“Simplistic, Shameful And Opportunistic”: Connecticut School Officials Blast NRA’s Reaction To Newtown
Teachers, school superintendents, mayors and police chiefs in Connecticut are rejecting the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) response to the shooting in Newtown, describing the gun lobby’s proposal to equip schools with armed guards and more guns as too simplistic, shameful, and opportunistic.
One Connecticut school superintendent dismissed the NRA’s suggestion as “an ill-conceived reaction from an organization that does not have any credibility or expertise with respect to addressing school violence” and said that the idea “is an excuse for not addressing the need to enact meaningful safe gun legislation in conjunction with an investment in mental health services.” Putnam Police Chief Rick Hayes called the proposal “scary,” noting that teachers can’t possibly have the kind of training necessary to safely handle large weapons.
In fact, newspaper headlines across the state flatly rejected militarizing Connecticut schools:
The growing outrage against the organization extends beyond school officials — even state Republican politicians are weary of eliminating school gun-free zones. Senate Minority Leader John McKinney (R), whose district includes Sandy Hook Elementary School, called the proposal “ill-timed.” “I also don’t think his idea of undoing or repealing gun-free school zones is a good idea at all,” he said. “I’ve always understood, and believe, that our Second Amendment is an integral part of our Constitution, and people should have the right to bear arms … but I think we should have a fair conversation in this country about what the limits to those rights are.”
Schools across the state are enacting greater security measures, but more guns aren’t on the agenda. Instead, districts are focusing on adding interior classroom door locks, expanding swipe-card access and requiring staff to wear photo identification.
Tom Moore, assistant superintendent for administration for West Hartford schools, told the Hartford Courant that his district “won’t be taking our advice on how to keep kids safe from the president of the NRA.” He added, “I come from a family of hunters; I have four brothers who are hunters and members of the NRA. All I’ll be asking for for Christmas, after hearing Wayne LaPierre essentially blame school officials for the shootings, is for [my brothers] to resign from the NRA.”
“A Real Plan B”: Pay For NRA’s Armed Guard Plan With A Gun Tax
After a week of radio silence after the Sandy Hook massacre, the National Rifle Association resurfaced today with a predictable solution to protecting the nation’s schoolchildren from gun violence: More guns.
At a press conference, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre proposed putting an armed police officer in every school in the nation, to guard against the “unknown number of genuine monsters” that he says are waiting for their chance to mount a similar assault. “With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school?” asked LaPierre.
LaPierre says an armed presence on school grounds actually would provide what he touts as “absolute protection” against an attack—a shaky assumption, considering that Columbine High School had an armed county sheriff’s deputy on the campus when it was attacked by two teenage gunmen in 1999, and he was unable to prevent them from killing a dozen students and a teacher, and injuring 21 others.
But let’s assume that LaPierre is right, and that putting an armed officer in each of the nation’s 132,183 public and private schools would make schools safer. How would we fund it? According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the nation has 461,000 local police officers, but they already have plenty of responsibilities to keep them busy, and it’s hard to imagine police departments allocating more than a quarter of their personnel to watching over schools. So clearly, we’d have to recruit, hire, equip and train more officers for the job. According to the agency, the average total operating cost of each officer—including salary, benefits, equipment, and training—is $116,500.
That means that the NRA’s proposal would cost taxpayers about $15.4 billion annually.
I know that LaPierre doesn’t think that’s a lot of money compared to what we spend on foreign aid, but in fact, it is well more than any item in the foreign aid budget. According the State Department’s FY 2013 fact sheet, the cost of providing an armed officer to every school in the nation would amount to five times what we provide in military assistance to Israel ($3.1 billion in 2012), and nearly four times the $4 billion that we spend on humanitarian assistance to war refugees and victims of natural disasters. It would amount to 15 times what we spend to support the United Nations and other international organizations.
So we’re talking about a lot of bucks here, especially at a time when federal taxes seem almost certain to go up for most Americans in 2013. Is it fair that the majority—70 percent of Americans, according to this 2011 survey—who don’t own guns should pay higher taxes to support the NRA’s idea, because of LaPierre’s insistence that gun control laws are unfair to gun owners?
I say no. Instead, here’s a counter-proposal. Let’s tax gun purchases to subsidize the cost of the NRA’s school security proposal. Gun owners bought 10.8 million firearms in 2011, according to Ammoland, a website for gun enthusiasts. At a surcharge of, say, $1,425 per weapon, we’d have enough to provide the absolute protection that LaPierre wants. We might be able to lower that a bit by adding additional taxes to ammunition as well.
By: Patrick Kiger, U. S. News and World Report, December 21, 2012
“The Problem, Folks, Is The Guns”: Wayne LaPierre Is A Perfect Example
In the aftermath of the massacre of first-graders at Sandy Hook elementary school, right-wing defenders of unregulated guns have gravitated to a common alibi: The problem isn’t guns; it’s mental illness. If only society kept better track of crazy people and kept weapons out of their hands, we could prevent more episodes of armed mayhem.
Senator elect Marco Rubio has spoken of the need to “keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill” and dozens of Tea Party Republicans have echoed the same talking point. The always predictable Charles Krauthammer wrote: “While law deters the rational, it has far less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them, disarm them…. there’s no free lunch. Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.” And the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, in additional to calling for an armed guard in every school, urged an “active national database of the mentally ill.”
Oh my, where to begin? Mental illness is just now starting to become less stigmatized. If we create an even more Orwellian society in which anyone who has ever sought treatment for emotional problems ended up in some national database, you can just imagine what that would do to people’s willingness to seek help. Surely it is better to end the easy purchase of combat weapons than it is to keep a record of everyone in America who might hypothetically go on a rampage.
Surveillance as a substitute for gun control is no idle threat. In the age of anti-terrorism, courts have already permitted the National Security Agency to troll among otherwise confidential records—everything from cell phone and computer-information trails to bank and insurance company records. The Fourth Amendment, which usually requires a warrant for invasion of privacy, has been simply waived. If the justification is preventing “terrorism”—and surely shooting up a classroom is a kind of terrorism—the NSA could create a database in which half of Americans are classified as potential mass killers.
Isn’t it better to just get rid of the guns?
For now, privacy protections such as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) make it illegal to disclose medical records, and mental-health treatment has an even higher standard of privacy protection. But it would be child’s play for the NSA to ignore these privacy protections, as it has others.
A second irony: The very right-wingers shedding crocodile tears over the need to focus on mental illness rather than gun control are the same people who have shredded public budgets that support treatment of the mentally ill. No area of public spending has been cut more deeply.
In Portland, Maine, a pioneering psychiatrist named William McFarlane has devised a strategy and outreach protocol for dramatically reducing the incidence of psychosis. The research of Dr. McFarlane and his colleagues demonstrated that it wasn’t the condition of schizophrenia per se so much as it was the devastating experience of a mental breakdown that disabled young adults and put them into the permanent status of the emotionally impaired.
Dr. McFarlane and his team devised an early outreach and prevention system called the Portland Identification and Early Referral program (PIER) that made use of community education. Teachers, counselors, clergy, youth workers and young people themselves were encouraged to be alert to patterns that might indicate future risks of psychosis. Dr. McFarlane’s main intervention was family education and early counseling, supplemented where necessary by medication.
Many teenagers who were loners or were haunted by delusional thoughts, seeing the educational materials “self-referred.” They would come into the PIER office saying, “that sounds like me.” In Portland, the predicted incidence of hospital admissions for psychotic breaks was reduced by between a third and a half.
McFarlane’s breakthrough was hailed as the most important insight about how to reduce the devastating effects of severe mental illness in decades. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the approach was expanded to several other cities and states. But in Portland, it has been shut down for lack of funding, thanks to that state’s right-wing governor. Reopening PIER in Portland would cost under $100,000 a year and would save many millions on hospital admissions and ruined lives spared.
What’s the connection to gun violence? “These kids who go on gun rampages,” says McFarlane, “tend to be pre-psychotic. Most people with mental illnesses are not dangerous, but these are. They still have enough functioning to methodically plot out their attacks. They have lost capacity for judgment but not for planning.”
“At our very first family meetings,” McFarlane adds, “one of the things we emphasize is safety. Families get it. If they own guns, they either get rid of them, or lock them up.”
It may be a coincidence, but there have been no gun massacres in the communities that have programs modeled on PIER. However, referrals to Dr. McFarlane’s program and others like them are voluntary. Nobody is put into a database.
At the very least, the right-wingers who hope to shift the focus from gun control to mental illness might have the decency to support more funding to treat the latter. According to Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), some 60 percent of people with some form of mental illness receive no treatment whatsoever. More than half the counties in America, he adds, have no practicing psychologist, psychiatrist, or clinical social worker.
When press coverage of Adam Lanza first surfaced, there was conjecture that the 20-year-old shooter may have had Asberger’s Syndrome, a loose diagnostic category that is being dropped from the newest edition of the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (DSM-V) in favor of the broader category of Autism.
All over America, parents of quirky kids are agonizing over whether their children might be “on the spectrum” or whether they simply hear “a different drummer,” as Thoreau so beautifully put it. Federal and state law gives parents the right to seek a full evaluation, and if a child is identified as having some version of even mild autism, the family can qualify for additional services. But there is the dreaded trade- off of services for stigma.
What if the risk of getting your child listed on some database as potential doers of violence were added to that equation? What parent would ever seek help? In fact, Asberger’s and Autism are seldom associated with violence.
The problem, folks, is the guns.
Absent the guns, the loners who have shot up schools and shopping malls might have gotten out of control, but they would not have been able to go on shooting sprees.
To the extent that the issue is mental illness, the problem is the gross underfunding of known treatments that work. Adding stigma and surveillance while not adding funds would only make an injustice that much worse. Can’t we at least keep that straight?
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
“The Mark Of A Weak Organization”: The NRA And America’s Long History Of Absolutist Extremism
Watching Wayne LaPierre’s press conference today (transcript here) I found myself searching for various synonyms of “insane” to describe it. Unglued, unhinged, taken leave of his senses, etc. It reads like the nutty handwritten letters to the editor magazines get, complete with lots of italicizations and exclamation points.
But the truth is this is not true madness. It’s something as old as the country, which bears some eerie similarity to the extremism of the slavery movement, as a lovely piece Ta-Nehisi Coates put up today argued. Here’s a taste:
In the 1850s, slaveholders got their way in Congress (including a hardened Fugitive Slave Act), in the Supreme Court (the Dred Scott decision), and in the White House (occupied by a succession of doughfaces). But proslavery hardliners weren’t satisfied. They sought the resumption of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which the Constitution had banned as of 1808. They branded moderates like Abraham Lincoln–who pledged to leave slavery alone in the South–as members of a “Black Republican” conspiracy to overthrow slavery. And they banished former allies such as Stephen Douglas, who lost his A-Rating for straying from the ultra-orthodox line that there must not be any restriction on slavery.
Rather than accede to Douglas’s nomination as Democratic candidate in the 1860 presidential election, which he might well have won, Southerners split the party and nominated one of their own, dividing the Democratic vote and paving Lincoln’s path to the White House. At which point, the Fire-Eaters led Southern states out of the Union rather than accept a democratically-elected president they opposed.
The NRA shows signs of similar derangement and over-reach. During the election, it demonized a president who had done nothing on gun control, claiming a “massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.” It has alienated staunch allies like Democrat John Dingell who resisted the NRA’s mad-dog campaign to hold Eric Holder in contempt over “Fast and Furious.” Other supporters who have deviated an inch from the NRA line have been targeted for electoral defeat.
This could be a positive development in the medium term, I suspect. The NRA still has a lot of clout, and they’re not clinically insane, but they’ve clearly lost the ability to know what they sound like to non-gun nuts, or a view of sensible tactics. That kind of overreach is the mark of a weak organization—one particularly vulnerable to being baited by the other side into overreach. I predict much trolling of the NRA in the coming weeks.
By: Ryan Cooper, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
“The NRA Shoots Itself In The Foot”: A Shill For Gun Manufacturers And The Home Of Unhinged Conspiracy Theorists
The National Rifle Association finally weighed in on the gun debate today, in a news conference (albeit one in which they took no questions) setting out their feelings at this critical moment. And they gave the movement for greater restrictions on guns the biggest favor it could have hoped for. While the organization was once devoted to marksmanship and gun safety, in recent years it has increasingly become a shill for the gun manufacturers that fund it and the home of unhinged conspiracy theorists. As it showed today, the worst thing it can do for its cause is to step into the light.
You can read Wayne LaPierre’s entire statement here, but here’s a choice excerpt:
We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers.
Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!
The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?
The italics and exclamation points are in the original. LaPierre went on to say, “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.” Gun manufacturers? Nope. Hollywood! He went on to blame the news media, and even added a little doomsday prepper rhetoric (“Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization”). And then came the proposal: What we need to do, LaPierre said, is immediately place armed police officers in every school in America.
So the NRA’s plan is this: Make sure that as many people as possible buy as many guns as possible and are allowed to take them into as many places as possible. And then, as this army of “monsters and predators” descends upon our schools, have someone there to return fire. Sounds reasonable.
If the NRA had just kept its head low like it did after every other mass shooting we’ve had in recent years, it would have done itself a favor. But I think that in years to come we may look back on this press conference as one of the key moments in a change in how people and legislators think of the NRA. It was a big public reminder, to people who may not have been aware of it, that these people are crazy. Even many gun owners, and many of the NRA’s own members, think the positions the organization takes are too extreme. When it’s this public about its dream vision of the society it would like to see, where every public place, from streets to supermarkets to parks to restaurants to schools, is nothing more than a gun battle waiting to happen, people are going to recoil in disgust. And to repeat, that includes lots of people who own guns.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
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