I Am Not a Murderer

I have followed all of the Facebook posts and many columns in the media, mainstream and social, regarding guns after the Oregon shootings. They are filled with emotion and anger, which is understandable in the face of senseless evil.  I have been have been saddened, however, that the rhetoric has degenerated to the point where those of us who have opposed further background checks have been characterized as “Murderers.” It is sometimes emotionally satisfying to reduce your opponent to someone who is defective morally or intellectually, but doing so does not enhance the merits of your argument. It simply diminishes your credibility as the advocate.

I realize that we live in a time where our President and several of those who now aspire to that office have made the use of insults a common part of the public discourse. I submit, however, that if you really want to be heard by and persuade your opponents, resorting to insults is not an effective strategy. All the more so when those targets are also your friends and neighbors.

Although I am an opponent of further gun purchase background checks, I don’t believe I am either morally or intellectually defective. Nor do I believe I am a murderer. So I must confess there is a temptation the respond in kind. But just as the insults of my opponents do nothing to advance us one iota toward a solution, neither would responsive invectives. I, therefore, would like to put aside the emotions and address facts.

If the goal is to begin to reduce the frequency of these events we have to begin to discuss the facts of the problem. Let’s start with the question of background checks. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence is a proponent of gun control laws. I cite to it in the hope that those of you who advocate further gun controls will give it credence. They summarize here all of the problems they see with the current background check process and laws. If you take the time to review the discussion and approach the discussion with a measure of intellectual openness and integrity, I think you will have to concede that if each proposed change in the laws had been in place before the Oregon shooter sought his first weapon, none would have prevented this event. Moreover, a good deal of what they address concerns problems in the enforcement of current laws. That is precisely the core of the opposition to further background check laws: pass no more laws that cannot be enforced; enforce those we have. Do not restrict liberty just to feel better emotionally.

The current Federal prohibitions to the sale and purchase of guns are set forth in 18 U.S.C. §922. If you really care about the issue read it. You will find that the restrictions are extensive as is the object of the background check. My perspective on the Oregon shooting is that there is something that can be done regarding the background checks that would help reduce violence, but it is not what those of you who regard us as murderers want to address.

From my observations, there are two commonalities in almost all of these events: (1) they occur in gun free zones, and (2) the shooter has demonstrated mental health issues that went unaddressed. Many gun supporters have focused on the gun free zones, but I do not want to debate those as I don’t think that armed citizens in our schools are the answer. They might reduce the frequency and reduce the numbers of those killed and injured in the events, and there have been events to support that conclusion, but we still will have the events and people will still die. We need to move further back in the chain of causation to cut out the shooter before he gets to the scene of the planned shooting.

One of the provisions of 18 U.S.C. §922 makes it illegal for any person to possess a gun who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution” and makes that a point of investigation for the background check also. Enforcement fails, however, because many states do not even have records to be checked or will not incur the costs of cooperating and producing them, but even if they did the check would still be meaningless. The check is meaningless because over the past 50 years the standards by which a person can be adjudicated as having a committable mental illness have been raised so high that as a practical matter few ever happen. A person almost has to be walking the streets with a gun looking for targets before he will be determined to be a threat to himself or others. That standard used to be much broader and permitted family members, professionals, and the community at large to petition a court to force an individual who exhibited threatening behaviors to seek treatment.

At the same time when the legal process was more effective, we also had a fairly extensive network of public institutions to provide that treatment. They were almost universally closed, however, in an overreaction to very justifiable criticisms of horrific abuses and failures in those institutions. So with the remedy being eliminated both institutionally and legally by misplaced compassion, society now feels that challenging the people with these problems is coercive and socially unacceptable. The result, however, is simply that we ignore the problem of those with mental problems and violent tendencies.

I believe that if you look carefully at the background of the shooters in the recent mass killings, except for the true terrorists most of them were identified by someone as exhibiting signs of mental illness. In earlier decades there is a fair likelihood that would have led to an interaction with the judicial and mental health communities. Now the pot just boils until they explode.

We have a real problem in this society and it will not be solved by another empty and unenforceable gun purchase background check. If you really care about stopping this violence, start pushing for something that will help. We need to rebuild our public mental health services and face the fact that we have people that cannot be addressed as outpatients because their illnesses and violent potential are too severe and threatening. We have to have resources to care for them in an inpatient environment. The solution is complex and expensive. But until we can identify them and remove them from society in a way that provides them due process we will still have mass killings. If you do choose to push to solve the problem, then I am with you and I will support forcing states to systematically record the adjudications and make the background checks effective. But if you just want to feel good about yourself well then go ahead and call me a murderer, or an idiot, or a gun nut, or whatever else will make you feel good. I won’t hear you because I won’t be listening.