The Shooting in Aurora: Three Editorials
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The Shooting in Aurora: Three Editorials
From The New York Times, July 23, 2012
“More Treatment Programs”
By David Brooks
1 Early in the morning of Sept. 4, 1913, Ernst Wagner murdered his wife and four
children in the town of Degerloch, Germany. Then he went to Mühlhausen, where
he feared the townsmen were mocking him for having sex with an animal. He
opened fire and hit 20 people, killing at least nine. This is believed to be one of
the first spectacular rampage murders of the 20th century. Over the next 60
years, there was about one or two of these spree killings per decade. Then the
frequency of such killings began to shoot upward. There were at least nine of
these rampages during the 1980s, according to history Web sites that track such
things, including the 1982 case of a police officer in South Korea who massacred
57 people.
2 In the 1990s, there were at least 11 spectacular spree killings. Over the past
decade, by my count, there have been at least 26 rampages. These include
Robert Steinhäuser’s murder of 16 people in Germany, Seung-Hui Cho’s murder
of 32 at Virginia Tech, Anders Breivik’s shooting spree at a summer camp in
Norway in which 69 died, and the killing of 12 moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado,
last week.
3 When you investigate the minds of these killers, you find yourself deep in a world
of delusion, untreated schizophrenia and ferociously injured pride. George
Hennard of Belton, Tex., was angry that women kept rejecting him. He drove his
car through the window of a restaurant and began firing, killing 14 women and
eight men. Tim Kretschmer, 17, hoped to become a professional table tennis
player but felt that the world didn’t appreciate his abilities, in that or anything else.
He returned to the German school where he had graduated the year before, went
straight for the top-floor chemistry labs, killed nine teenagers and then another
six people during his escape.
4 It’s probably a mistake to think that we can ever know what “caused” these
rampages, but when you read through the assessments that have been done by
the F.B.I., the Secret Service and various psychologists, you see certain common
motifs. Many of the killers had an exaggerated sense of their own significance,
which, they felt, was not properly recognized by the rest of the world. Many
suffered a grievous blow to their self-esteem — a lost job, a divorce or a school
failure — and decided to strike back in some showy way. Many had suffered from
severe depression or had attempted suicide. Many lived solitary lives, but most
shared their violent fantasies with at least one person before they committed their
crimes. The killers generally felt tense before they acted but at peace and in 2
control during the rampage. Some committed suicide when they were done. But
a surprising number just gave up. They’d made the statement they wanted to
make and hadn’t thought about what came after.
5 The crucial point is that the dynamics are internal, not external. These killers are
primarily the product of psychological derangements, not sociological ones.
6 Yet, after every rampage, there are always people who want to use these events
to indict whatever they don’t like about society. A few years ago, some writers
tried to blame violent video games for a rash of killings. The problem is that
rampage murderers tend to be older than regular murderers and they tend not to
be heavy video game users. Besides, there’s very little evidence that violent
video games lead to real life violence in the first place.
7 These days, people are trying to use the Aurora killings as a pretext to criticize
America’s gun culture or to call for stricter gun control laws. (This doesn’t happen
after European or Asian spree killings.) Personally, I’ve supported tighter gun
control laws. But it’s not clear that those laws improve public safety. Researchers
reviewing the gun control literature for the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, for example, were unable to show the laws are effective. And gun
control laws are probably even less germane in these cases. Rampage killers
tend to be meticulous planners. If they can’t find an easy way to get a new gun,
they’ll surely find a way to get one of the 200 million guns that already exist in
this country. Or they’ll use a bomb or find another way.
8 Looking at guns, looking at video games — that’s starting from the wrong
perspective. People who commit spree killings are usually suffering from severe
mental disorders. The response, and the way to prevent future episodes, has to
start with psychiatry, too. The best way to prevent killing sprees is with
relationships — when one person notices that a relative or neighbor is going off
the rails and gets that person treatment before the barbarism takes control. But
there also has to be a more aggressive system of treatment options, especially
for men in their 20s. The truly disturbed have always been with us, but their
outbursts are now taking more malevolent forms.
_________________________________________________________________
David Brooks became a New York Times Op-Ed columnist in 2003. He has been a
senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the
Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
The author of several books, his most recent is The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources
of Love, Character, and Achievement, published by Random House in 2011. 3
From The New York Times, July 20, 2012
“Guns and the Slog”
By Gail Collins
1 My favorite American heroes are the ones who went for the long slog, even when
their cause appeared to be hopeless to the point of ridiculous: civil rights activists
in the 1950s, generations’ worth of suffragists who trudged around the country
collecting signatures on petitions to give women the right to vote.
2 Also, anybody who works on gun control.
3 “We do just seem to slog along, from one tragedy to the next,” said Tom Mauser
of Colorado Ceasefire.
4 The gun control advocates were all working the phones on Friday, holding press
conferences, sending out e-mails in the wake of the mass shooting in Colorado.
They’re uncomfortably aware that they might appear to be taking political
advantage of a national tragedy. “This is the only time you have the opportunity
that people will listen to you,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, who has
spent her entire legislative career fruitlessly attempting to do something about
assault weapons that allow crazy people to easily mow down a flock of victims in
a couple of minutes.
5 There was a brief period of time when gun control was a popular issue, but that
was before the National Rifle Association mobilized itself into one of the most
powerful lobbying forces in the nation’s history. Now the N.R.A. is so feared and
so successful that it’s running out of issues and has to keep inventing new ones,
like the right to bear arms in airport lobbies.
6 The gun control advocates, who used to fight for sensible laws on universal
background checks and registration, now devote most of their time to stopping
states from making it legal to carry concealed weapons in a kindergarten, or to
shoot someone you sort of suspect may intend to hurt you.
7 Lately, even the most terrible gun tragedies fail to make a political dent. After the
Columbine shooting, Coloradans voted overwhelmingly in referendum to close
the loophole that allowed people to buy weapons at gun shows without a
background check. “The legislature wouldn’t pass it so we took it to the people,”
said Mauser. But since then, he said, “most of the time we’re just fighting against
awful gun bills.” 4
8 One of the terrible things about talking to gun control advocates is that so many
of them are relatives of gun violence victims. When I interviewed Mauser over the
phone, I had no idea that his son had been killed at Columbine until he broke
down briefly when I asked him what brought him to the cause. Then it was on to
Representative McCarthy, who lost her husband to a deranged gunman who shot
up a Long Island Rail Road car in which he and their son were riding. “I was up at
5:30 this morning,” she said, on the day when the Aurora shooting hit the news.
“You sit there, you go: ‘Oh, my God! It’s happening again.’ I can visualize myself
running to the hospital, standing by my son’s bedside, wondering if he was going
to make it through the night. It just throws you back to a place you don’t want to
go to.”
9 In our country, the mass shootings come so frequently that most of them go by
virtually unnoticed. Did you catch the one last week in Tuscaloosa? Seventeen
people at a bar, hit by a gunman with an assault weapon.
10 People from most other parts of the industrialized world find the American
proliferation of guns shocking, but, really, they have no idea. Even most
Americans don’t know that Congress has, in recent years, refused to consider
laws that would ban the sale of assault weapons capable of firing 100 bullets
without reloading, and declined to allow the attorney general to restrict people on
the terrorist watch list from purchasing weapons.
11 The country is not nearly as crazy as its politicians make it out to be. (A survey
by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found 82 percent of N.R.A. members opposed
letting people on the terrorist watch list buy guns.) Although it could certainly use
a little leadership.
12 After the latest shooting, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York laced into
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for limiting their post-Aurora remarks to
expressions of sympathy for the victims. “I feel your pain and I’m working on it,”
he snorted in an interview. “Romney passed a ban on assault weapons back
when he was governor and now he says he’s against it. Of course, he’s done that
on almost everything. Obama, when he was elected, said I want to reinstate the
ban on assault weapons and he’s never done it.”
13 But presidential candidates look at this issue and see the same thing other
elected officials do: a rich, fierce, loopy lobby on one side, and, on the other,
people with petitions, slogging along. Everybody, including the gun control
advocates, knows that nothing will change unless the people decide to do the
leading. Eventually, the American voters come around. Just ask the suffragists.
____________________________________________________________
Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial
board and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman
ever appointed editor of the Times’s editorial page. She is the author of When
Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to
the Present. 5
From Our Gun Thing: Guns and the People Who Love Them (BLOG), July 31, 2012
“Common Sense Gun Law #1: Registration”
by Dan Baum
1 You don’t have to be a gun-control activist to be upset by a shooting like the one
in Aurora, and at such times, people start talking about “common sense” gun
laws. By “common sense,” they mean to say, “what reasonable person could
disagree?” Since this blog is for people who don’t like guns as much as it is for
those who do, I will write over the next few days a run-down of the gun-guy
perspective on several “common sense” gun laws. If it seems that gun owners
are intransigent of what appear to be unobjectionable regulations, here’s why:
2 Registration: This seems benign enough, right? The police should know who has
what gun, so that if one is found at a crime scene, they can trace it to the owner.
As a practical matter, it doesn’t make much sense. People planning to get away
with murder aren’t going to use guns registered to themselves, and in cases
where a previously law-abiding person — law-abiding enough to register his guns
— goes nuts and shoots his wife, there’s not going to be much mystery about
who the shooter was. So there isn’t much law-enforcement benefit to registration
(Canada recently scrapped its long-gun registry because it cost so much and did
so little.)
3 The bigger problem with registration, though, from the gun-guy perspective, is
that it invests police with a creepy amount of power. We don’t go in for “lists” in
this country, and a list of gun owners is, to gun guys, a precursor to rounding up
guns — or gun owners. That people who call themselves “liberal” find this
paranoid seems strange. Liberals used to have a healthy mistrust of authoritarian
government, and a government that has a ready-made list of gun owners should
give civil libertarians the willies. Registration preceded confiscation elsewhere,
and you’d really have to believe that “it can’t happen here” to get comfortable
with police lists of gun owners. I wouldn’t have thought Guantanamo could
happen here, or warrantless killings of US citizens on the say-so of the president,
or the Fourth Amendment violations we accept in the name of the drug war. It
can happen here, and it does.
4 American gun guys take comfort pride in not living in a country where only the
police and military have guns. I’ve lived in such countries, and it honestly does
feel different. Gun guys like to say that an armed citizenry is the bulwark against
tyranny, and non-gun guys laugh at that. A bunch of guys taking rifles from their
closet, they say, would be no match for the tanks, jets, and helicopters the Army
would deploy. The gun-guy response to that is: Vietnam. North Vietnam and the
Vietcong defeated the modern American military with little more than rifles. 6
5 I suspect that nobody — even the most ardent Tea Partier — really expects
Americans to have to take up arms against their government. The issue is
subtler. That Americans can own firearms so freely bespeaks a relationship
between the people and their government that is unique, and that gun guys
cherish. A tremendous amount of respect and trust in ordinary people is implied
by allowing them to own guns. Gun guys are proud of being active flesh-and-
blood participants in such a radical experiment in governance. Some might
argue, particularly after Aurora, that that trust is misplaced. Gun guys would say
that shootings like Aurora are a tragedy, but it’s worth enduring such to live in a
country that enjoys that unique relationship between the people and their
government. A hundred and forty thousand American casualties between 1943
and 1945 were a tragedy, too, but not as bad letting Europe fall to the Nazis.
Freedom, gun guys would say, isn’t free.
6 Reasonable people can disagree, but I find gun guys refreshingly willing to think
on a grand, philosophical level about what American gun ownership means,
whereas the other side is too often mucking around in the shallow weeds of
wanting to “do something” after a tragedy. Guns are more than sporting goods,
and they’re more than murder weapons. They mean something powerful. The
idea of the government keeping a list of everybody touched by that power makes
gun guys recoil mightily.
______________________________________________________________________
Dan Baum is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, and has written for numerous
other magazines and newspapers including the New York Times Magazine, Playboy,
Rolling Stone, Harper's, and Wired. He is the author of NINE LIVES: Mystery, Magic,
Death and Life in New Orleans (Spiegel & Grau, 2009) and is currently at work on a
book about American gun culture, forthcoming from Knopf. He lives in Boulder,
Colorado.You can also read
