A Familiar Tragedy

I am constantly amazed at how easy it is to overlook the obvious until somehow the facts connect to our own experiences. Eleven days ago, as I was recovering in the hospital from back surgery, I heard the news of the Fort Hood massacre. Naturally, most of the news coverage focused on the number of dead and only briefly mentioned that 31 people were wounded.

As I was attempting to cope with the pain of a highly-controlled, planned-in-advance surgery, I found myself thinking of the pain and agony of those 31 human beings who were dealing with the trauma of unexpected gunshot wounds. I was forced to reflect how often we concentrate on the death totals of gun violence in America and overlook the fact that every day in our country 215 people are shot with guns and survive. What about them? They deserve more from our society, both in terms of resources and support.

I was also struck by the irony that Fort Hood is located in Killeen, Texas. Killeen is where one of the deadliest rampage shootings in American history took place in 1991, when an unemployed ex-Navy enlistee crashed his pickup truck into a popular cafeteria, pulled out two handguns, and killed 23 people before taking his own life. That tragedy held the "record" for America's worst shooting massacre until 2007, when a Virginia Tech student shot and killed 32 students and faculty. In another tragic twist, it turns out the Fort Hood shooter was a graduate of Virginia Tech in 1997.

The state of Texas reacted to the 1991 shootings in Killeen by enacting a law freeing up gun owners to carry concealed handguns in public. At the behest of the National Rifle Association, many other states followed suit. Perhaps predictably, the reaction from the gun lobby was similar after the Fort Hood shootings. Describing military bases as “gun-free zones,” commentators like John Lott have blamed the tragedy on their strict rules concerning concealed, private handguns. “The law-abiding, not the criminals, are the ones who obey the ban on guns,” says Lott.

Of course, there is an irony here as well. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood Shooter, held a concealed handgun permit in the state of Virginia. Furthermore, Virginia permits are recognized as valid in the state of Texas. Hasan, by Lott’s definition, was one of the “law-abiding citizens” who would have made his fellow service members safer by carrying a concealed handgun on military installations.

That type of “logic” is exactly what our service members don’t need, and hopefully it will be rejected by the U.S. Congress as it considers how to respond to the tragedy. For now, however, we should all turn our thoughts to the families who have lost loved ones, and to the 31 brave Americans who have long recovery processes ahead of them.

Two Horrifying Days

One horrifying day is seared in my memory—the day in 1962 I spent touring the remains of Auschwitz with a friend who had lost his wife, children and parents in that unspeakable death camp. I can not express the sense of evil that permeated those grounds. I was made acutely aware of the horror that can be unleashed by organized and armed hate groups.

The memory was brought vividly back to life by the tragic shooting at the U.S. Holocaust museum here in Washington, D.C. The perpetrator of the shooting left a note, “You want my weapons—this is how you’ll get them. The Holocaust is a lie.”

According to an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the killer “held subscription and mail-order memberships in an assortment of far-right and anti-Semitic organizations, including the California-based Institute for Historic Review, the Adelaide Institute, a far-right Australian group, and, at one point, was nominated as a ‘white racialist treasure’ by a visitor to Stormfront, a neo-Nazi Web site based in Florida. In 2004, [he] spent several months in Hayden, Idaho, home base of the now-defunct Aryan Nations, a longtime breeding ground for white supremacists and domestic terrorists that included The Order, a supremacist group that carried out murders and armed robberies in the 1980s. One intelligence document shows that…FBI agents discovered an application form for Mr. von Brunn for an Aryan Nations splinter group known as Church of the Sons of Yaweh.”

More frightening to me are the comments made by other spewers of racial hatred in the wake of the shooting. A friend of von Brunn’s, White Separatist John de Nugent, said "James von Brunn is significant because he is somebody who simply acted on his belief. But I think there are millions of white people who are trending in this direction. If I were to advocate the violent overthrow of the country I think hundreds of people would join me right now."

The Holocaust Museum shooting—so closely following on the heels of the shooting of abortion doctor George Tiller in his church—reminds us of how much damage can be done to our democratic ideals by a dedicated group of hate-mongers who have easy, unregulated access to deadly firearms. The comments of people like John de Nugent make my blood run cold.

Two of my current and former colleagues at CSGV, Josh Horwitz and Casey Anderson, recently published an important book, Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea, that discusses in detail the harm that is being done to our fragile democracy by these armed insurrectionists.

The Power of Doubt

Recently, the National Rifle Association (NRA) held its annual convention in Phoenix, and I chanced upon an interesting quote from a Remington employee who ran a booth at the gun expo there. Speaking about the NRA’s view on President Obama, he said, “We have our doubts and doubt is that makes this organization thrive.”

Just three days later, NRA Board Member Ted Nugent published an editorial in the Waco Tribune that seemed to confirm this theory by elevating doubt (or “fear,” if you prefer) to a new level.

“Water is essential to life … A certain lunatic fringe is always conspiring to ban guns, something else we need to live,” Nugent said, without offering any concrete examples of such proposals (or perhaps Mr. Nugent simply believes an assault weapon is as essential to human life as oxygen).

But Nugent wasn’t done there... He then described the NRA’s annual convention as “a great celebration of good over evil,” thereby condemning not only gun violence prevention organizations, but also the thousands of victims and survivors of gun violence across the country who actively advocate for tougher gun laws. That includes survivors of the Virginia Tech shootings and family members of the victims in that tragedy, 50 of whom recently wrote the Richmond Times to urge legislators to close the Gun Show Loophole, a proposal the NRA adamantly opposes.

Nugent’s doubts also extended to our nation’s law enforcement officers. “All the evidence tells us that calling 9-1-1 is a joke,” he states. “We’ll tell authorities to bring a dustpan and a mop to clean up the dead monster we just shot.”

“Peace and love will get you killed,” Nugent concluded, not bothering to explain why the United States, with its weak gun laws, has higher rates of homicide than virtually every other industrialized democracy in the world.

Doubts? I have my own, particularly in regards to the mental health of the NRA’s celebrity spokesmen.

April is the Cruelest Month

I have reached the age where I sometimes have difficulty remembering what I did the day before yesterday. However, shootings over this past weekend at Hampton University and the University of Georgia have vividly brought me back to me the events of Tuesday, April 20, 1999, with precision.

I will never be able to erase the memories of visiting Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the day after the horrific mass shooting. The things that stick in my mind are the faces of the students and parents trying to make sense of the tragedy; the sight of all those crosses placed on a hill outside the school; and the school parking lot turned into a makeshift monument with flowers, cards, signs and teddy bears from across the nation. Another image that haunts me is the media circus that surrounded the school. An added insult was a few super-righteous religious zealots who seized upon Columbine to make a faux case for religious martyrdom.

Journalist Dave Cullen has just released a comprehensive account of the massacre. The book is simply titled, Columbine. You can read a review of the book by Gary Kris from the Washington Post.

Cullen claims to expose several myths about the Columbine tragedy, but one piece of reporting that was true was the ease with which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were able to acquire the guns used in the shootings. Harris and Klebold had young friends of theirs purchase these weapons at Denver-area gun shows from private sellers—cash and carry, no questions asked. One of these friends, Robyn Anderson, later said, "It was too easy. I wish it would have been more difficult. I wouldn't have helped them buy the guns if I had faced a criminal background check."

Colorado closed the Gun Show Loophole by referendum one year after the shootings, and for that we can credit the courageous work of many of the students and parents of the victims at Columbine. They banded together to take positive action to stem the easy availability of guns in our society and we should learn from their example. Now that federal legislation to close the loophole has been introduced in Congress by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), we have an opportunity to prevent thousands of criminals and other dangerous individuals from buying guns with no oversight whatsoever.

We should seize it, and ensure that we will have something positive to reflect upon as a country when the twentieth anniversary of Columbine is observed ten years from now.


April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain...
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Does Anybody Hear?

As we prepare for Passover and Holy Week, we are mindful of the fact that over the past month there have been seven horrendous, high-profile mass shootings in our nation. These seven shootings have resulted in the death of 53 people. This is on top of the “normal” grisly daily total of 82 gun deaths.

There are two constants in these killings. First, all of the shooters have been men who were laid off from their jobs. Second, all of them had easy access to guns.

There is a third constant that rarely gets discussed in the media. Every one of those 53 victims left behind family and friends who are deeply scarred by their deaths. Over the years, I have been shocked and saddened by the aftermath of shooting deaths. I have seen families torn apart by the shooting death of a child. Children traumatized by the shooting of a parent—perhaps for life. Entire schools and communities scarred by tragedies. The pain continues to ripple out like waves from a pebble thrown into still water.

You can see anguish when you speak to people who lost loved ones at Virginia Tech or Columbine High School or any of the myriad of other similar events. Just listen to the voices on the news of the people of Binghamton, New York, as they express shock over the senseless horror that just occurred in their midst.

Gun violence spreads a pall over our entire nation. I remember the anguished cry of one young survivor of a shooting who asked, “Does anybody hear my cry?”

Does Congress hear these anguished voices or see the outward ripple of violence? Or will our elected leaders continue to ignore the results of the easy availability of guns in this nation?

Lest We Forget

My dear friends Jim and Sarah Brady have issued a call for Americans across the country to join them on Monday, March 30, at noon for a National Day of Prayer to End Gun Violence. They are asking for prayers “for a peaceable society where all children have the opportunity to grow and prosper, and where everyone can live without fear of being cut down by firearm violence.” 280 people are shot every day in the United States.

This day is of special significance as it is the day that Jim was wounded in the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan and it leads us into a month of anniversaries of gun violence that are all too familiar: April 4—Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated; April 16—Virginia Tech tragedy; and April 20—shooting at Columbine High School. Because every day in America brings new tragedies, we must now, sadly, add another to this list: March 29—Massacre at nursing home in Carthage, North Carolina.

President Reagan’s experience with gun violence, while horrifying, was far from unique. In the brief history of our nation, we have had 44 Presidents. Four of them were assassinated with guns while in office; six others were the victims of attempted assassinations:

Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed on April 14, 1865.

James A. Garfield was shot and killed on July 2, 1881.

William McKinley was shot and killed on Sept. 6, 1901.

John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on Nov 22, 1963.

Ronald Reagan was shot and severely wounded on March 31, 1981.

Andrew Jackson was shot at in the Capitol building on January 30, 1835, but avoided injury.

Theodore Roosevelt was shot in 1912 while campaigning for president.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was shot at on February 15, 1933, in Miami, Florida, just three weeks before his inauguration.

Assassins attempted to shoot and kill Harry Truman on November 1, 1950 but were stopped in a gunfight outside the Blair House.

Not one, but two, disturbed individuals attempted to shoot and kill Gerald Ford during his brief time as president.

As Sarah Brady has said in issuing the call for a Day of Prayer: “In this new day of hope and optimism, let us acknowledge our individual and collective power to create change through prayer.” Let us all do our part at noon today, as we envision a better future for America, “a future where criminals and dangerous individuals attempt to obtain guns and find it difficult or impossible to do so.”

March Madness

I can't help being struck by the irony of American college students being warned by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to stay out of Mexico during Spring Break because of the danger of gun violence created by the assault weapons that are being trafficked south of the border from our own country. Authorities have confirmed that U.S. guns stores and gun shows are the source of more than 90% of Mexico’s crime guns. The American weapons of choice for Mexico’s drug cartels? 9mm pistols, .38 Super pistols, 5.7mm pistols, .45-caliber pistols, AR-15 type rifles, and AK-47 type rifles.

Just four days before the ATF travel alert, 22 Democrats joined Republicans in the U.S. Senate to approve a National Rifle Association-drafted amendment to the D.C. voting rights bill that would force the 600,000 residents of Washington, D.C. to legalize assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines in the city. The bill, which is supposed to stand for the principle of self-determination, has since been stalled in the House of Representatives because Democratic leaders cannot figure out a way to overcome their own party’s supplication to the gun lobby.

Then, last Tuesday—in what can no longer be called a coincidence in our gun-obsessed and violence-ridden nation—a man who had failed in his dreams to become a U.S. Marine and police officer went on an assault weapons shooting spree in the Alabama countryside. Discharging more than 200 rounds from two assault rifles with high-capacity magazines that were taped together, Michael McClendon killed 10 people and then himself.

The term "March Madness" is taking on new meaning this year.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

School Daze

News this past weekend of a school shooting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, served to remind me of a couple of misconceptions about the nature of gun violence in our nation’s school systems.

As I travel around the country, I often hear people say that our nation’s schools are inherently dangerous because of gun violence. The truth is that our schools are far safer than the world outside. The most recent data from the Department of Justice (DOJ) shows that youth are over 50 times more likely to be murdered—and over 150 times more likely to commit suicide—when they are away from school than at school. Another DOJ study found that 93% of violent crimes that victimize college students occur off campus.

Secondly, I hear the belief expressed that school gun violence is confined to schools in large inner cities. The sheer lunacy of this line of argument always makes me think of the Columbine High School shooting, which took place in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. Two white students from this suburban school killed 15 students and a teacher and wounded 23 others before killing themselves.

This past year there have been major school shootings in Blacksburg, Virginia; Opelousas, Louisiana; Willoughby, Ohio; Phoenix , Arizona; Boca Raton, Florida; Omaha, Nebraska; Mobile, Alabama; and DeKalb, Illinois. A more complete listing of school shootings by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence illustrates the fact that the problem is not confined to major urban areas.

Despite that fact that our schools are some of the safest places in the country, we must continue to endeavor to keep them that way and improve existing security procedures. We must also be wary of a hard push by the gun lobby to put concealed handguns in our children’s classrooms. This disturbing development threatens to put our kids at greater risk and take the focus off the real problem—the incredibly easy access that children and the mentally unbalanced have to guns in our society.

The Wrong Question

Last week marked the first anniversary of the gun massacre at Virginia Tech. The remembrance was marked by more than 70 "Lie-Ins” across the nation, including one at the university, which also conducted a candlelight vigil and other commemorative events.

I could not help but be moved by the remarkable way the VA Tech community has responded to this great tragedy. I am also impressed that so many of the Hokies—students and parents—have become involved in the movement to stop gun violence.

As each of these shooting events takes place, the public response has for the most part become predictable. Most Americans are horrified and frustrated in equal parts. Certain politicians decry the violence, yet proclaim that guns have nothing to do with the problem. We all know that is not true. Guns have everything to do with it. There is no other consumer product used so frequently to deliberately kill our fellow citizens.

The pro-gun lobby is predictably using the recent school shootings as an opportunity to ask, “What if the teachers and students had been armed?” That is the wrong question.

The right question is, “What if the perpetrator had NOT been able to obtain those firearms?” How many lives would have been saved? Instead of asking what the U.S. would be like with more guns, shouldn’t we be asking what our country would be like with fewer guns? Guns do not solve problems, they create problems. A handgun is designed for the sole purpose of taking human life.

It is tragic that we have come to this; that we are obliged to be fearful of gun violence in our schools, our places of work and worship, our streets and highways. Our efforts must be dedicated to ending this shameful chapter in the life of the nation.