My Thoughts on the Newtown Massacre
(originally posted elsewhere on 12/17/12)
The two most impactful pieces that I’ve read on the Newtown massacre are i) Kristof’s op-ed in the NYTimes - Do We Have the Courage to Stop This, and ii) I haven’t verified if it’s true (it’s only on the internet) a blog from a mother who speaks about her son who is mentally ill and violent from time to time. Even if the blog is not legitimate, it raises a good point about one of the root issues in this event. She goes on to explain that her son has been violent and threatening at times, so his siblings are trained to run into the car and lock the doors. The mother is strong enough, for now, to wrest away a knife from her son, as he threatens to harm his family and himself, but that won’t last forever. Does she charge him with a crime to commit him to a penal system that can work to contain him and possibly help him from hurting himself and others?
My mother was a Registered Nurse for the entirety of her professional career. The predominance of that time was as an RN in the US, and exclusively here working at mental health hospitals. She had telephones thrown at her, injuring her, saw patients in unfair conditions, eating their own feces, heavily medicated. The Development Center in Willowbrook at which she worked in Staten Island was shut down eventually. There was a damning expose/documentary on the place by Albert Primo and Geraldo Rivera - Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace. And she worked there are after some of the resulting reform, but before its eventual closing. My mother also worked at South Beach Psychiatric Center in Staten Island at the tail end of her career as an RN before retirement. I would drop her off at times and pick her up after her shifts and listen to her tell me about the depths of human loneliness she would witness. How would you feel if your family had dropped you off at a Psychiatric Center, some choosing to never visit you again? How hard it was to see some other patients getting visits, but not you, how hard it was during the holidays. My mother served her entire career as a nurse in America serving the needs of these mentally ill and I’m sure she has more sympathy for them from it than most. The stories she could tell you. And read the mother’s blog. It’s time to talk about mental illness.
I don't have enough to say and flesh out re: the mental health issue. But I will say that my wife and I are Korean-American and live in the Bay Area. My wife was on the board for many years and we are active supporters of organizations like AACI, a non-profit which provides valuable mental health services for our local community, among other valuable health services. It's Santa Clara County's largest community-based organization focused on the Asian American community. It's health, recovery, advocacy, shelter and community. Small and big steps…
Read that mother's blog for example, where she says, “At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing."
Newtown, Aurora, Clackamas, Columbine, Virginia Tech. Young men in their 20s, many Caucausian. I'm Korean by ethnicity and at the risk of generalizing, it's a much more homogeneous society than the U.S., where people feel compelled to right the wrong things they see their neighbors' children doing, there is mandatory military service, there is strong gun control and very little gun-related homicide. Policy and culture working in concert seem stronger than working alone.
I’m not a policy wonk. I’m a parent of three boys, 8 years, 5 years (turning 9 and 6 in Jan) and an 8th month old who will be a year with us in April. And for all the insensitive Facebook posts I read from people I know who say if someone had a gun they could have stopped it, let me say this. Do you have a child? I think many parents, at least I do, think about a 6 or 7 year old, who believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, who is still very innocent and holding belief in the good of people. I think about their last moments, as they’re faced with semi-automatic weapon fire, terrified by the sounds in the hallway, of classmates and teachers being murdered. I think of their confusion. I think of them in their last moments. Have some of those thoughts on your mind, before you post things about right to bear arms right after a national tragedy like this one.
If you own a gun, let me just ask a few things. Have you ever used that gun inappropriately? Have you brandished it in a public or private setting inappropriately? Have you ever put your hands on that weapon, pulled it from under your car seat, held it in your pants like a gangster, and used it in a threatening way, when you shouldn’t have? Have you ever dressed up with it and fantasized gunning someone down and being a hero? Have you ever had too much alcohol or been under the influence of another drug and put your hands on your legally owned firearm, that you may have bought for a legitimate reason - you have a cash-driven small, retail business and feel unsafe making trips to the bank - and used it on an animal or flashed it to another person when you shouldn’t have? Have you ever had an accident shooting that gun? Think about what you've done with your firearm, as a sane and rational person. And think about what it does in the hands of someone who is depressed, ill, with bad judgment, in an accident, or with malicious intent.
And for those that say, if a teacher or school person had a firearm, they could have done something about the shooter, let me ask you a question. If you had that revolver, or that semi-automatic pistol, and you just happened to be on site at the place where one of these public shooting massacres was happening, and some ill person, with a hundred rounds of ammunition in a high-capacity magazine was spraying bullets with an automatic weapon, striking their targets and striking the innocent, and your suspicion was they were going to kill themselves at the end of the horrible episode, are you really saying you would stand up, take yourself out of cover, and try and shoot the shooter and be a hero? Really? If not, then I don’t want to read your post, I don’t want to hear you make that case. Here is some more sensible talk:
From Kristof’s op-ed:
Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence. So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage.
[Subjectively,] It is more difficult to adopt a pet than it is to buy a gun.
Don’t bother with the argument that if more people carried guns, they would deter shooters or interrupt them. Mass shooters typically kill themselves or are promptly caught, so it’s hard to see what deterrence would be added by having more people pack heat. There have been few if any cases in the United States in which an ordinary citizen with a gun stopped a mass shooting.
More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
And then a litany of good, actionable suggestions:
So what can we do? A starting point would be to limit gun purchases to one a month, to curb gun traffickers. Likewise, we should restrict the sale of high-capacity magazines so that a shooter can’t kill as many people without reloading.
We should impose a universal background check for gun buyers, even with private sales. Let’s make serial numbers more difficult to erase, and back California in its effort to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each shell so that it can be traced back to a particular gun.
“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” President Obama noted in a tearful statement on television. He’s right, but the solution isn’t just to mourn the victims — it’s to change our policies. Let’s see leadership on this issue, not just moving speeches.
Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands.
The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings.
In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half.
Or we can look north to Canada. It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them.
For that matter, we can look for inspiration at our own history on auto safety. As with guns, some auto deaths are caused by people who break laws or behave irresponsibly. But we don’t shrug and say, “Cars don’t kill people, drunks do.”
Instead, we have required seat belts, air bags, child seats and crash safety standards. We have introduced limited licenses for young drivers and tried to curb the use of mobile phones while driving. All this has reduced America’s traffic fatality rate per mile driven by nearly 90 percent since the 1950s.
Some of you are alive today because of those auto safety regulations. And if we don’t treat guns in the same serious way, some of you and some of your children will die because of our failure.
— Andrew Lee | Father, husband, citizen
