The Charleston Church Massacre Goes Much Deeper Than the Confederate Flag

There’s a poignant scene in the move Jerry Maguire in which the main character, played by Tom Cruise, in a crisis of conscience, stays up all night to write a new mission statement for his company. It is entitled The Things We Think and Do Not Say. As a conservative, native-born Texan, military member, Constitutional textualist, former military and federal prosecutor, and one who laments judicial activism and reading things into or out of the text of the Constitution, I feel very much like Jerry Maguire did as he wrote his mission statement; I know what I am about to say will not be well-received by most of my friends and colleagues. Even still, they would tell you that to call me a liberal would be laughable. What follows is what I have been thinking about for a long time, but until now I have not said out loud. Before you send me a post or email telling me I’m an idiot, just humor my thought process for a few moments.

We are a society that likes scapegoats and the apportioning of blame. Scapegoats are very easy to find and are a simple way to apportion blame. Within hours of the Charleston church shooting, and because the perpetrator Dylan Roof appeared in photographs with the Confederate flag, people started renewing calls for the Confederate to be removed from the South Carolina state capitol and any other place of open display. NASCAR — historically a bastion of Southern pride where fans routinely fly the flag on their campers and in the bleachers at races — followed suit announced that it would institute a policy advising fans at races not to fly or waive it.

The Confederate flag was and is an obvious and easy choice for a scapegoat because it is easy to remove, takes little effort, and certainly requires no deep thought or philosophical reflection; pretty much everyone agrees that no matter what it stood for in the past, it is a symbol that reminds us of a time we as a nation are rightly ashamed of. I guess the idea is if we eradicate what has become a symbol of hate, presto, we won’t have any more Dylan Roofs being so affected by a symbol of hate that they commit mass murders.

Such a policy allows our elected leaders to minimize the amount of time necessary to deal with crimes that seem to have hate or discrimination as a precipitating motive. All they have to do is hold a press conference, condemn the act, and blame the symbol. It takes very little time to say, “If it weren’t for that damn symbol, this wouldn’t have happened, so let’s remove it.” They can then get on with governing without going deeper and having to ask challenging and sometimes painful questions that require all of us as members of a civilized society to ponder. Questions that go beyond the Confederate flag. Questions that are directly in our face when a mass shooter, as with most mass shooting cases, isn’t holding a Confederate flag for us to hide behind. Deep and uncomfortable questions.

Questions like: Why aren’t we talking about the pistol Dylan Roof is holding in those photographs? How and why does a person like Dylan Roof come into possession of a .45 caliber pistol? This is a person whose own uncle described as a “monster” just hours after the shootings. A full two-weeks before the killings, a friend took the eventual murder weapon away from Roof after Roof threatened to kill people. What do these pieces of information tell us about the people close to Roof before the shooting? Clearly, people knew he was an extremely troubled person, if not one with significant mental problems. Was he mentally ill? Did people see the signs? Apparently, at least an uncle and a friend did. Others knew he had purchased the pistol with birthday money after turning 21. People close to him knew he had the weapon and knew he was troubled. The signs were apparently overlooked or ignored. We will now have to wait for his lawyers to investigate his mental history, like we always do — after someone has committed a gun massacre.

Other perpetrators of mass murder with firearms had documented histories of mental disease, like Jared Lee Loughner, the Tucson shooter who killed 6 people and injured 13 others. In Lougner’s case, he was found incompetent to stand trial and had to be forcibly medicated for a time before being rendered competent to stand trial and eventually pleading guilty. Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter who killed 26 children and teachers, had significant mental health issues that affected his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others, even those to whom he should have been close. These mental health issues went untreated.

Our society is woefully behind the power curve in identifying, treating, and in severe cases that necessitate it, protecting the public from people with mental disease and firearms. This problem is epitomized by a case I worked on when I was a federal prosecutor. Although a matter of public record, I will not disclose the defendant’s name here because the charges against him were dismissed. The upshot of his case was he was found asleep in a vehicle parked outside the U.S. Attorney’s office. He had multiple firearms and a cache of ammunition in his possession. His explanation for being there was he wanted to “meet with” a federal prosecutor. We discovered during the investigation he had been adjudicated mentally incapable of possessing a firearm, and a grand jury indicted him for possessing a firearm after having been so adjudicated. But in a series of events all too common in criminal cases involving firearms, he was found mentally incompetent to stand trial and sent to a federal medical treatment facility in order to be treated so he could be competent to stand trial. The case eventually wove its way back and forth from the trial court to the appellate court before all efforts to render him competent failed and he was finally deemed incompetent to stand trial. The charges were dismissed, and he was released without much assurance that he would ever be successfully treated and would not go right back out and accumulate another arsenal of firearms and ammunition.

This disturbing trend of mentally unstable people easily obtaining firearms becomes even more bizarre when one considers that we typically require no training whatsoever for anyone in firearms safety, functionality, operation or maintenance, not just when they are initially purchasing a weapon, but even when getting a concealed and carry permit. On the other hand, I have been a Marine for nearly 18 years. I have been required to qualify annually with a rifle and pistol over most of that time. Even though I had what many consider the best firearms training on the planet, every time I re-qualify or deploy I have to draw a weapon from the armory. When I do that, I have to go through a detailed administrative process before the Marine in the armory hands the weapon over to me. When I get to the range my weapon must always be under positive control. Although I have been through it countless times, the range officer takes all of us — from the highest ranking officer down to the youngest enlisted Marine — through safe weapons handling procedures on the range. Unless I am deployed, I do not get to hold on to the weapon over night; I turn it in to the armory as soon as I get off the range (after thoroughly breaking it down and cleaning it so that it is functional the next time I draw it). No such training, no such process is required for people like Dylan Roof, or any other civilian for that matter.

Now, I understand I am sort of comparing apples to oranges here; as a Marine drawing a government-owned weapon I am required to go through a very detailed and tedious process in order to account for and protect government property. When a person purchases a firearm for their own use it belongs to them and no such process is required. But the other piece of that process is the Marine Corps ensures that I can actually handle and care for that weapon in a safe manner.

The military inculcates the four safe weapons handling rules into every service member: (1) “Treat every weapon as if it were loaded.” This rule is intended to prevent unintentional injury to personnel or damage to property from handling or transferring possession of a weapon; (2) “Never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot.” This rule enforces the importance of muzzle awareness and reinforces positive identification of the target; (3) “Keep your finger straight and off the trigger until you are ready to fire.” This rule is intended to minimize the risk of firing the weapon negligently (when not firing, the trigger finger is straight along the receiver, outside of the trigger guard). This rule also reinforces positive identification of the target; and (4) “Keep the weapon on safe until you intend to fire.” This rule enforces the use of the weapon’s own safety feature and reinforces positive identification of the target. If you violate any of these rules or engage in an unsafe act on the range, you risk getting kicked off the range.

The same is true for law enforcement officers, but it is not the same for civilians purchasing or possessing firearms. A person can just walk in off the street and obtain a firearm with little or no training in its care or operation or safe handling. It’s ironic, then, that in many ways the people who are most trained and familiar with firearms and their nomenclature have a much more difficult time possessing one than somebody who has never touched or fired a weapon in his life. With this ease of possession and lack of required training, now mix in the untrained person also being mentally unstable, or worse, outright mentally incompetent, and you have a ticking time bomb.

Before you fire off that cheeky post or email reminding me that I took an oath to defend the Constitution — which includes the Bill of Rights containing the Second Amendment — realize I am well aware of that fact and know much more about what it means than anyone who has not taken that oath. Those who haven’t taken that oath don’t have any concept of what it means in practical terms. But regardless one’s position on what the amendment means and whether it’s precatory phrase “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State,” is still applicable in a time where militias no longer exist, serious questions must be asked and answered. For purposes of my observations here, let’s just assume the Second Amendment means what is contained after the precatory phrase, “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Does that mean that literally anyone should be allowed to possess a firearm? Is that really what the Founders wanted? Did the militias issue muskets to crazy people? Maybe that’s poor analogy because a musket took minutes to reload. Roof just kept depressing the trigger, taking 9 lives in a fraction of the time it would have taken a soldier in 1789 to reload a single round. Whether the Founders could have foreseen a day when an “arm” would fire automatically in a short span of seconds to exact the utterly destructive power we have seen in mass shootings — Columbine, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, and Charleston — is debatable.

But we already know the answer to my question is no; not everyone has the absolute right to possess a firearm at any place or at any time. In 2008, the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller first reaffirmed an individual’s right to possess a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. But the Court recognized in the same case that “the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. 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.” And the federal law used to indict my former defendant has upheld by the Supreme Court and lists a number of categories of persons who may not possess firearms. Title 18, U.S. Code section 922(g)- the primary federal firearms criminal statute — provides that convicted felons, fugitives, drug addicts, illegal aliens, former service members with dishonorable discharges, former American citizens who have renounced their citizenship, persons convicted of crimes of domestic violence crimes, and persons adjudicated mentally defective may not possess firearms. So the courts have already determined that in these other categories, this issue is not so much about the Second Amendment as it is public safety. I would humbly suggest we have a huge public safety problem on our hands.

I realize that I am engaging in what I often criticize “liberals” for doing: complaining about a problem without suggesting any solutions. But aren’t we smart enough to set up a preemptive system to identify people like Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Jared Lee Loughner, James Holmes, Adam Lanza and Dylan Roof who ought not be able to possess a firearm? Some will argue that not all of these people had documented cases of mental illness, but that is beside the point; they all showed signs of instability that should have been addressed. Courts already hold hearings on limiting or terminating rights relating to child custody, estate and financial matters, and health care, to name a few, when a person appears to be mentally incompetent. Doing so in this context would not affect a competent, law-abiding citizen’s right to own and possess firearms.

For a long time we have elevated an individual’s right to possess a firearm above what I would argue is a more important and fundamental right: The right to life. In doing so we make a single person’s right more important than the collective rights of all of us to be free from indiscriminate violence. I for one think it’s time we conservatives recognize and acknowledge the double-standard we adopt when we use the words “right to life” when we talk about abortion on one hand, and then ignore the right to life in the context of the gun control debate; why once the child is born do we suddenly stop talking about the right to life when guns come into the equation? Don’t we all have a right to life, a right to be free from one individual’s decision to play God and execute people? I mean, when was the last time a massacre was committed with a knife or a club? Maybe we need to reevaluate our priorities.

But perhaps we just aren’t smart enough to figure this out. The path of least resistance is to do nothing. Maybe we just need to sit back, blame things like the Confederate flag, and keep having massacres committed by unstable people who can get their hands on firearms much quicker than a Soldier or Marine can check one out of the armory.

Then again maybe this indiscriminate gun massacre plague is not about guns at all. Maybe it’s not about mental illness. Maybe it’s a much deeper sickness than we can contemplate, feeding on our country because of our history and culture — created by and unique to us. Maybe that’s why this plague is not limited to certain regions of our nation and it does not appear to discriminate, having struck in “Red” and “Blue” states ranging from Connecticut to Colorado, and Arizona to South Carolina. It’s an equal opportunity killer. But whatever this plague is, it shows no signs of weakening, and we need to find a cure.