Posted by Cockney Robin |
After reading about national security alerts in the US warning of potential terrorist strikes at shopping malls over Christmas, I find an awful irony in this story. At a US shopping mall in the heartland state of Nebraska, a 19 year old American adolescent slaughtered eight of his own fellow citizens.(BBC News) Being an American, he was able to lay hands on an SKS assault rifle. (BBC News) Having decided that he couldn't go on with his own life, Robert Hawkins of Bellevue Nebraska opened fire.(BBC News). He managed to fire 30 rounds and to kill himself and eight people (Reuters). President George W. Bush professes himself "deeply saddened" by the resultant bloodbath.(BBC News) Even so, US gun laws seem unlikely to change (Memeorandum)
Hawkins struck as the centre was crowded with Christmas shoppers, and witnesses spoke of people screaming and scrambling to find safe shelter....
Among the victims, six were employees of the Von Maur department store and two were customers, the head of Omaha police, Thomas Warren, said.
He said the gunman appeared to shoot at random and the incident was over before policemen, alerted by a 911 emergency call, could intervene..(BBC News)
The 19 year old, like most of the rest of us, suffered from depression. He'd recently got his heart broken and lost a job at (Christ) McDonald's.(BBC News)
He evidently also was estranged from his family, as he was living at the time with a family friend. She described him as "introverted, a troubled young man who was like a lost pound puppy that nobody wanted".(BBC News)
Before killing a number of people who had done him no harm whatsoever, he wrote a note which said ""he was sorry for everything, that he didn't want to be a burden to anybody, he loved his family, he loved all of his friends..."(BBC News)
It also said, ""I'm a piece of shit....but I'm going to be famous now." (Reuters) The night before the shootings he showed the weapon---stolen from his stepfather--- to the woman with whom he was staying.(Reuters) She thought it was too old to be functional.(Reuters)
She also thought that Hawkins was "trying to turn his life around"----though she must have had some intimation that he was teetering on the verge, judging by this: "When she heard about the mall shooting, she told the newspaper, "I thought 'Oh, my God, I hope this is not Robbie.""
Hawkins hid his rifle in a sweatshirt. (Reuters)
[A] review of security tapes and interviews revealed that unarmed mall police were aware that Hawkins had entered the Von Maur store on the second floor of the Westroads Mall. He quickly took an elevator to the third floor and began firing when the elevator door opened, he said.(Reuters)
Once again, we have a tragedy occurring simply because a troubled young person was able to get his hands on a weapon.
The response of my American friends and colleagues has been strangely muted. Are their reactions becoming blunted from repeated experiences of extreme violence? Are they becoming used to violence on this scale, so that the strongest reaction is "Thank God it wasn't worse"? When I suggested this to one of my Americans colleagues, she fired back an angry note calling my response 'unfair' and 'cynical.' She wrote again later. 'Maybe you are right,' she conceded.
"Our entire state is grieving," said Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman. Local media said it was the worst single day of violence in the state's history..(Reuters)
Included in the article a summary of U.S. mass shootings in 2007:
Oct: Asa H Coon, 14, shoots four people, injuring them, at his school in Cleveland, Ohio, before killing himself.April: Cho Seung-hui , 23, shoots 32 people dead on campus of Virginia Tech university, Virginia, then kills himself.Feb: Sulejman Talovic, 18, shoots dead five people and injures four at a mall in Salt Lake City, Utah, before being killed by police. (BBC News)
There has been a string of such shooting sprees in recent years, but little resonance among national politicians.
The right to bear arms is fiercely defended as a U.S. constitutional right by large numbers of collectors, hunters and advocates of home security, cherished the way civil libertarians champion the right to free speech.....
"Although people who favor increased gun control in the United States are a substantial majority, those who oppose it are far more intense in their opposition and far more likely to vote on the basis of that issue alone," said Bill Galston, senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
He cited the 1994 elections when the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress. Some political analysts attributed the rout to backlash against a Democratic-led ban on assault weapons. That law was allowed to expire 10 years later.
"I might want to qualify that judgment, but the fact that it's widely believed and that there is some basis for it is enough to determine political behavior," Galston said.....
A Pennsylvania state representative who last month helped defeat a proposal to limit hand gun purchases to one per person per month said he would support tougher sentencing laws for people who acquire and use illegal guns, but that law-abiding citizens should not have their rights infringed.... Besides, he said, no law may have prevented the Omaha tragedy.
I am always so bemused by this argument. Punishing people after the fact doesn't help the people they killed or their families, does it? And vengeance only satisfies the bystanders. And while no law might have prevented the tragedy, surely the reason all these people are dead is because a depressed adolescent was able to get his hands on an assault rifle (?)
There are saner voices in the US as well, of course.But even my American friends who are sickened by this state of things and would like to see it changed tell me it's too late to put the djinn back into the bottle.Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, disagrees. He said European countries have enacted effective gun control laws and that U.S. politicians are cowed by the gun lobby as exemplified by the National Rifle Association.
"There is the mythology advanced by the gun lobby of the Wild West and the individual frontiersman single-handedly holding off the British and the Indians and the bears simultaneously," said Helmke.
"They've got politicians nervous about anything that's even got the word gun in it."(Reuters)
And according to me, that's a tragedy as well.
Memeorandum discusses the Reuters article here. AMERICAblog has a post on this issue that cheered me up a little..
This piece by Gaius in Blue Crab Boulevard presents the other side, which focuses on the remedy (punish the person who violates the law by using the gun for the purpose for which it was presumably manufactured) rather than on first causes. This is what happens whenever people in America start arguing about guns and why my American colleague Damozel---who hates guns---always says, 'That ship has sailed.'
Is it 'twisting' the facts to focus on the fact that the mental health system and the gun laws didn't prevent this young person from getting hold, not just of a gun, but an assault rifle? Ah well. I am but a simple Brit. I have no agenda.The gunman broke the existing laws by stealing the gun in the first place. He broke the existing laws yet again when he entered the “Gun Free” zone. The gunman was treated by mental health authorities to the tune of more than a quarter of a million dollars. But the media and the anti-gun zealots will try to paint this as the need for still more laws/restrictions/bans/government intervention. That is a shameful twisting of facts to advance an agenda (Media
NarrativeAgenda).
RELATED BN-POLITICS POSTINGS:
Elsewhere in the World: Russia's "Chessboard Killer"
Child Care That Doesn't Care: On Criminal Children
Another Adolescent Gunman Opens Fire in an American School....
LINKED
Omaha massacre unlikely to alter gun laws (Reuters)
Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Gun Control Case (New York Times)
Colorado wasn't able to change gun laws less than 6 months after 13 people were killed, 23 wounded, at a little high school called Columbine. After all, Eric Harris had an assault rifle on his dresser for a year - on his dresser!
They won't change in Nebraska either.
Posted by: On a Limb with Claudia | December 07, 2007 at 09:55 PM