President Barack Obama promised to politicize gun violence last week after a man murdered eight college students and a professor at a small college in Oregon.
His justification for politicizing the issue, however, boiled down to a bunch of half-truths that have no place in the presidential bully pulpit.
Those kinds of misinformation--omissions, misrepresentations, twisted statistics--are what make voters mistrustful of government. To wit: "Somehow this has become routine ... We've become numb to this." Out of 320 million people in America, five or six each year will perpetrate a mass shooting on the scale of Oregon, West Virginia, Columbine, Newtown, etc. That's not routine; it's anomalous.
What truly is routine is the roughly 280,000 gun crimes committed annually by violent criminals--the majority of which already have previous violent records and many of whom have been incarcerated at some point. Known criminals, in other words. Repeat offenders.
We're not numb to mass shootings; we're still shocked and saddened when they occur. What we've become numb to is a culture of violence that produces more than 750 firearm crimes every single day.
"It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun."
Spoken by a president in a city (Washington) where gun laws are piled so high that it would seem like the hardest place on earth to get a gun--but the firearm murder rate in D.C. is nearly six times the U.S. average, and 18 times that of Oregon.
Let's remember: murder-suicide offenders are nearly impossible to predict and prevent, being essentially oblivious to any deterrent (they already know they won't survive to suffer any penalty).
In a land of liberty, it's always going to be "easy" for a person who functions as normal--but suddenly decides on an irrational, suicidal path of harm--to get a gun.
The Oregon shooter's mother legally purchased firearms, which wound up being used by the murderer. A government that seeks to prohibit law-abiding citizens from buying guns on the remotest possibility they might be stolen someday and used criminally isn't practicing prevention, but confiscation.
"Other countries ... have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings."
Again, misdirection. Rare mass shootings aren't the issue; common mass gun violence is.
Consider the U.S. and Switzerland--number one and four in the world on the "guns per capita" list and both "advanced" nations, to apply the president's qualification.
Logically, one would expect correlating crime statistics since both have high saturation of gun ownership.
Yet there's no comparison between the two.
The U.S. murder rate is 4.5 per 100,000 population. The Swiss rate is 0.49! Even more astonishing, the rate for aggravated assault (involving a weapon) is 80 times higher in America than in Switzerland.
To discount our cultural acceptance of intolerable violence in assessing mass shootings is deceitful.
"Each time this happens I'm going to bring this up."
If the president took to the podium every time a citizen is murdered by firearm, it would be an hourly exercise. His selectivity is disingenuous. Why only express umbrage over gun violence on isolated occasions involving inexplicable causes, instead of on the ubiquitous barrage of shootings when the motives are all too clear--and malicious?
The robber wants money. The rapist wants power. The gang member wants vengeance. But none of those gun-wielding types wants to die (there are no robbery-suicides). They all want to live to commit other crimes of gain.
"We're going to have to change our laws."
Gun-control legislation only affects the 99.92 percent of firearms not used in crimes. Gun crime penalties, conversely, apply specifically to that tiny percentage of people who use guns criminally--to inflict harm on others, as the president says.
Real gun control--the kind that will reduce gun crime--can only work by altering the habits of criminals. They are the ones toting guns to crimes. What's a broken gun law to someone about to rape, rob, assault or murder another person?
Instead of blaming "us" and Congress, President Obama should blame criminal-rights organizations that obstinately object to harsh sentencing for gun violators as "draconian" or "cruel and unusual."
It's anybody's guess why mass shootings occur more frequently nowadays, but here's a thought: No American younger than 40 has ever lived in a time that our violent crime rate wasn't obscene. Older Americans can still remember when violent crime was a fraction of today's rates; in some states 10 to 15 times lower.
It's possible that mass shooters are simply the product of a society that tolerates tremendous violent crime rates for five decades. This much we know: when violence rates were much lower, and guns were less restricted, there were fewer mass shootings.
We do need a single-issue focus: on new laws that severely punish everyone who carries a gun to a crime. Indeed, gun crime may warrant its own code, penalties and segregated incarceration for offenders featuring conspicuously austere prison conditions.
Criminals pack heat with a purpose. When the fear of assured punishment exceeds the potential benefit, their attitude toward armed violence will change.
But not before.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 10/09/2015