The datelines of the shootings change.
The names and number of the victims change.
And the deranged shooters' stories vary in their particulars some.
Yesterday the victim was Bill Gwatney, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. A handgun brandishing discount store worker who had lost his job murdered Gwatney in Little Rock, Arkansas. Why Gwatney was blamed for that job loss we don't yet know.
Three weeks ago-on July 28-the victims-six wounded and two dead-were members of a Unitarian Church congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their attacker opened up on them with a 12-gauge shotgun because he "hated liberals".
These sad and disturbing stories from the American Heartland all have a common thread:
An emotionally unstable man murdered innocent people with a firearm that should not have been available to him. Period.
I am unwilling to entertain at this time that tiresome and shop worn bit of National Rifle Association-inspired semantic obfuscation about "guns not killing".
Anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that a gun is designed and manufactured for the express and primary purpose of inflicting trauma to living flesh so that the animus or life spark residing in that flesh is forced to separate from said flesh permanently-die.
But I've written all of this before. I've written it again each time another shooting incident of major proportion occurred in this gun happy nation of swaggering 2nd Amendment devotees.
And that was far too often.
Rather than present my common sense arguments once more, I am reproducing a recent major statement of mine about the need for stricter gun laws in America. It was done in April 2007 at the time of the Virginia Tech massacre.
In truth, I don't expect this presentation to change any opinions or influence any legislators to alter any laws re: the availability of guns in America.
Neither presidential candidate has, to my knowledge, made a forthright statement about gun control in the face of Bill Gwatney's murder August 13. In all likelihood, neither candidate will have the courage to make a statement. This, because both Obama and McCain know the NRA and other gun lobbying organizations can, with one mailing to members, destroy a presidential candidate's chances in this nation of fools.
I believe that the idiots have prevailed in our nation. I no longer entertain a hope the madness that is 21st Century America will turn itself around, pendulum like, so that things get better.
I think our once hopeful, though always flawed, experiment in representative democracy is descending into its final death throes of chaos and dissolution.
D. Grant Haynes
August 14, 2008
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It's time to confront the gun lobby
April 18, 2007
Americans are busily soul searching one more time after another mass killing at an educational institution.
This time the setting was a university rather than a secondary school.
But the ghastly spectacle that unfolded at Virginia Polytechnic University in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16 when a disaffected student--Cho Seung-Hui, 23--systematically executed 32 innocent students and faculty members was fully as terrible as other such recent massacres in America--only worse.
More were killed at Virginia Tech than at Columbine High School in Colorado eight years ago. And the killer's cold-blooded and methodical resolve, as well as an inexplicable lack of appropriate and timely responses from police officers on the scene, will put the Virginia Tech massacre in a class apart always.
Media pundits, politicians, university administrators, psychologists, clergymen and others talk endlessly now about what lessons might be learned from Virginia Tech.
The university should have had a better evacuation or lock down protocol in place.
University and other police officers should have been more diligent in protecting students from Cho Seung-Hui's rage after his first shooting spree in which he killed two individuals more than two hours before he reappeared on campus to kill 30 more students.
The mental health community should have done a better job of intervention when Cho Seung-Hui had, over several years' time, displayed symptoms of mental illness.
There is ample blame to go around in this botched and bungled phantasmagoric mess that, seemingly, could not have been handled in a worse way than it was handled.
But in all of the hand-wringing 24-hour non-stop media reportage and speculation about Blacksburg, few professionals and fewer politicians with their fingers to the wind and their campaign coffers chock full of National Rifle Association dollars in some cases, have been willing to state the obvious.
Cho Seung-Hui could not have murdered 32 people so efficiently in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16 without access to two pistols and endless rounds of ammunition for them.
Cho was a brooding youth. One of his teachers had identified him as deeply troubled because of the excessively violent nature of his fictionalized scenarios. She had even referred him for counseling.
He had had encounters with the university police over allegations of stalking others.
He had been described as a potential menace to himself and others by a mental health professional.
Should not these facts alone have been a red flag sufficient to dictate a more than perfunctory look at him when he sought to acquire death-dealing handguns?
That should have been the case and would have been in a more sensible culture.
Had minimally effective gun control laws been in place in Virginia when Cho sought to purchase his pistols and cartridges, he would have been denied a permit and 32 dead Virginia Tech students and faculty members would be alive today.
For all practical purposes, anyone in this nation can obtain a firearm, regardless of his or her emotional stability, maturity, or legitimate need for the weapon.
This is wrong and is cause for people in more sane societies to fear for their very lives when contemplating a trip to America. This writer knows whereof he speaks because he lived in Great Britain for a time and was asked often about the danger of being gunned down in America.
What must they all think today?
More stringent gun control is the only answer to the madness of disaffected youths and others who, repeatedly, have walked into schools and work places and murdered innocent people.
But cowardly Democrats who should be at the forefront of gun control legislation are already distancing themselves from calls for tougher gun laws in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy.
Congressional Democrats fear the wrath of the National Rifle Association and that organization's clout with a certain segment of American voters too much to do what they know is both right and desperately needed.
Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D-NV) squelched serious talk of more rigid gun controls following the Virginia Tech shootings. The Associated Press reported Reid's lackluster and cowardly response to questions of stricter gun control as blood was being mopped at Virginia Tech.
"After the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cautioned Tuesday against a 'rush to judgment' on stricter gun control....
"I think we ought to be thinking about the families and the victims and not speculate about future legislative battles that might lie ahead," said Reid... ."
And you should also be thinking about the families and the victims of the next such massacre, Senator Reid.
A ban on the sale of assault rifles in the United States--one that was in place from 1994 until 2004 when a Republican Congress permitted it to expire--should be reinstated as soon as possible.
And handgun acquisition requirements should also be made more restrictive as soon as possible.
The American with a legitimate need for a personal handgun--certainly and especially a license to carry such a weapon on his person--should become a rare exception rather than the rule.
The Cho Seung-Hui's of this nation should never be permitted to purchase a handgun or an assault rifle. Background checks prior to the sale of a pistol should be infinitely more thorough--modeled, perhaps after the British system.
The only viable solution to the epidemic of mass killings at American educational institutions and work places is to drastically reduce the number of guns in the hands of Americans.
This can be done and should be done.
And to those who would at this point trot out the tired old bromide, "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns", one can only observe that we must start somewhere and at some point in time.
The process may take decades, but if assault rifle acquisitions are stanched altogether and handguns are made infinitely more difficult to obtain, there will be ever fewer of each in circulation over time.
That would represent a move in the right direction and would be a fitting memorial to those who gave their lives at Virginia Tech because Virginia's gun laws had permitted a psychologically impaired youth to acquire the instruments to murder 32 people on a morning that will live in infamy throughout American history.
How many more Virginia Techs must occur before our elected representatives muster the courage to confront the gun lobby and do what must be done ?