Trayvon Martin was shot and killed
by a crime watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., in February 2012.
The death of the unarmed black teenager and the decision of the local police
not to bring charges against the volunteer set off a national outcry,
and led to a decision by the Justice Department in March to open an
investigation.
a meet-and-greet between Representative Gabrielle Giffords
and some of her constituents outside a Tucson supermarket
turned deadly when a gunman opened fire, killing six people
and wounding 14 others.
Ms. Giffords, a conservative Democrat representing Arizona's Eighth District,
was among those injured.
She remained in critical condition after she survived a single
gunshot to the head fired at point-blank range.
µOne of her staffers, three retirees, a federal judge and a
9-year-old girl born on 9/11 all died in the attack.
A suspect,
Jared Lee Loughner,
was taken into custody at the scene,
tackled by onlookers as he struggled to reload his
semiautomatic weapon.
Mr. Lougher, a troubled 22-year-old college dropout,
was charged with five federal counts on Jan. 9,
including the attempted assassination of a member of Congress.
CHRISTIAN LEGAL SOCIETY CHAPTER OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, HASTINGS COLLEGE
OF THE LAW, AKA HASTINGS CHRISTIAN FELLOW-
SHIP v. MARTINEZ ET AL.
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
No. 08–1371. Argued April 19, 2010—Decided June 28, 2010
Gun lobby victory
as every American's right to bear arms
upheld by ruling
March 26,
2012
11:55 pm
The New York Times
By DREW WESTEN
When
Gabrielle Giffords tendered her resignation from the House of Representatives to
Speaker John Boehner because she did not feel she could continue to serve at her
current level of disability, the entire House erupted in a rare moment of
bipartisan unity, supporting their brave colleague who had survived a bullet
through the brain at point-blank range.
That was not, however, the first bipartisan moment related to the attack on
Gabby Giffords, nor would it be the last. In 2004, Congress let the assault
weapons ban Bill Clinton had passed “sunset” despite overwhelming public
support. That law limited the number of rounds of ammunition a shooter could
fire before having to reload, and letting it die an untimely death allowed a
mentally ill young man in Tucson to purchase a handgun with a 33-round magazine.
Had the assault weapons ban remained in place, he may well have been able to
shoot the congresswoman, but he would not have been able to empty his clip,
killing 6 people and wounding 13 others, before being tackled to the ground.
That moment was followed by another bipartisan moment, when President Obama
delivered a moving speech on Jan. 12 at the scene of the carnage in Tucson. In
it, the president called on the nation to mourn not only the shooting of a
beloved member of Congress but the lives of the people who died at the hands of
Giffords’ assailant, including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge. But on
neither that national day of mourning nor on any day since has the president or
the members of Congress, who are either too frightened or too corrupted by the
National Rifle Association, honored Giffords or the memory of those who died in
that massacre in Tucson in the most appropriate way: with a return to common
sense, like reestablishing the assault weapons ban that might have saved their
lives. Later in January, Representative Carolyn McCarthy and Senator Frank
Lautenberg proposed legislation to outlaw high-capacity magazines; it has gone
nowhere.
The first President Bush, unlike his swaggering son (who advocated the demise of
a ban on assault weapons whose sole purpose is to hunt humans) showed political
courage by publicly quitting the N.R.A. in disgust in 1995 when it began
advocating ideas like its contention that citizens need military-style assault
weapons to protect themselves against our own government (members, for example,
of the National Guard). In colorful but paranoid language, it called law
enforcement officers “jack-booted government thugs,” prompting the elder Bush to
condemn the group for its disrespect for the law and those who defend it. Since
then, it has successfully advocated for increasingly radical laws. One of them,
of course, is Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which discourages de-escalation
of potential firefights in public with predictable results, like the shooting
death in Sanford, Fla., of Trayvon Martin.
Between the Giffords massacre and Martin’s death, we have seen more shootings
and more bipartisan moments. Around the anniversary of the Tucson massacre that
cut short the congressional career of an extraordinary woman — a woman I had
come to know personally and adore in her five years in Congress — came two more
mass killings. One occurred in Chardon High School in a small town in Ohio, as a
17-year-old opened fire on students with a Ruger .22-caliber semiautomatic with
a capacity of 10 rounds. Fortunately the alleged shooter, T.J. Lane, didn’t have
access to a gun with more firepower. About two weeks later, a man entered one of
the nation’s premiere medical centers, at the University of Pittsburgh, with two
semiautomatic handguns, and opened fire.
And in yet another show of bipartisanship, political leaders on both sides of
the aisle put on their silencers. If an assassination attempt on one of their
own did not move members of Congress to ask whether the N.R.A. has a little too
much sway in their chambers, a few dead and wounded teenagers, medical patients,
and their family members were not going to unlock their safeties. Most have
clearly made the risk assessment that they have more to fear from the N.R.A.
than they do from an occasional sniper. In the 2010 election cycle, the N.R.A.
spent over $7 million in independent expenditure campaigns for and against
specific candidates, and it has a remarkable record of success at taking out
candidates and elected officials with the misfortune of being caught in its
crosshairs.
Over a million Americans have lost their lives to gunfire since that awful
spring of 1968 when both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were killed
by assassins’ bullets. Last year alone guns killed or wounded another 100,000
Americans; roughly 30,000 of them died. Had that occurred elsewhere, we
would call it genocide. We don’t know exactly how many have been killed in the
fighting in Libya, Egypt and Syria, but our elected officials have had far less
trouble calling for the ouster of Middle Eastern leaders than the leadership of
the N.R.A. But it’s not just money that prevents common-sense action on gun
violence in America. Millions of Americans hunt, and a third of all households
in the United States own a gun. Guns were part of the frontier culture that
shaped the American psyche, and hunting has passed from generation to generation
in much of America. As a son of the South, I could give an intruder a run for
his money (although, like most people, I would do better to rely first on our
security service and the loud alarm a break-in sets off), and I put on my
thickest Southern accent and tease my soon-to-be teenage daughter that I’ll be
out on the front porch “cleaning my shotgun” when her first date arrives at the
door.
In so many cases, it’s a failure of our leaders — Republicans, who prey on the
fears of their constituents and don’t even bother anymore to hide the puppet
strings pulled by large corporations, and Democrats, who too frequently forget
that humans are supposed to be vertebrates (and hence to have a spine) — to
speak to Americans’ ambivalence about guns. Over the years in my capacity as a
strategic messaging consultant, I’ve tested a range of messages on guns, and the
messages that resonate with hunters and gun owners sound like this: “If you need
an M-16 to hunt deer, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a damned gun,” or “If
you’re hunting with an AK-47, you’re not bringing that meat home for dinner.”
The first things responsible hunters teach are never to point a gun anywhere but
up or down unless you mean to shoot, and where the safety is.
It’s no wonder that Democrats have backed off of even talking about guns since
Clinton signed the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban into law nearly two
decades ago. The last thing you want to be armed with as an advocate of common
sense are phrases like “gun control,” which makes a government-wary public and
law-abiding gun-owners uneasy — and susceptible to tendentious “slippery slope”
arguments about how “they want to take away your guns.” In contrast, everyone
but the lunatic fringe in America supports gun safety laws — such as eliminating
the gun-show loophole that allows the sale of military-grade weapons without
background checks, and has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans
as well as Mexicans, whose drug cartels find the loophole extremely helpful.
Democrats could steel their spines if they could find the point of intersection
between law-abiding gun owners and law-abiding citizens who may or may not own a
gun but want to keep their families safe. In national testing, we’ve found that
a simple, non-equivocating statement focusing on that point of intersection —
law-abiding — beats the toughest “they want to take away your guns” message we
can fire at it. It leads every demographic group other than those who stockpile
weapons to support common-sense gun safety laws. Offered a message that speaks
to their ambivalence, people readily recognize that a 33-round clip makes it
virtually impossible to tackle a shooter until he has had time to kill 15 or 16
people. They understand that allowing people to purchase military-style weapons
at gun shows without a background check renders gun safety laws meaningless. And
they find it incomprehensible that we have laws on the books that tie the hands
of law enforcement officials trying to track down where a gun was bought and
sold, and that we keep such sloppy records that criminals, people with a history
of commitment for care for serious mental illness, and people with active
restraining orders on them can slip by background checks even where they’re
required.
Beginning with a statement of principle both makes clear the speaker’s intent
and inoculates against all the slippery-slope arguments used by the N.R.A. and
the elected officials in its employ or fearful of its power: “My view on guns
reflects one simple principle: that our gun laws should guarantee the rights and
freedoms of all law-abiding Americans. That’s why I stand with the majority who
believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns to hunt or protect
their families. And that’s why I stand with the majority who believe they have
the right to send their kids to school and see them return home safely at
night.” Versions of a message containing that principle win by over a 2:1 margin
with independents, and they win in every region of the country, including in my
own backyard, in the red clay of Georgia.
This shouldn’t be an issue of left or right. Grocery stores in Tucson, where
Gabby Giffords was shot (and where my mother-in-law shops — she just happened to
be out of town that Saturday), are not hotbeds of “socialism.” I don’t know the
party affiliations of the fallen teenagers in Chardon or the staff members,
patients or families in Pittsburgh, but I suspect they ranged across the
political spectrum.
Guns don’t kill people. Silence does.
Drew Westen is
a professor of psychology at Emory University
and the author
of “The Political Brain:
The Role of
Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”
March 23,
2012
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES and HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
— President Obama did not mention race even as he addressed it on Friday,
instead letting his person and his words say it all: “If I had a son, he’d look
like Trayvon.”
Weighing in for the first time on the death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black
teenager shot and killed a month ago in Florida by a neighborhood watch
volunteer, Mr. Obama in powerfully personal terms deplored the “tragedy” and, as
a parent, expressed sympathy for the boy’s mother and father.
“I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about
this boy, I think about my own kids,” Mr. Obama said. “Every parent in America,”
he added, “should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we
investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together — federal,
state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.”
While speaking movingly from his perspective as the father of two girls, one a
teenager, Mr. Obama notably made no reference to the racial context that has
made the killing of Trayvon and the gunman’s claim of self-defense a rallying
point for African-Americans. Since Mr. Obama first began campaigning to be
“president of all the people,” as his advisers would put it when pressed on
racial issues, he has been generally reluctant to talk about race. And after his
historic election as the first black president, Mr. Obama learned the hard way
about the pitfalls of the chief executive opining on law enforcement matters
involving civil rights.
His remark at a news conference in the summer of 2009 that a white police
officer in Cambridge, Mass., had acted “stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard
law professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., at his home led to a national controversy
that ended with Mr. Obama holding a peacemaking “beer summit” with the two men
at the White House.
Until Friday, Mr. Obama had refrained from commenting on the death of Trayvon,
17, a high school student who was killed on the night of Feb. 26 in Sanford,
Fla., near Orlando. George Zimmerman, 28, the neighborhood watch volunteer, said
he fired at Trayvon in self-defense, although there is no apparent evidence that
the teenager, who held only a bag of Skittles candy and an iced tea, was doing
anything wrong.
But when a reporter asked about the case at a White House event introducing Jim
Yong Kim as his choice to be president of the World Bank, Mr. Obama, who
typically leaves such events ignoring the shouted questions of reporters, seemed
prepared.
“It was inevitable given the high-profile nature of this story that he would be
asked about it,” his press secretary, Jay Carney, said later. He added that Mr.
Obama “had thought about it and was prepared to answer that question when he got
it.”
Mr. Carney himself had refused for days to speak for Mr. Obama about Trayvon’s
death, and other advisers on Friday likewise declined to weigh in on the
thinking at the White House about the case and its repercussions. Mr. Obama’s
mostly white male inner circle has long been reluctant to talk for their boss
when the subject is race, given how personal it is for him. One aide, speaking
only on the grounds of anonymity, said that there was no internal debate about
how to respond to Trayvon’s death, but that Mr. Obama wanted to await the
Justice Department’s initial review of the case and the announcement this week
by his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., that the civil rights division
would investigate.
In his remarks, Mr. Obama endorsed the Justice Department investigation as well
as efforts by local and state agencies in Florida to examine the circumstances
of the shooting. Trayvon’s parents “are right to expect that all of us as
Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that
we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” Mr. Obama said.
The president indicated his caution in not reacting earlier was due to the
hazards of addressing an issue under inquiry. “I’m the head of the executive
branch and the attorney general reports to me so I’ve got to be careful about my
statements to make sure that we’re not impairing any investigation that’s taking
place right now,” he said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who organized a rally on Thursday
night in Florida protesting the handling of the case and has been working with
the Martin family, praised Mr. Obama’s comments and took issue with black
critics who say the president should have spoken out sooner.
“We’re trying to win a case, not just have the president make high-profile
statements,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview. “As one who’s been with the
family, the president making a statement before the Justice Department announced
an investigation could have been used by Zimmerman to say the White House was
pre-judging a legal case.”
Charles J. Ogletree, an African-American law professor at Harvard who taught Mr.
Obama there and remains a confidant, said there was no doubt the president had
been moved by Trayvon’s death. “Nothing is more frightening for a parent than
losing a child,” Professor Ogletree said. “I know personally that he felt this
pain, from the moment he was made aware of the case.” He added: “He has two
young daughters. This is personal.”
Mr. Carney said he could not say whether Mr. Obama planned to call Trayvon’s
parents, as some black activists have urged. Boyce D. Watkins, a Syracuse
University professor and the founder of the Your Black World coalition, said
Friday in a Twitter message, “If Trayvon’s mother were white, would Obama give
her a call?”
Dr. Watkins, in an interview, called Mr. Obama’s statement “a step in the right
direction,” but added that the president could “squash a great deal of the
criticism” with a call to the parents. And while applauding Mr. Obama’s comment
that his own son would look like Trayvon, Dr. Watkins said the president’s
remarks were characteristic of how Mr. Obama talks to black people.
“That’s what I would refer to as a standard political smoke signal that
President Obama sends through the back door to the black community,” Dr. Watkins
said. “He communicates to the black community in code language. That’s a subtle
way of saying, ‘I know this kid is black.’ ”
Mr. Obama’s comments appeared to prompt several of the Republicans campaigning
to run against him to weigh in against the shooting for the first time. Both
Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum said that based on what they knew, Florida’s
“Stand Your Ground” self-defense law should not apply in Mr. Zimmerman’s case.
Speaking publicly for the first time on Friday evening, Craig A. Sonner, Mr.
Zimmerman’s lawyer, said on CNN that he would not use the Stand Your Ground
defense should his client be charged in the shooting. He said he would use
self-defense.
Mr. Santorum, campaigning at a shooting range in Louisiana, which holds a
presidential primary on Saturday, called the decision of local officials not to
immediately prosecute Mr. Zimmerman “another chilling example of horrible
decisions made by people in this process.” Mitt Romney, the Republican
front-runner, told reporters in Louisiana that the shooting was “a terrible
tragedy, unnecessary, uncalled for and inexplicable at this point.”
Richard A.
Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from West Monroe and Shreveport, La.
November
26, 2011
The New York Times
By NATASHA SINGER
SCARBOROUGH, Me.
LINED up in a gun rack beneath mounted deer heads is a Bushmaster Carbon 15, a
matte-black semiautomatic rifle that looks as if it belongs to a SWAT team. On
another rack rests a Teflon-coated Prairie Panther from DPMS Firearms, a
supplier to the United States Border Patrol and security agencies in Iraq. On a
third is a Remington 750 Woodsmaster, a popular hunting rifle.
The variety of rifles and shotguns on sale here at Cabela’s, the national
sporting goods chain, is a testament to America’s enduring gun culture. But, to
a surprising degree, it is also a testament to something else: Wall Street
deal-making.
In recent years, many top-selling brands — including the 195-year-old Remington
Arms, as well as Bushmaster Firearms and DPMS, leading makers of military-style
semiautomatics — have quietly passed into the hands of a single private company.
It is called the Freedom Group — and it is the most powerful and mysterious
force in the American commercial gun industry today.
Never heard of it?
You’re not alone. Even within gun circles, the Freedom Group is something of an
enigma. Its rise has been so swift that it has become the subject of wild
speculation and grassy-knoll conspiracy theories. In the realm of consumer
rifles and shotguns — long guns, in the trade — it is unrivaled in its size and
reach. By its own count, the Freedom Group sold 1.2 million long guns and 2.6
billion rounds of ammunition in the 12 months ended March 2010, the most recent
year for which figures are publicly available.
Behind this giant is Cerberus Capital Management, the private investment company
that first came to widespread attention when it acquired Chrysler in 2007.
(Chrysler later had to be rescued by taxpayers). With far less fanfare,
Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, has been buying big names in guns and ammo.
From its headquarters on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, Cerberus has
assembled a remarkable arsenal. It began with Bushmaster, which until recently
was based here in Maine. Unlike military counterparts like automatic M-16’s,
rifles like those from Bushmaster don’t spray bullets with one trigger pull.
But, with gas-powered mechanisms, semiautomatics can fire rapid follow-up shots
as fast as the trigger can be squeezed. They are often called “black guns”
because of their color. The police tied a Bushmaster XM15 rifle to shootings in
the Washington sniper case in 2002.
After Bushmaster, the Freedom Group moved in on Remington, which traces its
history to the days of flintlocks and today is supplying M24 sniper rifles to
the government of Afghanistan and making handguns for the first time in decades.
The group has also acquired Marlin Firearms, which turned out a special model
for Annie Oakley, as well as Dakota Arms, a maker of high-end big-game rifles.
It has bought DPMS Firearms, another maker of semiautomatic, military-style
rifles, as well as manufacturers of ammunition and tactical clothing.
“We believe our scale and product breadth are unmatched within the industry,”
the Freedom Group said in a filing last year with the Securities and Exchange
Commission.
Here at Cabela’s, Mark Eliason, the vice president for sales and marketing at
Windham Weaponry, a new competitor of Bushmaster that was established by
Bushmaster’s founder, surveys the racks. He estimates that roughly 20 percent of
the long guns for sale here are made by Freedom Group companies. In the aisles,
he examines shelf upon shelf of ammunition. About a third of it comes from the
Freedom Group, he says.
“That’s a very large presence,” Mr. Eliason says.
So large, in fact, that rumors about the Freedom Group — what it is, and who is
behind it — have been circulating in the blogosphere. Some gun enthusiasts have
claimed that the power behind the company is actually George Soros, the
hedge-fund billionaire and liberal activist. Mr. Soros, these people have
warned, is buying American gun companies so he can dismantle the industry,
Second Amendment be damned.
The chatter grew so loud that the National Rifle Association issued a statement
in October denying the rumors.
“N.R.A. has had contact with officials from Cerberus and Freedom Group for some
time,” the N.R.A. assured its members. “The owners and investors involved are
strong supporters of the Second Amendment and are avid hunters and shooters.”
Mr. Soros isn’t behind the Freedom Group, but, ultimately, another financier is:
Stephen A. Feinberg, the chief executive of Cerberus.
CERBERUS is
part of one of the signature Wall Street businesses of the past decade: private
equity. Buyout kings like Mr. Feinberg, 51, try to acquire undervalued
companies, often with borrowed money, fix them up and either take them public or
sell at a profit to someone else.
Before the financial crisis of 2008, scores of well-known American companies,
from Chrysler down, passed into the hands of private-equity firms. For the
financiers, the rewards were often enormous. But some companies that they
acquired later ran into trouble, in part because they were burdened with debt
from the takeovers.
Mr. Feinberg, a Princeton graduate who began his Wall Street career at Drexel
Burnham Lambert, the junk bond powerhouse of Michael R. Milken fame, got into
private equity in 1992. That year, he and William L. Richter founded Cerberus,
which takes its name from the three-headed dog in Greek mythology that guards
the gates of Hades.
Today, Mr. Feinberg presides over a private empire that rivals some of the
mightiest public companies in the land. Cerberus manages more than $20 billion
in capital. Together, the companies it owns generate annual revenue of about $40
billion — more than either Amazon or Coca-Cola last year.
Why Cerberus went after gun companies isn’t clear. Many private investment firms
shy away from such industries to avoid scaring off big investors like pension
funds.
Yet, in many ways, the move is classic Cerberus. Mr. Feinberg has a history of
investing in companies that other people may not want, but that Cerberus
believes it can turn around. When Cerberus embarked on its acquisition spree in
guns, it essentially had the field to itself.
“There’s much less competition for buying these companies,” says Steven N.
Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a
private equity expert. “They must have decided there is an opportunity to make
money by investing in the firearms industry and trying to build a big company.”
Whatever the reason, Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, is now a major player.
It may come as a surprise to many people, given the prominence of guns in
American culture, the national conversation and politics, but the commercial
firearms market in the United States is actually relatively small. Sales of guns
and ammunition total about $4 billion annually, according to estimates from the
National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group.
True, the N.R.A. estimates that about 70 million to 80 million Americans
collectively own 300 million firearms. But how many of those people buy new guns
regularly? For companies like the Freedom Group, the challenge is to expand the
market. These days, more women are involved in target shooting, according to
participation reports from the National Sporting Goods Association. But,
analysts say, many young men who in the past might have taken up game hunting
are now more interested in other pursuits like online gaming.
So, to keep growing, the Freedom Group has expanded its sales staff in the
United States and increased its business internationally. It has sold weapons to
the governments of Afghanistan, Thailand, Mexico and Malaysia, among others, and
obtained new business from the United States Army, including a contract worth up
to $28.2 million, to upgrade the M24 sniper weapon system.
Cerberus brings some connections to the table. The longtime chairman of its
global investments group is Dan Quayle, the former vice president. The Freedom
Group, meantime, has added two retired generals to its board. One is George A.
Joulwan, who retired from the Army after serving as Supreme Allied Commander of
Europe. The other is Michael W. Hagee, formerly commandant of the Marine Corps.
Jessica Kallam, a spokeswoman at the Freedom Group, said executives there
declined to comment for this article. Timothy Price, a managing director of
Cerberus, also declined to comment.
THE old Bushmaster factory in Windham, Me., doesn’t look like much. With a
facade of brick and gray aluminum siding, it squats in an unassuming office park
on the Roosevelt Trail.
But Cerberus representatives who arrived here in 2005 clearly saw potential.
Inside, several dozen gunsmiths, working by hand, were fitting together 6,000 to
7,000 weapons a month. At the time, Bushmaster was thriving, though it had been
stung by bad publicity stemming from the Beltway sniper shootings. (In a 2004
settlement with victims of the shootings and their families, Bull’s Eye Shooter
Supply, the store where the gun was acquired, agreed to pay $2 million, and
Bushmaster agreed to pay $568,000, but they did not admit liability.)
Richard Dyke, then the principal owner and chairman of Bushmaster, welcomed the
visitors from New York. A blunt-spoken Korean War veteran and Republican
fund-raiser, he had made a fortune himself by buying companies in trouble,
including one that made poker chips. In 1976, he bought a bankrupt gun maker in
Bangor, Me., for $241,000, moved it to Windham and later changed its name to
Bushmaster.
The company that Mr. Dyke bought had patents on semiautomatic weapons designed
for the military and police. But he was drawn to the nascent market in
military-style firearms for civilians. He saw as his customers precision target
shooters, including current and former military personnel, police officers and,
well, military wannabes, he says.
A Bushmaster Carbon 15 .223 semiautomatic is about three feet long. But,
weighing in at just under six pounds, it is surprisingly easy to maneuver, even
for a novice. It doesn’t have to be recocked after it’s fired: you just squeeze
the trigger over and over.
“At 25 meters, if you are a decent shot,” Mr. Dyke says, “you can put it into a
bull’s-eye that is the size of a quarter.”
The Bushmaster brand began to grow in the 1980s after the company started
supplying its semiautomatics to police departments. It won a much larger
consumer following in the 1990s, after it landed several small military
contracts.
Bushmaster was among the first to sell ordinary people on weapons that look and
feel like the ones carried by soldiers. Today many gun makers have embraced
military-style weapons, a major but controversial source of growth for the
commercial gun market, says Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst at the Violence
Policy Center, a research group that backs gun control.
“It’s clear that the militarized stuff is the stuff that sells and is defining
the industry,” Mr. Diaz says.
Mr. Dyke says he’s not sure why Bushmaster caught the eye of Cerberus. Whatever
the case, when Cerberus came calling, Mr. Dyke, then past 70, was ready to sell.
At the time, Bushmaster had $85 million in annual sales and about several
million dollars in debt, he says. In April 2006, he sold the company to Cerberus
for about $76 million, he says, and Cerberus rented the Bushmaster plant here
for five years.
The next year, Cerberus formed the Freedom Group.
Now Bushmaster is gone from Maine. Earlier this year, Mr. Dyke says, the Freedom
Group notified him it was closing Bushmaster’s operation in the state and moving
it to a bigger plant owned by Remington, a typical consolidation play for a
private investment firm looking to cut costs and increase efficiency. Remington,
for its part, announced earlier this year that it was expanding its
manufacturing capacity and hiring new employees to make Bushmasters.
Several months ago, Mr. Dyke started a new company, Windham Weaponry, at the old
Bushmaster site and has rehired most of his former employees. But he’s not
planning to go head-to-head with the Freedom Group.
“It’s the big gorilla in the room,” he says, adding: “We don’t have to do $100
million. We’d have hopes of doing $20 million.”
REMINGTON
has been producing guns since 1816, when, according to lore, a young man named
Eliphalet Remington made a flintlock rifle in his father’s forge in Ilion Gulch,
in upstate New York. By the 1870s, the brand was so popular that the company
diversified into typewriters.
In 2007, the Freedom Group swooped in and bought Remington for $370 million,
including $252 million in assumed debt. In one stroke, the Freedom Group gained
one of the most famous names in American firearms, the largest domestic maker of
shotguns and rifles and a major manufacturer of ammunition.
“That caused a lot of stir in the industry,” says Dean J. Lockwood, a weapons
systems analyst at Forecast International, a market research firm.
Next, the Freedom Group in rapid succession went after other firearms companies:
DPMS; Marlin Firearms, a classic maker that came with two niche shotgun brands,
Harrington & Richardson and L. C. Smith; and Dakota Arms. The Freedom Group also
bought S&K industries, which supplies wood and laminate for gun stocks, as well
as the Advanced Armament Corporation, which makes silencers. It acquired Barnes
Bullets, which makes copper-jacketed bullets popular with precision shooters and
police departments.
The more the company diversifies its portfolio, analysts say, the more it has to
offer to firearms distributors and leading retailers like Wal-Mart and Cabela’s.
“You can see Freedom Group constantly expanding its manufacturing base,” Mr.
Lockwood says. “You don’t want to be a one-trick pony. They are trying to get as
far into the market as they can.” What is left? The Freedom Group does not own
the Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation or Sturm, Ruger, both publicly traded.
Nor does it own the Colt’s Manufacturing, which is privately owned.
Cerberus also does not own Winchester Repeating Arms or Browning, both part of
the Herstal Group of Belgium.
Still, the Freedom Group has ingested so many well-known brands so quickly that
some gun owners are uneasy about what it might do next. Two years ago, a
Cerberus managing director, George Kollitides, ran for the board of the N.R.A.
Despite an endorsement from Remington, and the fact that he was a director of
the Freedom Group and Remington, he lost. His campaign didn’t sit well with some
gun bloggers, who viewed him as an industry interloper.
Andrew Arulanandam, the N.R.A.’s director for public affairs, declined to
speculate about why Mr. Kollitides lost. “It’s a great question to ask our four
million members,” he said.
THE
challenges for gun makers in America go far beyond those faced by many other
companies. As in many industries, sales tend to rise and fall with the economy.
But firearms makers must also grapple with the vicissitudes of politics and
public opinion.
Many Americans are solidly behind the right to own guns. In a Gallup poll
conducted in October, only 43 percent of respondents said they supported
stricter gun laws — an all-time low since the company first asked the question
in 1990. And 47 percent reported that there was a gun in their home or on their
property, the highest level of self-reported gun ownership since 1993, according
to the poll, which canvassed about 1,000 adults in early October.
Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed a “right to carry” bill
that would require states to recognize one another’s permits to carry concealed
weapons. If the bill passes the Senate, people in states with weaker
concealed-weapon regulations would be able to carry concealed handguns into
states like California, which requires extensive background checks.
The development would be good news for handgun makers like Colt and Smith &
Wesson, but wouldn’t be much help to the Freedom Group, which focuses on long
guns.
That, however, may be changing. Not long ago, Remington introduced the Remington
1911 R1, its first pistol in decades. Industry analysts speculate that the
Freedom Group might next go shopping for a handgun maker to expand its presence
in that segment of the market.
“At the right price,” says Jim Barrett, an analyst at CL King who covers
firearms companies, “it would be logical for them to be interested in one of the
premier handgun manufacturers.”
But, in an industry with few independent players left, the big question is this:
What is Freedom Group’s long-term strategy? Because the company is private,
outsiders can only speculate.
The Freedom Group had planned to go public, but backed away earlier this year
when the financial markets turned turbulent. As of the end of September, the
company had nearly half a billion dollars in debt, according to a third-quarter
earnings report available on the Freedom Group’s Web site. That includes about
$225 million in debt that the company raised last year to pay itself a special
dividend used to buy back preferred stock from Cerberus, according to a company
prospectus filed with the S.E.C.
Some analysts say tactical rifles have peaked, that the market has topped out,
and that small, concealable handguns are the way forward for the near future.
And yet, after a tough 2010, gun sales at the Freedom Group were up 5.6 percent
during the first nine months of this year, although the company reported a net
loss of $6.3 million for the same time period, according to the company’s most
recent earnings report.
Meantime, the Freedom Group, despite its place atop the industry, appears to be
operating without an official chief executive of its own. Its most recent
C.E.O., Theodore H. Torbeck, resigned in September 2010 and no replacement has
been named. For the moment, a temporary office of the chief executive, led by
Robert L. Nardelli, the Cerberus executive who oversaw Chrysler, is helping to
lead the company
“It’s a sensible strategy to roll up things,” says Gautam Khanna, an aerospace
and military industry analyst at Cowen & Company. The issue is whether the
Freedom Group, and Cerberus, can persuade more Americans to buy more guns.
PULASKI,
Va. — In May 2009, Sam French hit bottom, once again. A relative found him face
down in his carport “talking gibberish,” according to court records. He later
told medical personnel that he had been conversing with a bear in his backyard
and hearing voices. His family figured he had gone off his medication for
bipolar disorder, and a judge ordered him involuntarily committed — the fourth
time in five years he had been hospitalized by court order.
When Mr. French’s daughter discovered that her father’s commitment meant it was
illegal for him to have firearms, she and her husband removed his cache of 15
long guns and three handguns, and kept them after Mr. French was released in
January 2010 on a new regime of mood-stabilizing drugs.
Ten months later, he appeared in General District Court — the body that handles
small claims and traffic infractions — to ask a judge to restore his gun rights.
After a brief hearing, in which Mr. French’s lengthy history of relapses never
came up, he walked out with an order reinstating his right to possess firearms.
The next day, Mr. French retrieved his guns.
“The judge didn’t ask me a whole lot,” said Mr. French, now 62. “He just said:
‘How was I doing? Was I taking my medicine like I was supposed to?’ I said,
‘Yes, sir.’ ”
Across the country, states are increasingly allowing people like Mr. French, who
lost their firearm rights because of mental illness, to petition to have them
restored.
A handful of states have had such restoration laws on their books for some time,
but with little notice, more than 20 states have passed similar measures since
2008. This surge can be traced to a law passed by Congress after the 2007
massacre at Virginia Tech that was actually meant to make it harder for people
with mental illness to get guns.
As a condition of its support for the measure, the National Rifle Association
extracted a concession: the inclusion of a mechanism for restoring firearms
rights to those who lost them for mental health reasons.
The intent of these state laws is to enable people to regain the right to buy
and possess firearms if it is determined that they are not a threat to public
safety. But an examination of restoration procedures across the country, along
with dozens of cases, shows that the process for making that determination is
governed in many places by vague standards and few specific requirements.
States have mostly entrusted these decisions to judges, who are often
ill-equipped to conduct investigations from the bench. Many seemed willing to
simply give petitioners the benefit of the doubt. The results often seem
haphazard.
At least a few hundred people with histories of mental health issues already get
their gun rights back each year. The number promises to grow, since most of the
new state laws are just beginning to take effect. And in November, the
Department of Veterans Affairs responded to the federal legislation by
establishing a rights restoration process for more than 100,000 veterans who
have lost their gun privileges after being designated mentally incompetent by
the agency.
The issue goes to the heart of the nation’s complicated relationship with guns,
testing the delicate balance between the need to safeguard the public and the
dictates of what the Supreme Court has proclaimed to be a fundamental
constitutional right.
Mike Fleenor, the commonwealth’s attorney here in Pulaski County, whose office
opposed restoring Mr. French’s rights, worries that the balance is being thrown
off by weak standards.
“I think that reasonable people can disagree about issues of the Second
Amendment and gun control and things like that, but I don’t believe that any
reasonable person believes that a mentally ill person needs a firearm,” Mr.
Fleenor said. “The public has a right to be safe in their community.”
In case after case examined by The New York Times, judges made decisions without
important information about an applicant’s mental health.
Larry Lamb, a Vietnam veteran from San Diego who has suffered from depression
and post-traumatic stress disorder, lost his gun rights and his cache of weapons
in 2006 when he was involuntarily hospitalized after his dog’s death left him
suicidal. A psychiatrist who examined Mr. Lamb wrote that he “is extremely
paranoid with a full-blown P.T.S.D., believing that he is still at war in the
active military and he is a personal bodyguard of the president and many
senators.”
In early 2008, a Superior Court judge in San Diego granted Mr. Lamb’s petition
to have his firearms rights restored, after his psychologist testified that he
was not dangerous. But the judge, without access to Mr. Lamb’s full medical
history, was unaware of a crucial fact: the local Veterans Affairs hospital had
placed a “red flag” on Mr. Lamb, barring him from the hospital grounds because
he was perceived to be a threat to personnel there.
The spread of these restoration laws is especially striking against the backdrop
of the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and others in
Tucson early this year by a suspect who has been declared mentally incompetent
to stand trial — a case that spotlighted anew the link between mental illness
and violence.
Supporters of gun rights and mental health advocates point out that a vast
majority of people with mental illness are not violent. At the same time,
though, a variety of studies have found that people with serious mental illness
are more prone to violence than the general population.
The difficulty of assessing risk emerges in places like Los Angeles, where the
Superior Court conducts a relatively thorough review of firearms rights
requests. The Times found multiple instances over the last decade in which
people who won back their gun rights went on to be charged with or convicted of
violent or gun-related crimes, including spousal battery, negligent discharge of
a firearm or assault with a firearm.
Then there are the nightmare cases — like that of Ryan Anthony, 35, a former
Emmy Award-winning animator at Disney who was involuntarily hospitalized in
mid-2001 after losing his job and separating from his wife. Mr. Anthony filed a
petition to get back his gun rights in early 2002, telling a court-appointed
psychiatrist that he wanted to go skeet shooting.
A few weeks after the court granted his petition, Mr. Anthony bought a Remington
870 12-gauge shotgun, holed up in a Holiday Inn in Burbank, Calif., and
committed suicide.
An N.R.A.
Victory
The galvanizing revelation for gun-control advocates after the Virginia Tech
massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history, was that the gunman,
Seung-Hui Cho, should never have been able to buy the guns he used in the
rampage.
Two years earlier, a special justice declared Mr. Cho “an imminent danger to
himself as a result of mental illness” and ordered him to outpatient treatment.
Under federal law, anyone involuntarily committed or adjudicated a “mental
defective” is barred from buying or possessing firearms. But the prohibition is
often toothless because many states do not share their mental health records
with the F.B.I.’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
Mr. Cho’s case offered Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, a
chance to advance a stalled bill that she had sponsored several years earlier to
improve reporting by states to the F.B.I. database.
Ms. McCarthy’s political career and commitment to gun control was born out of
tragedy. In 1993, a deranged gunman opened fire on a commuter train on Long
Island, killing six people, including her husband, and gravely injuring her son.
After more than a decade working on the issue in Congress, however, she had
little to show for it.
Ms. McCarthy said she was wiser after years of setbacks. “I don’t believe in
introducing legislation that won’t go anywhere,” she said.
She joined forces with Representative John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and
former N.R.A. board member, who acted as a liaison with the gun lobby. The
N.R.A. had long been interested in gun-rights restoration. It also wanted to
help tens of thousands of veterans who lost their rights after being designated
mentally incompetent and unable to handle their finances by the Department of
Veterans Affairs.
“We don’t want to treat our soldiers as potential criminals because they’re
struggling with the aftermath of dealing with their service,” said Chris Cox,
the association’s chief lobbyist.
The gun lobby secured a broad provision in the legislation. The new law made
money available to states to help improve their record sharing, but the
provision pushed by the N.R.A. made it a prerequisite for states to establish a
“relief from disability” program for people with histories of mental health
issues to apply for the restoration of gun rights. The Veterans Affairs
Department and other federal agencies were required to do the same.
Gun-control groups attacked the provisions. “You make one bad judgment, and you
could have another Virginia Tech on your hands,” Kristen Rand, legislative
director for the Violence Policy Center, said in an interview.
But the most prominent gun-control organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent
Gun Violence, ultimately supported the bill. “She felt if she didn’t do this, it
wasn’t going to proceed,” Paul Helmke, the group’s president, said of Ms.
McCarthy. “An imperfect bill is better than no bill.”
Ms. McCarthy said her background as a nurse made her amenable to restoring
someone’s rights, “if they could prove they are no longer mentally ill.”
After the bill became law in 2008, the N.R.A. began lobbying state lawmakers to
keep requirements for petitioners to a minimum.
In Idaho, for example, a committee of law enforcement and mental health
officials proposed requiring courts to make findings by “clear and convincing”
evidence and mandating that petitioners have a recent mental health evaluation.
But without the N.R.A.’s imprimatur, the legislation went nowhere.
Instead, a Republican state representative, Raúl R. Labrador, who is now a
congressman, worked with the N.R.A. to draft a bill, passed last year, that
dropped the requirement for a mental health evaluation and lowered the standard
of proof to a “preponderance of evidence.”
A few states have set stricter standards. In New York, decisions are made by
mental health officials, and applicants must submit a long list of documents,
including five years’ worth of medical records and records of psychiatric and
substance abuse treatment going back 20 years. State officials can also require
applicants to undergo clinical evaluations and risk assessments.
So far, there has been only a trickle of petitions in states with new
restoration laws. The statutes are not yet well known, and federal authorities
have yet to certify many of the state programs, making them fully operational
under federal law.
But the demand will almost certainly grow, given the experience of states with
longer-standing restoration statutes. In California, for instance, judges
restored gun rights to 180 people in 2010. At the federal level, the Veterans
Affairs Department has already received more than 100 applications, of which 12
were processed and one was granted.
As for the original aim of Ms. McCarthy’s legislation, the reporting of mental
health records by states to the F.B.I. database remains woeful. The reasons
vary, including privacy laws, technological challenges and inattention from
state officials.
But one significant hurdle has been that only a handful of states have received
the federal money to improve their reporting capabilities. Officials with the
Bureau of Justice Statistics indicated that while 22 states applied for grants
in 2009 and 2010, only nine have gotten financing. Most of those that did not
receive grants were rejected because they did not have certified restoration
programs in place.
One
State’s Experience
Lawmakers in Virginia, the scene of Mr. Cho’s rampage, were among the first to
respond to the federal legislation by amending the state’s existing restoration
statute to reflect the new law. To restore firearms rights, judges must find
that the petitioner “will not likely act in a manner dangerous to public safety”
and that “the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public
interest.” There are few specific standards or guidelines beyond that.
In 2010, judges in Virginia considered roughly 40 restoration applications and
granted firearms rights under state law to 25 people — 14 who had been
involuntarily committed, and 11 who had been the subjects of temporary detention
orders and were voluntarily admitted for mental health treatment, according to
figures from the Virginia Supreme Court and the State Police. In 2009, the
courts restored rights to 21 people.
There is no central repository for cases heard around Virginia, but to get a
picture of how the process works in one state, The Times obtained dozens of
petitions and judges’ orders, mainly from 2009 and 2010, along with supporting
documentation, and interviewed petitioners, lawyers and judges. The hearings
were often relatively brief, sometimes perfunctory, and judges had wide latitude
in handling the petitions.
Teresa Hall, who had moved to Idaho, said she simply wrote a letter to Hampton
General District Court explaining that her commitment several years earlier
occurred when she was experiencing marital difficulties. To her shock, she got a
judge’s order granting her petition several days later in the mail.
“I was surprised it was that easy,” Ms. Hall said.
Some judges insisted on seeing a doctor’s note, but others did not.
In a typical case, Joshua St. Clair, who served in Iraq with the National Guard,
got his gun rights back last year. About six months earlier, Mr. St. Clair, now
22, had heard a rattling at his gate. He said he “kind of blacked out” and the
next thing he knew, he was pointing his M-4 assault rifle at his friend’s chest.
That led to a temporary detention order, treatment for post-traumatic stress
disorder and loss of his firearms rights.
He took a note from his psychiatrist to his restoration hearing, which he said
“lasted maybe about five minutes,” but he said the judge did not even ask to see
it. The judge asked Mr. St. Clair’s father a few questions and asked Mr. St.
Clair himself whether he thought he should have his rights restored. He said,
“Of course.”
Often the doctors’ recommendations came from general practitioners, not mental
health professionals. The notes tended to be short, often just a few sentences.
In many cases, the hospitalizations occurred just a few months, or even weeks,
earlier.
Bobby Bullion, 37, got his gun rights back about four months after he left a
note for his wife and son that indicated he was considering suicide — his wife
had told him she was divorcing him — and the police found him in his car with
two loaded weapons. Mr. Bullion presented the judge with a letter from his
psychiatrist endorsing the restoration.
Oran Greenway, 68, had his rights restored in August, just two months after he
was involuntarily committed. The judge’s restoration shocked Mr. Greenway’s
relatives, who said they had been worried for years about his mental stability.
In an interview, he said he started taking Lexapro for depression several years
ago. In 2005, he slammed a large branch on a neighbor’s head during an argument,
resulting in a conviction for assault and battery.
“Knowing what I know about Oran, I wouldn’t let Oran have a gun,” said Elizabeth
Dequino, a cousin who lives up the road.
Even when a court-ordered commitment occurred years ago, the wisdom of restoring
certain petitioners’ firearms rights was open to question. David Neal Moon, 63,
was involuntarily committed in 1995 after his struggles with schizoaffective
bipolar disorder got so bad that he had threatened to commit suicide and was
walking in circles around his house with a MAK-90 assault rifle, as if on guard
duty, according to medical and court records and an interview with Cynthia
Allison, who is now his ex-wife.
A psychiatrist’s report described him threatening to “bash in the face of his
wife” and ranting about getting his guns so he could “shoot everybody.” It also
mentions a violent hair-pulling episode with his wife.
He had not been committed since, but he had continued to struggle with his
illness and was bad about taking his medication, Ms. Allison said.
In an interview, Mr. Moon insisted he took his medication and was not mentally
ill. Yet he alluded to his phone being tapped by the State Police and “by maybe
the Pentagon.”
His firearms hearing in early 2009 in Amherst General District Court, where Mr.
Moon showed up in military camouflage, lasted “about eight minutes,” said Mr.
Moon’s lawyer, Gregory Smith, adding that he did not recall presenting any
recent medical evaluation.
Just over a month later, another judge granted Ms. Allison a protective order
against her husband. The pair had split up, and Mr. Moon had been making veiled
threats by phone and telling his children about demons in the walls, according
to her court affidavit.
“The judge just sat there and listened to him talk,” Ms. Allison said. “I didn’t
even say anything. If you listened to him talk, you could tell he’s as crazy as
a bedbug.”
Among those whose applications were denied, many were turned down for technical
reasons, like filing in the wrong jurisdiction or failing to show up for a
hearing.
In others cases — like one last year in Lynchburg in which the petitioner,
Undreas Smith, submitted a letter explaining he had been struggling with recent
deaths in his family — the judge ruled against the petitioner because he failed
to provide documentation from a mental health provider.
In the case of James Tuckson Jr. of Harrisonburg, who was involuntarily
committed in 2006 and applied in October to get back his gun rights, prosecutors
said his multiple arrests probably played a significant role in the judge’s
decision to deny Mr. Tuckson’s petition.
Presented with The Times’s findings, Richard Bonnie, the chairman of the
Virginia Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, which was formed after the
Virginia Tech shootings, expressed concerns about the restoration process,
particularly the vagueness of the statute. Mr. Bonnie said the panel would begin
collecting information on the petitions on a monthly basis to better evaluate
how they were being handled.
“There is an ambiguity in the statute that we need to look at,” he said.
‘A Hole
in the Process’
When Sam French, the man with bipolar disorder whose daughter removed his guns,
appeared late last year in Pulaski General District Court, he presented his
recent medical records. Progress notes over several months showed that his
bipolar disorder and substance abuse were in “remission.”
Nevertheless, Bobby Lilly, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, opposed the
petition, partly because Mr. French’s latest update indicated he had expressed
interest in lowering the dosage of his medication. Mr. French’s two most recent
hospitalizations had come after he went off his medication.
Mr. Lilly was also worried because it had been less than a year since his
release. “We didn’t have a demonstrated track record of being able to comply
with whatever the mental health provider’s directives were,” Mr. Lilly said.
In fact, a few months later, in March, a judge at the circuit level — the higher
court in Virginia — denied Mr. French’s application for a concealed weapons
permit because a five-year wait after a psychiatric commitment is required for
such a permit.
But there is no waiting period for the restoration of basic gun rights.
Mr. French’s case fell to Judge Royce Glenwood Lookabill, a genial presence on
the bench since 2006. Judge Lookabill said he quizzed Mr. French about whether
he had had any other episodes and whether he was taking his prescribed drugs.
“I was satisfied that he wasn’t a danger — again, subject to him taking his
medication,” Judge Lookabill said in an interview.
The judge acknowledged, however, that he might have made a different decision
had he been aware of Mr. French’s previous commitments, including one that came
after he was arrested for public drunkenness and later allegedly assaulted two
police officers. (The assault charges were dropped.) No one had checked a state
database for his commitment history.
“It’s a hole in the process,” said Mr. Lilly, who added that his office had only
limited access to such information.
Judge Lookabill suggested that the process belonged in a higher court and should
be made more adversarial. “I would feel a lot more comfortable,” he said, “if
there were more safeguards.”
An
Increased Risk
Most people with mental health issues, of course, will never be violent. But
there is widespread consensus among scientists that the increased risk of
violence among those with a serious mental illness — schizophrenia, major
depression or bipolar disorder — is statistically significant. That risk rises
when substance abuse, which is more prevalent among people with mental illness,
is also present.
One frequently cited study, led by Jeffrey W. Swanson, an expert on mental
health and violence who is now at Duke University, showed that 33 percent of
people with a serious mental illness reported past violent behavior, compared
with 15 percent of people without a major mental disorder. Violent behavior was
defined as including acts ranging from taking part in more than one fistfight as
an adult to using a weapon in a fight. The rate for those with substance abuse
issues but without a serious mental illness was 55 percent. The highest rate, 64
percent, was exhibited by people with major mental disorders and substance abuse
issues.
Other studies have concluded that additional factors significantly increase the
risk of violence among people with mental illness, including exposure to
violence and being a victim of violence.
But taking these data and applying them to individuals is profoundly difficult.
Scientists have concluded that it is most accurate to augment clinical judgments
with an “actuarial” approach, in which variables like psychiatric diagnosis,
history of violence and anger control are plugged into a risk assessment model.
The models categorize people into higher and lower risk groups. But many
clinicians are unfamiliar with the technique. Indeed, none of the doctors who
wrote letters on behalf of their patients in cases The Times reviewed appeared
to utilize the approach.
Doctors’ declarations clearly influenced judges. But most wrote their letters at
the request of their patients, which Randy Otto, a former president of the
American Board of Forensic Psychology and an associate professor at the
University of South Florida, said can be problematic.
“They’re more subject to pressure from their patients to offer opinions that
will help the patients get what they want,” Dr. Otto said.
He said many doctors, particularly those not in the mental health field, are
probably not steeped in the most important clues to future violence. Even
psychologists and psychiatrists, relying on their clinical judgment alone, are
extremely unreliable in predicting violence, studies have shown.
“Unstructured clinical judgments, just judgments of mental health professionals
about how risky someone is,” Dr. Otto said, “are probably the least reliable and
the least accurate.”
Weighing
the Threats
The difficulties of predicting violence are particularly striking in Los Angeles
County, where the Superior Court has a relatively rigorous process for
determining whether to restore gun rights.
In California, anyone placed on a 72-hour or 14-day psychiatric hold and
determined to be a danger to themselves or others loses gun rights for five
years. But upon discharge, the person can apply to have these prohibitions
lifted. Applicants in Los Angeles County are required to provide records from
all involuntary hospitalizations, which are checked against a list provided by
the State Department of Justice. They must also be examined by a court-appointed
psychiatrist, who can call friends or relatives to gather more information.
Under the statute, the burden is on the district attorney to establish that the
petitioner “would not be likely to use firearms in a safe and lawful manner.”
Over all, 1,579 petitions have been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court since
2000. More than 1,000 were dismissed, usually because applicants did not furnish
the required documentation or failed to show up. Of those who actually got
hearings, 381 won their cases.
“Dealing with somebody who suffers from severe mental illness and mixing that
with firearms, you really have to cross the t’s and dot the i’s,” said Richard
J. Vagnozzi, a deputy district attorney who handles these cases. Mr. Vagnozzi
said the process “isn’t perfect, but we do the best we can with the available
data and what we’re allowed to do.”
Even with the vigorous checks, there are people like Afshin Poordavoud, who lost
his gun rights in June 2000. During a heated argument with his brother, Mr.
Poordavoud threatened to shoot himself. His brother called the police, and Mr.
Poordavoud was hospitalized briefly, according to court records.
Several months later, Mr. Poordavoud petitioned to have his firearms rights
restored and to have the police return his shotgun and 9-millimeter
semiautomatic handgun. A court-appointed psychiatrist recommended that the
decision be put off for three months and that Mr. Poordavoud get a full
psychiatric evaluation and treatment, pointing out that the hospital had found
him to be “likely depressed and minimizing his level of depression and suicidal
risk.”
Mr. Poordavoud returned to court three months later with a letter from a
therapist, indicating he had been undergoing treatment. This time, a different
psychiatrist examined him but wrote at the end of his report, “Inconclusive: I
have no opinion.” The psychiatrist suggested that the case be referred back to
the initial doctor so she could interview Mr. Poordavoud’s therapist and obtain
the full file from his hospitalization.
The judge, however, granted Mr. Poordavoud’s restoration request that same day
in a pro forma hearing.
In late 2004, Mr. Poordavoud drove up to a house in Chatsworth, Calif., in the
middle of the night and began banging on the windows and the doors, shouting for
an acquaintance to come out, according to court testimony.
When a man opened the door, Mr. Poordavoud sprayed him and two others with mace,
according to court testimony. In the ensuing fight, Mr. Poordavoud slashed at
one of them with a pair of brass knuckles fitted with blades.
Mr. Poordavoud retrieved a gun from his car and fired a single shot that missed.
In an interview, he said he had only fired in the air in self-defense.
The police eventually charged Mr. Poordavoud with multiple felonies. He pleaded
guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and using tear gas not in self-defense,
and he was sentenced to about a year in county jail.
“I had an anger problem,” said Mr. Poordavoud, who is no longer allowed to have
guns because of his felony record. “I still have an anger problem.”
Violence against others is not the only concern.
Ryan Anthony, the talented but troubled Disney artist who had a history of
alcoholism, had talked about suicide for years with relatives. His father,
Michael Anthony, said his son once threatened to jump off a highway overpass;
another time, he vowed to hang himself from a chandelier in his home. A few
months before he filed his petition to restore his firearms rights, he had
attempted suicide by swallowing some pills, said his brother Loren.
But Mr. Anthony was able to hide his troubled past when a court-appointed
psychiatrist examined him for the restoration hearing in April 2002. He told Dr.
Rose Pitt, according to court records, that he had simply been going through a
difficult period after he lost his job and split up with his wife. He was
normally not a drinker, he said, but began drinking heavily. Since his
involuntary hospitalization in mid-2001, he had been sober and attending
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Dr. Pitt wrote in her report.
“Does not own guns but wants to skeet shoot, and so wants to purchase guns,” Dr.
Pitt wrote. “There does not appear to be any contraindication to his being able
to get guns.”
His relatives were incredulous. Had they been called, they said, they would have
told officials to deny his request.
“I would have said, ‘No, that doesn’t sound right,’ ” Loren Anthony said. “He
didn’t like guns.”
Mr. Anthony had been staying with Steven and Sofia Shafit, family friends. They
said he had been doing better but was still hurting.
About two weeks after he got his firearms rights restored, he borrowed $300 from
Ms. Shafit, saying he wanted to take a girl on a date. Instead, he went out and
bought a shotgun — investigators found the receipt by his body — and checked
into a room at a Holiday Inn.
On the desk, he left a three-page suicide note, according to a report from the
Los Angeles County coroner’s office. At some point, he lay down on the bed,
placed the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Toby Lyles,
Lisa Schwartz and Jack Styczynski contributed research.
January 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
LAS VEGAS — In a sea of rifles, handguns, knives and ammunition, thousands of
gun enthusiasts gathered here Wednesday for the annual Shot Show, the nation’s
largest gun trade show, where the convention’s sponsors decried gun laws and
said there was something else to blame for the Jan. 8 deadly shooting rampage in
Tucson: the mental health system.
The Shot Show sponsors as well as several exhibitors and others attending the
sprawling event rejected suggestions of a connection between the attack and gun
control legislation. Instead, they questioned why people around the man accused
of the shootings, Jared L. Loughner — his parents, friends, teachers and the
police — had not alerted mental health authorities about his apparent mental
decline before the rampage that left 6 people dead and 13 injured.
“What happened wasn’t caused by the failure or absence of some gun control law,”
said Lawrence G. Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports
Foundation, the organizer of the Shot Show. “It was caused by a breakdown in the
public mental health system. The question is why wasn’t this individual dealt
with when everyone around him apparently saw there were very real issues.”
“To my mind,” Mr. Keane added, “gun control is a failed social experiment, and
it is time to move on.”
Mr. Keane offered that view as 57,000 people, an overflow crowd, turned out for
the 50th anniversary of the convention, which spilled out of the Sands
Convention Center and into the adjacent Venetian hotel. Throughout the day, the
lively crowd —overwhelmingly male, representing gun shops, the military and law
enforcement agencies — traipsed through fields of booths that displayed, among
other things, rifles, ammunition, silencers, camouflage gear, knives,
bulletproof vests, night goggles, holsters and, of course, pistols, including in
pink and lavender.
People attending the show were explicitly barred from carrying personal firearms
or ammunition.
The Tucson shootings complicated plans for the Shot Show. Sponsors said they had
decided after the shootings not to get drawn into debates about gun control
until they arrived here to an event that drew 2,200 members of the news media.
Still, they said, there was never any doubt that the Shot Show would go on.
And there was little discussion of the events as the crowd surveyed this year’s
wares, reflecting a consensus that there was little chance that the shootings
would have political ramifications. “Congress is more pro-gun than at any time
in recent memory,” Steve Sanetti, president of the shooting sports foundation,
proclaimed in the daily newsletter of the convention, Shot Daily.
The carpeted expanse set aside for Glock — maker of the Glock 19 pistol that Mr.
Loughner is accused of using — was one of the largest spaces at the convention,
and it was bustling with people throughout the day. Two Glock employees, dressed
in black, stood on a riser and offered tips on target shooting.
“How many Glock shooters do we have in the crowd?” asked Randi Rogers, one of
the instructors, as she flexed a pistol in her arm, bending slightly at the
knees. As just about every hand rose, Ms. Rogers smiled and said, “Oh, I like
that.”
A Glock sales representative tending to potential customers as they looked at
pistols, including a Glock 19, said they had been instructed by the company not
to discuss the Tucson shootings or gun control.
“Tucson is a tragedy, but that’s all we have to say about it,” said the sales
representative, Tony Musa. “I have no opinion about gun control.”
Mr. Musa referred questions to a Glock vice president, Josh Dorsey.
“Basically, all I can say is no thank you,” Mr. Dorsey said, adding that no one
had raised the Tucson shootings with him.
Downstairs, Scherer Supply, an East Tennessee purveyor and maker of shooting
supplies, displayed the same kind of extended magazines, including a 33-shot
one, that was used in the Tucson shootings. Anthony Scherer, an owner of the
company, shook his head vigorously when asked about gun control advocates who
have called for restricting the sale of large magazines, which they said
contributed to the extent of the carnage on Jan. 8.
“To point any fingers at the gun industry is ignorant,” Mr. Scherer said, as
passers-by stopped to pick up and examine the magazines lined up on the counter.
“That’s like pointing a finger at Ford and blaming them for car deaths.”
“It’s the same kind of panicked reaction you get after a hurricane,” he said.
“It’s over, and everyone wants to get shutters.”
At the Smith and Wesson booth, Chris D’Amato, a Marine from Savannah, Ga.,
disputed the suggestion that a smaller magazine would have reduced the injuries
in Tucson.
“I know where you’re going with that,” Mr. D’Amato said, when asked about the
size of the magazine in one of the handguns he and his wife were admiring on a
table of military and police guns. “It really doesn’t make much of a
difference.”
Mr. Keane of the shooting sports foundation described this as a good time for
gun enthusiasts, and said that fears that the Obama administration and a
Democratic-controlled Congress would result in a round of new tough gun laws had
not been realized.
“People are pleasantly surprised about where we are,” he said. “But we remain
ever vigilant.”
Mr. Keane said his organization would support strengthening the federal
background check for gun buyers, which he suggested had failed in the case of
Mr. Loughner.
“I’m sure the dealer who sold him the gun would have liked to know that this
person has had this mental health background,” he said.
Mark Thomas, a managing director with the foundation, said: “The scary thing
here is that the things we’ve read, the things we’ve seen, people didn’t seem
surprised at this, the way they said, ‘Yeah, he had changed over the last couple
of years.’ If you cared about that person, why didn’t you take some action?”
Still, trying to toughen the federal background check system — which is intended
to keep felons and people with records of mental health problems, among others,
from buying guns — is a subject of debate among gun enthusiasts. They say they
are concerned that it would create more obstacles for legitimate gun enthusiasts
without deterring people who should not get weapons.
January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
On April 22, 2008, almost exactly one year after 32 students and faculty
members were slain in the massacre at Virginia Tech, the dealer who had sold one
of the weapons used by the gunman delivered a public lecture on the school’s
campus. His point: that people at Virginia Tech should be allowed to carry
concealed weapons on campus.
Eric Thompson, owner of the online firearms store that sold a .22-caliber
semiautomatic handgun to the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, did not think that his
appearance at Virginia Tech was disrespectful or that his position was extreme.
He felt so strongly that college students should be allowed to be armed while
engaged in their campus activities that he offered discounts to any students who
wanted to buy guns from him.
Thompson spun the discounts as altruistic. He told ABCNews.com, “This offers
students and people who might not have otherwise been able to afford a weapon to
purchase one at a hefty discount and at a significant expense to myself.”
The sale to Cho was not Thompson’s only unfortunate link to a mass killer. His
firm sold a pair of 9-millimeter Glock magazines and a holster to Steven
Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old graduate student in DeKalb, Ill., who, on the
afternoon of Feb. 14, 2008, went heavily armed into an auditorium-type lecture
hall at Northern Illinois University. Kazmierczak walked onto the stage in front
of a crowd of students and opened fire. He killed five people and wounded 18
others before killing himself.
We’ve allowed the extremists to carry the day when it comes to guns in the
United States, and it’s the dead and the wounded and their families who have had
to pay the awful price. The idea of having large numbers of college students
packing heat in their classrooms and at their parties and sporting events, or at
the local pub or frat house or gymnasium, or wherever, is too stupid for words.
Thompson did not get a warm welcome at Virginia Tech. A spokesman for the
school, Larry Hincker, said the fact that he “would set foot on this campus” was
“terribly offensive” and “incredibly insensitive to the families of the
victims.”
Just last week, a sophomore at Florida State University, Ashley Cowie, was shot
to death accidentally by a 20-year-old student who, according to authorities,
was showing off his rifle to a group of friends in an off-campus apartment
complex favored by fraternity members. A second student was shot in the wrist.
This occurred as state legislators in Florida are considering a proposal to
allow people with permits to carry concealed weapons on campuses. The National
Rifle Association thinks that’s a dandy idea.
The slaughter of college students — or anyone else — has never served as a
deterrent to the gun fetishists. They want guns on campuses, in bars and taverns
and churches, in parks and in the workplace, in cars and in the home. Ammunition
everywhere — the deadlier, the better. A couple of years ago, a state legislator
in Arizona, Karen Johnson, argued that adults needed to be able to carry guns in
all schools, from elementary on up. “I feel like our kindergartners are sitting
there like sitting ducks,” she said.
Can we get a grip?
The contention of those who would like college kids and just about everybody
else to be armed to the teeth is that the good guys can shoot back whenever the
bad guys show up to do harm. An important study published in 2009 by researchers
at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine estimated that people in
possession of a gun at the time of an assault were 4.5 times more likely to be
shot during the assault than someone in a comparable situation without a gun.
“On average,” the researchers said, “guns did not seem to protect those who
possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun
uses can and do occur, the findings of this study do not support the perception
that such successes are likely.”
Approximately 100,000 shootings occur in the United States every year. The
number of people killed by guns should be enough to make our knees go weak.
Monday was a national holiday celebrating the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. While the gun crazies are telling us that ever more Americans need to
be walking around armed, we should keep in mind that more than a million people
have died from gun violence — in murders, accidents and suicides — since Dr.
King was shot to death in 1968.
We need fewer homicides, fewer accidental deaths and fewer suicides. That means
fewer guns. That means stricter licensing and registration, more vigorous
background checks and a ban on assault weapons. Start with that. Don’t tell me
it’s too hard to achieve. Just get started.
January 12, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Jared Loughner was considered too mentally unstable to attend
community college. He was rejected by the Army. Yet buy a Glock handgun and a
33-round magazine? No problem.
To protect the public, we regulate cars and toys, medicines and mutual funds.
So, simply as a public health matter, shouldn’t we take steps to reduce the toll
from our domestic arms industry?
Look, I’m an Oregon farm boy who was given a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday. I
still shoot occasionally when visiting the family farm, and I understand one
appeal of guns: they’re fun.
It’s also true that city slickers sometimes exaggerate the risk of any one gun.
The authors of Freakonomics noted that a home with a swimming pool is
considerably more dangerous for small children than a home with a gun. They said
that 1 child drowns annually for every 11,000 residential pools, but 1 child is
shot dead for every 1 million-plus guns.
All that said, guns are far more deadly in America, not least because there are
so many of them. There are about 85 guns per 100 people in the United States,
and we are particularly awash in handguns.
(The only country I’ve seen that is more armed than America is Yemen. Near the
town of Sadah, I dropped by a gun market where I was offered grenade launchers,
machine guns, antitank mines, and even an anti-aircraft weapon. Yep, an N.R.A.
dream! No pesky regulators. Just terrorism and a minor civil war.)
Just since the killings in Tucson, another 320 or so Americans have been killed
by guns — anonymously, with barely a whisker of attention. By tomorrow it’ll be
400 deaths. Every day, about 80 people die from guns, and several times as many
are injured.
Handgun sales in Arizona soared by 60 percent on Monday, according to Bloomberg
News, as buyers sought to beat any beefing up of gun laws. People also often buy
guns in hopes of being safer. But the evidence is overwhelming that firearms
actually endanger those who own them. One scholar, John Lott Jr., published a
book suggesting that more guns lead to less crime, but many studies have now
debunked that finding (although it’s also true that a boom in concealed weapons
didn’t lead to the bloodbath that liberals had forecast).
A careful article forthcoming in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine by
David Hemenway, a Harvard professor who wrote a brilliant book a few years ago
reframing the gun debate as a public health challenge, makes clear that a gun in
the home makes you much more likely to be shot — by accident, by suicide or by
homicide.
The chances that a gun will be used to deter a home invasion are unbelievably
remote, and dialing 911 is more effective in reducing injury than brandishing a
weapon, the journal article says. But it adds that American children are 11
times more likely to die in a gun accident than in other developed countries,
because of the prevalence of guns.
Likewise, suicide rates are higher in states with more guns, simply because
there are more gun suicides. Other kinds of suicide rates are no higher. And
because most homicides in the home are by family members or acquaintances — not
by an intruder — the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of a gun
murder in that home.
So what can be done? I asked Professor Hemenway how he would oversee a public
health approach to reducing gun deaths and injuries. He suggested:
• Limit gun purchases to one per month per person, to reduce gun trafficking.
And just as the government has cracked down on retailers who sell cigarettes to
minors, get tough on gun dealers who sell to traffickers.
• Push for more gun safes, and make serial numbers harder to erase.
• Improve background checks and follow Canada in requiring a 28-day waiting
period to buy a handgun. And ban oversize magazines, such as the 33-bullet
magazine allegedly used in Tucson. If the shooter had had to reload after firing
10 bullets, he might have been tackled earlier. And invest in new technologies
such as “smart guns,” which can be fired only when near a separate wristband or
after a fingerprint scan.
We can also learn from Australia, which in 1996 banned assault weapons and began
buying back 650,000 of them. The impact is controversial and has sometimes been
distorted. But the Journal of Public Health Policy notes that after the ban, the
firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and
the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.
Congress on Wednesday echoed with speeches honoring those shot in Tucson. That’s
great — but hollow. The best memorial would be to regulate firearms every bit as
seriously as we regulate automobiles or toys.
The National Rifle Association keeps coming up with clever new ways to
undermine public safety.
Just in the past year, the gun-rights group sought to scuttle basic gun controls
enacted by the District of Columbia, including a ban on powerful semiautomatic
weapons in the nation’s capital. The group also blocked common-sense efforts in
Congress to bar people on the F.B.I.’s terrorist watch list from buying guns and
explosives. It kept open the deadly loophole in federal law that lets gun
traffickers and other unqualified buyers to obtain weapons without background
checks at gun shows.
Last week, President Obama had barely nominated a new director for the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is supposed to control firearms
— Andrew Traver, a well-qualified career professional — before the gun lobby
denounced him as “deeply aligned with gun control advocates.” Mr. Traver’s sin?
Associating with a police chief’s group that wants to reduce the use of handguns
on city streets. The nomination was rated dead on arrival in the next Congress,
where the N.R.A. will, if anything, be more powerful.
Finally, the gun lobby has filed two lawsuits in federal court in Lubbock, Tex.,
to compel the State of Texas to allow young people between the ages of 18 and 20
years old to buy handguns and carry them concealed in public places.
The first suit challenges the longstanding federal law prohibiting licensed gun
dealers from selling handguns to anyone under 21 years old. The second case
contests a Texas law setting 21 as the minimum age for carrying a concealed
weapon.
As a legal matter, both lawsuits should fail. In its recent Second Amendment
rulings, the Supreme Court struck down complete bans on handgun ownership, but
explicitly left room for limits on gun ownership and possession by felons and
the mentally ill, and other reasonable restrictions like Texas’ age limitations.
The Supreme Court has said nothing to suggest that the Second Amendment requires
Americans to allow armed teenagers in their communities.
Beyond the dubious legal claims, the idea that young individuals ages 18 to 20
have a constitutional right to buy weapons and carry them loaded and concealed
in public is breathtakingly irresponsible.
Young people in that age range commit a disproportionate amount of gun violence.
F.B.I. crime data from 2009 shows arrests for murder, nonnegligent homicides and
other violent crimes peaking from ages 18 to 20. That age group accounts for
about 5 percent of the population but nearly 20 percent of homicide and
manslaughter arrests, and nearly twice the number of such arrests for those ages
30 to 34, according to the F.B.I. figures.
What the N.R.A. should be doing is keeping our streets and our teenagers safer
by working to extend the prohibition on guns sales to people 18 to 20 years old
by licensed dealers to include unlicensed sellers at gun shows and elsewhere.
LOS ANGELES — It was a real-life Halloween nightmare: 5-year-old Aaron
Shannon Jr. was posing for pictures in his Spider-Man costume in the backyard of
his family’s South Los Angeles home when men opened fire from a nearby alley.
Aaron was hit in the back of the head and died in the hospital the next day.
The shooting set off outrage throughout Los Angeles County, with multiple law
enforcement agencies working on the case and various government agencies
offering a combined $100,000 reward in the case.
On Friday, the Los Angeles police announced that they had arrested two suspects:
Leonard Hall Jr., 21, and Marcus Denson, 18, whom they identified as members of
the Kitchen Crips gang.
At a news conference, Deputy Police Chief Patrick M. Gannon said the Shannon
family had no gang ties and had not been targets. He said he did not think the
shooting was part of a gang initiation, as had been rumored in a city plagued by
violence between Crips and Bloods.
“We have a lot of murders in which the killers and victims are kind of on the
same page,” Chief Gannon said. “This definitely isn’t one of those.”
East of Central Avenue, near where the shooting occurred, is Crips territory;
west of it is Bloods territory. Because the shooting occurred in Bloods
territory and the gunmen fled east across Central Avenue, police believed that
cross-border gang activity was involved, though they would not speculate about a
motive.
Chief Gannon said the police received tips from community members that helped
identify the suspects, including tips from gang members.
“This incident shook the consciousness not only of every resident in the
community; it also shook the consciousness of gang members,” he said.
Aaron’s grandfather, William Shannon, 55, was struck in the wrist in the
shootings, and his uncle was hit in the thigh. Neither man’s injuries were
serious.
Mr. Shannon said they were preparing to leave for a Halloween party around 1:30
p.m. when two men started shooting into the yard through a chain-link fence.
Aaron Shannon Sr., the boy’s father, carried the child into the bathroom, where
they waited until paramedics arrived.
“He was so proud to be Spider-Man,” William Shannon said. “He was running around
and jumping. I had just mentioned what a beautiful day it was when the shooting
happened.”
NASHVILLE — Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous
bar just off this city’s strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops when Adam
Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of
his gray slacks.
Mr. Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state’s nearly 300,000
handgun permit holders who have recently seen their rights greatly expanded by a
new law — one of the nation’s first — that allows them to carry loaded firearms
into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.
“If someone’s sticking a gun in my face, I’m not relying on their charity to
keep me alive,” said Mr. Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for
personal protection when he is not at work.
Gun rights advocates like Mr. Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but many
customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision.
“That’s not cool in my book,” Art Andersen, 44, said as he nursed a Coors Light
at Sam’s Sports Bar and Grill near Vanderbilt University. “It opens the door to
trouble. It’s giving you the right to be Wyatt Earp.”
Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that
recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other
states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in
Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court
rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a
well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.
Experts say these laws represent the latest wave in the country’s gun debate, as
the gun lobby seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday
life.
The rulings, which overturned handgun bans in Washington and Chicago, have
strengthened the stance of gun rights advocates nationwide. More than 250
lawsuits now challenge various gun laws, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a
Republican, called for guns to be made legal on campuses after a shooting last
week at the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that armed bystanders might
have stopped the gunman.
The new laws have also brought to light the status of 20 other states — New
York, New Jersey and Massachusetts among them — that do not address the
question, appearing by default to allow those with permits to carry guns into
establishments that serve alcohol, according to the Legal Community Against
Violence, a nonprofit group that promotes gun control and tracks state gun laws.
“A lot of states for a long time have not felt the need to say you could or
couldn’t do it,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent
Gun Violence. “There weren’t as many conceal-carry permits out there, so it
wasn’t really an issue.” Now, he said, “the attitude from the gun lobby is that
they should be able to take their guns wherever they want. In the last year,
they’re starting to move toward needing no permit at all.”
State Representative Curry Todd, a Republican who first introduced the
guns-in-bars bill here, said that carrying a gun inside a tavern was never the
law’s primary intention. Rather, he said, the law lets people defend themselves
while walking to and from restaurants.
“Folks were being robbed, assaulted — it was becoming an issue of personal
safety,” said Mr. Todd, who added that the National Rifle Association had aided
his legislative efforts. “The police aren’t going to be able to protect you.
They’re going to be checking out the crime scene after you and your family’s
been shot or injured or assaulted or raped.”
Under Tennessee’s new law, gun permit holders are not supposed to drink alcohol
while carrying their weapons. Mr. Ringenberg washed down his steak sandwich with
a Coke.
But critics of the law say the provision is no guarantee of safety, pointing to
a recent shooting in Virginia where a customer who had a permit to carry a
concealed weapon shot himself in the leg while drinking beer at a restaurant.
“Guns and alcohol don’t mix; that’s the bottom line,” said Michael Drescher, a
spokesman for Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, who vetoed the
bill but was overridden by the legislature.
The law allows restaurant and bar owners to prohibit people from carrying
weapons inside their establishments by posting signs out front. But many
restaurateurs are reluctant to discourage the patronage of gun owners, often
saying privately that they do not allow guns but holding off on posting a sign.
“I’ve talked to a lot of restaurants, and probably 50 to 60 percent of them have
no clue what’s going on,” said Ray Friedman, 51, who has created a Web site
listing the firearms policies of area restaurants.
Previously, states like Tennessee did not allow its residents to carry concealed
weapons unless they had a special permit from the local authorities. That began
to shift in the mid-1990s, as the gun lobby pushed states to adopt policies that
made permits for concealed weapons more accessible.
The new law passed with broad legislative support, despite opposition from the
Nashville Chamber of Commerce and the Tennessee Hospitality Association.
So far, the law has been challenged only once. Filed by an anonymous waiter, the
complaint contended that allowing guns into a tavern creates an unsafe work
environment for servers. His complaint was denied by the state’s Division of
Occupational Safety and Health.
“A loaded concealed weapon in a bar is a recognized hazard,” said David Randolph
Smith, a lawyer who represents the waiter and is preparing to appeal the
decision. “I have a right to go into a restaurant or bar and not have people
armed. And of course, the waiter has a right to a safe workplace.”
Down at Bobby’s Idle Hour, however, Mike Gideon said he did not believe that
guns in bars were unsafe. As he sipped a beer in the fading afternoon light, Mr.
Gideon, who characterized his 19-gun collection as “serious,” said that having a
few permit holders around made any public space safer and that he boycotts any
business that does not allow him to carry a weapon.
“People who have gun permits have the cleanest records around,” said Mr. Gideon,
54. “The guy that’s going to do the bad thing? He’s not worried about the law at
all. The ‘No Guns’ sign just says to him, ‘Hey, buddy, smooth sailing.’ ”
July 12, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — Fresh off a string of victories in the courts and
Congress, the National Rifle Association is flexing political muscle outside its
normal domain, with both Democrats and Republicans courting its favor and
avoiding its wrath on issues that sometimes seem to have little to do with guns.
The N.R.A., long a powerful lobby on gun rights issues, has in recent months
also weighed in on such varied issues as health care, campaign finance, credit
card regulations and Supreme Court nominees.
In the health care debate this year, for instance, the N.R.A.’s lobbyists worked
with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to include a little-noticed
provision banning insurance companies from charging higher premiums for people
with guns in their homes.
The N.R.A. worked out a deal last month exempting itself from a proposal
requiring groups active in political spending to disclose their financial
donors. Its push this spring for greater gun rights in the District of Columbia
served to effectively kill a measure — once seemingly assured of passage — to
give the district a voting seat in Congress.
With a push from the N.R.A., a popular bill last year restricting credit card
lenders came with an odd add-on: It also allowed people to carry loaded guns in
national parks. And the gun lobby put potential supporters of the Supreme Court
nominee Elena Kagan on notice this month that a vote for her would be remembered
at the ballot boxes in November.
The N.R.A.’s expanding portfolio is an outgrowth of its success in the courts,
Congressional officials and political analysts said. With the Supreme Court
ruling last month for the second time since 2008 that the Second Amendment
guarantees an individual the right to have a gun, the N.R.A. now finds that its
defining battle is a matter of settled law, and it has the resources to expand
into other areas.
When the N.R.A. had a narrower range of targets, it relied on a core group of
political figures and met with stiffer resistance from vocal gun control
advocates in Congress and outside groups. It now has freer rein to leave its
mark politically on issues that once seemed out of its reach.
“The last two years have been a disaster for us,” said Representative Carolyn
McCarthy, a New York Democrat and a longtime advocate of increased gun control.
“A lot of members are just afraid of the N.R.A.”
On Monday, the N.R.A. began broadcasting advertisements urging senators to
oppose or filibuster the Kagan nomination. But the group’s top priority is still
finding ways to use the Supreme Court ruling in cities, states and courts
nationwide to overturn more restrictive gun laws and establish gun rights
measures.
N.R.A. officials say they are determined to protect gun rights even if it means
using the group’s $307 million budget and membership of more than four million
gun owners to influence ancillary issues.
“What you’re seeing is a recognition that support for the Second Amendment is
not only a very powerful voting bloc, but a very powerful political force.”
Chris W. Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, said in an interview last week at the
group’s Washington office, a few blocks from the Capitol.
He pointed to the debate this spring over loosening gun laws in the District of
Columbia after a 2008 Supreme Court ruling found the city’s gun ban
unconstitutional. At the time, advocates for district voting rights saw their
best chance in many years to gain a voting seat in the House, but they abandoned
their own proposal after gun rights supporters attached a provision weakening
local gun laws.
“I honestly don’t care about D.C. voting rights,” Mr. Cox said of the
legislative maneuvering. “I care about reforming D.C. gun laws, and we’re going
to use voting rights or any other vehicle at our disposal to address what we
consider a blatant disregard for the Constitution.”
The N.R.A. was just as aggressive last month in getting Congressional Democrats
to carve out an exemption tailor-made for the group to exclude it from the
so-called Disclose Act, requiring disclosure of donors, rather than risk a
defeat of the whole bill because of opposition from Republicans and conservative
Democrats supportive of gun rights.
“They shot holes in the Disclose Act with such precision and force that it would
make an N.R.A. member proud,” said Kenneth Gross, a Washington lawyer who
specializes in lobbying issues.
But the group’s muscle has generated tensions with some gun owners themselves,
who do not like the idea of the N.R.A. straying into areas outside its core base
and aligning itself with Democrats as it broadens its agenda.
The headline on a recent blog post from a rival faction, the Gun Owners of
America, singling out the N.R.A.’s exemption from the campaign finance bill,
captured the sentiment: “The N.R.A. Sells out Freedom to the Democrats.”
A point of contention on both the left and the right is the N.R.A.’s close
working relationship with Mr. Reid, the Senate leader who helped get a number of
pro-gun rights measures included in broader bills.
That relationship has led some gun rights supporters to lobby against the idea
that the N.R.A. might endorse Mr. Reid in his tough re-election campaign this
November in Nevada.
The N.R.A. is not tamping down speculation. While Mr. Cox said the group had not
decided on any endorsements, he pointed to what he considered an unattractive
alternative if Mr. Reid loses and the Democrats hold power. “I’ll give you four
words: Majority Leader Chuck Schumer,” he said.
Mr. Reid, for his part, does not run from his support for the N.R.A. His office
noted that he had been a longtime “champion of the Second Amendment.”
One reason for the group’s greater political leverage is that battles in
Washington are so closely fought now that powerful interest groups hold more
sway even if they can only deliver a handful of votes.
Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, said in
pursuing an ambitious legislative agenda, President Obama — who has been largely
silent on gun issues — and Congressional Democrats must either work with the gun
lobby or risk losing votes. “They basically end up saying, ‘We’re willing to
capitulate to the N.R.A. to get the greater good of whatever passed,’ ” he said.
That approach bothers him and Ms. McCarthy, who first came to politics on a
pro-gun-control platform after a gunman with a semiautomatic weapon killed her
husband and five others during a rampage on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993.
Ms. McCarthy said the group drew its power from its money — it has donated more
than $17.5 million to federal candidates, mostly Republicans, since 1989, and
spent millions more in lobbying — and the fear of political retribution.
“I’ve told the Democratic leadership, if you give in to them once, you’re going
to see every piece of legislation with a gun amendment added to it,” she said.
“But it’s put the leadership in a very difficult position because they know they
might not get their bill passed.”
N.R.A. leaders say they plan on broadening their efforts.
“I think we’ve done it better than any organization in the country, to be
honest,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s executive vice president.
Thirteen days ago, the Supreme Court undermined Chicago’s ban on handguns by
applying the Second Amendment to the states, ruling that people have a right to
protect their homes with a gun. Four days after that, Chicago passed another
handgun restriction that edged right up to the line drawn by the court. And on
Tuesday, a group of gun dealers and enthusiasts sued the city again to overturn
the new law.
Bullets are flying on city streets, but the vital work of limiting gun use has
become a cat-and-mouse game. Beleaguered citizens deserve better from both
sides.
We strongly disagreed with the reasoning that led the court to find an
individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, ending handgun bans in
Washington, D.C., in 2008 and everywhere else last month. Nonetheless, the law
of the land is now that people have a constitutional right to a gun in their
home for self-defense.
That right can be limited, the court explicitly said, with reasonable
restrictions. But it provided very little guidance as to what is reasonable,
leaving lawyers, lawmakers and judges to thrash it out in a bog of lawsuits that
could take many years to clear.
Cities and states have a need to be extremely tough in limiting access to guns,
but they need to do it with more forethought than went into the Chicago
ordinance. Lawmakers there sensibly limited residents to one operable handgun
per home, with a strict registration and permitting process. But residents are
not allowed to buy a gun in the city. They must receive firearms training, but
ranges are illegal in the city. Chicago lawmakers sloughed off on the suburbs
the responsibility to regulate sales and training. As a result, more people will
travel more miles to transport guns.
The law is likely to draw heightened equal-protection scrutiny from skeptical
judges at all levels. Chicago would have been better off allowing gun sales
under the strict oversight of the police department, which could then better
check the backgrounds and movements of every buyer and seller. The District of
Columbia passed a largely similar ordinance last year after its law was struck
down by the court. But it permits sales at the few gun shops in the district,
and a federal judge upheld that ordinance after it was challenged. It could
stand as a model for other cities.
As flawed as the Chicago regulation is, the lawsuit challenging it is entirely
over the top. It disputes virtually every aspect of the law as a violation of
the Second Amendment and poses ludicrous hypothetical situations to show that
everyone needs a gun. “If an elderly widow lives in an unsafe neighborhood and
asks her son to spend the night because she has recently received harassing
phone calls,” the lawsuit complains, “the son may not bring his registered
firearm with him to his mother’s home as an aid to the defense of himself and
his mother.” Putting granny in the middle of a neighborhood firefight is
preferable to having her simply call the police?
The gun lobby is going to attack virtually every gun ordinance it can find, if
only to see what it can get away with now. (Last week, the same lawyers who
brought the Chicago and Washington cases sued North Carolina, challenging a law
that prohibits carrying weapons during a state of emergency.)
Lawmakers need not match the lobby’s obduracy. Cities and states should counter
with tough but sensible laws designed to resist legal challenges and keep gun
possession to a minimum.
About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal
statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of
the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on
handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining
Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real
and bloody.
This began two years ago, when the Supreme Court disregarded the plain words of
the Second Amendment and overturned the District of Columbia’s handgun ban,
deciding that the amendment gave individuals in the district, not just militias,
the right to bear arms. Proceeding from that flawed logic, the court has now
said the amendment applies to all states and cities, rendering Chicago’s ban on
handgun ownership unenforceable.
Once again, the court’s conservative majority imposed its selective reading of
American history, citing the country’s violent separation from Britain and the
battles over slavery as proof that the authors of the Constitution and its later
amendments considered gun ownership a fundamental right. The court’s members
ignored the present-day reality of Chicago, where 258 public school students
were shot last school year — 32 fatally.
Rather than acknowledging Chicago’s — and the nation’s — need to end an epidemic
of gun violence, the justices spent scores of pages in the decision analyzing
which legal theory should bind the Second Amendment to the states. Should it be
the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, or the amendment’s immunities
clause? The argument was not completely settled because there was not a
five-vote majority for either path.
The issue is not trivial; had the court backed the immunity-clause path
championed by Justice Clarence Thomas, it might have had the beneficial effect
of applying more aspects of the Bill of Rights to the states. That could make it
easier to require that states, like the federal government, have unanimous jury
verdicts in criminal trials, for example, or ban excessive fines.
While the court has now twice attacked complete bans on handgun ownership, the
decision left plenty of room for restrictions on who can buy and sell arms.
The court acknowledged, as it did in the District of Columbia case, that the
amendment did not confer “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any
manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” It cited a few examples of what it
considered acceptable: limits on gun ownership by felons or the mentally ill,
bans on carrying firearms in sensitive places like schools or government
buildings and conditions on gun sales.
Mayors and state lawmakers will have to use all of that room and keep adopting
the most restrictive possible gun laws — to protect the lives of Americans and
aid the work of law enforcement officials. They should continue to impose
background checks, limit bulk gun purchases, regulate dealers, close gun-show
loopholes.
They should not be intimidated by the theoretical debate that has now concluded
at the court or the relentless stream of lawsuits sure to follow from the gun
lobby that will undoubtedly keep pressing to overturn any and all restrictions.
Officials will have to press back even harder. Too many lives are at stake.
The New York Times
June 28, 2010
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court held Monday that the
Constitution's Second Amendment restrains government's ability to significantly
limit "the right to keep and bear arms," advancing a recent trend by the John
Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.
By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices signaled, however, that less severe
restrictions could survive legal challenges.
Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of
its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right "applies
equally to the federal government and the states."
The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five
conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed.
Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.
Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an
individual's right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the
home.
That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a
trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal
city with a unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not
to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.
Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun
control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have
been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says
those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.
Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches
were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court
justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.
The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of
Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.
Monday's decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering
a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that
they would eventually fall.
Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully
binding on states and cities "limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability
to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values."
November 6, 2009
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
An Army psychiatrist facing deployment to one of America’s war zones killed
12 people and wounded 31 others on Thursday in a shooting rampage with two
handguns at the sprawling Fort Hood Army post in central Texas, military
officials said.
It was one of the worst mass shootings ever at a military base in the United
States.
The gunman, who was still alive after being shot four times, was identified by
law enforcement authorities as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, who had been in the
service since 1995. Major Hasan was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan,
said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.
Clad in a military uniform and firing an automatic pistol and another weapon,
Major Hasan, a balding, chubby-faced man with heavy eyebrows, sprayed bullets
inside a crowded medical processing center for soldiers returning from or about
to be sent overseas, military officials said.
The victims, nearly all military personnel but including two civilians, were cut
down in clusters, the officials said. Witnesses told military investigators that
medics working at the center tore open the clothing of the dead and wounded to
get at the wounds and administer first aid.
As the shooting unfolded, military police and civilian officers of the
Department of the Army responded and returned the gunman’s fire, officials said,
adding that Major Hasan was shot by a first-responder, who was herself wounded
in the exchange.
In the confusion of a day of wild and misleading reports, the major and the
officer who shot him were both reported killed in the gun battle, but both
reports were erroneous.
Eight hours after the shootings, Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, a base spokesmen, said
Major Hasan, whom he described as the sole gunman, had been shot four times, but
was hospitalized off the base, under around-the-clock guard, in stable condition
and was not in imminent danger of dying.
Another military spokesman listed the major’s condition as critical. The
condition of the officer who shot the gunman was not given.
Major Hasan was not speaking to investigators, and much about his background —
and his motives — were unknown.
General Cone said that terrorism was not being ruled out, but that preliminary
evidence did not suggest that the rampage had been an act of terrorism. Fox News
quoted a retired Army colonel, Terry Lee, as saying that Major Hasan, with whom
he worked, had voiced hope that President Obama would pull American troops out
of Iraq and Afghanistan, had argued with military colleagues who supported the
wars and had tried to prevent his own deployment.
As a parade of ambulances wailed to the scene of the shootings, officials said
the extent of injuries to the wounded varied significantly, with some in
critical condition and others lightly wounded. General Cone praised the
first-responders and the medics who acted quickly to administer first aid at the
scene.
“Horrible as this was, I think it could have been much worse,” the general said.
The rampage recalled other mass shootings in the United States, including 13
killed at a center for immigrants in upstate New York last April, the deaths of
10 during a gunman’s rampage in Alabama in March and 32 people killed at
Virginia Tech in 2007, the deadliest shooting in modern American history.
As a widespread investigation by the military, the F.B.I., and other agencies
began, much about the assault in Texas remained unclear. Department of Homeland
Security officials said the Army would take the lead in the investigation.
A federal law enforcement official said the F.B.I. was sending more agents to
join the inquiry. On Thursday night, F.B.I. agents were interviewing residents
of a townhouse complex in the Washington suburb of Kensington, Md., where Major
Hasan had lived before moving to Texas.
Mr. Obama called the shootings “a horrific outburst of violence” and urged
Americans to pray for those who were killed and wounded.
“It is difficult enough when we lose these men and women in battles overseas,”
he said. “It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on
American soil.”
The president pledged “to get answers to every single question about this
horrible incident.”
Military records indicated that Major Hasan was single, had been born in
Virginia, had never served abroad and listed “no religious preference” on his
personnel records. Three other soldiers, their roles unclear, were taken into
custody in connection with the rampage. The office of Representative John
Carter, Republican of Texas, said they were later released, but a Fort Hood
spokesman could not confirm that. General Cone said that more than 100 people
had been questioned during the day.
Fort Hood, near Killeen and 100 miles south of Dallas-Fort Worth, is the largest
active duty military post in the United States, 340 square miles of training and
support facilities and homes, a virtual city for more than 50,000 military
personnel and some 150,000 family members and civilian support personnel. It has
been a major center for troops being deployed to or returning from service in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
The base went into lockdown shortly after the shootings. Gates were closed and
barriers put up at all entrance and exit checkpoints, and the military police
turned away all but essential personnel. Schools on the base were closed,
playgrounds were deserted and sidewalks were empty. Sirens wailed across the
base through the afternoon, a warning to military personnel and their families
to remain indoors.
Military commanders were instructed to account for all personnel on the base.
“The immediate concern is to make sure that all of our soldiers and family
members are safe, and that’s what commanders have been instructed to do,” said
Jay Adams of the First Army, Division West, at Ford Hood.
General Cone said the shooting took place about 1:30 p.m., inside a complex of
buildings that he called a Soldier Readiness Processing Center. The type of
weapons used was unclear, and it was not known whether the gunman had reloaded,
although it seemed likely, given that 43 people were shot, perhaps more than
once.
All the victims were gunned down “in the same area,” General Cone said.
As the shootings ended, scores of emergency vehicles rushed to the scene, which
is in the center of the fort, and dozens of ambulances carried the shooting
victims to hospitals in the region.
Both of the handguns used by Major Hasan were recovered at the scene, officials
said. Investigators said the major’s computers, cellphones and papers would be
examined, his past investigated and his friends, relatives and military
acquaintances would be interviewed in an effort to develop a profile of him and
try to learn what had motivated his deadly outburst.
Major Hasan was assigned to the Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood.
The weapons used in the attack were described as “civilian” handguns. Security
experts said the fact that two handguns had been used suggested premeditation,
as opposed to a spontaneous act.
Rifles and assault weapons are conspicuous and not ordinarily seen on the
streets of a military post, and medical personnel would have no reason to carry
any weapon, they said. Moreover, security experts noted, it took a lot of
ammunition to shoot 43 people, another indication of premeditation.
It appeared certain that the shootings would generate a whole new look at
questions of security on military posts of all the armed forces in the United
States. Expressions of dismay were voiced by public officials across the
country.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council, speaking for many American Muslims, condemned
the shootings as a “heinous incident” and said, “We share the sentiment of our
president.”
The council added, “Our entire organization extends its heartfelt condolences to
the families of those killed as well as those wounded and their loved ones.”
General Cone said Fort Hood was “absolutely devastated.”
News of the shooting set off panic among families and friends of the base
personnel. Alyssa Marie Seace’s husband, Pfc. Ray Seace Jr., sent her a text
message just before 2 p.m. saying that someone had “shot up the S.R.P.
building,” referring to the Soldier Readiness Processing Center. He told her he
was “hiding.”
Ms. Seace, 18, who lives about five minutes from the base and had not been
watching the news, reacted with alarm. She texted him back but got no response.
She called her father in Connecticut, who told her not to call her husband
because it might reveal his hiding place.
Finally, 45 minutes later, her husband, a mechanic who is scheduled to deploy to
Iraq in February, texted back to say that three people from his unit had been
hit and that a dozen people in all were dead.
By late afternoon, the sirens at Fort Hood had fallen silent. In Killeen, state
troopers were parked on ridges overlooking the two main highways through town.
In residential areas, the only signs of life were cars moving through the
streets. In the business districts, people went about their business.
In 1991, Killeen was the scene of one of the worst mass killings in American
history. A gunman drove his pickup truck through the window of a cafeteria,
fatally shot 22 people with a handgun, then killed himself.
Fort Hood, opened in September 1942 as America geared up for World War II, was
named for Gen. John Bell Hood of the Confederacy. It has been used continuously
for armor training and is charged with maintaining readiness for combat
missions.
It is a place that feels, on ordinary days, like one of the safest in the world,
surrounded by those who protect the nation with their lives. It is home to nine
schools — seven elementary schools and two middle schools, for the children of
personnel. But on Thursday, the streets were lined with emergency vehicles,
their lights flashing and sirens piercing the air as Texas Rangers and state
troopers took up posts at the gates to seal the base.
Shortly after 7 p.m., the sirens sounded again and over the loudspeakers a
woman’s voice that could be heard all over the base announced in a clipped
military fashion: “Declared emergency no longer exists.”
The gates reopened, and a stream of cars and trucks that had been bottled up for
hours began to move out.
Reporting was contributed by Michael Brick from Fort Hood, Tex., Michael Luo
from New York, and David Stout from Washington.
June 26, 2009
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Ken Pagano, the pastor of the New Bethel Church here, is
passionate about gun rights. He shoots regularly at the local firing range, and
his sermon two weeks ago was on “God, Guns, Gospel and Geometry.” And on
Saturday night, he is inviting his congregation of 150 and others to wear or
carry their firearms into the sanctuary to “celebrate our rights as Americans!”
as a promotional flier for the “open carry celebration” puts it.
“God and guns were part of the foundation of this country,” Mr. Pagano, 49, said
Wednesday in the small brick Assembly of God church, where a large wooden cross
hung over the altar and two American flags jutted from side walls. “I don’t see
any contradiction in this. Not every Christian denomination is pacifist.”
The bring-your-gun-to-church day, which will include a $1 raffle of a handgun,
firearms safety lessons and a picnic, is another sign that the gun culture in
the United States is thriving despite, or perhaps because of, President Obama’s
election in November.
Last year, the National Rifle Association ran a multimillion-dollar advertising
campaign against Mr. Obama, stoking fears that he would be the most antigun
president in history and that firearms would be confiscated. One worry was that
a Democratic president and Congress would reinstitute the assault-weapons ban,
which expired in 2004.
But there is little support for the ban. Mr. Obama and his party have largely
ignored gun-control issues, and the president even signed a measure that will
allow firearms in national parks.
Still, the fear remains that Mr. Obama, and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder
Jr., will crack down on guns sooner or later. That — along with the faltering
economy, which gun sellers say has spurred purchases for self-defense — has
fueled a record surge in gun sales.
“Every president wants to be re-elected, and gun bans are pretty much a
nonstarter for getting re-elected,” said Win Underwood, owner of the Bluegrass
Indoor Range here. “What I suspect is going to happen is, Obama’s going to cool
his jets until he can get re-elected, and then he’ll start building his legacy
in these hot-button areas.”
When Mr. Obama was elected in November, federal instant background checks, the
best indicator of gun sales, jumped 42 percent over the previous November. Every
month since then, the number of checks has been higher than the year before,
although the postelection surge may be tapering off, as all surges eventually
do. While the number of checks in April increased 30 percent from the year
before, the number of checks in May (1,023,102) was only 15 percent higher than
in May 2008.
The National Rifle Association says its membership is up 30 percent since
November. And several states have recently passed laws allowing gun owners to
carry firearms in more places — bars, restaurants, cars and parks.
“We have a very active agenda in all 50 states,” said Chris W. Cox, legislative
director of the N.R.A., widely considered the country’s most powerful lobby. “We
have right-to-carry laws in over 40 states; 20 years ago, it was in just six.”
Of the 40 states with right-to-carry laws, 20 allow guns in churches.
Public attitudes also seem to be turning more sympathetic to gun owners. In
April, the Pew Research Center found for the first time that almost as many
people said it was more important to protect the rights of gun owners (45
percent) than to control gun ownership (49 percent). Just a year ago, Pew said,
58 percent said gun control was more important than the rights of gun owners (37
percent).
Gun-control advocates say they feel increasingly ineffective, especially after a
recent spate of high-profile shootings, including last month’s murder, inside a
church in Kansas, of a doctor who performed late-term abortions.
“We’ve definitely been marginalized,” said Pam Gersh, a public relations
consultant here who helped organize a rally in Louisville in 2000, to coincide
with the Million Mom March against guns in Washington.
“The Brady Campaign and other similar organizations who advocate sensible gun
responsibility laws don’t have the money and the political power — not even
close,” she said. “This pastor is obviously crossing a line here and saying ‘I
can even take my guns to church, and there is nothing you can do about it.’ ”
Ms. Gersh said she was not aware that a group of local churches and peace
activists were staging a counterpicnic — called “Bring your peaceful heart,
leave your gun at home” — at the same time as Mr. Pagano’s event.
But news media attention — some from overseas — has focused on Mr. Pagano, who
has been planning the event for a year, in celebration of the Fourth of July.
Cameras will not be allowed in the church, he said, to protect the
congregation’s privacy.
The celebration will feature lessons in responsible gun ownership, Mr. Pagano
said. Sheriff’s deputies will be at the doors to check that openly carried
firearms are unloaded, but they will not check for concealed weapons.
“That’s the whole point of concealed,” Mr. Pagano said, adding that he was not
worried because such owners require training.
Mr. Pagano said the church’s insurance company, which he would not identify, had
canceled the church’s policy for the day on Saturday and told him that it would
cancel the policy for good at the end of the year. If he cannot find insurance
for Saturday, people will not be allowed in openly carrying their guns.
Arkansas and Georgia recently rejected efforts to allow people to carry
concealed weapons in church. Watching the debate in Arkansas was John Phillips,
pastor of the Central Church of Christ in Little Rock. In 1986, Mr. Phillips was
preaching in a different church there when a gunman shot him and a parishioner.
Both survived, but Mr. Phillips, 51, still has a bullet lodged in his spine.
In a telephone interview, he said he found the idea of “packing in the pew”
abhorrent.
“There is a movement afoot across the nation, with the gun lobby pushing the
envelope, trying to allow concealed weapons to be carried in places where they
used to be prohibited — churches, schools, bars,” Mr. Phillips said.
“I don’t understand how any minister who is familiar with the teachings of the
Bible can do this,” he added. “Jesus didn’t say, ‘Go ahead, make my day.’ ”
Mr. Pagano takes such comments as a challenge to his faith and says they make
him more determined.
“When someone from within the church tells me that being a Christian and having
firearms are contradictions, that they’re incompatible with the Gospel —
baloney,” he said. “As soon as you start saying that it’s not something that
Christians do, well, guns are just the foil. The issue now is the Gospel. So in
a sense, it does become a crusade. Now the Gospel is at stake.”
A year ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark decision
establishing the constitutional right of Americans to own guns. But the justices
did not explain what the practical effect of that ruling would be on city and
state gun laws.
Could a city still ban handguns? The justices said the District of Columbia
could not, but only because it is a special federal district. The question of
the constitutionality of existing city and state gun laws was left unanswered.
That left a large vacuum for the lower courts to fill. Supporters of gun rights
filed a flurry of lawsuits to strike down local gun restrictions, and now
federal appeals courts have begun weighing in on this divisive issue, using very
different reasoning.
One court this month upheld Chicago’s ban on automatic weapons and concealed
handguns, while in April a California court disagreed on the constitutional
issue.
The differing opinions mean that the whole issue of city and state gun laws will
probably head back to the Supreme Court for clarification, leading many legal
experts to predict a further expansion of gun rights.
The new cases are fallout from last year’s Supreme Court case, District of
Columbia v. Heller, which struck down parts of Washington’s gun control
ordinance, the strictest in the country, and stated for the first time that the
Second Amendment gives individuals a right to keep and bear arms for personal
use. But the court declined to say whether the Second Amendment in general
applies to state and local governments.
In January, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New
York, in a ruling joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, declined to apply the Second
Amendment to a New York law that banned the martial arts device known as chukka
sticks. The ban was allowed to stay in place.
Then in April, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled
that the Second Amendment did apply to the states, even though it allowed a
California county to ban guns on government property like state fairgrounds.
That case, Nordyke v. King, is being considered for a rehearing by the full
Ninth Circuit.
Those two conflicting cases set the stage for two other cases that were heard as
one in the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, testing that city’s handgun ban. On June
2, a three-judge panel of the court, led by Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, a
well-known conservative, ruled that there was no basis for the court to apply
the Second Amendment to the states. Such a decision, Judge Easterbrook wrote,
should be made only by the Supreme Court, not at the appellate level.
The right of states to make their own decisions on such matters, Judge
Easterbrook wrote, “is an older and more deeply rooted tradition than is a right
to carry any particular kind of weapon.”
The lawyers for the plaintiffs, including the National Rifle Association, have
asked the Supreme Court to take up the Chicago cases.
A split among the federal appeals circuits, especially on constitutional issues,
invites Supreme Court action, said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
“Californians, Hawaiians and Oregonians have a Second Amendment right to bear
arms, but New Yorkers, Illinoisans, and Wisconsinites don’t,” Professor Winkler
said. “The Supreme Court will want to correct this sooner rather than later.”
The process of applying amendments of the Bill of Rights to the states, known as
incorporation, began after the Civil War but had its heyday in the activist
Supreme Court of the Earl Warren era. Much of the Bill of Rights, including the
First Amendment’s freedom of speech and some rights of criminal defendants, have
been applied to the states, but other elements have not, including the Seventh
Amendment right to a civil jury trial and the Second Amendment.
Incorporation fell out of favor after the 1960s, but a new generation of largely
liberal scholars of law and history have brought it back into the intellectual
mainstream, said Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale University, who
supports the process.
“The precedents are now supportive of incorporation of nearly every provision of
the Bill of Rights,” Professor Amar said. “Now what’s odd is that the Second
Amendment doesn’t apply to the states.”
Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, said he would be
surprised if the Supreme Court accepted these gun cases, because some of the
conservative justices on the court had scoffed at incorporation arguments in the
past and might not want to set a precedent.
Professor Amar, however, argued that the justices would not only take up the
case but would also ultimately vote for incorporation of the Second Amendment.
Even if the Second Amendment becomes the controlling law of every state and
town, constitutional scholars say it is still unlikely that gun laws would be
overturned wholesale. The Supreme Court’s Heller decision last year, notes
Nelson Lund, a law professor at George Mason University, “clearly indicates that
governments will still have wide latitude to regulate firearms.”
Even the Ninth Circuit in California, while applying the Second Amendment to the
states, still upheld the gun ordinance that gave rise to the lawsuit.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles,
said the view of the Ninth Circuit reflected what polls have said was, by and
large, the view of the American people.
“There is a right to bear arms,” Professor Volokh said, “but it’s not absolute.”
December
26, 2008
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE and ANAHAD O’CONNOR
COVINA,
Calif. — A man in a Santa Claus outfit opened fire on a Christmas Eve gathering
of his in-laws in this Los Angeles suburb and then methodically set their house
ablaze, killing at least eight people and injuring several others, the
authorities said Thursday.
Shortly after the attack, the gunman, identified as Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45,
killed himself with a single shot to the head at the home of his brother in the
Sylmar section of Los Angeles, the police said.
In addition to the eight people whose bodies were found in the ashes of the
house here, none of whom were identified, at least one other person was thought
to be missing, and perhaps as many as three. Among the total of dead or missing
were the couple who owned the home and their daughter, the estranged wife of the
gunman, the police said.
Investigators continued to search the charred structure Thursday, and coroners
said dental records would be needed to identify some of the remains.
The frenzied shooting occurred just before midnight Wednesday at the two-story
house, set on a cul-de-sac in this middle-class town about 22 miles east of Los
Angeles. Lt. Pat Buchanan of the Covina Police Department said Mr. Pardo, armed
with one or two handguns and fire accelerant, had gone to the house looking for
his former wife, Sylvia, with whom he was finalizing a contentious divorce after
only a year of marriage.
People who escaped the house got out by smashing through glass and jumping. One
woman broke an ankle when she leapt from a second-floor window.
The house was owned by James and Alicia Ortega, an elderly couple who were
retired from their spray-painting business and who often invited their large
extended family over for parties, particularly around Christmas.
Relatives said about 25 people, among them many children, were inside the home
celebrating when Mr. Pardo knocked on the door around 11:30 p.m. He had
apparently disguised himself as a hired entertainer for the children in order to
gain access.
When a guest opened the door, Lieutenant Buchanan said, Mr. Pardo stepped inside
the house, drew a semiautomatic handgun and immediately started shooting,
beginning with an 8-year-old girl who was hit in the face but who survived, as
did an older girl who was shot in the back.
As Mr. Pardo unleashed a barrage of gunfire in the living room, relatives
smashed through windows, hid behind furniture or bounded upstairs. Then he
sprayed the room with accelerant, using a device made of two pressurized tanks,
one of which held pressurized gas. Within seconds, the house was ablaze.
Joshua Chavez of Seattle was visiting his mother’s house, which sits behind the
Ortegas’, when he heard a loud explosion. “Then I saw black smoke and this large
flame,” he said.
Mr. Chavez ran out to the backyard and heard three girls, including the one who
had been shot in the back, trying to climb over his mother’s wall. “There’s some
guy shooting in there,” he said one of the girls told him.
“About 20 seconds after that,” he continued, “the house was totally on fire. One
girl said that a guy dressed as Santa started shooting.”
Another neighbor, Jeannie Goltz, 51, saw three more partygoers fleeing the
burning home. One of them, a young woman, had escaped upstairs from the living
room but broke her ankle when she jumped out a second-story window.
SWAT teams arrived shortly after Ms. Goltz had shepherded these three survivors
into another neighbor’s house, but by that time Mr. Pardo was on his way back to
Los Angeles.
Police officers said they could not recall so horrific a crime in Covina, and
neighbors said they would never have imagined anything so grisly on their quiet
block.
The Ortegas had lived in the house for more than two decades and were known for
their family spirit, their generosity and their dog, which frequently escaped
their yard.
“I would generally play Santa for the family every year,” said Pat Bower, a
neighbor of the Ortegas for 25 years. “The family was always together. Brothers
and sisters, aunts and uncles were always in the house. They were a gigantic
family. We all envied them, actually.”
Robert and Gloria Magcalas lived next door to the Ortegas for 11 years but were
celebrating Christmas Eve with relatives in Los Angeles. Their own home was
barely spared the flames.
“They were a big, loving family,” Mrs. Magcalas said. “We usually exchanged
gifts with them today. They gave us tamales and cookies every Christmas.”
The police said they had found two handguns in the ruins, and an additional two
pistols at the scene of Mr. Pardo’s apparent suicide. Officials said they would
continue to search the crime scene Friday, seeking information about the
identities of the dead.
Solomon Moore reported from Covina, and Anahad O’Connor from New York.
November 11, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN DOUGHERTY and ANAHAD O’CONNOR
An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with premeditated murder in
the deaths of his father and another man shot each victim at least four times
with a .22-caliber rifle, methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them,
prosecutors said Monday.
Although investigators initially said they thought the boy might have suffered
severe physical or sexual trauma, they have found no evidence of abuse, said Roy
Melnick, the police chief in St. Johns, Ariz., where the shootings occurred.
Psychologists say such abuse is often a factor in the extremely rare instances
in which a small child murders a parent.
An investigation found no evidence that the boy had had disciplinary problems at
school or shown signs that he was troubled, Chief Melnick said. “That’s what
makes this case somewhat puzzling,” he said, adding that the court had ordered a
psychological evaluation for the boy. “Our goal is to get him some help.”
Kathleen M. Heide, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida,
said the odds of such killings “are so infinitesimal, it’s really hard to even
comprehend.”
From 1976 to 2005, there were 62 cases in the United States in which a 7- or
8-year-old was arrested on murder charges, said Dr. Heide, who analyzed F.B.I.
data. Only two of those cases involved a child killing a parent. Children
younger than 7 who commit killings are not charged in most states.
In cases in which a child kills a parent, the child is typically a teenager and
usually acts for one of three reasons, psychologists say. Most often, the child
has suffered years of physical or sexual abuse. Others kill because of severe
mental illness. And some have extreme antisocial or psychopathic tendencies — a
child who is used to getting his way and kills out of anger.
“The wrinkle here,” Dr. Heide said, “is that this boy is so young, it could
possibly be immaturity and impulsivity.” In children as young as 8, parts of the
brain that weigh decisions and consequences are so underdeveloped that a child
might not understand the finality of death.
The boy in Arizona was no stranger to weapons — his father, an avid hunter,
reportedly trained his son to shoot prairie dogs — and psychologists said that
might have played a role.
The shootings occurred Wednesday afternoon in the two-story home in St. Johns,
about 200 miles northeast of Phoenix, where the boy lived with his father,
Vincent Romero, 29. The deputy attorney for Apache County, Brad Carlyon, said
Monday that the boy was taken to the police by his grandmother and initially
considered a victim because he was believed to have discovered the men’s bodies.
But about 45 minutes into an hourlong police interview, Mr. Carlyon said, the
boy confessed to shooting his father and a man who rented a room in the house,
Timothy Romans, 39, of San Carlos, Ariz.
Mr. Carlyon said the boy told the police that he had been spanked at home the
night before because he was having trouble at school. But, the prosecutor said,
the boy “did not say that was the reason he committed any of the acts.”
Prosecutors said the murder weapon was a single-action .22-caliber hunting rifle
that requires reloading before each shot. “He had to eject the shell from the
rifle and put in a new shell each time he fired,” Mr. Carlyon said.
Mr. Carlyon and Chief Melnick spoke to The New York Times shortly before an
Apache County judge placed a gag order on lawyers and the police a little before
noon Monday.
Mr. Romero, who was divorced from the boy’s mother, had recently remarried and
had custody of his son. Mr. Romero was the first victim, investigators said,
shot in the head and chest as he walked up a staircase inside the house shortly
after 5 p.m.
Mr. Romans was outside the house talking on his cellphone to his wife, Mr.
Carlyon said, when he heard some commotion inside. Mr. Carlyon said the rifle
produced only a “muffled, soft popping” sound, making it likely that Mr. Romans
had no idea what had happened inside. Mr. Carlyon said Mr. Romans had told his
wife that the boy was calling for him. He was on the porch on his way into the
house when he was shot in the chest and head, the authorities said.
The police arrived at the house one minute after receiving a phone call from a
neighbor at 5:08 p.m., Chief Melnick said. Both men were dead. The chief said
the boy was not immediately taken into custody. “He was considered a witness,”
Chief Melnick said.
A secretary for the boy’s lawyer, Benjamin Brewer, said Mr. Brewer was in court
all day Monday and could not be reached for comment. Mr. Brewer has said that
neither he nor the boy’s family was present for the questioning and that the boy
was not read his rights. He is being held at the Apache County Juvenile
Detention Center.
August 29, 2008
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
HARROLD, Tex. — Students in this tiny town of grain silos and ranch-style
houses spent much of the first couple of days in school this week trying to
guess which of their teachers were carrying pistols under their clothes.
“We made fun of them,” said Eric Howard, a 16-year-old high school junior.
“Everybody knows everybody here. We will find out.”
The school board in this impoverished rural hamlet in North Texas has drawn
national attention with its decision to let some teachers carry concealed
weapons, a track no other school in the country has followed. The idea is to
ward off a massacre along the lines of what happened at Columbine High School in
Colorado in 1999.
“Our people just don’t want their children to be fish in a bowl,” said David
Thweatt, the schools superintendent and driving force behind the policy.
“Country people are take-care-of-yourself people. They are not under the
illusion that the police are there to protect them.”
Even in Texas, with its tradition of lenient gun laws and frontier justice, the
idea of teachers’ taking guns to class has rattled some people and sparked a
fiery debate.
Gun-control advocates are wringing their hands, while pro-gun groups are
gleeful. Leaders of the state’s major teachers unions have expressed stunned
outrage, while the conservative Republican governor, Rick Perry, has endorsed
the idea.
In the center of the storm is Mr. Thweatt, a man who describes himself as “a
contingency planner,” who believes Americans should be less afraid of protecting
themselves and who thinks signs at schools saying “gun-free zone” make them
targets for armed attacks. “That’s like saying sic ’em to a dog,” he said.
Mr. Thweatt maintains that having teachers carry guns is a rational response to
a real threat. The county sheriff’s office is 17 miles away, he argues, and the
district cannot afford to hire police officers, as urban schools in Dallas and
Houston do.
The school board decided that teachers with concealed guns were a better form of
security than armed peace officers, since an attacker would not know whom to
shoot first, Mr. Thweatt said. Teachers have received training from a private
security consultant and will use special ammunition designed to prevent
ricocheting, he added.
Harrold, about 180 miles northwest of Dallas, is a far cry from the giant
districts in major Texas cities, where gang violence is the main concern and
most schools have their own police forces. Barely 100 students of all ages
attend classes here in two brick buildings built more than 60 years ago. There
are two dozen teachers, a handful of buses and a football field bordered by
crops.
Yet the town is not isolated in rustic peace, supporters of the plan point out.
A four-lane highway runs through town, bringing with it a river of humanity,
including criminals, they say. The police recently shut down a drug-producing
laboratory in a ramshackle house near school property. Drifters sometimes sleep
under the overpass.
“I’m not exactly paranoid,” Mr. Thweatt said. “I like to consider myself
prepared.”
Some residents and parents, however, think Mr. Thweatt may be overstating the
threat. Many say they rarely lock their doors, much less worry about random
drifters with pistols running amok at the school. Longtime residents were
hard-pressed to recall a single violent incident there.
Others worry that introducing guns into the classroom might create more problems
than it solved. A teacher tussling with a student could lose control of a
weapon, or a gun might go off by accident, they said.
“I don’t think there is a place in the school whatsoever for a gun unless you
have a police officer in there,” said Bobby G. Brown, a farmer and former school
board chairman whose two sons were educated at the school. “I don’t care how
much training they have.”
His wife, Diane Brown, added: “There are too many things that could happen. They
are not trained to make life-and-death-situation judgments.”
Mr. Thweatt declined to say how many teachers were armed, or who they were, on
the theory that it would tip off the bad guys. He also declined to identify the
private consultant who provided teachers with about 40 hours of weapons
training.
Most critics question whether teachers, even with extra training, are as
qualified as police officers to take out an armed attacker.
“We are trained to teach and to educate,” said Zeph Capo, the legislative
director for the Houston Association of Teachers. “We are not trained to tame
the Wild West.”
Texas gun laws ban the weapons on school property. But the Legislature carved
out an exception allowing school boards to permit people with concealed handgun
licenses to carry their weapons. No local district had taken advantage of the
exception until the Harrold school board acted.
Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, said the state’s
hands were tied. “We have really tried not to get involved in this,” Ms.
Ratcliffe said. “Frankly, it’s a matter of local control.”
Gun-control advocates say, however, that while the school district may be
complying with state gun laws, it appears to be violating the education statute.
That law says “security personnel” authorized to carry weapons on campuses must
be “commissioned peace officers,” who undergo police training.
“It seems to us not only an unwise policy but an illegal one,” said Brian
Siebel, a lawyer in Washington for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
The school district has countered that teachers are not “security personnel” and
so do not need to become peace officers.
As a general rule, the seven school board members — a collection of farmers and
oil workers led by an ambulance medic — have referred all questions from
reporters to Mr. Thweatt. But one member, Coy Cato, gave a short interview. “In
my opinion, it is the best way to protect our kids,” Mr. Cato said. Asked if
others in the community shared his view, he said that he had not taken a poll,
but “I think so.”
Still, several residents complained that the board made little or no effort to
gather public opinion on the matter. Some said they did not hear about the plan
until reporters started asking questions about it in early August.
Mr. Thweatt said the board discussed the proposal for nearly two years and
considered several options — tranquilizer guns, beanbag guns, Tasers, Mace and
armed security guards — but each was found lacking in some way. “We
devil-advocated it to death,” Mr. Thweatt said.
That discussion went unnoticed by many parents.
Traci McKay, a 34-year-old restaurant employee, sends three children to the
school, yet said she had not heard about the pistol-carrying teachers until two
weeks before the start of the semester. She was stunned.
“I should have been informed,” Ms. McKay said. “If something happens, do we
really want all these people shooting at each other?”
Ms. McKay said Mr. Thweatt had yet to explain why a town with such a low crime
rate needed such measures. She is afraid, however, that her children might face
repercussions if she takes up a petition against the idea.
“We are pretty much being told to deal with this or move,” Ms. McKay said.
WASHINGTON
— The Supreme Court declared for the first time on Thursday that the
Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun, not just the right of
the states to maintain militias.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the landmark 5-to-4
decision, said the Constitution does not allow “the absolute prohibition of
handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.” In so declaring, the
majority found that a gun-control law in the nation’s capital went too far by
making it nearly impossible to own a handgun.
But the court held that the individual right to possess a gun “for traditionally
lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home” is not unlimited. “It is
not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and
for whatever purpose,” Justice Scalia wrote.
The ruling does not mean, for instance, that laws against carrying concealed
weapons are to be swept aside. Furthermore, Justice Scalia wrote, “The court’s
opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the
possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the
carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government
buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale
of arms.”
The decision upheld a federal appeals court ruling that the District of
Columbia’s gun law, one of the strictest in the country, went beyond
constitutional limits. Not only did the 1976 law make it practically impossible
for an individual to legally possess a handgun in the district, but it also
spelled out rules for the storage of rifles and shotguns. But the court did not
articulate a specific standard of review for what might be a reasonable
restraint on the right to possess a firearm.
The court also said on Thursday that the district law’s requirement that lawful
weapons be rendered essentially inoperable, by trigger locks or disassembly, was
unconstitutional because it rendered the weapons useless for self-defense.
Joining Justice Scalia were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices
Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
A dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens asserted that the majority “would have us
believe that over 200 years ago, the framers made a choice to limit the tools
available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.”
Joining him were Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G.
Breyer.
The high court’s ruling was the first since 1939 to deal with the scope of the
Second Amendment, and the first to so directly address the meaning of the
amendment’s ambiguous, comma-laden text: “A well regulated Militia, being
necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and
bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Not surprisingly, Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens differed on the clarity (or
lack thereof) of the Second Amendment. “The amendment’s prefatory clause
announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second
clause,” wrote Justice Scalia. “The operative clause’s text and history
demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.”
Not at all, Justice Stevens countered, asserting that the majority “stakes its
holding on a strained and unpersuasive reading of the amendment’s text.” Justice
Stevens read his dissent from the bench, an unmistakable signal that he
disagreed deeply with the majority.
Indeed, it was clear from the conflicting opinions of Justices Scalia and
Stevens that the case had generated emotional as well as intellectual sparks at
the court.
Justice Scalia devoted page after page of his opinion to the various state
constitutions and to the use of language in the 18th and 19th centuries to
support his view that an individual right to bear arms is embodied in the
Constitution. And Justice Scalia, who clearly takes pride in his writing as well
as his reasoning, used adjectives like “frivolous” and “bizarre” to describe the
other side’s arguments.
Not to be outdone, Justice Stevens called the majority’s interpretation of the
Second Amendment “overwrought and novel” and said it “calls to mind the parable
of the six blind men and the elephant,” in which each of the sightless men had a
different conception of the animal.
“Each of them, of course, has fundamentally failed to grasp the nature of the
creature,” Justice Stevens wrote.
The ruling on Thursday will surely not quiet the debate about guns and violence
in the United States, where deaths by firearm take a far higher toll than in
many other countries, as Justice Scalia acknowledged.
“We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country,” he wrote,
saying that he took seriously the concerns of those who believe that
“prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution.”
Lawmakers in the District of Columbia and across the country may look to the
decision as a blueprint for writing new legislation to satisfy the demands of
constituents who say there is too much regulation of firearms now, or too
little, depending on the sentiments in their regions. (Washington’s Mayor,
Adrian M. Fenty, will instruct the police department to issue new
handgun-registration rules within 30 days while city officials study the ruling,
The Washington Post reported on its Web site.)
Nor was there any suggestion that the court’s ruling would lead to a
proliferation of deadly, military-style assault weapons. Alluding to the 1939
Supreme Court decision, which held that the weapons protected under the Second
Amendment were those “in common use at the time,” Justice Scalia said, “We think
that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting
the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”
The White House issued a statement saying that President Bush “strongly agrees
with the Supreme Court’s historic decision today that the Second Amendment
protects the individual right of Americans to keep and bear arms.”
The Supreme Court ruling is likely to play out in this year’s elections, as
Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee for
president, made clear. “I applaud this decision as well as the overturning of
the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and limitations on the ability to use
firearms for self-defense,” Mr. McCain said in a statement, which contained a
reminder that his Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, refused
to join him in signing an amicus brief in support of overturning the district’s
law.
Indeed, Mr. Obama’s view, expressed in a statement, was more nuanced than Mr.
McCain’s. “I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right
of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged
communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets
through common-sense, effective safety measures,” Mr. Obama said, predicting
that the ruling would provide needed guidance for lawmakers.
The National Rifle Association and other supporters of rights to have firearms
are sure to use the decision as a launch pad for lawsuits. The N.R.A. said it
would file suits in San Francisco, Chicago and several Chicago suburbs
challenging handgun restrictions there. “I consider this the opening salvo in a
step-by-step process of providing relief for law-abiding Americans everywhere
that have been deprived of this freedom,” Wayne LaPierre, executive vice
president of the N.R.A., told The Associated Press.
Reaction on Capitol Hill differed sharply. Representative John A. Boehner of
Ohio, the Republican minority leader in the House, applauded the ruling. “The
Constitution plainly guarantees the solemn right to keep and bear arms, and the
whims of politically correct bureaucrats cannot take it away,” he said in a
statement.
But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and a former mayor of San
Francisco, said she was disappointed in the ruling. “I speak as a former mayor,”
she said at a session of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I speak as somebody
who has gone to homicide crime scenes.”
The last time the Supreme Court weighed a case involving the Second Amendment,
in 1939, it decided a narrower question, finding that the Constitution did not
protect any right to possess a specific type of firearm, the sawed-off shotgun.
By contrast, the issues in the District of Columbia case seemed much more
“mainstream,” if that term can be used in reference to gun-control issues. When
the justices announced on Nov. 20 that they were accepting the case of District
of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290, they indicated that they would go to the
heart of the long debate.
The question, they said, is whether the district’s restrictions on firearms
“violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with
any state-regulated militia but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for
private use in their homes.”
Dick Anthony Heller, a security guard who carries a handgun for his job
protecting federal judiciary offices, challenged the District of Columbia’s law
after his request for a license to keep his gun at home was rejected.
There have been debates about the efficacy of gun-control efforts in the
capital. Those district residents who want guns — and are willing to risk
punishment if caught with them without bothering to apply for permits — can get
them easily enough, across the Potomac River in Virginia and in other nearby
states.
Washington’s homicide rate, while high by world standards, is sharply lower than
it was in the early 1990s. Last year, there were 181 homicides in Washington,
down from a peak of 479 in 1991, when crack cocaine was a huge problem in some
sections of the city.
Concluding his opinion, Justice Scalia wrote, “Undoubtedly some think that the
Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride
of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and
where gun violence is a serious problem.”
“That is perhaps debatable,” Justice Scalia wrote, “but what is not debatable is
that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment
extinct.”
When the Heller case was argued before the justices on March 18, Mr. Heller’s
lawyer, Alan Gura, did not assert that the Second Amendment precluded any kind
of ban related to gun possession. He said that a ban on the shipment of machine
guns and sawed-off shotguns would be acceptable, and in answer to a question
from the justices, so, too, might be a prohibition on guns in schools. Some of
the justices signaled during arguments that they thought the District’s
near-total ban on handguns went too far.
A legislature “has a great deal of leeway in regulating firearms,” Mr. Gura
argued, but not to the extent of virtually banning them in homes.
The Washington law not only established high barriers to the private possession
of handguns, it also required that rifles and shotguns be kept either in a
disassembled state or under a trigger lock.
Walter Dellinger, the lawyer who argued for the district on March 18, asserted
that “the people” and “the militia” were essentially the same, and that the
Second Amendment gave people the right to bear arms only in connection with
their militia service.
Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, representing the federal government, argued
on behalf of the individual-rights position, which has been the Bush
administration’s policy. But he said that the appeals court had also gone too
far in overturning the ordinance and that the right to bear arms was always
subject to “reasonable regulations.”
(Reuters) -
A gunman opened fire from a balcony in a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, on
Wednesday, killing eight people, wounding five before taking his own life,
police said.
Following is a chronology of some of the deadlier mass shootings in the United
States in recent years:
March 1998 - At Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, two boys aged 13
and 11 pulled a fire alarm and began shooting teachers and classmates as they
left the school, killing four students and a teacher.
April 1999 - Two students shot to death 12 other students and a teacher at
Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, before killing themselves.
July 1999 - A day trader killed his wife and two children before shooting nine
people to death at two Atlanta brokerages. He then killed himself.
September 1999 - A 47-year-old loner killed seven people in a Fort Worth, Texas,
Baptist church. Then he killed himself.
November 1999 - A Xerox copier repairman in Honolulu gunned down seven
co-workers before fleeing, triggering one of the biggest manhunts in Hawaii
history. He was located and surrendered to police after a five-hour armed
standoff.
March 2005 - A 16-year-old high school student gunned down five students, a
teacher and a security guard at Red Lake High School in far northern Minnesota
before killing himself. He also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's
companion elsewhere on the Chippewa Indian reservation.
October 2, 2006 - A local milk truck driver who was not Amish, tied up and shot
10 Amish schoolgirls aged 6 to 14 in their classroom, killing five of them
before turning the gun on himself in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, about 60
miles (97 km) west of Philadelphia.
April 16, 2007 - A university in Blacksburg, Virginia, Virginia Tech, became the
site of the deadliest rampage in U.S. history when a gunman killed 32 people and
himself.
December 5, 2007 - A gunman opened fire from a balcony in a shopping mall in
Omaha, Nebraska, killing eight people and wounding five, before taking his own
life, police said.
(Writing by Paul Grant, Washington Editorial Reference Unit, editing by Philip
Barbara)
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Remarks by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
Police Headquarters
The New York Times
I AM GOING TO GIVE YOU ALL OF THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM AT
THIS POINT.
THERE IS SOME INFORMATION WE DON’T HAVE. THAT’S BECAUSE WE ARE
PRECLUDED FROM INTERVIEWING ALL OF THE OFFICERS INVOLVED UNTIL THE DISTRICT
ATTORNEY FINISHES HIS REVIEW. THE SHOOTING HAPPENED AT 4:14 THIS MORNING IN
JAMAICA, QUEENS.
ONE PERSON WAS SHOT AND KILLED AND TWO OTHERS WERE WOUNDED BY
POLICE GUNFIRE. A TOTAL OF SEVEN POLICE OFFICERS WERE INVOLVED IN THE INCIDENT,
FIVE OF WHOM FIRED THEIR WEAPONS. THE OTHER TWO, WHO DID NOT SHOOT, A LIEUTENANT
AND AN UNDERCOVER OFFICER, HAVE BEEN INTERVIEWED.
THE EVENTS LEADING UP TO THE SHOOTING UNFOLDED AT THE CLUB KALUA AT 143-08 94TH
STREET IN JAMAICA. A CLUB ENFORCEMENT TASK FORCE HAD BEEN ASSIGNED TO MONITOR
THE CLUB BECAUSE OF A CHRONIC HISTORY OF NARCOTICS, PROSTITUTION AND WEAPONS
COMPLAINTS THERE. IT HAD BEEN CLOSED THROUGH NUISANCE ABATEMENT IN JULY 2005 FOR
PROSTITUTION AND UNDER AGE DRINKING.
IT WAS ALLOWED TO RE-OPEN IN OCTOBER 2005. SINCE THEN, IT HAS BEEN THE SUBJECT
OF NUMEROUS COMPLAINTS. THERE WERE TWENTY-SIX 9-1-1 CALLS TO THE CLUB IN THE
LAST 12 MONTHS, AND 8 ARRESTS THERE FOR WEAPONS, NARCOTICS AND PROSTITUTION. THE
MOST RECENT ARRESTS THERE FOR NARCOTICS AND PROSTITUTION WERE MADE ON TUESDAY.
TWO UNDERCOVER OFFICERS WERE INSIDE THE CLUB AT ABOUT ONE A.M... TODAY TO
DOCUMENT ANY ILLICIT ACTIVITY THERE. WITH ONE MORE DOCUMENTED VIOLATION, THE
CLUB WOULD FACE ANOTHER NUISANCE ABATEMENT CLOSURE.
AT ABOUT 3:00 A.M., ONE OF THE UNDERCOVER OFFICERS OVERHEARD ONE OF THE CLUB’S
DANCERS COMPLAIN TO A MAN THAT SHE HAD BEEN BOTHERED BY ONE OF THE PATRONS. THE
MAN INDICATED BY PATTING HIS WAISTBAND THAT HE HAD A GUN, AND HE TOLD THE WOMAN
WOULD TAKE CARE OF THE PROBLEM. THE UNDERCOVER WHO HEARD THE EXCHANGE LEFT THE
CLUB TO NOTIFY HIS SUPERVISOR AND BACK-UP TEAM OF POSSIBLE TROUBLE.
AT ABOUT 4 AM OUTSIDE IN FRONT OF THE CLUB, A GROUP OF APPROXMAILEY 8 MEN BEGAN
TO ARGUE WITH A LONE MALE, THREATENING TO ASSAULT HIM. ONE OF THE MALES IN THE
GROUP OF 8 YELLED “YO, GET MY GUN.” AND ANOTHER THREATENED TO ASSAULT THE LONE
MALE. THE GROUP OF 8 ULTIMATELY LEFT THE MAN ALONE.
THEY BROKE INTO TWO GROUPS OF 4 AND PROCEEDED EAST ON 94TH
AVENUE,
ABOUT A HALF BLOCK TO LIVERPOOL STREET, WHERE THEY TURNED SOUTH.
ONE OF THE UNDERCOVER OFFICERS, WHO I’LL CALL UNDERCOVER NUMBER ONE, STAYED
CLOSE BEHIND THE SECOND GROUP OF FOUR. UNDERCOVER OFFICER TWO REMAINED IN FRONT
OF THE CLUB. MEANWHILE, THE BACK UP TEAMS FOLLOWED UNDERCOVER OFFICER ONE AS HE
STAYED CLOSE BEHIND THE GROUP OF FOUR. THE BACK UP TEAMS WERE COMPRISED OF A
LIEUTENANT AND TWO OTHER OFFICERS IN AN UNMARKED TOYOTA CAMRY, AND TWO OTHER
OFFICERS IN A FORD “FREESTAR” MINIVAN.
UNDERCOVER OFFICER ONE CROSSED FROM THE WEST SIDE TO THE EAST SIDE OF LIVERPOOL
STREET, AS THE FOUR MEN HE WAS OBSERVING ENTERED A NISSAN ALTIMA. AS THE
UNDERCOVER OFFICER APPROACHED THE FRONT OF THE CAR, THE CAR MOVED FORWARD,
STRIKING THE UNDERCOVER. IT THEN PLOWED INTO THE FRONT OF THE POLICE MINIVAN
THAT HAD JUST TURNED SOUTH ON LIVERPOOL STREET. THE DRIVER OF THE ALTIMA PUT THE
CAR IN REVERSE AND DROVE BACKWARD ONTO THE SIDEWALK, SLAMMING INTO A ROLL-DOWN
GATE OF THE BUILDING THERE, CLOSE TO WHERE THE UNDERCOVER OFFICER WAS
LOCATED.THE DRIVER PUT THE CAR INTO FORWARD AND RAMMED THE POLICE MINIVAN A
SECOND TIME.
FIVE POLICE OFFICERS FIRED A TOTAL OF 50 ROUNDS AT THE THE ALTIMA. THE DRIVER,
SEAN BELL, WAS STRUCK TWICE, IN THE RIGHT ARM AND NECK. HE WAS PRONOUNCED AT
JAMAICA HOSPITAL. JOSEPH GUZMAN, WHO WAS IN THE FRONT PASSENGER SEAT, WAS STRUCK
MULTIPLE TIMES…AS MANY AS 11 TIMES. HE IS IN CRITICAL CONDITION AT MARY
IMMACULATE IN QUEENS. TRENT BENEFIELD, WHO WAS IN THE BACK SEAT, WAS SHOT THREE
TIMES, IN LOWER LEGS AND THE RIGHT REAR BUTTOCKS. HE IS IN STABLE CONDITION AT
MARY IMMACULATE HOSPITAL.
THERE MAY HAVE BEEN A FOURTH INDIVIDUAL IN THE CAR WHO FLED.
THE POLICE OFFICER WHO WAS STRUCK BY THE VEHICLE WAS TREATED AND RELEASED FOR AN
ABRASION TO HIS RIGHT SHIN. ONE OF THE DETECTIVES ASSIGNED AS BACK UP REMAINS AT
NORTH SHORE HOSPITAL IN NASSAU COUNTRY FOR OBSERVATION BECAUSE OF HYPERTENSION.
TWO PORT AUTHORITY POLICE OFFICERS WERE TREATED AND RELEASED FOR MINOR FACIAL
INJURES FROM GLASS FROM A WINDOW IN THE NEARBY AIR TRAIN FACILITY. THE WINDOW
HAD BEEN SHATTERED BY AN ERRANT ROUND. ANOTHER ERRANT ROUND PENETRATED THE
WINDOW OF A PRIVATE HOUSE NEARBY. THERE WERE NO INJURIES ASSOCIATED WITH IT,
HOWEVER.
THE TWO OFFICERS IN THE MINIVAN, EXITED THEIR VEHICLE AND FIRED AT TOTAL OF 34
SHOTS BETWEEN THEM. ONE OF THE TWO, A 12-YEAR VETERAN OF THE DEPARTMENT, FIRED
31 TIMES. THE OTHER, A 5-YEAR VETERAN, FIRED THREE TIMES.
THE TWO OFFICERS WITH THE LIEUTENANT IN THE CAMRY EXITED THE VEHICLE AND FIRED A
TOTAL OF 5 TIMES. ONE OFFICER, A 17-YEAR VETERAN, FIRED FOUR TIMES.
THE OTHER, A 9-YEAR VETERAN, FIRED ONCE. UNDERCOVER OFFICER, A FIVE-YEAR
VETERAN, FIRED 11 TIMES. ALL OF THESE OFFICERS WERE ARMED WITH 9MM
SEMI-AUTOMATIC PISTOLS. NONE HAD BEEN INVOLVED IN SHOOTINGS PREVIOUSLY.
NEITHER THE LIEUTENANT NOR UNDERCOVER OFFICER TWO FIRED.
OUR BALLISTICS TEAM HAS RECOVERED 40 SHELL CASINGS SO FAR. THEY FOUND THE NISSAN
ALTIMA HAS BEEN STRUCK 21 TIMES.
AT ABOUT 2:30 THIS AFTERNOON, A SEARCH WARRANT WAS OBTAINED FOR THE ALTIMA. NO
WEAPON WAS RECOVERED.
AS I MENTIONED, WE ARE PRECLUDED FROM INTERVIEWING THE SHOOTING OFFICERS UNTIL,
THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY COMPLETES HIS INVESTIGATION. WE HAVE QUESTIONED THE TWO
NON-SHOOTING OFFICERS, INCLUDING UNDERCOVER OFFICER TWO. UNDERCOVER OFFICER TWO
WAS IN FRONT OF THE CLUB WHEN HE HEARD AN INDIVIDUAL LATER IDENTIFIED AS THE
DRIVER OF THE ULTIMA, SEAN BELL, SAY “LET’S F… HIM UP,” IN REFERENCE TO AN
UNIDENTIFIED MALE STANDING BY A BLACK SUV IN FRONT OF THE CLUB. THE UNDERCOVER
OFFICER SAID THAT HE HEARD THE INDIVIDUAL LATER IDENTIFIED AS JOSEPH GUZMAN SAY
“YO, GO GET MY GUN.”
THE LIEUTENANT, IN HIS INTERVIEW SAID, THAT UNDERCOVER OFFICER ONE CALLED HIM
JUST PRIOR TO THE SHOOTING TO REPORT THAT, QUOTE: “IT’S GETTING HOT ON
LIVERPOOL, FOR REAL, I THINK THERE’S A GUN.” AT THIS POINT, THE LIEUTENANT WAS
PRECEDING EAST ON 94TH AVENUE IN THE TOYOTA CAMRY ABOUT AT BLOCK FROM LIVERPOOL
STREET. THE POLICE MINIVAN FOLLOWED HIM ONTO THE BLOCK
AS THE LIEUTENANT TURNED SOUTH ONTO LIVERPOOL, AND PROCEEDED DOWN THE BLOCK, HE
PASSED THE ALTIMA, AND THEN HEARD THE ALTIMA CRASH INTO THE MINIVAN AND THEN THE
SHOTS FIRED. A CIVILIAN WITNESS DESCRIBED THE ULTIMA CRASH INTO THE POLICE
MINIVAN AND THE ENSUING SHOOTING.
WE WILL LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS SHOOTING WHEN WE HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO INTERVIEW
THE OFFICERS WHO FIRED. NOW, I’LL TAKE QUESTIONS.
