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History > 2014 > USA > Gun violence (I)
Reuniting with families
after a shooting at Berrendo Middle
School in Roswell, N.M.
Two students were seriously wounded.
Mark Wilson/Reuters
In Age of School Shootings, Lockdown Is the New Fire Drill
NYT
16.1.2014
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/
us/in-age-of-school-shootings-lockdown-drills-are-the-new-duck-and-cover.html
History > 2014 > USA > Gun violence (I)
One Nation Under Guard
February 15, 2014
4:20 pm
The New York Times
The Great Divide
By SAMUEL BOWLES
and ARJUN JAYADEV
Another dubious first for America: We now employ as many
private security guards as high school teachers — over one million of them, or
nearly double their number in 1980.
And that’s just a small fraction of what we call “guard labor.” In addition to
private security guards, that means police officers, members of the armed
forces, prison and court officials, civilian employees of the military, and
those producing weapons: a total of 5.2 million workers in 2011. That is a far
larger number than we have of teachers at all levels.
What is happening in America today is both unprecedented in our history, and
virtually unique among Western democratic nations. The share of our labor force
devoted to guard labor has risen fivefold since 1890 — a year when, in case you
were wondering, the homicide rate was much higher than today.
Is this the curse of affluence? Or of ethnic diversity? We don’t think so. The
guard-labor share of employment in the United States is four times what it is in
Sweden, where living standards rival America’s. And Britain, with its diverse
population, uses substantially less guard labor than the United States.
In America, growing inequality has been accompanied by a boom in gated
communities and armies of doormen controlling access to upscale apartment
buildings. We did not count the doormen, or those producing the gates, locks and
security equipment. One could quibble about the numbers; we have elsewhere
adopted a broader definition, including prisoners, work supervisors with
disciplinary functions, and others.
But however one totes up guard labor in the United States, there is a lot of it,
and it seems to go along with economic inequality. States with high levels of
income inequality — New York and Louisiana — employ twice as many security
workers (as a fraction of their labor force) as less unequal states like Idaho
and New Hampshire.
When we look across advanced industrialized countries, we see the same pattern:
the more inequality, the more guard labor. As the graph shows, the United States
leads in both.
Note that, in 1979 (shown by the pink dot), the United States was less unequal
and employed less guard labor. In the graph, inequality in income takes account
of payment of taxes and receipt of government transfers such as Social Security.
(We measure inequality by the Gini index, a measure that varies from 0 for
complete equality — that is, if all families have the same income — to a value
of 1 if a single person has all of the income.) The data shown are the most
recent for all nations on which comparable measures of inequality and guard
labor are available.
For the same countries, guard labor is also more common where those starting out
in life face a sharply tilted playing field, such as America, Britain and Italy.
These are countries in which the income of a father is a good predictor of the
income of his adult son. The countries with the least guard labor are those in
which there is greater equality of economic opportunity by this measure: These
are Denmark and Sweden, countries in which knowing the father’s income does not
enable a very accurate guess of the son’s income when he grows up.
Nobody has a good explanation of why the United States is a standout when it
comes to guard labor. Some of the differences in the guard-labor fraction across
nations arise because, in many countries, the job of getting people to play by
the rules is not left up to enforcement specialists. Anyone who has tried
jaywalking in Germany will know what we mean: It’s not the police who are on
your case, but your fellow pedestrians. In the United States, when the
neighbor’s boisterous party is disturbing sleep, it’s often the police who will
get the irate call, not the neighbor. Some of the increase in guard labor over
the past century in America may reflect a shift from the informal enforcement of
social norms to their enforcement by specialists in uniform.
Does the graph show that inequality causes a country to devote more of its labor
force to guard labor? It is hard to be sure. It could be that people with a
strong commitment to economic justice are, for some unknown reason, also more
law-abiding, explaining the difference between Denmark and the United States.
But the correlation evident in the graph could be evidence that economic
disparities push nations to devote more of their productive capacity to guarding
people and property. Fear and distrust of one’s neighbors and fellow citizens
fuel the demand for guard labor. Economic disparities can contribute to both.
Among the countries shown, a common measure of distrust of strangers is strongly
correlated with both the guard-labor fraction and inequality.
Social spending, also, is strongly and inversely correlated with guard labor
across the nations shown in the graph. There is a simple economic lesson here: A
nation whose policies result in substantial inequalities may end up spending
more on guns and getting less butter as a result.
Nobody doubts that the work of guard labor is essential. One of us, Samuel
Bowles, knows this firsthand: His son-in-law is a corrections officer whose work
is skilled, demanding and necessary. Every society divides its labor between
those who produce things and those who guard the store. But how much guard labor
is too much?
“You have money spent on guarding stuff rather than making stuff,” said Michael
Hood, an economist at Barclays Capital. “There’s a large population standing
around in blue blazers rather than engaged in more productive activities.” He
was talking about Latin America, but could have been describing things in the
United States.
“It is lamentable to think,” wrote the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in 1848,
“how a great proportion of all efforts and talents in the world are employed in
merely neutralizing one another.” He went on to conclude, “It is the proper end
of government to reduce this wretched waste to the smallest possible amount, by
taking such measures as shall cause the energies now spent by mankind in
injuring one another, or in protecting themselves from injury, to be turned to
the legitimate employment of the human faculties.”
This venerable call to beat swords into plowshares resonates still in America
and beyond. Addressing unjust inequality would help make this possible.
Samuel Bowles,
a research professor of behavioral sciences
at the Santa Fe Institute, is the author
of “The New Economics of Inequality and Redistribution.”
Arjun Jayadev, an associate professor of economics
at the University of Massachusetts, Boston,
also teaches at Azim Premji University, Bangalore,
and works at the Institute for New Economic Thinking,
New York.
One Nation Under Guard, NYT, 15.2.2014,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/one-nation-under-guard/
Jury Reaches Partial Verdict
in Florida Killing Over Loud Music
FEB. 15, 2014
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — After four days of deliberation, the jury
in the racially tinged trial of Michael Dunn, a Florida man who set off another
firestorm over the state’s self-defense laws when he shot a teenager to death in
a parking lot during a dispute over loud music, said it could not agree on
whether Mr. Dunn had acted to protect himself or was guilty of murder.
The jurors did find Mr. Dunn guilty of three counts of second-degree attempted
murder for getting out of his car and firing several times at the Dodge Durango
sport utility vehicle in which Jordan Davis, 17, was killed. Three other
teenagers, the subjects of the attempted murder charges, were in the car but
were not struck. Mr. Dunn continued to fire at the vehicle even as it pulled
away. On the attempted murder convictions, he could be sentenced to 60 years in
prison.
Judge Russell L. Healey of Duval County declared a mistrial on the count of
first-degree murder, which applied only in the death of Mr. Davis. The jury also
failed to reach agreement on lesser charges that are automatically included in
jury instructions. Those were second- and third-degree murder and manslaughter.
The state attorney for Jacksonville, Angela Corey, said immediately after the
verdict that she planned to retry Mr. Dunn on first-degree murder. Ms. Corey
said she hoped jurors would explain why they could not agree on that charge,
which could help her team in the new trial.
Mr. Davis’s parents, who wept after the verdict, said they were grateful for the
jury’s decision to convict Mr. Dunn of attempted murder and would await his
retrial. “It has been a long, long road, and we’re so very happy to have a
little bit of closure,” said Lucia McBath, Mr. Davis’s mother.
Mr. Dunn’s lawyer, Cory Strolla, said that Mr. Dunn was in shock over the
verdict and that his parents were “devastated.”
“There were no winners; everybody lost,” Mr. Strolla said. “It’s hard to call it
a victory.”
Mr. Dunn’s sentencing hearing was expected to occur in March.
The case was steeped in racial overtones. Mr. Dunn, 47, is white, and the
teenagers black. It also drew renewed attention to Florida’s expansive
self-defense laws that allow people who say they feel threatened to use lethal
force to protect themselves. The trial began six months after the verdict in
another high-profile case that focused on race, in which George Zimmerman was
acquitted in the fatal shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin.
The 12 jurors, who had been sequestered since Feb. 6, consisted of four white
men, four white women, two black women, one Hispanic man and one Asian-American
woman. Some black leaders expressed disappointment that there were no black men
on the jury.
The deadlock means that at least one juror had reasonable doubt about the
prosecution’s version of events.
The prosecutors had argued that Mr. Dunn did not shoot Mr. Davis in
self-defense, as he testified. He shot him, they said, because he was enraged
that when he asked the teenagers to turn down the music booming from their
vehicle in a gas station parking lot — Mr. Dunn described it to his fiancée as
“thug music” — Mr. Davis did not do so and then cursed him repeatedly.
Mr. Dunn, who was visiting from out of town, left the scene and did not call 911
or the police after the shooting. Instead, he returned to his hotel, and the
next morning drove two and a half hours to his home in Brevard County. The
prosecutors said his behavior did not jibe with the actions of a man who had
fired in self-defense. They also argued that Mr. Dunn had had enough time to
reflect before shooting, which was why they accused him of premeditated murder.
Coming on the heels of the failure to convict Mr. Zimmerman in July, the verdict
was a blow to Ms. Corey, who was the special prosecutor in the Zimmerman case.
“The verdict won’t sit well with the black community in Jacksonville,” said Ken
Jefferson, a vice president for Operation Save Our Sons, a group that tries to
help young men in Jacksonville, where blacks make up 30 percent of the
population. “There is a feeling of being able to shoot black people and get away
with it,” he said, particularly after the Zimmerman case.
Mr. Strolla said the prosecutors had overcharged Mr. Dunn, reaching for
premeditated murder because they were seeking vindication after their showing in
the Zimmerman trial.
Mr. Dunn, who testified on Tuesday, told jurors that Mr. Davis had pointed a
shotgun at him from the window of the Durango, threatened to kill him and then
tried to get out of the car. It was only then, Mr. Dunn said, that he reached
into his glove box, unholstered his 9-millimeter pistol, put a round in the
chamber, and fired 10 times.
“It was Jordan Davis who kept escalating this to the point where I had no choice
but to defend myself,” Mr. Dunn said on the stand. “It was life or death.”
Mr. Davis, a high school senior who had spent the day with three friends on the
day he was killed, Nov. 23, 2012, was hit three times and died in the car. He
would have turned 19 on Sunday.
The prosecutors argued that Mr. Dunn had fabricated his story about the shotgun
to bolster his self-defense claim. The police never found a shotgun, and no
witnesses ever reported seeing one. The teenagers testified that none of them
had a shotgun in the car. That was why no one shot back at Mr. Dunn, the
prosecutors said.
The trial, which lasted six days before deliberations began on Wednesday, was
the latest courtroom test for Florida’s expansive self-defense statutes,
including the so-called Stand Your Ground provision. Under the law, Mr. Dunn
needed only to have been convinced that he saw a shotgun, whether or not one was
present.
Since their son’s death, the Davises have worked to try to change Florida’s
self-defense laws, including the Stand Your Ground provision, which grants wide
latitude to people who believed they face a threat. The prosecutors portrayed
Mr. Dunn as a man who felt threatened right away because he viewed the teenagers
as “gangsters.” Mr. Strolla disputed that notion and said Mr. Dunn has
maintained it was the violent rap subculture, not race, that influenced Mr.
Davis’s behavior.
Legal analysts said the defense had a relatively weak case because only Mr. Dunn
said he had seen a shotgun, and his fiancée’s testimony undermined his
credibility. To back his claim, Mr. Dunn was forced to testify, always a risky
move since it opens a defendant up to cross-examination. “He testified very
straightforward and honest,” Mr. Strolla said.
In what prosecutors called a “wow” trial moment, the fiancée, Rhonda Rouer,
shaking on the witness stand, said that Mr. Dunn had not mentioned to her in the
night and day they spent together before his arrest that any of the teenagers
had a shotgun. Ms. Rouer was inside the gas station convenience store when the
shooting occurred.
But there were weaknesses in the prosecutors’ case.
Mr. Strolla repeatedly told jurors that no shotgun had been found because the
police had failed to thoroughly search for it.
The teenagers, he said, had three minutes to hide the weapon after they drove to
a nearby lot to escape the gunfire.
“They thought this was just another murder in Jacksonville,” Mr. Strolla,
referring to the police, said at a news conference before the verdict.
Mr. Strolla also underscored what he said were inconsistencies in the testimony
of the teenagers and cast doubt on the witness who said he had heard Mr. Dunn
say, “You’re not going to talk to me that way,” before reaching for his pistol.
A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 2014,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:
Jury Reaches Partial Verdict in Florida Killing
Over Loud Music.
Jury Reaches Partial Verdict in Florida
Killing Over Loud Music,
NYT, 15.2.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/us/florida-killing-over-loud-music.html
Firearms’ Toll Among the Young
FEB. 3,
2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The world
at large heard instantly about the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., where 20
youngsters were murdered in 2012 in a terrifying spree of gunfire. Far less
noticed but no less horrific is the unending toll from the more routine bursts
of gunfire that each day send an average of 20 American children and adolescents
to hospitals, many of them for long-term treatment.
This grim statistic is found in a new study that focuses on the lasting damage
suffered by young victims who survive. Of 7,391 hospitalizations of youths ages
19 and under shot in 2009, 6 percent ended in death; the rest joined the growing
casualty list of gun victims, many needing lengthy and costly treatment,
according to the study published in Pediatrics magazine. An estimated 3,000
additional youngsters died before reaching emergency rooms.
Newtown and other mass shootings have prompted schools across the nation to
instruct schoolchildren on ways to hide from armed intruders, much the way
students were told to duck and cover from nuclear attack in the Cold War era.
Where that old threat was external to America, the new threat is internal,
spawned by the easy access to firearms that Congress refuses to adequately
control.
The cases in the 2009 study showed that very few of the shootings occurred in
schoolhouses, which offers little comfort for school authorities who need to
prepare for the worst. But it shows that the wounding and death of youngsters is
a national health crisis that deserves far more attention — no easy task when
the gun lobby continues to block research and data collection about guns.
A version of
this editorial appears in print on February 4, 2014,
on page A20 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Firearms’ Toll
Among the Young .
Firearms’ Toll Among the Young, NYT, 3.2.2104,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/opinion/firearms-toll-among-the-young.html
The Gun
Report, 1 Year Later
FEB. 3, 2014
The New York Times
It has been a year since my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I
started publishing The Gun Report, an effort to use my blog to aggregate daily
gun violence in America. Our methodology is pretty simple: We do a Google News
search each weekday morning for the previous day’s shootings and then list them.
Most days, we have been finding between 20 and 30 shootings; on Mondays, when we
also add the weekend’s violence, the number is usually well over 100.
From the start, we knew we were missing a lot more incidents than we found. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after all, says that nearly 32,000
people are killed by guns each year. Slate, the online magazine, which tried to
tally every gun death in the year after the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., arrived
at a number of 12,042, far higher than ours. (We include gun injuries as well as
gun deaths.)
Part of the issue, as Slate has noted, is that it is impossible to track
suicides using news media accounts — and suicides, according to the C.D.C.,
account for some 60 percent of gun deaths. But it was also obvious that a Google
News search was bound to miss plenty of examples; that’s just the nature of the
beast. Comprehensiveness was never really the point, though. Mostly we were
trying to get a feel for the scale and scope of gun violence in America. A year
later, it seems like a good time to take stock.
First, the biggest surprise, especially early on, was how frequently either a
child accidentally shot another child — using a loaded gun that happened to be
lying around — or an adult accidentally shot a child while handling a loaded
gun. I have written about this before, mainly because these incidents seem so
preventable. Gun owners simply need to keep their guns locked away. Indeed, one
pro-gun reader, Malcolm Smith, told me that after reading “about the death toll,
especially to children” in The Gun Report, he had come to believe that some gun
regulation was necessary. He now thinks gun owners should be licensed and
“should have to learn how to store guns safely.” No doubt he’ll be drummed out
of the National Rifle Association for expressing such thoughts.
Second, the N.R.A. shibboleth that having a gun in one’s house makes you safer
is demonstrably untrue. After The Gun Report had been up and running for a
while, several Second Amendment advocates complained that we rarely published
items that showed how guns were used to prevent a crime. The reason was not that
we were biased against crime prevention; it was that it didn’t happen very
often. (When we found such examples, we put them in The Gun Report.) More to the
point, there are an increasing number of gun deaths that are the result of an
argument — often fueled by alcohol — among friends, neighbors and family
members. Sadly, cases like the recent shooting in a Florida movie theater — when
one man killed someone who was texting during the previews — is not all that
uncommon.
Third, gang shootings are everywhere. You see it in the big cities, like
Chicago, Detroit and Miami, and you see it in smaller cities in economic decline
like Flint, Mich., and Fort Wayne, Ind. Drive-by shootings are prevalent in
California, especially Los Angeles and Fresno. As often as gang members shoot
each other, they kill innocent victims, often children who happen to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time.
Among the readers who post daily comments to The Gun Report are a number of gun
rights advocates. What has been astonishing to me is the degree to which they
tend to dismiss inner-city violence, as if to say that such killings are
unavoidable. The code word they often use is “demographics.”
It is unquestionably true that the most gun homicides occur in the inner cities
— the anecdotes we collect in The Gun Report are confirmed by such studies as a
May 2013 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. And, yes, plenty of them are the
result of gang violence. But why should that make them any less lamentable, or
preventable?
There are an estimated 300 million guns in America, and that’s not going to
change anytime soon. But to read The Gun Report is to be struck anew at the
reality that most of the people who die from guns would still be alive if we
just had fewer of them. The guys in the movie theater would have had a fistfight
instead of a shooting. The momentary flush of anger would pass. The suicidal
person might have taken a pause if taking one’s life were more difficult. And
on, and on. The idea that guns, on balance, save lives — which is one of the
most common sentiments expressed in the pro-gun comments posted to The Gun
Report — is ludicrous.
On the contrary: The clearest message The Gun Report sends is the most obvious.
Guns make killing way too easy.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 4, 2014,
on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Gun Report, 1 Year Later.
The Gun Report, 1 Year Later, NYT,
3.2.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/opinion/nocera-the-gun-report-1-year-later.html
Three Dead in Shooting at Maryland Mall;
Police Call the Episode Isolated
JAN. 25, 2014
The New York Times
By JADA F. SMITH
and EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS
COLUMBIA, Md. — Shots rang out at a popular shopping mall in
this suburb between Washington and Baltimore on Saturday morning, sending
shoppers running from stores and hiding under tables in the food court.
When police officers arrived, they found three people dead inside a skate shop
on the upper level of the two-story center, the Mall in Columbia. Two of the
victims were a young man and woman who worked at the store. The body of another
man, who is suspected of being the attacker, was found near the victims with a
shotgun and ammunition nearby, police officials said. The man is believed to
have committed suicide, they said.
Five other people had minor injuries — most of them suffered as they fled after
hearing the gunshots — and were released from a hospital on Saturday evening
after receiving treatment. The shootings at the Mall in Columbia set off fears
in the area as residents waited to hear from loved ones and concern across the
country over thoughts of yet another mass killing.
But at a news conference held about two hours after the initial gunshots, the
county police chief, William J. McMahon, said he believed the shootings were an
isolated episode involving just the three people who were found dead. “To our
knowledge, all the activity took place at one time, in one store,” Chief McMahon
said.
He said that only one weapon was found at the scene — a shotgun — and that
police officers had not fired any shots.
The police said they had tentatively identified the suspect, but they declined
to release his name while they followed up on leads. They did say he had a large
amount of ammunition, including a bag that contained two “crude devices that
appeared to be an attempt at making explosives using fireworks.” Those devices
were disabled, the police said.
The two employees who were killed were identified by Saturday evening as Brianna
Benlolo, 21, of College Park, Md., and Tyler Johnson, 25, of Ellicott City, Md.
On her Facebook profile, Ms. Benlolo said that she was the first assistant
manager at the store and had worked there since November 2012. She was from
Cocoa Beach, Fla., and had attended a Paul Mitchell hair school in Rockville,
Md., according to her profile. Mr. Johnson’s Facebook profile said he started
working at Zumiez in November 2013.
The Howard County 911 center received reports of shots fired at the mall around
11:15 a.m. The victims were found on the upper level at a store called Zumiez,
which carries clothing and accessories for skateboarding and snowboarding.
At the news conference, the Howard County executive, Ken Ulman, said it had been
a “tremendously trying few hours.”
He added, “We want to send our thoughts and prayers to the family members of the
victims.”
Chief McMahon said that uniformed patrol officers were the first to arrive on
the scene. They were joined a short time later by SWAT team members who began
sweeping the mall looking for other potential gunmen and helping shoppers who
were hiding inside stores. The authorities had asked people to stay there until
they were sure it was safe to leave.
The police said that they believed the suspect had died of a self-inflicted
gunshot wound and had acted alone.
Chief McMahon said his officers had not determined a motive for the attack.
The five people who were injured at the mall were taken to Howard County General
Hospital. One person had a gunshot wound to the foot, and the four others were
treated for a medical condition or minor injuries, like a twisted ankle. On
Saturday evening, the hospital said that the five patients had been treated
there and released.
The owner of Zumiez released a statement on Saturday evening saying that the
company was “deeply saddened” by the violence at the store. The company said it
planned to make counseling available to store employees in the area.
“The Zumiez team is a tight-knit community and all of our hearts go out to
Brianna and Tyler’s families,” Richard Brooks, the company’s chief executive,
said in a statement.
On Saturday afternoon, the police responded to news media reports that the
shootings were related to a domestic dispute, saying the authorities had not
confirmed that. They said they had no information about whether the suspected
gunman knew the victims.
“Motive of shooting is unknown. Not determined to be domestic or any other cause
at this time. Any other reports are complete speculation,” the Police Department
said Saturday afternoon via Twitter.
By 4 p.m., the police had cleared the mall of all shoppers and employees as
investigators examined the crime scene.
The mall had opened around 10 a.m. and was busy on the chilly day. It is a huge
complex with almost 200 shops, including the anchor stores Macy’s and Sears, and
a movie theater.
Henry Callahan, 19, was sitting at a table in the food court when he heard “what
sounded like a trash can being thrown over the balcony.” He heard someone shout
that a man had a gun and more screaming from upstairs.
He hid under the table with a family that had a young child. He heard about nine
shots fired, he said.
“I was legitimately frightened,” Mr. Callahan said. “I had no idea what was
going on.”
“The panic on their faces was tremendous,” he said of the family he was hiding
with.
Mr. Callahan and the family hopped over the counter at an Arby’s restaurant and
escaped through a security door in the back hallway, he said.
Law enforcement officials arrived in less than two minutes, Chief McMahon said.
Around 12:20 p.m., just over an hour after it had begun, the Police Department
posted on Twitter that the episode appeared to be over and that no additional
shots had been heard.
The department continued to post frequent updates to Twitter throughout the
afternoon.
Outside the mall, there was a swarm of emergency vehicles. Helicopters hovered
as heavily armed officers stood watch.
Chief McMahon noted that the police had practiced an emergency drill at the
mall, which he said had helped them in their response to the shooting.
The mall was built in 1971 in Columbia, Md., a planned community about 25 miles
from Washington and about 15 miles from Baltimore. The town has about 97,000
residents spread over 10 separate villages. Along with the nearby Ellicott City,
it was named by Money magazine in 2010 as one of the best places to live in
America.
Debbie Sergi was working at the Wockenfuss Candies store when she heard about
five or six shots ring out that “sounded like a transformer had blown up.”
“People started running, so we got our gates closed and got our customers hidden
in the back room,” she said. “We were lucky to get our doors closed and locked.
We all cried. We were all scared. Really scared.”
Weis Karzai, 22, of Silver Spring, said he was walking into the mall with his
younger brother when people suddenly began streaming out. “People were running
out, saying, ‘Don’t go in there. There’s a guy with a gun,’ ” he said. “I
grabbed my brother and just ran out and went back to the car.” Just as he got
into the car, he said, police and ambulances arrived on the scene.
The mall will remain closed on Sunday, but the police said officers would patrol
outside it throughout the night and guard the crime scene.
Jada F. Smith reported from Columbia,
and Emma G. Fitzsimmons from New York. Jennifer Preston
and Ashley Southall contributed reporting from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on January 26, 2014,
on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline:
Three Dead in Shooting at Maryland Mall;
Police Call the Episode Isolated.
Three Dead in Shooting at Maryland Mall;
Police Call the Episode Isolated,
NYT, 25.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/us/
3-reported-dead-in-maryland-mall-shooting.html
In Age of School
Shootings,
Lockdown Is the New Fire Drill
JAN. 16, 2014
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY
The bomb threat was just a hoax, but officials at Hebron High
School near Dallas took no chances: School officials called the police and
locked down the school this week. Separately, a middle school 2,000 miles away
in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class.
But the threat and the gun were real at Berrendo Middle School in Roswell, N.M.,
where a seventh grader with a sawed-off shotgun walked into the gymnasium and
opened fire on his classmates on Tuesday, wounding two of them. School officials
and teachers, who had long prepared for such a moment, locked down the school as
police officers and parents rushed to the scene.
For students across the country, lockdowns have become a
fixture of the school day, the duck-and-cover drills for a generation growing up
in the shadow of Columbine High School in Colorado and Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Connecticut. Kindergartners learn to hide quietly behind bookshelves.
Teachers warn high school students that the glow of their cellphones could make
them targets. And parents get regular text messages from school officials
alerting them to lockdowns.
School administrators across the country have worked with police departments in
recent years to create detailed plans to secure their schools, an effort that
was redoubled after the December 2012 shootings in Newtown, Conn. At the whiff
of a threat, teachers are now instructed to snap off the lights, lock their
doors and usher their students into corners and closets. School officials call
the police. Students huddle in their classrooms for minutes or hours, texting
one another, playing cards and board games, or just waiting until they get the
all clear.
“They kept saying, ‘Lock your doors and keep everyone away from the windows,’ ”
said Rebecca Grossman, a 10th grader at Watertown High School, outside Boston,
where students have been forced to “shelter in place” three times this school
year, a less serious version of a full lockdown.
The lockdowns were more disruptive than scary, Rebecca said, like the time last
month when a bullet was discovered in a classroom, and she and her classmates
had to stay in place for four hours. She said the litany of false alarms was
desensitizing students, who have come to see the responses as “just an
annoyance.”
The lockdowns are part of a constellation of new security measures deployed by
schools over the last decade, a complement to closed-circuit cameras, doors that
lock automatically and police officers in the building. Most states have passed
laws requiring schools to devise safety plans, and several states, including
Michigan, Kentucky and North Dakota, specifically require lockdown drills.
Some drills are as simple as a principal making an announcement and students
sitting quietly in a darkened classroom. At other schools, police officers and
school officials playact a shooting, stalking through the halls like gunmen and
testing whether doors have been locked.
School officials and security experts say that the lockdowns are a modest and
sensible effort to guard against the unthinkable, and that they have helped keep
students safe, calm and organized during shootings and emergencies. And dozens
of times every month, the drills become reality.
Last month, when an 18-year-old student walked into his high school in suburban
Denver and fatally shot a classmate in the head, students huddled in their
classrooms behind locked doors as police commandos swept the building. They were
evacuated classroom by classroom, hands over their heads, onto the snowy playing
fields, all according to a plan school officials had put in place to prepare for
just such an emergency.
“The staff and students knew how to safely lock down and then evacuate the
school,” Scott Murphy, the district schools superintendent, wrote to parents
after the shooting at Arapahoe High School in Colorado, praising what he called
a well-coordinated response. “They acted quickly, appropriately, and bravely.”
Even without a direct threat, schools will default to a lockdown. A high school
in the San Francisco Bay Area was locked down last week as the police in the
area hunted for a carjacking suspect.
Some parents wonder whether the trend has laid a backdrop of fear and paranoia
across their children’s education.
The North Carolina elementary school where Jackson Green, 5, counts to 100 and
delights in celebrating classmates’ birthdays has gone into lockdown twice this
school year, once for a drill and once for real, sending Jackson and his
classmates to huddle quietly in a hidden corner of the classroom until their
teacher says everything is O.K.
On Oct. 11, the school was locked down for part of the morning after a fifth
grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school who turned out to be a
parent. The school, which locks doors during the school day and has cameras at
entrances, alerted parents and called the police.
“It speaks to the psychological conditions of these children, that they’re
alert, they’re on the lookout, that this danger is always present for them,”
Jackson’s mother, Sarah Green, said in an interview. “It’s constantly on their
minds.”
Though Jackson is still too young to understand the broader threats behind the
drills, he has absorbed their lessons so well that he has started playing
lockdown at home, Ms. Green said. “Attention everyone, this is a lockdown!” he
announces in the playroom. “Turn off the lights!”
“For Jackson, it’s just normal,” Ms. Green said in an email. “Quite frankly, it
is horrifying that my son imposes lockdowns on his little brother in the same
way that he pretends to announce the lunch menu.”
In Louisville, Ky., the school where Rachel Hurd Anger’s daughter, Ella, attends
second grade was locked down after a man with five BB guns walked onto the
campus. A few days later, Ms. Hurd Anger said her daughter drew a red-and-yellow
emergency button and taped it to her bedroom wall. When she presses it, she and
her 4-year-old brother run to the basement to hide. “It’s kind of like a
security blanket,” Ms. Hurd Anger said. “She doesn’t want to take it down.”
Even the preparatory drills can leave an imprint on the youngest children. In
Manhattan, Kan., Tina Steffensmeier said her first-grade son had to hide in his
classroom cubby during a drill while police officers walked through the hallways
and into classrooms, practicing how they would ensure that the children were
tucked out of a gunman’s sight. That night, she said, he had a nightmare that a
“bad guy” shot him at school.
“He’s a sensitive kid, and it really affected him,” Ms. Steffensmeier said. “How
sad it is that our kids have to deal with this.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 17, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Age of School Shootings,
Lockdown Is the New Duck-and-Cover.
In Age of School Shootings, Lockdown Is the
New Fire Drill, NYT, 16.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/us/
in-age-of-school-shootings-lockdown-drills-are-the-new-duck-and-cover.html
2 Injured in Shooting
at New Mexico School
JAN. 14, 2014
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS
A 12-year-old boy opened fire with a shotgun on Tuesday at the
middle school he attends in Roswell, N.M., striking two among the dozens of
students who were gathered inside a gym waiting for the first bell to ring, the
police and witnesses said.
The victims, an 11-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, were flown to University
Medical Center in Lubbock, Tex., 170 miles east of Roswell. By Tuesday evening,
he was listed in critical condition and she was in satisfactory condition, Eric
Finley, a hospital spokesman, said.
The boy suspected in the shooting, whom the police did not identify, carried a
shotgun inside a band-instrument bag, pulling it out once he entered the gym at
Berrendo Middle School about 8:15 a.m. and stood before the first victim,
identified by classmates as Nathaniel Tavarez, 11. The other victim, identified
by a family friend as Kendal Sanders, 13, was struck in the chest, according to
students who were there.
The boy stopped shooting once a social studies teacher told him to, and then he
dropped the gun on the floor, police and school officials said. He was
apprehended by a State Police lieutenant whom the school’s principal had flagged
as she raced to close the main door to the campus during the shooting.
“I believe we have in custody right now the only individual who is responsible
for this,” Pete N. Kassetas, the New Mexico State Police chief, said at a news
conference in Roswell.
At the same news conference, Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico said that a
staff member at the school suffered minor injuries as a result of the shooting,
but declined medical treatment because he wanted to stay and help.
The boy whom several students identified as the gunman was described as smart
and bookish. On Facebook, he was pictured beside a deer he had killed during a
hunting trip. (The picture has since been removed.) Laura Folts, 13, an
eighth-grade student at Berrendo who worked as an aide to the boy’s
second-period language arts teacher, said in an interview that he was “really
smart, nice with everyone.”
Chief Kassetas said during the news conference that investigators had
interviewed more than 100 students and staff members at the school but had yet
to pin down a motive for the shooting.
Students and staff members at Berrendo — on the north end of Roswell, a city of
about 48,000 in southeastern New Mexico — had been through several safety
drills, and the school also hired its own security staff, said Tom Burris,
superintendent of the Roswell Independent School District. According to the
parents of current and former students, the school did not have a metal
detector.
The school stayed on lockdown for several hours after the shooting, and the
police also blocked access to portions of Highway 70, which runs near the
campus. Students were taken to a nearby mall, where they were reunited with
their families.
Mr. Burris said he had canceled Wednesday’s classes.
Susan Beachy contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on January 15, 2014,
on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline:
New Mexico: 2 Students Wounded In Shooting
at Middle School.
2 Injured in Shooting at New Mexico School,
NYT, 14.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/
2-injured-in-shooting-at-new-mexico-school.html
Judge Rejects
Chicago’s Ban on Gun Shops
January 6, 2014
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY
CHICAGO — This city’s ban on gun shops violates the
Constitution, a federal judge ruled on Monday, dealing the latest setback to
politicians here who had put in place some of the nation’s strictest limits on
firearms.
“The stark reality facing the city each year is thousands of shooting victims
and hundreds of murders committed with a gun,” the judge, Edmond E. Chang, of
Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, wrote. “But on the
other side of this case is another feature of government: certain fundamental
rights are protected by the Constitution, put outside government’s reach,
including the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense under the Second
Amendment.”
The judge stayed his ruling, giving the city a chance to appeal, and said it
could still enact regulations on the sale and transfer of weapons if they did
not amount to a complete ban.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel strongly disagreed with the judge’s finding against the ban
and directed the city’s lawyers to “consider all options to better regulate the
sale of firearms within the city’s borders,” said Roderick Drew, a spokesman for
the city’s law department.
Chicago, which has wrestled with gang-related violence and more killings in
recent years than in the larger cities of New York and Los Angeles, had for
decades banned handguns within city limits. But in 2010, the United States
Supreme Court ruled that the city went too far, prompting leaders here to settle
for new limits, including outlawing the sale of firearms in the city.
Several residents and an association of Illinois firearms retailers filed a
lawsuit, leading to Judge Chang’s decision. “Chicago’s ordinance goes too far in
outright banning legal buyers and legal dealers from engaging in lawful
acquisitions and lawful sales of firearms,” the judge wrote, “and at the same
time the evidence does not support that the complete ban sufficiently furthers
the purposes that the ordinance tries to serve.”
Gun rights advocates said they hoped the ruling would send a message to Chicago
and other cities setting similar limits. “Just because people live in Chicago
doesn’t mean they’ve given up their rights,” said Richard Pearson, the executive
director of the Illinois State Rifle Association. Even with Chicago’s ban on
sales, officials have long complained about the patchwork of laws that allowed
guns to be obtained in neighboring states and suburbs.
“Every year Chicago police recover more illegal guns than officers in any city
in the country, a factor of lax federal laws as well as lax laws in Illinois and
surrounding states related to straw purchasing and the transfer of guns,” Mr.
Drew said.
Last year, a federal appeals court decision forced state lawmakers to allow
residents to carry concealed weapons in Illinois, and the state has begun
accepting applications to do so.
Judge Rejects Chicago’s Ban on Gun Shops,
NYT, 6.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/
judge-rejects-chicagos-ban-on-gun-shops.html
Stopping Mentally Ill Gun Buyers
January 3, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Rebuffed by Congress on stronger gun safety laws, President
Obama is wisely using use his executive powers in a more focused attempt to bar
mentally ill people from eluding federal watch lists and purchasing firearms.
Two sensible changes proposed for the background check system would allow states
and mental health providers more discretion than they have now in reporting
information about potentially violent people.
The first would deal with longstanding complaints from law enforcement
authorities about the narrow scope of a rule stipulating that a person cannot be
denied the purchase of a firearm unless he or she has been “committed to a
mental institution” in the past. This ignores whole categories of obviously
risky citizens.
The proposed change would broaden the rule to include involuntary outpatient as
well as inpatient commitments. Some of the shooters in cases of mass gun
violence were found to have previously come to the attention of authorities but
received psychiatric testing or care that fell short of orders of commitment.
Including inpatient and outpatient care broadens the grounds for denying
weapons.
The second proposal deals with privacy strictures in health insurance laws that
states say prevent the passing on of relevant information about potentially
violent people. After consultation with mental health professionals, the White
House said health insurance organizations would be extended “an express
permission” to furnish to federal authorities “the limited information necessary
to help keep guns out of potentially dangerous hands.”
Neither of these changes can fully solve the nation’s gun safety problem, but
both offer a promise of relief. Far more is needed, if Congress can ever
disenthrall itself from the gun lobby to rein in the carnage.
Stopping Mentally Ill Gun Buyers, NYT,
3.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/opinion/stopping-mentally-ill-gun-buyers.html
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