Dear America,
Most states, if not all of them, have statutes that provide for involuntary commitment of those who are threats to themselves or others, all of which have procedural safeguards to prevent unjust restraint. But those statutes are not specific to guns, and they all relate to mental illness, temporary or long term. What about cases involving simple rage, abusiveness or other forms of brutality or coercion? According to today's New York Times, there are five states--Connecticut, California, Oregon, Washington and Indiana, and apparently a dozen or more are contemplating joining them--that have statutes related specifically to possession of guns by people evincing those kinds of unacceptable tendencies and behaviors. The various laws take different forms and require differing versions of probable cause and enforcement authority, but what they all have in common is that they do not involve commitment...just confiscation of guns. While Florida may be, or may become, one of the states considering such a statute, it doesn't have such a statute now, and didn't have one before the murders in Parkland a little more than a week ago. To be fair, Connecticut has had its confiscation law in effect since 1999, before the mass murder of his mother and twenty six children and teachers in Newtown; some circumstances defy any law intended to preempt gun violence. Those circumstances include the irresponsibility of family members, such as in the Newtown case in which Adam Lanza's mother bought the guns he used to kill all those people, including herself. She also bought a gun safe, which she kept in Lanza's room...unlocked. And though the murderer in that case was mentally handicapped, the risk of mass murder apparently was not evinced prior to the events themselves.
Hence, though laws that constitute a constitutionally acceptable form of prior restraint relative to gun possession do apparently have some effects that serve to prevent suicides in particular, and probably mass murders as well if they are adequately used, they are not the exclusive answer. They are just a part of a complex set of steps that need to be taken in order to stem the trend in our society for disgruntled and deranged people to commit mass assassinations of people against whom they think they have grievances. At the core of the problem is the accessibility of what we might as well start calling weapons of mass destruction as we did when we went to war against the Iraqi mass murderer, Saddam Hussein. The problem is the same except for the matter of scale. In Hussein's case, there were no such weapons; there was just a tendentious political myth. But in Nikolas Cruz's case, 17 people in Parkland, Florida paid the ultimate price for the reality that a lunatic was possessed of an assault rifle...a real weapon of mass destruction. The resistance to banning them persists behind the demagoguery of sinister advocates like Wayne LaPierre of the NRA and other conservatives who casuistically conflate banning assault weapons with confiscation of all guns. But the reality is that the only guns for which control of access is being proposed are those that serve no purpose but to kill people in bunches. No one is proposing to take all guns from all people. Let me repeat: no one is proposing to take all guns from all people, no matter what Donald Trump and Wayne LaPierre have hallucinated and purveyed to their eager followers as a threat to liberty.
I find myself wondering what objection those conservative fabricators of a threat to freedom are thinking. It seems improbable that even they could object to disarming self-proclaimed portentous, gun-armed, potential assailants. Maybe we could save some wives and children if we passed universal laws allowing the police to confiscate the weapons of people who express an intention to do harm with them. How can that be a bad thing. And it is only one more step to at least require the age of prudence of purchasers of assault weapons, and even better, to ban them altogether.
The statistics may not prove anything about such a ban, though as I have pointed out before, the last ban did have positive effects according to credible sources. Research strongly suggests that if nothing else, an assault weapons ban--and in my opinion it should include automatic hand guns for which the owner doesn't have a license--can do no harm. So to any of you readers who might be legislators, maybe you can consider all that when a law comes up in your state's legislature. After all, 70% of us think you should.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment