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[captainsblog]

I've got a year-in-review post largely written in the head, still have some reviews to write, and who knows what these final days of 2012 will bring, but this is the one I've got to get out there before Bad Things Happen again:

America's gone crazy in the head over guns. Batshit insane. Just ten days apart, two men, armed with identical Bushmaster models that belong nowhere outside a "well-regulated militia," committed mayhem that added up to a measurable fraction of the 9/11 deaths and, emotionally, caused almost as great a toll.  Our youngest children are not safe in their schools, and our first responders are not safe when responding. 

And yet, even open up the topic of revising our laws on this topic and you hear the prefabricated chorus. It's too soon- let's grieve! Then, MORE GUNS MORE BULLETS TO STOP MORE BAD GUYS! And before long, our ADD news cycle moves on to the latest shit the Kardashians are doing, and the "conversation" is all Gun control, we can't talk about -OH LOOK A KITTY!

Somehow, in the 1930s, when the bad guys had escalated to machine guns, our nation had no trouble recognizing the seriousness of the slaughter and outlawing that form of weaponry.  Ask a gun nut today about similar bans on semi-automatics, and you'll hear techobabble about how AR-15's aren't automatic weapons and they have to be manually shot for each shot and yadda yadda yadda....

Twenty kids. Killed in record time. One shot eleven times. Eleven. I don't care what the weapon was, or how automatic it is. That's got to be stopped.

This week's maniac of the moment was a convicted felon, and, yes, wasn't allowed to possess a firearm. But his family was. He was 62 at the time of the slaughter, and his still-alive father reportedly had a horde of weapons in the house. When he went off to treatment and relocation for dementia, did anyone think to check the records of his weapon ownership? Of course not- because there are none.  Even in the aftermath of 9/11, when our non-gun civil liberties were being cheerfully sacrificed in the name of safety, anti-terrorist investigators could look at your email, your library records, just about anything about you.... except whether you owned or had attempted to own a weapon.

The Nuts Running America have kept our alleged regulatory agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, from doing its job for close to a decade:

...under current laws the bureau is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions. So while detectives on television tap a serial number into a computer and instantly identify the buyer of a firearm, the reality could not be more different.

When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.

ATF is also handcuffed in being able to inspect gun dealers, release information about purchasers in anything other than aggregate format, or prevent "straw" purchases of weapons by lawful purchasers buying for the unlawful.  They wouldn't even allow George W. Bush to nominate a permanent ATF director; it's languished without one for years, the gun nut equivalent of drowning "big government" in a bathtub.

You'll see all kinds of crap about how ineffective gun laws are- why, the places with the most stringent laws have the most homicides!  Yeah, but they also tend to have the largest populations, and on a per capita basis, their gun crimes are down. WAY down.  Behold this snippet from News of the Weird, of all places:

Deputy NYPD Commissioner Paul Browne told reporters in November that, in the 24 hours of Monday, November 26th, not a single criminal shooting, stabbing, or slashing was reported in the five boroughs. Browne said no police official could remember such a day, ever. (The city is on track to finish 2012 with fewer than 400 homicides—compared to the record year of 1990, when 2,245 people were murdered.)

And that's with unfettered access to troves of guns from other states. Stop them at regulated borders, and those 400 homicides among a similar population drop to two digits. Or even one.  Because other countries somehow didn't enshrine firepower in their constitutions the way we did.  

I remain doubtful that anything will ever change. The lobby is too strong and bullying.  I can still wish, though. And complain.

Comments

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

I'm extraordinarily tired of the "but but but we must also examine the state of mental health in this country!" As if one "solution" were somehow more magically possible than the other. As if addressing the mental health crisis would help more than addressing a gun crisis. Has anyone stopped to take a realistic look at the healthcare system? People were screaming up and down about socialism when Obama made it possible for all people to be covered by health insurance -- but now it's a chorus of "cure the mentally ill, keep all the guns!" How this makes sense to thinking people is anyone's guess. Oh right; it DOESN'T make sense to thinking people.

Of course I'm singing to the choir here, but it does boggle me that gun fanatics (and I distinguish them from the average gun owner) don't understand that the mentally ill with homicide on their minds are DEFINITELY going to be thwarted in their aims if they're forced to come up with other means of achieving their mayhem than just pulling the assault weapons off the rack above the sofa and heading out the mall.

The whole thing makes me blind with anger. However, to reasonable, average people, the NRA look like a huge bunch of jackassholes, when after their days of anticipatory lead-up... allusions to "meaningful contributions to the conversation" ended up being PUT AN ARMED GUARD AT EVERY SCHOOL.

Good heavens.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

We'll likely never know for sure, but it's a damn good bet that School Shooter Santorum HAD plenty of mental health coverage. His father was a Wall Street bigwig and his mother was a public employee- and, under Obamacare already, he was eligible to be covered by either of them until age 26.

The bigger issues? One: was he GETTING such treatment, or did the social stigma against mental illness keep him, and/or a stuffed shirt dad, and/or a gun-hoarding mom, from seeking it out? Two: if he was getting it, was it effective, and was he on whatever course of treatment, be that meds or therapy or whatever, that he should have been? New York has Kendra's Law, to encourage, if not outright force, mental health patients to stay on their meds. No idea if CT had such a thing, or if, again, Prepper Mama didn't believe in such things.