"A colleague recently offered the common-sense opinion that anyone who chooses to own a large dog or other animal capable of killing or maiming a human being should be held strictly liable--i.e., should face monetary and possibly criminal consequences should that animal harm another person. He wrote that it was 'a simple matter of one being personally responsible for their actions.' I concur.
"Now to firearms."
--Philip Martin, in Tuesday's paper
The ink wasn't even dry on the page when another mass shooting happened in a neighboring state. Philip Martin says he wrote those lines before the news had passed it up.
What are We the People going to do about these mass shootings?
The cynic would say: Not much. After all, if America didn't change after Columbine, or Sandy Hook, or Las Vegas, or Virginia Tech, or Uvalde . . . .
Somebody less cynical, but not any more helpful, would say: Do something!
Yes, but what?
The president wants to ban assault rifles (again). That idea worked so poorly in the 1990s that Congress let the bill on that ban expire. After all, when it comes to assault rifles, the toothpaste is out of the tube. The Washington Post says that the AR-15, and only the AR-15, is the best-selling rifle in the United States, and there are about 16 million of them out there.
How long, do you wonder, would it take to get those weapons off the streets? One hundred years? Two hundred? How long before they'd rust away, or before the kids found dead Uncle Joe's stash in his attic after the funeral?
(It might be worth it, actually, to support a ban on assault rifles once again. If only to show--once again--that such bans don't work. And force folks to think differently about solving this problem.)
The main problem with an assault weapons ban is this: If you could wave a magic wand, and make them all disappear tomorrow, what happened in Nashville earlier this week would still happen. Only it would happen with a 30.06. Or a 30-30. Or a 7mm-08. Or any other hunting rifle.
But those guns don't have magazines that hold 30 shots! Now we're back to the toothpaste thing again. There are more guns in this country than people in it. And those who follow these things say there are three times as many magazines. The magic wand would be great, but it's not taking away all those clips.
Those weapons that fall into the category of "assault rifle" are mostly different from granddad's deer rifle in one way: They look cooler. But a semi-automatic AR-15 doesn't fire one bit faster than the semi-automatic any other gun.
So what do we do? Just . . . nothing? Are we that helpless?
No, we are not. There is a lot we can do. If we only would.
There are steps we can take with these guns.
First, get rid of any loopholes to background checks, whether that loophole be a gun show or anything else. Background checks are almost universally supported, so why allow loopholes?
A bump stock was used in Las Vegas. How these were ever allowed on the street is beyond some of us. They turn a legal semi-automatic rifle into a fully automatic rifle in a minute. They violate the spirit of the law. They should violate the letter. (A case wending through the courts has made bump stocks legal again because Congress hasn't made it clear they should be banned. Why can't Congress do this?)
There are steps we can take from the other end:
Implementing red-flag laws in every state would be a good start.
The details of the Nashville shooter are still coming out, but this person seems to be the poster child for red-flag laws. The police chief of Nashville told the press that the suspect was under care for an "emotional disorder." And the perp's parents thought the 28-year-old shouldn't have firearms. But the police knew nothing about any of it.
If a family and local police--and a judge in good standing--think somebody might harm himself or others, then authorities should be able to take away his guns. With, of course, due process rules for those who are concerned about potential overreach. NB: Tennessee doesn't have red-flag laws.
Schools must be made into hardened, or at least harder, targets. Armed cops on campus should be the minimum. And fences and locked doors and cameras. And after Nashville, we'd add bulletproof glass.
Then this, finally and importantly: The mental health processes in this country must be changed for the better, and better funded at that. No telling what was going on in the head of the Nashville shooter, but many of these cases happen because mental illness wasn't handled correctly. Want to make sure the number of these kinds of shootings--not just in schools, but in churches, malls, and the streets--drastically fall? Here's an answer:
We take the answer from the late, great Dr. Charles Krauthammer, who wrote these lines in 2013, when an unstable man named Aaron Alexis shot up the Washington Naval Yard, killing 12. The masterful writing, and thinking, deserves to be quoted here at length. The rest of this editorial are his words from Sept. 23, 2013:
On Aug. 7 . . . Alexis had called police from a Newport, R.I., Marriott. He was hearing voices. Three people were following him, he told the cops. They were sending microwaves through walls, making his skin vibrate and preventing him from sleeping. He had already twice changed hotels to escape the men, the radiation, the voices.
Delusions, paranoid ideation, auditory (and somatic) hallucinations: the classic symptoms of schizophrenia.
So here is this panic-stricken soul, psychotic and in terrible distress. And what does modern policing do for him? The cops tell him to "stay away from the individuals that are following him." Then they leave.
But the three "individuals" were imaginary, for God's sake . . . .
Had this happened 35 years ago in Boston, Alexis would have been brought to me as the psychiatrist on duty at the ER of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Were he as agitated and distressed as in the police report, I probably would have administered an immediate dose of Haldol, the most powerful fast-acting anti-psychotic of the time.
This would generally relieve the hallucinations and delusions, a blessing not only in itself, but also for the lucidity it brought on that would allow him to give us important diagnostic details--psychiatric history, family history, social history, medical history, etc.
If I thought he could be sufficiently cared for by family or friends to receive regular oral medication, therapy and follow-up, I would have discharged him. Otherwise, I'd have admitted him. And if he refused, I'd have ordered a 14-day involuntary commitment.
Sounds cruel? On the contrary. For many people living on park benches, commitment means a warm bed, shelter and three hot meals a day. For Alexis, it would have meant the beginning of a treatment regimen designed to bring him back to himself before discharging him to a world heretofore madly radioactive.
That's what a compassionate society does. It would no more abandon this man to fend for himself than it would a man suffering a stroke . . . .
I know the civil libertarian arguments. I know that involuntary commitment is outright paternalism. But paternalism is essential for children because they don't have a fully developed rational will. Do you think Alexis was in command of his will that night in Newport?
We cannot be cavalier about commitment. We should have layers of review, albeit rapid. But it's both cruel and reckless to turn loose people as lost and profoundly suffering as Alexis, even apart from any potential dangerousness.
More than half of those you see sleeping on grates have suffered mental illness. It's a national scandal. It's time we recalibrated the pendulum that today allows the mentally ill to die with their rights on--and, rarely but unforgivably, take a dozen innocents with them.