the latest in a long list of culprits. More than twelve years ago--twelve years!--the day after 32 were shot and killed at Virginia Tech in April 2007, I asked, "How many times do mass killings... have to occur before we get it through our thick, wired for the Stone Age skulls? For that matter, how many times do people have to write a column like this one decrying the insanity of gun violence in America?"
Here's that column once again. Will I ever be able to stop writing it?
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High-Capacity Semiautomatic Handguns: Weapon of Choice for US Mass Shooters
A deadly common thread runs through spate of rampage shootings in the US
Aug 07, 2012
Wade Michael Page, the Wisconsin gunman who opened fire inside a Sikh Temple during Sunday services this weekend, joins a string of men in recent US history -- guided by rage, insanity, or some combination of both -- who acted alone with murderous results. But Page had more in common with those men than just the urge and capacity to execute such a hideous act: he had the same perfectly designed weapon they had, too.
Like Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia Tech University student who killed 32 people and then himself in 2007, Jared Loughner who killed six people in Arizona in 2011, and James Holmes who murdered twelve in a Colorado movie theater last month, Wade Michael Page on Sunday carried out his assault with a highly concealable, high capacity semiautomatic handgun.
According to a Reutersreport and based on new details emerging from the weekend tragedy, Page's gun, a Springfield 9mm, was purchased legally at a Wisconsin gun shop and was likely chosen, experts say, for being "adaptable to using high-capacity magazines."
Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit group that advocates to reduce gun violence, told Reuters these kinds of guns -- especially when using the high-capacity clips available for them -- allow the shooters to fire the maximum number of bullets in a short period of time.
"There is no valid reason for civilians to have assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns and high-capacity magazines," he said. "We have to start ratcheting down the firepower in civilian hands in the United States."
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It's Past Time to Protect Children Not Guns
Mar 24, 2012
Thousands of people across the country have poured into the streets -- from New York to Sanford, Florida -- to demand justice for Trayvon Martin. Hundreds of thousands more stepped up to protest online. In response to the public outcry, the Sanford chief of police has temporarily stepped down and the state prosecutor has stepped aside. But nearly one month after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was stopped, stalked, shot and killed while walking home from a convenience store, armed only with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea, his killer, George Zimmerman, has not been arrested. Today, the Children's Defense Fund released its new report, Protect Children, Not Guns 2012, dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin and the thousands of children and teenagers killed by guns in America, including the 5,740 children killed in 2008 and 2009 according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Where is the outrage over every single one of the thousands of children and teens killed by guns -- too many by gun slinging Americans unrestrained by common sense gun control laws. Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, also known as the "shoot first, ask questions later" law, is now under national scrutiny. But will it and others be changed to protect children rather than gun owners and sellers?
April 16 marks the fifth anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre where 32 students and faculty were killed by a gun, 25 others were injured, and many more were traumatized. Each year since then has seen gun victims -- young children, teenagers, young adults, a member of Congress, a federal judge and many more. Days, weeks, months and years go by and little or nothing -- except fleeting headlines, tears, trauma and talk -- is done to protect children instead of guns.
- The 5,740 children and teens killed by guns in 2008 and 2009:
- Would fill more than 229 public school classrooms of 25 students each;
- Was greater than the number of U.S. military personnel killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,013).
- The number of preschoolers killed by guns in 2008 (88) and 2009 (85) was nearly double the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty in 2008 (41) and 2009 (48).
- Black children and teens accounted for 45 percent of all child and teen gun deaths in 2008 and 2009 but were only 15 percent of the total child population.
- The leading cause of death among black teens ages 15 to 19 in 2008 and 2009 was gun homicide. For white teens 15 to 19 it was motor vehicle accidents followed by gun homicide (2008) and gun suicide (2009).
- Of the 116,385 children and teens killed by a gun since 1979 when gun data was first collected by age, 44,038 were black -- nearly 13 times more than the number of recorded lynchings of black people of all ages in the 86 years from 1882 to 1968. But more white than black children and teens have died from gun violence which threatens all in America everywhere.
By any standards of human and moral decency, children in America are under assault, and by international standards, America remains the unchallenged world leader in children and teen gun deaths.
Analysis of the most recent data from 23 high-income countries reported that 87 percent of all firearm deaths of children under 15 were in the United States. The rate of U.S. gun homicides for teens and young adults 15 to 24 was 42.7 times higher than the overall gun homicide rate for that same age group in the other countries.
Why are common-sense gun regulations so shockingly absent in our country? Even in the wake of the Tucson tragedy and the near-fatal shooting of one of their own, Congress failed to act. Calls for banning high-volume ammunition clips and tightening up the federal background check system were ignored. Our leaders once again capitulated to the powerful gun lobby over the rights of children and citizens to life and safety. In November 2011, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act. If a similar bill is passed by the Senate and becomes law, a person with a permit to carry a concealed handgun in one state -- a person like George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida -- could carry that concealed weapon in another state even if it was against the second state's law. Proponents of such dangerous laws maintain the fiction that guns promote personal safety. It is long past time to acknowledge gun violence as a hugely serious threat to children, teens, and overall public health and safety.
Our leaders in Washington, D.C. are not alone in refusing to make America safer. Forty-two states have adopted preemption laws to ensure state legislatures control of gun policy, impeding the ability of cities to develop local solutions to gun violence in their own communities. In 2011, Kansas, Mississippi and Utah enacted laws allowing concealed weapon permit holders to carry loaded, concealed firearms in or on the grounds of elementary and secondary schools. With all eyes on Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, few noticed a law passed last year that, if upheld, threatens loss of a medical license for doctors who ask patients about whether a gun is in the home although it is not at all unusual or inappropriate for pediatricians particularly to ask patients and parents of patients about possible safety hazards in the home including guns.
We have so much work to do to build safe communities for our children. We need leaders at all levels of government who will protect children over guns. We need a relentless, powerful citizens' voice to break the gun lobby's veto on common sense gun policy. Our laws must control who can obtain firearms and close the gun show loophole, require consumer safety standards and childproof safety features for all guns, and strengthen child access prevention laws that ensure guns in the home are stored safely and securely. And all must take action and ask political candidates this fall what steps they will take to protect children from guns. We must remove guns from our homes where children so often find them and put themselves and others in harm's way and combat cultural glorification of guns and violence. As a nation, we must aspire and act to become the world leader in protecting children against guns rather than leading the world in child victims of guns. Every child's life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.
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