"What Can We Do to Stop Massacres?"

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic:

The massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, has caused many people, including people at the White House, to say that this is not the day to talk about gun policy. This day is obviously for mourning the dead, but I don't understand why we shouldn't talk about the conditions that lead to these sorts of shootings. I wrote about this issue in the current issue of The Atlantic (you can read the story here), and I want to quickly make a few points drawn from that longer article.

1) This is a gun country. We are saturated with guns. There are as many as 300 million guns in circulation today (the majority owned legally, but many not) and more than 4 million new guns come onto the market each year. To talk about eradicating guns, especially given what the Supreme Court has said about the individual right to gun-ownership, is futile.

2) There are, however, some gun control laws that could be strengthened. The so-called gun-show loophole (which is not a loophole at all -- 40 percent of all guns sold in America legally are sold without benefit of a federal background check) should be closed. Background checks are no panacea -- many of our country's recent mass-shooters had no previous criminal records, and had not been previously adjudicated mentally ill -- but they would certainly stop some people from buying weapons.

3) We must find a way to make it more difficult for the non-adjudicated mentally ill to come into possession of weapons. This is crucially important, but very difficult, because it would require the cooperation of the medical community -- of psychiatrists, therapists, school counselors and the like -- and the privacy issues (among other issues) are enormous. But: It has to be made more difficult for sociopaths, psychopaths and the otherwise violently mentally-ill (who, in total, make up a small portion of the mentally ill population) to buy weapons.

4) People should have the ability to defend themselves. Mass shootings take many lives in part because no one is firing back at the shooters. The shooters in recent massacres have had many minutes to complete their evil work, while their victims cower under desks or in closets. One response to the tragic reality that we are a gun-saturated country is to understand that law-abiding, well-trained, non-criminal, wholly sane citizens who are screened by the government have a role to play in their own self-defense, and in the defense of others (read The Atlantic article to see how one armed school administrator stopped a mass shooting in Pearl Mississippi). I don't know anything more than anyone else about the shooting in Connecticut at the moment, but it seems fairly obvious that there was no one at or near the school who could have tried to fight back.

5) All of this is tragic. As I wrote in The Atlantic, Canada, which has a low-rate of gun ownership and strict gun laws, seems like a pretty nice place sometimes.

Please read Goldberg's other article in The Atlantic as well.

I pretty much agree. I have no problem with background checks-- they make sense-- but they don't and won't do much good. Crazies who break laws against murder will break laws against obtaining guns without going through a background check. Believing that gun control will mass shooters is like believing that more laws against double-parking will stop truck bombers.

There is no realistic (and constitutional) way to reliably prevent homicidal psychos from getting guns or to reliably institutionalize homocidal psychos who will commit such crimes. Mass shootings are horrendous but exceedingly rare, the perpetrators have characteristics of millions of Americans (loners, video games afficionatos, goths), and there are hundreds of millions of guns extant that aren't going away regardless of what (unconstitutional) gun control laws we enact.

The only realistic way to stop mass shootings is to give people the ability to defend themselves. In some situations, that means (a few) victims being personally armed. In other situations, that means armed professional security. Mass shootings occur almost without exception in gun-free zones. Schools are gun-free zones, obviously, and the movie theatre in Colorado was a gun-free zone (the theatre chain's policy), malls are gun-free zones, and even Ft. Hood was a gun-free zone (soldiers were not allowed to carry weapons on base, unless involved in a training exercise).

Gun-free zones attract mass shooters. Flames attract moths. It ain't rocket science.


N.B. I should note that Goldberg has a short memory regarding the 'Canadian gun-free paradise'. He forgets the massacre of 14 women-- specifically targeted because they were women-- at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Hardly a testament to a "pretty nice" gun-free place, unless you're the shooter.