Monday, December 17, 2012 6:27:42 AM
Mike Huckabee Says Shooting Happened Because We've Removed God From Our Schools (Dec 14, 2012)
SOURCE: http://www.foxnews.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtRM1LCCbTk
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Huckabee on shooting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZeEM_Pqqgw [in case the longer excerpt above disappears, this one should last; also at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U_qPSCDZq4 ]
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Cenk in response to Mike Huckabee's comments on school shooting: 'You sick son of a bitch'
On Newtown shooting, Fox News host Mike Huckabee said, "We ask why there's violence in our schools, but we systematically remove God from our schools."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpEdcCB3H04
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Mike Huckabee: Newtown Shooting No Surprise, We've 'Systematically Removed God' From Schools
12/15/2012
[...]
This line of reasoning isn't new for Huckabee.
Speaking about a mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. over the summer, the former GOP presidential candidate claimed that such violent episodes were a function of a nation suffering from the removal of religion from the public sphere.
"We don't have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem," Huckabee said [ http://www.newshounds.us/20120722_mike_huckabee_aurora_shooting_caused_by_sin_godlessness_in_schools ] on Fox News. "And since we've ordered God out of our schools, and communities, the military and public conversations, you know we really shouldn't act so surprised ... when all hell breaks loose."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/mike-huckabee-school-shooting_n_2303792.html [with (now going past 30,000) comments]
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Bryan Fischer: God Did Not Protect Connecticut Shooting Victims Because Prayer Banned In Schools (VIDEO)
*
Fischer: God Didn't Stop School Shooting Because He's A Gentleman Who Doesn't Go Where Not Wanted
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-god-didnt-stop-ct-school-shooting-because-hes-gentleman-who-doesnt-go-where-he-not-w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is2x7QTZ8AI
*
By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 12/15/2012 8:26 am EST | Updated: 12/15/2012 3:59 pm EST
As the nation reeled from reports of the horrifying mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting_n_2300831.html ] in Newtown, Conn., most Americans responded with an outpouring of sympathy.
However, Bryan Fischer [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is2x7QTZ8AI (above)] made some notably controversial comments in the wake of the tragedy.
The conservative Christian who has continuously drawn the ire of groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/bryan-fischer ] and GLAAD for his anti-gay rhetoric and vitriolic tirades on behalf of the American Family Association, said on his radio show that God did not protect the victims [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/14/bryan-fischer-all-class.html ] of the Connecticut shooting because prayer has been prohibited from the public school system:
The question is going to come up, where was God? I though God cared about the little children. God protects the little children. Where was God when all this went down. Here's the bottom line, God is not going to go where he is not wanted.
Now we have spent since 1962 -- we're 50 years into this now--we have spent 50 years telling God to get lost, telling God we do not want you in our schools, we don't want to pray to you in our schools, we do not want to pray to your before football games, we don't want to pray to you at graduations, we don't want anybody talking about you in a graduation speech...
In 1962 we kicked prayer out of the schools. In 1963 we kicked God's word out of ours schools. In 1980 we kicked the Ten Commandments out of our schools. We've kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children, but you've got to invite me back into your world first. I'm not going to go where I'm not wanted. I am a gentlemen.
"The ultimate solution here is not the Second Amendment, but the First Amendment," Fisher continued. "Maybe it's time for some school board and administrators to say, we don't care, the lives of our children are just too important to us. We are going to pray in our schools, at the beginning of the day, we are going to pray for protection."
Fischer's comments are his latest attempt to politicize a senseless tragedy.
In November, Fischer said that terrorists who attacked the United States [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/16/bryan-fischer-singing-god-bless-america-prevents-terrorist-attacks/ ] on Sept. 11, 2001 were "the agents of God’s wrath” because they prompted “God Bless America” to be sung at Major League Baseball games, which is one “one of the reasons we haven’t been hit since 9/11," Raw Story notes. He has also said that gun rights are based on God's teachings [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/04/bryan-fischer-gun-rights-based-on-christs-teachings/ ], that being gay may be a "birth defect" [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/bryan-fischer-homosexuality-birth-defect-abortions-_n_2293079.html ] and that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal will increase pedophilia [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/01/bryan-fischer-dont-ask-dont-tell-repeal-pedophilia-military_n_1930352.html ].
However, Fischer is not the only one to make controversial comments regarding the Sandy Hook shooting.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee made similar remarks [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/mike-huckabee-school-shooting_n_2303792.html (excerpted above)] on Friday.
"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/15/bryan-fischer-god-did-not-protect-connecticut-shooting-victims-prayer-banned_n_2303903.html [with comments]
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Former Scout leader admits downloading child porn
Boy Scout leader Edward Orenchuk III, 23, leaves Nassau Police headquarters to be arraigned on felony child pornography charges including three counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child and three counts of possessing a sexual performance by a child. (Dec. 13, 2012)
Photo credit: Howard Schnapp
By CHAU LAM
Originally published: December 13, 2012 10:03 AM
Updated: December 13, 2012 9:23 PM
A former Garden City Boy Scout leader who authorities said downloaded and shared child pornography with others on the Web apologized in a statement for his behavior and told investigators he needs "professional" help.
Edward Orenchuk III, 23, said he knew it was wrong for him to capture images of children engaging in sex with adults off the Internet and transfer them to his computer, according to the Dec. 12 statement to police, and he promised to never do it again.
"I can now only seek forgiveness from [God], do my penance and hope for forgiveness," Orenchuk said.
At his arraignment in First District Court in Hempstead Thursday, Orenchuk pleaded not guilty to three counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child as a sexually motivated felony and three counts of possessing a sexual performance by a child.
His court-appointed attorney, from the Nassau County Legal Aid Society, told the judge that Orenchuk plans to testify when a grand jury is convened to hear his case.
Orenchuk worked at the Garden City Public Library and was an Eagle Scout who serves as an assistant scout master with Boy Scout Troop 243 in Garden City. If convicted, he faces up to 7 years in prison.
Orenchuk's father and an unidentified woman were in court but they declined to comment afterward.
District Court Judge Sondra Pardes set bail at $200,000 cash or $400,000 bond and ordered Orenchuk, who was in custody Thursday, to return Dec. 17.
Carolyn Voegler, Garden City Library director, said she was unaware of the charges until she read news accounts and removed him from the work schedule.
A leader for Troop 243 could not immediately be reached for comment. But a spokesman for Theodore Roosevelt Council of Boy Scouts, which serves nearly 10,500 youth and 294 scouting units including Troop 243, said Thursday that Orenchuk's membership has been revoked. The organization issued a statement, saying it was "shocked to learn about the allegations," which run "counter to everything for which the Boy Scouts of America stands."
Investigators from the Nassau district's attorney's office tracked the downloaded images to Orenhuck's Wheeler Avenue home in Garden City. During a search, Orenchuk admitted he had "hundreds" of images on his computer, authorities said.
In his statement to police, Orenchuk said when he got his MacBook, he downloaded a program to retrieve child pornography off the Internet. However, he said he did not mean to share them with others.
Copyright © 2012 Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/former-scout-leader-admits-downloading-child-porn-1.4328208 [with comments] [and see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/boy-scout-leader-faces-ch_n_2293386.html (with comments)]
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This Week in God
By Steve Benen
Sat Dec 15, 2012 10:27 AM EST
First up from the God Machine this week is a look at the deeply unfortunate reaction from some prominent religious right leaders to yesterday's school massacre in Connecticut.
The American Family Association's Bryan Fischer blamed [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-god-didnt-stop-ct-school-shooting-because-hes-gentleman-who-doesnt-go-where-he-not-w (see above)] the horrific violence on public schools' neutrality towards religion. God could have protected the gunman's victims, Fischer said, but chose not to because "God is not going to go where he is not wanted." Around the same time, Mike Huckabee made a similar argument [ http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/12/14/huckabee-schools-become-a-place-of-carnage-when/191864 (see above)] on Fox News.
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U_qPSCDZq4 embedded; same at the top of this post]
For those who can't watch clips online, Neil Cavuto said that many invariably ask after tragedies like this, "How could God let this happen?" Huckabee responded:
"Well, you know, it's an interesting thing. We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? [...]
"You know, God wasn't armed. He didn't go to the school. But God will be there in the form of a lot people with hugs and with therapy and a whole lot of ways in which I think he will be involved in the aftermath. Maybe we ought to let him in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end."
So, by Huckabee's reasoning, the separation of church and state is at least partially responsible for a gunman killing 26 people, including 20 children. There are a few problems with such a perspective.
Theologically, many Christians believe God is omnipresent, and can't be "systematically removed" from anything. For that matter, there's very little in the Christian tradition that suggests God punishes children when constitutional law hurts His feelings.
Politically, Huckabee's comments -- seeking to exploit a violent tragedy to push a bogus culture war agenda -- are a reminder that the former Arkansas governor and failed presidential candidate occasionally just isn't a nice guy [ http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/05/16/11734824-morally-repugnant-political-whores ].
And legally, Huckabee doesn't have the foggiest idea what he's talking about.
For the Republican pundit, Americans "have systematically removed God from our schools," presumably a reference to Supreme Court rulings prohibiting state-sponsored, government-endorsed religion in public schools.
What Huckabee may not appreciate is just how many religious rights public school students currently enjoy. Contrary to myth, students can pray before, during, and after school, so long as it's not disruptive to class. They can say grace before meals in the cafeteria, they can invite classmates to religious services, and they can form after-school religious clubs. All of this is legal right now, under existing law and court precedents, suggesting if anyone has tried to "systematically remove" religion from public schools, they've failed.
The only thing the law prohibits is schools and school officials interfering. Government, in other words, must remain neutral, leaving religious lessons in the hands of families and faith leaders.
Huckabee may find this offensive, and may prefer big government step in to promote religion. That's certainly his right. But to blame horrific violence on his confusion about church-state separation is, at a minimum, deeply unfortunate.
Also from the God Machine this week:
* Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) declared last Saturday a "Day of Restoration" [ https://www.au.org/media/press-releases/kansas-governor-s-promotion-of-fundamentalist-prayer-event-undermines ] in his state, and called on his constituents to "collectively repent of distancing ourselves from God and ask for His mercy on us."
* The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, generally known as the Mormon Church, has shifted its teachings, and now believes sexuality is not a personal choice [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/mormon-church-sexuality-is-not-a-choice ]. The church continues to believe, however, that it is sinful to "act on" homosexuality.
* A Milwaukee-area Roman Catholic priest was stripped of his priestly duties [ http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/08/15698507-priest-stripped-of-duties-for-celebrating-mass-with-woman-priest ] last week after he presided over a Mass with a woman priest.
* And in Texas, a chain email prompted Dallas-area school officials to launch an investigation into "Islamic bias" in the district's curriculum. Ironically, the probe reached the opposite conclusion: there's a Christian bias in schools [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/12/12/1321841/texas-school-islam-christian-bias/ ], not a Muslim one.
© 2012 NBCNews.com
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/12/15/15928590-this-week-in-god [with comments]
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The Shooting Of Children And 'God's Plan'
By Edward J. Blum
Posted: 12/14/2012 9:21 pm
Children die. Sometimes peacefully at home, as my eight-month-old son did about a year ago. Sometimes when bombs blow up churches, as was the case in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, when four little girls died. And sometimes they are slaughtered, as in several biblical tales and during the shootings in Connecticut. These are horrific moments that leave us wondering, "where is God?"
We are not the first, and sadly, we will not be the last, to wonder about the place of the sacred amid the deaths of innocents. That theodical problem is with us - theologically unsolved and socially unresolved. But history and personal experience have taught me one thing: silence can be powerful.
"God has a plan for this," a woman explained to me as she prattled on just before the memorial service for my son Elijah. She meant the words to be comforting, but I swallowed them as if lumps of clay. They have sat in my stomach ever since, and try as I may I have been unable to vomit them out spiritually. Providential interpretations of everyday life sometimes feel satisfying - like when bad traffic slows me or down or when a friend has a cold. The deaths of children are quite another.
This chatty woman was Elijah's very evangelical grandmother. She meant well; she loved and loves Elijah, but to her, everything was in the hands of a big, all-seeing, all-powerful Father. For me, the thought that God had a plan for my son to be unable to eat, that God intended for my son to fail to breath, or that God was instrumental in my son dying in my arms was disgusting. To me, that God could only be an awful and wicked monster.
And the thought, today, that God perhaps has a plan amid the Connecticut shooting sickens me as well.
As a historian, I knew that I was neither the first, nor the last to lose a child. Millions have lost their children or experienced those losses from afar, and sometimes in devastating and highly public circumstances. In 1963, white terrorists killed four young girls when they bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Anne Moody (who became a civil rights activist and then wrote one of the most famous memoirs of the movement) did not know them, but she heard the news on the radio with her family in Mississippi. It sent shockwaves through them. "I looked at George; he sat with his face buried in the palms of his hands. Dave sat motionless with tears in his eyes. Mattie looked at Dave as if she had been grounded by an electric shock. I put my hand up to my face. Tears were pouring out of my eyes, and I hadn't even known I was crying." She could not remain in the house. Moody fled into the streets and then, lost and confused, she "I found myself in a graveyard."
She wanted to find God and some meaning in it all. "I sat there looking up through the trees, trying to communicate with God." She prayed, "Now talk to me, God. Come on down and talk to me." God did not come down, so Moody decided to shout up. "Mama used to tell us that you would forgive us seventy-seven times a day, and I believed in you. I bet you those girls in Sunday school were being taught the same as I was when I was their age. It that teaching wrong? Are you going to forgive their killers?" Moody was at a loss for how to deal with the deaths and with the killers.
On that day, Moody's pacifism died. She would no longer stand back as others used violence to get their way. If God refused to help, then she even threatened violence at his throne. If she found out that God was "black," then, "I'll try my best to kill you when I get to heaven."
For Anne Moody, traditional Christian teachings offered her very little, if anything. Turning the other cheek would only allow the violent to continue. Arguments that "God has a plan" would never bring back those four little girls (as they will not bring back the lost in Connecticut or my little son). She wanted change and change now - from heaven and from politicians.
But perhaps God was there as Moody prayed - in the silence. Perhaps God did not say anything, because God knows that words at times like that were meaningless. Perhaps God is more like the whisper in the wind that the biblical Eljiah experienced or like the Jesus who knelt silently when the "adulterous woman" was brought before him. Perhaps he knew, as my friend Jonathan Walton - now the pastor at Harvard University's Memorial Chapel - knew that one can mourn with another without telling them how to interpret the events. Reverend Walton's text message to me after my son's death is the only one I have kept: it reads simply, "sigh." He knew as a father and as a brother that this was not the time to counsel.
So as we mourn the many losses; as we hug our children; as we have our debates over gun control; and as we wonder where God is, perhaps we can think about what we say and what we do not. Perhaps in this moment "sigh" is better than childish theology; perhaps to remain attentively quiet is what God would ask of us - because that is what God seems to do too.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edward-j-blum/the-shooting-of-children-_b_2304677.html [with comments]
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Outrage Over Comic Victoria Jackson's Sandy Hook Comments, Says Killer No Different Than Women Who Have Abortions
By Radar Staff
Posted on Dec 16, 2012 @ 05:26PM
Victoria Jackson is at it again.
The former Saturday Night Live comic and outspoken ultra conservative has made a series of controversial comments in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.
Jackson took to her Facebook page [ https://www.facebook.com/victoriajacksonfanpage ] to comment on the tragedy that has rocked the nation since Friday when 20 six to seven-year-old children were gunned down in Newtown, Connecticut.
[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/victoria-jackson-connecticut-school-shooting_n_2303518.html (with comments)]
“My friend Jim Riley posted: ‘Wasn’t the Connecticut killer just doing what abortionists do every day? It’s a wonder we don’t have more 20-year-old 'dads' doing what women and doctors have been an accomplice to for years in America," she wrote.
“’When you forget the TEN COMMANDMENTS, people, THIS is what you get’.”
While one outraged person commented that Jackson should have to "go before all of the families that lost loved ones" with her views, that didn't stop Jackson.
The Tea Party supporter went on to criticize President Barack Obama who tearfully addressed [ http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/12/newtown-school-shooting-video-gunman-adam-lanza-connecticut-sandy-hook ] the country in the wake of the shootings.
Jackson wrote: “Obama dramatically wiped a tear as he said, ‘The majority of those who died today were children – beautiful little kids [ http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/12/father-slain-sandy-hook-child-emilie-parker-offers-condolences-shooter-family ] …They had their entire lives ahead of them…”
She adds: “YEAH OBAMA. SAME AS THE MILLION BABIES YOU HAD ABORTED THIS YEAR.
“ARE YOU CRYING FOR THEM?!”
Jackson frequently uses social media to share her controversial views. As RadarOnline.com previously reported [ http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/11/victoria-jackson-tweets-election-barack-obama ] the 53-year-old let rip on election night when President Obama was reelected.
She tweeted: “I can’t stop crying. America died.” Jackson also wrote: “Thanks a lot Christians, for not showing up. You disgust me.”
On her Facebook page Jackson describes herself as being “an outspoken activist for the conservative movement.”
Copyright 2012 Radar Online
http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/12/victoria-jackson-compares-sandy-hook-killer-women-have-abortion [with comments]
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Westboro Baptist Church says ‘Gay rights caused Newton school shooting massacre’
Members of Westboro Baptist Church
Photo credit: topics.pennlive.com
By: Tarringo Vaughan
December 16, 2012
The Westboro Baptist Church, which prides itself on being an anti-gay church, has found a way to blame the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut on homosexuality. As the town of Newtown begins to try to recover from the tragic events that took place on Friday at Sandy Hook elementary school, members of the Westboro Baptist church have threatened to picket the site of the shooting believing it was God’s way of punishing the state of Connecticut for legalizing same-sex marriage. Acoording to GayStarNews [ http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/westboro-baptists-threaten-picket-sandy-hook-shooting-site161212 ] on Sunday, members of the church have made several threats of picketing via twitter.
One Church member tweeted “Westboro will picket Sandy Hook elementary school to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment.”
While another tweeted, “God Almight smacked USA with #Sandy & she’s brazen in her sin still; THEN he gives you a right hook – make that #SandyHook! #RepentingYet??”
If Westboro Baptist Church wasn’t already the “most controversial church in the world”, it certainly is now. These insensitive remarks and beliefs come right after the names of the twenty children and six adults who were murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school were announced. Most of those children were between the ages of six and seven. The death of any child is never God’s purpose.
Members of the anti-gay church blame the advances in LGBT rights for everything bad that happens to Americans. They have blamed LGBT rights for every natural disaster that happens and every major tragedy that takes place in the United States. The church has not missed the opportunity to blame what most believe as the second worst mass shooting in US history on homosexuality also but what they fail to recognize is that there were many innocent lives taken and affected and that their hate for any group will not be tolerated.
© 2012 Clarity Digital Group LLC d/b/a Examiner.com
http://www.examiner.com/article/westboro-baptist-church-says-gay-rights-caused-newton-school-shooting-massacre [with comments]
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Anonymous Hacks The Westboro Baptist Church: Posts All Their Personal Information
By Wolff Bachner
Posted: December 16, 2012
Commentary – Updated | The hacking collective known as Anonymous renewed their war on the Westboro Baptist Church today. After the haters from the infamous church posted their intentions to picket the funerals of the twenty children [ http://www.inquisitr.com/440355/westboro-baptist-church-to-picket-sandy-hook-elementary-praise-god-for-shooting/ ] killed in the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, Anonymous responded by re-posting the personal and professional information [ http://www.armywtfmoments.com/leaked-wbc-personal-contact-information (currently results in a 'not found')] for members of the church on the Internet. Now the general public can contact the church members directly and tell them what they think about people who would desecrate the funerals of murdered children.
Westboro Baptist Church has been irritating Americans for years with venom filled message about their demented version of God. According to the many closely related and intermarried members of the Phelps family who make up the majority of the congregation of the so-called church, God enjoys killing children and soldiers. They constantly proclaim God hates homosexuals and plans to destroy America for not following the Westboro Baptist Church’s twisted version of Christianity. The incredible obsession with homosexuality expressed by Fred and family seems to many as a sure fire case of “thou dost protest too much.”
Anonymous has been after the Westboro Baptist Church for several months now, hacking their websites repeatedly. Recently, they accused the church [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20033942-501465.html ] of creating a fake letter from the hacking group in order to trick other hackers into attacking the website. Anonymous warned their supporters the church planned to harvest internet addresses and sue people. Suing people is apparently the primary activity of the Westboro Baptist Church when they aren’t screaming hate at funerals.
Of course, Westboro denied the charges and taunted Anonymous as incompetent hackers. They claimed their website was protected by God. Big mistake. A few days later, while a Westboro spokeswoman was boasting about how the church foiled Anonymous on a radio talk show, an Anonymous spokesman called in and hacked the church’s website in real time on the air [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/25/anonymous-westboro-baptist-church_n_828068.html ].
Hopefully saner heads will prevail and nothing terrible will occur if the Westboro Baptist Church shows up in Newtown, Connecticut. The State Police made the extraordinary decision to assign a trooper to each of the victim’s families to prevent unwelcome idiots from tormenting them and to protect their privacy.
It is hard to imagine what kind of person would attend the funerals for these children and promote the hate filled message of the Phelps family and their followers. While we certainly do not condone illegal activity, it is hard not to root for Anonymous as they take it to these sad, pathetic excuses for human beings from the Westboro Baptist Church. If the Church’s website is offline forever, it wouldn’t be a moment too soon for most Americans.
UPDATE 4:00 am CST:
A few minutes after the original commentary was published, The Inquisitr received an email from a sender who claimed to represent Anonymous. The email is similar in content to many other “official” Anonymous emails and we decided to share it with our readers. The email included the following statement:
“Just hacked Westboro’s site. Freedom of speech is one thing. But freedom to hate is another. A domain such as “godhatesfags.com should not exist despite rumblings of members picketing Sandy Hook. Those families have enough anguish to deal with.”
The conflict between Anonymous and the Westboro Baptist Church is building to a fever pitch and judging from the multitude of reader comments on several prominent social media websites, the public strongly supports Anonymous by a ninety nine to one majority.
How do you feel about the war between Anonymous and the Westboro Baptist Church? Do you think Anonymous is doing a good deed by hacking the Church’s website or should everyone respect their First Amendment rights and just try to ignore them?
© 2012 The Inquisitr
http://www.inquisitr.com/440545/anonymous-hacks-the-westboro-baptist-church-posts-all-their-personal-information/ [with comments]
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Colin, You’re AMAZING!!!
By: Josh and Brent
We’ve received over 8000 congratulation wishes so far, and we’ve read every single one. Going through them is like winning the race all over again. They each made us feel very special, and we thank you.
But today, we want to help someone else feel special.
Below is one of the first letters we received this week after winning the Amazing Race. It comes from a mother with a son named Colin:
“I’m sure you guys are way too busy to read this, but I want you to know how inspirational you two are to my 12 year old son. He is gay and is dealing with bullying and harassment in middle school. It’s so hard to see him going through this, and sometimes the “It Gets Better” message is lost on a 12 year old who feels that middle school will never end…We cheered you on every Sunday night and agonized every time you had difficulties. My son was so incredibly thrilled when you two won last night (as was I!). Thank you for helping him see that not only DOES it get better, it gets AMAZING.” (Permission was granted by both Colin and his mother to reprint letter and use names.)
We were called the “Ultimate Underdogs” on the Amazing Race. And when we hit the finish mat, we urged everyone who feels like they’re down-and-out to “keep going, try as hard as you can, eventually someone will help you – and you will win.”
Colin, we know that you’re doing your best, and working as hard as you can in school. We shared Colin’s mom’s note with our fellow Amazing Racers – who have also all been underdogs for various reasons at some point in their lives.
And here is the entire Amazing Race 21 team’s message to you, Colin!…
[embedded images, folks holding up supportive messages]
Copyright © Beekman1802.com
http://beekman1802.com/colin-youre-amazing/ [with comments]
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Gun Sales In 2012 Set Record, FBI Data Indicates
Posted: 12/14/2012 6:45 pm EST | Updated: 12/14/2012 6:45 pm EST
The gun business in the United States is thriving and the tragic events on Friday [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting_n_2300831.html ] in Newtown, Conn. may likely do little to quell Americans' spending on munitions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded more than 16.8 million background checks for gun purchases in 2012 [ http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/20121203_1998_2012_monthly_yearly_totals.pdf ], the highest number since the FBI began publishing the data in 1998. A record number of requests for background checks for gun buyers went through on Black Friday [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/black-friday-gun-sales_n_2203957.html ] in November, the FBI reported at the time, in part because of fears that President Barack Obama and other lawmakers would tighten gun control laws.
The FBI does not track actual firearms purchases, and the number of weapons sold could be even higher [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/26/black-friday-gun-sales/1727409/ ] than the number of background-check calls because customers can purchase multiple guns, USA Today reports.
If the past is any indication, Friday's mass shooting will do little to slow the pace of sales. It’s not uncommon for gun sales to see a boost following a mass shooting, as buyers head to stores mostly motivated by self-defense, according to the Christian Science Monitor. In the first four days following the July mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., gun sales increased 41 percent [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2012/0725/Why-gun-sales-spike-after-mass-shootings-It-s-not-what-you-might-think ], the CSM reported.
On Friday some pro-gun groups took to Twitter urging people to buy guns: Conservative pundit Ann Coulter tweeted [ http://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/279694604633272320 ] "more guns, less mass shootings" in the wake of the event.
Gun control proponents outraged by Friday's events called for action. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg urged Obama to take "immediate action" [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/michael-bloomberg-gun-control-school-shooting_n_2303499.html ] to tighten gun laws.
Though the industry is doing well, overall gun ownership is actually on the decline [ http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/07/21/the-declining-culture-of-guns-and-violence-in-the-united-states/ ], according to political scientist Patrick Egan. Firearm ownership is at near all-time lows.
Still, the firearms industry had a $31.8 billion impact [ http://nssf.org/impact/ (even not counting shooting victims' expenses) (. . .)] on the economy last year, up from $27.8 billion in 2009, due to job creation, sales and taxes levied on guns, according to data from the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
The firearms industry didn't see much dropoff in the recession that hit so many other U.S. businesses. Gun industry-related jobs grew by more than 30 percent [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ycharts/2012/11/11/gun-maker-stocks-a-replay-of-the-obama-sales-boom/ ] between 2008 and 2011, according to NSSF data cited by Forbes.
Demand for firearms was “robust” in 2008 [ http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-03-22/industries/31223495_1_firearms-sturm-ruger-gun-rights ] and through the downturn, according to National Shooting Sports Foundation statements cited by MarketWatch. In addition, the Foundation noted in 2011 that many indicators showed that the industry “continues to thrive in a down economy,” according to Marketwatch.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/gun-sales-2012_n_2303513.html [with comments]
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Gun Advocate On Connecticut Shooting: Armed Teachers Could Have Minimized Tragedy (VIDEO)
Steve Dulan, a board member of the Michigan Coalition of Responsible Gun Owners said Friday that having armed teachers inside Sandy Hook Elementary School would have "if not prevented, then perhaps minimized" the tragedy.
By John Stephens
Posted: 12/14/2012 9:13 pm EST | Updated: 12/14/2012 9:13 pm EST
Steve Dulan, a board member for the Michigan Coalition of Responsible Gun Owners who is supporting a state bill that would allow concealed weapons in schools and other gun-free zones, said Friday that having armed teachers inside Sandy Hook Elementary School [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/us/connecticut-school-shooting/index.html ] would have, "if not prevented, then perhaps minimized," the tragedy.
"We do know that armed citizens defend themselves all the time, in all kinds of different contexts," Dulan told HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/gun-owners-respond-to-today's-ct-school-shooting-/50c69c6bfe34442123000119 ].
Dulan's comments came in response to a mass shooting Friday morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting_n_2300831.html ] in Newtown, Conn. Police reported 27 deaths, including 20 children, six adults and the shooter, according to the Associated Press.
Watch the Full Segment on HuffPost Live [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/gun-owners-respond-to-today's-ct-school-shooting-/50c69c6bfe34442123000119 ].
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/connecticut-shooting-armed-teachers-gun-advocate_n_2304654.html [with embedded video of the comments and video report, and comments]
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Louie Gohmert Says More Guns Are Answer To Preventing Mass Killings
By Dave Jamieson
Posted: 12/16/2012 10:34 am EST | Updated: 12/16/2012 9:33 pm EST
WASHINGTON -- In the wake of the mass killing that claimed 26 children and adults at a Connecticut elementary school Friday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) made the case Sunday that the answer to preventing massacres in the U.S. is for more Americans to carry guns.
"There has been great investigation and study into this," Gohmert told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, arguing that mass killings happen where citizens tend to be unarmed. "They choose this place [because] they know no one will be armed."
Gohmert argued that the mass slaughter would have gone differently if Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung had been armed.
"Chris, I wish to God she had had an m-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out ... and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids," Gohmert said.
The mass murder in Connecticut has renewed the national discussion about gun control, with Democrats in particular calling for a new assault weapons ban.
So far, Gohmert appears to be one of the few pro-gun rights conservatives in Congress willing to make the public case for more guns in the wake of the Connecticut shooting. "Meet the Press" producer Betsy Fischer Martin tweeted Sunday [ https://twitter.com/BetsyMTP/status/280318090376527874 (and see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/david-gregory-pro-gun-rights-senators_n_2311559.html {with comments})] that the show extended an invitation to 31 pro-gun rights senators in the new Congress to discuss the issue on the show and found no takers.
Gohmert argued Sunday that tighter gun controls such as assault weapon bans are not the answer.
"Once you start drawing the line, where do you stop?" Gohmert said. "That's why it is important to not just look at this emotionally."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/louie-gohmert-guns_n_2311379.html [with comments]
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Bill Bennett, Former Education Secretary, Says Schools Should Consider Arming Employees (VIDEO)
By Dave Jamieson
Posted: 12/16/2012 1:15 pm EST | Updated: 12/16/2012 11:44 pm EST
In the wake of the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting that claimed 26 lives Friday, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett said Sunday that schools should possibly consider arming certain employees to prevent attacks.
"Let's remember the good things here: the heroism of those teachers and that principal," Bennett said on "Meet the Press." "And I'm not so sure -- and I'm sure I'll get mail for this -- I'm not so sure I wouldn't want one person in a school armed, ready for this kind of thing."
"The principal lunged at this guy," Bennett, who served as education secretary under Ronald Reagan, went on. "The school psychologist lunged at the guy. It has to be someone who's trained, responsible. But, my god, if you can prevent this kind of thing, I think you ought to."
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union, advised against arming school employees.
"Schools have to be safe sanctuaries," she said. "We need to actually stop this routine view that just having more guns will actually make people safer. We are opposed to having someone who has access to guns."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) also said more guns weren't the answer.
"Is this the way we want America to go?" Feinstein said. "In other words, the rights of the few overcome the safety of the majority? I don't think so."
Friday's shooting at Sandy Hook School has launched a national debate on gun control, with Feinstein announcing Sunday that she will introduce a bill to ban assault weapons on the first day of the new Congress. The massacre has also renewed a discussion on school security, with Newtown now the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, behind Virginia Tech.
Feinstein laid out details of her bill on Sunday, saying, "it will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession, not retroactively, but prospectively," and also ban the sale of clips of more than ten bullets. "The purpose of this bill is to get ... weapons of war off the streets," she said.
A previous assault weapons ban was signed into law in 1994 but expired ten years later.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/bill-bennett-education-secretary-connecticut-shooting_n_2311774.html [with embedded video, and comments]
===
Dawn Hochsprung, Sandy Hook Principal, Had Implemented New Security Measures
12/15/2012\
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/dawn-hochsprung-sandy-hook-principal-security-measures_n_2303520.html [with comments]
===
Hundreds of bullets, multiple 30-round clips at Conn. school
CBS/AP
December 16, 2012, 4:56 PM
NEWTOWN, Conn. Connecticut state police say multiple 30-round magazines and hundreds of bullets were found at an elementary school where 26 students and staffers were killed.
State Police Lt. Paul Vance also said Sunday that authorities have officially identified the gunman in the school rampage as Adam Lanza. They say his mother, Nancy, was one of his victims.
The gunman shot his mother four times in the head before going to the school, officials said, as details emerged suggesting that Adam Lanza had planned an even more gruesome massacre but was stopped short.
Lanza blasted his way into the building and used a .223 semi-automatic rifle to kill 20 children and six adults, including the principal who tried to stop him, authorities said.
The unthinkable bloodshed might even have been worse. Gov. Dannel Malloy said Lanza shot himself when he heard police coming. He used one of the handguns to kill himself.
The third gun he carried into the school (another semi-automatic pistol) was still in the pocket of his military-style cargo pants when his body was discovered.
The arrival of the first police officers forced Lanza to end his spree earlier than he otherwise might have.
Officials say the presence of a fourth weapon in the trunk of the black Honda Lanza drove to the school - a car which belonged to his mother - suggests he was perhaps thinking of an even broader attack.
"There was a lot of ammo, a lot of clips," State Police Lt. Paul Vance. "Certainly a lot of lives were potentially saved."
The evaluation of ballistics continues, but investigators suspect Lanza never fired the second handgun.
As President Barack Obama prepared a visit and churches opened their doors to comfort a grieving town Sunday, federal agents fanned out to dozens of gun stores and shooting ranges across Connecticut, chasing leads they hoped would cast light on Lanza's life.
Among the questions: Why did his mother, a well-to-do suburban divorcee , keep a cache of high-power weapons in the house? What experience did Lanza have with those guns? And, above all, what set him on a path to go classroom-by-classroom, massacring 6- and 7-year-olds?
Malloy offered no possible motive for the shooting and a law enforcement official has said police have found no letters or diaries left behind that could shed light on it.
All the victims at the school were shot with the rifle, at least some of them up close, and all were apparently shot more than once, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver said. There were as many as 11 shots on the bodies he examined. Lanza died of a gunshot wound to the head from a 10 mm gun, and the bullet was recovered in a classroom wall, said the same official who described the scene at his mother's house.
All six adults killed at the school were women. Of the 20 children, eight were boys and 12 were girls.
Asked whether the children suffered, Carver said, "If so, not for very long." Asked how many bullets were fired, Carver said, "I'm lucky if I can tell you how many I found."
Parents identified the children through photos to spare them some shock, Carver said.
The terrible details about the last moments of young innocents emerged as authorities released their names and ages — the youngest 6 and 7, the oldest 56. They included Ana Marquez-Greene, a little girl who had just moved to Newtown from Canada; Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old teacher who apparently died while trying to hide her pupils; and principal Dawn Hochsprung, who authorities said lunged at the gunman in an attempt to overtake him.
The tragedy has plunged Newtown into mourning and added the picturesque New England community of 27,000 people to the grim map of towns where mass shootings in recent years have periodically reignited the national debate over gun control but led to little change.
School officials were trying to determine what to do about sending the survivors back to class, Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said at a news conference Sunday.
Sinko said he "would find it very difficult" for students to return to the school. But, he added, "we want to keep these kids together. They need to support each other," he said.
Plans were being made for some students to attend classes in nearby Monroe, said Jim Agostine, superintendent of schools there.
Residents and faith leaders reflected Sunday on the mass shooting and what meaning, if any, to find in it. Obama planned to attend an interfaith vigil — the fourth time he will have traveled to a city after a mass shooting.
At St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic church, Jennifer Waters, who at 6 is the same age as many of the victims and attends a different school, came to Mass on Sunday in Newtown with a lot of questions.
"The little children — are they with the angels?" she asked her mother while fiddling with a small plastic figurine on a pew near the back of the church. "Are they going to live with the angels?"
Her mother, Joan, 45, assured her they were, then put a finger to her daughter's lips, urging her to be quiet.
An overflow crowd of more than 800 people attended the 9 a.m. service at the church, where eight children will be buried later this week. The gunman, Adam Lanza, and his mother also attended church here. Spokesman Brian Wallace said the diocese has yet to be asked to provide funerals for either.
Boxes of tissues were placed strategically in each pew and on each window sill. The altar was adorned with bouquets, one shaped as a broken heart, with a zigzag of red carnations cutting through the white ones.
In his homily, the Rev. Jerald Doyle, the diocesan administrator, tried to answer the question of how parishioners could find joy in the holiday season with so much sorrow surrounding them.
"You won't remember what I say, and it will become unimportant," he said. "But you will really hear deep down that word that will finally and ultimately bring peace and joy. That is the word by which we live. That is the word by which we hope. That is the word by which we love."
After the Mass, Joan and Jennifer stopped by a memorial outside the church filled with votive candles and a pile of bouquets and stuffed animals underneath, to pray the Lord's Prayer.
Jennifer asked whether she could take one.
"No, those are for the little children," her mother replied.
"Who died?" her daughter asked.
"Yes," said her mother, wiping away a tear.
Amid the confusion and sorrow, stories of heroism emerged, including an account of Hochsprung, 47, and the school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, 56, rushing toward Lanza in an attempt to stop him. Both died.
There was also 27-year-old teacher Victoria Soto, whose name has been invoked as a portrait of selflessness. Investigators told relatives she was killed while shielding her first-graders from danger. She reportedly hid some students in a bathroom or closet, ensuring they were safe, a cousin, Jim Wiltsie, told ABC News.
"She put those children first. That's all she ever talked about," a friend, Andrea Crowell, told The Associated Press. "She wanted to do her best for them, to teach them something new every day."
There was also 6-year-old Emilie Parker, whose grieving father, Robbie, talked to reporters not long after police released the names of the victims but expressed no animosity, offering sympathy for Lanza's family.
"I can't imagine how hard this experience must be for you," he said.
The gunman's father, Peter Lanza, issued a statement relating his own family's anguish in the aftermath.
"Our family is grieving along with all those who have been affected by this enormous tragedy. No words can truly express how heartbroken we are," he said. "We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why. ... Like so many of you, we are saddened, but struggling to make sense of what has transpired."
The rifle used was a Bushmaster .223-caliber, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to speak about it and talked on condition of anonymity. The gun is commonly seen at competitions and was the type used in the 2002 sniper killings in the Washington, D.C., area. Also found in the school were two handguns, a Glock 10 mm and a Sig Sauer 9 mm.
A law enforcement official said Saturday that authorities were investigating fresh leads that could reveal more about the lead-up to the shooting. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Ginger Colbrun, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said earlier there was no evidence Lanza was involved in gun clubs or had trained for the shooting. When reached later in the day and asked whether that was still true, she said, "We're following any and all leads related to this individual and firearms."
Law enforcement officials have said they have found no note or manifesto from Lanza of the sort they have come to expect after murderous rampages such as the Virginia Tech bloodbath in 2007 that left 33 people dead.
Education officials said they had found no link between Lanza's mother and the school, contrary to news reports that said she was a teacher there. Investigators said they believe Adam Lanza attended Sandy Hook many years ago, but they had no explanation for why he went there Friday.
Authorities said Adam Lanza had no criminal history, and it was not clear whether he had a job. Lanza was believed to have suffered from a personality disorder, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Another law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Lanza also had been diagnosed with Asperger's, a mild form of autism often characterized by social awkwardness.
People with the disorder are often highly intelligent. While they can become frustrated more easily, there is no evidence of a link between Asperger's and violent behavior, experts say.
The law enforcement officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation.
Richard Novia, the school district's head of security until 2008, who also served as adviser for the high school technology club, of which Lanza was a member, said he clearly "had some disabilities."
"If that boy would've burned himself, he would not have known it or felt it physically," Novia said in a phone interview. "It was my job to pay close attention to that."
© 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57559470/hundreds-of-bullets-multiple-30-round-clips-at-conn-school/ [with comments]
===
http://qz.com/37103
===
How school killings in the US stack up against 36 other countries put together
By Simone Foxman and Ritchie King — December 15, 2012
A mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, has—as of the most recent police statements—resulted in the deaths of 27 people, including the gunman. Twenty of those victims were children.
The Academy for Critical Incident Analysis at John Jay College has collected data, compiled from news reports, on 294 attempted or actual multiple killings [ http://archive.aciajj.org/the-acia-archive/datasets-available-for-analysis/shooting-incidents-in-educational-settings/ ] on school grounds that had two or more victims. The data span 38 countries and nearly 250 years, from 1764 to 2010, and do not include “single homicides, off-campus homicides, killings caused by government actions, militaries, terrorists or militants.”
We tried to limit any effects of possible underreporting of cases by limiting the data set to the most recent ten years of data, between 2000 and 2010, and by counting only incidents in which someone was injured or killed. (Limiting the data to 2000 or after also eliminated one country that no longer exists: Austria-Hungary.)
The results are above. The number of such incidents in the US was only one less than in all the other 36 countries put together. In 13 of those countries there were no incidents at all, either actual or attempted.
In 2010, the US was home to a population of approximately 309 million. The populations of these other countries totaled 3.8 billion.
In the vast majority of US killings, perpetrators used guns. By comparison, China—with the second-greatest number of incidents—saw 10 mass killings, but none involving firearms. Germany saw three mass shootings; Finland saw two. Thirteen other countries each saw one incident with at least one person being wounded or killed; in the rest nobody was reported as hurt.
Copyright 2012 Quartz
http://qz.com/37015
===
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/new-york-times-shooting-victims_n_2311329.html [with comments]
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My Plea to the Supreme Court
By Lisa McElroy
Posted: 12/14/2012 5:08 pm
I am flying to Belize today, getting ready to help the Mayan people there celebrate the end of the world.
When I left Philadelphia this morning, I did not think that it would really be the end of the world, but rather a welcoming in of a new era.
It turns out that I was wrong about the end of the world, but right about the new era. Because today, in Newtown, Connecticut, for many parents, teachers, and children, the end of the world has arrived, about a week ahead of schedule. And we're well into a new era, one in which news of a school shooting, or a theater shooting, or a mall shooting, is just an ordinary part of our morning news.
Anyone who knows me -- in fact, anyone who read my post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-mcelroy/supreme-court-gun-control_b_1691982.html ] on July 22, 2012, just after the Aurora shootings -- knows that I have two great loves in life: my children, and the Supreme Court. As I wrote back then, it's rare that these two passions intersect.
In fact, most Americans would say that the Supreme Court is almost never relevant in their lives, and certainly not relevant to their children's lives.
The school shootings over the past 13 years or so are evidence of just how wrong they are. Because the Supreme Court's decisions [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller (more complete listing at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82485291 )] over the past four or five years have guaranteed the rights of most Americans to bear arms, and though those rights may be limited for people with certain kinds of documented mental illnesses or felony records, the Court's interpretation of the Second amendment to the United States Constitution has made it difficult to stop most gun sales before tragedy occurs.
Because I'm a Supreme Court expert, I'm often asked how many more Justices President Obama will have the opportunity to appoint. I don't know the answer, of course (Justices don't have to retire until they want to, and it's impossible to predict death or incapacity during life tenure), but I'd make an educated guess that lightning will strike at least twice over the next four years.
Because I'm a mother, I'm often asked how these school shootings make me feel. And I'll tell you how they make me feel. They make me feel unbelievably angry. No, unlike my Facebook friends who post that they're stunned, or in a state of disbelief, or saddened, or grieving, I'm just plain bullshit mad.
Because the Supreme Court expert in me is talking to the mother in me. And the Supreme Court expert in me knows that the only way to even think about stopping the carnage that the mother in me hates is to appoint Justices to the bench who believe that the Court's current interpretation of the Second Amendment is wrong. Even one new Justice who believed that guns were for militias, not individuals, could vote to change the law, perhaps for decades, perhaps for the entire rest of my children's lifetimes. And my worries about putting my children on the school bus would be much more about whether the bus would crash or some mean kid would bully them than about whether they'd come home in a body bag. And my children would only have to worry about whether my grandchildren would be able to teletransport themselves home safely at the end of the day instead of whether those grandchildren would fall to the floor in some public school classroom, full of bullet holes.
Honestly, folks, it's that easy. Put people in the Senate who will make gun rights and the Second Amendment the threshold question for whether a nominee is qualified. Forget abortion -- we've been fighting about that for 40 years, and nominees are just not going to answer that question. (Remember Clarence Thomas back in the '90s, who claimed he had never discussed Roe v. Wade?) Forget gay marriage -- the Court has already agreed to hear challenges to laws prohibiting recognition of it, and I predict that, by June, the Constitution will guarantee that anyone can marry the person she loves, just as our children already think she should be able to.
Vote for senators who will refuse to confirm a nominee who thinks it is OK for an individual to own a gun that can slaughter most of an elementary school. Who will think that the day a school shooting occurs is the absolute right time to talk about gun control. Who will, when the Supreme Court changes its interpretation of the Second Amendment -- and remember, it will only take ONE conservative Justice replaced by one liberal or moderate one -- vote to pass strict gun control laws, keeping guns out of the hands of those who would use them to hurt children, and parents, and teachers, and communities.
Otherwise, folks, we're looking at the end of the world.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-mcelroy/my-plea-to-the-supreme-court_b_2303510.html [with comments]
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Clause and Effect
Sagmeister Inc.
By ADAM FREEDMAN
Published: December 16, 2007
LAST month, the Supreme Court agreed to consider District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down Washington’s strict gun ordinance as a violation of the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms.”
This will be the first time in nearly 70 years that the court has considered the Second Amendment. The outcome of the case is difficult to handicap, mainly because so little is known about the justices’ views on the lethal device at the center of the controversy: the comma. That’s right, the “small crooked point,” as Richard Mulcaster described this punctuation upstart in 1582. The official version of the Second Amendment has three of the little blighters:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The decision invalidating the district’s gun ban, written by Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, cites the second comma (the one after “state”) as proof that the Second Amendment does not merely protect the “collective” right of states to maintain their militias, but endows each citizen with an “individual” right to carry a gun, regardless of membership in the local militia.
How does a mere comma do that? According to the court, the second comma divides the amendment into two clauses: one “prefatory” and the other “operative.” On this reading, the bit about a well-regulated militia is just preliminary throat clearing; the framers don’t really get down to business until they start talking about “the right of the people ... shall not be infringed.”
The circuit court’s opinion is only the latest volley in a long-simmering comma war. In a 2001 Fifth Circuit case, a group of anti-gun academics submitted an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief arguing that the “unusual” commas of the Second Amendment support the collective rights interpretation. According to these amici, the founders’ use of commas reveals that what they really meant to say was “a well-regulated militia ... shall not be infringed.”
Now that the issue is heading to the Supreme Court, the pro-gun American Civil Rights Union is firing back with its own punctuation-packing brief. Nelson Lund, a professor of law at George Mason University, argues that everything before the second comma is an “absolute phrase” and, therefore, does not modify anything in the main clause. Professor Lund states that the Second Amendment “has exactly the same meaning that it would have if the preamble had been omitted.”
Refreshing though it is to see punctuation at the center of a national debate, there could scarcely be a worse place to search for the framers’ original intent than their use of commas. In the 18th century, punctuation marks were as common as medicinal leeches and just about as scientific. Commas and other marks evolved from a variety of symbols meant to denote pauses in speaking. For centuries, punctuation was as chaotic as individual speech patterns.
The situation was even worse in the law, where a long English tradition held that punctuation marks were not actually part of statutes (and, therefore, courts could not consider punctuation when interpreting them). Not surprisingly, lawmakers took a devil-may-care approach to punctuation. Often, the whole business of punctuation was left to the discretion of scriveners, who liked to show their chops by inserting as many varied marks as possible.
Another problem with trying to find meaning in the Second Amendment’s commas is that nobody is certain how many commas it is supposed to have. The version that ended up in the National Archives has three, but that may be a fluke. Legal historians note that some states ratified a two-comma version. At least one recent law journal article refers to a four-comma version.
The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas (which, I know, means that only outlaws will have commas). Without the distracting commas, one can focus on the grammar of the sentence. Professor Lund is correct that the clause about a well-regulated militia is “absolute,” but only in the sense that it is grammatically independent of the main clause, not that it is logically unrelated. To the contrary, absolute clauses typically provide a causal or temporal context for the main clause.
The founders — most of whom were classically educated — would have recognized this rhetorical device as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” (ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras). The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.”
Likewise, when the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary.
Advocates of both gun rights and gun control are making a tactical mistake by focusing on the commas of the Second Amendment. After all, couldn’t one just as easily obsess about the founders’ odd use of capitalization? Perhaps the next amicus brief will find the true intent of the amendment by pointing out that “militia” and “state” are capitalized in the original, whereas “people” is not.
Adam Freedman, the author of “The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese,” writes the Legal Lingo column for New York Law Journal Magazine.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16freedman.html
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Illinois Concealed Carry Ruling Sets Stage For High Court Fight Over Right To Carry A Gun
In this March 7, 2012 file photo, gun owners and supporters participate in an Illinois Gun Owners Lobby Day rally at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield. The next big issue in the national debate over guns -- whether people have a right to be armed in public -- is moving closer to Supreme Court review.
(AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File)
By MARK SHERMAN 12/16/12 12:53 PM ET EST
WASHINGTON — The next big issue in the national debate over guns – whether people have a right to be armed in public – is moving closer to Supreme Court review.
A provocative ruling by a panel of federal appeals court judges in Chicago struck down the only statewide ban on carrying concealed weapons, in Illinois. The ruling is somewhat at odds with those of other federal courts that have largely upheld state and local gun laws, including restrictions on concealed weapons, since the Supreme Court's landmark ruling declaring that people have a right to have a gun for self-defense.
In, 2008, the court voted 5-4 in District of Columbia v. Heller to strike down Washington's ban on handgun ownership and focused mainly on the right to defend one's own home. The court left for another day how broadly the Second Amendment may protect gun rights in other settings.
Legal scholars say the competing appellate rulings mean that day is drawing near for a new high court case on gun rights.
The appeals court ruling in Chicago came early in a week that ended with the mass shooting in Connecticut that left 28 people dead, including 20 children at an elementary school and the presumed gunman.
Laurie Levenson, a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said that along with thorny legal issues, "we have the overlay of these tragedies hitting us on a somewhat regular basis."
The author of a book that traces the battle over gun control in the U.S. said he thinks Supreme Court intervention is likely in the short-term. "Since the Heller case, the next great question for the Supreme Court to decide was whether there is a right to carry guns in public," said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, whose book "Gunfight" was published last year.
Roughly 40 states make it easy for people to carry a gun in public. But in California, New York and a few other states, local and state regulations make it difficult if not impossible to get a license to carry a weapon. Illinois and the District of Columbia have been the only places to refuse to allow people to be armed in public.
"In some of our most populated states, the right does not exist either because it's completely forbidden or practically forbidden," said Alan Gura, the lawyer who won the Heller case at the Supreme Court.
Gun rights advocates and gun control supporters are as split over the issue of having guns in public as they were over whether the Constitution protected gun ownership at all – and along the same lines.
Jonathan Lowy, an attorney with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said, "If law enforcement makes a determination that somebody would increase the danger to the public by carrying a loaded gun on the streets, then that person should not be carrying a loaded gun. Some people in the gun lobby want to tie the hands of law enforcement."
But Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, said, "Clearly, the individual right under the Constitution does not apply only to your home. People have lives outside their home and the constitutional right applies outside their home."
Sometimes, LaPierre said, "The only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
Judge Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals employed similar reasoning in his majority opinion striking down the Illinois law. Posner said that threatening confrontations do not only or even principally occur at home. "A Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower," the judge said.
He homed in on the distinction between inside the home and on the street in his questioning of another recent appeals court ruling that upheld New York's restrictive law on granting people permits to carry concealed weapons. A unanimous panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the requirement that people demonstrate a special need to carry a concealed weapon does not violate the Constitution.
"Our principal reservation about the Second Circuit's analysis is its suggestion that the Second Amendment should have much greater scope inside the home than outside simply because other provisions of the Constitution have been held to make that distinction," including the right to privacy that underlies the high court ruling striking down sodomy laws. "Well of course, the interest in having sex inside one's home is much greater than the interest in having sex on the sidewalk in front of one's home. But the interest in self-protection is as great outside as inside the home," Posner said.
In dissent, Judge Ann Williams said governments have a strong interest in regulating guns on the street. "It is common sense, as the majority recognizes, that a gun is dangerous to more people when carried outside the home. When firearms are carried outside the home, the safety of a broader range of citizens is at issue. The risk of being injured or killed now extends to strangers, law enforcement personnel, and other private citizens who happen to be in the area," Williams said.
Gura represents the challengers to the New York law and he said he will ask the high court to review the 2nd Circuit ruling. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has not yet said whether the state will ask the full 7th Circuit court to reconsider its ruling or appeal to the Supreme Court.
So far, the Supreme Court has turned down appeals asking it to say more about guns. But that reluctance might fade if the court were presented with a split between appeals courts, typically a strong factor in attracting the justices' interest.
The Second Amendment talks about "the right to keep and bear arms and it's as if some courts want to take giant eraser to the words `and bear' and pretend that they're not there," said David Thompson, managing partner of the Cooper and Kirk law firm in Washington. Thompson represented some plaintiffs in the Illinois case.
Northwestern University law professor Eugene Kontrovich said the difference between the New York and Chicago courts over what it means to bear arms could be enough to persuade the Supreme Court to intervene.
Winkler, the UCLA professor, said he thinks the Illinois statute would fall if it were to put to a test at the Supreme Court, probably by the same 5-4 vote as in Heller. But it is hard to predict how the Supreme Court might rule on restrictions that fall short of an outright ban on the right to carry a loaded weapon in public for self-defense, he said.
"Public possession is a different issue than having a gun in your home," Winkler said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/illinois-concealed-carry-_1_n_2311130.html [with comments]
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To Judge Richard Posner, Gun Control Is a Joke
Cody Miller, 9, fires a machine gun with help from a range worker in West Point, Kentucky.
(Aaron Bernstein/Reuters)
Days before Newtown, the Seventh Circuit extended the Second Amendment beyond even the Supreme Court's decisions.
By Garrett Epps
Dec 16 2012
Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit has never minded being the bad guy in public debate. He once suggested that adoption law could be improved by selling babies [ http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/724219 ] to the highest bidder. After September 11, he publicly defended the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II.
But not even a contrarian like Posner could have imagined that he would issue a pro-gun opinion so radical [ ] it makes Justice Scalia look timid -- in the same week as the Newtown massacre of 20 children and six adults by an intruder with a gun.
Posner's opinon in the new case Moore v. Madigan contains the most bizarre line I have read in a federal-court opinion since, well, ever. The issue is whether the Supreme Court's two recent gun-rights decisions, Heller v. District of Columbia and McDonald v. City of Chicago, create a right to armed self-defense outside the home. The Court's opinions said they did not; but to Posner, that's silly: "To confine the right to be armed to the home is to divorce the Second Amendment from the right of self-defense described in Heller and McDonald. It is not a property right -- a right to kill a houseguest who, in a fit of aesthetic fury, tries to slash your copy of Norman Rockwell's painting, Santa with Elves."
People may be dying in the streets, but to Posner, the case is a chance for shtick.
The Seventh Circuit case was a challenge to Illinois's statute -- one of the strictest in the country -- against carrying a loaded, accessible firearm anywhere outside the home. As noted, Heller and McDonald concerned the right to own a hand weapon in a private home. Posner has previously been critical of Heller, but in Moore he extends it far beyond its original result. He concludes that the Second Amendment right must extend beyond the home, because it's possible some people that carry guns might be able to defend themselves against attackers with guns. True, the statistical evidence of this is pretty thin, but Posner really doesn't care. "Twenty-first century Illinois has no hostile Indians. But a Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower," he reasons. There's some evidence that this may increase the severity of crime, if not the rate -- but that doesn't matter either: "the Supreme Court made clear in Heller that it wasn't going to make the right to bear arms depend on casualty counts."
Even though Posner rather casually changes the holding of Heller, he is right about that. Neither the Supreme Court nor the Seventh Circuit displays the slightest concern for the real-world effects of its decision. Instead, what matters is a kind of airless, abstract reasoning. To Justice Scalia, it is clothed in the garb of history; to Posner, it represents "pragmatism." In fact, that callous indifference to consequences -- ahistorical and unpragmatic -- disfigures both the Supreme Court's Second Amendment cases and reveals a flip attitude toward the problems of those who must live their lives outside federal courthouses surrounded by metal detectors and marshals.
More and more, the right wing of the federal judiciary is behaving like the nasty old uncle at the family dinner table, grumbling about how stupid young people are today. Why do they need medical care, or contraception, or protections from sexual violence, or anti-smoking efforts, or gun control? We didn't have any of that stuff when I was a kid, and look how great I turned out!
That avuncular growl is grating at the best of times. In a moment of national mourning, it is repellent.
Justice Scalia made his own set of headlines this week, mocking and belittling gay rights to a Princeton audience. Posner has recently made a specialty of needling Scalia, but the truth is the two judges are more alike than either would like to admit. And both of them might consider whether it's a good time to dial it back a bit.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/to-judge-richard-posner-gun-control-is-a-joke/266323/ [with comments]
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Did This Really Happen in My Elementary School?
[Eric Theyer/Reuters]
The town and school where I have innumerable positive memories have been suddenly torn away from me in the most grotesque way possible.
By Edward Small
Dec 15 2012, 11:52 AM ET
I've always had two stock answers for people whenever they ask me about Newtown. One is, "It's from the half of Connecticut that wants to be New York City." The other is, "We invented Scrabble. After that, nothing really happened." It's a town of about 27,000 people where things don't stay open past 10 p.m. and a boy digging a big hole is a story worthy of the local paper's front page. It's also where I grew up and made my first friends and got my first job and learned about 80 percent of what I know today.
And now, none of that matters.
It's just after midnight at the end of a long day of shaking, crying, worrying, and telling several concerned friends that I'm fine. It's only true in the narrowest sense, of course. Yesterday, 20 children were shot and killed in my old elementary school. I'm sad, confused, infuriated, and I want to do something about it. The problem is, I can't think of anything that would actually matter.
I think that's where a lot of the confused anger and despair I've been trying to deal with over the past 24 hours stems from: sheer, overwhelming impotence. The town and school where I have innumerable positive memories have both been suddenly torn away from me in the most grotesque way possible. I say that without exaggeration: we're talking about a gunman who opened fire in anelementary school. That can't be a real event.
When talking to friends and family about this, the one phrase that keeps coming up is "I can't believe." It's a cliché, but also true in a very literal sense. I spent all day reading the headlines and the body counts, but part of me is still waiting for the grand reveal that none of this really happened because how could any of it have really happened? How could the elementary school where I wrote my first story and got in trouble for calling Ross Perot a butthead also be the site of the nation's second-deadliest school shooting? I can't reconcile the memories I have of Sandy Hook School with the events of today. They simply aren't the same place.
In other words, the feeling of helplessness isn't just coming from the fact that I can't do anything about the murders on Friday. If anything, I'm still far too baffled as to how and why a fellow human being could kill 27 people--20 of them schoolchildren -- to feel much of anything besides inchoate shock and rage. The helplessness comes more from the fact that my hometown doesn't belong to me anymore.
Over the course of just a few hours on a crisp Friday in December, I saw my humble town become infamous. I saw its name plastered on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I saw it trending on Twitter. I heard it come out of Barack Obama's mouth. (Although I'm pretty sure you said "Newton," Mr. President. I tried to ignore that because it was a good speech, but come on. We're very proud of that second "w.") It belongs to the world now, not to me. And this is all and only because of the shooting.
I don't know how you make sense of an event like this, where even words like "abominable" and "sickening" come off as understatement. I don't know what type of person decides to kill 20 elementary school students. If Columbine is any indication, the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary will likely be the main if not the only thing that people think of when they hear the word "Newtown" for decades to come. This is eminently understandable, but I can't help but feel angry about how unfair it seems as well. Because there is more to my hometown than one horrific shooting, and I want people to know that. I want them to know about the Labor Day Parade and the General Store sandwiches, about Newtown High School soccer and the $2 movies at Edmond Town Hall, about how we put a giant flagpole in the middle of a busy four-way intersection that everyone seems to both love and hate at the same time. I want them to know that St. Rose of Lima isn't just a place for candlelight vigils but for weddings and baptisms, and I want the Times to know that the adjectives "wooded" and "bucolic" don't begin to do my town justice, and I want to chastise my adolescent self for devoting so much of his existence to complaining about a place that never showed him anything but family and friendship and love, and, damn it, President Obama, that really was a moving speech, but it's Newtown.
A friend of mine set up a fund [ http://www.crowdrise.com/SHSRelief ] for the victims' families, if you'd like to contribute.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/did-this-really-happen-in-my-elementary-school/266317/ [with comments]
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The Secret History of Guns
Joseph Durning/Durning 3D
The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership—and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.
By Adam Winkler
September 2011 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.
The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must
take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.
Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.
It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.
THE TEXT OF the Second Amendment is maddeningly ambiguous. It merely says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Yet to each side in the gun debate, those words are absolutely clear.
Gun-rights supporters believe the amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms and outlaws most gun control. Hard-line gun-rights advocates portray even modest gun laws as infringements on that right and oppose widely popular proposals—such as background checks for all gun purchasers—on the ground that any gun-control measure, no matter how seemingly reasonable, puts us on the slippery slope toward total civilian disarmament.
This attitude was displayed on the side of the National Rifle Association’s former headquarters: THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. The first clause of the Second Amendment, the part about “a well regulated Militia,” was conveniently omitted. To the gun lobby, the Second Amendment is all rights and no regulation.
Although decades of electoral defeats have moderated the gun-control movement’s stated goals, advocates still deny that individual Americans have any constitutional right to own guns. The Second Amendment, in their view, protects only state militias. Too politically weak to force disarmament on the nation, gun-control hard-liners support any new law that has a chance to be enacted, however unlikely that law is to reduce gun violence. For them, the Second Amendment is all regulation and no rights.
While the two sides disagree on the meaning of the Second Amendment, they share a similar view of the right to bear arms: both see such a right as fundamentally inconsistent with gun control, and believe we must choose one or the other. Gun rights and gun control, however, have lived together since the birth of the country. Americans have always had the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of state constitutional law. Today, 43 of the 50 state constitutions clearly protect an individual’s right to own guns, apart from militia service.
Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.
For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.
OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.
Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”
Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.
Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.
Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.
The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.
In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.
Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.
“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.
“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.
By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.
The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.
Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.
THE PANTHERS’ METHODS provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.
Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”
The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.
A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”
Political will in Congress reached the critical point around this time. In April of 1968, James Earl Ray, a virulent racist, used a Remington Gamemaster deer rifle to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s assassination—and the sniper fire faced by police trying to quell the resulting riots—gave gun-control advocates a vivid argument. Two months later, a man wielding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. The very next day, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.
Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”
INDISPUTABLY, FOR MUCH of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”
After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.
IN RESPONSE TO the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”
That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.
One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.” In December of 1865, Bingham had proposed what would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among its provisions was a guarantee that all citizens would be secure in their fundamental rights:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The key phrase, in Bingham’s view, was privileges or immunities of citizens—and those “privileges or immunities,” he said, were “chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal sponsor of Bingham’s amendment in the Senate, reminded his colleagues that these amendments guaranteed “the freedom of speech and of the press,” “the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures,” and “the right to keep and bear arms.”
Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”
The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.
TODAY, THE NRA is the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control. Yet the organization didn’t always oppose gun regulation. Founded in 1871 by George Wingate and William Church—the latter a former reporter for a newspaper now known for hostility to gun rights, The New York Times—the group first set out to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship. Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)
Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.
The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932 Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”
When Congress was considering the first significant federal gun law of the 20th century—the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a steep tax and registration requirements on “gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns—the NRA endorsed the law. Karl Frederick and the NRA did not blindly support gun control; indeed, they successfully pushed to have similar prohibitive taxes on handguns stripped from the final bill, arguing that people needed such weapons to protect their homes. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”
One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. When asked during his testimony on the National Firearms Act whether the proposed law violated “any constitutional provision,” he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” In other words, the president of the NRA hadn’t even considered whether the most far-reaching federal gun-control legislation in history conflicted with the Second Amendment. Preserving the ability of law-abiding people to have guns, Frederick would write elsewhere, “lies in an enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative action. It is not to be found in the Constitution.”
In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Orth and the NRA didn’t favor stricter proposals, like national gun registration, but when the final version of the Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, Orth stood behind the legislation. While certain features of the law, he said, “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”
A GROWING GROUP OF rank-and-file NRA members disagreed. In an era of rising crime rates, fewer people were buying guns for hunting, and more were buying them for protection. The NRA leadership didn’t fully grasp the importance of this shift. In 1976, Maxwell Rich, the executive vice president, announced that the NRA would sell its building in Washington, D.C., and relocate the headquarters to Colorado Springs, retreating from political lobbying and expanding its outdoor and environmental activities.
Rich’s plan sparked outrage among the new breed of staunch, hard-line gun-rights advocates. The dissidents were led by a bald, blue-eyed bulldog of a man named Harlon Carter, who ran the NRA’s recently formed lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.
The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms. Both groups valued guns primarily as a means of self-defense. Both thought people had a right to carry guns in public places, where a person was easily victimized, and not just in the privacy of the home. They also shared a profound mistrust of law enforcement. (For years, the NRA has demonized government agents, like those in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency that enforces gun laws, as “jack-booted government thugs.” Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”) For both the Panthers in 1967 and the new NRA after 1977, law-enforcement officers were too often representatives of an uncaring government bent on disarming ordinary citizens.
A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate. Their chosen candidate was none other than Ronald Reagan, who more than a decade earlier had endorsed Don Mulford’s law to disarm the Black Panthers—a law that had helped give Reagan’s California one of the strictest gun-control regimes in the nation. Reagan’s views had changed considerably since then, and the NRA evidently had forgiven his previous support of vigorous gun control.
IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.
Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.
So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.
The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from the Heller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, 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.
This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.
Adam Winkler is a professor of constitutional law at UCLA law school. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America [ http://www.amazon.com/Gunfight-Battle-over-Right-America/dp/0393077411 ], to be published by W. W. Norton in September.
*
Also see:
Debating the Second Amendment
From satires to investigative reports, four decades of Atlantic authors weigh in on gun control
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/from-the-archives-debating-the-second-amendment/243279
*
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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How America’s toxic culture breeds mass murder
(Credit: defpicture [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-626827p1.html ] via Shutterstock)
Mass shooters in the U.S. are almost always men — angry men who can get guns more easily than mental health care
By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Dec 15, 2012 11:00 AM CST
As a parent, an American and a human being, I’m having trouble functioning in the wake of Friday’s elementary-school shootings in Newtown, Conn. You’ll read this some hours after I write it, so you’ll know more than I do now about the children and adults who have died and the families who are enduring unbearable losses, and about the life and death of Adam Lanza, the young man who apparently inflicted them. Those things are dreadfully important to the people involved, but they won’t change the bigger picture much. That’s a picture of grief and horror and profound collective mystification about how such a thing could happen, a picture of a disordered culture that produces these spectacular outbreaks of psychotic violence more and more often, even in an era of relatively low crime.
While the grief and horror are understandable, as well as fully justified – I’m forcing myself to move my fingers across the keyboard, when I would probably be better off sitting quietly in a darkened room, or spending time with my own children – maybe we shouldn’t be quite as bewildered as we claim to be. I don’t mean that we should understand, or even try to understand, how a person can become so angry and sick that he picks up a gun and starts shooting other people’s children at random. There may be artists and psychiatrists and philosophers who can glean something useful from looking into that kind of hateful and bottomless despair, but I sure don’t want to do it.
What I am saying is that we’ve had enough of these events over the last few decades to see undeniable overlapping patterns, and the same toxic stew of legal, cultural and psychological factors recurring in almost every case. Some of this information has to do with readily quantifiable data, such as the fact that most mass shooters acquire their guns legally on the open market, and most use assault weapons or semiautomatic handguns that would be far less easy to obtain if we had more reasonable and realistic gun laws. Some of it is blindingly obvious but not openly discussed, such as the fact that this is almost exclusively a male problem. (As a remarkable survey published a few weeks ago by Mother Jones [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map ] attests, 60 of the 61 mass shooters in America over the last three decades have been men or boys. Now, I suppose, it’s 61 of 62.)
Some of it is more nebulous and subjective, such as the media’s pornographic fixation on events of this kind, even though they make up a small proportion of the firearms killings in the United States every year. As a culture critic by trade, I tend to resist cause-and-effect explanations that blame violent entertainment for real-world violence. (I’m not saying that it hasn’t happened in individual cases.) But I find it unfortunately plausible that the massive media spectacles erected around incidents like the one in Newtown, or the “Dark Knight Rises” shootings [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/20/does_batman_have_blood_on_his_hands/ ] in Colorado, with their grave and studied theatricality – the somber-looking anchors, the wobbly amateur video of people crying in a parking lot, the police photograph of some crazy-looking guy in a prison jumpsuit – can inspire copycats and emulators who want to be that famous too.
Whether these patterns point the way toward preventing these kinds of horrific events I really couldn’t say. Maybe they suggest some places to start and some strategies worth trying, or maybe they just help us understand the dimensions of the problem a little better. Here are some of the key factors in these outrages, as I see them.
Take the Second Amendment and shove it. There are numerous reporters and commentators, at Salon and elsewhere, more qualified than I am to go after the National Rifle Association and the rest of the gun lobby, who have so successfully hijacked this issue over the last 20 years or so. We’ve seen the Democratic Party largely abandon the struggle for reasonable standards of national gun control since the Clinton administration, no doubt because it didn’t focus-group well in swing districts of Pennsylvania and Michigan or whatever. And even if outrageous crimes like the Newtown and Aurora shooting begin to swing the tide of public opinion back toward a nationwide assault-weapons ban, the NRA has already won the war on the ground. The country is flooded with millions of such weapons, and short of the kind of house-to-house, black-helicopter search the gun nuts fear, we’ll never get rid of all of them.
That’s not a reason not to try, obviously. As I mentioned earlier, data collected by Mother Jones indicates that the majority of mass shooters acquired their guns legally, and that very few of them used more “normal” consumer firearms like revolvers, hunting rifles or shotguns. Yes, you can still commit murder with a weapon like that, and people do it all the time. But mass murder becomes much more difficult. Urban liberals might aspire to live in a European-style country where private gun ownership is exceptionally rare, but that’s not likely to happen here. It’s not necessary to repeal the Second Amendment, or force folks in Kansas to give up Grandpa’s blunderbuss. Americans have a long history with guns, blah blah blah – I’m actually not interested in prying your trusty .30-06 out of your cold, dead hands. But gun owners have been brainwashed to believe that private ownership of semiautomatic weapons whose only real purpose is to kill large groups of people is a constitutional right. That’s utterly insane and immoral, and over the long haul maybe they can be brainwashed back.
America has a major angry-man problem. Reading the Mother Jones article, whose lead author is former Salon reporter Mark Follman, I was actually surprised to learn that there was one female mass shooter in recent American history, a disgruntled postal worker in Goleta, Calif., who shot a neighbor and several co-workers. But the other 61 people who have so tragically acted out their twisted private fantasies on people around them have all been male. While some element of sexual or misogynistic drama was frequently involved – a mother or ex-wife or girlfriend; a rejection or divorce or suggestions of closeted homosexuality – the one thing you can point to in almost every case is perceived humiliation.
Over and over again you read stories of workplace shootings – at technology companies, aircraft factories, day-trading firms, fast-food franchises, maintenance yards and (infamously) post offices – in which some guy who got fired or lost a promotion or generally felt that everybody hated him goes and gets a gun, or several, and acts out his revenge fantasy. Of course there’s no possible justification for such an act, and it seems reasonable to conclude that anybody who shoots a lot of people has suffered a mental breakdown, probably one with deep roots and multiple causative factors. Nonetheless I suspect that economic realities play a role. It’s plausible that these grotesque events are by-products of the downward pressure on wages, especially in the working class and lower fringes of the middle class, and reflect what has sometimes been called the “crisis of masculinity,” meaning the perceived emasculation and loss of privilege felt by some men in an age of increasing sexual equality.
I’m not suggesting this is good news, but the stereotype that these kinds of shooters are invariably white men is less true than it used to be. In the last decade or so, almost every possible demographic has been represented: There have been two infamous campus shootings by Asian graduate students, one by a Native American teenager living on a Minnesota reservation, and a couple by African-Americans and Latinos. Overall, 43 of the 61 shooters in mass killings since 1982 have been white, which is only a little higher than the proportion of whites in the general population.
Each of these cases represents a failure of the mental-health system. If, that is, you want to claim we even have one. One of the repeating elements in these dreadful dramas is an attempt to point fingers at some shrink or counselor or teacher or social worker who knew there was a problem and didn’t do enough to intervene successfully. In several recent cases, including the “Dark Knight” and Virginia Tech shootings, the perpetrators had sought help at various times before they went off the deep end into apocalypse. It’s impossible to imagine the pain and guilt a professional in that position would feel after something like this happens, but we’re pointing fingers in the wrong direction.
There’s only so much the overworked people in the mental-health field can do about someone who very likely has a worsening disorder, is by definition poorly equipped to make good decisions, and may be refusing to accept competent care and advice. But what lies behind that problem is the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a national health-care system that could maintain standardized medical records of at-risk individuals, and at least seek to enforce a nationwide standard of care. Of course that wouldn’t prevent every single mass killing, but you can’t convince me it wouldn’t stop some of them. There are many reasons why the social-welfare states of Western Europe have lower rates of violent crime than we do – but the fact that they still have social welfare states, however decayed, has a lot to do with it.
Media fascination with violence, and the 24/7 news cycle, may have made things worse. “If it bleeds it leads” is a longtime maxim of the news industry, to be sure. By the time Martin Scorsese made “Taxi Driver” in the mid-‘70s, the archetype of the psychotic killer as media hero was well established. But the mass shooting as a collectively created media spectacle, shared by television, the major Internet news portals, the mainstream media’s big names and millions of individuals on social media, has changed the nature of the experience. I do realize the painful and profoundly unfunny irony of raising this issue in a day-after analysis story on the Internet, one of dozens or hundreds you may come across this weekend.
When I wrote about the “Dark Knight” shootings [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/20/does_batman_have_blood_on_his_hands/ ] in Colorado earlier this year, I discussed the way that particular lunatic seemed to want to elevate his evil psychodrama to the level of spectacle seen in Christopher Nolan’s film. The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday had nothing to do with a movie, but the whole thing was a spectacle all the same. News reports suggest that Lanza arrived at the school dressed in the all too predictable “black fatigues and military vest” required by his role, and he had to know that shooting little kids would guarantee him several days of stardom in a drama of his own construction, even if he’s no longer here to see it.
What Lanza apparently did was contemptible and unforgivable, and it would be better to ignore him and focus on the bigger picture. I am not suggesting he deserves our pity, but he is a victim too. Moving backwards from the evidence here, I would suggest that these atrocities tend to occur in a culture with numerous fundamental problems: one that is economically divided and socially stratified, with a dark undercurrent of male anxiety and anger, one where high-powered firearms with no legitimate uses are far too easy to find, where the social safety net has been shredded and decent mental-health care is not available to all, and where our experience of the world is increasingly as a shared media spectacle. Does that sound familiar?
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/how_americas_toxic_culture_breeds_mass_murder/ [with comments]
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Gun Control Laws: After Sandy Hook, Poll Finds Bump In Support For Greater Restrictions
President Barack Obama pauses as he talks about the Connecticut elementary school shooting, Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, in the White House briefing room in Washington.
12/16/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/gun-control-laws-sandy-hook-poll_n_2309324.html [with comments]
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The Geography of U.S. Gun Violence
Dec 14, 2012
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/12/geography-us-gun-violence/4171/ [with comments]
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Jordan Davis Shooting: Charges Upgraded To First Degree Murder In Slaying Of Unarmed Teen
This undated photo provided by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office shows Michael David Dunn, 45, who is charged with murder and attempted murder in the Nov. 23 shooting death of 17-year-old Jordan Davis.
(AP Photo/Jacksonville Sheriff's Office)
By Susan Cooper Eastman
Posted: 12/13/2012 11:44 pm EST | Updated: 12/14/2012 5:12 pm EST
JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Dec 13 (Reuters) - A grand jury indicted a Florida man for first degree murder on Thursday in the shooting death of an unarmed, black high school student last month after an argument over loud rap music.
Software developer Michael Dunn, 46, shot high school junior Jordan Davis, 17, through the window of a sport utility vehicle at a Jacksonville convenience store gas station on Nov. 23, before driving away, authorities say.
Dunn, who is white, faces charges of attempted first degree murder for firing at the car which contained three other passengers, all friends of Davis.
Dunn was arrested the day after the shooting for second degree murder and pleaded not guilty. He was being held in Duval County without bond awaiting arraignment.
The state attorney's office later decided to upgrade the charge to first degree murder, which in Florida requires a grand jury decision.
Dunn's arraignment on the new charges is scheduled for Dec. 17.
Davis's father, Ron Davis, has pledged to turn his son's shooting death into a crusade against guns and Florida's controversial Stand Your Ground law which allows people to defend themselves if they "reasonably believe" someone will hurt them.
Widespread opposition to the law has emerged after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, also an unarmed, black 17-year-old, in February by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in central Florida. Zimmerman, whom police initially declined to arrest, will stand trial next June for murder.
Dunn's lawyer says he fired out of fear for his life when someone in the SUV brandished a shotgun and threatened him.
Dunn and his fiance Rhonda Rouer were in Jacksonville on the night of the shooting to attend a wedding when they stopped at the store to buy a bottle of wine before returning to their hotel, authorities say. They parked next to the SUV containing Davis and his three friends who were listening to rap music on their way home after shopping at Black Friday sales at a mall.
Dunn asked the teens to turn down the volume of the music, but, his attorney said, the teens turned up the volume, threatened Dunn and brandished a shotgun. Dunn grabbed a pistol from the glove compartment of his car and opened fire, before driving away, authorities say. Police said no weapon was found on the teens.
Dunn was taken into custody at his oceanfront townhome about 170 miles (270 km) south of Jacksonville the day after the shooting.
(Editing by David Adams and Mohammad Zargham)
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/jordan-davis-shooting-charges-upgraded_n_2297721.html [with comments]
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Ron Weiser, RNC Finance Chair, Criticized For Controversial Detroit Voter Remarks
12/16/12 03:13 PM ET EST
DETROIT -- The finance chair for the Republican National Committee told a Michigan tea party gathering this summer that Detroit's plummeting population and lack of a mayoral machine to get voters "to stop playing pool and drinking beer in the pool hall" has decreased its influence in elections.
In the video, Weiser, the state's former GOP chairman, can be seen telling attendees what his thoughts were heading into the Nov. 6 presidential election, which President Barack Obama won.
Detroit – which is more than 80 percent black and votes almost overwhelmingly Democratic – isn't to be feared as much because the city's population has dropped below 700,000 people and there no longer are strong, mayor-led machines to get voters to the polls, Weiser said.
There is "no Coleman Young machine. No Kwame Kilpatrick machine. There is no Dave Bing machine," he said. "There's no machine to go to the pool halls and the barbershops and put those people on buses, and then bus them from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times.
"And there's no machine to get 'em to stop playing pool and drinking beer in the pool hall. And it does make a difference."
Young was Detroit's first black mayor and served nearly 20 years in the office. Kilpatrick resigned in 2008 during his second term while facing perjury and other charges related to text-messaging sex scandal. Bing, a professional basketball Hall of Famer and former businessman, was elected mayor in 2009.
"Obama has hired a lot of people to go help him get that vote out," Weiser continued in the video. "But if you're not from Detroit, the places where those pool halls and barbershops are, you're not going to be going at 6:30 in November. Not without a side arm."
The Rev. David Bullock, chairman of the Michigan Rainbow Push Coalition, characterized the remarks as racist.
"Detroit is much more than pool halls and barbershops," Bullock told the Free Press. "There are churches, there are parks, there are universities. It's disheartening that the political culture in Michigan and much of the country is so subversively and racially charged."
The comments also drew a sharp response by Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer.
"We have a major Republican figure in Michigan and nationally who is making racist stereotype remarks about voters in Detroit," Brewer said.
Weiser, an Ann Arbor businessman and Michigan Republican Party chairman from 2009-10, later told the newspaper his comments were "never intended to be racist" and that he didn't intend to offend anyone by his statements at the tea party meeting in Milford, northwest of Detroit.
He said he believes voter fraud occurred in Detroit during Young's and Kilpatrick's time in office and defended his statements.
"I don't think there's anything negative about pool halls and barbershops," Weiser told the newspaper Friday "There are many other places I could have talked about that would have had negative connotations.
"Since when is it a stereotype to talk about the fact people drink beer in pool halls? What do you think they drink? Soda pop?"
He also defended his view of crime in Detroit, a city with one of the highest violent crime rates in the country.
"I challenge you to find anyone who says you can walk around the neighborhoods of Detroit at 6:30 in the morning and not find it dangerous," Weiser said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/ron-weiser-detroit_n_2312539.html [with comments]
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82516883 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82518619 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82518528 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82518754 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82518777 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82519050 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82519950 (and any future following)
Published on Dec 15, 2012 by SignsofThyComing
SOURCE: http://www.foxnews.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtRM1LCCbTk
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Huckabee on shooting
Published on Dec 14, 2012 by ThinkProgress TP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZeEM_Pqqgw [in case the longer excerpt above disappears, this one should last; also at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U_qPSCDZq4 ]
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Cenk in response to Mike Huckabee's comments on school shooting: 'You sick son of a bitch'
Published on Dec 14, 2012 by Current
On Newtown shooting, Fox News host Mike Huckabee said, "We ask why there's violence in our schools, but we systematically remove God from our schools."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpEdcCB3H04
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Mike Huckabee: Newtown Shooting No Surprise, We've 'Systematically Removed God' From Schools
12/15/2012
[...]
This line of reasoning isn't new for Huckabee.
Speaking about a mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. over the summer, the former GOP presidential candidate claimed that such violent episodes were a function of a nation suffering from the removal of religion from the public sphere.
"We don't have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem," Huckabee said [ http://www.newshounds.us/20120722_mike_huckabee_aurora_shooting_caused_by_sin_godlessness_in_schools ] on Fox News. "And since we've ordered God out of our schools, and communities, the military and public conversations, you know we really shouldn't act so surprised ... when all hell breaks loose."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/mike-huckabee-school-shooting_n_2303792.html [with (now going past 30,000) comments]
===
Bryan Fischer: God Did Not Protect Connecticut Shooting Victims Because Prayer Banned In Schools (VIDEO)
*
Fischer: God Didn't Stop School Shooting Because He's A Gentleman Who Doesn't Go Where Not Wanted
Published on Dec 14, 2012 by RWWBlog
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-god-didnt-stop-ct-school-shooting-because-hes-gentleman-who-doesnt-go-where-he-not-w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is2x7QTZ8AI
*
By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 12/15/2012 8:26 am EST | Updated: 12/15/2012 3:59 pm EST
As the nation reeled from reports of the horrifying mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting_n_2300831.html ] in Newtown, Conn., most Americans responded with an outpouring of sympathy.
However, Bryan Fischer [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is2x7QTZ8AI (above)] made some notably controversial comments in the wake of the tragedy.
The conservative Christian who has continuously drawn the ire of groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/bryan-fischer ] and GLAAD for his anti-gay rhetoric and vitriolic tirades on behalf of the American Family Association, said on his radio show that God did not protect the victims [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/14/bryan-fischer-all-class.html ] of the Connecticut shooting because prayer has been prohibited from the public school system:
The question is going to come up, where was God? I though God cared about the little children. God protects the little children. Where was God when all this went down. Here's the bottom line, God is not going to go where he is not wanted.
Now we have spent since 1962 -- we're 50 years into this now--we have spent 50 years telling God to get lost, telling God we do not want you in our schools, we don't want to pray to you in our schools, we do not want to pray to your before football games, we don't want to pray to you at graduations, we don't want anybody talking about you in a graduation speech...
In 1962 we kicked prayer out of the schools. In 1963 we kicked God's word out of ours schools. In 1980 we kicked the Ten Commandments out of our schools. We've kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children, but you've got to invite me back into your world first. I'm not going to go where I'm not wanted. I am a gentlemen.
"The ultimate solution here is not the Second Amendment, but the First Amendment," Fisher continued. "Maybe it's time for some school board and administrators to say, we don't care, the lives of our children are just too important to us. We are going to pray in our schools, at the beginning of the day, we are going to pray for protection."
Fischer's comments are his latest attempt to politicize a senseless tragedy.
In November, Fischer said that terrorists who attacked the United States [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/16/bryan-fischer-singing-god-bless-america-prevents-terrorist-attacks/ ] on Sept. 11, 2001 were "the agents of God’s wrath” because they prompted “God Bless America” to be sung at Major League Baseball games, which is one “one of the reasons we haven’t been hit since 9/11," Raw Story notes. He has also said that gun rights are based on God's teachings [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/04/bryan-fischer-gun-rights-based-on-christs-teachings/ ], that being gay may be a "birth defect" [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/bryan-fischer-homosexuality-birth-defect-abortions-_n_2293079.html ] and that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal will increase pedophilia [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/01/bryan-fischer-dont-ask-dont-tell-repeal-pedophilia-military_n_1930352.html ].
However, Fischer is not the only one to make controversial comments regarding the Sandy Hook shooting.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee made similar remarks [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/mike-huckabee-school-shooting_n_2303792.html (excerpted above)] on Friday.
"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/15/bryan-fischer-god-did-not-protect-connecticut-shooting-victims-prayer-banned_n_2303903.html [with comments]
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Former Scout leader admits downloading child porn
Boy Scout leader Edward Orenchuk III, 23, leaves Nassau Police headquarters to be arraigned on felony child pornography charges including three counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child and three counts of possessing a sexual performance by a child. (Dec. 13, 2012)
Photo credit: Howard Schnapp
By CHAU LAM
Originally published: December 13, 2012 10:03 AM
Updated: December 13, 2012 9:23 PM
A former Garden City Boy Scout leader who authorities said downloaded and shared child pornography with others on the Web apologized in a statement for his behavior and told investigators he needs "professional" help.
Edward Orenchuk III, 23, said he knew it was wrong for him to capture images of children engaging in sex with adults off the Internet and transfer them to his computer, according to the Dec. 12 statement to police, and he promised to never do it again.
"I can now only seek forgiveness from [God], do my penance and hope for forgiveness," Orenchuk said.
At his arraignment in First District Court in Hempstead Thursday, Orenchuk pleaded not guilty to three counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child as a sexually motivated felony and three counts of possessing a sexual performance by a child.
His court-appointed attorney, from the Nassau County Legal Aid Society, told the judge that Orenchuk plans to testify when a grand jury is convened to hear his case.
Orenchuk worked at the Garden City Public Library and was an Eagle Scout who serves as an assistant scout master with Boy Scout Troop 243 in Garden City. If convicted, he faces up to 7 years in prison.
Orenchuk's father and an unidentified woman were in court but they declined to comment afterward.
District Court Judge Sondra Pardes set bail at $200,000 cash or $400,000 bond and ordered Orenchuk, who was in custody Thursday, to return Dec. 17.
Carolyn Voegler, Garden City Library director, said she was unaware of the charges until she read news accounts and removed him from the work schedule.
A leader for Troop 243 could not immediately be reached for comment. But a spokesman for Theodore Roosevelt Council of Boy Scouts, which serves nearly 10,500 youth and 294 scouting units including Troop 243, said Thursday that Orenchuk's membership has been revoked. The organization issued a statement, saying it was "shocked to learn about the allegations," which run "counter to everything for which the Boy Scouts of America stands."
Investigators from the Nassau district's attorney's office tracked the downloaded images to Orenhuck's Wheeler Avenue home in Garden City. During a search, Orenchuk admitted he had "hundreds" of images on his computer, authorities said.
In his statement to police, Orenchuk said when he got his MacBook, he downloaded a program to retrieve child pornography off the Internet. However, he said he did not mean to share them with others.
Copyright © 2012 Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/former-scout-leader-admits-downloading-child-porn-1.4328208 [with comments] [and see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/boy-scout-leader-faces-ch_n_2293386.html (with comments)]
===
This Week in God
By Steve Benen
Sat Dec 15, 2012 10:27 AM EST
First up from the God Machine this week is a look at the deeply unfortunate reaction from some prominent religious right leaders to yesterday's school massacre in Connecticut.
The American Family Association's Bryan Fischer blamed [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-god-didnt-stop-ct-school-shooting-because-hes-gentleman-who-doesnt-go-where-he-not-w (see above)] the horrific violence on public schools' neutrality towards religion. God could have protected the gunman's victims, Fischer said, but chose not to because "God is not going to go where he is not wanted." Around the same time, Mike Huckabee made a similar argument [ http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/12/14/huckabee-schools-become-a-place-of-carnage-when/191864 (see above)] on Fox News.
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U_qPSCDZq4 embedded; same at the top of this post]
For those who can't watch clips online, Neil Cavuto said that many invariably ask after tragedies like this, "How could God let this happen?" Huckabee responded:
"Well, you know, it's an interesting thing. We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? [...]
"You know, God wasn't armed. He didn't go to the school. But God will be there in the form of a lot people with hugs and with therapy and a whole lot of ways in which I think he will be involved in the aftermath. Maybe we ought to let him in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end."
So, by Huckabee's reasoning, the separation of church and state is at least partially responsible for a gunman killing 26 people, including 20 children. There are a few problems with such a perspective.
Theologically, many Christians believe God is omnipresent, and can't be "systematically removed" from anything. For that matter, there's very little in the Christian tradition that suggests God punishes children when constitutional law hurts His feelings.
Politically, Huckabee's comments -- seeking to exploit a violent tragedy to push a bogus culture war agenda -- are a reminder that the former Arkansas governor and failed presidential candidate occasionally just isn't a nice guy [ http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/05/16/11734824-morally-repugnant-political-whores ].
And legally, Huckabee doesn't have the foggiest idea what he's talking about.
For the Republican pundit, Americans "have systematically removed God from our schools," presumably a reference to Supreme Court rulings prohibiting state-sponsored, government-endorsed religion in public schools.
What Huckabee may not appreciate is just how many religious rights public school students currently enjoy. Contrary to myth, students can pray before, during, and after school, so long as it's not disruptive to class. They can say grace before meals in the cafeteria, they can invite classmates to religious services, and they can form after-school religious clubs. All of this is legal right now, under existing law and court precedents, suggesting if anyone has tried to "systematically remove" religion from public schools, they've failed.
The only thing the law prohibits is schools and school officials interfering. Government, in other words, must remain neutral, leaving religious lessons in the hands of families and faith leaders.
Huckabee may find this offensive, and may prefer big government step in to promote religion. That's certainly his right. But to blame horrific violence on his confusion about church-state separation is, at a minimum, deeply unfortunate.
Also from the God Machine this week:
* Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) declared last Saturday a "Day of Restoration" [ https://www.au.org/media/press-releases/kansas-governor-s-promotion-of-fundamentalist-prayer-event-undermines ] in his state, and called on his constituents to "collectively repent of distancing ourselves from God and ask for His mercy on us."
* The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, generally known as the Mormon Church, has shifted its teachings, and now believes sexuality is not a personal choice [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/mormon-church-sexuality-is-not-a-choice ]. The church continues to believe, however, that it is sinful to "act on" homosexuality.
* A Milwaukee-area Roman Catholic priest was stripped of his priestly duties [ http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/08/15698507-priest-stripped-of-duties-for-celebrating-mass-with-woman-priest ] last week after he presided over a Mass with a woman priest.
* And in Texas, a chain email prompted Dallas-area school officials to launch an investigation into "Islamic bias" in the district's curriculum. Ironically, the probe reached the opposite conclusion: there's a Christian bias in schools [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/12/12/1321841/texas-school-islam-christian-bias/ ], not a Muslim one.
© 2012 NBCNews.com
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/12/15/15928590-this-week-in-god [with comments]
===
The Shooting Of Children And 'God's Plan'
By Edward J. Blum
Posted: 12/14/2012 9:21 pm
Children die. Sometimes peacefully at home, as my eight-month-old son did about a year ago. Sometimes when bombs blow up churches, as was the case in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, when four little girls died. And sometimes they are slaughtered, as in several biblical tales and during the shootings in Connecticut. These are horrific moments that leave us wondering, "where is God?"
We are not the first, and sadly, we will not be the last, to wonder about the place of the sacred amid the deaths of innocents. That theodical problem is with us - theologically unsolved and socially unresolved. But history and personal experience have taught me one thing: silence can be powerful.
"God has a plan for this," a woman explained to me as she prattled on just before the memorial service for my son Elijah. She meant the words to be comforting, but I swallowed them as if lumps of clay. They have sat in my stomach ever since, and try as I may I have been unable to vomit them out spiritually. Providential interpretations of everyday life sometimes feel satisfying - like when bad traffic slows me or down or when a friend has a cold. The deaths of children are quite another.
This chatty woman was Elijah's very evangelical grandmother. She meant well; she loved and loves Elijah, but to her, everything was in the hands of a big, all-seeing, all-powerful Father. For me, the thought that God had a plan for my son to be unable to eat, that God intended for my son to fail to breath, or that God was instrumental in my son dying in my arms was disgusting. To me, that God could only be an awful and wicked monster.
And the thought, today, that God perhaps has a plan amid the Connecticut shooting sickens me as well.
As a historian, I knew that I was neither the first, nor the last to lose a child. Millions have lost their children or experienced those losses from afar, and sometimes in devastating and highly public circumstances. In 1963, white terrorists killed four young girls when they bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Anne Moody (who became a civil rights activist and then wrote one of the most famous memoirs of the movement) did not know them, but she heard the news on the radio with her family in Mississippi. It sent shockwaves through them. "I looked at George; he sat with his face buried in the palms of his hands. Dave sat motionless with tears in his eyes. Mattie looked at Dave as if she had been grounded by an electric shock. I put my hand up to my face. Tears were pouring out of my eyes, and I hadn't even known I was crying." She could not remain in the house. Moody fled into the streets and then, lost and confused, she "I found myself in a graveyard."
She wanted to find God and some meaning in it all. "I sat there looking up through the trees, trying to communicate with God." She prayed, "Now talk to me, God. Come on down and talk to me." God did not come down, so Moody decided to shout up. "Mama used to tell us that you would forgive us seventy-seven times a day, and I believed in you. I bet you those girls in Sunday school were being taught the same as I was when I was their age. It that teaching wrong? Are you going to forgive their killers?" Moody was at a loss for how to deal with the deaths and with the killers.
On that day, Moody's pacifism died. She would no longer stand back as others used violence to get their way. If God refused to help, then she even threatened violence at his throne. If she found out that God was "black," then, "I'll try my best to kill you when I get to heaven."
For Anne Moody, traditional Christian teachings offered her very little, if anything. Turning the other cheek would only allow the violent to continue. Arguments that "God has a plan" would never bring back those four little girls (as they will not bring back the lost in Connecticut or my little son). She wanted change and change now - from heaven and from politicians.
But perhaps God was there as Moody prayed - in the silence. Perhaps God did not say anything, because God knows that words at times like that were meaningless. Perhaps God is more like the whisper in the wind that the biblical Eljiah experienced or like the Jesus who knelt silently when the "adulterous woman" was brought before him. Perhaps he knew, as my friend Jonathan Walton - now the pastor at Harvard University's Memorial Chapel - knew that one can mourn with another without telling them how to interpret the events. Reverend Walton's text message to me after my son's death is the only one I have kept: it reads simply, "sigh." He knew as a father and as a brother that this was not the time to counsel.
So as we mourn the many losses; as we hug our children; as we have our debates over gun control; and as we wonder where God is, perhaps we can think about what we say and what we do not. Perhaps in this moment "sigh" is better than childish theology; perhaps to remain attentively quiet is what God would ask of us - because that is what God seems to do too.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edward-j-blum/the-shooting-of-children-_b_2304677.html [with comments]
===
Outrage Over Comic Victoria Jackson's Sandy Hook Comments, Says Killer No Different Than Women Who Have Abortions
By Radar Staff
Posted on Dec 16, 2012 @ 05:26PM
Victoria Jackson is at it again.
The former Saturday Night Live comic and outspoken ultra conservative has made a series of controversial comments in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.
Jackson took to her Facebook page [ https://www.facebook.com/victoriajacksonfanpage ] to comment on the tragedy that has rocked the nation since Friday when 20 six to seven-year-old children were gunned down in Newtown, Connecticut.
[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/victoria-jackson-connecticut-school-shooting_n_2303518.html (with comments)]
“My friend Jim Riley posted: ‘Wasn’t the Connecticut killer just doing what abortionists do every day? It’s a wonder we don’t have more 20-year-old 'dads' doing what women and doctors have been an accomplice to for years in America," she wrote.
“’When you forget the TEN COMMANDMENTS, people, THIS is what you get’.”
While one outraged person commented that Jackson should have to "go before all of the families that lost loved ones" with her views, that didn't stop Jackson.
The Tea Party supporter went on to criticize President Barack Obama who tearfully addressed [ http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/12/newtown-school-shooting-video-gunman-adam-lanza-connecticut-sandy-hook ] the country in the wake of the shootings.
Jackson wrote: “Obama dramatically wiped a tear as he said, ‘The majority of those who died today were children – beautiful little kids [ http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/12/father-slain-sandy-hook-child-emilie-parker-offers-condolences-shooter-family ] …They had their entire lives ahead of them…”
She adds: “YEAH OBAMA. SAME AS THE MILLION BABIES YOU HAD ABORTED THIS YEAR.
“ARE YOU CRYING FOR THEM?!”
Jackson frequently uses social media to share her controversial views. As RadarOnline.com previously reported [ http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/11/victoria-jackson-tweets-election-barack-obama ] the 53-year-old let rip on election night when President Obama was reelected.
She tweeted: “I can’t stop crying. America died.” Jackson also wrote: “Thanks a lot Christians, for not showing up. You disgust me.”
On her Facebook page Jackson describes herself as being “an outspoken activist for the conservative movement.”
Copyright 2012 Radar Online
http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/12/victoria-jackson-compares-sandy-hook-killer-women-have-abortion [with comments]
===
Westboro Baptist Church says ‘Gay rights caused Newton school shooting massacre’
Members of Westboro Baptist Church
Photo credit: topics.pennlive.com
By: Tarringo Vaughan
December 16, 2012
The Westboro Baptist Church, which prides itself on being an anti-gay church, has found a way to blame the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut on homosexuality. As the town of Newtown begins to try to recover from the tragic events that took place on Friday at Sandy Hook elementary school, members of the Westboro Baptist church have threatened to picket the site of the shooting believing it was God’s way of punishing the state of Connecticut for legalizing same-sex marriage. Acoording to GayStarNews [ http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/westboro-baptists-threaten-picket-sandy-hook-shooting-site161212 ] on Sunday, members of the church have made several threats of picketing via twitter.
One Church member tweeted “Westboro will picket Sandy Hook elementary school to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment.”
While another tweeted, “God Almight smacked USA with #Sandy & she’s brazen in her sin still; THEN he gives you a right hook – make that #SandyHook! #RepentingYet??”
If Westboro Baptist Church wasn’t already the “most controversial church in the world”, it certainly is now. These insensitive remarks and beliefs come right after the names of the twenty children and six adults who were murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school were announced. Most of those children were between the ages of six and seven. The death of any child is never God’s purpose.
Members of the anti-gay church blame the advances in LGBT rights for everything bad that happens to Americans. They have blamed LGBT rights for every natural disaster that happens and every major tragedy that takes place in the United States. The church has not missed the opportunity to blame what most believe as the second worst mass shooting in US history on homosexuality also but what they fail to recognize is that there were many innocent lives taken and affected and that their hate for any group will not be tolerated.
© 2012 Clarity Digital Group LLC d/b/a Examiner.com
http://www.examiner.com/article/westboro-baptist-church-says-gay-rights-caused-newton-school-shooting-massacre [with comments]
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Anonymous Hacks The Westboro Baptist Church: Posts All Their Personal Information
By Wolff Bachner
Posted: December 16, 2012
Commentary – Updated | The hacking collective known as Anonymous renewed their war on the Westboro Baptist Church today. After the haters from the infamous church posted their intentions to picket the funerals of the twenty children [ http://www.inquisitr.com/440355/westboro-baptist-church-to-picket-sandy-hook-elementary-praise-god-for-shooting/ ] killed in the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, Anonymous responded by re-posting the personal and professional information [ http://www.armywtfmoments.com/leaked-wbc-personal-contact-information (currently results in a 'not found')] for members of the church on the Internet. Now the general public can contact the church members directly and tell them what they think about people who would desecrate the funerals of murdered children.
Westboro Baptist Church has been irritating Americans for years with venom filled message about their demented version of God. According to the many closely related and intermarried members of the Phelps family who make up the majority of the congregation of the so-called church, God enjoys killing children and soldiers. They constantly proclaim God hates homosexuals and plans to destroy America for not following the Westboro Baptist Church’s twisted version of Christianity. The incredible obsession with homosexuality expressed by Fred and family seems to many as a sure fire case of “thou dost protest too much.”
Anonymous has been after the Westboro Baptist Church for several months now, hacking their websites repeatedly. Recently, they accused the church [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20033942-501465.html ] of creating a fake letter from the hacking group in order to trick other hackers into attacking the website. Anonymous warned their supporters the church planned to harvest internet addresses and sue people. Suing people is apparently the primary activity of the Westboro Baptist Church when they aren’t screaming hate at funerals.
Of course, Westboro denied the charges and taunted Anonymous as incompetent hackers. They claimed their website was protected by God. Big mistake. A few days later, while a Westboro spokeswoman was boasting about how the church foiled Anonymous on a radio talk show, an Anonymous spokesman called in and hacked the church’s website in real time on the air [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/25/anonymous-westboro-baptist-church_n_828068.html ].
Hopefully saner heads will prevail and nothing terrible will occur if the Westboro Baptist Church shows up in Newtown, Connecticut. The State Police made the extraordinary decision to assign a trooper to each of the victim’s families to prevent unwelcome idiots from tormenting them and to protect their privacy.
It is hard to imagine what kind of person would attend the funerals for these children and promote the hate filled message of the Phelps family and their followers. While we certainly do not condone illegal activity, it is hard not to root for Anonymous as they take it to these sad, pathetic excuses for human beings from the Westboro Baptist Church. If the Church’s website is offline forever, it wouldn’t be a moment too soon for most Americans.
UPDATE 4:00 am CST:
A few minutes after the original commentary was published, The Inquisitr received an email from a sender who claimed to represent Anonymous. The email is similar in content to many other “official” Anonymous emails and we decided to share it with our readers. The email included the following statement:
“Just hacked Westboro’s site. Freedom of speech is one thing. But freedom to hate is another. A domain such as “godhatesfags.com should not exist despite rumblings of members picketing Sandy Hook. Those families have enough anguish to deal with.”
The conflict between Anonymous and the Westboro Baptist Church is building to a fever pitch and judging from the multitude of reader comments on several prominent social media websites, the public strongly supports Anonymous by a ninety nine to one majority.
How do you feel about the war between Anonymous and the Westboro Baptist Church? Do you think Anonymous is doing a good deed by hacking the Church’s website or should everyone respect their First Amendment rights and just try to ignore them?
© 2012 The Inquisitr
http://www.inquisitr.com/440545/anonymous-hacks-the-westboro-baptist-church-posts-all-their-personal-information/ [with comments]
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Colin, You’re AMAZING!!!
By: Josh and Brent
We’ve received over 8000 congratulation wishes so far, and we’ve read every single one. Going through them is like winning the race all over again. They each made us feel very special, and we thank you.
But today, we want to help someone else feel special.
Below is one of the first letters we received this week after winning the Amazing Race. It comes from a mother with a son named Colin:
“I’m sure you guys are way too busy to read this, but I want you to know how inspirational you two are to my 12 year old son. He is gay and is dealing with bullying and harassment in middle school. It’s so hard to see him going through this, and sometimes the “It Gets Better” message is lost on a 12 year old who feels that middle school will never end…We cheered you on every Sunday night and agonized every time you had difficulties. My son was so incredibly thrilled when you two won last night (as was I!). Thank you for helping him see that not only DOES it get better, it gets AMAZING.” (Permission was granted by both Colin and his mother to reprint letter and use names.)
We were called the “Ultimate Underdogs” on the Amazing Race. And when we hit the finish mat, we urged everyone who feels like they’re down-and-out to “keep going, try as hard as you can, eventually someone will help you – and you will win.”
Colin, we know that you’re doing your best, and working as hard as you can in school. We shared Colin’s mom’s note with our fellow Amazing Racers – who have also all been underdogs for various reasons at some point in their lives.
And here is the entire Amazing Race 21 team’s message to you, Colin!…
[embedded images, folks holding up supportive messages]
Copyright © Beekman1802.com
http://beekman1802.com/colin-youre-amazing/ [with comments]
===
Gun Sales In 2012 Set Record, FBI Data Indicates
Posted: 12/14/2012 6:45 pm EST | Updated: 12/14/2012 6:45 pm EST
The gun business in the United States is thriving and the tragic events on Friday [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting_n_2300831.html ] in Newtown, Conn. may likely do little to quell Americans' spending on munitions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded more than 16.8 million background checks for gun purchases in 2012 [ http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/20121203_1998_2012_monthly_yearly_totals.pdf ], the highest number since the FBI began publishing the data in 1998. A record number of requests for background checks for gun buyers went through on Black Friday [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/black-friday-gun-sales_n_2203957.html ] in November, the FBI reported at the time, in part because of fears that President Barack Obama and other lawmakers would tighten gun control laws.
The FBI does not track actual firearms purchases, and the number of weapons sold could be even higher [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/26/black-friday-gun-sales/1727409/ ] than the number of background-check calls because customers can purchase multiple guns, USA Today reports.
If the past is any indication, Friday's mass shooting will do little to slow the pace of sales. It’s not uncommon for gun sales to see a boost following a mass shooting, as buyers head to stores mostly motivated by self-defense, according to the Christian Science Monitor. In the first four days following the July mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., gun sales increased 41 percent [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2012/0725/Why-gun-sales-spike-after-mass-shootings-It-s-not-what-you-might-think ], the CSM reported.
On Friday some pro-gun groups took to Twitter urging people to buy guns: Conservative pundit Ann Coulter tweeted [ http://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/279694604633272320 ] "more guns, less mass shootings" in the wake of the event.
Gun control proponents outraged by Friday's events called for action. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg urged Obama to take "immediate action" [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/michael-bloomberg-gun-control-school-shooting_n_2303499.html ] to tighten gun laws.
Though the industry is doing well, overall gun ownership is actually on the decline [ http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/07/21/the-declining-culture-of-guns-and-violence-in-the-united-states/ ], according to political scientist Patrick Egan. Firearm ownership is at near all-time lows.
Still, the firearms industry had a $31.8 billion impact [ http://nssf.org/impact/ (even not counting shooting victims' expenses) (. . .)] on the economy last year, up from $27.8 billion in 2009, due to job creation, sales and taxes levied on guns, according to data from the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
The firearms industry didn't see much dropoff in the recession that hit so many other U.S. businesses. Gun industry-related jobs grew by more than 30 percent [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ycharts/2012/11/11/gun-maker-stocks-a-replay-of-the-obama-sales-boom/ ] between 2008 and 2011, according to NSSF data cited by Forbes.
Demand for firearms was “robust” in 2008 [ http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-03-22/industries/31223495_1_firearms-sturm-ruger-gun-rights ] and through the downturn, according to National Shooting Sports Foundation statements cited by MarketWatch. In addition, the Foundation noted in 2011 that many indicators showed that the industry “continues to thrive in a down economy,” according to Marketwatch.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/gun-sales-2012_n_2303513.html [with comments]
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Gun Advocate On Connecticut Shooting: Armed Teachers Could Have Minimized Tragedy (VIDEO)
Steve Dulan, a board member of the Michigan Coalition of Responsible Gun Owners said Friday that having armed teachers inside Sandy Hook Elementary School would have "if not prevented, then perhaps minimized" the tragedy.
By John Stephens
Posted: 12/14/2012 9:13 pm EST | Updated: 12/14/2012 9:13 pm EST
Steve Dulan, a board member for the Michigan Coalition of Responsible Gun Owners who is supporting a state bill that would allow concealed weapons in schools and other gun-free zones, said Friday that having armed teachers inside Sandy Hook Elementary School [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/us/connecticut-school-shooting/index.html ] would have, "if not prevented, then perhaps minimized," the tragedy.
"We do know that armed citizens defend themselves all the time, in all kinds of different contexts," Dulan told HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/gun-owners-respond-to-today's-ct-school-shooting-/50c69c6bfe34442123000119 ].
Dulan's comments came in response to a mass shooting Friday morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting_n_2300831.html ] in Newtown, Conn. Police reported 27 deaths, including 20 children, six adults and the shooter, according to the Associated Press.
Watch the Full Segment on HuffPost Live [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/gun-owners-respond-to-today's-ct-school-shooting-/50c69c6bfe34442123000119 ].
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/connecticut-shooting-armed-teachers-gun-advocate_n_2304654.html [with embedded video of the comments and video report, and comments]
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Louie Gohmert Says More Guns Are Answer To Preventing Mass Killings
By Dave Jamieson
Posted: 12/16/2012 10:34 am EST | Updated: 12/16/2012 9:33 pm EST
WASHINGTON -- In the wake of the mass killing that claimed 26 children and adults at a Connecticut elementary school Friday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) made the case Sunday that the answer to preventing massacres in the U.S. is for more Americans to carry guns.
"There has been great investigation and study into this," Gohmert told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, arguing that mass killings happen where citizens tend to be unarmed. "They choose this place [because] they know no one will be armed."
Gohmert argued that the mass slaughter would have gone differently if Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung had been armed.
"Chris, I wish to God she had had an m-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out ... and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids," Gohmert said.
The mass murder in Connecticut has renewed the national discussion about gun control, with Democrats in particular calling for a new assault weapons ban.
So far, Gohmert appears to be one of the few pro-gun rights conservatives in Congress willing to make the public case for more guns in the wake of the Connecticut shooting. "Meet the Press" producer Betsy Fischer Martin tweeted Sunday [ https://twitter.com/BetsyMTP/status/280318090376527874 (and see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/david-gregory-pro-gun-rights-senators_n_2311559.html {with comments})] that the show extended an invitation to 31 pro-gun rights senators in the new Congress to discuss the issue on the show and found no takers.
Gohmert argued Sunday that tighter gun controls such as assault weapon bans are not the answer.
"Once you start drawing the line, where do you stop?" Gohmert said. "That's why it is important to not just look at this emotionally."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/louie-gohmert-guns_n_2311379.html [with comments]
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Bill Bennett, Former Education Secretary, Says Schools Should Consider Arming Employees (VIDEO)
By Dave Jamieson
Posted: 12/16/2012 1:15 pm EST | Updated: 12/16/2012 11:44 pm EST
In the wake of the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting that claimed 26 lives Friday, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett said Sunday that schools should possibly consider arming certain employees to prevent attacks.
"Let's remember the good things here: the heroism of those teachers and that principal," Bennett said on "Meet the Press." "And I'm not so sure -- and I'm sure I'll get mail for this -- I'm not so sure I wouldn't want one person in a school armed, ready for this kind of thing."
"The principal lunged at this guy," Bennett, who served as education secretary under Ronald Reagan, went on. "The school psychologist lunged at the guy. It has to be someone who's trained, responsible. But, my god, if you can prevent this kind of thing, I think you ought to."
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union, advised against arming school employees.
"Schools have to be safe sanctuaries," she said. "We need to actually stop this routine view that just having more guns will actually make people safer. We are opposed to having someone who has access to guns."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) also said more guns weren't the answer.
"Is this the way we want America to go?" Feinstein said. "In other words, the rights of the few overcome the safety of the majority? I don't think so."
Friday's shooting at Sandy Hook School has launched a national debate on gun control, with Feinstein announcing Sunday that she will introduce a bill to ban assault weapons on the first day of the new Congress. The massacre has also renewed a discussion on school security, with Newtown now the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, behind Virginia Tech.
Feinstein laid out details of her bill on Sunday, saying, "it will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession, not retroactively, but prospectively," and also ban the sale of clips of more than ten bullets. "The purpose of this bill is to get ... weapons of war off the streets," she said.
A previous assault weapons ban was signed into law in 1994 but expired ten years later.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/bill-bennett-education-secretary-connecticut-shooting_n_2311774.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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Dawn Hochsprung, Sandy Hook Principal, Had Implemented New Security Measures
12/15/2012\
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/dawn-hochsprung-sandy-hook-principal-security-measures_n_2303520.html [with comments]
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Hundreds of bullets, multiple 30-round clips at Conn. school
CBS/AP
December 16, 2012, 4:56 PM
NEWTOWN, Conn. Connecticut state police say multiple 30-round magazines and hundreds of bullets were found at an elementary school where 26 students and staffers were killed.
State Police Lt. Paul Vance also said Sunday that authorities have officially identified the gunman in the school rampage as Adam Lanza. They say his mother, Nancy, was one of his victims.
The gunman shot his mother four times in the head before going to the school, officials said, as details emerged suggesting that Adam Lanza had planned an even more gruesome massacre but was stopped short.
Lanza blasted his way into the building and used a .223 semi-automatic rifle to kill 20 children and six adults, including the principal who tried to stop him, authorities said.
The unthinkable bloodshed might even have been worse. Gov. Dannel Malloy said Lanza shot himself when he heard police coming. He used one of the handguns to kill himself.
The third gun he carried into the school (another semi-automatic pistol) was still in the pocket of his military-style cargo pants when his body was discovered.
The arrival of the first police officers forced Lanza to end his spree earlier than he otherwise might have.
Officials say the presence of a fourth weapon in the trunk of the black Honda Lanza drove to the school - a car which belonged to his mother - suggests he was perhaps thinking of an even broader attack.
"There was a lot of ammo, a lot of clips," State Police Lt. Paul Vance. "Certainly a lot of lives were potentially saved."
The evaluation of ballistics continues, but investigators suspect Lanza never fired the second handgun.
As President Barack Obama prepared a visit and churches opened their doors to comfort a grieving town Sunday, federal agents fanned out to dozens of gun stores and shooting ranges across Connecticut, chasing leads they hoped would cast light on Lanza's life.
Among the questions: Why did his mother, a well-to-do suburban divorcee , keep a cache of high-power weapons in the house? What experience did Lanza have with those guns? And, above all, what set him on a path to go classroom-by-classroom, massacring 6- and 7-year-olds?
Malloy offered no possible motive for the shooting and a law enforcement official has said police have found no letters or diaries left behind that could shed light on it.
All the victims at the school were shot with the rifle, at least some of them up close, and all were apparently shot more than once, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver said. There were as many as 11 shots on the bodies he examined. Lanza died of a gunshot wound to the head from a 10 mm gun, and the bullet was recovered in a classroom wall, said the same official who described the scene at his mother's house.
All six adults killed at the school were women. Of the 20 children, eight were boys and 12 were girls.
Asked whether the children suffered, Carver said, "If so, not for very long." Asked how many bullets were fired, Carver said, "I'm lucky if I can tell you how many I found."
Parents identified the children through photos to spare them some shock, Carver said.
The terrible details about the last moments of young innocents emerged as authorities released their names and ages — the youngest 6 and 7, the oldest 56. They included Ana Marquez-Greene, a little girl who had just moved to Newtown from Canada; Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old teacher who apparently died while trying to hide her pupils; and principal Dawn Hochsprung, who authorities said lunged at the gunman in an attempt to overtake him.
The tragedy has plunged Newtown into mourning and added the picturesque New England community of 27,000 people to the grim map of towns where mass shootings in recent years have periodically reignited the national debate over gun control but led to little change.
School officials were trying to determine what to do about sending the survivors back to class, Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said at a news conference Sunday.
Sinko said he "would find it very difficult" for students to return to the school. But, he added, "we want to keep these kids together. They need to support each other," he said.
Plans were being made for some students to attend classes in nearby Monroe, said Jim Agostine, superintendent of schools there.
Residents and faith leaders reflected Sunday on the mass shooting and what meaning, if any, to find in it. Obama planned to attend an interfaith vigil — the fourth time he will have traveled to a city after a mass shooting.
At St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic church, Jennifer Waters, who at 6 is the same age as many of the victims and attends a different school, came to Mass on Sunday in Newtown with a lot of questions.
"The little children — are they with the angels?" she asked her mother while fiddling with a small plastic figurine on a pew near the back of the church. "Are they going to live with the angels?"
Her mother, Joan, 45, assured her they were, then put a finger to her daughter's lips, urging her to be quiet.
An overflow crowd of more than 800 people attended the 9 a.m. service at the church, where eight children will be buried later this week. The gunman, Adam Lanza, and his mother also attended church here. Spokesman Brian Wallace said the diocese has yet to be asked to provide funerals for either.
Boxes of tissues were placed strategically in each pew and on each window sill. The altar was adorned with bouquets, one shaped as a broken heart, with a zigzag of red carnations cutting through the white ones.
In his homily, the Rev. Jerald Doyle, the diocesan administrator, tried to answer the question of how parishioners could find joy in the holiday season with so much sorrow surrounding them.
"You won't remember what I say, and it will become unimportant," he said. "But you will really hear deep down that word that will finally and ultimately bring peace and joy. That is the word by which we live. That is the word by which we hope. That is the word by which we love."
After the Mass, Joan and Jennifer stopped by a memorial outside the church filled with votive candles and a pile of bouquets and stuffed animals underneath, to pray the Lord's Prayer.
Jennifer asked whether she could take one.
"No, those are for the little children," her mother replied.
"Who died?" her daughter asked.
"Yes," said her mother, wiping away a tear.
Amid the confusion and sorrow, stories of heroism emerged, including an account of Hochsprung, 47, and the school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, 56, rushing toward Lanza in an attempt to stop him. Both died.
There was also 27-year-old teacher Victoria Soto, whose name has been invoked as a portrait of selflessness. Investigators told relatives she was killed while shielding her first-graders from danger. She reportedly hid some students in a bathroom or closet, ensuring they were safe, a cousin, Jim Wiltsie, told ABC News.
"She put those children first. That's all she ever talked about," a friend, Andrea Crowell, told The Associated Press. "She wanted to do her best for them, to teach them something new every day."
There was also 6-year-old Emilie Parker, whose grieving father, Robbie, talked to reporters not long after police released the names of the victims but expressed no animosity, offering sympathy for Lanza's family.
"I can't imagine how hard this experience must be for you," he said.
The gunman's father, Peter Lanza, issued a statement relating his own family's anguish in the aftermath.
"Our family is grieving along with all those who have been affected by this enormous tragedy. No words can truly express how heartbroken we are," he said. "We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why. ... Like so many of you, we are saddened, but struggling to make sense of what has transpired."
The rifle used was a Bushmaster .223-caliber, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to speak about it and talked on condition of anonymity. The gun is commonly seen at competitions and was the type used in the 2002 sniper killings in the Washington, D.C., area. Also found in the school were two handguns, a Glock 10 mm and a Sig Sauer 9 mm.
A law enforcement official said Saturday that authorities were investigating fresh leads that could reveal more about the lead-up to the shooting. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Ginger Colbrun, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said earlier there was no evidence Lanza was involved in gun clubs or had trained for the shooting. When reached later in the day and asked whether that was still true, she said, "We're following any and all leads related to this individual and firearms."
Law enforcement officials have said they have found no note or manifesto from Lanza of the sort they have come to expect after murderous rampages such as the Virginia Tech bloodbath in 2007 that left 33 people dead.
Education officials said they had found no link between Lanza's mother and the school, contrary to news reports that said she was a teacher there. Investigators said they believe Adam Lanza attended Sandy Hook many years ago, but they had no explanation for why he went there Friday.
Authorities said Adam Lanza had no criminal history, and it was not clear whether he had a job. Lanza was believed to have suffered from a personality disorder, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Another law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Lanza also had been diagnosed with Asperger's, a mild form of autism often characterized by social awkwardness.
People with the disorder are often highly intelligent. While they can become frustrated more easily, there is no evidence of a link between Asperger's and violent behavior, experts say.
The law enforcement officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation.
Richard Novia, the school district's head of security until 2008, who also served as adviser for the high school technology club, of which Lanza was a member, said he clearly "had some disabilities."
"If that boy would've burned himself, he would not have known it or felt it physically," Novia said in a phone interview. "It was my job to pay close attention to that."
© 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57559470/hundreds-of-bullets-multiple-30-round-clips-at-conn-school/ [with comments]
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http://qz.com/37103
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How school killings in the US stack up against 36 other countries put together
By Simone Foxman and Ritchie King — December 15, 2012
A mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, has—as of the most recent police statements—resulted in the deaths of 27 people, including the gunman. Twenty of those victims were children.
The Academy for Critical Incident Analysis at John Jay College has collected data, compiled from news reports, on 294 attempted or actual multiple killings [ http://archive.aciajj.org/the-acia-archive/datasets-available-for-analysis/shooting-incidents-in-educational-settings/ ] on school grounds that had two or more victims. The data span 38 countries and nearly 250 years, from 1764 to 2010, and do not include “single homicides, off-campus homicides, killings caused by government actions, militaries, terrorists or militants.”
We tried to limit any effects of possible underreporting of cases by limiting the data set to the most recent ten years of data, between 2000 and 2010, and by counting only incidents in which someone was injured or killed. (Limiting the data to 2000 or after also eliminated one country that no longer exists: Austria-Hungary.)
The results are above. The number of such incidents in the US was only one less than in all the other 36 countries put together. In 13 of those countries there were no incidents at all, either actual or attempted.
In 2010, the US was home to a population of approximately 309 million. The populations of these other countries totaled 3.8 billion.
In the vast majority of US killings, perpetrators used guns. By comparison, China—with the second-greatest number of incidents—saw 10 mass killings, but none involving firearms. Germany saw three mass shootings; Finland saw two. Thirteen other countries each saw one incident with at least one person being wounded or killed; in the rest nobody was reported as hurt.
Copyright 2012 Quartz
http://qz.com/37015
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/new-york-times-shooting-victims_n_2311329.html [with comments]
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My Plea to the Supreme Court
By Lisa McElroy
Posted: 12/14/2012 5:08 pm
I am flying to Belize today, getting ready to help the Mayan people there celebrate the end of the world.
When I left Philadelphia this morning, I did not think that it would really be the end of the world, but rather a welcoming in of a new era.
It turns out that I was wrong about the end of the world, but right about the new era. Because today, in Newtown, Connecticut, for many parents, teachers, and children, the end of the world has arrived, about a week ahead of schedule. And we're well into a new era, one in which news of a school shooting, or a theater shooting, or a mall shooting, is just an ordinary part of our morning news.
Anyone who knows me -- in fact, anyone who read my post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-mcelroy/supreme-court-gun-control_b_1691982.html ] on July 22, 2012, just after the Aurora shootings -- knows that I have two great loves in life: my children, and the Supreme Court. As I wrote back then, it's rare that these two passions intersect.
In fact, most Americans would say that the Supreme Court is almost never relevant in their lives, and certainly not relevant to their children's lives.
The school shootings over the past 13 years or so are evidence of just how wrong they are. Because the Supreme Court's decisions [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller (more complete listing at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82485291 )] over the past four or five years have guaranteed the rights of most Americans to bear arms, and though those rights may be limited for people with certain kinds of documented mental illnesses or felony records, the Court's interpretation of the Second amendment to the United States Constitution has made it difficult to stop most gun sales before tragedy occurs.
Because I'm a Supreme Court expert, I'm often asked how many more Justices President Obama will have the opportunity to appoint. I don't know the answer, of course (Justices don't have to retire until they want to, and it's impossible to predict death or incapacity during life tenure), but I'd make an educated guess that lightning will strike at least twice over the next four years.
Because I'm a mother, I'm often asked how these school shootings make me feel. And I'll tell you how they make me feel. They make me feel unbelievably angry. No, unlike my Facebook friends who post that they're stunned, or in a state of disbelief, or saddened, or grieving, I'm just plain bullshit mad.
Because the Supreme Court expert in me is talking to the mother in me. And the Supreme Court expert in me knows that the only way to even think about stopping the carnage that the mother in me hates is to appoint Justices to the bench who believe that the Court's current interpretation of the Second Amendment is wrong. Even one new Justice who believed that guns were for militias, not individuals, could vote to change the law, perhaps for decades, perhaps for the entire rest of my children's lifetimes. And my worries about putting my children on the school bus would be much more about whether the bus would crash or some mean kid would bully them than about whether they'd come home in a body bag. And my children would only have to worry about whether my grandchildren would be able to teletransport themselves home safely at the end of the day instead of whether those grandchildren would fall to the floor in some public school classroom, full of bullet holes.
Honestly, folks, it's that easy. Put people in the Senate who will make gun rights and the Second Amendment the threshold question for whether a nominee is qualified. Forget abortion -- we've been fighting about that for 40 years, and nominees are just not going to answer that question. (Remember Clarence Thomas back in the '90s, who claimed he had never discussed Roe v. Wade?) Forget gay marriage -- the Court has already agreed to hear challenges to laws prohibiting recognition of it, and I predict that, by June, the Constitution will guarantee that anyone can marry the person she loves, just as our children already think she should be able to.
Vote for senators who will refuse to confirm a nominee who thinks it is OK for an individual to own a gun that can slaughter most of an elementary school. Who will think that the day a school shooting occurs is the absolute right time to talk about gun control. Who will, when the Supreme Court changes its interpretation of the Second Amendment -- and remember, it will only take ONE conservative Justice replaced by one liberal or moderate one -- vote to pass strict gun control laws, keeping guns out of the hands of those who would use them to hurt children, and parents, and teachers, and communities.
Otherwise, folks, we're looking at the end of the world.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-mcelroy/my-plea-to-the-supreme-court_b_2303510.html [with comments]
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Clause and Effect
Sagmeister Inc.
By ADAM FREEDMAN
Published: December 16, 2007
LAST month, the Supreme Court agreed to consider District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down Washington’s strict gun ordinance as a violation of the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms.”
This will be the first time in nearly 70 years that the court has considered the Second Amendment. The outcome of the case is difficult to handicap, mainly because so little is known about the justices’ views on the lethal device at the center of the controversy: the comma. That’s right, the “small crooked point,” as Richard Mulcaster described this punctuation upstart in 1582. The official version of the Second Amendment has three of the little blighters:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The decision invalidating the district’s gun ban, written by Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, cites the second comma (the one after “state”) as proof that the Second Amendment does not merely protect the “collective” right of states to maintain their militias, but endows each citizen with an “individual” right to carry a gun, regardless of membership in the local militia.
How does a mere comma do that? According to the court, the second comma divides the amendment into two clauses: one “prefatory” and the other “operative.” On this reading, the bit about a well-regulated militia is just preliminary throat clearing; the framers don’t really get down to business until they start talking about “the right of the people ... shall not be infringed.”
The circuit court’s opinion is only the latest volley in a long-simmering comma war. In a 2001 Fifth Circuit case, a group of anti-gun academics submitted an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief arguing that the “unusual” commas of the Second Amendment support the collective rights interpretation. According to these amici, the founders’ use of commas reveals that what they really meant to say was “a well-regulated militia ... shall not be infringed.”
Now that the issue is heading to the Supreme Court, the pro-gun American Civil Rights Union is firing back with its own punctuation-packing brief. Nelson Lund, a professor of law at George Mason University, argues that everything before the second comma is an “absolute phrase” and, therefore, does not modify anything in the main clause. Professor Lund states that the Second Amendment “has exactly the same meaning that it would have if the preamble had been omitted.”
Refreshing though it is to see punctuation at the center of a national debate, there could scarcely be a worse place to search for the framers’ original intent than their use of commas. In the 18th century, punctuation marks were as common as medicinal leeches and just about as scientific. Commas and other marks evolved from a variety of symbols meant to denote pauses in speaking. For centuries, punctuation was as chaotic as individual speech patterns.
The situation was even worse in the law, where a long English tradition held that punctuation marks were not actually part of statutes (and, therefore, courts could not consider punctuation when interpreting them). Not surprisingly, lawmakers took a devil-may-care approach to punctuation. Often, the whole business of punctuation was left to the discretion of scriveners, who liked to show their chops by inserting as many varied marks as possible.
Another problem with trying to find meaning in the Second Amendment’s commas is that nobody is certain how many commas it is supposed to have. The version that ended up in the National Archives has three, but that may be a fluke. Legal historians note that some states ratified a two-comma version. At least one recent law journal article refers to a four-comma version.
The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas (which, I know, means that only outlaws will have commas). Without the distracting commas, one can focus on the grammar of the sentence. Professor Lund is correct that the clause about a well-regulated militia is “absolute,” but only in the sense that it is grammatically independent of the main clause, not that it is logically unrelated. To the contrary, absolute clauses typically provide a causal or temporal context for the main clause.
The founders — most of whom were classically educated — would have recognized this rhetorical device as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” (ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras). The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.”
Likewise, when the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary.
Advocates of both gun rights and gun control are making a tactical mistake by focusing on the commas of the Second Amendment. After all, couldn’t one just as easily obsess about the founders’ odd use of capitalization? Perhaps the next amicus brief will find the true intent of the amendment by pointing out that “militia” and “state” are capitalized in the original, whereas “people” is not.
Adam Freedman, the author of “The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese,” writes the Legal Lingo column for New York Law Journal Magazine.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16freedman.html
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Illinois Concealed Carry Ruling Sets Stage For High Court Fight Over Right To Carry A Gun
In this March 7, 2012 file photo, gun owners and supporters participate in an Illinois Gun Owners Lobby Day rally at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield. The next big issue in the national debate over guns -- whether people have a right to be armed in public -- is moving closer to Supreme Court review.
(AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File)
By MARK SHERMAN 12/16/12 12:53 PM ET EST
WASHINGTON — The next big issue in the national debate over guns – whether people have a right to be armed in public – is moving closer to Supreme Court review.
A provocative ruling by a panel of federal appeals court judges in Chicago struck down the only statewide ban on carrying concealed weapons, in Illinois. The ruling is somewhat at odds with those of other federal courts that have largely upheld state and local gun laws, including restrictions on concealed weapons, since the Supreme Court's landmark ruling declaring that people have a right to have a gun for self-defense.
In, 2008, the court voted 5-4 in District of Columbia v. Heller to strike down Washington's ban on handgun ownership and focused mainly on the right to defend one's own home. The court left for another day how broadly the Second Amendment may protect gun rights in other settings.
Legal scholars say the competing appellate rulings mean that day is drawing near for a new high court case on gun rights.
The appeals court ruling in Chicago came early in a week that ended with the mass shooting in Connecticut that left 28 people dead, including 20 children at an elementary school and the presumed gunman.
Laurie Levenson, a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said that along with thorny legal issues, "we have the overlay of these tragedies hitting us on a somewhat regular basis."
The author of a book that traces the battle over gun control in the U.S. said he thinks Supreme Court intervention is likely in the short-term. "Since the Heller case, the next great question for the Supreme Court to decide was whether there is a right to carry guns in public," said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, whose book "Gunfight" was published last year.
Roughly 40 states make it easy for people to carry a gun in public. But in California, New York and a few other states, local and state regulations make it difficult if not impossible to get a license to carry a weapon. Illinois and the District of Columbia have been the only places to refuse to allow people to be armed in public.
"In some of our most populated states, the right does not exist either because it's completely forbidden or practically forbidden," said Alan Gura, the lawyer who won the Heller case at the Supreme Court.
Gun rights advocates and gun control supporters are as split over the issue of having guns in public as they were over whether the Constitution protected gun ownership at all – and along the same lines.
Jonathan Lowy, an attorney with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said, "If law enforcement makes a determination that somebody would increase the danger to the public by carrying a loaded gun on the streets, then that person should not be carrying a loaded gun. Some people in the gun lobby want to tie the hands of law enforcement."
But Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, said, "Clearly, the individual right under the Constitution does not apply only to your home. People have lives outside their home and the constitutional right applies outside their home."
Sometimes, LaPierre said, "The only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
Judge Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals employed similar reasoning in his majority opinion striking down the Illinois law. Posner said that threatening confrontations do not only or even principally occur at home. "A Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower," the judge said.
He homed in on the distinction between inside the home and on the street in his questioning of another recent appeals court ruling that upheld New York's restrictive law on granting people permits to carry concealed weapons. A unanimous panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the requirement that people demonstrate a special need to carry a concealed weapon does not violate the Constitution.
"Our principal reservation about the Second Circuit's analysis is its suggestion that the Second Amendment should have much greater scope inside the home than outside simply because other provisions of the Constitution have been held to make that distinction," including the right to privacy that underlies the high court ruling striking down sodomy laws. "Well of course, the interest in having sex inside one's home is much greater than the interest in having sex on the sidewalk in front of one's home. But the interest in self-protection is as great outside as inside the home," Posner said.
In dissent, Judge Ann Williams said governments have a strong interest in regulating guns on the street. "It is common sense, as the majority recognizes, that a gun is dangerous to more people when carried outside the home. When firearms are carried outside the home, the safety of a broader range of citizens is at issue. The risk of being injured or killed now extends to strangers, law enforcement personnel, and other private citizens who happen to be in the area," Williams said.
Gura represents the challengers to the New York law and he said he will ask the high court to review the 2nd Circuit ruling. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has not yet said whether the state will ask the full 7th Circuit court to reconsider its ruling or appeal to the Supreme Court.
So far, the Supreme Court has turned down appeals asking it to say more about guns. But that reluctance might fade if the court were presented with a split between appeals courts, typically a strong factor in attracting the justices' interest.
The Second Amendment talks about "the right to keep and bear arms and it's as if some courts want to take giant eraser to the words `and bear' and pretend that they're not there," said David Thompson, managing partner of the Cooper and Kirk law firm in Washington. Thompson represented some plaintiffs in the Illinois case.
Northwestern University law professor Eugene Kontrovich said the difference between the New York and Chicago courts over what it means to bear arms could be enough to persuade the Supreme Court to intervene.
Winkler, the UCLA professor, said he thinks the Illinois statute would fall if it were to put to a test at the Supreme Court, probably by the same 5-4 vote as in Heller. But it is hard to predict how the Supreme Court might rule on restrictions that fall short of an outright ban on the right to carry a loaded weapon in public for self-defense, he said.
"Public possession is a different issue than having a gun in your home," Winkler said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/illinois-concealed-carry-_1_n_2311130.html [with comments]
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To Judge Richard Posner, Gun Control Is a Joke
Cody Miller, 9, fires a machine gun with help from a range worker in West Point, Kentucky.
(Aaron Bernstein/Reuters)
Days before Newtown, the Seventh Circuit extended the Second Amendment beyond even the Supreme Court's decisions.
By Garrett Epps
Dec 16 2012
Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit has never minded being the bad guy in public debate. He once suggested that adoption law could be improved by selling babies [ http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/724219 ] to the highest bidder. After September 11, he publicly defended the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II.
But not even a contrarian like Posner could have imagined that he would issue a pro-gun opinion so radical [ ] it makes Justice Scalia look timid -- in the same week as the Newtown massacre of 20 children and six adults by an intruder with a gun.
Posner's opinon in the new case Moore v. Madigan contains the most bizarre line I have read in a federal-court opinion since, well, ever. The issue is whether the Supreme Court's two recent gun-rights decisions, Heller v. District of Columbia and McDonald v. City of Chicago, create a right to armed self-defense outside the home. The Court's opinions said they did not; but to Posner, that's silly: "To confine the right to be armed to the home is to divorce the Second Amendment from the right of self-defense described in Heller and McDonald. It is not a property right -- a right to kill a houseguest who, in a fit of aesthetic fury, tries to slash your copy of Norman Rockwell's painting, Santa with Elves."
People may be dying in the streets, but to Posner, the case is a chance for shtick.
The Seventh Circuit case was a challenge to Illinois's statute -- one of the strictest in the country -- against carrying a loaded, accessible firearm anywhere outside the home. As noted, Heller and McDonald concerned the right to own a hand weapon in a private home. Posner has previously been critical of Heller, but in Moore he extends it far beyond its original result. He concludes that the Second Amendment right must extend beyond the home, because it's possible some people that carry guns might be able to defend themselves against attackers with guns. True, the statistical evidence of this is pretty thin, but Posner really doesn't care. "Twenty-first century Illinois has no hostile Indians. But a Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower," he reasons. There's some evidence that this may increase the severity of crime, if not the rate -- but that doesn't matter either: "the Supreme Court made clear in Heller that it wasn't going to make the right to bear arms depend on casualty counts."
Even though Posner rather casually changes the holding of Heller, he is right about that. Neither the Supreme Court nor the Seventh Circuit displays the slightest concern for the real-world effects of its decision. Instead, what matters is a kind of airless, abstract reasoning. To Justice Scalia, it is clothed in the garb of history; to Posner, it represents "pragmatism." In fact, that callous indifference to consequences -- ahistorical and unpragmatic -- disfigures both the Supreme Court's Second Amendment cases and reveals a flip attitude toward the problems of those who must live their lives outside federal courthouses surrounded by metal detectors and marshals.
More and more, the right wing of the federal judiciary is behaving like the nasty old uncle at the family dinner table, grumbling about how stupid young people are today. Why do they need medical care, or contraception, or protections from sexual violence, or anti-smoking efforts, or gun control? We didn't have any of that stuff when I was a kid, and look how great I turned out!
That avuncular growl is grating at the best of times. In a moment of national mourning, it is repellent.
Justice Scalia made his own set of headlines this week, mocking and belittling gay rights to a Princeton audience. Posner has recently made a specialty of needling Scalia, but the truth is the two judges are more alike than either would like to admit. And both of them might consider whether it's a good time to dial it back a bit.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/to-judge-richard-posner-gun-control-is-a-joke/266323/ [with comments]
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Did This Really Happen in My Elementary School?
[Eric Theyer/Reuters]
The town and school where I have innumerable positive memories have been suddenly torn away from me in the most grotesque way possible.
By Edward Small
Dec 15 2012, 11:52 AM ET
I've always had two stock answers for people whenever they ask me about Newtown. One is, "It's from the half of Connecticut that wants to be New York City." The other is, "We invented Scrabble. After that, nothing really happened." It's a town of about 27,000 people where things don't stay open past 10 p.m. and a boy digging a big hole is a story worthy of the local paper's front page. It's also where I grew up and made my first friends and got my first job and learned about 80 percent of what I know today.
And now, none of that matters.
It's just after midnight at the end of a long day of shaking, crying, worrying, and telling several concerned friends that I'm fine. It's only true in the narrowest sense, of course. Yesterday, 20 children were shot and killed in my old elementary school. I'm sad, confused, infuriated, and I want to do something about it. The problem is, I can't think of anything that would actually matter.
I think that's where a lot of the confused anger and despair I've been trying to deal with over the past 24 hours stems from: sheer, overwhelming impotence. The town and school where I have innumerable positive memories have both been suddenly torn away from me in the most grotesque way possible. I say that without exaggeration: we're talking about a gunman who opened fire in anelementary school. That can't be a real event.
When talking to friends and family about this, the one phrase that keeps coming up is "I can't believe." It's a cliché, but also true in a very literal sense. I spent all day reading the headlines and the body counts, but part of me is still waiting for the grand reveal that none of this really happened because how could any of it have really happened? How could the elementary school where I wrote my first story and got in trouble for calling Ross Perot a butthead also be the site of the nation's second-deadliest school shooting? I can't reconcile the memories I have of Sandy Hook School with the events of today. They simply aren't the same place.
In other words, the feeling of helplessness isn't just coming from the fact that I can't do anything about the murders on Friday. If anything, I'm still far too baffled as to how and why a fellow human being could kill 27 people--20 of them schoolchildren -- to feel much of anything besides inchoate shock and rage. The helplessness comes more from the fact that my hometown doesn't belong to me anymore.
Over the course of just a few hours on a crisp Friday in December, I saw my humble town become infamous. I saw its name plastered on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I saw it trending on Twitter. I heard it come out of Barack Obama's mouth. (Although I'm pretty sure you said "Newton," Mr. President. I tried to ignore that because it was a good speech, but come on. We're very proud of that second "w.") It belongs to the world now, not to me. And this is all and only because of the shooting.
I don't know how you make sense of an event like this, where even words like "abominable" and "sickening" come off as understatement. I don't know what type of person decides to kill 20 elementary school students. If Columbine is any indication, the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary will likely be the main if not the only thing that people think of when they hear the word "Newtown" for decades to come. This is eminently understandable, but I can't help but feel angry about how unfair it seems as well. Because there is more to my hometown than one horrific shooting, and I want people to know that. I want them to know about the Labor Day Parade and the General Store sandwiches, about Newtown High School soccer and the $2 movies at Edmond Town Hall, about how we put a giant flagpole in the middle of a busy four-way intersection that everyone seems to both love and hate at the same time. I want them to know that St. Rose of Lima isn't just a place for candlelight vigils but for weddings and baptisms, and I want the Times to know that the adjectives "wooded" and "bucolic" don't begin to do my town justice, and I want to chastise my adolescent self for devoting so much of his existence to complaining about a place that never showed him anything but family and friendship and love, and, damn it, President Obama, that really was a moving speech, but it's Newtown.
A friend of mine set up a fund [ http://www.crowdrise.com/SHSRelief ] for the victims' families, if you'd like to contribute.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/did-this-really-happen-in-my-elementary-school/266317/ [with comments]
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The Secret History of Guns
Joseph Durning/Durning 3D
The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership—and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.
By Adam Winkler
September 2011 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.
The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must
take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.
Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.
It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.
THE TEXT OF the Second Amendment is maddeningly ambiguous. It merely says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Yet to each side in the gun debate, those words are absolutely clear.
Gun-rights supporters believe the amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms and outlaws most gun control. Hard-line gun-rights advocates portray even modest gun laws as infringements on that right and oppose widely popular proposals—such as background checks for all gun purchasers—on the ground that any gun-control measure, no matter how seemingly reasonable, puts us on the slippery slope toward total civilian disarmament.
This attitude was displayed on the side of the National Rifle Association’s former headquarters: THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. The first clause of the Second Amendment, the part about “a well regulated Militia,” was conveniently omitted. To the gun lobby, the Second Amendment is all rights and no regulation.
Although decades of electoral defeats have moderated the gun-control movement’s stated goals, advocates still deny that individual Americans have any constitutional right to own guns. The Second Amendment, in their view, protects only state militias. Too politically weak to force disarmament on the nation, gun-control hard-liners support any new law that has a chance to be enacted, however unlikely that law is to reduce gun violence. For them, the Second Amendment is all regulation and no rights.
While the two sides disagree on the meaning of the Second Amendment, they share a similar view of the right to bear arms: both see such a right as fundamentally inconsistent with gun control, and believe we must choose one or the other. Gun rights and gun control, however, have lived together since the birth of the country. Americans have always had the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of state constitutional law. Today, 43 of the 50 state constitutions clearly protect an individual’s right to own guns, apart from militia service.
Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.
For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.
OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.
Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”
Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.
Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.
Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.
The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.
In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.
Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.
“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.
“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.
By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.
The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.
Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.
THE PANTHERS’ METHODS provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.
Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”
The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.
A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”
Political will in Congress reached the critical point around this time. In April of 1968, James Earl Ray, a virulent racist, used a Remington Gamemaster deer rifle to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s assassination—and the sniper fire faced by police trying to quell the resulting riots—gave gun-control advocates a vivid argument. Two months later, a man wielding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. The very next day, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.
Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”
INDISPUTABLY, FOR MUCH of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”
After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.
IN RESPONSE TO the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”
That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.
One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.” In December of 1865, Bingham had proposed what would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among its provisions was a guarantee that all citizens would be secure in their fundamental rights:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The key phrase, in Bingham’s view, was privileges or immunities of citizens—and those “privileges or immunities,” he said, were “chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal sponsor of Bingham’s amendment in the Senate, reminded his colleagues that these amendments guaranteed “the freedom of speech and of the press,” “the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures,” and “the right to keep and bear arms.”
Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”
The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.
TODAY, THE NRA is the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control. Yet the organization didn’t always oppose gun regulation. Founded in 1871 by George Wingate and William Church—the latter a former reporter for a newspaper now known for hostility to gun rights, The New York Times—the group first set out to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship. Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)
Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.
The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932 Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”
When Congress was considering the first significant federal gun law of the 20th century—the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a steep tax and registration requirements on “gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns—the NRA endorsed the law. Karl Frederick and the NRA did not blindly support gun control; indeed, they successfully pushed to have similar prohibitive taxes on handguns stripped from the final bill, arguing that people needed such weapons to protect their homes. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”
One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. When asked during his testimony on the National Firearms Act whether the proposed law violated “any constitutional provision,” he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” In other words, the president of the NRA hadn’t even considered whether the most far-reaching federal gun-control legislation in history conflicted with the Second Amendment. Preserving the ability of law-abiding people to have guns, Frederick would write elsewhere, “lies in an enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative action. It is not to be found in the Constitution.”
In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Orth and the NRA didn’t favor stricter proposals, like national gun registration, but when the final version of the Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, Orth stood behind the legislation. While certain features of the law, he said, “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”
A GROWING GROUP OF rank-and-file NRA members disagreed. In an era of rising crime rates, fewer people were buying guns for hunting, and more were buying them for protection. The NRA leadership didn’t fully grasp the importance of this shift. In 1976, Maxwell Rich, the executive vice president, announced that the NRA would sell its building in Washington, D.C., and relocate the headquarters to Colorado Springs, retreating from political lobbying and expanding its outdoor and environmental activities.
Rich’s plan sparked outrage among the new breed of staunch, hard-line gun-rights advocates. The dissidents were led by a bald, blue-eyed bulldog of a man named Harlon Carter, who ran the NRA’s recently formed lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.
The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms. Both groups valued guns primarily as a means of self-defense. Both thought people had a right to carry guns in public places, where a person was easily victimized, and not just in the privacy of the home. They also shared a profound mistrust of law enforcement. (For years, the NRA has demonized government agents, like those in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency that enforces gun laws, as “jack-booted government thugs.” Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”) For both the Panthers in 1967 and the new NRA after 1977, law-enforcement officers were too often representatives of an uncaring government bent on disarming ordinary citizens.
A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate. Their chosen candidate was none other than Ronald Reagan, who more than a decade earlier had endorsed Don Mulford’s law to disarm the Black Panthers—a law that had helped give Reagan’s California one of the strictest gun-control regimes in the nation. Reagan’s views had changed considerably since then, and the NRA evidently had forgiven his previous support of vigorous gun control.
IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.
Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.
So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.
The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from the Heller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, 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.
This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.
Adam Winkler is a professor of constitutional law at UCLA law school. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America [ http://www.amazon.com/Gunfight-Battle-over-Right-America/dp/0393077411 ], to be published by W. W. Norton in September.
*
Also see:
Debating the Second Amendment
From satires to investigative reports, four decades of Atlantic authors weigh in on gun control
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/from-the-archives-debating-the-second-amendment/243279
*
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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How America’s toxic culture breeds mass murder
(Credit: defpicture [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-626827p1.html ] via Shutterstock)
Mass shooters in the U.S. are almost always men — angry men who can get guns more easily than mental health care
By Andrew O'Hehir
Saturday, Dec 15, 2012 11:00 AM CST
As a parent, an American and a human being, I’m having trouble functioning in the wake of Friday’s elementary-school shootings in Newtown, Conn. You’ll read this some hours after I write it, so you’ll know more than I do now about the children and adults who have died and the families who are enduring unbearable losses, and about the life and death of Adam Lanza, the young man who apparently inflicted them. Those things are dreadfully important to the people involved, but they won’t change the bigger picture much. That’s a picture of grief and horror and profound collective mystification about how such a thing could happen, a picture of a disordered culture that produces these spectacular outbreaks of psychotic violence more and more often, even in an era of relatively low crime.
While the grief and horror are understandable, as well as fully justified – I’m forcing myself to move my fingers across the keyboard, when I would probably be better off sitting quietly in a darkened room, or spending time with my own children – maybe we shouldn’t be quite as bewildered as we claim to be. I don’t mean that we should understand, or even try to understand, how a person can become so angry and sick that he picks up a gun and starts shooting other people’s children at random. There may be artists and psychiatrists and philosophers who can glean something useful from looking into that kind of hateful and bottomless despair, but I sure don’t want to do it.
What I am saying is that we’ve had enough of these events over the last few decades to see undeniable overlapping patterns, and the same toxic stew of legal, cultural and psychological factors recurring in almost every case. Some of this information has to do with readily quantifiable data, such as the fact that most mass shooters acquire their guns legally on the open market, and most use assault weapons or semiautomatic handguns that would be far less easy to obtain if we had more reasonable and realistic gun laws. Some of it is blindingly obvious but not openly discussed, such as the fact that this is almost exclusively a male problem. (As a remarkable survey published a few weeks ago by Mother Jones [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map ] attests, 60 of the 61 mass shooters in America over the last three decades have been men or boys. Now, I suppose, it’s 61 of 62.)
Some of it is more nebulous and subjective, such as the media’s pornographic fixation on events of this kind, even though they make up a small proportion of the firearms killings in the United States every year. As a culture critic by trade, I tend to resist cause-and-effect explanations that blame violent entertainment for real-world violence. (I’m not saying that it hasn’t happened in individual cases.) But I find it unfortunately plausible that the massive media spectacles erected around incidents like the one in Newtown, or the “Dark Knight Rises” shootings [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/20/does_batman_have_blood_on_his_hands/ ] in Colorado, with their grave and studied theatricality – the somber-looking anchors, the wobbly amateur video of people crying in a parking lot, the police photograph of some crazy-looking guy in a prison jumpsuit – can inspire copycats and emulators who want to be that famous too.
Whether these patterns point the way toward preventing these kinds of horrific events I really couldn’t say. Maybe they suggest some places to start and some strategies worth trying, or maybe they just help us understand the dimensions of the problem a little better. Here are some of the key factors in these outrages, as I see them.
Take the Second Amendment and shove it. There are numerous reporters and commentators, at Salon and elsewhere, more qualified than I am to go after the National Rifle Association and the rest of the gun lobby, who have so successfully hijacked this issue over the last 20 years or so. We’ve seen the Democratic Party largely abandon the struggle for reasonable standards of national gun control since the Clinton administration, no doubt because it didn’t focus-group well in swing districts of Pennsylvania and Michigan or whatever. And even if outrageous crimes like the Newtown and Aurora shooting begin to swing the tide of public opinion back toward a nationwide assault-weapons ban, the NRA has already won the war on the ground. The country is flooded with millions of such weapons, and short of the kind of house-to-house, black-helicopter search the gun nuts fear, we’ll never get rid of all of them.
That’s not a reason not to try, obviously. As I mentioned earlier, data collected by Mother Jones indicates that the majority of mass shooters acquired their guns legally, and that very few of them used more “normal” consumer firearms like revolvers, hunting rifles or shotguns. Yes, you can still commit murder with a weapon like that, and people do it all the time. But mass murder becomes much more difficult. Urban liberals might aspire to live in a European-style country where private gun ownership is exceptionally rare, but that’s not likely to happen here. It’s not necessary to repeal the Second Amendment, or force folks in Kansas to give up Grandpa’s blunderbuss. Americans have a long history with guns, blah blah blah – I’m actually not interested in prying your trusty .30-06 out of your cold, dead hands. But gun owners have been brainwashed to believe that private ownership of semiautomatic weapons whose only real purpose is to kill large groups of people is a constitutional right. That’s utterly insane and immoral, and over the long haul maybe they can be brainwashed back.
America has a major angry-man problem. Reading the Mother Jones article, whose lead author is former Salon reporter Mark Follman, I was actually surprised to learn that there was one female mass shooter in recent American history, a disgruntled postal worker in Goleta, Calif., who shot a neighbor and several co-workers. But the other 61 people who have so tragically acted out their twisted private fantasies on people around them have all been male. While some element of sexual or misogynistic drama was frequently involved – a mother or ex-wife or girlfriend; a rejection or divorce or suggestions of closeted homosexuality – the one thing you can point to in almost every case is perceived humiliation.
Over and over again you read stories of workplace shootings – at technology companies, aircraft factories, day-trading firms, fast-food franchises, maintenance yards and (infamously) post offices – in which some guy who got fired or lost a promotion or generally felt that everybody hated him goes and gets a gun, or several, and acts out his revenge fantasy. Of course there’s no possible justification for such an act, and it seems reasonable to conclude that anybody who shoots a lot of people has suffered a mental breakdown, probably one with deep roots and multiple causative factors. Nonetheless I suspect that economic realities play a role. It’s plausible that these grotesque events are by-products of the downward pressure on wages, especially in the working class and lower fringes of the middle class, and reflect what has sometimes been called the “crisis of masculinity,” meaning the perceived emasculation and loss of privilege felt by some men in an age of increasing sexual equality.
I’m not suggesting this is good news, but the stereotype that these kinds of shooters are invariably white men is less true than it used to be. In the last decade or so, almost every possible demographic has been represented: There have been two infamous campus shootings by Asian graduate students, one by a Native American teenager living on a Minnesota reservation, and a couple by African-Americans and Latinos. Overall, 43 of the 61 shooters in mass killings since 1982 have been white, which is only a little higher than the proportion of whites in the general population.
Each of these cases represents a failure of the mental-health system. If, that is, you want to claim we even have one. One of the repeating elements in these dreadful dramas is an attempt to point fingers at some shrink or counselor or teacher or social worker who knew there was a problem and didn’t do enough to intervene successfully. In several recent cases, including the “Dark Knight” and Virginia Tech shootings, the perpetrators had sought help at various times before they went off the deep end into apocalypse. It’s impossible to imagine the pain and guilt a professional in that position would feel after something like this happens, but we’re pointing fingers in the wrong direction.
There’s only so much the overworked people in the mental-health field can do about someone who very likely has a worsening disorder, is by definition poorly equipped to make good decisions, and may be refusing to accept competent care and advice. But what lies behind that problem is the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a national health-care system that could maintain standardized medical records of at-risk individuals, and at least seek to enforce a nationwide standard of care. Of course that wouldn’t prevent every single mass killing, but you can’t convince me it wouldn’t stop some of them. There are many reasons why the social-welfare states of Western Europe have lower rates of violent crime than we do – but the fact that they still have social welfare states, however decayed, has a lot to do with it.
Media fascination with violence, and the 24/7 news cycle, may have made things worse. “If it bleeds it leads” is a longtime maxim of the news industry, to be sure. By the time Martin Scorsese made “Taxi Driver” in the mid-‘70s, the archetype of the psychotic killer as media hero was well established. But the mass shooting as a collectively created media spectacle, shared by television, the major Internet news portals, the mainstream media’s big names and millions of individuals on social media, has changed the nature of the experience. I do realize the painful and profoundly unfunny irony of raising this issue in a day-after analysis story on the Internet, one of dozens or hundreds you may come across this weekend.
When I wrote about the “Dark Knight” shootings [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/20/does_batman_have_blood_on_his_hands/ ] in Colorado earlier this year, I discussed the way that particular lunatic seemed to want to elevate his evil psychodrama to the level of spectacle seen in Christopher Nolan’s film. The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday had nothing to do with a movie, but the whole thing was a spectacle all the same. News reports suggest that Lanza arrived at the school dressed in the all too predictable “black fatigues and military vest” required by his role, and he had to know that shooting little kids would guarantee him several days of stardom in a drama of his own construction, even if he’s no longer here to see it.
What Lanza apparently did was contemptible and unforgivable, and it would be better to ignore him and focus on the bigger picture. I am not suggesting he deserves our pity, but he is a victim too. Moving backwards from the evidence here, I would suggest that these atrocities tend to occur in a culture with numerous fundamental problems: one that is economically divided and socially stratified, with a dark undercurrent of male anxiety and anger, one where high-powered firearms with no legitimate uses are far too easy to find, where the social safety net has been shredded and decent mental-health care is not available to all, and where our experience of the world is increasingly as a shared media spectacle. Does that sound familiar?
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/how_americas_toxic_culture_breeds_mass_murder/ [with comments]
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Gun Control Laws: After Sandy Hook, Poll Finds Bump In Support For Greater Restrictions
President Barack Obama pauses as he talks about the Connecticut elementary school shooting, Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, in the White House briefing room in Washington.
12/16/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/gun-control-laws-sandy-hook-poll_n_2309324.html [with comments]
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The Geography of U.S. Gun Violence
Dec 14, 2012
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/12/geography-us-gun-violence/4171/ [with comments]
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Jordan Davis Shooting: Charges Upgraded To First Degree Murder In Slaying Of Unarmed Teen
This undated photo provided by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office shows Michael David Dunn, 45, who is charged with murder and attempted murder in the Nov. 23 shooting death of 17-year-old Jordan Davis.
(AP Photo/Jacksonville Sheriff's Office)
By Susan Cooper Eastman
Posted: 12/13/2012 11:44 pm EST | Updated: 12/14/2012 5:12 pm EST
JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Dec 13 (Reuters) - A grand jury indicted a Florida man for first degree murder on Thursday in the shooting death of an unarmed, black high school student last month after an argument over loud rap music.
Software developer Michael Dunn, 46, shot high school junior Jordan Davis, 17, through the window of a sport utility vehicle at a Jacksonville convenience store gas station on Nov. 23, before driving away, authorities say.
Dunn, who is white, faces charges of attempted first degree murder for firing at the car which contained three other passengers, all friends of Davis.
Dunn was arrested the day after the shooting for second degree murder and pleaded not guilty. He was being held in Duval County without bond awaiting arraignment.
The state attorney's office later decided to upgrade the charge to first degree murder, which in Florida requires a grand jury decision.
Dunn's arraignment on the new charges is scheduled for Dec. 17.
Davis's father, Ron Davis, has pledged to turn his son's shooting death into a crusade against guns and Florida's controversial Stand Your Ground law which allows people to defend themselves if they "reasonably believe" someone will hurt them.
Widespread opposition to the law has emerged after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, also an unarmed, black 17-year-old, in February by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in central Florida. Zimmerman, whom police initially declined to arrest, will stand trial next June for murder.
Dunn's lawyer says he fired out of fear for his life when someone in the SUV brandished a shotgun and threatened him.
Dunn and his fiance Rhonda Rouer were in Jacksonville on the night of the shooting to attend a wedding when they stopped at the store to buy a bottle of wine before returning to their hotel, authorities say. They parked next to the SUV containing Davis and his three friends who were listening to rap music on their way home after shopping at Black Friday sales at a mall.
Dunn asked the teens to turn down the volume of the music, but, his attorney said, the teens turned up the volume, threatened Dunn and brandished a shotgun. Dunn grabbed a pistol from the glove compartment of his car and opened fire, before driving away, authorities say. Police said no weapon was found on the teens.
Dunn was taken into custody at his oceanfront townhome about 170 miles (270 km) south of Jacksonville the day after the shooting.
(Editing by David Adams and Mohammad Zargham)
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/jordan-davis-shooting-charges-upgraded_n_2297721.html [with comments]
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Ron Weiser, RNC Finance Chair, Criticized For Controversial Detroit Voter Remarks
12/16/12 03:13 PM ET EST
DETROIT -- The finance chair for the Republican National Committee told a Michigan tea party gathering this summer that Detroit's plummeting population and lack of a mayoral machine to get voters "to stop playing pool and drinking beer in the pool hall" has decreased its influence in elections.
In the video, Weiser, the state's former GOP chairman, can be seen telling attendees what his thoughts were heading into the Nov. 6 presidential election, which President Barack Obama won.
Detroit – which is more than 80 percent black and votes almost overwhelmingly Democratic – isn't to be feared as much because the city's population has dropped below 700,000 people and there no longer are strong, mayor-led machines to get voters to the polls, Weiser said.
There is "no Coleman Young machine. No Kwame Kilpatrick machine. There is no Dave Bing machine," he said. "There's no machine to go to the pool halls and the barbershops and put those people on buses, and then bus them from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times.
"And there's no machine to get 'em to stop playing pool and drinking beer in the pool hall. And it does make a difference."
Young was Detroit's first black mayor and served nearly 20 years in the office. Kilpatrick resigned in 2008 during his second term while facing perjury and other charges related to text-messaging sex scandal. Bing, a professional basketball Hall of Famer and former businessman, was elected mayor in 2009.
"Obama has hired a lot of people to go help him get that vote out," Weiser continued in the video. "But if you're not from Detroit, the places where those pool halls and barbershops are, you're not going to be going at 6:30 in November. Not without a side arm."
The Rev. David Bullock, chairman of the Michigan Rainbow Push Coalition, characterized the remarks as racist.
"Detroit is much more than pool halls and barbershops," Bullock told the Free Press. "There are churches, there are parks, there are universities. It's disheartening that the political culture in Michigan and much of the country is so subversively and racially charged."
The comments also drew a sharp response by Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer.
"We have a major Republican figure in Michigan and nationally who is making racist stereotype remarks about voters in Detroit," Brewer said.
Weiser, an Ann Arbor businessman and Michigan Republican Party chairman from 2009-10, later told the newspaper his comments were "never intended to be racist" and that he didn't intend to offend anyone by his statements at the tea party meeting in Milford, northwest of Detroit.
He said he believes voter fraud occurred in Detroit during Young's and Kilpatrick's time in office and defended his statements.
"I don't think there's anything negative about pool halls and barbershops," Weiser told the newspaper Friday "There are many other places I could have talked about that would have had negative connotations.
"Since when is it a stereotype to talk about the fact people drink beer in pool halls? What do you think they drink? Soda pop?"
He also defended his view of crime in Detroit, a city with one of the highest violent crime rates in the country.
"I challenge you to find anyone who says you can walk around the neighborhoods of Detroit at 6:30 in the morning and not find it dangerous," Weiser said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/ron-weiser-detroit_n_2312539.html [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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