In December 2012, in one of the worst cases
of mass murder, Adam Lanza killed his mother and then went to an elementary
school and shot 26 first graders and six adults. Lanza had suffered with
serious mental health problems through his life.
In June
2015 Dylann Storm Roof, a white man, went to a black church in
Charleston, SC, and pretended to pray with the people there for a while and
then shot and killed nine church members. He said that he hoped his action
would start a race war.
A month later Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazees, a
naturalized American citizen who had graduated from high school and college in Tennessee, went to two military recruiting centers in Chattanooga, TN,
and shot five military recruiters to death and wounded three more.
That October Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer
shot and killed eight of his fellow students and his teacher to death at Umpqua Community
College. He had struggled with mental issues
since his teenage years.
The next month Robert Lewis Dear went to a
Planned Parenthood Office in Colorado
Springs, CO, where he
shot twelve people, including a police officer. Three of his victims died from
the gunshot wounds. Recently he was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial
for his crimes.
In December of 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook,
born in America and working
for the county Department of Public Health, along with his wife Tashfeen Malik,
went to a holiday party in San
Bernadino, CA, where
his coworkers were still celebrating, and killed 14 and wounded 22.
Then on June 12, 2016 Noor Mateen, also
American born, went to a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, where he used an assault
rifle to slaughter 49 people and wound over 50 more. He had worked as a
security guard, so he must have been investigated before he was hired. Nevertheless,
he was an unstable person. His ex-wife stated that Mateen flew into rages and
beat her. People who knew him said he was not very religious, yet as he began
his assault, he called 911, and claimed allegiance to ISIS.
His father said that Mateen had once seen two men kissing in the street, and
flew into a rage because of the sight. Yet he had often frequented the club
himself in the past. There is some suggestion that part of Mateen’s anger came
from conflict over his own sexual orientation.
What is the common denominator in these and
similar terrible acts of carnage in recent years? You can’t say it is the
Muslim religion. Three of the men were Muslims, yet they were all American
citizens, two of them born in this country. All three of them seemed to have
fit in well with American culture. Abdulazees and Farook were college
graduates.
Is the denominator mental health? Dear,
Harper-Mercer, and Lanza all had severe mental health problems. Anyone who
contemplates such horrific crimes as these of course has serious mental
problems. Despite his problems, Harper-Mercer was able to enlist in the army,
although he did not make it through basic training. Despite Mateen’s tendency
to violence, he was able to function on his job and legally to buy an assault
weapon. You can’t keep these weapons out of the hands of mentally unstable
people if the weapons are available at all. People can sometimes function
pretty well and then suddenly flip out. As Richard Cohen said, in the Washington Post, “We can’t even keep
nuts from running for President.” So trying to keep weapons of mass destruction
from mentally unstable people but making them available for others will not
work.
What all these events have in common is the
ease with which unstable people are able to purchase guns. In the events that
created the most the shooters were armed with assault rifles. We need to keep these weapons from the hands
of EVERYONE. No civilian needs an AK-15. These guns are made to kill a large
number of people at once. We don’t need an AK-15 for hunting. We don’t need one
for home protection. These are military rifles. They have no place in the hands
of individuals.
Don’t
say that we need to have such weapons to protect ourselves from the federal
government who might take our guns away. Paranoia is a mental illness. Do we
want people to be able to have machine guns, mortars and tanks as well?
The only way to keep assault rifles out of
the hands of mentally unstable people is to keep them out of the hands of all
civilians. Don’t say that if we ban assault rifles from ordinary people, only
outlaws will have these guns. Don’t say that the government is trying to take
away your guns. It is only trying to take away the kind of guns that no civilian
should have any use for.
During prohibition gangsters used tommy guns
to fight rival gangs and law enforcement officers. Finally the federal
government solved the problem by levying a huge tax on these weapons and
sawed-off shotguns. One gangster, Jack
Miller, a bank robber, was caught with a sawed-off shotgun. He was charged with
having an unregistered weapon, essentially a tax evasion. The case went to the
Supreme Court, which decided:
In the absence of
any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ’shotgun having a
barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable
relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we
cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such
an instrument.
These weapons are no longer in use. There is
no reason that the same thing can’t be done with assault rifles.
Except that the National Rifle Association
will fight to defeat the re-election of any member of Congress who votes for
reasonable gun laws. Haven’t we been intimidated by the NRA long enough? Maybe
it is time that sane people mount a campaign to fight the re-election of
members of Congress who refuse to create laws that protect our citizens from
the crazies who use assault rifles to murder our citizens.
