Will The Incidents Of Mass Gun Violence Never End?

President Obama spoke on the tragedy yesterday in Roseburg, Oregon:



Clearly he was exasperated at having to make this speech one... more... time, one of hundreds of incidents in America this year alone, incidents which simply do not happen in great quantities in any other free and democratic society in the world... including some in which law-abiding citizens' access to guns is, in practice, no more restricted than it is in the US. We have guns; they have guns— we have rampages, episodes of mass killings using guns which American criminals seem always able to get their hands on; they do not.  (Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee criticized Obama for making this obligatory speech, which Fuckabee called political. Then again, the Guv is known for shooting... shooting off his mouth, that is.)

How many hundreds of episodes of mass homicide by firearm must we endure every year before Americans awaken to the fact that ready availability of guns, moment to moment, legally or illegally but in any case not "well-regulated," is a primary cause of these events?

Yes, I know the drill: an armed society is a polite society; if a household always has guns at hand, it can always protect itself; etc. etc. ad nauseam. The problem with all such statements is that the statistics do not bear them out: the person likeliest to be shot with a personal handgun is the gun's owner or his/her family member, and America is the only free and democratic nation that experiences hundreds of incidents of gun-inflicted mass violence every year.

And yes, I know there is a national organization that makes its bucks by scaring people into implementing the 2^nd Amendment in a manner that almost guarantees repeated, frequent, terrifying incidents of mass gun violence. The problem with that org is that... do I really need to explain this one? Let me know if President Obama takes away your guns— if he actually does, maybe I'll modify my position, but I'm not holding my breath.

Chris Harper Mercer's source of guns?
At gun shows, shot happens, you know...

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A personal aside: in 1990, my mother died of Alzheimer's disease. The last year before she had to be institutionalized, Mom, being a country girl by birth, started begging Dad to buy a shotgun, ostensibly because Mom was hearing prowlers around their mobile home, itself quite a way out in the country.

Now there's improved safety for you: one aged and diagnosed demented member of a household hears people who aren't there, and demands a shotgun to protect herself from those nonexistent people. Oh, yeah; having a loaded gun handy was really going to heighten the safety of everyone living in or visiting that household. Uh-huh. Right.

Dad actually handled the situation very well: given that Mom's requests for a gun were ceaseless as long as she had no gun she could see and, theoretically, put her hands on, Dad bought the gun, and a small amount of ammunition, placed the unloaded gun in plain sight in a closet at home, and hid the ammo where only he could get to it. I wasn't present for the event, but I think Dad test-fired the gun once, again in plain sight so Mom could take comfort in the fact that the gun worked. The ammo? well, that disappeared until I found it when I cleaned out the mobile home after both of them had passed away.

Upon Dad's death, I gave the gun to his next-door neighbor, who already had three hunting rifles in his house. Three guns; four guns— it was IMO unlikely he'd do more damage with four than with three.

Your Cheery Sunday Morning: FBI Director Says Gun Laws Failed In Charleston Massacre

In an ironic twist in the tragic and exasperating Charleston-Roof case, the background check laws aimed at preventing gun sales to convicted felons just plain failed, allowing convicted felon Dylann Roof to buy a powerful handgun more suited to use as a law enforcement officer's sidearm. So says FBI Director James Comey, and surely we can always believe him, right? [/sarcasm] (Everytown for Gun Safety says in a broadcast email that it was "because of an NRA-backed loophole in the law" but we all know the NRA would never do anything that would result in harm to anyone, ever, right? right?? [/extreme‑sarcasm])

Glock 41

Nine people died because Dylann Roof, a convicted felon, was able to buy a powerful handgun (reportedly a Glock 41 semiautomatic) in South Carolina back in April, which he used two months later to murder nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, NC... just because they were Black. Roof even had the unmitigated nerve to attend their Bible study for an hour before he slaughtered them; apparently, though, the message "love one another" didn't take hold in him.

People generally had one reaction, no matter their political or religious outlook: horror, sorrow, a deep sense of loss. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on the other hand, saw the event as an opportunity to proselytize for the gun lobby and for keeping the gun laws just the way they are now:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement: "It's disastrous that this bureaucratic mistake prevented existing laws from working and blocking an illegal gun sale. The facts undercut attempts to use the tragedy to enact unnecessary gun laws. The American people, and especially the victims' families, deserve better."

Yeah, Chuck, it sure as hell is "disastrous." Far be it from me to point any fingers of blame, of course; we're all at fault because a doubtless perfect law did not function perfectly when it was needed most. There is of course no need... never any need... to improve the law. Right, Chuck?

I shall not live to see these terrible tragedies— rather, this one huge ongoing tragedy— come to an end. And that's true even if I don't encounter a convicted felon packing heat who was able to purchase his piece illegally. [/sigh] This is the 21^st century, not the 18^th; surely there is some way the 2^nd Amendment can be interpreted that does not result in widespread criminal ownership and use of firearms. There's gotta be a way.

Heaven Help Us All To Survive In This Violence‑Plagued Age

I still cannot fathom the kind of mental disorder that leads someone to mass murder (9 people dead when BBC wrote the story), but I do know that ready availability of guns of types that are of no use for hunting, self-defense, etc. has enabled such disturbed people to perpetrate such crimes:

Charleston church shooting: Police hunt suspected killer

US police are hunting for a man they suspect of shooting dead nine people at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Officials released CCTV images of a man they said was white, in his early 20s, and sat in on a bible study meeting for an hour before opening fire.

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This killer got away, and is being sought. Surveillance video footage shows a suspect from the side and a vehicle from the front (see above linked BBC article); unfortunately, SC does not believe in front license plates.

I may not be a great fan of religion, but when we have reached the point at which a church meeting is not a safe place to be, our society is badly deteriorated. My prayers and condolences to the families of those killed.

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UPDATE Thu 6/18 about 12:45 CT: a suspect has been captured. From the description, it sounds as if the 21-year-old man is an extreme racist nut-job. See what you think.

The Texas A&M Shooting: 3 Dead

The shooting, for those who know the campus, was at the intersection of George Bush Dr. and Wellborn Rd. (I swear I am not making those names up.) George Bush Dr. is a northeast-southwest street on the eastern border of campus, and the TAMU representative, as quoted by PoliticusUSA from the LA Times said the shooter was "not on campus". The constable, Brian Bachmann, who engaged in gunfire with the alleged perpetrator, was among the slain... as was the alleged shooter himself. From the above-linked CNN article:

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund noted that the slain constable, Brian Bachmann, is the sixth law enforcement official killed so far this year in Texas.

Six officers dead: six too many. R.I.P., Mr. Bachmann.

The problem with casual accessibility of guns to just about anyone who seeks them, with scant or no background checks, is that, among the many gun enthusiasts wanting to purchase guns for legal uses, there are always a few who are actually nuts, and the wide-open atmosphere regarding the sale of guns in the US means that even such regulations as exist requiring criminal background checks are often not enforced. How many of these mass shootings in the heat of summer could be prevented by stricter enforcement of regulations? We have to at least try: the No Rational Argument lobby assures that no politician is going to attempt a legislative solution even if it complies fully with the Second Amendment. We have to work with the laws we have, not the ones we wish we had. Meanwhile, the roll of the dead grows ever longer...