The most telling commentary on the Aurora massacre was actually created in 2011. Tom Tomorrow, in response to the recent tragedy in Colorado, reposted a "This Modern World" comic he had originally drawn in response to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. The comic is brutally and nakedly truthful about the current politics of gun control. Sparky the Penguin, speaking to a nameless conservative, admits defeat:
Barring some seismic realignment in this country, the gun control debate is all but settled -- and your side won. The occasional horrific civilian massacre is just the price the rest of us have to pay. Over and over again, apparently.
No matter where you stand on gun control, this is where the country stands politically -- like it or not. Democrats learned, back in the 1990s, that they could get thrown out of office when they voted for new gun control laws. You can quibble over whether the assault weapons ban was the sole motivating factor for any individual lawmaker's defeat, but in this case perception has become reality, at least in Democrats' thinking. "Once burned, twice shy" is the party's mantra now on gun control.
Gun control's support varies in proportion to how urbanized an area is, roughly. People in large cities tend to support gun control, and rural populations tend to be strong Second Amendment supporters. Suburbs and small towns are usually somewhere in the middle of this range. This is admittedly an oversimplification, but it's good enough for our purposes here.
Without getting in to the mechanics (or even the effectiveness) of any particular gun control measure, the hard cold political fact is that no new federal gun control law is going to be passed in the near future -- or, for that matter, in the next few years. Even if Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, this basic truth would not change one bit. Not only is it currently an election year, but Democrats simply cannot put together enough House members from urban (or otherwise gun-control-supportive) districts that would add up to a majority vote.
Fears of Barack Obama "taking our guns away" reportedly led to a massive run on ammunition, during his first years in office. After all, Obama was supposedly the most leftist president of all time, so of course he was going to begin confiscating weapons -- probably starting with the red states. This, quite obviously, has not come to pass. In fact, gun laws have actually been relaxed under Obama, as well as by Supreme Court decisions from the past decade or so. So no jack-booted federal agents will be coming for anybody's guns in the foreseeable future.
There is a larger argument I'm all but ignoring, here -- the gun control debate itself. Americans like to believe, in all tragedies of this type, that "something should have been done" beforehand. With perfect-vision hindsight, we all search for the "signs" that someone, somewhere "should have caught." Pro-gun control folks like to believe that some law or another could easily have prevented such a tragedy from ever taking place. Anti-gun control folks like to believe that if someone had just been armed in the audience itself, that the guy could have been stopped.
Both views ignore the fact that, just perhaps, they might be wrong. Banning high-volume clips (or whatever other idea for a law) may not have stopped this guy from killing just as many people. It might have slightly inconvenienced the alleged shooter, but then again nobody knows all the facts yet, so drawing such conclusions is premature, at best. From the other side, the guy was wearing body armor and could conceivably have outgunned anyone with a pistol at the ready, so it is impossible to accurately state that this would have changed the situation all that much.
Sometimes there are no easy answers. Sometimes Monday-morning quarterbacking is no real solution. The alleged shooter had a clean background on both his past run-ins with the law and on his mental health -- so any supposed miracle method of "reading the signs" beforehand would likely not have caught this particular guy before he did what he did. Sometimes the consoling thought that "somebody somewhere should have done something beforehand" is just not realistic, hard as that may be for many to accept.
This all may sound pretty defeatist, and I will admit that it largely is. Not only on proposed panaceas from all sides of the gun control (and mental health) debate, but also on the politics of the situation. Whether you agree with the concept or not, federal gun control is just not going to happen any time soon. That is the political reality in Washington, and across this country.
That's not to say that people shouldn't work for changes which they believe would improve American society. But what it does say is: "expect a long fight." Because, for now, it's a losing proposition. Here's how the political equation stands: Democrats who want gun control must take the House, increase their proportion in the Senate, and regain the White House. But running on gun control is a losing issue in much of the country, because you have to win districts outside of urban areas to control Congress, and rural Democrats often lose when they support gun control (or, at least, so says the conventional wisdom of the times). So if Democrats made gun control a central part of their campaign, they might actually lose seats in the House. There doesn't seem to be a way out of this conundrum for the Democratic Party. To get enough power to enact gun control, Democrats must not run on their support for gun control. Catch-22.
Changing the public's mind is the only real option, but the news for the gun control advocates on this front is not good. In the 1990s, support among the general public was actually quite high for gun control. It no longer is -- like many political issues these days, the public is about evenly split on the question. So the gun control advocates have a long and hard road to travel to build public pressure to the point where Democrats (even in rural areas) think they can win on the issue at the polls.
For now, though, it is seen as a big losing issue for Democratic politicians. Viewed through the lens of political reality, Tom Tomorrow's acidly cynical comic is the most intelligent thing I've heard said on the Colorado shooting. Gun control advocates, at least for now, have lost. The other side has won. Horrific civilian massacres will indeed continue. It's as true today as it was when Gabrielle Giffords was shot.
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Doesn't that kinda say gun-control advocate must run disengeniusly in order to get in and act against their constituents wishes. If the majority of Americans wanted restrictive gun laws then the issue wouldn't be dead on arrival. Now if the issue is DOA then want does that tell you about the beliefs of the majority of Americans?
There have been two times in my life where I was grateful I had the right to be armed. I, for one, am quite convinced that taking firearms away from citizens like me does not make anyone safer.
I am not convinced that taking firearms away from everyone would make me safer from people like Holmes. He'd either acquire the weapons anyway, or choose different weapons. There are too many counter-examples of places with strict laws and high levels of violence anyway. And even in places with low crime overall, the mass-killings occasionally happen anyway, with or without guns. Norway's gun laws, in many ways much like those being advocated, did not save them from a terrible event.
Besides, interacting with legal firearms owners is much safer for police, and most officers recognize this fact.
Having a concealed carry license puts you in one of the groups least likely to commit a violent crime. Less likely than police officers themselves.
I'm sure having a monopoly on force would be a blessing to certain police officers out there. After all, isn't that the definition of having a 'police state'?
However police officers must respect all of our Constitutional rights, not just the ones they find convenient.
Once, frequent public service announcements described the "fire triangle": fuel, oxygen and heat. Take away any one of those factors and no fire can occur. Gunmen freely executing massacres is also based on three factors: the gunmen, their weaponry, and public inaction. Take away any one of those factors and the frequency and extent of massacres drops.
One day America will minimize the frequency and extent of massacres, just as other democracies do, by recognizing that our current, deadly stalemate rests on falsehoods. They include: "The Framers of our Constitution wanted everyone armed to be able to overthrow our government." (No, they didn't. The Second Amendment, when drafted, applied to one-shot, muzzle-loading rifles in a rural, 18th century nation too poor to arm its military--and wasn't intended to protect insurrection, the blood sport of hunting, or even to augment local police forces.) "We must preserve our Constitution exactly as originally framed." (No, we don't. The Framers even specified how We, the People, can amend it.)
Arms makers and Republican Congressmen may benefit from a vastly over-armed general public, but the most-heavily armed parts of our nation endure periodic massacres (and exhibit high suicide rates), in consequence.
You completely leave out the aspect of Mental Heath Care or the lack thereof. Plus, an educated public in the matters of mental illness and the stigma still attached to it that need to be addressed.
I believe that therein, we will begin to limit the sad event that seems to reoccur each spring or early summer. (The time of Year that is another piece of the mental issue.)
Holmes had no personal grudge with any of the victims. He seems to have had no political agenda, so he wasn't a terrorist in the generally accepted sense. He didn't rob his victims.
We are running out of motives here. The guy was insane, probably not in a legal sense, but almost certainly in a clinical sense, and definitely in a common sense sense. Attention seeking may have played a role, but that still leaves him in the crazy bracket.
There was a window of months when somebody could have had a reasonably high chance of stopping the tragedy by putting his arms purchases and mental state together. My guess is right around the end of his grad school career, when he was still connected to a fair number of people who observed him on a day to day basis. Once he went loner, the window closed for practical purposes.
Does you doctor report you to the FBI (who run the background checks) because he gave you a prescription for Zoloft? Given the HIPPA laws, wouldn't they be prosecuted for that?
At the end of the day, it would take Orwellian control to catch every single person who went over the edge, and the cost to society as a whole would be ruinous.
It's one thing to have mental health records be part of a background check, but what if there is no record of mental instability?
It's not always apparent what someone's mental state is. And unless someone is truly acting bizarre and dangerous, if they don't seek help on their own, there is not much that can legally be done in any case.
Sometimes these things are impossible to spot, in other words.
-CW
Someone in James Holmes daily life could have called his parents to come to Colorado.
The police and others can have someone hospitalized for 72 hours for observation for mental illness.
Trying something would have, hopefully, prevented this tragic result that occurred.
And it might have ended in a better result for both James and the innocents in that movie theater.
No harm in asking what it's for.
That isn't to say that some politicians in this country have not done that very thing, in my view. Some arguments can be made that such ethical bankruptcy characterized the Bush Administration in general.
Translation:
Banning high capacity magazines.
You're welcome.
R/ PRONESE
"Assault Control."
Control Of.
"Assault Weapons."
Right. No one is ever fooled. Romney is running neck and neck with Obama because no one is being fooled.
Thanks for providing a hearty laugh to get the day rolling.