Pursuant to the new normal, another “lone wolf” opened fire on a military recruitment center in Chattanooga on Thursday, killing four marines and one midshipman.
The gunfire came in rapid bursts, too many shots to count, a witness said…
Within hours, a picture began to emerge of the shooting suspect, a 24-year-old Kuwaiti-born electrical engineering graduate. The gunman also was killed.
(The Tennessean, July 17, 2015)
No doubt you’ve seen politicians of every stripe all over TV since then, waxing indignant about what law enforcement needs to do to prevent such attacks.
But it’s an indication of the influence and immunity the NRA has purchased that no politician dares to mention, let alone condemn, the role it plays in facilitating such attacks. Which is rather like waxing indignant about the ravages of tobacco without condemning the tobacco lobby.
Meanwhile, it is self-evident that there is nothing law enforcement can do to prevent lone-wolf attacks. What’s more, all of the media profiling and psychoanalyzing that invariably follow them only incentivize and embolden other lone wolves to follow fashion. This is why I refuse to even publish their names….
I don’t know why the media always reward these psychotic people by giving them the fame they covet; that is, by plastering their pathetic mugs all over television and on the front page of every major newspaper … worldwide, and reporting pop psychology about why and how they did their dastardly deeds. Isn’t it clear to see, especially in this age of instant celebrity, why some loser kid would find this route to infamy irresistible?
You’d think – given the record of these psychotic and vainglorious episodes since Columbine – that we would have figured out by now that the best way to discourage them is by focusing our attention on the victims and limiting what we say about the shooter to: May God have mercy on your soul as you burn in hell!
(“Massacre in Omaha,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 7, 2007)
Am I the only one who sees the foolhardy and self-defeating nature of this kind of media attention? Moreover, why does the public need to know about every lead the FBI gets and every dot it’s trying to connect? Instead of peddling and propagating fear, the media should be educating the public about the existential imperative to say something if you see something.
On the other hand, it is equally self-evident that there is something politicians can do to limit the carnage such attacks cause. What’s more, that something can be summed up in two words: gun control.
Apropos of which, the argument I proffered in “The Second Amendment and Gun Control,” December 19, 2012, might be instructive.
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The Second Amendment specifically refers to ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.’ No doubt the framers thought it necessary because the American people might have to mount a second revolution if their own government became too tyrannical. But I suspect they thought this militia was necessary primarily to guard against enemies foreign (namely the avenging British), not domestic.
Whatever the case, the framers drafted this amendment 225 years ago. But they would not have even thought about it if, back then, the United States had the well regulated police forces, to say nothing of the well regulated military forces, it has today.
It’s arguable therefore that the Second Amendment pertains primarily to those actively involved in ensuring national security. This means that nobody else has the right to ‘keep and bear arms.’ After all, the framers could not conceive of a US government so powerful (as it is today) that mounting a second revolution against it (no matter how tyrannical it becomes) would constitute mass suicide.
Still, I would concede that keeping and bearing six-cylinder handguns and double-barrel shotguns (for home protection) and single-shot rifles (for hunting) do not violate the spirit of the Second Amendment. But it would violate both its letter and spirit for civilians to keep and bear arms of any other type (e.g., assault weapons). Period!
Too many anti-gun advocates argue for a ban on all guns. But they are just as irrational as anti-immigration advocates who argue for the deportation of all illegal immigrants. Likewise, too many pro-gun advocates argue that civilians have the right to keep and bear everything from semi-automatic pistols to assault rifles (with magazines that carry 100 rounds). But they are just as irrational as pro-life advocates who argue that abortions should be illegal even in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother. …
[T]he NRA has perpetrated a brazen and unconscionable fraud on the American people by pretending to be arch defenders of their right to keep and bear arms.
Because the NRA is just the lobbying arm of gun manufacturers, and its sole mission is to ensure that those manufactures have the right to sell as many guns of every type to as many people as possible. Period!
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In this case, if a ban on assault weapons and limit on magazine clips were in effect, the death toll might have been one instead of five. After all, if this lone wolf only had access to a handgun, instead of the assault rifles he used, there would have been no “gunfire … in rapid bursts, too many shots to count.” More to the point, the marines would have had a chance to duck and run for cover.
Unfortunately, the words “gun control” have become as sacrilege in American politics as the words “democratic freedoms” have in Russian politics.
Only this explains why President Obama could not even get Congress to pass legislation requiring universal background checks on all firearm sales, let alone legislation banning the sale of assault weapons. This congressional obstructionism makes a mockery of the national outpouring in the wake of the December 2012 lone-wolf attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, which killed twenty children and six adults.
Nobody is more mindful of the venality and hypocrisy of the NRA. Yet even I did not think we’d be here, nearly four months after Newtown, facing the prospect of not having enough congressional support to pass even universal background checks. Especially given that, according to a Quinnipiac poll published this week, ninety-one percent of the American people favor such checks.
(“This Gun-Control Debate Is Insane,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 5, 2013)
Hence the manifest absurdity of marines at military recruitment centers – who are prohibited from bearing arms – having to worry now about some psycho legally purchasing assault rifles to hunt them down like sitting ducks.
An absurdity made farcical, incidentally, by redneck vigilantes now showing up at these centers – bearing military-style assault weapons and vowing to protect the unarmed recruiters.
In any event, the American people accept gun violence these days as readily as American politicians accept NRA donations. Therefore, it seems pointless to get too emotionally or politically exercised about the growing scourge of mass shootings – whether perpetrated by ISIS sympathizers or American psychos.
Related commentaries:
Lone wolf terrorizes Australia…
Gun-control debate insane…