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School Shootings: It’s Not the Guns, It’s Kids Killing Kids
Americans ages 18 to 20 account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murders. School shootings and their equivalent at Walmarts get the most attention. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young men who wield them. That means any possible solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm.
There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70% of school shootings since 1999 have been carried out by people under 18. The median age of school shooters is 16. It’s kids shooting kids, whether because they are left out, bullied, teased, or angry at some slight or teacher’s offense, it is kids killing kids. Since these killings tend to be “local,” typically shooter and the dead share a racial and/or social-economic background, leaving “white supremacy” as a cause in the dustbin alongside the 1990s blaming “heavy metal” and Satanism. There have been at least 554 school shooting victims, with at least 311,000 children exposed to gun violence at school in the U.S. since the Y-in-the-road game changing Columbine High School massacre, spread across 331 schools. The frequency of shootings has increased, with a surge of 34 incidents in 2021, the highest in any year since 1999.
Since it’s not the guns per se but young men who are to blame, more traditional gun control is unlikely to make much of a difference. Already under the Federal Gun Control Act (GCA), shotguns and rifles, and ammunition for shotguns or rifles may be sold only to individuals 18 years of age or older. All other firearms can be sold only to individuals 21 years of age or older. Licensed sellers are bound by the minimum age requirements established by the GCA regardless of state or local law. However, if state law or local ordinances establish a higher minimum age, the licensee must observe the higher age requirement.
Background checks vary in quality from state to state but generally seek to prohibit sales for reasons such as a history of domestic abuse or violent felony convictions, crimes unlikely to snare the shooters just out of high school. No background check is going to catch someone seething with rage over race or his grandmother. Checks also are at the time of purchase and gun ownership can be forever. There is the private transfer loophole that bypasses most background checks, but no evidence that young mass killers seek out this method of gun purchase.There is also the Columbine divide that somehow factors in to kids killing kids. Pre-Columbine America saw school shootings number only approximately 300 instances in 150 years. Post-Columbine shootings number 331 in only 23 years. Something big is very wrong in America and our kids are not alright. Add in drug use and overdose deaths, and teen suicides (many involving guns; suicide is the third greatest cause of teen death, with homicide in the number two position), and you have more than a crisis, you have a nightmare.Though the Columbine killers had few friends, it is doubtful no one (including parents and siblings) had no idea about the thoughts running through their heads. Later this would all be blamed on the then-new shooting games like DOOM (a “murder” simulator) and heavy metal music. But it seems much less a surface problem and more something deeper and thus ironically more visible. In other words, in Columbine and likely in many of the other 331 modern-era school shooting, somebody should have seen it coming.Therein lies several potential solutions. Lessening gun access in specific, targeted ways may help, such as raising the Federal age for long guns to age 21 or older. Provide tougher penalties for anyone who illegally sells guns to those under age, and for adults/parents who do not secure their guns. Such measures are statistically supported, do not affect most current gun owners, and simply require the sacrifice by legitimate young hunters of safely using dad’s old rifle another year.But real change will require enhanced red flag laws, laws which enlist parents, gun sales people, teachers, and peers in spotting students who should not have ready access to firearms. A red flag law allows people to petition a state court for the temporary removal of firearms from a person who may present a danger themselves or others. A judge makes the final determination. Such laws exist in 19 states and D.C. at present (14 states of those states adopted red flag gun laws after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida) with considerable variation. One of the most significant variations is who may petition a court to take someone’s guns away. Every state currently allows law enforcement to do so, but California is the only one which includes family members. None of the laws in place allow teachers, clergy, doctors, coworkers, or school peers, people who may well know a young man’s intent best, to petition. A Federal law which standardizes such criteria is badly needed.Opposition to red flag laws tends to fall on standard grounds, specifically that not all states allow the gun holder full due process at his hearing (easily remedied by a Federal law that does) and the generic concern about the government having the ability to take a gun anyway from anyone. Yet gun confiscation via a hearing, though likely needing a Supreme Court decision of its own for clarity, appears to be an example of presumptively lawful regulatory measures (such as regulating concealed weapons, prohibiting possession of firearms by felons, etc.) already permissible under Heller v. District of Columbia. Basic red flag laws are judicially sound, and have, for example, been used in Florida nearly 6,000 times since 2018 and survived a state Supreme Court challenge there. And Florida has had no school shootings since the law went into effect. New York’s current red flag law, had it been properly implemented, could have stopped the grocery store shooter.School shootings almost always involve a delineable type of shooter: 16-18, male, loner. Red flag laws are designed to take guns away from people before they commit crimes, and have been legally tested. As a potential national-level solution they do not restrict gun ownership among most adults, and barely open the Pandora’s Box of the Second Amendment. They are as apolitical as anything to do with guns in America can be (and are supported by 72 percent of Americans. Donald Trump has backed red flag laws.) In the search for answers following the latest school shooting, a Federal red flag law is worth a… shot.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Justice Stevens is Wrong: Repealing the Second Amendment in Post-Constitutional America
It is not a healthy sign for a democracy when the people ask that rights be taken from them by the government.
Former Justice of the Supreme Court John Paul Stevens is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment in an Op-Ed in the New York Times. And make no mistake; the article is not for restrictions on rights (which can have their place) but for the elimination of an “inalienable” right, stripping the 2A from the Constitution. Stop what you’re about to say — this is about something more fundamental than guns alone.
Stevens argues guns are dangerous things and the Second Amendment is, in his words, “a relic of the 18th century.” He advanced similar thoughts in 2008, when dissenting in the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller, where the Supreme Court held the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms on an individual basis, even for those unaffiliated with a militia (thus an “individual” right not a “collective” right.) Stevens claimed in his dissent “There is no indication Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.”
Justice Stevens instead sees the Second Amendment as a “propaganda weapon of immense power” for the NRA. His renewed call to repeal the 2A is based mostly what he saw on TV this weekend, a march in Washington in favor of something-something-gun control-somehow Stevens believes represents a “clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons.” He maintains as long as the 2A exists, the NRA will simply use its declaration of the inalienable right to bear arms to “stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation.” The bulk of the Supreme Court rejected his ideas back in 2008, when Stevens tried to vote down the right to bear arms in District of Columbia v. Heller. It doesn’t make any more sense now.
Now of course the 2A will not be repealed; a nation that can’t make up its mind on the proper legal age to purchase a handgun will never reach a consensus to amend the Bill of Rights. People like Stevens calling for its repeal likely believe they are clever negotiators, setting a marker way out there, thinking it makes bargaining towards some middle easier. Same for using the PTSD-encrusted Parkland kids as emotional, meaty symbols, labeling those who oppose “gun control” as literal murderers, alongside members of the NRA, the Republican party, and any other politician who accepts NRA money.
The problem is demonizing everyone who owns a gun for whatever reason is never going to promote meaningful change. Those people vote, they certainly don’t see themselves as demons or people who would condone the killing of children, and they won’t trust reforms to people who label them as demons. Under those circumstances, the only “answers” are repeal or keep things as they are, the kind of solution Prohibition failed at with alcohol.
In the ten years since his original dissent and today’s New York Times Op-Ed, Stevens hasn’t come up any better argument other than the presence of the 2A itself enables the NRA to block incremental change. That will almost certainly drive away any gun owners who might otherwise be willing to talk about some sort of restrictions. Going to the table demanding all or nothing usually yields you nothing. Stevens has also just played directly into the hands of the NRA, who have maintained all along “reforms” are just sneaky waypoints toward banning all guns. Justice Stevens’ critique is fundamentally wrong, as its premise is that not everyone is to be allowed rights, that they are gummy, not inalienable. He argues extra-Consitutionally some choices (the Parkland ones of course) exist above rights.
Historians may well look back on Stevens’ article as a marker the United States has entered its third great era. The first, starting from the colonists’ arrival, saw the principles of the Enlightenment used to push back the abuses of an imperial government and create the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The next two hundred some years, imperfect as they were, saw those principles progress, putting into practice what an evolving government of the people might look like. The line was steady — greater rights, more freedom, encoding away the ability of government to restrict how people could chose to live.
We are now wading in the shallows of the third era, Post-Constitutional America, a time when we are abandoning the basic ideas that saw our nation through centuries of challenges. Those ideas — enshrined in the Bill of Rights — are disarmingly concise, the haiku of a People’s government. Now, deeper, darker waters lay in front of us, and we are drawn down into them.
The very idea of even discussing willfully removing rights guts the heart of who we are. Rights inside our form of society are inalienable, existing organically, and are not granted by government and should not be able to be taken away. Such extraordinary privilege comes with the responsibility of tolerance; that is why the 1A protects all speech, including some quite purposely hateful and racist. It is meant to be that Americans can hate the idea of abortion, or same sex marriage, and still support someone’s else’s right to different choices with all their heart. I don’t own a gun, but you can.
Some will argue guns are different, they kill. The same argument can be applied to abortion of course, and to speech designed to stir people to war. Some, like Stevens, say the 2A, which speaks of a “well regulated militia” the Founders intended as a substitute to a standing army is archaic language. It is. The idea a handful of people with personal weapons poses much of a tactical challenge to a standing army in the 21st century is as outdated as the Third Amendment, which prohibits the government from quartering troops in private homes.
But the Constitution is a living document, and has changed mightly over the last two centuries to greatly expand rights implicitly and explicitly left out in the 18th century-limited minds of the men who wrote it, particularly in regards to slavery, universal suffrage, and discrimination in all its forms. “Speech” has been constantly redefined in broader and broader ways that would astound the Founders. But the broad pattern has always been toward expansion of rights carefully moderated by restrictions as limited as they must be (no shouting fire in a crowded theatre.)It is wrong and frightening and anti-democratic to see calls for the elimination of a full amendment from the Bill of Rights, and doubly so that such appeals resonate with so many Americans acting now out of fear and emotion. It bespeaks a fundamental change in how Americans came to be America, and opens the door wider to a Post-Constitutional United States that seems to say “You want inalienable rights? You can’t handle inalienable rights.”
The Founders feared a King would become jealous of the People’s power and want some back. They never anticipated in 2018 the people might demand it be taken from them.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Guns and Deaths: We Really Don’t Care, Do We?
More than one a day.That is how often mass shootings (four or more people wounded or dead) occurred in the United States this year. Including the worst shooting of the year (so far), which unfolded only yesterday in San Bernardino, a total of 462 people have died and 1,314 have been wounded in such attacks these past eleven months.
And now, the pundits, from Fox to Maddow to the guy next to you at the bar will rumble through the same old arguments: we have to do something but the Second Amendment and it’s the damn NRA but background checks wouldn’t have stopped them and I’ll need to arm myself for protection and it is all just that these get so much attention and the Internet but right-wing hate and wait until it happens in your community and so forth and so on and, wait, did you see CNN, there’s another active shooter…Active shooter. The endless stream of mass shootings has birthed its own vocabulary. Active shooter. Long guns. Lock down. Ongoing situation. Device. Tactical. Person of interest. Americans with little previous knowledge of weapons now know the caliber of various typical active shooter long guns.
There have been only a handful of Americans killed by terrorists, but no one throws up their hands and says there is nothing that can be done. A multi-trillion dollar “homeland” (no one but the Nazi’s even used that term prior to 2001) security complex was created, and we take off our shoes at the airport and tolerate — no, welcome — the NSA spying on everyone of us on the off chance it might help.
And despite the fact that there is no evidence that any of that has ever stopped a terrorist, we blithly accept that it “might have” or that “we’ll never know if the security measures dissuaded a terror attack; the easiest ones to stop are the ones that never occur.”
Yet at the same time we are still accepting something as illogical as if you buy a gun at a shop you are subject to a background check while if you buy a weapon at a gun show there is no background check. Yet statistically there is less likelihood of mass killings in states that require more comprehensive background checks for all handgun sales than in states that do not. We register drones with the federal government but not weapons.
If there was one terror attack a day in America, you can be assured no one would throw up their hands and say “but what can we do.” Instead, the president simply goes on TV (again) to state the non-statement of “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world.” Kinda material that writes itself.And don’t say it — if more armed people were the answer to shoot back, then America would be the safest place on earth. There are some 300 million firearms already out there.
It is the NRA. It is a lack of background checks. It is a mental health problem. It is all of those things. But it seems more and more the underlying problem is we simply don’t care anymore. A new normal too readily accepted under the falsehood that there is nothing that can be done.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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