What Is Sandy Hook About?

A makeshift memorial at Sandy Hook Elementary School (Source: TIME)

Over the past few days there have been a very vocal contingent of those calling for increased gun control in the wake of the horrible massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. We've seen New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Meet the Press. We've seen Joe Scarborough, a former Congressman given the highest rating from the NRA, come out in favor of increased gun control. Even West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin - who was endorsed by the NRA in the 2012 senate election and even made a campaign ad in which he shot a copy of the cap and trade bill with a rifle - has had positive things to say about potential gun control legislation.

One notable absence from the national dialogue about guns in America is the National Rifle Association. They've been silent on their Twitter account and deactivated their Facebook page, mere days after bragging about the more than 1.7 million "Likes" it had received. This is not rare, as the NRA has remained silent in the face of national tragedy before. Additionally, many senators refused to talk about their support for gun rights over the weekend. Meet the Press asked 31 pro-gun senators if they wanted to appear on Sunday's show. Not one accepted.

For such a principled group like the NRA, to be silent when those principles are called into question does not look good. There are two main reasons for something like this, neither of which bodes well for the group. On the one hand, they could be wavering in their views and slowly coming to the view that many Americans have: this country needs stricter gun control. I highly doubt this, as the NRA is the group that held their annual convention in Denver not 11 days after the Columbine massacre less than 15 miles away.

The second - and more plausible reason - is that in this day and age, many of the NRA's positions are indefensible. No citizen needs assault weapons. Someone like Nancy Lanza didn't need five guns. Hunting these days is for pure sport, not survival. Other countries have tightened gun restrictions in the wake of shooting tragedies with positive results. Why can't we do the same in America?

While the NRA and many elected officials have been silent, some pro-gun individuals have spoken out - but not about guns. They point to everything but in order to deflect the blame from easy access to guns. Mike Huckabee is the forerunner here, blaming everything from no prayer in schools to gays to abortion pills to smartphones to evolution. But he's not alone. I won't dignify other talking heads who have spoken out about this in even more ridiculous ways by analyzing their statements here.

I'll agree that mental health plays a role in this tragedy, and it is certainly something to talk about, but it's not the main point. I would pose this question who feel mental health plays a greater role than access to guns: what's easier to ban, mental disease or firearms? The answer is obvious.

So at the end of day it's not about God or gays or smartphones. It's not even primarily about mental health. It's about guns.

On a more personal note, this is not some screed from some lifelong anti-gun crusader. I've shot many kinds of guns, and while I have never been a card-carrying member of the NRA (by any stretch of the imagination), I have not been very vocal about restricting guns in the past. I even planned on owning a gun when I lived in a part of the country that allowed it (essentially anywhere but New York City).

Newtown has changed that. There's no valid reason I need a gun. There's no reason this country needs to have higher gun ownership per capita than one of the poorest countries in the Middle East with a weak central government. I refuse to add to that statistic and add another firearm to a country already saturated with them. I don't need a 21st century killing tool governed by 18th century doctrine. I feel - and hope - that after the heartbreaking events on Friday that many will join me in this thinking.

Newtown and Gun Control

Children being led away from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, CT after the shooting. (Source: NYTimes)

I looked on with horror, as much of the nation did yesterday, as news reports were coming out of Newtown, Connecticut about the horrible tragedy taking place there. To imagine what occurred in that classroom yesterday morning is something impossible to do without going to a dark place, and that's not what this post is about. Instead, it's about one aspect of the shooting that makes it all the more heart-wrenching.

This did not have to happen. This did not occur out of the blue. I don't mean to say that there were specific signs relating directly to Adam Lanza. I'm saying that we've seen massacre after massacre, from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Geneva County to Binghamton to Aurora. The guns from these massacres appear to have been bought legally - they were not purchased in some back alley black market deal. They were bought from gun shows or dealers.

And it appears that the guns used in the Newtown massacre were also purchased legally by Lanza's mother. With so many guns out there in the country - there are almost 300 million guns in this nation, whose population is 315 million - some are going to end up in the hands of those who have no business having one, as happened today. The answer is not more guns in this country, as the NRA would have you believe, but less guns. It's simple math: the less guns there are in this country, the less opportunity for massacres like the one that occurred in Newtown.

There's another underlying factor here, and it has to do with mental health. We don't need to wait for the psychiatric profiles to come out to know that a person who would do this to children is not well. But even with the best mental health services available, there will still be sick people in the world. We cannot prevent that. What we can prevent is the preponderance of firearms out there. Because if a mentally ill person is determined to hurt others, he will. The problem is that his ability to hurt others is exponentially increased when he is carrying a gun.

Look at a country like the UK, which has very strict gun laws. Their firearms-related homicide rate is nearly 100 times lower than the US's. One hundred times. Some point to America's "gun culture." I cannot really speak to that without a sociological background, but I will share a quote from the Economist blog from today that gave me pause:

Even in a country as accustomed to gun violence (and, increasingly, mass shootings) as America, the murder of 20 children in their elementary-school classroom is uniquely shocking.

According to this quote, had this been the murder of 20 innocent adults it would have been a talking point for a week or so before being replaced by another news story. We have massacre fatigue, which speaks to how regular mass shootings occur in this country. Let's not forget that today's tragedy is overshadowing a shooting earlier in the week in Oregon in which a man opened fire with an assault weapon on Christmas shoppers at a mall, killing two.

We have to ask ourselves if the continued loss of life is worth such easy access to firearms. What are we gaining as a society by maintaining such an easy buying process for guns? Do the more than 11,000 people killed every year in America in firearm-related homicides outnumber those who have used their firearms for self-defense? What about the almost 19,000 people who kill themselves with a gun? If anything positive can come out of such a horrendous event, it is an honest look at gun policy in this country. It's just incredibly tragic that it would have taken a room full of dead children for it to happen.

Shoot First, Ask Questions Later

New Haven PD patch
(Police App)

Scenario: What do you do if someone is in your basement during the night? Storm the room and start shooting. Now, what do you do if the person in your basement was your daughter? Well, if your name is Eric Scott and you're a New Haven cop who likes to shoot his service weapon before identifying a threat, then you get off scot-free.

Eric Scott was sleeping on May 28 when he was awoken by his outdoor lights that are motion-sensored. He grabs his taxpayer-funded service weapon and heads downstairs to see what's going on. He finds a door open that he had locked previously in the night and heads down to the basement with a flashlight to investigate. Up to this point there really isn't any issue here: you think someone is in your home you grab a weapon and see what's going on.

But this is where Eric Scott errs wildly. He goes down into his dark basement with only a flashlight, sees someone moving around and just fires. No warning, no verification of who is in the basement, no nothing. Well, to make a long story short no one was robbing Eric Scott's home, but his daughter was returning from sneaking out earlier in the night. Scott believed that his daughter was upstairs sleeping, not prowling in their basement. State attorney Jonathon Benedict has declined to press charges claiming that the burden of proof would be too large for his office to prove.

So here is the issue: Scott goes into his basement, sees a person down there and just shoots. I hope this is not how they train New Haven cops. State law concerning use of physical force in the defense of property, Chapter 951, Sec. 53a-21, states that a person can use physical force only when "he reasonably believes such to be necessary to prevent an attempt by such other person to commit larceny or criminal mischief involving property." Scott did not reasonably believe that someone was in his home committing a crime, that's what he may have thought based on what he believed was occurring, but without verifying that the person in the basement did not belong in the home by a simple warning to the person or by turning the lights on, he just did not know. All of this is made painfully obvious by the fact that the person he shot was his own daughter, which leads me to believe that he had a horrible visual on the "intruder" as he could not even recognize his own daughter. But the tale doesn't end for the $0.75 Scott spent shooting his daughter (about the price of a Glock bullet). Whose insurance will cover 18 year-old Tasha Scott's medical bills? Last I checked, medical expenses for someone who is shot in the knee with a bullet that then lodges in their thigh is not cheap. Surgery to remove the bullet along with extensive physical therapy will be very costly, most likely at the expense of New Haven taxpayers who contribute to city workers' insurance plans.

This brings up an important question: should police officers be allowed to bring their service weapons home? It's one thing if they buy their own gun and shoot intruders with it, its another to be given a gun to do it. There have been a number of incidents involving off-duty cops inappropriately using their service weapons (read: here, here) and one has to wonder if these incidents would have happened if they were not given a free gun. One thing I can almost gurantee: Eric Scott's daughter will not sneak out or miss another curfew while she lives in that house.