Remember Clackamas Town Center?
That’s where 22-year-old Jacob Tyler Roberts went Christmas shooting last week. He shot up a suburban Portland, Ore., mall with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Garbed in a camouflage outfit and hockey mask, he killed two shoppers in the food court. A jammed weapon prevented a full-fledged bloodbath. Roberts then killed himself. Ghastly images from AR-15-armed James Holmes’ midnight movie massacre in Aurora, Colo., in July came readily to mind.
Alas, the senseless Portland rampage wasn’t even the most notorious shooting frenzy of last week. Three days later Newtown, Conn., galvanized the country’s–and the world’s–attention. Twenty-seven people, including 20 students at Sandy Hook Elementary School, were mowed down by a masked- and body-armored, one-man arsenal named Adam Lanza, 20. His weapon of chilling choice: an AR-15 style rifle, fed by multiple, high-capacity magazines.
And for the fourth time in his presidency, Barack Obama assumed the role of on-site Grief Counselor-in-Chief. “We can’t tolerate this anymore,” stated the president at Sunday’s memorial service. “These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.”
We’ll see.
They didn’t change after Virginia Tech. Or after Ft. Hood, Texas. Or after Tucson, Ariz. Or after the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. Or after Aurora. The 10-year, federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. The National Rifle Association’s intimidation of both sides of the political aisle has kept it that way.
However, maybe the sheer depravity of slaughtered Newtown innocents will prove the “tipping point” in America’s seemingly relentless perversion of the Second Amendment. Perhaps the time finally is nigh for acting on the acknowledgement that Philly’s founding fathers were not lustily envisioning assault-weapon, itchy trigger fingers on its 21st century citizenry.
What we’ve needed for too long is something more than White House condolences and “thoughts-and-prayers” statements that have now become benumbingly routine after horrific incidents.
Maybe this exercise in evil will finally decouple this country from the obsession that is its politically obscene “third rail”: the mere mention of “gun control.” We’re not talking taxes or trade or immigration or health-care overhaul here. We are, however, talking about a special entitlement–the right to live in other than a gun-crazed culture where the NRA is a de facto branch of government. Common-sense and common cause shouldn’t be partisan issues.
“What choice do we have?” rhetorically asked the president. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”
Obama’s Opportunity
Now in his second term, the president will have ample opportunity to use the ultimate bully pulpit and rally the country around gun sanity. Heretofore, he’s done little beyond his assault-weapon frowns. He has even signed laws permitting people to carry concealed weapons in national parks and in checked bags on Amtrak trains.
His inauguration and State of the Union speeches should pull no gun-sanity punches. This time grief and outrage must translate into “No more Newtowns” action. The president can justifiably mount the moral high ground and channel the conscience of a bereaved country looking for meaningful, not politically expedient, leadership. The memory of innocent unlived lives matters more than the legacy of Charlton Heston.
President Obama, who has vowed to send violence-reducing gun proposals to Congress by January, should not lack for legislation to champion. Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., has pledged to reintroduce an assault-weapons ban in the upcoming Congress. And Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., will introduce legislation next month to ban the sale of high-capacity magazines. Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., supports the bans and has pushed for a national commission to scrutinize gun-law loopholes, the country’s mental health system and the impact on society of ultra-violent movies and video games. Vice President Joe Biden will chair the resultant task force.
Now–tragically and ironically–is the absolutely best time to put everything on the table, including a certain unconscionable “third rail” issue. Opportunity, borne of the unspeakably horrific, uniquely beckons. Unnecessary gun deaths are not the price of “freedom.” Not to act now is to be, in effect, complicit in future incidents triggered by our gun veneration, dysfunctional pandering politics, violent pop culture and unaddressed mental-health scenarios. For too many fringe Americans, it’s easier to get an assault weapon than mental-health care. A helluva lot easier. Thank you, again, gun-shows.
What’s paramount is that the specious, zero-sum, NRA-talking-points rationales no longer carry the day–rhetorically or politically. That includes, of course, the sophist mantra that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument, that should be countered with a vigorous variation of an “Unarmed people are uniquely ill-prepared to kill” theme.
As to whether gun “control” will eliminate violent crime? Of course it won’t, unless you eliminate the human condition. But it can mitigate such murderous matters. What’s that worth?
Presumed “tipping point” notwithstanding, the path to gun sanity is still littered with gun-lobby IEDs.
Guns, as we know here in the Gunshine State where there are now 1 million concealed-weapons-permit holders, are part of a culture that transcends “castle-protectors” and deer hunters. Lanza’s mother, as we also know, inexplicably–and legally–owned at least five guns, including the semi-automatic weapon that killed her. True believers most notably include the “slippery-slopers” who see the ban of any weapon, including assault rifles, as the inevitable road to big government lockdown and confiscation. The route to a safer citizenry doesn’t lie in limits and bans, goes the paranoid reasoning, but in arming ever more Americans to kill bad guys and thwart a bad government before it turns on you.
Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, for example, went on the offensive on Fox News Sunday by lamenting that the Sandy Hook principal wasn’t packing serious heat herself. “I wish to God she had an M-4 in her office,” he said. He really did. The M-4 Carbine, by the way, is marketed as the “preferred weapon of the U.S. Army Special Forces.”
And then there was former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who couldn’t resist going all opportunistically fundamentalist by implying that a massacre at an elementary school might very well be a form of biblical retribution for America having “systematically removed God from our schools.” He really did.
President Obama, of course, has a lot on his plate. But he also has a window of serious action that won’t stay open once even seared memories fade and political realities inevitably reassert themselves. Why not treat sensible gun control as an extension of 9/11 self protection? And not as a finger-wagging opportunity to lecture yahoos, survivalists and ideologues. We don’t need to invite more polarization.
What we are confronting is a form of societal terrorism, one that we have been negligently and tragically permitting and enabling. Second Amendment context needs to be understood and underscored. It was passed in 1791. It was a time of muskets and militias, “well-regulated” at that. The onus should be on the registered, background-checked, would-be gun owner to make the case for possession, let alone concealed carry. The case for assault weapons doesn’t exist outside the military. In fact, if you really need one, that’s reason enough not to have one.
Timing, of course, is everything. But if not now, when? If not this president, who?