I wanted to say a few words on President Obama’s reaction to the shootings in Oregon yesterday. I view them more as a cri de coeur than as a policy prescription. I can understand how those who are radicalized with respect to gun ownership could have seen them as an attack.
As far as policies go, based on what we know now from published accounts, what could have prevented the deaths from happening? Just off the top of my head I can think of three or four, none of them constitutional. It makes me wonder what President Obama meant by “commonsense reforms”?
Much as I hate to credit it, the only prescription I’ve seen that would meet constitutional muster and might have prevented the tragedy is the one from the Second Amendment absolutists: open carry.
In conclusion I’m glad I’m not faced with being expected to respond to every news story as President Obama is. Sometimes just being sad and having no other opinion is about all I can come up with.
Is he really expected to respond to every news story? I actually assumed that Obama simply got caught with a question by a reporter, but he called the press to him for a pedestrian sermon and a sheet of bogus gun statistics. (I’ve come to think most, if not all, gun stats are misleading no matter the point of view) Have previous Presidents called press conferences to respond to local news?
The only thing I’ve thought might be useful after these types of events is to learn what warning signs of mental illness existed. So far the signs are minimal (inward and withdrawn, a most peculiar man) . . .
Maybe he just expects himself to react. Maybe it’s opportunistic.
Judging by the discussion over at OTB, there are some who are indifferent to the legal and constitutional issues. IMO nothing short of going house to house and confiscating all firearms would be sufficient to place a categorical end to all mass murders using firearms.
I can think of all sorts of unconstitutional measures of varying levels of heinousness that would prevent incidents of this sort. But part of the problem in discussing it depends on what the speaker means by “of this sort”. You could eliminate mass murders on college campuses by eliminating college campuses, for example.
“Sometimes just being sad and having no other opinion is about all I can come up with.”
…and, that’s really all a President can/should do, especially right after such a tragedy has occurred, especially amidst ongoing confusion and sketchy facts, including not even an official identification of the shooter.
However, that was not the conduct of our President. Instead, he immediately appeared before cameras, with blistering criticism, once again blaming an inanimate object (a gun) rather than the person whose decision it was to use a gun to intimidate/wound/kill others.
If some people detect any political motive, his presentation certainly gave them fodder to do so.
In the meantime, Ben Carson, a physician candidate for the presidency, shifted focus to the red flags of mental health issues as underlying reasons for some of these incomprehensible violent acts — something the current president has talked about addressing, but with no follow-up action to those words.
Also, this school was supposedly a “gun-free zone,” much like the movie theater was in Aurora, Colorado. In fact, the lone campus security guard was unarmed. However, there is evidence that such zones merely provide better gun-free environments for criminals and crazies, alike, to unobtrusively roam. This dovetails in with one commenter’s remark yesterday who, when asked how such incidents could be averted, answered it’s when “a bad man’s gun is met by a good man’s gun” — something simplistically true in so many unreported cases where victims lived to tell the story.
Today, though, President Obama is slated to hold another news conference @ 3:30 pm eastern time. I hope he takes this pubic opportunity to discuss the ongoing ME problems rather than dubiously squeezing more out of what happened in Oregon.
I believe it was George W. Bush who famously said “freedom is messy” I want to make the comparison to the carnage we tolerate by private ownership and usage of automobiles. People are human. accidents happen. People are mentally disordered, gun accidents happen. Freedom has always come at a price. And yes , I do feel sorrow for the kids at that school.
It is a numbers issue. Airplane accidents are similar. They kill a lot of people at once. Like auto accidents, everyday murders are background noise.
Drunk driving only got any attention because the MADD mothers aggregated the drunk driving statistics and kept at it. The gun control groups would need to do the same, but this would also highlight a lot of crime in places that many of them do not want highlighted. We have two groups with a similar problem, and one was effective. The other is not because their stated cause is not their primary focus.
President Obama could use his bully pulpit, but he refuses. He is no better than those he opposes.
He could have used his bully pulpit if he had something of substance to say. Instead he “didn’t let a good tragedy go to waste” and made a mockery of himself.
Naturally, our evenhanded press didn’t take long to take a different tack, and take the comments of a Republican presidential candidate – “stuff happens” – wildly and pathetically out of context to attempt to make a mockery of him.
And people wonder why the press and politicians are held in such low regard……
I have yet to hear any serious proposal to my question of how would the government disarmament my town, Pine Hills. Had one idiot tell me all the gang bangers & gun nuts would hand them over if the government asked politely. That person was clearly mentally defective.
As The Onion’s headline puts it: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happensâ€.
Steve
It was not a gun free zone.
“Umpqua Community College, the site of the massacre on Thursday that left at least 10 people dead, was not — in law or in practice — a gun free zone.
It was the policy of university administrators to limit the use of guns to the extent allowed by law. But, as ThinkProgress and the New York Times reported, Oregon is one of seven states that allows concealed carry on postsecondary campuses. This was based on a 2011 state court decision invalidating efforts to ban guns at public universities in Oregon. Public colleges like UCC are permitted to exclude concealed weapons from certain buildings and facilities but not the campus in general.
But not only was UCC not a gun free zone by law, there were also people who brought guns onto campus at the time of the massacre.
John Parker Jr., a veteran and student at UCC, spoke with MSNBC and revealed that he was in a campus building with a concealed handgun when the shooting started. He suggested other students with him at the time were also carrying concealed handguns.”
As a practical matter we have too many guns to do much about this. Open carry just means a shooter has his first targets chosen for him. We will see nothing done to attempt to change this.
As PD notes, most gun stats are suspect. We aren’t able to do real research so we will never have good numbers.
Steve
It’s the nexus of a cultural issue, media attention and celebrity, and mental health, steve. Making guns more difficult to find will result in fewer gun deaths…….maybe, but a mentally ill or criminally determined (read: murderer) individual isn’t going to let a gun law stop them. That’s fantasy.
I’d make a gentlemens bet that if the politicians would shut up, and the media would simply solemnly and briefly report the facts, we would experience a greater reduction in these spectacular shooting events than any gun law would produce.
There have been, probably, hundreds of studies and meta-studies. The way I read their results and limiting to the U. S. tighter gun control laws would result in a small number of fewer suicides but wouldn’t do much about homicides for reasons that include those that steve cites above.
I’m not opposed to tighter gun controls. I just think that those for whom it’s a defining cause are overestimating what the effects will be.
I also think that those who read what the president is doing as trying to move the Overton window all I can say is that if that’s what he’s trying to do, it’s not working. What the opinion polls tell me is that most Americans think that our level of gun control is about right and that support for tougher gun control laws is weakening if anything.
As PD suggests above, we’d probably get more mileage from better mental health care and more vigilance about the young, isolated young men who are most likely to engage in mass murder.
One final word. In his zeal to promote gun control I think the president missed a real opportunity. Maybe (maybe) Trayvon Martin could have been his son but (presuming the published reports are correct) the shooter in the Oregon shooting could have been him. He has a distinct and relevant perspective to offer and he declined to offer it.
” the media would simply solemnly and briefly report the facts”
If it bleeds it leads. We have way, way fewer deaths from terror acts, and we obsess over those much more than these, spending billions to try to stop them. Refusing to be terrorized is probably a good way to minimize terrorism, but mass shootings like we have? Hard to say, but attention getting does seem a part of some of these shootings, so it might cut down on a few. Probably doesn’t stop the revenge killings or the ones by purely crazy folks. Guns are so readily available and such good force multipliers we are mostly just stuck with these.
“more vigilance about the young, isolated young men who are most likely to engage in mass murder.”
Too many to monitor. There are lots of isolated young men. We are not good at predicting which ones will become violent. We have put a lot of effort into figuring it out, with no success.
Steve
Steve, Here is some additional information substantiating the “gun-free zone: statement for Umpqua Community College.