Newtown massacre.

Flag and shattered sky at Newtown

I'm late posting here about the Newtown shooting, but-- with the handle of caseymoz, I was posting/arguing about it on the Democratic Underground for the week after it happened. Some examples:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1997575

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1977591

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=337620

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=338503


Descriptive words can only turn this horrific tragedy into some kind of fiction. All 20 children, 28 people total were murdered in such a cold, malicious way.





I knew-- sooner or later-- if gun law and ownership trends continued, there would be a shooting so heinous that it would turn the debate. Even if the pro-gunners are able to stop the momentum now, another such shooting of children will take place, and the outrage will continue to build.

Parents tend to get hysterical when they think children are threatened. These hysterias are usually over nothing real, but when they reach fruition, the measures taken tend to be irrational. Just ask NORML what happened with marijuana starting about 1978. At the time, 11 states had decriminalized weed and the momentum seemed to be growing. Then, parents discovered that pot was being marketed directly to children, and found  (gasp!) early teens were using it. The backlash that followed was insane. Never mind tobacco companies had been marketing to children for a century. So many parents were hooked on nicotine that this seemed customary. Fast-forward five years later, and pot was criminalized everywhere, and with very heavy penalties.

The anti-pot crusade was by no means the worst or most irrational one. The Dungeons & Dragons hysteria was only comical, but the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria that followed it in the late '80s and early '90s was no joke. On the sole evidenced of child testimony, people were convicted-- by juries-- and imprisoned for committing crimes that were physically impossible.

Once parents get the idea that something mortally threatens their kids physical or psychological safety, actions will be taken; and usually not fair, just, level-headed measures that respect rights. That's why a rational gun policy would have been important for the pro-gunners, to prevent the oppressive, irrational ones that will be enacted in a backlash to permissive gun ownership.

If the pro-gunners have lost the parental constituency, the great Second Amendment gunfight is over. Now matter what the Founders intended, if there are enough school shootings parents would declare keeping and bearing arms to be unworkable as an individual right. They would just consider the Framers of the Constitution to be mistaken. That's happened before, such as with that Right to Keep Slaves the Constitution protects. 

There is some merit to the argument that the Founders were simply wrong. If the Second Amendment's purpose is to prevent or check tyranny, then I'd have to question how a rag-tag group of weekend gun hobbyists can stand up against the US military? If you're in open rebellion and the US Military is called up to stop it, the insurrection will be over in days, probably hours. That's just with conventional weapons, not even considering that the US has a nuclear arsenal.

Furthermore, events in the last two years have even brought the supposed purpose of the Second Amendment into question. Tyrants fell in Libya, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia and (soon) Syria. The populations in those countries didn't start out keeping and bearing arms at all. In fact, in Libya, weapons left in civilian hands from the uprising are making it harder, not easier, to restore the peace and establish a stable political system. The populations of those countries had been long oppressed, but it didn't matter. If anything, recent events should teach us that it's unnecessary to have an armed populace at the outset of a rebellion against tyranny. 

What does seem to be necessary is information. Remember what prompted those overthrows? Wikileaks. Yes, Julian Assange deserves credit. What keeps the revolution in Syria going after so much hardship is that Assad can't hide the atrocities his regime commits. For rebels, the big picture is important. It's the First Amendment, not the Second Amendment that guards the people from tyranny. Otherwise, enclaves of resistance can be isolated made to surrender one by one.

For the US armed forces defeating a well-regulated militia is as predictable as rock beating scissors. If-- instead of forming a militia-- people of he US would shut down the economy with protests, the government would soon buckle.

Therefore, the Second Amendment phrase, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state," is questionable. Especially when we have a standing huge, standing army and National Guard. These are not foreseen in The Constitution.

After Newtown, the counter-arguments and proposals that came out from the pro-gunners have been, to say it bluntly, reckless. They suggested doing away with gun free school zones and arming teachers and school officials. The one thing that's always awed me is how fast pro-gunners adopt a single, uniform message. I could tell they went to gun nut websites and got on the page with the latest crazy response to this horrific massacre, and then echoed it without further thought. They call gun-free zones "a magnet for killers." This is an incredibly irresponsible statement.

First, gun free zones weren't meant to stop a crime like this. They were meant to minimize gang violence and armed, hot-headed arguments in places where bystanders could be caught in the cross fire. Judging GFZ by how they stop spree shootings that target innocent people is like declaring a Kevlar vest ineffective for not stopping rocket fire. GFZ's should be judged on what they're meant to do. (And about that, their effectiveness might be dubious.)

Second, of the 62 mass shootings in the last 30 years, only 14 took place in GFZ's of any sort. When you subtract interventions by off-duty police or military personnel, the rate of stopping these shootings in progress is the same in or outside GFZ's: zero.

I've heard the point made that these "cowardly" gunmen don't target places where people are armed, like police stations or banks, because they're afraid of an armed opponent. However, people who commit these shootings often end them by committing suicide, so it's cockeyed to argue that fear of getting shot will discourage them. They seem to target places where they're likely to kill the most people before they're stopped. Many are like suicide bombers. Harris and Klebold, for example, had planned for their bombs to do the vast majority of the killing, they were hoping for 600 dead in the initial explosions. This might have happened if only weren't so poor at wiring their devices.

Arguably, the shooters can be dissuaded from schools and such because they can't kill as many people before they're brought down. On the other hand, if they want to strike those places, can't they just show up with bullet-proof armor?

If the shooter is smart, and many of these guys are, he'll know that the odds are against anybody returning fire. Drawing a gun and shooting back while you're under fire is actually a skill. It takes a lot of training, and more than that, it's still difficult to do unless you've experienced battle-stress. The military expends a lot of time teaching personnel to do this, and still they know a green unit will freeze under fire, or run.

Yet, the pro-gunners count on this degree of level-headedness and courage. They'll say that gun owners are brave enough to return fire on an armed shooter, but then claim that these hardy courageous souls are too afraid of being arrested for carrying their peace-makers into a GFZ. A GFZ would not have discouraged Dirty Harry if he thought he could save children.

Banks don't have armed guards to actually save lives. With a bank, or jewelry story, you have a different kind criminal: a thief. You can discourage them by threatening their lives. Despite some idiots declaring shooters to be cowards, just to insult them more, that's not really a spree shooter's weak spot. Damaging your wares in the cross fire is not a problem. 

Plus, with a bank, what your protecting is far less likely to be damaged in the cross fire, whereas in schools children can be. Still, progunners are calling for teachers and school administrators to carry guns. Teachers weren't asked about it before the idea was floated, and nobody has proposed raising their pay for acting as armed body-guards for twenty-eight or more pupils. No, armed body guards are paid a lot more than teachers. I think many would resign from the profession if they were expected to carry guns, which means you'd likely get people less qualified to teach but more qualified to carry a gun. This would be bad for the schools or the pupils on a day-to-day basis.

There are so many ways a plan like this can routinely go wrong. You'll have teachers misplacing guns; you'll have students stealing off the teachers, because they know the teachers are carrying them; you might even have teachers going on shooting sprees, because their jobs are high stress, low pay and those students are terribly frustrating a lot. I don't want someone under that day to day to be within arm's reach of a gun.

Then you had the NRA president and screwball Wayne LaPierre who comes out saying is the solution is to put an armed policeman in every school. Since this will cost $18 billion a year to hire 99,000 security officers, it's a nonstarter. Even if the NRA pushes past that, what's this full-time guard supposed to do when he's not waiting for a school shooting? You wouldn't know it, but school shootings are rare. I have to admit, though, it's a little better than arming teachers.

I know why it took a week for LaPierre to make a statement. He needed to torture and murder his conscience.

Then he proposed that we arm more law abiding citizens. What? The US now has 270 million civilian owned guns. That's 88.8 guns for 100 people. That's more than enough to arm the entire adult population of the US. If the Right to Keep and Bear Arms isn't working the way it should yet, it's not going to work. If we don't have the freest society with the safest people, putting two guns in people's hands isn't going to improve it.

I think the tide is turned. I think gun policy will begin to change.For myself, I have no patience with the paranoid conspiracy theories anymore. In discussions I just didn't want to hear them.There is simply no other way this debate can go now. The progunners, especially the NRA, had better get used to life at the fringes.

Sorry for the verbosity. It's what happens when I stay away from my blog too long.