The waves of mass shootings continue to roll over the United
States like surf on the ship of state’s prow. Every few weeks now we get hit
with a jolt of cold water. We shake and shudder, and then brace ourselves for
the next one.
So we beat on — a nation whose people are 20 times more likely to die of gun
violence than those of most other developed countries. The only thing
extraordinary about mass shootings in America is how ordinary the killing
grounds are — elementary schools, high schools, colleges, military recruitment
centers, theaters, parks, churches.
Is no place safe? Actually, several places are. You want protection in a country
that allows a deranged man to get an assault weapon to hunt down innocent people
in a public space? Go to the airport — that bubble of gun-free security. Or go
to a major-league baseball game, or a stadium in the National Football League.
Our big league venues may be engaging only in security theater, as critics
assert, but their owners don’t think so. They now mandate metal detectors to
snag weapons, and most of them even ban off-duty cops from bringing guns to the
games.
Nationwide, if you want to lessen your chances of getting shot, stay out of the
South. The South is the most violent region in the United States, and also the
place with the highest rate of gun ownership. More guns, easily obtained by the
mentally ill, religious fanatics and anti-government extremists, mean more gun
deaths.
Better to go to a city or state with gun restrictions, at least if you’re
playing the odds. Most of the states with tighter gun laws have fewer gun
deaths.
That’s one America, the slightly safer one. It includes government gun-screened
zones like airports, courthouses and many high schools. But more significantly,
it also covers property used by our most popular obsession, pro football — the
free market at work.
The other America is an open-fire zone, backed by politicians who think it
should be even more crowded with average people parading around with lethal
weapons. Just after the tragedy in a Louisiana theater a week ago — a shooting
by a hate-filled man who was able to legally obtain a gun despite a history of
mental illness — Rick Perry called gun-free zones a bad idea.
In his view, echoing that of the fanatics who own the Republican Party by
intimidation, everyone should be armed, everywhere. Once a shooting starts, the
bad guy with the gun will be killed by the good guy with the gun, somehow able
to get a draw on the shooter in a darkened theater, or behind a pew in church.
This scenario almost never happens. The logic is nonsense, the odds of a
perfectly timed counter-killer getting the drop on the evil killer unlikely. And
even when such a situation does happen, as in the Tucson shooting of 2011, the
armed citizen who jumps into the melee can pose a mortal threat to others. In
Tucson, an innocent person came within seconds of getting shot by an armed
bystander who wasn’t sure whom to shoot.
Most gun-free zones, like the theater in Lafayette, La., are not gun-free at
all. They have no metal detectors or screening — that would cost too much, the
theater owners claim. Gun-free is a suggestion, and therefore a misnomer.
Eventually, the more prosperous theaters in better communities will pay for
metal detectors, further setting apart the two Americas in our age of mass
shootings.
The Mall of America — more than 500 stores in four miles of retail space,
drawing 40 million annual visitors to a climate-controlled part of Minnesota —
is trying to be a gun-free zone. “Guns are banned on these premises” is the
mall’s official policy.
If the mall took up Rick Perry’s suggestion, shoppers could roam among the chain
stores packing heat, ready for a shootout. The owners of that vast operation,
similar to those who stage concerts and pro sports, think otherwise. The mall
has a security force of more than a hundred people. Yeah — I hear the joke about
the feckless mall cops. But the Mall of America trusts them more than well-armed
shoppers to protect people, as they should.
Surprising though it may seem, gun ownership is declining over all in the United
States. We are still awash with weapons — nearly a third of all American
households have an adult with a gun. But that’s down from nearly half of all
households in 1973.
What we’re moving toward, then, are regions that are safer than others, and
public spaces that are safer than others, led by private enterprise, shunning
the gun crazies who want everyone armed. The new reality comes with the
inconvenience and hassle of screening and pat-downs similar to the routines at
airports — enforced gun-free zones, not mere suggestions.
As a way to make everyday life seem less frightening, the new reality is absurd.
But that’s the cost, apparently, of an extreme interpretation of a
constitutional amendment designed to fend off British tyranny, a freedom that
has become a tyranny in itself.
NEARLY three years ago, in the days after the mass killings at
Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Obama went to Newtown, Conn., to speak
at a vigil for the victims. He spoke movingly, and seemed to embody the nation’s
outrage and its determination to reduce the number of people killed with guns in
America. “Do not lose heart,” he told the families of the victims. He said he
would use “whatever power this office holds.”
He has not done that. He tried one lever of presidential power — proposing
legislation. When that didn’t work, the president failed to move the other
levers in a meaningful way.
For more than a year, we and fellow religious leaders across the nation have
worked to persuade President Obama to use what we believe is the most powerful
tool government has in this area: its purchasing power. The federal government
is the nation’s top gun buyer. It purchases more than a quarter of the guns and
ammunition sold legally in the United States. State and local law enforcement
agencies also purchase a large share. Major gun manufacturers depend on these
taxpayer-funded purchases. For the government to keep buying guns from these
companies — purchases meant to ensure public safety — without making demands for
change is to squander its leverage.
Some of the leading brands of handguns purchased by the government — Glock,
Smith & Wesson, Sig Sauer, Beretta, Colt, Sturm, Ruger & Company — are also
leading brands used in crimes. Among the brands of handguns recovered by the
Chicago Police Department at crime scenes between January 2012 and October 2013,
all six of these companies ranked in the top 11. When police officers carrying
Glocks are recovering Glocks at crime scenes on a regular basis, shouldn’t this
prompt questions about whether the police department could use its influence to
reduce the number of guns that end up in the hands of criminals? When Smith &
Wessons turn up frequently in the hands of criminals, shouldn’t questions be
asked when Smith & Wesson seeks a contract with the federal government?
What could gun manufacturers do to protect the public?
They could distribute their guns exclusively through dealers that sell guns
responsibly, and end their relationships with the small percentage of bad-apple
dealers that sell a disproportionate number of the guns used in crimes. They
could produce “smart guns” that can be fired only by authorized users, and that
therefore are far less likely to be used in accidental or intentional shootings.
These measures, over time, would prevent many thousands of deaths.
But companies will innovate in these areas only if their major customers ask
them to.
The president can push companies to compete in the area of safer guns and more
responsible distribution. Here’s how to start.
First, use federal purchasing power to begin a substantive conversation with gun
manufacturers. The Pentagon is in the process of selecting the provider of
handguns for the United States Army. It should require all bidders to provide
detailed information about their gun safety technologies and distribution
practices in the civilian market. No response, no contract.
The F.B.I. should do likewise. In his forthright statement on how Dylann Roof
obtained the gun used to murder churchgoers in Charleston without having a
completed background check, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, explained that
gun dealers have the discretion to execute a sale — or not — if a background
check isn’t completed within three days. The next logical step, in our view, is
for Mr. Comey to ask the F.B.I.’s firearms suppliers to stop doing business with
dealers who won’t agree to use that discretion to protect the public.
Second, work with companies to develop new models of distribution, such as
through dealers certified by the industry as reputable.
Third, rescue the federal government’s smart-gun research efforts from oblivion.
Tens of millions of research dollars are needed to help get promising safety
technologies to market.
Fourth, develop a set of metrics for measuring manufacturers’ performance. We
might measure, for instance, the number of a manufacturer’s guns found at crime
scenes, as a percentage of their overall sales.
Let’s give gun manufacturers an incentive to make more smart guns and to allow
fewer guns into the hands of criminals.
The Rev. David K. Brawley, the Rev. Otis Moss III, the Rev. David Benke and
Rabbi Joel Mosbacher are members of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, aimed
at building power for social change.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up
for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 18, 2015, on page A19 of the
New York edition with the headline: A Way to Control Guns.
December 14, 2013
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
A YEAR ago, America was shocked by the murder of 26 children
and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But momentum to take action has
faded, and we still lose that many lives to gun violence every eight hours on
average.
The price of our gun policy can be seen in this breathtaking statistic: More
Americans have died from guns here in the United States since 1970 (nearly 1.4
million) than American soldiers have died in all the wars in our country’s
history over more than 200 years (about 1.2 million).
Those gun killings have been committed by people like John Lennon (his real
name, but no relation to the Beatles star), who, in 2001, used an assault rifle
to shoot an acquaintance dead in a quarrel over drugs. Lennon is now locked up
at Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, N.Y., and he underscores that while
people kill people, so do guns.
“I do take responsibility for the murder; I’m sorry for taking his life, and all
the life he could have had,” Lennon writes in an essay that he sent me out of
the blue and that I’ve published on my blog. “But without a gun, I would not
have killed.”
Lennon says that only “that perfect killing machine” of a gun assured that the
murder would succeed.
“Could I have stabbed him?” he adds. “Strangled him? Bludgeoned him? If I had
done so and he hadn’t died, why would that have made me less culpable than I am
now, a man who swiftly and cowardly shot another man to death? A killer
nonetheless, I hash these things out, in my head, in my cell, in Attica serving
28 years to life.”
Lennon does not deny that people will still try to kill each other without guns.
Indeed, he knows that firsthand, for he writes about being the target of a
revenge attack:
“He sneaked upon me in the prison yard like I sneaked upon his friend in a
Brooklyn street. When I turned, I saw his arm swing for my neck. I weaved. Then
I felt the piercing blows, as he gripped my shirt and dug into my side.
Pressured by the blood-thirsty crowd, he stabbed me six times because I shot his
friend to death. The ice pick didn’t do the job, though. He got away with it
because we were in a blind spot of the yard, and I never told on him. Prison
ethics. While my assailant’s intent was clear, the weapon he had access to was
insufficient. Therefore I lived.”
“It’s clear that the only reason I’m alive is because my assailant didn’t have
his weapon of choice,” he adds. “Can you imagine if we had access to guns in
prison?”
Lennon says that he has been tempted to commit suicide but that hanging himself
— the best option in prison — is grim and difficult. So he settles for living.
Indeed, he notes the irony that it is only because he is in a safe refuge
without guns that he has not been murdered or killed himself; at large, he
believes he would be dead.
In quoting a murderer and publishing an essay by him on my blog, I’m not
diminishing his crime or romanticizing it. But Lennon speaks a blunt truth that
Washington politicians too often avoid.
“I’m all for the market system,” Lennon says, “but when the products are killing
machines, why shouldn’t we tighten measures to keep guns out of the hands of
people like me?”
He’s right. Take cars, which are also potentially lethal instruments ubiquitous
in America. We’ve undertaken a remarkable half-century effort to make
automobiles far, far safer — and that is precisely the model for what we should
do with guns. We’ve introduced seat belts, air bags, prominent brake lights and
padded dashboards. We’ve cracked down on drunken drivers, improved road layouts
and railings, introduced graduated licenses for young drivers and required
insurance for drivers.
The upshot is that we have reduced the vehicle fatality rate per 100 million
miles driven by more than 80 percent — so that firearms now claim more American
lives each year than vehicles.
We need to approach gun safety in the same meticulous way we approach safety in
motor vehicles and so many other aspects of life: It’s ridiculous that a
cellphone can require a code to use, but a gun doesn’t.
One of the heroes at Sandy Hook was Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old teacher who was
killed while trying to hide and protect her students. It would be nice if
Washington could show a fraction of that courage, but instead, on this issue of
guns, politicians display paralysis and fecklessness. So, as Lennon writes, and
he should know: “we parade through life to the relentless drumbeat of death.”
In 2006,
Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm run by the secretive
financier Steven Feinberg, set out to raise $6.5 billion in a new fund called
Cerberus Institutional Partners Series IV. Feinberg’s reputation for extracting
value from troubled companies — by replacing management, shuttering facilities
and creating “efficiencies” — was such that by May 2007, when the fund was
finally closed, it had gotten commitments for nearly $1 billion more than it had
sought.
Cerberus Institutional Partners Series IV is the fund that took over Chrysler in
2007. It bought General Motors’ financing arm, now called Ally Financial. It
gobbled up hospitals, purchased bus companies, and even bought the raunchy
magazine Maxim.
It is also the fund that bought Bushmaster Firearms, the company that made the
assault weapon used by Adam Lanza to massacre 20 children and seven adults in
Newtown, Conn., last month. It bought Remington Arms, the maker of the
pump-action shotgun that was among the guns James Holmes used to kill 12 people
and wound 58 in Aurora, Colo. It bought a handful of other firearms companies,
which it then merged into a new parent company, Freedom Group. At which point,
Cerberus was the largest manufacturer of guns and ammunition in the country.
Not long ago, I obtained a partial list of the institutional investors that
committed money to the Cerberus fund. One of the investors, the California State
Teachers’ Retirement System, which put in $500 million, has already announced
that it will divest its gun holdings. “We shouldn’t be investing in things like
that,” says Bill Lockyer, the California state treasurer. He noted that assault
weapons are illegal in California.
Most of the other big investors, however, have kept their heads down. TIAA-CREF,
the financial services giant, committed $147.8 million to the Series IV fund.
(“No comment,” said a spokesman.) The State of Wisconsin Investment Board put up
$100 million. The University of Texas endowment made a $75 million commitment;
the Regents of the University of California kicked in $40 million; the
University of Missouri endowment was an investor. So were the Los Angeles Fire
and Police Pension system, the Indiana Public Retirement System, and the
Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System (which kicked in $400
million). And plenty of others.
When I called these investors to ask their rationale for investing in a fund
that financed a gun “roll-up,” as the Cerberus strategy is called, I got three
main responses. The first was that the percentage of their investment that went
to Freedom Group was minuscule. “We have a very small investment in Bushmaster,
which translates to about $1 million,” said Dianne Klein, a spokeswoman for the
University of California system. (She added that the California system was going
to divest its gun holdings.) Jennifer Hollingshead at the University of Missouri
told me that the endowment’s exposure was less than $450,000 — “which represents
about 0.01 percent of our total portfolio.”
The second response was that, as limited partners, the institutional investors
didn’t have a say in how Cerberus invested the money. The fact that Feinberg
decided to buy companies whose guns have repeatedly been used for mass slaughter
was, in effect, his decision to make.
The third was that the core duty of a pension fund or university endowment is to
maximize returns. Nobody made this point more vehemently than Bruce Zimmerman, a
spokesman for the University of Texas Investment Management Company. “We have no
plans to divest,” he said. “We invest strictly on economic considerations, and
we do not take into account social and political consideration.”
Cerberus never tried to hide what it was doing. And why would it? It was proud
of its gun strategy. It held annual meetings with its investors and talked
freely about Freedom Group. Investors were also aware that in 2010, Cerberus had
tried (and failed) to take Freedom Group public.
But until Newtown, none of the investors gave the business a second’s thought.
Aurora, Fort Hood, Wisconsin — and dozens of other mass slaughters — came and
went, and the investors stuck with Cerberus.
Newtown, it is often said, has changed that dynamic, sensitizing the country to
the insanity of its gun laws, and giving gun control advocates hope that reform
might finally be possible. But with the tragedy barely a month old, you can
already feel the pushback. Supporters of the National Rifle Association in
Congress are vowing to resist any effort to tighten the nation’s gun laws.
Gun-friendly state legislators are pushing absurd laws aimed at pre-empting
federal gun legislation. And then there are the investors, who have a unique
ability to push companies to change, if they so choose. (Just recall the South
African boycott.)
What I learned this week is that, Newtown notwithstanding, too many of them have
other priorities. Making money is still more important that saving lives.
Rainier
Arms, a gun dealer in Auburn, Wash., receives great Yelp reviews for its
responsiveness. But a call to the dealer on Friday led to a full voice mail box,
and an e-mail to its sales team drew this automatic response: “Thank you for
contacting Rainier Arms for your AR-15 needs. Due to an overwhelming response to
the latest political climate, we are experiencing longer-than-normal response
times.”
At Bud’s Gun Shop in Maryland, a message on the Web site said that customer
service was “completely overwhelmed” and it discouraged customers from calling
or e-mailing.
And on GunBroker.com, an Oracle .223 that normally retails for around $650 had
been bid up to $1,175 with three days left in the auction.
With gun-control legislation getting more serious discussion than it has in
years, gun sales are spiking as enthusiasts stock up in advance of possible
restrictions.
Gun sales have been increasing over the past five years, with marked increases
around the 2008 and 2012 elections, and after mass shootings like the one in
Aurora, Colo., and now in Newtown, Conn.
“The largest factor by far is fears over a potential change in gun laws — that’s
what’s driving most guns enthusiasts or even first-time buyers to go buy a gun,”
said Nima Samadi, senior guns and ammunition analyst for the research firm
IBISWorld.
There is increasing demands for guns in the United States. Last year, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted 16.45 million background checks for
firearm sales through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a
14 percent jump from the previous year. In the first 11 months of this year, the
bureau conducted 16.8 million background checks, a record since the system’s
founding in 1998.
Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, though, a few
companies associated with gun sales have backed away. Cerberus Capital
Management put the company that makes the Bushmaster, a gun used in the
shootings, up for sale on Tuesday, saying, “The Sandy Hook tragedy was a
watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an
unprecedented level.”
Dick’s Sporting Goods temporarily ceased selling all guns in its location
closest to Newtown, and has also put a hold on sales of so-called modern
sporting rifles, which include semiautomatic guns, nationwide.
And Deseret Digital Media, which owns KSL.com, a Web site that has been
criticized by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for allowing unregulated gun sales,
said it was suspending classified advertisements for guns.
Elsewhere, though, consumers are hurrying to buy guns, leading to some models
being out of stock, warnings of shipping and customer-service delays, and
significant premiums on assault rifles.
“We are seeing a total madhouse of buying everything in sight,” said Bob Irwin,
owner of the Gun Store, a Las Vegas shooting range and retailer. Thursday, he
said, was the largest sales day in the history of the store, which has been open
for 30 years. “We have not only a run on the guns, but a run on ammunition.”
Mr. Irwin has begun limiting how much of some types of ammunition customers can
buy, and he has canceled employees’ days off to handle the demand.
Walmart, the largest retailer of guns and ammunition in the United States,
indicated that several semiautomatic guns were out of stock at locations across
the country. Kory Lundberg, a spokesman, said the company was not sold out of
guns altogether, but had low inventory in some situations. Walmart carries guns
in about half its stores, and about one-third carry so-called modern sporting
rifles, the category including the Bushmaster and other AR-15 weapons.
Other retailers around the country were selling out of guns and accessories. On
Friday on ImpactGuns.com, the Bushmaster .223 was out of stock. Davidson’s, a
supplier to gun retailers, placed a notice on its Web site that said it was
seeing “unprecedented demand,” and at MidwayUSA.com, more than 100 parts for
AR-15 guns were out of stock and on back order.
On AR15.com, a gun-enthusiast Web site, a user posted that a barrel for a gun
disappeared from an online shopping cart overnight, and is now on back order.
Another user, named warplg8654, responded, “Dealers can’t keep anything in stock
for what I think are obvious reasons given the current political climate.”
When a user called JazzFan asked whether paying a $100 premium for a Stag Model
3 was a good deal, another user said that seemed “reasonable with all of the
panic buying.”
Gavin Gear, the founder of the enthusiast site Northwest Gun, said gun owners
were feeling “apprehension.”
“People are trying to think ahead, and if they want to own a particular firearm
and they think it’s going to be outlawed or restricted, they’re more likely to
buy now,” he said.
When the
Supreme Court struck down a ban on handguns by the District of Columbia in 2008,
ruling that there is a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for
self-defense, the decision was enormously controversial in the legal world. But
the court’s conclusion has generally been accepted in the real world because the
ruling was in tune with popular opinion — favoring Americans’ rights to own guns
but also control of gun ownership.
The text of the Second Amendment creates no right to private possession of guns,
but Justice Antonin Scalia found one in legal history for himself and the other
four conservatives. He said the right is not outmoded even “in a society where
our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces
provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem.”
It is not just liberals who have lambasted the ruling, but some prominent
conservatives like Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of
Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The majority, he wrote, “read an ambiguous
constitutional provision as creating a substantive right that the Court had
never acknowledged in the more than two hundred years since the amendment’s
enactment. The majority then used that same right to strike down a law passed by
elected officials acting, rightly or wrongly, to preserve the safety of the
citizenry.” He said the court undermined “conservative jurisprudence.”
In the real world, however, criticism has abated in part because the majority
opinion was strikingly respectful of commonplace gun regulations. “Like most
rights,” Justice Scalia said, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not
unlimited.”
And: “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding
prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or
laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and
government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the
commercial sale of arms. We also recognize another important limitation on the
right to keep and carry arms” —“prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and
unusual weapons.’ ”
Justice Scalia does not say how federal courts should evaluate such regulations
and the Supreme Court may need to return to this issue soon, to resolve a
substantial disagreement that has arisen in federal appeals courts.
Does the court’s 4-year-old ruling imply “a right to carry a loaded gun outside
the home”? That is what the Seventh Circuit appellate court concluded last week
in striking down an Illinois law that prohibited most people from carrying a
loaded weapon in public.
Or does the Supreme Court’s ruling on handguns support the view that public
interest in safety outweighs an individual’s interest in self-defense because
gun rights are more limited outside the home? That is what the Second Circuit
found last month in upholding a New York State law limiting handgun possession
in public to people who can show a threat to their own safety.
Where “gun violence is a serious problem,” as Justice Scalia said it is in the
United States, the courts must be very cautious about extending the individual
right to own a gun. The justice’s opinion made that clear.
December 6,
2012
9:00 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN
On national
television, you can talk about the sordid details of your sex life, the depth of
your religious piety or your belief that an organization that no longer exists,
Acorn, stole the 2012 presidential election -- a fantasy held by half of
Republicans. You can call climate change a hoax, you can say the moon landing
never happened, you can even praise Alex Rodriguez, though you shouldn't.
But you cannot talk about the 300 million or more guns circulating in private
hands in the United States. The most armed society in the world, ranked first
among 179 nations in the rate of gun ownership, had 9,146 gun homicides in 2009.
The same year, Canada had 173. But don't bring that up.
In Florida, it was against the law -- until the law was blocked by a federal
judge last summer -- for hospital doctors to even ask about firearms ownership
of victims, even though gunshot wounds account for 1 in 25 emergency room
visits.
Conservatives complain about anti-free-speech vigilantes who keep incendiary
voices of the right from being heard on college campuses, and they have a valid
point. But some of these same First Amendment defenders are the first to smother
any talk about the American weapons culture. The gun gag rules.
The latest public figure to face the shame shower is Bob Costas, the sports
broadcaster who occasionally steps outside the chalk lines of the games he
covers. Last Sunday, a day in late autumn devoted as usual to the lucrative
violence of professional football, Costas spoke about a more tragic kind of
violence. In passing on the words of a local writer, he wondered whether the
Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher and his girlfriend might still be
alive had guns not been so readily available. Belcher, who kept a handgun on the
kitchen table and an assault rifle in the den, shot Kasandra Perkins, the mother
of their infant child, and then himself last weekend.
Costas made his brief remarks at halftime of the Sunday night game. Within
minutes, the censors went after him. Top Republicans called for his resignation.
Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin, who are to reasoned argument what salt is to
a slug, condemned him. And Herman Cain, the pizza guy who at one point led the
Republican presidential primary field in the polls, passed on this tweet:
"Excuse me, Bob Costas, but you are an idiot, so shut up."
Those last two words pretty much define the current climate regarding debate
about guns and violence. In this country, it is the issue that dare not speak
its name.
Costas said later he had nothing against the Second Amendment. But our gun
culture more often than not leads to tragedy, he noted. In this, he was stating
a fact, not an opinion. "Give me one example of an athlete -- and I know it's
happened in society -- but give me one example of a professional athlete who by
virtue of having a gun took a dangerous situation and turned it around for the
better," he said.
My sentiments are with Costas. I've lost friends and family members to gun
violence. Still, I have nothing against people exercising their Second Amendment
rights. Adults can have all the guns they want, but please -- they should
understand that their arsenal makes them less safe.
People with guns in the home are at a far greater risk of dying of homicide than
those without, the American Journal of Epidemiology reported in 2004. For men,
the likelihood of death by suicide is much higher if a gun is nearby. And 90
percent of suicide attempts by gun are successful; for willful drug overdoses,
the rate is only 2 percent.
Understandably, people buy guns for self-defense. But a gun in the home is 12
times more likely to result in the death of a household member, or a visitor,
than an intruder, a 2010 study by the official journal of the Southern Medical
Association found.
For all those grim numbers, the United States is not the most violent society.
Drug oligarchies and broken tribal nations are much more lethal places to live.
But among the 23 wealthiest countries, the United States is easily the
bloodiest: homicide gun rates are 19.5 times higher here than in any other
high-income country, Politifact reported.
Going into a theater or a mall in America can be a risky thing, as recent mass
shootings have shown. I just returned from Idaho, where people are buying guns
at a record clip because of the delusional fear that President Obama is going to
take them away. The safest place in Idaho, by far, is just inside the security
line at the Boise airport, where a big sign warns people that they will soon be
entering a mandatory gun-free zone.
How these basic truths came to be treated as unmentionables is a tribute to the
gun lobby's power to strangle debate on even simple safety questions. At the
same time, they have all but shut down public health research into gun violence.
For the politicians and pundits who do the gun industry's bidding, the First
Amendment does not apply to the Second Amendment. It took a sportscaster,
accustomed to parsing the nuances of a stunt blitz, to break the code of
shameful silence.
Opinionator
A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web
By THERESA BROWN
Wisconsin, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine. We all know these
place names and what happened there. By the time this column appears, there may
well be a new locale to add to the list. Such is the state of enabled and
murderous mayhem in the United States.
With the hope of presenting the issue of guns in America in a novel way, I'm
going to look at it from an unusual vantage point: the eyes of a nurse. By that
I mean looking at guns in America in terms of the suffering they cause, because
to really understand the human cost of guns in the United States we need to
focus on gun-related pain and death.
Every day 80 Americans die from gunshots and an additional 120 are wounded,
according to a 2006 article in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Those 80 Americans left their homes in the morning and went to work, or to
school, or to a movie, or for a walk in their own neighborhood, and never
returned. Whether they were dead on arrival or died later on in the hospital, 80
people's normal day ended on a slab in the morgue, and there's nothing any of us
can do to get those people back.
In a way that few others do, I became aware early on that nurses deal with death
on a daily basis. The first unretouched dead bodies I ever saw were the two
cadavers we studied in anatomy lab. One man, one woman, both donated their
bodies for dissection, and I learned amazing things from them: the sponginess of
lung tissue, the surprising lightness of a human heart, the fabulous intricacy
of veins, arteries, tendons and nerves that keep all of us moving and alive.
I also learned something I thought I already knew: death is scary. I expected my
focus in the lab to be on acquiring knowledge, and it was, but my feelings about
these cadavers intruded also. I had nightmares. The sound of bones being sawed
and snapped was excruciating the day our teaching assistant broke the ribs of
one of them to extract a heart. Some days the smell was so overwhelming I wanted
to run from the lab. Death is the only part of life that is really final, and I
learned about the awesomeness of finality during my 12 weeks with those two very
dead people.
Of course, in hospitals, death and suffering are what nurses and doctors
struggle against. Our job is to restore people to health and wholeness, or at
the very least, to keep them alive. That's an obvious aim on the oncology floor
where I work, but nowhere is the medical goal of maintaining life more
immediately urgent than in trauma centers and intensive-care units. In those
wards, patients often arrive teetering on the border between life and death, and
the medical teams that receive them have fleeting moments in which to act.
The focus on preserving life and alleviating suffering, so evident in the
hospital, contrasts strikingly with its stubborn disregard when applied to lives
ended by Americans lawfully armed as if going into combat. The deaths from guns
are as disturbing, and as final, as the cadavers I studied in anatomy lab, but
the talk we hear from the gun lobby is about freedom and rights, not life and
death.
Gun advocates say that guns don't kill people, people kill people. The truth,
though, is that people with guns kill people, often very efficiently, as we saw
so clearly and so often this summer. And while there can be no argument that the
right to bear arms is written into the Constitution, we cannot keep pretending
that this right is somehow without limit, even as we place reasonable limits on
arguably more valuable rights like the freedom of speech and due process.
No one argues that it should be legal to shout "fire" in a crowded theater; we
accept this limit on our right to speak freely because of its obvious real-world
consequences. Likewise, we need to stop talking about gun rights in America as
if they have no wrenching real-world effects when every day 80 Americans, their
friends, families and loved ones, learn they obviously and tragically do.
Many victims never stand a chance against a dangerously armed assailant, and
there's scant evidence that being armed themselves would help. Those bodies skip
the hospital and go straight to the morgue. The lucky ones, the survivors - the
120 wounded per day - get hustled to trauma centers and then intensive care
units to, if possible, be healed. Many of them never fully recover.
A trauma nurse I know told me she always looked at people's shoes when they lay
on gurneys in the emergency department. It struck her that life had still been
normal when that patient put them on in the morning. Whether they laced up
Nikes, pulled on snow boots or slid feet into stiletto heels, the shoes became a
relic of the ordinariness of the patient's life, before it turned savage.
So I have a request for proponents of unlimited access to guns. Spend some time
in a trauma center and see the victims of gun violence - the lucky survivors -
as they come in bloody and terrified. Understand that our country's blind
embrace of gun rights made this violent tableau possible, and that it's playing
out each day in hospitals and morgues all over the country.
Before leaving, make sure to look at the patients' shoes. Remember that at the
start of the day, before being attacked by a person with a gun, that patient
lying on a stretcher writhing helplessly in pain was still whole.
Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse and the author of
With the
ease of downloading a song, anyone with a computer and a credit card can order
thousands of bullets and shotgun shells on the Internet, along with tear-gas
canisters and speed loaders. They can get the same high-capacity ammunition
clips that infantry soldiers use. They can even get bulletproof vests and SWAT
helmets. All without fear of a single background check.
No one is paying attention to whether buyers have criminal histories or
mental-health records. No one is monitoring bulk sales of ammunition to see who
might be building an arsenal. Even after a young man in Colorado buys 6,000
rounds by mail order and uses them to commit mass murder, it is the rare
politician who proposes to make the tools of terror slightly harder to obtain.
When he was campaigning for office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to reinstate the
assault weapons ban that had expired in 2004. That would have prohibited the
AR-15 rifle used in the Colorado theater shooting on Friday, along with the
large 100-round magazine attached to it. But as president, Mr. Obama has made no
attempt to do so. Mitt Romney banned assault weapons as governor of
Massachusetts and undoubtedly saved many lives, but now he opposes all gun
control measures. He never repeats what he said in 2004 when he signed the ban:
“Deadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts,” he said. “They are
instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing
people.”
Both men fear the power of gun ideologues, particularly in swing states like
Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina, where many voters have fallen under the
spell of a gun lobby that considers any restriction an unthinkable assault on
the Constitution. Senator Ron Johnson, the Tea Party favorite from Wisconsin,
spoke for the Republican Party (and many Democrats) when he said that limiting
high-capacity magazines would infringe on a basic right. “When you try and do
it, you restrict our freedom,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Freedom to do what, precisely? To fire off 100 rounds without reloading? A few
sport shooters may enjoy doing that on a firing range, but that’s hardly
sufficient reason to empower someone else to do it in a movie theater. It has
nothing to do with the basic right of home protection and self-defense found by
the Supreme Court in 2008.
A Democratic senator, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, is one of the few
officials courageous enough to propose a better idea: A ban on clips that hold
more than 10 bullets, which are not needed to hunt, practice or protect oneself.
He first proposed this last year, after a gunman in Tucson used a 33-round
magazine to shoot 18 people, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords,
killing six. The shooter was tackled when he had to reload.
The ban went nowhere and will undoubtedly be laughed off by gun advocates this
year, too. In 1993, they killed a proposal by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of
New York to impose a heavy tax on handgun ammunition, especially the bullets
that expand and cause heavy tissue damage. A few years ago, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger of California signed a law requiring identification to buy
handgun ammunition and forbidding mail-order sales. A group of gun sellers sued
and won a trial-court ruling that the law was too vague. (The state attorney
general, Kamala Harris, appealed the ruling in February.)
But the gun lobby’s legal and political victories can’t obscure the facts. The
assault weapons ban didn’t clearly reduce crime, the best study of the measure
found, but allowing high-capacity magazines would “result in more shots fired,
more persons hit, and more wounds inflicted per victim than do attacks with
other firearms.” Sensible restrictions on ammunition and clips won’t eliminate
mass shootings; they may make them less likely and reduce their level of
violence.
Many politicians of both parties know this. To overcome their fear of the gun
lobby, they need only look at the faces of the victims in Aurora, Colo.
March 26,
2012
11:55 pm
The New York Times
By DREW WESTEN
When
Gabrielle Giffords tendered her resignation from the House of Representatives to
Speaker John Boehner because she did not feel she could continue to serve at her
current level of disability, the entire House erupted in a rare moment of
bipartisan unity, supporting their brave colleague who had survived a bullet
through the brain at point-blank range.
That was not, however, the first bipartisan moment related to the attack on
Gabby Giffords, nor would it be the last. In 2004, Congress let the assault
weapons ban Bill Clinton had passed “sunset” despite overwhelming public
support. That law limited the number of rounds of ammunition a shooter could
fire before having to reload, and letting it die an untimely death allowed a
mentally ill young man in Tucson to purchase a handgun with a 33-round magazine.
Had the assault weapons ban remained in place, he may well have been able to
shoot the congresswoman, but he would not have been able to empty his clip,
killing 6 people and wounding 13 others, before being tackled to the ground.
That moment was followed by another bipartisan moment, when President Obama
delivered a moving speech on Jan. 12 at the scene of the carnage in Tucson. In
it, the president called on the nation to mourn not only the shooting of a
beloved member of Congress but the lives of the people who died at the hands of
Giffords’ assailant, including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge. But on
neither that national day of mourning nor on any day since has the president or
the members of Congress, who are either too frightened or too corrupted by the
National Rifle Association, honored Giffords or the memory of those who died in
that massacre in Tucson in the most appropriate way: with a return to common
sense, like reestablishing the assault weapons ban that might have saved their
lives. Later in January, Representative Carolyn McCarthy and Senator Frank
Lautenberg proposed legislation to outlaw high-capacity magazines; it has gone
nowhere.
The first President Bush, unlike his swaggering son (who advocated the demise of
a ban on assault weapons whose sole purpose is to hunt humans) showed political
courage by publicly quitting the N.R.A. in disgust in 1995 when it began
advocating ideas like its contention that citizens need military-style assault
weapons to protect themselves against our own government (members, for example,
of the National Guard). In colorful but paranoid language, it called law
enforcement officers “jack-booted government thugs,” prompting the elder Bush to
condemn the group for its disrespect for the law and those who defend it. Since
then, it has successfully advocated for increasingly radical laws. One of them,
of course, is Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which discourages de-escalation
of potential firefights in public with predictable results, like the shooting
death in Sanford, Fla., of Trayvon Martin.
Between the Giffords massacre and Martin’s death, we have seen more shootings
and more bipartisan moments. Around the anniversary of the Tucson massacre that
cut short the congressional career of an extraordinary woman — a woman I had
come to know personally and adore in her five years in Congress — came two more
mass killings. One occurred in Chardon High School in a small town in Ohio, as a
17-year-old opened fire on students with a Ruger .22-caliber semiautomatic with
a capacity of 10 rounds. Fortunately the alleged shooter, T.J. Lane, didn’t have
access to a gun with more firepower. About two weeks later, a man entered one of
the nation’s premiere medical centers, at the University of Pittsburgh, with two
semiautomatic handguns, and opened fire.
And in yet another show of bipartisanship, political leaders on both sides of
the aisle put on their silencers. If an assassination attempt on one of their
own did not move members of Congress to ask whether the N.R.A. has a little too
much sway in their chambers, a few dead and wounded teenagers, medical patients,
and their family members were not going to unlock their safeties. Most have
clearly made the risk assessment that they have more to fear from the N.R.A.
than they do from an occasional sniper. In the 2010 election cycle, the N.R.A.
spent over $7 million in independent expenditure campaigns for and against
specific candidates, and it has a remarkable record of success at taking out
candidates and elected officials with the misfortune of being caught in its
crosshairs.
Over a million Americans have lost their lives to gunfire since that awful
spring of 1968 when both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were killed
by assassins’ bullets. Last year alone guns killed or wounded another 100,000
Americans; roughly 30,000 of them died. Had that occurred elsewhere, we
would call it genocide. We don’t know exactly how many have been killed in the
fighting in Libya, Egypt and Syria, but our elected officials have had far less
trouble calling for the ouster of Middle Eastern leaders than the leadership of
the N.R.A. But it’s not just money that prevents common-sense action on gun
violence in America. Millions of Americans hunt, and a third of all households
in the United States own a gun. Guns were part of the frontier culture that
shaped the American psyche, and hunting has passed from generation to generation
in much of America. As a son of the South, I could give an intruder a run for
his money (although, like most people, I would do better to rely first on our
security service and the loud alarm a break-in sets off), and I put on my
thickest Southern accent and tease my soon-to-be teenage daughter that I’ll be
out on the front porch “cleaning my shotgun” when her first date arrives at the
door.
In so many cases, it’s a failure of our leaders — Republicans, who prey on the
fears of their constituents and don’t even bother anymore to hide the puppet
strings pulled by large corporations, and Democrats, who too frequently forget
that humans are supposed to be vertebrates (and hence to have a spine) — to
speak to Americans’ ambivalence about guns. Over the years in my capacity as a
strategic messaging consultant, I’ve tested a range of messages on guns, and the
messages that resonate with hunters and gun owners sound like this: “If you need
an M-16 to hunt deer, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a damned gun,” or “If
you’re hunting with an AK-47, you’re not bringing that meat home for dinner.”
The first things responsible hunters teach are never to point a gun anywhere but
up or down unless you mean to shoot, and where the safety is.
It’s no wonder that Democrats have backed off of even talking about guns since
Clinton signed the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban into law nearly two
decades ago. The last thing you want to be armed with as an advocate of common
sense are phrases like “gun control,” which makes a government-wary public and
law-abiding gun-owners uneasy — and susceptible to tendentious “slippery slope”
arguments about how “they want to take away your guns.” In contrast, everyone
but the lunatic fringe in America supports gun safety laws — such as eliminating
the gun-show loophole that allows the sale of military-grade weapons without
background checks, and has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans
as well as Mexicans, whose drug cartels find the loophole extremely helpful.
Democrats could steel their spines if they could find the point of intersection
between law-abiding gun owners and law-abiding citizens who may or may not own a
gun but want to keep their families safe. In national testing, we’ve found that
a simple, non-equivocating statement focusing on that point of intersection —
law-abiding — beats the toughest “they want to take away your guns” message we
can fire at it. It leads every demographic group other than those who stockpile
weapons to support common-sense gun safety laws. Offered a message that speaks
to their ambivalence, people readily recognize that a 33-round clip makes it
virtually impossible to tackle a shooter until he has had time to kill 15 or 16
people. They understand that allowing people to purchase military-style weapons
at gun shows without a background check renders gun safety laws meaningless. And
they find it incomprehensible that we have laws on the books that tie the hands
of law enforcement officials trying to track down where a gun was bought and
sold, and that we keep such sloppy records that criminals, people with a history
of commitment for care for serious mental illness, and people with active
restraining orders on them can slip by background checks even where they’re
required.
Beginning with a statement of principle both makes clear the speaker’s intent
and inoculates against all the slippery-slope arguments used by the N.R.A. and
the elected officials in its employ or fearful of its power: “My view on guns
reflects one simple principle: that our gun laws should guarantee the rights and
freedoms of all law-abiding Americans. That’s why I stand with the majority who
believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns to hunt or protect
their families. And that’s why I stand with the majority who believe they have
the right to send their kids to school and see them return home safely at
night.” Versions of a message containing that principle win by over a 2:1 margin
with independents, and they win in every region of the country, including in my
own backyard, in the red clay of Georgia.
This shouldn’t be an issue of left or right. Grocery stores in Tucson, where
Gabby Giffords was shot (and where my mother-in-law shops — she just happened to
be out of town that Saturday), are not hotbeds of “socialism.” I don’t know the
party affiliations of the fallen teenagers in Chardon or the staff members,
patients or families in Pittsburgh, but I suspect they ranged across the
political spectrum.
November
26, 2011
The New York Times
By NATASHA SINGER
SCARBOROUGH, Me.
LINED up in a gun rack beneath mounted deer heads is a Bushmaster Carbon 15, a
matte-black semiautomatic rifle that looks as if it belongs to a SWAT team. On
another rack rests a Teflon-coated Prairie Panther from DPMS Firearms, a
supplier to the United States Border Patrol and security agencies in Iraq. On a
third is a Remington 750 Woodsmaster, a popular hunting rifle.
The variety of rifles and shotguns on sale here at Cabela’s, the national
sporting goods chain, is a testament to America’s enduring gun culture. But, to
a surprising degree, it is also a testament to something else: Wall Street
deal-making.
In recent years, many top-selling brands — including the 195-year-old Remington
Arms, as well as Bushmaster Firearms and DPMS, leading makers of military-style
semiautomatics — have quietly passed into the hands of a single private company.
It is called the Freedom Group — and it is the most powerful and mysterious
force in the American commercial gun industry today.
Never heard of it?
You’re not alone. Even within gun circles, the Freedom Group is something of an
enigma. Its rise has been so swift that it has become the subject of wild
speculation and grassy-knoll conspiracy theories. In the realm of consumer
rifles and shotguns — long guns, in the trade — it is unrivaled in its size and
reach. By its own count, the Freedom Group sold 1.2 million long guns and 2.6
billion rounds of ammunition in the 12 months ended March 2010, the most recent
year for which figures are publicly available.
Behind this giant is Cerberus Capital Management, the private investment company
that first came to widespread attention when it acquired Chrysler in 2007.
(Chrysler later had to be rescued by taxpayers). With far less fanfare,
Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, has been buying big names in guns and ammo.
From its headquarters on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, Cerberus has
assembled a remarkable arsenal. It began with Bushmaster, which until recently
was based here in Maine. Unlike military counterparts like automatic M-16’s,
rifles like those from Bushmaster don’t spray bullets with one trigger pull.
But, with gas-powered mechanisms, semiautomatics can fire rapid follow-up shots
as fast as the trigger can be squeezed. They are often called “black guns”
because of their color. The police tied a Bushmaster XM15 rifle to shootings in
the Washington sniper case in 2002.
After Bushmaster, the Freedom Group moved in on Remington, which traces its
history to the days of flintlocks and today is supplying M24 sniper rifles to
the government of Afghanistan and making handguns for the first time in decades.
The group has also acquired Marlin Firearms, which turned out a special model
for Annie Oakley, as well as Dakota Arms, a maker of high-end big-game rifles.
It has bought DPMS Firearms, another maker of semiautomatic, military-style
rifles, as well as manufacturers of ammunition and tactical clothing.
“We believe our scale and product breadth are unmatched within the industry,”
the Freedom Group said in a filing last year with the Securities and Exchange
Commission.
Here at Cabela’s, Mark Eliason, the vice president for sales and marketing at
Windham Weaponry, a new competitor of Bushmaster that was established by
Bushmaster’s founder, surveys the racks. He estimates that roughly 20 percent of
the long guns for sale here are made by Freedom Group companies. In the aisles,
he examines shelf upon shelf of ammunition. About a third of it comes from the
Freedom Group, he says.
“That’s a very large presence,” Mr. Eliason says.
So large, in fact, that rumors about the Freedom Group — what it is, and who is
behind it — have been circulating in the blogosphere. Some gun enthusiasts have
claimed that the power behind the company is actually George Soros, the
hedge-fund billionaire and liberal activist. Mr. Soros, these people have
warned, is buying American gun companies so he can dismantle the industry,
Second Amendment be damned.
The chatter grew so loud that the National Rifle Association issued a statement
in October denying the rumors.
“N.R.A. has had contact with officials from Cerberus and Freedom Group for some
time,” the N.R.A. assured its members. “The owners and investors involved are
strong supporters of the Second Amendment and are avid hunters and shooters.”
Mr. Soros isn’t behind the Freedom Group, but, ultimately, another financier is:
Stephen A. Feinberg, the chief executive of Cerberus.
CERBERUS is
part of one of the signature Wall Street businesses of the past decade: private
equity. Buyout kings like Mr. Feinberg, 51, try to acquire undervalued
companies, often with borrowed money, fix them up and either take them public or
sell at a profit to someone else.
Before the financial crisis of 2008, scores of well-known American companies,
from Chrysler down, passed into the hands of private-equity firms. For the
financiers, the rewards were often enormous. But some companies that they
acquired later ran into trouble, in part because they were burdened with debt
from the takeovers.
Mr. Feinberg, a Princeton graduate who began his Wall Street career at Drexel
Burnham Lambert, the junk bond powerhouse of Michael R. Milken fame, got into
private equity in 1992. That year, he and William L. Richter founded Cerberus,
which takes its name from the three-headed dog in Greek mythology that guards
the gates of Hades.
Today, Mr. Feinberg presides over a private empire that rivals some of the
mightiest public companies in the land. Cerberus manages more than $20 billion
in capital. Together, the companies it owns generate annual revenue of about $40
billion — more than either Amazon or Coca-Cola last year.
Why Cerberus went after gun companies isn’t clear. Many private investment firms
shy away from such industries to avoid scaring off big investors like pension
funds.
Yet, in many ways, the move is classic Cerberus. Mr. Feinberg has a history of
investing in companies that other people may not want, but that Cerberus
believes it can turn around. When Cerberus embarked on its acquisition spree in
guns, it essentially had the field to itself.
“There’s much less competition for buying these companies,” says Steven N.
Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a
private equity expert. “They must have decided there is an opportunity to make
money by investing in the firearms industry and trying to build a big company.”
Whatever the reason, Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, is now a major player.
It may come as a surprise to many people, given the prominence of guns in
American culture, the national conversation and politics, but the commercial
firearms market in the United States is actually relatively small. Sales of guns
and ammunition total about $4 billion annually, according to estimates from the
National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group.
True, the N.R.A. estimates that about 70 million to 80 million Americans
collectively own 300 million firearms. But how many of those people buy new guns
regularly? For companies like the Freedom Group, the challenge is to expand the
market. These days, more women are involved in target shooting, according to
participation reports from the National Sporting Goods Association. But,
analysts say, many young men who in the past might have taken up game hunting
are now more interested in other pursuits like online gaming.
So, to keep growing, the Freedom Group has expanded its sales staff in the
United States and increased its business internationally. It has sold weapons to
the governments of Afghanistan, Thailand, Mexico and Malaysia, among others, and
obtained new business from the United States Army, including a contract worth up
to $28.2 million, to upgrade the M24 sniper weapon system.
Cerberus brings some connections to the table. The longtime chairman of its
global investments group is Dan Quayle, the former vice president. The Freedom
Group, meantime, has added two retired generals to its board. One is George A.
Joulwan, who retired from the Army after serving as Supreme Allied Commander of
Europe. The other is Michael W. Hagee, formerly commandant of the Marine Corps.
Jessica Kallam, a spokeswoman at the Freedom Group, said executives there
declined to comment for this article. Timothy Price, a managing director of
Cerberus, also declined to comment.
THE old Bushmaster factory in Windham, Me., doesn’t look like much. With a
facade of brick and gray aluminum siding, it squats in an unassuming office park
on the Roosevelt Trail.
But Cerberus representatives who arrived here in 2005 clearly saw potential.
Inside, several dozen gunsmiths, working by hand, were fitting together 6,000 to
7,000 weapons a month. At the time, Bushmaster was thriving, though it had been
stung by bad publicity stemming from the Beltway sniper shootings. (In a 2004
settlement with victims of the shootings and their families, Bull’s Eye Shooter
Supply, the store where the gun was acquired, agreed to pay $2 million, and
Bushmaster agreed to pay $568,000, but they did not admit liability.)
Richard Dyke, then the principal owner and chairman of Bushmaster, welcomed the
visitors from New York. A blunt-spoken Korean War veteran and Republican
fund-raiser, he had made a fortune himself by buying companies in trouble,
including one that made poker chips. In 1976, he bought a bankrupt gun maker in
Bangor, Me., for $241,000, moved it to Windham and later changed its name to
Bushmaster.
The company that Mr. Dyke bought had patents on semiautomatic weapons designed
for the military and police. But he was drawn to the nascent market in
military-style firearms for civilians. He saw as his customers precision target
shooters, including current and former military personnel, police officers and,
well, military wannabes, he says.
A Bushmaster Carbon 15 .223 semiautomatic is about three feet long. But,
weighing in at just under six pounds, it is surprisingly easy to maneuver, even
for a novice. It doesn’t have to be recocked after it’s fired: you just squeeze
the trigger over and over.
“At 25 meters, if you are a decent shot,” Mr. Dyke says, “you can put it into a
bull’s-eye that is the size of a quarter.”
The Bushmaster brand began to grow in the 1980s after the company started
supplying its semiautomatics to police departments. It won a much larger
consumer following in the 1990s, after it landed several small military
contracts.
Bushmaster was among the first to sell ordinary people on weapons that look and
feel like the ones carried by soldiers. Today many gun makers have embraced
military-style weapons, a major but controversial source of growth for the
commercial gun market, says Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst at the Violence
Policy Center, a research group that backs gun control.
“It’s clear that the militarized stuff is the stuff that sells and is defining
the industry,” Mr. Diaz says.
Mr. Dyke says he’s not sure why Bushmaster caught the eye of Cerberus. Whatever
the case, when Cerberus came calling, Mr. Dyke, then past 70, was ready to sell.
At the time, Bushmaster had $85 million in annual sales and about several
million dollars in debt, he says. In April 2006, he sold the company to Cerberus
for about $76 million, he says, and Cerberus rented the Bushmaster plant here
for five years.
The next year, Cerberus formed the Freedom Group.
Now Bushmaster is gone from Maine. Earlier this year, Mr. Dyke says, the Freedom
Group notified him it was closing Bushmaster’s operation in the state and moving
it to a bigger plant owned by Remington, a typical consolidation play for a
private investment firm looking to cut costs and increase efficiency. Remington,
for its part, announced earlier this year that it was expanding its
manufacturing capacity and hiring new employees to make Bushmasters.
Several months ago, Mr. Dyke started a new company, Windham Weaponry, at the old
Bushmaster site and has rehired most of his former employees. But he’s not
planning to go head-to-head with the Freedom Group.
“It’s the big gorilla in the room,” he says, adding: “We don’t have to do $100
million. We’d have hopes of doing $20 million.”
REMINGTON
has been producing guns since 1816, when, according to lore, a young man named
Eliphalet Remington made a flintlock rifle in his father’s forge in Ilion Gulch,
in upstate New York. By the 1870s, the brand was so popular that the company
diversified into typewriters.
In 2007, the Freedom Group swooped in and bought Remington for $370 million,
including $252 million in assumed debt. In one stroke, the Freedom Group gained
one of the most famous names in American firearms, the largest domestic maker of
shotguns and rifles and a major manufacturer of ammunition.
“That caused a lot of stir in the industry,” says Dean J. Lockwood, a weapons
systems analyst at Forecast International, a market research firm.
Next, the Freedom Group in rapid succession went after other firearms companies:
DPMS; Marlin Firearms, a classic maker that came with two niche shotgun brands,
Harrington & Richardson and L. C. Smith; and Dakota Arms. The Freedom Group also
bought S&K industries, which supplies wood and laminate for gun stocks, as well
as the Advanced Armament Corporation, which makes silencers. It acquired Barnes
Bullets, which makes copper-jacketed bullets popular with precision shooters and
police departments.
The more the company diversifies its portfolio, analysts say, the more it has to
offer to firearms distributors and leading retailers like Wal-Mart and Cabela’s.
“You can see Freedom Group constantly expanding its manufacturing base,” Mr.
Lockwood says. “You don’t want to be a one-trick pony. They are trying to get as
far into the market as they can.” What is left? The Freedom Group does not own
the Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation or Sturm, Ruger, both publicly traded.
Nor does it own the Colt’s Manufacturing, which is privately owned.
Cerberus also does not own Winchester Repeating Arms or Browning, both part of
the Herstal Group of Belgium.
Still, the Freedom Group has ingested so many well-known brands so quickly that
some gun owners are uneasy about what it might do next. Two years ago, a
Cerberus managing director, George Kollitides, ran for the board of the N.R.A.
Despite an endorsement from Remington, and the fact that he was a director of
the Freedom Group and Remington, he lost. His campaign didn’t sit well with some
gun bloggers, who viewed him as an industry interloper.
Andrew Arulanandam, the N.R.A.’s director for public affairs, declined to
speculate about why Mr. Kollitides lost. “It’s a great question to ask our four
million members,” he said.
THE
challenges for gun makers in America go far beyond those faced by many other
companies. As in many industries, sales tend to rise and fall with the economy.
But firearms makers must also grapple with the vicissitudes of politics and
public opinion.
Many Americans are solidly behind the right to own guns. In a Gallup poll
conducted in October, only 43 percent of respondents said they supported
stricter gun laws — an all-time low since the company first asked the question
in 1990. And 47 percent reported that there was a gun in their home or on their
property, the highest level of self-reported gun ownership since 1993, according
to the poll, which canvassed about 1,000 adults in early October.
Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed a “right to carry” bill
that would require states to recognize one another’s permits to carry concealed
weapons. If the bill passes the Senate, people in states with weaker
concealed-weapon regulations would be able to carry concealed handguns into
states like California, which requires extensive background checks.
The development would be good news for handgun makers like Colt and Smith &
Wesson, but wouldn’t be much help to the Freedom Group, which focuses on long
guns.
That, however, may be changing. Not long ago, Remington introduced the Remington
1911 R1, its first pistol in decades. Industry analysts speculate that the
Freedom Group might next go shopping for a handgun maker to expand its presence
in that segment of the market.
“At the right price,” says Jim Barrett, an analyst at CL King who covers
firearms companies, “it would be logical for them to be interested in one of the
premier handgun manufacturers.”
But, in an industry with few independent players left, the big question is this:
What is Freedom Group’s long-term strategy? Because the company is private,
outsiders can only speculate.
The Freedom Group had planned to go public, but backed away earlier this year
when the financial markets turned turbulent. As of the end of September, the
company had nearly half a billion dollars in debt, according to a third-quarter
earnings report available on the Freedom Group’s Web site. That includes about
$225 million in debt that the company raised last year to pay itself a special
dividend used to buy back preferred stock from Cerberus, according to a company
prospectus filed with the S.E.C.
Some analysts say tactical rifles have peaked, that the market has topped out,
and that small, concealable handguns are the way forward for the near future.
And yet, after a tough 2010, gun sales at the Freedom Group were up 5.6 percent
during the first nine months of this year, although the company reported a net
loss of $6.3 million for the same time period, according to the company’s most
recent earnings report.
Meantime, the Freedom Group, despite its place atop the industry, appears to be
operating without an official chief executive of its own. Its most recent
C.E.O., Theodore H. Torbeck, resigned in September 2010 and no replacement has
been named. For the moment, a temporary office of the chief executive, led by
Robert L. Nardelli, the Cerberus executive who oversaw Chrysler, is helping to
lead the company
“It’s a sensible strategy to roll up things,” says Gautam Khanna, an aerospace
and military industry analyst at Cowen & Company. The issue is whether the
Freedom Group, and Cerberus, can persuade more Americans to buy more guns.
PULASKI,
Va. — In May 2009, Sam French hit bottom, once again. A relative found him face
down in his carport “talking gibberish,” according to court records. He later
told medical personnel that he had been conversing with a bear in his backyard
and hearing voices. His family figured he had gone off his medication for
bipolar disorder, and a judge ordered him involuntarily committed — the fourth
time in five years he had been hospitalized by court order.
When Mr. French’s daughter discovered that her father’s commitment meant it was
illegal for him to have firearms, she and her husband removed his cache of 15
long guns and three handguns, and kept them after Mr. French was released in
January 2010 on a new regime of mood-stabilizing drugs.
Ten months later, he appeared in General District Court — the body that handles
small claims and traffic infractions — to ask a judge to restore his gun rights.
After a brief hearing, in which Mr. French’s lengthy history of relapses never
came up, he walked out with an order reinstating his right to possess firearms.
The next day, Mr. French retrieved his guns.
“The judge didn’t ask me a whole lot,” said Mr. French, now 62. “He just said:
‘How was I doing? Was I taking my medicine like I was supposed to?’ I said,
‘Yes, sir.’ ”
Across the country, states are increasingly allowing people like Mr. French, who
lost their firearm rights because of mental illness, to petition to have them
restored.
A handful of states have had such restoration laws on their books for some time,
but with little notice, more than 20 states have passed similar measures since
2008. This surge can be traced to a law passed by Congress after the 2007
massacre at Virginia Tech that was actually meant to make it harder for people
with mental illness to get guns.
As a condition of its support for the measure, the National Rifle Association
extracted a concession: the inclusion of a mechanism for restoring firearms
rights to those who lost them for mental health reasons.
The intent of these state laws is to enable people to regain the right to buy
and possess firearms if it is determined that they are not a threat to public
safety. But an examination of restoration procedures across the country, along
with dozens of cases, shows that the process for making that determination is
governed in many places by vague standards and few specific requirements.
States have mostly entrusted these decisions to judges, who are often
ill-equipped to conduct investigations from the bench. Many seemed willing to
simply give petitioners the benefit of the doubt. The results often seem
haphazard.
At least a few hundred people with histories of mental health issues already get
their gun rights back each year. The number promises to grow, since most of the
new state laws are just beginning to take effect. And in November, the
Department of Veterans Affairs responded to the federal legislation by
establishing a rights restoration process for more than 100,000 veterans who
have lost their gun privileges after being designated mentally incompetent by
the agency.
The issue goes to the heart of the nation’s complicated relationship with guns,
testing the delicate balance between the need to safeguard the public and the
dictates of what the Supreme Court has proclaimed to be a fundamental
constitutional right.
Mike Fleenor, the commonwealth’s attorney here in Pulaski County, whose office
opposed restoring Mr. French’s rights, worries that the balance is being thrown
off by weak standards.
“I think that reasonable people can disagree about issues of the Second
Amendment and gun control and things like that, but I don’t believe that any
reasonable person believes that a mentally ill person needs a firearm,” Mr.
Fleenor said. “The public has a right to be safe in their community.”
In case after case examined by The New York Times, judges made decisions without
important information about an applicant’s mental health.
Larry Lamb, a Vietnam veteran from San Diego who has suffered from depression
and post-traumatic stress disorder, lost his gun rights and his cache of weapons
in 2006 when he was involuntarily hospitalized after his dog’s death left him
suicidal. A psychiatrist who examined Mr. Lamb wrote that he “is extremely
paranoid with a full-blown P.T.S.D., believing that he is still at war in the
active military and he is a personal bodyguard of the president and many
senators.”
In early 2008, a Superior Court judge in San Diego granted Mr. Lamb’s petition
to have his firearms rights restored, after his psychologist testified that he
was not dangerous. But the judge, without access to Mr. Lamb’s full medical
history, was unaware of a crucial fact: the local Veterans Affairs hospital had
placed a “red flag” on Mr. Lamb, barring him from the hospital grounds because
he was perceived to be a threat to personnel there.
The spread of these restoration laws is especially striking against the backdrop
of the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and others in
Tucson early this year by a suspect who has been declared mentally incompetent
to stand trial — a case that spotlighted anew the link between mental illness
and violence.
Supporters of gun rights and mental health advocates point out that a vast
majority of people with mental illness are not violent. At the same time,
though, a variety of studies have found that people with serious mental illness
are more prone to violence than the general population.
The difficulty of assessing risk emerges in places like Los Angeles, where the
Superior Court conducts a relatively thorough review of firearms rights
requests. The Times found multiple instances over the last decade in which
people who won back their gun rights went on to be charged with or convicted of
violent or gun-related crimes, including spousal battery, negligent discharge of
a firearm or assault with a firearm.
Then there are the nightmare cases — like that of Ryan Anthony, 35, a former
Emmy Award-winning animator at Disney who was involuntarily hospitalized in
mid-2001 after losing his job and separating from his wife. Mr. Anthony filed a
petition to get back his gun rights in early 2002, telling a court-appointed
psychiatrist that he wanted to go skeet shooting.
A few weeks after the court granted his petition, Mr. Anthony bought a Remington
870 12-gauge shotgun, holed up in a Holiday Inn in Burbank, Calif., and
committed suicide.
An N.R.A.
Victory
The galvanizing revelation for gun-control advocates after the Virginia Tech
massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history, was that the gunman,
Seung-Hui Cho, should never have been able to buy the guns he used in the
rampage.
Two years earlier, a special justice declared Mr. Cho “an imminent danger to
himself as a result of mental illness” and ordered him to outpatient treatment.
Under federal law, anyone involuntarily committed or adjudicated a “mental
defective” is barred from buying or possessing firearms. But the prohibition is
often toothless because many states do not share their mental health records
with the F.B.I.’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
Mr. Cho’s case offered Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, a
chance to advance a stalled bill that she had sponsored several years earlier to
improve reporting by states to the F.B.I. database.
Ms. McCarthy’s political career and commitment to gun control was born out of
tragedy. In 1993, a deranged gunman opened fire on a commuter train on Long
Island, killing six people, including her husband, and gravely injuring her son.
After more than a decade working on the issue in Congress, however, she had
little to show for it.
Ms. McCarthy said she was wiser after years of setbacks. “I don’t believe in
introducing legislation that won’t go anywhere,” she said.
She joined forces with Representative John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and
former N.R.A. board member, who acted as a liaison with the gun lobby. The
N.R.A. had long been interested in gun-rights restoration. It also wanted to
help tens of thousands of veterans who lost their rights after being designated
mentally incompetent and unable to handle their finances by the Department of
Veterans Affairs.
“We don’t want to treat our soldiers as potential criminals because they’re
struggling with the aftermath of dealing with their service,” said Chris Cox,
the association’s chief lobbyist.
The gun lobby secured a broad provision in the legislation. The new law made
money available to states to help improve their record sharing, but the
provision pushed by the N.R.A. made it a prerequisite for states to establish a
“relief from disability” program for people with histories of mental health
issues to apply for the restoration of gun rights. The Veterans Affairs
Department and other federal agencies were required to do the same.
Gun-control groups attacked the provisions. “You make one bad judgment, and you
could have another Virginia Tech on your hands,” Kristen Rand, legislative
director for the Violence Policy Center, said in an interview.
But the most prominent gun-control organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent
Gun Violence, ultimately supported the bill. “She felt if she didn’t do this, it
wasn’t going to proceed,” Paul Helmke, the group’s president, said of Ms.
McCarthy. “An imperfect bill is better than no bill.”
Ms. McCarthy said her background as a nurse made her amenable to restoring
someone’s rights, “if they could prove they are no longer mentally ill.”
After the bill became law in 2008, the N.R.A. began lobbying state lawmakers to
keep requirements for petitioners to a minimum.
In Idaho, for example, a committee of law enforcement and mental health
officials proposed requiring courts to make findings by “clear and convincing”
evidence and mandating that petitioners have a recent mental health evaluation.
But without the N.R.A.’s imprimatur, the legislation went nowhere.
Instead, a Republican state representative, Raúl R. Labrador, who is now a
congressman, worked with the N.R.A. to draft a bill, passed last year, that
dropped the requirement for a mental health evaluation and lowered the standard
of proof to a “preponderance of evidence.”
A few states have set stricter standards. In New York, decisions are made by
mental health officials, and applicants must submit a long list of documents,
including five years’ worth of medical records and records of psychiatric and
substance abuse treatment going back 20 years. State officials can also require
applicants to undergo clinical evaluations and risk assessments.
So far, there has been only a trickle of petitions in states with new
restoration laws. The statutes are not yet well known, and federal authorities
have yet to certify many of the state programs, making them fully operational
under federal law.
But the demand will almost certainly grow, given the experience of states with
longer-standing restoration statutes. In California, for instance, judges
restored gun rights to 180 people in 2010. At the federal level, the Veterans
Affairs Department has already received more than 100 applications, of which 12
were processed and one was granted.
As for the original aim of Ms. McCarthy’s legislation, the reporting of mental
health records by states to the F.B.I. database remains woeful. The reasons
vary, including privacy laws, technological challenges and inattention from
state officials.
But one significant hurdle has been that only a handful of states have received
the federal money to improve their reporting capabilities. Officials with the
Bureau of Justice Statistics indicated that while 22 states applied for grants
in 2009 and 2010, only nine have gotten financing. Most of those that did not
receive grants were rejected because they did not have certified restoration
programs in place.
One
State’s Experience
Lawmakers in Virginia, the scene of Mr. Cho’s rampage, were among the first to
respond to the federal legislation by amending the state’s existing restoration
statute to reflect the new law. To restore firearms rights, judges must find
that the petitioner “will not likely act in a manner dangerous to public safety”
and that “the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public
interest.” There are few specific standards or guidelines beyond that.
In 2010, judges in Virginia considered roughly 40 restoration applications and
granted firearms rights under state law to 25 people — 14 who had been
involuntarily committed, and 11 who had been the subjects of temporary detention
orders and were voluntarily admitted for mental health treatment, according to
figures from the Virginia Supreme Court and the State Police. In 2009, the
courts restored rights to 21 people.
There is no central repository for cases heard around Virginia, but to get a
picture of how the process works in one state, The Times obtained dozens of
petitions and judges’ orders, mainly from 2009 and 2010, along with supporting
documentation, and interviewed petitioners, lawyers and judges. The hearings
were often relatively brief, sometimes perfunctory, and judges had wide latitude
in handling the petitions.
Teresa Hall, who had moved to Idaho, said she simply wrote a letter to Hampton
General District Court explaining that her commitment several years earlier
occurred when she was experiencing marital difficulties. To her shock, she got a
judge’s order granting her petition several days later in the mail.
“I was surprised it was that easy,” Ms. Hall said.
Some judges insisted on seeing a doctor’s note, but others did not.
In a typical case, Joshua St. Clair, who served in Iraq with the National Guard,
got his gun rights back last year. About six months earlier, Mr. St. Clair, now
22, had heard a rattling at his gate. He said he “kind of blacked out” and the
next thing he knew, he was pointing his M-4 assault rifle at his friend’s chest.
That led to a temporary detention order, treatment for post-traumatic stress
disorder and loss of his firearms rights.
He took a note from his psychiatrist to his restoration hearing, which he said
“lasted maybe about five minutes,” but he said the judge did not even ask to see
it. The judge asked Mr. St. Clair’s father a few questions and asked Mr. St.
Clair himself whether he thought he should have his rights restored. He said,
“Of course.”
Often the doctors’ recommendations came from general practitioners, not mental
health professionals. The notes tended to be short, often just a few sentences.
In many cases, the hospitalizations occurred just a few months, or even weeks,
earlier.
Bobby Bullion, 37, got his gun rights back about four months after he left a
note for his wife and son that indicated he was considering suicide — his wife
had told him she was divorcing him — and the police found him in his car with
two loaded weapons. Mr. Bullion presented the judge with a letter from his
psychiatrist endorsing the restoration.
Oran Greenway, 68, had his rights restored in August, just two months after he
was involuntarily committed. The judge’s restoration shocked Mr. Greenway’s
relatives, who said they had been worried for years about his mental stability.
In an interview, he said he started taking Lexapro for depression several years
ago. In 2005, he slammed a large branch on a neighbor’s head during an argument,
resulting in a conviction for assault and battery.
“Knowing what I know about Oran, I wouldn’t let Oran have a gun,” said Elizabeth
Dequino, a cousin who lives up the road.
Even when a court-ordered commitment occurred years ago, the wisdom of restoring
certain petitioners’ firearms rights was open to question. David Neal Moon, 63,
was involuntarily committed in 1995 after his struggles with schizoaffective
bipolar disorder got so bad that he had threatened to commit suicide and was
walking in circles around his house with a MAK-90 assault rifle, as if on guard
duty, according to medical and court records and an interview with Cynthia
Allison, who is now his ex-wife.
A psychiatrist’s report described him threatening to “bash in the face of his
wife” and ranting about getting his guns so he could “shoot everybody.” It also
mentions a violent hair-pulling episode with his wife.
He had not been committed since, but he had continued to struggle with his
illness and was bad about taking his medication, Ms. Allison said.
In an interview, Mr. Moon insisted he took his medication and was not mentally
ill. Yet he alluded to his phone being tapped by the State Police and “by maybe
the Pentagon.”
His firearms hearing in early 2009 in Amherst General District Court, where Mr.
Moon showed up in military camouflage, lasted “about eight minutes,” said Mr.
Moon’s lawyer, Gregory Smith, adding that he did not recall presenting any
recent medical evaluation.
Just over a month later, another judge granted Ms. Allison a protective order
against her husband. The pair had split up, and Mr. Moon had been making veiled
threats by phone and telling his children about demons in the walls, according
to her court affidavit.
“The judge just sat there and listened to him talk,” Ms. Allison said. “I didn’t
even say anything. If you listened to him talk, you could tell he’s as crazy as
a bedbug.”
Among those whose applications were denied, many were turned down for technical
reasons, like filing in the wrong jurisdiction or failing to show up for a
hearing.
In others cases — like one last year in Lynchburg in which the petitioner,
Undreas Smith, submitted a letter explaining he had been struggling with recent
deaths in his family — the judge ruled against the petitioner because he failed
to provide documentation from a mental health provider.
In the case of James Tuckson Jr. of Harrisonburg, who was involuntarily
committed in 2006 and applied in October to get back his gun rights, prosecutors
said his multiple arrests probably played a significant role in the judge’s
decision to deny Mr. Tuckson’s petition.
Presented with The Times’s findings, Richard Bonnie, the chairman of the
Virginia Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, which was formed after the
Virginia Tech shootings, expressed concerns about the restoration process,
particularly the vagueness of the statute. Mr. Bonnie said the panel would begin
collecting information on the petitions on a monthly basis to better evaluate
how they were being handled.
“There is an ambiguity in the statute that we need to look at,” he said.
‘A Hole
in the Process’
When Sam French, the man with bipolar disorder whose daughter removed his guns,
appeared late last year in Pulaski General District Court, he presented his
recent medical records. Progress notes over several months showed that his
bipolar disorder and substance abuse were in “remission.”
Nevertheless, Bobby Lilly, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, opposed the
petition, partly because Mr. French’s latest update indicated he had expressed
interest in lowering the dosage of his medication. Mr. French’s two most recent
hospitalizations had come after he went off his medication.
Mr. Lilly was also worried because it had been less than a year since his
release. “We didn’t have a demonstrated track record of being able to comply
with whatever the mental health provider’s directives were,” Mr. Lilly said.
In fact, a few months later, in March, a judge at the circuit level — the higher
court in Virginia — denied Mr. French’s application for a concealed weapons
permit because a five-year wait after a psychiatric commitment is required for
such a permit.
But there is no waiting period for the restoration of basic gun rights.
Mr. French’s case fell to Judge Royce Glenwood Lookabill, a genial presence on
the bench since 2006. Judge Lookabill said he quizzed Mr. French about whether
he had had any other episodes and whether he was taking his prescribed drugs.
“I was satisfied that he wasn’t a danger — again, subject to him taking his
medication,” Judge Lookabill said in an interview.
The judge acknowledged, however, that he might have made a different decision
had he been aware of Mr. French’s previous commitments, including one that came
after he was arrested for public drunkenness and later allegedly assaulted two
police officers. (The assault charges were dropped.) No one had checked a state
database for his commitment history.
“It’s a hole in the process,” said Mr. Lilly, who added that his office had only
limited access to such information.
Judge Lookabill suggested that the process belonged in a higher court and should
be made more adversarial. “I would feel a lot more comfortable,” he said, “if
there were more safeguards.”
An
Increased Risk
Most people with mental health issues, of course, will never be violent. But
there is widespread consensus among scientists that the increased risk of
violence among those with a serious mental illness — schizophrenia, major
depression or bipolar disorder — is statistically significant. That risk rises
when substance abuse, which is more prevalent among people with mental illness,
is also present.
One frequently cited study, led by Jeffrey W. Swanson, an expert on mental
health and violence who is now at Duke University, showed that 33 percent of
people with a serious mental illness reported past violent behavior, compared
with 15 percent of people without a major mental disorder. Violent behavior was
defined as including acts ranging from taking part in more than one fistfight as
an adult to using a weapon in a fight. The rate for those with substance abuse
issues but without a serious mental illness was 55 percent. The highest rate, 64
percent, was exhibited by people with major mental disorders and substance abuse
issues.
Other studies have concluded that additional factors significantly increase the
risk of violence among people with mental illness, including exposure to
violence and being a victim of violence.
But taking these data and applying them to individuals is profoundly difficult.
Scientists have concluded that it is most accurate to augment clinical judgments
with an “actuarial” approach, in which variables like psychiatric diagnosis,
history of violence and anger control are plugged into a risk assessment model.
The models categorize people into higher and lower risk groups. But many
clinicians are unfamiliar with the technique. Indeed, none of the doctors who
wrote letters on behalf of their patients in cases The Times reviewed appeared
to utilize the approach.
Doctors’ declarations clearly influenced judges. But most wrote their letters at
the request of their patients, which Randy Otto, a former president of the
American Board of Forensic Psychology and an associate professor at the
University of South Florida, said can be problematic.
“They’re more subject to pressure from their patients to offer opinions that
will help the patients get what they want,” Dr. Otto said.
He said many doctors, particularly those not in the mental health field, are
probably not steeped in the most important clues to future violence. Even
psychologists and psychiatrists, relying on their clinical judgment alone, are
extremely unreliable in predicting violence, studies have shown.
“Unstructured clinical judgments, just judgments of mental health professionals
about how risky someone is,” Dr. Otto said, “are probably the least reliable and
the least accurate.”
Weighing
the Threats
The difficulties of predicting violence are particularly striking in Los Angeles
County, where the Superior Court has a relatively rigorous process for
determining whether to restore gun rights.
In California, anyone placed on a 72-hour or 14-day psychiatric hold and
determined to be a danger to themselves or others loses gun rights for five
years. But upon discharge, the person can apply to have these prohibitions
lifted. Applicants in Los Angeles County are required to provide records from
all involuntary hospitalizations, which are checked against a list provided by
the State Department of Justice. They must also be examined by a court-appointed
psychiatrist, who can call friends or relatives to gather more information.
Under the statute, the burden is on the district attorney to establish that the
petitioner “would not be likely to use firearms in a safe and lawful manner.”
Over all, 1,579 petitions have been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court since
2000. More than 1,000 were dismissed, usually because applicants did not furnish
the required documentation or failed to show up. Of those who actually got
hearings, 381 won their cases.
“Dealing with somebody who suffers from severe mental illness and mixing that
with firearms, you really have to cross the t’s and dot the i’s,” said Richard
J. Vagnozzi, a deputy district attorney who handles these cases. Mr. Vagnozzi
said the process “isn’t perfect, but we do the best we can with the available
data and what we’re allowed to do.”
Even with the vigorous checks, there are people like Afshin Poordavoud, who lost
his gun rights in June 2000. During a heated argument with his brother, Mr.
Poordavoud threatened to shoot himself. His brother called the police, and Mr.
Poordavoud was hospitalized briefly, according to court records.
Several months later, Mr. Poordavoud petitioned to have his firearms rights
restored and to have the police return his shotgun and 9-millimeter
semiautomatic handgun. A court-appointed psychiatrist recommended that the
decision be put off for three months and that Mr. Poordavoud get a full
psychiatric evaluation and treatment, pointing out that the hospital had found
him to be “likely depressed and minimizing his level of depression and suicidal
risk.”
Mr. Poordavoud returned to court three months later with a letter from a
therapist, indicating he had been undergoing treatment. This time, a different
psychiatrist examined him but wrote at the end of his report, “Inconclusive: I
have no opinion.” The psychiatrist suggested that the case be referred back to
the initial doctor so she could interview Mr. Poordavoud’s therapist and obtain
the full file from his hospitalization.
The judge, however, granted Mr. Poordavoud’s restoration request that same day
in a pro forma hearing.
In late 2004, Mr. Poordavoud drove up to a house in Chatsworth, Calif., in the
middle of the night and began banging on the windows and the doors, shouting for
an acquaintance to come out, according to court testimony.
When a man opened the door, Mr. Poordavoud sprayed him and two others with mace,
according to court testimony. In the ensuing fight, Mr. Poordavoud slashed at
one of them with a pair of brass knuckles fitted with blades.
Mr. Poordavoud retrieved a gun from his car and fired a single shot that missed.
In an interview, he said he had only fired in the air in self-defense.
The police eventually charged Mr. Poordavoud with multiple felonies. He pleaded
guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and using tear gas not in self-defense,
and he was sentenced to about a year in county jail.
“I had an anger problem,” said Mr. Poordavoud, who is no longer allowed to have
guns because of his felony record. “I still have an anger problem.”
Violence against others is not the only concern.
Ryan Anthony, the talented but troubled Disney artist who had a history of
alcoholism, had talked about suicide for years with relatives. His father,
Michael Anthony, said his son once threatened to jump off a highway overpass;
another time, he vowed to hang himself from a chandelier in his home. A few
months before he filed his petition to restore his firearms rights, he had
attempted suicide by swallowing some pills, said his brother Loren.
But Mr. Anthony was able to hide his troubled past when a court-appointed
psychiatrist examined him for the restoration hearing in April 2002. He told Dr.
Rose Pitt, according to court records, that he had simply been going through a
difficult period after he lost his job and split up with his wife. He was
normally not a drinker, he said, but began drinking heavily. Since his
involuntary hospitalization in mid-2001, he had been sober and attending
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Dr. Pitt wrote in her report.
“Does not own guns but wants to skeet shoot, and so wants to purchase guns,” Dr.
Pitt wrote. “There does not appear to be any contraindication to his being able
to get guns.”
His relatives were incredulous. Had they been called, they said, they would have
told officials to deny his request.
“I would have said, ‘No, that doesn’t sound right,’ ” Loren Anthony said. “He
didn’t like guns.”
Mr. Anthony had been staying with Steven and Sofia Shafit, family friends. They
said he had been doing better but was still hurting.
About two weeks after he got his firearms rights restored, he borrowed $300 from
Ms. Shafit, saying he wanted to take a girl on a date. Instead, he went out and
bought a shotgun — investigators found the receipt by his body — and checked
into a room at a Holiday Inn.
On the desk, he left a three-page suicide note, according to a report from the
Los Angeles County coroner’s office. At some point, he lay down on the bed,
placed the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
On April 22, 2008, almost exactly one year after 32 students and faculty
members were slain in the massacre at Virginia Tech, the dealer who had sold one
of the weapons used by the gunman delivered a public lecture on the school’s
campus. His point: that people at Virginia Tech should be allowed to carry
concealed weapons on campus.
Eric Thompson, owner of the online firearms store that sold a .22-caliber
semiautomatic handgun to the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, did not think that his
appearance at Virginia Tech was disrespectful or that his position was extreme.
He felt so strongly that college students should be allowed to be armed while
engaged in their campus activities that he offered discounts to any students who
wanted to buy guns from him.
Thompson spun the discounts as altruistic. He told ABCNews.com, “This offers
students and people who might not have otherwise been able to afford a weapon to
purchase one at a hefty discount and at a significant expense to myself.”
The sale to Cho was not Thompson’s only unfortunate link to a mass killer. His
firm sold a pair of 9-millimeter Glock magazines and a holster to Steven
Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old graduate student in DeKalb, Ill., who, on the
afternoon of Feb. 14, 2008, went heavily armed into an auditorium-type lecture
hall at Northern Illinois University. Kazmierczak walked onto the stage in front
of a crowd of students and opened fire. He killed five people and wounded 18
others before killing himself.
We’ve allowed the extremists to carry the day when it comes to guns in the
United States, and it’s the dead and the wounded and their families who have had
to pay the awful price. The idea of having large numbers of college students
packing heat in their classrooms and at their parties and sporting events, or at
the local pub or frat house or gymnasium, or wherever, is too stupid for words.
Thompson did not get a warm welcome at Virginia Tech. A spokesman for the
school, Larry Hincker, said the fact that he “would set foot on this campus” was
“terribly offensive” and “incredibly insensitive to the families of the
victims.”
Just last week, a sophomore at Florida State University, Ashley Cowie, was shot
to death accidentally by a 20-year-old student who, according to authorities,
was showing off his rifle to a group of friends in an off-campus apartment
complex favored by fraternity members. A second student was shot in the wrist.
This occurred as state legislators in Florida are considering a proposal to
allow people with permits to carry concealed weapons on campuses. The National
Rifle Association thinks that’s a dandy idea.
The slaughter of college students — or anyone else — has never served as a
deterrent to the gun fetishists. They want guns on campuses, in bars and taverns
and churches, in parks and in the workplace, in cars and in the home. Ammunition
everywhere — the deadlier, the better. A couple of years ago, a state legislator
in Arizona, Karen Johnson, argued that adults needed to be able to carry guns in
all schools, from elementary on up. “I feel like our kindergartners are sitting
there like sitting ducks,” she said.
Can we get a grip?
The contention of those who would like college kids and just about everybody
else to be armed to the teeth is that the good guys can shoot back whenever the
bad guys show up to do harm. An important study published in 2009 by researchers
at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine estimated that people in
possession of a gun at the time of an assault were 4.5 times more likely to be
shot during the assault than someone in a comparable situation without a gun.
“On average,” the researchers said, “guns did not seem to protect those who
possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun
uses can and do occur, the findings of this study do not support the perception
that such successes are likely.”
Approximately 100,000 shootings occur in the United States every year. The
number of people killed by guns should be enough to make our knees go weak.
Monday was a national holiday celebrating the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. While the gun crazies are telling us that ever more Americans need to
be walking around armed, we should keep in mind that more than a million people
have died from gun violence — in murders, accidents and suicides — since Dr.
King was shot to death in 1968.
We need fewer homicides, fewer accidental deaths and fewer suicides. That means
fewer guns. That means stricter licensing and registration, more vigorous
background checks and a ban on assault weapons. Start with that. Don’t tell me
it’s too hard to achieve. Just get started.
January 12, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Jared Loughner was considered too mentally unstable to attend
community college. He was rejected by the Army. Yet buy a Glock handgun and a
33-round magazine? No problem.
To protect the public, we regulate cars and toys, medicines and mutual funds.
So, simply as a public health matter, shouldn’t we take steps to reduce the toll
from our domestic arms industry?
Look, I’m an Oregon farm boy who was given a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday. I
still shoot occasionally when visiting the family farm, and I understand one
appeal of guns: they’re fun.
It’s also true that city slickers sometimes exaggerate the risk of any one gun.
The authors of Freakonomics noted that a home with a swimming pool is
considerably more dangerous for small children than a home with a gun. They said
that 1 child drowns annually for every 11,000 residential pools, but 1 child is
shot dead for every 1 million-plus guns.
All that said, guns are far more deadly in America, not least because there are
so many of them. There are about 85 guns per 100 people in the United States,
and we are particularly awash in handguns.
(The only country I’ve seen that is more armed than America is Yemen. Near the
town of Sadah, I dropped by a gun market where I was offered grenade launchers,
machine guns, antitank mines, and even an anti-aircraft weapon. Yep, an N.R.A.
dream! No pesky regulators. Just terrorism and a minor civil war.)
Just since the killings in Tucson, another 320 or so Americans have been killed
by guns — anonymously, with barely a whisker of attention. By tomorrow it’ll be
400 deaths. Every day, about 80 people die from guns, and several times as many
are injured.
Handgun sales in Arizona soared by 60 percent on Monday, according to Bloomberg
News, as buyers sought to beat any beefing up of gun laws. People also often buy
guns in hopes of being safer. But the evidence is overwhelming that firearms
actually endanger those who own them. One scholar, John Lott Jr., published a
book suggesting that more guns lead to less crime, but many studies have now
debunked that finding (although it’s also true that a boom in concealed weapons
didn’t lead to the bloodbath that liberals had forecast).
A careful article forthcoming in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine by
David Hemenway, a Harvard professor who wrote a brilliant book a few years ago
reframing the gun debate as a public health challenge, makes clear that a gun in
the home makes you much more likely to be shot — by accident, by suicide or by
homicide.
The chances that a gun will be used to deter a home invasion are unbelievably
remote, and dialing 911 is more effective in reducing injury than brandishing a
weapon, the journal article says. But it adds that American children are 11
times more likely to die in a gun accident than in other developed countries,
because of the prevalence of guns.
Likewise, suicide rates are higher in states with more guns, simply because
there are more gun suicides. Other kinds of suicide rates are no higher. And
because most homicides in the home are by family members or acquaintances — not
by an intruder — the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of a gun
murder in that home.
So what can be done? I asked Professor Hemenway how he would oversee a public
health approach to reducing gun deaths and injuries. He suggested:
• Limit gun purchases to one per month per person, to reduce gun trafficking.
And just as the government has cracked down on retailers who sell cigarettes to
minors, get tough on gun dealers who sell to traffickers.
• Push for more gun safes, and make serial numbers harder to erase.
• Improve background checks and follow Canada in requiring a 28-day waiting
period to buy a handgun. And ban oversize magazines, such as the 33-bullet
magazine allegedly used in Tucson. If the shooter had had to reload after firing
10 bullets, he might have been tackled earlier. And invest in new technologies
such as “smart guns,” which can be fired only when near a separate wristband or
after a fingerprint scan.
We can also learn from Australia, which in 1996 banned assault weapons and began
buying back 650,000 of them. The impact is controversial and has sometimes been
distorted. But the Journal of Public Health Policy notes that after the ban, the
firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and
the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.
Congress on Wednesday echoed with speeches honoring those shot in Tucson. That’s
great — but hollow. The best memorial would be to regulate firearms every bit as
seriously as we regulate automobiles or toys.
The National Rifle Association keeps coming up with clever new ways to
undermine public safety.
Just in the past year, the gun-rights group sought to scuttle basic gun controls
enacted by the District of Columbia, including a ban on powerful semiautomatic
weapons in the nation’s capital. The group also blocked common-sense efforts in
Congress to bar people on the F.B.I.’s terrorist watch list from buying guns and
explosives. It kept open the deadly loophole in federal law that lets gun
traffickers and other unqualified buyers to obtain weapons without background
checks at gun shows.
Last week, President Obama had barely nominated a new director for the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is supposed to control firearms
— Andrew Traver, a well-qualified career professional — before the gun lobby
denounced him as “deeply aligned with gun control advocates.” Mr. Traver’s sin?
Associating with a police chief’s group that wants to reduce the use of handguns
on city streets. The nomination was rated dead on arrival in the next Congress,
where the N.R.A. will, if anything, be more powerful.
Finally, the gun lobby has filed two lawsuits in federal court in Lubbock, Tex.,
to compel the State of Texas to allow young people between the ages of 18 and 20
years old to buy handguns and carry them concealed in public places.
The first suit challenges the longstanding federal law prohibiting licensed gun
dealers from selling handguns to anyone under 21 years old. The second case
contests a Texas law setting 21 as the minimum age for carrying a concealed
weapon.
As a legal matter, both lawsuits should fail. In its recent Second Amendment
rulings, the Supreme Court struck down complete bans on handgun ownership, but
explicitly left room for limits on gun ownership and possession by felons and
the mentally ill, and other reasonable restrictions like Texas’ age limitations.
The Supreme Court has said nothing to suggest that the Second Amendment requires
Americans to allow armed teenagers in their communities.
Beyond the dubious legal claims, the idea that young individuals ages 18 to 20
have a constitutional right to buy weapons and carry them loaded and concealed
in public is breathtakingly irresponsible.
Young people in that age range commit a disproportionate amount of gun violence.
F.B.I. crime data from 2009 shows arrests for murder, nonnegligent homicides and
other violent crimes peaking from ages 18 to 20. That age group accounts for
about 5 percent of the population but nearly 20 percent of homicide and
manslaughter arrests, and nearly twice the number of such arrests for those ages
30 to 34, according to the F.B.I. figures.
What the N.R.A. should be doing is keeping our streets and our teenagers safer
by working to extend the prohibition on guns sales to people 18 to 20 years old
by licensed dealers to include unlicensed sellers at gun shows and elsewhere.
NASHVILLE — Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous
bar just off this city’s strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops when Adam
Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of
his gray slacks.
Mr. Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state’s nearly 300,000
handgun permit holders who have recently seen their rights greatly expanded by a
new law — one of the nation’s first — that allows them to carry loaded firearms
into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.
“If someone’s sticking a gun in my face, I’m not relying on their charity to
keep me alive,” said Mr. Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for
personal protection when he is not at work.
Gun rights advocates like Mr. Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but many
customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision.
“That’s not cool in my book,” Art Andersen, 44, said as he nursed a Coors Light
at Sam’s Sports Bar and Grill near Vanderbilt University. “It opens the door to
trouble. It’s giving you the right to be Wyatt Earp.”
Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that
recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other
states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in
Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court
rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a
well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.
Experts say these laws represent the latest wave in the country’s gun debate, as
the gun lobby seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday
life.
The rulings, which overturned handgun bans in Washington and Chicago, have
strengthened the stance of gun rights advocates nationwide. More than 250
lawsuits now challenge various gun laws, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a
Republican, called for guns to be made legal on campuses after a shooting last
week at the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that armed bystanders might
have stopped the gunman.
The new laws have also brought to light the status of 20 other states — New
York, New Jersey and Massachusetts among them — that do not address the
question, appearing by default to allow those with permits to carry guns into
establishments that serve alcohol, according to the Legal Community Against
Violence, a nonprofit group that promotes gun control and tracks state gun laws.
“A lot of states for a long time have not felt the need to say you could or
couldn’t do it,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent
Gun Violence. “There weren’t as many conceal-carry permits out there, so it
wasn’t really an issue.” Now, he said, “the attitude from the gun lobby is that
they should be able to take their guns wherever they want. In the last year,
they’re starting to move toward needing no permit at all.”
State Representative Curry Todd, a Republican who first introduced the
guns-in-bars bill here, said that carrying a gun inside a tavern was never the
law’s primary intention. Rather, he said, the law lets people defend themselves
while walking to and from restaurants.
“Folks were being robbed, assaulted — it was becoming an issue of personal
safety,” said Mr. Todd, who added that the National Rifle Association had aided
his legislative efforts. “The police aren’t going to be able to protect you.
They’re going to be checking out the crime scene after you and your family’s
been shot or injured or assaulted or raped.”
Under Tennessee’s new law, gun permit holders are not supposed to drink alcohol
while carrying their weapons. Mr. Ringenberg washed down his steak sandwich with
a Coke.
But critics of the law say the provision is no guarantee of safety, pointing to
a recent shooting in Virginia where a customer who had a permit to carry a
concealed weapon shot himself in the leg while drinking beer at a restaurant.
“Guns and alcohol don’t mix; that’s the bottom line,” said Michael Drescher, a
spokesman for Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, who vetoed the
bill but was overridden by the legislature.
The law allows restaurant and bar owners to prohibit people from carrying
weapons inside their establishments by posting signs out front. But many
restaurateurs are reluctant to discourage the patronage of gun owners, often
saying privately that they do not allow guns but holding off on posting a sign.
“I’ve talked to a lot of restaurants, and probably 50 to 60 percent of them have
no clue what’s going on,” said Ray Friedman, 51, who has created a Web site
listing the firearms policies of area restaurants.
Previously, states like Tennessee did not allow its residents to carry concealed
weapons unless they had a special permit from the local authorities. That began
to shift in the mid-1990s, as the gun lobby pushed states to adopt policies that
made permits for concealed weapons more accessible.
The new law passed with broad legislative support, despite opposition from the
Nashville Chamber of Commerce and the Tennessee Hospitality Association.
So far, the law has been challenged only once. Filed by an anonymous waiter, the
complaint contended that allowing guns into a tavern creates an unsafe work
environment for servers. His complaint was denied by the state’s Division of
Occupational Safety and Health.
“A loaded concealed weapon in a bar is a recognized hazard,” said David Randolph
Smith, a lawyer who represents the waiter and is preparing to appeal the
decision. “I have a right to go into a restaurant or bar and not have people
armed. And of course, the waiter has a right to a safe workplace.”
Down at Bobby’s Idle Hour, however, Mike Gideon said he did not believe that
guns in bars were unsafe. As he sipped a beer in the fading afternoon light, Mr.
Gideon, who characterized his 19-gun collection as “serious,” said that having a
few permit holders around made any public space safer and that he boycotts any
business that does not allow him to carry a weapon.
“People who have gun permits have the cleanest records around,” said Mr. Gideon,
54. “The guy that’s going to do the bad thing? He’s not worried about the law at
all. The ‘No Guns’ sign just says to him, ‘Hey, buddy, smooth sailing.’ ”
Thirteen days ago, the Supreme Court undermined Chicago’s ban on handguns by
applying the Second Amendment to the states, ruling that people have a right to
protect their homes with a gun. Four days after that, Chicago passed another
handgun restriction that edged right up to the line drawn by the court. And on
Tuesday, a group of gun dealers and enthusiasts sued the city again to overturn
the new law.
Bullets are flying on city streets, but the vital work of limiting gun use has
become a cat-and-mouse game. Beleaguered citizens deserve better from both
sides.
We strongly disagreed with the reasoning that led the court to find an
individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, ending handgun bans in
Washington, D.C., in 2008 and everywhere else last month. Nonetheless, the law
of the land is now that people have a constitutional right to a gun in their
home for self-defense.
That right can be limited, the court explicitly said, with reasonable
restrictions. But it provided very little guidance as to what is reasonable,
leaving lawyers, lawmakers and judges to thrash it out in a bog of lawsuits that
could take many years to clear.
Cities and states have a need to be extremely tough in limiting access to guns,
but they need to do it with more forethought than went into the Chicago
ordinance. Lawmakers there sensibly limited residents to one operable handgun
per home, with a strict registration and permitting process. But residents are
not allowed to buy a gun in the city. They must receive firearms training, but
ranges are illegal in the city. Chicago lawmakers sloughed off on the suburbs
the responsibility to regulate sales and training. As a result, more people will
travel more miles to transport guns.
The law is likely to draw heightened equal-protection scrutiny from skeptical
judges at all levels. Chicago would have been better off allowing gun sales
under the strict oversight of the police department, which could then better
check the backgrounds and movements of every buyer and seller. The District of
Columbia passed a largely similar ordinance last year after its law was struck
down by the court. But it permits sales at the few gun shops in the district,
and a federal judge upheld that ordinance after it was challenged. It could
stand as a model for other cities.
As flawed as the Chicago regulation is, the lawsuit challenging it is entirely
over the top. It disputes virtually every aspect of the law as a violation of
the Second Amendment and poses ludicrous hypothetical situations to show that
everyone needs a gun. “If an elderly widow lives in an unsafe neighborhood and
asks her son to spend the night because she has recently received harassing
phone calls,” the lawsuit complains, “the son may not bring his registered
firearm with him to his mother’s home as an aid to the defense of himself and
his mother.” Putting granny in the middle of a neighborhood firefight is
preferable to having her simply call the police?
The gun lobby is going to attack virtually every gun ordinance it can find, if
only to see what it can get away with now. (Last week, the same lawyers who
brought the Chicago and Washington cases sued North Carolina, challenging a law
that prohibits carrying weapons during a state of emergency.)
Lawmakers need not match the lobby’s obduracy. Cities and states should counter
with tough but sensible laws designed to resist legal challenges and keep gun
possession to a minimum.
About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal
statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of
the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on
handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining
Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real
and bloody.
This began two years ago, when the Supreme Court disregarded the plain words of
the Second Amendment and overturned the District of Columbia’s handgun ban,
deciding that the amendment gave individuals in the district, not just militias,
the right to bear arms. Proceeding from that flawed logic, the court has now
said the amendment applies to all states and cities, rendering Chicago’s ban on
handgun ownership unenforceable.
Once again, the court’s conservative majority imposed its selective reading of
American history, citing the country’s violent separation from Britain and the
battles over slavery as proof that the authors of the Constitution and its later
amendments considered gun ownership a fundamental right. The court’s members
ignored the present-day reality of Chicago, where 258 public school students
were shot last school year — 32 fatally.
Rather than acknowledging Chicago’s — and the nation’s — need to end an epidemic
of gun violence, the justices spent scores of pages in the decision analyzing
which legal theory should bind the Second Amendment to the states. Should it be
the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, or the amendment’s immunities
clause? The argument was not completely settled because there was not a
five-vote majority for either path.
The issue is not trivial; had the court backed the immunity-clause path
championed by Justice Clarence Thomas, it might have had the beneficial effect
of applying more aspects of the Bill of Rights to the states. That could make it
easier to require that states, like the federal government, have unanimous jury
verdicts in criminal trials, for example, or ban excessive fines.
While the court has now twice attacked complete bans on handgun ownership, the
decision left plenty of room for restrictions on who can buy and sell arms.
The court acknowledged, as it did in the District of Columbia case, that the
amendment did not confer “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any
manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” It cited a few examples of what it
considered acceptable: limits on gun ownership by felons or the mentally ill,
bans on carrying firearms in sensitive places like schools or government
buildings and conditions on gun sales.
Mayors and state lawmakers will have to use all of that room and keep adopting
the most restrictive possible gun laws — to protect the lives of Americans and
aid the work of law enforcement officials. They should continue to impose
background checks, limit bulk gun purchases, regulate dealers, close gun-show
loopholes.
They should not be intimidated by the theoretical debate that has now concluded
at the court or the relentless stream of lawsuits sure to follow from the gun
lobby that will undoubtedly keep pressing to overturn any and all restrictions.
Officials will have to press back even harder. Too many lives are at stake.
The New York Times
June 28, 2010
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court held Monday that the
Constitution's Second Amendment restrains government's ability to significantly
limit "the right to keep and bear arms," advancing a recent trend by the John
Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.
By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices signaled, however, that less severe
restrictions could survive legal challenges.
Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of
its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right "applies
equally to the federal government and the states."
The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five
conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed.
Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.
Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an
individual's right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the
home.
That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a
trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal
city with a unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not
to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.
Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun
control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have
been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says
those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.
Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches
were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court
justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.
The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of
Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.
Monday's decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering
a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that
they would eventually fall.
Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully
binding on states and cities "limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability
to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values."
June 26, 2009
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Ken Pagano, the pastor of the New Bethel Church here, is
passionate about gun rights. He shoots regularly at the local firing range, and
his sermon two weeks ago was on “God, Guns, Gospel and Geometry.” And on
Saturday night, he is inviting his congregation of 150 and others to wear or
carry their firearms into the sanctuary to “celebrate our rights as Americans!”
as a promotional flier for the “open carry celebration” puts it.
“God and guns were part of the foundation of this country,” Mr. Pagano, 49, said
Wednesday in the small brick Assembly of God church, where a large wooden cross
hung over the altar and two American flags jutted from side walls. “I don’t see
any contradiction in this. Not every Christian denomination is pacifist.”
The bring-your-gun-to-church day, which will include a $1 raffle of a handgun,
firearms safety lessons and a picnic, is another sign that the gun culture in
the United States is thriving despite, or perhaps because of, President Obama’s
election in November.
Last year, the National Rifle Association ran a multimillion-dollar advertising
campaign against Mr. Obama, stoking fears that he would be the most antigun
president in history and that firearms would be confiscated. One worry was that
a Democratic president and Congress would reinstitute the assault-weapons ban,
which expired in 2004.
But there is little support for the ban. Mr. Obama and his party have largely
ignored gun-control issues, and the president even signed a measure that will
allow firearms in national parks.
Still, the fear remains that Mr. Obama, and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder
Jr., will crack down on guns sooner or later. That — along with the faltering
economy, which gun sellers say has spurred purchases for self-defense — has
fueled a record surge in gun sales.
“Every president wants to be re-elected, and gun bans are pretty much a
nonstarter for getting re-elected,” said Win Underwood, owner of the Bluegrass
Indoor Range here. “What I suspect is going to happen is, Obama’s going to cool
his jets until he can get re-elected, and then he’ll start building his legacy
in these hot-button areas.”
When Mr. Obama was elected in November, federal instant background checks, the
best indicator of gun sales, jumped 42 percent over the previous November. Every
month since then, the number of checks has been higher than the year before,
although the postelection surge may be tapering off, as all surges eventually
do. While the number of checks in April increased 30 percent from the year
before, the number of checks in May (1,023,102) was only 15 percent higher than
in May 2008.
The National Rifle Association says its membership is up 30 percent since
November. And several states have recently passed laws allowing gun owners to
carry firearms in more places — bars, restaurants, cars and parks.
“We have a very active agenda in all 50 states,” said Chris W. Cox, legislative
director of the N.R.A., widely considered the country’s most powerful lobby. “We
have right-to-carry laws in over 40 states; 20 years ago, it was in just six.”
Of the 40 states with right-to-carry laws, 20 allow guns in churches.
Public attitudes also seem to be turning more sympathetic to gun owners. In
April, the Pew Research Center found for the first time that almost as many
people said it was more important to protect the rights of gun owners (45
percent) than to control gun ownership (49 percent). Just a year ago, Pew said,
58 percent said gun control was more important than the rights of gun owners (37
percent).
Gun-control advocates say they feel increasingly ineffective, especially after a
recent spate of high-profile shootings, including last month’s murder, inside a
church in Kansas, of a doctor who performed late-term abortions.
“We’ve definitely been marginalized,” said Pam Gersh, a public relations
consultant here who helped organize a rally in Louisville in 2000, to coincide
with the Million Mom March against guns in Washington.
“The Brady Campaign and other similar organizations who advocate sensible gun
responsibility laws don’t have the money and the political power — not even
close,” she said. “This pastor is obviously crossing a line here and saying ‘I
can even take my guns to church, and there is nothing you can do about it.’ ”
Ms. Gersh said she was not aware that a group of local churches and peace
activists were staging a counterpicnic — called “Bring your peaceful heart,
leave your gun at home” — at the same time as Mr. Pagano’s event.
But news media attention — some from overseas — has focused on Mr. Pagano, who
has been planning the event for a year, in celebration of the Fourth of July.
Cameras will not be allowed in the church, he said, to protect the
congregation’s privacy.
The celebration will feature lessons in responsible gun ownership, Mr. Pagano
said. Sheriff’s deputies will be at the doors to check that openly carried
firearms are unloaded, but they will not check for concealed weapons.
“That’s the whole point of concealed,” Mr. Pagano said, adding that he was not
worried because such owners require training.
Mr. Pagano said the church’s insurance company, which he would not identify, had
canceled the church’s policy for the day on Saturday and told him that it would
cancel the policy for good at the end of the year. If he cannot find insurance
for Saturday, people will not be allowed in openly carrying their guns.
Arkansas and Georgia recently rejected efforts to allow people to carry
concealed weapons in church. Watching the debate in Arkansas was John Phillips,
pastor of the Central Church of Christ in Little Rock. In 1986, Mr. Phillips was
preaching in a different church there when a gunman shot him and a parishioner.
Both survived, but Mr. Phillips, 51, still has a bullet lodged in his spine.
In a telephone interview, he said he found the idea of “packing in the pew”
abhorrent.
“There is a movement afoot across the nation, with the gun lobby pushing the
envelope, trying to allow concealed weapons to be carried in places where they
used to be prohibited — churches, schools, bars,” Mr. Phillips said.
“I don’t understand how any minister who is familiar with the teachings of the
Bible can do this,” he added. “Jesus didn’t say, ‘Go ahead, make my day.’ ”
Mr. Pagano takes such comments as a challenge to his faith and says they make
him more determined.
“When someone from within the church tells me that being a Christian and having
firearms are contradictions, that they’re incompatible with the Gospel —
baloney,” he said. “As soon as you start saying that it’s not something that
Christians do, well, guns are just the foil. The issue now is the Gospel. So in
a sense, it does become a crusade. Now the Gospel is at stake.”
A year ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark decision
establishing the constitutional right of Americans to own guns. But the justices
did not explain what the practical effect of that ruling would be on city and
state gun laws.
Could a city still ban handguns? The justices said the District of Columbia
could not, but only because it is a special federal district. The question of
the constitutionality of existing city and state gun laws was left unanswered.
That left a large vacuum for the lower courts to fill. Supporters of gun rights
filed a flurry of lawsuits to strike down local gun restrictions, and now
federal appeals courts have begun weighing in on this divisive issue, using very
different reasoning.
One court this month upheld Chicago’s ban on automatic weapons and concealed
handguns, while in April a California court disagreed on the constitutional
issue.
The differing opinions mean that the whole issue of city and state gun laws will
probably head back to the Supreme Court for clarification, leading many legal
experts to predict a further expansion of gun rights.
The new cases are fallout from last year’s Supreme Court case, District of
Columbia v. Heller, which struck down parts of Washington’s gun control
ordinance, the strictest in the country, and stated for the first time that the
Second Amendment gives individuals a right to keep and bear arms for personal
use. But the court declined to say whether the Second Amendment in general
applies to state and local governments.
In January, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New
York, in a ruling joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, declined to apply the Second
Amendment to a New York law that banned the martial arts device known as chukka
sticks. The ban was allowed to stay in place.
Then in April, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled
that the Second Amendment did apply to the states, even though it allowed a
California county to ban guns on government property like state fairgrounds.
That case, Nordyke v. King, is being considered for a rehearing by the full
Ninth Circuit.
Those two conflicting cases set the stage for two other cases that were heard as
one in the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, testing that city’s handgun ban. On June
2, a three-judge panel of the court, led by Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, a
well-known conservative, ruled that there was no basis for the court to apply
the Second Amendment to the states. Such a decision, Judge Easterbrook wrote,
should be made only by the Supreme Court, not at the appellate level.
The right of states to make their own decisions on such matters, Judge
Easterbrook wrote, “is an older and more deeply rooted tradition than is a right
to carry any particular kind of weapon.”
The lawyers for the plaintiffs, including the National Rifle Association, have
asked the Supreme Court to take up the Chicago cases.
A split among the federal appeals circuits, especially on constitutional issues,
invites Supreme Court action, said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
“Californians, Hawaiians and Oregonians have a Second Amendment right to bear
arms, but New Yorkers, Illinoisans, and Wisconsinites don’t,” Professor Winkler
said. “The Supreme Court will want to correct this sooner rather than later.”
The process of applying amendments of the Bill of Rights to the states, known as
incorporation, began after the Civil War but had its heyday in the activist
Supreme Court of the Earl Warren era. Much of the Bill of Rights, including the
First Amendment’s freedom of speech and some rights of criminal defendants, have
been applied to the states, but other elements have not, including the Seventh
Amendment right to a civil jury trial and the Second Amendment.
Incorporation fell out of favor after the 1960s, but a new generation of largely
liberal scholars of law and history have brought it back into the intellectual
mainstream, said Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale University, who
supports the process.
“The precedents are now supportive of incorporation of nearly every provision of
the Bill of Rights,” Professor Amar said. “Now what’s odd is that the Second
Amendment doesn’t apply to the states.”
Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, said he would be
surprised if the Supreme Court accepted these gun cases, because some of the
conservative justices on the court had scoffed at incorporation arguments in the
past and might not want to set a precedent.
Professor Amar, however, argued that the justices would not only take up the
case but would also ultimately vote for incorporation of the Second Amendment.
Even if the Second Amendment becomes the controlling law of every state and
town, constitutional scholars say it is still unlikely that gun laws would be
overturned wholesale. The Supreme Court’s Heller decision last year, notes
Nelson Lund, a law professor at George Mason University, “clearly indicates that
governments will still have wide latitude to regulate firearms.”
Even the Ninth Circuit in California, while applying the Second Amendment to the
states, still upheld the gun ordinance that gave rise to the lawsuit.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles,
said the view of the Ninth Circuit reflected what polls have said was, by and
large, the view of the American people.
“There is a right to bear arms,” Professor Volokh said, “but it’s not absolute.”
HARROLD, Tex. — Students in this tiny town of grain silos and ranch-style
houses spent much of the first couple of days in school this week trying to
guess which of their teachers were carrying pistols under their clothes.
“We made fun of them,” said Eric Howard, a 16-year-old high school junior.
“Everybody knows everybody here. We will find out.”
The school board in this impoverished rural hamlet in North Texas has drawn
national attention with its decision to let some teachers carry concealed
weapons, a track no other school in the country has followed. The idea is to
ward off a massacre along the lines of what happened at Columbine High School in
Colorado in 1999.
“Our people just don’t want their children to be fish in a bowl,” said David
Thweatt, the schools superintendent and driving force behind the policy.
“Country people are take-care-of-yourself people. They are not under the
illusion that the police are there to protect them.”
Even in Texas, with its tradition of lenient gun laws and frontier justice, the
idea of teachers’ taking guns to class has rattled some people and sparked a
fiery debate.
Gun-control advocates are wringing their hands, while pro-gun groups are
gleeful. Leaders of the state’s major teachers unions have expressed stunned
outrage, while the conservative Republican governor, Rick Perry, has endorsed
the idea.
In the center of the storm is Mr. Thweatt, a man who describes himself as “a
contingency planner,” who believes Americans should be less afraid of protecting
themselves and who thinks signs at schools saying “gun-free zone” make them
targets for armed attacks. “That’s like saying sic ’em to a dog,” he said.
Mr. Thweatt maintains that having teachers carry guns is a rational response to
a real threat. The county sheriff’s office is 17 miles away, he argues, and the
district cannot afford to hire police officers, as urban schools in Dallas and
Houston do.
The school board decided that teachers with concealed guns were a better form of
security than armed peace officers, since an attacker would not know whom to
shoot first, Mr. Thweatt said. Teachers have received training from a private
security consultant and will use special ammunition designed to prevent
ricocheting, he added.
Harrold, about 180 miles northwest of Dallas, is a far cry from the giant
districts in major Texas cities, where gang violence is the main concern and
most schools have their own police forces. Barely 100 students of all ages
attend classes here in two brick buildings built more than 60 years ago. There
are two dozen teachers, a handful of buses and a football field bordered by
crops.
Yet the town is not isolated in rustic peace, supporters of the plan point out.
A four-lane highway runs through town, bringing with it a river of humanity,
including criminals, they say. The police recently shut down a drug-producing
laboratory in a ramshackle house near school property. Drifters sometimes sleep
under the overpass.
“I’m not exactly paranoid,” Mr. Thweatt said. “I like to consider myself
prepared.”
Some residents and parents, however, think Mr. Thweatt may be overstating the
threat. Many say they rarely lock their doors, much less worry about random
drifters with pistols running amok at the school. Longtime residents were
hard-pressed to recall a single violent incident there.
Others worry that introducing guns into the classroom might create more problems
than it solved. A teacher tussling with a student could lose control of a
weapon, or a gun might go off by accident, they said.
“I don’t think there is a place in the school whatsoever for a gun unless you
have a police officer in there,” said Bobby G. Brown, a farmer and former school
board chairman whose two sons were educated at the school. “I don’t care how
much training they have.”
His wife, Diane Brown, added: “There are too many things that could happen. They
are not trained to make life-and-death-situation judgments.”
Mr. Thweatt declined to say how many teachers were armed, or who they were, on
the theory that it would tip off the bad guys. He also declined to identify the
private consultant who provided teachers with about 40 hours of weapons
training.
Most critics question whether teachers, even with extra training, are as
qualified as police officers to take out an armed attacker.
“We are trained to teach and to educate,” said Zeph Capo, the legislative
director for the Houston Association of Teachers. “We are not trained to tame
the Wild West.”
Texas gun laws ban the weapons on school property. But the Legislature carved
out an exception allowing school boards to permit people with concealed handgun
licenses to carry their weapons. No local district had taken advantage of the
exception until the Harrold school board acted.
Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, said the state’s
hands were tied. “We have really tried not to get involved in this,” Ms.
Ratcliffe said. “Frankly, it’s a matter of local control.”
Gun-control advocates say, however, that while the school district may be
complying with state gun laws, it appears to be violating the education statute.
That law says “security personnel” authorized to carry weapons on campuses must
be “commissioned peace officers,” who undergo police training.
“It seems to us not only an unwise policy but an illegal one,” said Brian
Siebel, a lawyer in Washington for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
The school district has countered that teachers are not “security personnel” and
so do not need to become peace officers.
As a general rule, the seven school board members — a collection of farmers and
oil workers led by an ambulance medic — have referred all questions from
reporters to Mr. Thweatt. But one member, Coy Cato, gave a short interview. “In
my opinion, it is the best way to protect our kids,” Mr. Cato said. Asked if
others in the community shared his view, he said that he had not taken a poll,
but “I think so.”
Still, several residents complained that the board made little or no effort to
gather public opinion on the matter. Some said they did not hear about the plan
until reporters started asking questions about it in early August.
Mr. Thweatt said the board discussed the proposal for nearly two years and
considered several options — tranquilizer guns, beanbag guns, Tasers, Mace and
armed security guards — but each was found lacking in some way. “We
devil-advocated it to death,” Mr. Thweatt said.
That discussion went unnoticed by many parents.
Traci McKay, a 34-year-old restaurant employee, sends three children to the
school, yet said she had not heard about the pistol-carrying teachers until two
weeks before the start of the semester. She was stunned.
“I should have been informed,” Ms. McKay said. “If something happens, do we
really want all these people shooting at each other?”
Ms. McKay said Mr. Thweatt had yet to explain why a town with such a low crime
rate needed such measures. She is afraid, however, that her children might face
repercussions if she takes up a petition against the idea.
“We are pretty much being told to deal with this or move,” Ms. McKay said.
WASHINGTON
— The Supreme Court declared for the first time on Thursday that the
Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun, not just the right of
the states to maintain militias.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the landmark 5-to-4
decision, said the Constitution does not allow “the absolute prohibition of
handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.” In so declaring, the
majority found that a gun-control law in the nation’s capital went too far by
making it nearly impossible to own a handgun.
But the court held that the individual right to possess a gun “for traditionally
lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home” is not unlimited. “It is
not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and
for whatever purpose,” Justice Scalia wrote.
The ruling does not mean, for instance, that laws against carrying concealed
weapons are to be swept aside. Furthermore, Justice Scalia wrote, “The court’s
opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the
possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the
carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government
buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale
of arms.”
The decision upheld a federal appeals court ruling that the District of
Columbia’s gun law, one of the strictest in the country, went beyond
constitutional limits. Not only did the 1976 law make it practically impossible
for an individual to legally possess a handgun in the district, but it also
spelled out rules for the storage of rifles and shotguns. But the court did not
articulate a specific standard of review for what might be a reasonable
restraint on the right to possess a firearm.
The court also said on Thursday that the district law’s requirement that lawful
weapons be rendered essentially inoperable, by trigger locks or disassembly, was
unconstitutional because it rendered the weapons useless for self-defense.
Joining Justice Scalia were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices
Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
A dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens asserted that the majority “would have us
believe that over 200 years ago, the framers made a choice to limit the tools
available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.”
Joining him were Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G.
Breyer.
The high court’s ruling was the first since 1939 to deal with the scope of the
Second Amendment, and the first to so directly address the meaning of the
amendment’s ambiguous, comma-laden text: “A well regulated Militia, being
necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and
bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Not surprisingly, Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens differed on the clarity (or
lack thereof) of the Second Amendment. “The amendment’s prefatory clause
announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second
clause,” wrote Justice Scalia. “The operative clause’s text and history
demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.”
Not at all, Justice Stevens countered, asserting that the majority “stakes its
holding on a strained and unpersuasive reading of the amendment’s text.” Justice
Stevens read his dissent from the bench, an unmistakable signal that he
disagreed deeply with the majority.
Indeed, it was clear from the conflicting opinions of Justices Scalia and
Stevens that the case had generated emotional as well as intellectual sparks at
the court.
Justice Scalia devoted page after page of his opinion to the various state
constitutions and to the use of language in the 18th and 19th centuries to
support his view that an individual right to bear arms is embodied in the
Constitution. And Justice Scalia, who clearly takes pride in his writing as well
as his reasoning, used adjectives like “frivolous” and “bizarre” to describe the
other side’s arguments.
Not to be outdone, Justice Stevens called the majority’s interpretation of the
Second Amendment “overwrought and novel” and said it “calls to mind the parable
of the six blind men and the elephant,” in which each of the sightless men had a
different conception of the animal.
“Each of them, of course, has fundamentally failed to grasp the nature of the
creature,” Justice Stevens wrote.
The ruling on Thursday will surely not quiet the debate about guns and violence
in the United States, where deaths by firearm take a far higher toll than in
many other countries, as Justice Scalia acknowledged.
“We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country,” he wrote,
saying that he took seriously the concerns of those who believe that
“prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution.”
Lawmakers in the District of Columbia and across the country may look to the
decision as a blueprint for writing new legislation to satisfy the demands of
constituents who say there is too much regulation of firearms now, or too
little, depending on the sentiments in their regions. (Washington’s Mayor,
Adrian M. Fenty, will instruct the police department to issue new
handgun-registration rules within 30 days while city officials study the ruling,
The Washington Post reported on its Web site.)
Nor was there any suggestion that the court’s ruling would lead to a
proliferation of deadly, military-style assault weapons. Alluding to the 1939
Supreme Court decision, which held that the weapons protected under the Second
Amendment were those “in common use at the time,” Justice Scalia said, “We think
that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting
the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”
The White House issued a statement saying that President Bush “strongly agrees
with the Supreme Court’s historic decision today that the Second Amendment
protects the individual right of Americans to keep and bear arms.”
The Supreme Court ruling is likely to play out in this year’s elections, as
Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee for
president, made clear. “I applaud this decision as well as the overturning of
the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and limitations on the ability to use
firearms for self-defense,” Mr. McCain said in a statement, which contained a
reminder that his Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, refused
to join him in signing an amicus brief in support of overturning the district’s
law.
Indeed, Mr. Obama’s view, expressed in a statement, was more nuanced than Mr.
McCain’s. “I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right
of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged
communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets
through common-sense, effective safety measures,” Mr. Obama said, predicting
that the ruling would provide needed guidance for lawmakers.
The National Rifle Association and other supporters of rights to have firearms
are sure to use the decision as a launch pad for lawsuits. The N.R.A. said it
would file suits in San Francisco, Chicago and several Chicago suburbs
challenging handgun restrictions there. “I consider this the opening salvo in a
step-by-step process of providing relief for law-abiding Americans everywhere
that have been deprived of this freedom,” Wayne LaPierre, executive vice
president of the N.R.A., told The Associated Press.
Reaction on Capitol Hill differed sharply. Representative John A. Boehner of
Ohio, the Republican minority leader in the House, applauded the ruling. “The
Constitution plainly guarantees the solemn right to keep and bear arms, and the
whims of politically correct bureaucrats cannot take it away,” he said in a
statement.
But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and a former mayor of San
Francisco, said she was disappointed in the ruling. “I speak as a former mayor,”
she said at a session of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I speak as somebody
who has gone to homicide crime scenes.”
The last time the Supreme Court weighed a case involving the Second Amendment,
in 1939, it decided a narrower question, finding that the Constitution did not
protect any right to possess a specific type of firearm, the sawed-off shotgun.
By contrast, the issues in the District of Columbia case seemed much more
“mainstream,” if that term can be used in reference to gun-control issues. When
the justices announced on Nov. 20 that they were accepting the case of District
of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290, they indicated that they would go to the
heart of the long debate.
The question, they said, is whether the district’s restrictions on firearms
“violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with
any state-regulated militia but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for
private use in their homes.”
Dick Anthony Heller, a security guard who carries a handgun for his job
protecting federal judiciary offices, challenged the District of Columbia’s law
after his request for a license to keep his gun at home was rejected.
There have been debates about the efficacy of gun-control efforts in the
capital. Those district residents who want guns — and are willing to risk
punishment if caught with them without bothering to apply for permits — can get
them easily enough, across the Potomac River in Virginia and in other nearby
states.
Washington’s homicide rate, while high by world standards, is sharply lower than
it was in the early 1990s. Last year, there were 181 homicides in Washington,
down from a peak of 479 in 1991, when crack cocaine was a huge problem in some
sections of the city.
Concluding his opinion, Justice Scalia wrote, “Undoubtedly some think that the
Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride
of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and
where gun violence is a serious problem.”
“That is perhaps debatable,” Justice Scalia wrote, “but what is not debatable is
that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment
extinct.”
When the Heller case was argued before the justices on March 18, Mr. Heller’s
lawyer, Alan Gura, did not assert that the Second Amendment precluded any kind
of ban related to gun possession. He said that a ban on the shipment of machine
guns and sawed-off shotguns would be acceptable, and in answer to a question
from the justices, so, too, might be a prohibition on guns in schools. Some of
the justices signaled during arguments that they thought the District’s
near-total ban on handguns went too far.
A legislature “has a great deal of leeway in regulating firearms,” Mr. Gura
argued, but not to the extent of virtually banning them in homes.
The Washington law not only established high barriers to the private possession
of handguns, it also required that rifles and shotguns be kept either in a
disassembled state or under a trigger lock.
Walter Dellinger, the lawyer who argued for the district on March 18, asserted
that “the people” and “the militia” were essentially the same, and that the
Second Amendment gave people the right to bear arms only in connection with
their militia service.
Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, representing the federal government, argued
on behalf of the individual-rights position, which has been the Bush
administration’s policy. But he said that the appeals court had also gone too
far in overturning the ordinance and that the right to bear arms was always
subject to “reasonable regulations.”
