Scott Martelle

Jul 21, 2012 4:59 AM EDT

Scott, if you can go back and count the victims, surely you should also be able to count the follow-ups. How many of these killers were mentally ill? I know that you will immediately say that the mentally ill should not have gun permits in the first place, but I think the point is larger.

In every case that I have followed, not only was the shooter mentally unstable or outright ill, but their illness was untreated. Often, that lack of treatment was due to no health care, no treatment available -- in the US, we have an abysmal record of caring for our sick and poor. Reagan closed down hundreds of thousands of treatment facilities and mental hospitals around the country, and the people who needed the care they provided were turned out into the streets.

The hole in the gun control argument is this: A determined anybody can get their hands on weapons, legally or illegally. You can tighten the regulations, outlaw whole classes of weapons, all you want; but making it legally impossible to buy an AK-47 doesn't mean people -- especially determined psychotic or schizophrenic people -- won't be able to get them.

Hundreds of thousands of gun owners use their weapons responsibly every year. I'm not arguing against more rigorous permitting or tighter controls. I'm saying blaming gun laws for the actions of the dangerous and untreated mentally ill is like blaming aviation laws for plane crashes. In the wake of a catastrophic plane crash, we don't argue that airline companies shouldn't be able to buy new McConnell or Boeing jets. We argue that they should be more closely regulated, with new safety laws, inspections and oversight.

Until we face and deal with the simple fact that seriously ill people are unable to get needed treatment, and until we enact systems to see that they can, we're going to continue to see exactly these kind of tragedies. If they didn't use guns, they'd make bombs. Or poison. Or some other method.

Just my .02.

- Robin

Jul 21, 2012 5:39 AM EDT

To me, they're separate issues (and I agree with you on our abysmal record on helping the mentally ill). There is no defensible reason for anyone to have ready access to weapons that can kill multiple people in seconds. Yes, there are responsible gun-owners; that isn't the point. There is no need in our society for these weapons to be available at all. They fill our streets with danger, they have fed (along with our drug habits, also woefully untreated) the violence and instability in Mexico; they are NOTHING like what the writers of the Constitution envisioned when they wrote the Second Amendment. Militias then involved drawing in people who often brought their own weapons; thus it was in the government's interest to let them have weapons. It's a different world now. Would strict constitutionalists defend the consignment of blacks to property status? Jefferson himself said something to the effect that the Constitution was not set in stone but should grow and change as did the country. He used the metaphor of the coat of the child no longer fitting the coat of the adult. Our gun laws have not fit for decades....

- Scott Martelle

Jul 21, 2012 12:16 PM EDT

The ease of mass slayings is the issue. The unconscionable simplicity of being able to order up a police precinct's worth of ammunition -- 3,000 rounds for an AR15 with a click of the mouse? -- without a squint of attention. This is the world the NRA has created and we have to live and die in it. For James Holmes, the NRA and gun fetishist response is the standard ``don't blame the gun, blame the shooter'' and then exit the discussion when the reply is ``So, why don't we talk about the mentally ill shooter?'' If that theater had been shot up by a jihadist, the NRA and gun fetishist response would be ``Bomb Iran.'' It's never about the fanatical protection of laws that accommodate homicide.

- Paul L.

Jul 21, 2012 2:29 PM EDT

Scott is right on the money noting that the currents weapon technology is lightyears beyond anything the writers of the Constitution could have imagined.

I would also agree with Robin that determined psychotics could probably get weapons regardless of tighter laws and regulations. But who is to say that all of the murderers in Scott's list took the time to plan their assaults in great detail? Tighter gun regulations would, at least, make unplanned, crimes of passion less likely.

- David Salamone

Jul 22, 2012 7:23 AM EDT

Add the shootings at Western Psychiatric Hospital (Pittsburgh, two blocks from my office)last March. A young man, brilliant and mentally ill, from a priviledged background, opens fire in the hospital that was not able to treat him adequately. His parents were crusing on their sailboat in the Bahamas. He killed a young man who was a geriatric therapist; the young man had just gotten engaged and his fiancee was at work as a nurse at the hospital across the street. The young man's sister had been killed less than two years eariler by her partner in a dispute over drugs. Those were the only two children in the family.

The shooter was well armed. While a number of people knew that he was struggling with his maladies, no one was able to get him to the treatment he needed.

You can't make up a story as nuanced as this. The shooter traveled to a state where his previous stay at a mental hospital would not be checked when he bought the guns he used. He had been accepted as a PhD student at a Pittsburgh university and started in the fall before the shootings, but washed out before Christmas because of his behavior. His mother attended a disciplinary hearing at the university with him in October; then she got back on the boat, leaving him in a nice apartment near the university with no one to keep an eye on him.

The gun issue, the mental health issue, inadequate security at the hospital,the campus police trained for just this type of event who saved lives and took the shooter down, two families burying their only children, and employees of Western Psych who just went to work one day and were greviously injured.

Wish I could write - this story needs to be told.

- Marjorie Ford Johnson

Jul 24, 2012 1:03 AM EDT

Here is an outsiders take on the situation. This type of violence is dealt with very differently in places like Northern Ireland. When the IRA were carrying out violent campaigns, the British government made it illegal for the press to publish images of the accused & guilty. Their faces and real voices were never used by the media.
I think that if the US and Canada were to enact a similar law, the senseless mass shootings would cease to be a viable method for the disenfranchised to be 'heard'. If the public stopped being so intent on delving into the lives of these, often ill people, it may just curb that fatal thought from developing in the damaged mind of the would be mass murderer.

- Alice Kilduff

Jul 24, 2012 3:57 AM EDT

Thanks for the comment, Alice. The difference between here and there is the First Amendment precludes the government from telling the media what it can or cannot publish or air on television newscasts, so that solution would never get off the ground here. And I don't think it should. Democracy lives and dies on the open exchange of ideas and information, and we would curtail it at great risk. There are limits on the press and free speech (libel, inability to yell fire in a full theater), but those are safeguards against directly caused damages. Interfering with the nature of the coverage of events itself steps far beyond balancing the rights of the press against the rights of the individuals, since the direct impact here is awareness of a significant public event.

Further, in Northern Ireland the intent of the violence was terrorism in the hopes of effecting political change. The parallel here would be to muzzle the media's coverage of terror attacks like 9/11, which would not be in the public's interest.

- Scott Martelle

Jul 24, 2012 10:49 PM EDT

Just for the record:
I don't want readers of this blog to get the impression that we are the only nation that has citizens that harm other citizens. The U.S. gets a megaton of attention when horrors like this occur; but, we are not alone. Mental illness is a global phenomenon. Where ever there are humans there will be unfortunate souls who's mind persuades them to inflict pain on another human, and even worse, groups of humans. First there was the rock, then there was the club. Soon iron was tied to the club and sharpened on a rock until someone perfected the chemical reaction that forced a metal ball out of the barrel of a hollow pipe. Perhaps, in a century from now psychotic minds will employ the latest technology of portable high energy lasers to cause mayhem. Absolutely no amount of regulation is going to keep these devices out of the hands of those who want to harm others. Never did. Never will.

I know this might sound ridiculous, but imagine the chief of an ancient village locking all of the clubs away in a guarded cave for the protection of the community. How long would it take before a troubled individual fashioned his own club from a fallen oak tree branch or travelled to another village and secured a new one?

The following is a partial list, borrowed appropriately from the Huff Post, of mass shootings that DID NOT occur in the United States. Many of these countries have stricter gun accruement regulations and laws than we do.

_ July 22, 2011: Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik kills 77 in Norway in twin attacks: a bombing in downtown Oslo and a shooting massacre at a youth camp outside the capital. The self-styled anti-Muslim militant admitted both attacks.

April 30, 2009: Farda Gadyrov, 29, enters the prestigious Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in the capital, Baku, armed with an automatic pistol and clips. He kills 12 people before killing himself as police close in.

_ Sept. 23, 2008: Matti Saari, 22, walks into a vocational college in Kauhajoki, Finland, and opens fire, killing 10 people and burning their bodies with firebombs before shooting himself fatally in the head.

_ Nov. 7, 2007: After revealing plans for his attack in YouTube postings, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen fires kills eight people at his high school in Tuusula, Finland.

_ April 26, 2002: Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, who had been expelled from school in Erfurt, Germany, kills 13 teachers, two former classmates and policeman, before committing suicide.

_ April 28, 1996: Martin Bryant, 29, bursts into cafeteria in seaside resort of Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia, shooting 20 people to death. Driving away, he kills 15 others. He was captured and imprisoned.

_ March 13, 1996: Thomas Hamilton, 43, kills 16 kindergarten children and their teacher in elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and then kills himself.

_ Dec. 6, 1989: Marc Lepine, 25, bursts into Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique college, shooting at women he encounters, killing nine and then himself.

_ Aug. 19, 1987: Michael Ryan, 27, kills 16 people in small market town of Hungerford, England, and then shoots himself dead after being cornered by police.

The first country on the list, Norway, has such stringent laws that individuals in law enforcement agencies have to get specific permission to carry and load a firearm. Ironically one of the first persons to be killed at that Norwegian youth camp was an-- unarmed-- police officer. Imagine if that helpless policeman witnessed the beginning of that shooting spree and stopped Anders Behring Breivik dead in his tracks. Just imagine that…. Instead, he was allowed to continue and kill 69 innocent victims, mostly teenagers from the Workers Youth League of the Labor Party, on an island for one hour and a half. It took 90 minutes for the "good guys" to show up with their own guns. Maybe it took that long to get permission from the authorities.

Taken from your own words: "And nothing will change. Because we, as a nation, really don't want it to."

You're right, Scott. We really don't want it to.

- Robert Kirkham

Jul 25, 2012 12:40 AM EDT

Bobby, no one claims the U.S. has an exclusive problem with mental illness. Or violence. But mass killings like that in Aurora have become so common they are an identifying hallmark of our society, where the rampage in Norway, for instance, stands out because of its rarity.

- Scott Martelle