Wayne LaPierre, NRA chief

By Bob Gaydos

Well, all it took for America to finally enter into a serious, rational discussion of gun control was for 20 kindergarten students to get gunned down in school by a troubled young man with an automatic weapon and lots of ammo. Who says we’ve become desensitized?

I mean, it is perfectly rational for the chairwoman of a legislative committee in Ulster County, N.Y., to argue against her state’s recently enacted tough gun control law by stating: “Genocide is almost always preceded by gun confiscation. History tells us that.” That’s rational isn’t it?

After all, that threat of government confiscation of guns is right out of the literature of the National Rifle Association, proud defender of all citizens’ rights, or at least those rights as the NRA interprets them in the Second Amendment. And genocide is not a loaded word meant to inspire fear in the minds of the less-informed members of the citizenry, is it?

Of course not. All the sturm und drung among self-declared fans of the Second Amendment — the marches and demonstrations and outraged letters to the editor — are, at least as the NRA sees it, justified sensible responses to proposals by President Barack Obama and countless political leaders around the country, including in New York, to rob them of their right to own as many guns as they want, of as many types, with as much ammo, and, truth be told, the right to carry them around anywhere they want, concealed or not, whenever they want.

Because you never know when the government is going to come after you. Hey, look at Ruby Ridge, right? Right. But setting aside the right or wrong of that incident for a moment, who won that particular shootout? And if the motivation for unfettered gun ownership is to protect citizens against their own government — as the NRA leadership often claims — how in the name of anything sane could a group of heavily armed citizens — of any size — prevail against the might of the American military with an even more unfettered access to weapons of every type? Forget the fact that most Americans have no real fear that their government is going to come after them armed to the teeth, most Americans also know that would be a losing battle.

That’s why they focus their energies in the gun control debate on such sensible proposals as requiring a background check for anyone who wants to buy a gun. All recent polls say roughly 90 percent of Americans favor this idea. That obviously includes many gun owners, but not the NRA leaders. And if they fear the government coming after their guns, why do roughly 70 percent of Americans favor creation of a federal database of gun sales? To make the FBI’s job easier? Actually, yes. Because it is the sane thing to do.

As support for gun control measures have gained strength in the wake of the ghastly shooting in Newtown, Conn., the arguments against more restrictions have grown increasingly strident and outrageous by some elements of the NRA.

This is a typical, fearful response. After years of bullying and cowing politicians with threats of political defeat, the NRA leadership is faced with a growing consensus of citizens — if not politicians — who are fed up with people claiming they have the right to carry AK-47s around in public, with lots of well-stocked magazines, because our Founding Fathers gave them that right. In fact, polls show 55 to 60 percent of Americans favor a ban on semi-automatic and assault-type weapons and about 55 percent favor a ban on high-capacity ammo magazines of the type that has created such a furor in New York because the Legislature voted to downsize the capacity from 10 to 7 rounds. This has led some gun owners to fret about being “outgunned.” I for one, don’t want to be around for that shootout, whoever has the most bullets.

The point is that as ever larger numbers of average Americans have finally stepped forward to support sensible restrictions on gun ownership, the arguments by the most avid opponents of gun control have become less sensible. Kids being shot in school? Arm the teachers. Want a safer city? Let citizens strap on guns in public. A few proud Americans armed with AR15s will keep any shopping mall safe. Requiring background checks at gun shows will only keep criminals from trying to get guns there. And making it harder for criminals to get guns is bad, why?

There is no assault on the Second Amendment going on in this gun-crazy country. (There are about 300 million firearms privately owned in America, but most Americans don’t own guns. Most gun owners own two or more weapons.) Rather, there is a growing public consensus that the time of being fearful of the NRA and its most vocal advocates is gone, drowned in the blood of kindergarten students. Politicians who don’t get this are those fearful of losing political and financial support from the NRA and some of its members. It is time for courage on their part. The responsible, prudent course for them would be to suggest reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, not rail about the unfairness of some laws that were long overdue. Work to right good laws.

The NRA has waged a long, illogical campaign of fear and threat in the guise of protecting citizens’ rights. But in recent weeks it has shown through statements of its leader, Wayne LaPierre, that its agenda is not about protecting the Second Amendment, but rather removing any and all restrictions on gun ownership. But the U.N. is not coming for your guns, America. Genocide is not on the horizon. Grow up. Demand sensible gun laws that protect you from those who have no business owning deadly weapons.

Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Our Founding Fathers also believed in those rights. No one has ever needed an assault weapon to enjoy them in America.

bob@zestoforange.com 

The families of victims grieve near Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman opened fire on students and staff members, killing 20 children and six adults. Photo by Adrees Latif/Reuters

“Guns magnify impulses. Assault weapons and high-capacity clips multiply victims exponentially.”

– Jeffrey Jampel, New York Times website commenter

By Emily Theroux

Two days after the horrific slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults by a suicidal rampage killer armed with a semi-automatic rifle, witless Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert had the basic lack of human decency to use the gunman’s monstrous act for political gain.

Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, died in a hail of bullets while trying to tackle shooter Adam Lanza, during a brave but futile attempt to save more of the nascent lives in her care. On Faux News, the wingnut congressman projectile-vomited obscene National Rifle Association propaganda:

“I wish to God she had had an M-4 [assault rifle] in her office, locked up, so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off, before he can kill those precious kids.”

Oh, really, Louie? And exactly how would that fantasy scenario have gone down? By the time the principal “heard gunfire,” most of those children would already have been mowed down. By the time she unlocked the cabinet, Lanza would have shot her in the back. (And in the hellhole of that darkened Colorado movie theater back in July, armed vigilantes probably would have shot themselves, each other, and many of the people they were trying to protect.)

The Newtown shooter held all the cards: premeditation, deadly intent, the “magical thinking” of mental aberration, the power burst of adrenaline, and the perennial advantage of surprise. He also had a green light (even though it only inadvertently lit the pathway for a maniac looking for easy firepower) from elected politicians  and National Rifle Association lobbyists.

Gun apologists like to defer responsibility for shooting rampages in America onto happenstance, or God’s anger at secular humanists for “kicking prayer out of the public schools,” or individual lunatics who would surely have resorted to bombs if they had been prevented by gun-control laws from acquiring firearms.

Among mainstays of the far-right firearms rationale:

1) If more people carried guns, these incidents could be thwarted.

2) Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. If people didn’t have access to guns, they would just use something else.

3) Such mass shootings always happen in states with gun control laws, which are strict enough as it is.

4) The guns Lanza used were legally registered to his mother, so his apparent mental issues wouldn’t have prevented the rampage weapons from falling into his hands.

5) “We need 30-round magazines for target shooting.”

6) The Second Amendment guarantees the absolute right of all American citizens to own as many guns as they want (according to a controversial 2008 ruling by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority).

7) “We have the right to defend ourselves.

Targeting NRA talking points with rapier of reason:

1) People who keep guns in their homes or cars for purposes of protection from intruders, muggers, or murderers (including Nancy Lanza) are more likely to injure or kill a family member or loved one” (or themselves) than to use a gun against a threatening outsider, according to Washington Cease Fire, a Seattle gun-control organization that ran a campaign of bus ads urging people “to think twice about owning guns,” after a series of gun accidents killed or wounded three young children (two of them after being momentarily left by their parents in cars with loaded handguns “hidden” under the seats.

A 2011 survey by the Harvard School of Public Health indicated that the health risk of keeping guns in the home is greater than the benefit. “The presence of a gun makes quarrels, disputes, assaults, and robberies more deadly. Many murders are committed in a moment of rage,” wrote Dr. David Hemenway. “For example, a large percentage of homicides – and especially homicides in the home – occur during altercations over matters such as love, money, and domestic problems.” The survey presented no credible evidence that guns reduce injury during a home invasion.

2) Adam Lanza’s attack wouldn’t have ever occurred (or to have been as lethal to so many victims) if he hadn’t had access to semi-automatic guns, and it wouldn’t have taken place “in the blink of an eye” without a 30-round ammunition clip. (By contrast, on the same day as the Sandy Hook school massacre, a deranged man in China attacked 22 elementary school students with the deadliest weapon he could get his hands on in a country with strict gun laws: a knife. Death toll? Zero.)

3) Connecticut does prohibit assault weapons, but the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used by Lanza is exempt from the ban. Republican legislators riddled the 1994 federal ban as well as similar state bans with numerous loopholes that limited the definition of a banned “assault weapon” to include fully automatic firearms (already banned since 1934) and only certain semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines with at least two of five features: a folding or telescoping stock, a pistol grip, a bayonet mount, a grenade launcher, and/or a flash suppressor. Most NRA supporters claim the definition is bogus anyway, because even though the high-capacity magazine allows you to shoot much faster than a non-automatic gun would, you still have to pull the trigger each time you fire a semi-automatic.

This point may soon become moot, since the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management announced plans to “immediately” sell the Freedom Group, which manufactures the Bushmaster – after the California teachers’ pension plan suggested it might reconsider its $750 million investment with Cerberus in the wake of the elementary school tragedy. (Making this move even more imperative was the fact that Martin Feinberg, the father of the firm’s owner, billionaire financier Stephen A. Feinberg, happens to live in Newtown, Connecticut and pronounced the shooting “horrendous, truly horrendous.”)

4) You could easily argue that Nancy Lanza was just as disturbed as her son. Described by her own sister as an adherent of a doomsday survivalist cult, she was an avid gun collector and knew her son was mentally unbalanced. Nevertheless, she taught Adam and his brother how to fire guns at shooting ranges. Should she have been able to legally purchase a semi-automatic rifle and multiple-round magazines?

5) The grave danger to our children from semi-automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines far outweighs the fleeting pleasure of pretending to mow down “bad guys” (or federal agents, depending on the imaginative and ideological bent of the individual target shooter). The 30-round magazine used by Lanza was designed to allow soldiers to fire as many rounds as possible (and at a lightning-fast clip) at enemy troops or insurgents, with an optimal goal of killing them while surviving the encounter.

As Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey pointed out on The Ed Show, semi-automatic rifles equipped with high-capacity magazines were designed for use by the military, not for hunting or target shooting. (An Olympic marksman doesn’t use an assault weapon to hit a bullseye, as my husband pointed out. “It’s a power weapon, not a precision weapon,” Lance explained.”You don’t shoot assault weapons to take precise aim but to cut your target in half.” After I heard him out, I rather wished I hadn’t.)

6) Until four years ago, most federal judges agreed with the historic interpretation of the Second Amendment, whose purpose was “to ensure that the ‘state armies’ – ‘the militia’ – would be maintained for the defense of the state,” according to Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court. The amendment, as Cass Sunstein recalled the justice saying in 1991, “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word fraud – on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The D.C. vs. Heller decision in 2008 may have granted a right to bear arms to individuals for the first time, but it didn’t obviate many forms of gun control, Sunstein observed.“Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” wrote none other than Antonin Scalia, arguably the court’s most radical member.

7) The truly fanatic gun-rights fringe (folks far to the right of the NRA – like Larry Pratt, executive director for the past 30 years of Gun Owners of America) wants access to assault weapons for what 2010 Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle called “Second Amendment remedies.” Far-right conspiracy theorists have been stockpiling guns and ammo since the president’s first term – not to be used by “a well-regulated militia” to defend “the security of a free state,” but to shore their movement up against the federal government, in case Obama should suddenly ban all gun sales, and proclaim the dreaded “One World Order” – which is considered a very real threat by survivalists.

Others, however, are beginning to disagree. Republican Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan just vetoed a bill, passed the night before the shooting, that would have allowed concealed pistol license holders to carry concealed pistols in churches, schools, and day-care centers. And lifetime NRA member Joe Manchin, the junior senator from West Virginia, uttered words that would have been considered heresy a week ago: “I don’t know anybody that needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting.”

With the number of gun deaths expected to exceed traffic fatalities for the first time by 2015, reasonable people need to start paying attention.

Emily Theroux can be contacted at emily@zestoforange.com.

By Nadia Allen

Mental Health Association in Orange County joins Americans in mourning the loss of those killed in the tragic shootings in Newtown, Conn. Our thoughts and sincere prayers are with the families of the victims and everyone who is affected by this horrific event. Additionally, we express our hope for the full recovery of those who were injured.

At this point, we do not know the motivation behind this senseless act. We do know that events like this will impact families, the Newtown community and the nation. Many may feel at risk and may experience feelings of anxiety and fear. Parents may be groping with how to discuss these and similar events with their children.

Mental Health America has developed guidelines to help Americans respond and cope with tragic events, which can be found at www.mentalhealthamerica.net/go/information/get-info/coping-with-disaster. To guide discussions about the shooting, MHA offers the following suggestions for parents as they communicate with young people in the area and across the nation:

• Children sense the anxiety and tension in adults around them. Furthermore, like adults, children experience the same feelings of helplessness and lack of control that tragedy-related stress can bring about. Conversely, unlike adults, children have little experience to help them place their current situation into perspective.

• Each child responds differently to tragedy, depending on his or her understanding and maturity, but it’s easy to see how an event of this magnitude can create a great deal of anxiety in children of all ages. Most likely, they will interpret the tragedy as a personal danger to themselves and those they care about.

• Whatever the child’s age or relationship to the damage caused by tragedy, it’s important that you be open about the consequences for your family, and that you encourage him or her to talk about it.

• Talk honestly about the incident, without graphic detail, and share some of your own feelings about it.

• Encourage young people to talk about their concerns and to express their feelings, and validate the young person’s feelings and concerns.

• Limit television viewing. It can be difficult to process the images and messages in news reports.

• Recognize what may be behind a young person’s behavior. They may minimize their concerns outwardly, but may become argumentative, withdrawn or allow their school performance to decline.

• Keep the dialogue going even after media coverage subsides. Continue to talk about feelings and discuss actions being taken to make schools and communities safer.

• Seek help when necessary. If you are worried about a young person’s reaction or have ongoing concerns about his/her behavior or emotions, contact a mental health professional at their school or at your community mental health center.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives and everyone who is affected by these shocking events. And we join in applauding the brave actions of individuals who prevented greater harm.

It will likely take many days to understand the reasons and motivations behind this national tragedy. Many have pointed to mental health as an issue. It must first be emphasized that people with mental health conditions are no more likely to be violent than the rest of the population. Furthermore, we have science-based methods to successfully treat persons with even the most severe mental illnesses. A very small group of individuals with a specific type of mental health symptoms are at greater risk for violence if their symptoms are untreated.

It is also important that, as a community, we assist persons with signs and symptoms of mental illnesses to seek treatment. Although rare, when a person becomes so ill that he/she is a danger to themselves or others state laws provide a way to provide them help even if they don’t believe that they need it. The best strategy, however, is to have an accessible system of care that is easy to use, well funded and provides effective services.

Science has not developed tools to predict reliably individuals at risk for violence. But we can reduce the small risk of violence in those with certain mental health conditions by investing in proven intensive, coordinated community-based mental health services and making certain that they can access these services.

We do not know if the mental health system failed in this situation or if there were missed opportunities or if effective treatment might have averted this tragedy. It’s our sincere hope that we can find answers and create solutions that prevent this tragedy from ever happening again.

If you are worried about a young person’s reaction or have ongoing concerns about his/her behavior or emotions, contact a mental health professional at their school or at your community mental health center. We encourage you to call MHA’s 24/7 Helpline @ 1-800-832-1200 and/or text MHA’s TEXT 4 TEENS @ 845-391-1000 for information, referrals, or to simply talk or text with a trained listener.

Nadia Allen is executive director of Mental Health Association in Orange County. MHA is a private, not-for-profit agency seeking to promote the positive mental health and emotional well-being of Orange County residents, working towards reducing the stigma of mental illness, developmental disabilities, and providing support to victims of sexual assault and other crimes. 

By Jeffrey Page

Not since Jerry Falwell looked into a TV camera 12 days after 9/11 and blamed the attack on lesbians, the ACLU and People for the American Way (among others) has an American politician uttered the vicious outrages Mike Huckabee has spewed in the days after the mass killings in Newtown, Conn.

Soon after the bloodshed, Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister who has expressed presidential ambitions, was asked by Fox News how God could have allowed the massacre of 20 little children and six adults. His response defines the word “cruel” and displays a breathless lack of humanity.

It was all our faults.

At a time when the people of Newtown and another 300 million people of the United States needed comfort and a kind word, Huckabee decided to browbeat us by declaring that the shootings were the result of a lack of prayer in the public schools.

We have to be responsible for where our arguments lead us. I follow Huckabee’s reasoning like this: Whose fault is it that there is no compulsory prayer in the schools? I could compose a list of names, but the shorthand answer is the Supreme Court. And who sits there? Nine men and women appointed by a president. And who picks the president?

That would be us.

And among “us” are residents of Newtown, a place where it is unlikely that townspeople never marched on a school board meeting to demand a restoration of school prayer.

I don’t think God works this way; making little girls and boys pay for the inaction of the older people in town.

“It’s an interesting thing,” Huckabee said on Fox News. “We ask why there’s violence in our schools but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools.”

“Interesting?”

Huckabee doesn’t get it. Making school violence an “interesting” subject reduces the Connecticut tragedy – parents facing the incomprehensible truth of life without their children – to about the level of urgency and importance as trying to do the crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times. A new movie is “interesting.” The murder of babies is not “interesting.”

And “systematically removing” God from classrooms?

In fact we have done no such thing.

Some students pray in school whenever they wish, maybe before an algebra exam, maybe to thank God for another day, or for a dad’s recovery from illness, or for a date for the prom. But these are personal entreaties made by individuals, maybe in a whisper, maybe in silence. The First Amendment may rule against organized prayer in public institutions but prevent praying in schools? Kick God out? Never happened. Never could.

Most ministers understand that no one is powerful enough or, for that matter, stupid enough, to try to remove God from the schools. It can’t be done because, the clergy will tell you, God is with everyone all the time – even in school. Does Huckabee think that a mere schoolhouse door is going to keep the lord out?

Huckabee, continuing with the grace and mercy of a stampeding buffalo as Newtown parents arranged for the funerals of their babies, said, “Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Of course we should be so surprised, and maybe a little astonished that someone with a public persona could be so insensitive to the misery and pain that has overcome Newtown.