Prior restraint has a particular meaning within the ambit of the first amendment to our constitution: the prohibition of publication of the material in question, and our constitution does not permit it. But the phrase has a generic meaning as well. In common parlance, it might refer to arresting someone for saying he intended to do something before he actually did it. And as in first amendment cases under our constitution, everyone is entitled to due process under the fifth amendment. That means that you cannot be arrested until there is probable cause to believe that you have committed a crime, not that you might. That is why the gun rights advocates' effort to focus blame for the Parkland, Florida high school shooting on either the FBI or the local sheriff's department is a red herring...an overt and disingenuous attempt to deflect blame from where it lies; it lies with them.
The assassin in Parkland apparently did show signs of being dangerous and of his ultimate intention, and those signs as well as his social media threat to become a "professional school shooter" might well have risen to the level of the mental health exception to the rules against prior restraint that exist in most states. In Connecticut for example, if one presents a threat to himself or others, he can be involuntarily committed for a period of three days without court review, but on the third day, a judge must determine if the involuntary commitment can continue if the committed party asks for such a review, and the review is then as mandatory as the proverbial free phone call. Such a process might well involve local law enforcement, but the FBI would have no role other than as an informant. Thus, while the FBI did get an anonymous tip on the killer that it didn't forward to local law enforcement or investigate itself, as it turns out local law enforcement was already aware of the potential threat and chose not to act after investigating. Since the killings, it has been disclosed that the FBI gets over 750,000 such tips every year, and it screens them to ascertain which ones can be taken seriously resulting in a thousand or more investigations being active at any given time. But unless congress wants to fund a profound increase in the staffing of the FBI, some lines have to be drawn based on the credibility of the threats, and that is what the FBI, and apparently local law enforcement did. In the final analysis then, hundreds of thousands of these threats reach just the FBI every year, but well over 99.99% of them amount to nothing. The reason that the Parkland mass murders took place isn't that law enforcement was lax. The first and fifth amendments are at least as important as the second amendment, and they are mandates for our law enforcement agencies to adhere to as well. So what could have been done to prevent the massacre?
Perhaps threats that appear on-line should become part of the background check before anyone can buy a gun, but I'm sure the NRA, and the ACLU for that matter, would object. And certainly people with histories of violence that has led to protective orders or greater restraint such as prison should be prohibited from buying guns, but the background checks must be made more thorough before they can be deemed effective. Apparently, congress is working on that. But a reprise of the law banning of assault weapons legislated in 1994, which ended in 2004 when its sunset provision annulled the law, seems an impossibility legislatively now. The rationale for resistance to another assault weapons ban was propounded by, among others, Senator Marco Rubio in a televised town hall meeting a few days ago. He said it didn't work and was thus nothing but a pointless infringement on gun owners' rights, but that is not true. According to at least one expert panel, an assault weapons ban would be at least 60% effective in preventing mass shootings. And the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence found in 2004 that the use of assault weapons in crimes dropped from nearly 5% to just more than 1.5%. And if you added into the statistics the assault weapon "copy cats" the frequency of use of such weapons still dropped to 3.1%: a diminution of 45%. Thus, if you want to apply conservative casuistry to the facts, if an assault weapons ban had already been in effect when Parkland occurred, maybe only 8 people would have died instead of 17. But the reality is that if there had been a ban, the shooting probably would never have occurred at all.
Arming teachers--that is fighting the problem of too many guns by giving them to more people--makes little sense. It would be only a matter of time before a teacher shot someone as controversially as police officers often seem to. And then of course there is the mortality rate for teachers using hand guns to fend off assault-weapon-bearing lunatics to consider. And besides, armed teachers wouldn't have saved the nearly sixty people killed in Las Vegas a few months ago. No, the real answer is a ban on weapons that serve no purpose other than murder. Hunters don't use them. Bank robbers and deranged holders of grudges, real or imagined, do. As I always say, on election day, the American people get what they deserve. I think we deserve better than we have now. Go and vote, America...and make sure your representatives and senators know that you intend to.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment