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Obama on Oregon Shooting: ‘This Is Something We Should Politicize’
President Obama delivered an angry statement on the Thursday shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, OR. “Each time we see one of these mass shootings,” he said from the White House briefing room podium, “our thoughts and prayers are not enough.
In a 15-minute statement, Obama stressed that the US is “the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every couple of months.” He praised the gun control efforts in Australia, a nation that conducted a mass confiscation of firearms from its citizenry.
The President repeatedly complained about the Republican-led Congress and gun rights advocates. “There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America,” he said, “so how can you with a straight face say more guns will make us safer?”
Obama claimed that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths and repeatedly called for “common-sense” gun safety legislation. “Somebody somewhere will comment and say, ‘Obama politicized this issue.’ Well, this is something we should politicize,” the President said.
Instead of offering a plan of his own, Obama told voters to change American politics on the issue. He even requested that the media make gun control more popular.
“I would ask news organizations — because I won’t put these facts forward — have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on their news reports. It won’t be information coming from me, it’ll be coming from you,” the President said, pointing to reporters in the room.
Published in Guns
I am not—again, Gentleman—advocating for a wholesale ban on firearms for all Americans. I’m not advocating for anything, just trying to get someone (anyone?) to consider, even for a moment, the possibility that one way to reduce the number of gun massacres might be to make it just a tad more difficult for a mentally ill person to get hold of a gun. This might make it a little more difficult and time-consuming for an ordinary gun-owner like you to buy your next gun, too. I get that—but since I do feel that all of us, whether we are gun owners are not, are being inconvenienced and, arguably anyway, deprived of the sense of ordinary safety that we would otherwise reasonably expect to enjoy as we go about Pursuing Happiness, wouldn’t you be willing to give up not your right to own guns but your right to buy them on impulse, say? Or your right to buy every weapon you might conceivably want?
As gun people, you would know far better than I what the possibilities are. Could we make the waiting period longer? Do more public-health advertising about the importance of keeping guns locked up and away from family members (not to mention random heroin addicts in search of steal-able valuables?)? Encourage Guns & Ammo and the NRA to tone down their advertising and rhetoric (the Cold Dead Fingers bit) and ask games manufacturers stop making realistic First Person Shooter games that serve as training for isolated, unbalanced young murderers?
There are a lot of moving parts in the problem of Columbine-style murders. Our treatment (and lack of it) for mental illness, our social dislocation, the notion—exemplified in abortion—that it is okay to view the lives of other people as means or obstacles to our own ends, and so on.
I’m not “calling myself clergy” I am clergy. And while, statistically speaking, I am unlikely to be the victim of an ordinary murder because of various demographic realities (my gender, my age, where I live, what I do) I am as likely or unlikely as anyone else to either be the victim of the next mass-shooting, or to have one of my loved-ones die because he or she happened to go to the grocery store, or to history class, or the library, or the V.A. to have his PTSD meds adjusted (our most recent would-be mass shooter was firing into our veterans hospital before he was shot by my beloved colleagues, thankfully before he was able to shoot them.)
It is a liberal’s trick, according to the Ricochetti, to make the transformation of human hearts the prerequisite for any improvement in a social problem. Education, consciousness-raising, addressing the root causes which always turn out to be intangibles like “racism” or, if I may say so, the wickedness of man’s heart. Since I like to think that conservatives are realists, who recognize that the brilliance of the Founding Fathers was that they were not content to wait for the wickedness of man’s heart to change before constructing a more just, peaceful, free and happiness-promoting world with a system that accounts for how things actually are, not how they may someday be, I see the epidemic of mass murder as a problem that can be, if not solved, at least ameliorated. And I think that gun owners —normal gun owners, like you guys—are much better equipped than non-gun-owners (not to mention anti-gun liberals) to know what the reasonable, effective and rights-respecting trade-offs are likely to be.
Kate, your discussions suggest that you believe there are few requirements and legal thresholds for legal possession of firearms. Please describe what you perceive as the applicable laws for the legal possession of arms already on the books. You can start with your home state if you prefer, or at the federal level if any laws of these sort exist. You don’t even have to go into laws applicable to manufacturing, sale, advertising, or even transportation. Just leave it to the applicable restrictions on your average person’s legal possession.
It really makes little sense to discuss what you may believe to be common sense requirements if you are not knowledgeable on what already applies.
Last note before I go off and do what I’m supposed to be doing today! And that is that killing dangerous mentally-ill people is not really a solution, nor is anyone going to be inclined to batter their bodies afterward. I know this, because I provide pastoral care to LEOs after they have been forced to shoot such people, and while anger is part of their reaction, their anger at the subject is always combined with anger at all those who failed to do what could have been done before it came down to one, awful moment; parents, doctors, the system under which mentally ill people are treated or, too-often, left untreated, the idiot who thought it would be a fine idea to give his nutcase son a gun “to make him feel more like a man” after the state took his guns away, and so on and so on. They don’t feel triumphant. They certainly don’t believe that they have prevented any other crazy person from picking up a weapon and using it. Mostly, they feel sick, blank, both exhausted and agitated, and inclined to maybe find another line of work.
I know that all of you—Mike, Whiskey, jmelvin—would do your best to respond heroically in the event that you were present when a deadly threat presented itself. I believe in you, and am grateful, since I know you would try to protect me, too. But I really hope and (clergy-thing again) pray that you never have to do it. It’s no fun.
You’re quite right, jmelvin—I am not conversant with these. That’s why I want you guys to help me out, here, instead of assuming I’m just trying to take your guns away. What I do know is that —under the present system operating here in Maine— crazy people are still able to legally acquire guns.
I don’t think the requirement— enforced or implicit—that everyone must arm him or herself is realistic and therefore defies common sense. Again, as a pro-gun Ricochetti once declared, the best argument for gun-control was the other guys he’d see at the range on Saturday morning. The human race is (you might have noticed this?) filled with inattentive, un-self-disciplined, badly-coordinated and distracted specimens who simply can’t be counted on to respond effectively to a threat and, when encouraged to think of themselves as Rambo, may be far more trouble to themselves and the rest of us than they’re worth. There’s a reason the heroes of the Paris subway were able to react promptly and appropriately to a would-be mass murderer; they had military training. Most don’t. Even those who do are out-of-practice, out-of-shape and preoccupied with the Kardashians, or whether our spouse is cheating on us, or whether two beers a night makes a person an alcoholic. A military person is trained not only to use weapons, but to imagine himself (and, if deployed, experience himself) an actor in a threatening environment.
We can’t replicate that, or even come close to it. Even the posters on the ladies’ room wall at my office, however assiduously studied, are unlikely to result in all our massively overweight, kindly secretaries remembering which is the safe room, getting themselves to it and remembering the password so their predecessors will let them in. You probably live and work in a community full of Americans; looking around, how many of them would you really trust to protect themselves and others in case of even a minor emergency, let alone an armed assault?
We can get all Darwinian and gloomy about it—all those unaggressive, self-centered fatties deserve to get gunned down… or we can accept that a basic element of civilization is that everyone doesn’t have to protect him or herself by violence from violence. It is reasonable to expect prudence from the population, but it is indeed the job of government to protect the vulnerable, which yes, traditionally (and we’re talking tribal times) includes middle-aged women along with children, the elderly, the infirm and —sigh—the pudgy imprudent too.
I am as likely to be killed in a mass shooting as anyone. I volunteer in a VA hospital. I’m also going to be volunteering at a local community college.
I don’t arm myself in response to the threat. But I don’t want other people to be disarmed. In fact, I’m hopeful that if a shooter shows up in any place I happen to be that some other armed people will take him out.
I empathize with Kate’s sense that if something could be done to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people we should do it. I just don’t know what that something is except for restrictions that would cause more harm than good.
In the not-too-distant future the threat to soft targets (schools, malls, government buildings) will not be crazy people. It will be Islamic terrorists. Then, we will all need to be armed, or at least enough of us to provide adequate protection.
I’m sympathetic to Kate’s arguments, but I don’t want to live in a world where the strong get to rule over the weak and that is the world you’ll get if you dramatically reduce the right to bear arms.
As an aside, I recently purchased my first gun(s) here in California and it was by no means easy. Kate, I suspect a lot of the common sense restrictions you are calling for are already in place – and then some – in many states.
Kate, the fact that shooters (in some cases) acquired their weapons legally does not carry the implications you think it does. Rather, it means that you cannot take away guns from such people without more commonly taking away guns (and/or the right to self-defense) of people like me. You say you don’t want to take my guns, but you miss the fact that the logical meaning of what you seek is effectively confiscation from legal gun owners.
You say that “these things” haven’t been tried, yet refuse to specify what “these things” are. (That’s a pretty dishonest way to discuss the issue in the first place, but I’ll leave that aside.) When pressed, you admit that you’re not familiar with what laws are already in place. Well, most of the items on gun controllers’ lists are or were already in place. Oregon had universal background checks. Places like DC and Chicago have had near total bans on ownership. This has resulted in more deaths, not fewer, since citizens cannot defend themselves from the criminals who scoff at the law. A set of “solutions” that solves a problem other than the one at hand is better understood as an agenda.
So here are my questions to you: Do you care more about dead bodies, or mass shootings? If DC-style laws result in fewer mass shootings but more overall deaths, is that your preference? What if violence (not excluding mass shootings) is better understood as a condition to be managed, rather than a problem to be solved? If the evidence showed that overall you could reduce deaths by increasing gun ownership, would you change your mind? If banks and courthouses and the president employ armed protection, why should we not consider that as a solution to protect our schools?
There was a piece in the New York Times about “Where they got their guns.” If I were president, would it be worth my convening a blue ribbon panel that included everybody, but especially people who really know about guns because they own and use them and/or manufacture/sell them, to consider what changes (if any) could be made to make it more difficult for crazy people to get guns? On Ryan’s thread, I pointed out that it is much more difficult to purchase hypodermic needles, various kinds of medications (oxycontin, antibiotics) with which you can only harm yourself than it is to buy a weapon with which you can harm—quickly and relatively easily—large numbers of other people. Yes, the obstacle that might slow or impede a mass shooter (or, for that matter, suicide) will also slow or impede the legitimate gun owner. But the same is true for the cancer sufferer who needs oxycontin, or the diabetic who needs a hypodermic; when we impede the addicts, we impede the suffering ill as well. Why couldn’t the same principle apply?
For some of us, this example is dispositive in the other direction. The extra suffering experienced by legitimate consumers of pain medication — because of a misguided effort to protect a small number others from themselves — is to our shame.
Yes. Absolutely.
If the evidence showed that overall you could reduce deaths by eliminating gun ownership, would you change your mind? (Nor saying I’m advocating this, just for the sake of argument—that is, does the 2nd Amendment trump public safety?)
I don’t mean to be dishonest. And I agree—very, very strongly—that violence in general, with gun violence as a subset, is a complex, multi-faceted problem which will require complex, multi-faceted solutions (we discussed the issue of mental healthcare, very profitably from my point of view, on an earlier thread).
But is there literally nothing—nothing at all—that could be done to specifically to make it more difficult for a crazy person to acquire a gun? Would it really be so onerous for a non-crazy, normal gun-owner if, say, the waiting period was longer, or at least some minimal training and a license were required? Why wouldn’t training-and-a-license help? (We do it with cars).
Speaking of dishonest arguments—though you haven’t done this, others will insist that Adam Lanza acquired his guns illegally by “stealing” these from his mother. Lanza’s mother obviously shared her arsenal so generously with her son that, had he not killed her, we could no more say he “stole” them than that he “stole” the milk he took from her refrigerator that morning.
Whether you want to believe Lanza stole them or not, nothing you have proposed would have kept him from getting those guns. His mother was sane and had no criminal background. She would have been legally cleared to purchase those weapons under any law you’ve proposed which means Adam still would have had access to them. The only way you are going to prevent the insane from purchasing guns is to do a psych eval on every single person who tries to by one. That is unrealistic from a practical standpoint without even addressing the civil liberties aspect.
How are you going to enforce this on private sales? Is there going to be a psychiatrist on call in every city to perform these checks? How crazy does one have to be before we say they can’t purchase a gun? Foaming at the mouth? Schizophrenic? Mildly eccentric? Bear in mind that in most of the shootings the people who knew the shooter thought he was odd but didn’t think he was capable of mass murder so we’re not talking about psychotics like the homeless in NYC who stand on the street corner screaming at people. Are we separating the insane from the sane who subscribe to hate-filled ideology? The Charleston shooter didn’t appear to be insane at all. He subscribed to a racist, hateful ideology. The reporters killed in VA were killed by a man consumed with hate. Neither would have obviously been candidates for exclusion from purchase because they functioned in society for years without a problem. The idea we can pass a law to make it all better is a gross oversimplification that fails to address the real problem that our culture is losing its respect for life.
Kate,
Why is it so hard for you to accept that the left knows no more about gun violence than it does about the economy, health care, foreign policy, global warming or a host of other issues that they completely get backwards.
There are ten times as many blacks killing whites as whites killing blacks but the President wildly emphasizes the lesser. When a hate crime is committed against Christians he misdirects attention away from it. In the last two years 4500 people have been shot in neighborhoods of Chicago that the President knows very well. There have been 1500 deaths. Not once in seven years of his Presidency has he mentioned this. Almost all are the result of black gangs. Almost all are committed with illegal guns as Chicago has one of the strictest gun laws in the country.
In every case of the mass killings by lone gunman none of the proposed gun laws would have stopped them. Meanwhile, in every case concealed carry guns at the site would have saved many lives without question.
cont.
cont. from #168
You need to ask yourself why you cannot simply accept the reality here. The President, as usual, is manipulating everyone at a cheap emotional level. He has no solutions! He is only going to drive this society further from solutions to exploit the misery!
Regards,
Jim
You’re the one making a utilitarian argument, not I. If you believe there is a utilitarian case to be made, you first need empirical evidence that your solution will actually achieve what you claim. You appear to be working backwards from a preordained solution.
When you have that evidence, we can talk. In the meantime, I believe self-defense is a fundamental right (protected by the 2A, not granted by it), so I would not support a ban regardless. Consider that the one thing that may cut down on mass shootings — if you follow the research on such things — would be a law making it illegal to report on the shootings. Many such shootings are “copycat” events, and in Oregon, the shooter specifically cited the notoriety earned by Bryce Williams, the social media shooter.
This law would limit free speech rights. Why not support it? After all, in contrast to all the gun control proposals, it would actually have prevented this latest shooting.
Yes, such longer waiting periods are onerous, and result in innocent deaths.
The above is just one recent example. There are many others.
In principle, I support licensing and minimal training requirements. They exist in my state. They did not prevent the Newtown shooting.
(IMO “we do it with cars” should not be the benchmark, because driving a car is not a fundamental right, in contrast to the right to self-defense. But if “we do it with cars” is your utilitarian benchmark, then would you allow reciprocity across state lines as we do with cars? And not require a license for exclusive use on your own property? )
The car analogy completely falls apart. People have to get licenses to drive. That does not stop unlicensed people from driving. It doesn’t stop people from speeding, driving recklessly, or getting behind the wheel drunk. That is not an argument that licensing serves no purpose, but it does contradict the idea that requiring licensing and training is a solution to prevent the wrong people or negligent people from breaking the law.
Okay, you guys are giving me good arguments. (Don’t bother bringing Obama or the Left into this; I’m not listening to/reading them).
I wasn’t challenging you, SofS, I was asking whether, in theory, you’d be willing to consider restrictions on gun ownership if there was good evidence that fewer deaths would result. (How many fewer deaths…how good would the evidence have to be…blah blah–you don’t have to get into it; it was a general impression I was after, not specifics)
We do, at the moment, have significant restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. Land mines, bombs, hand grenades, shoulder-fired missiles, .50 caliber machine guns; I am not allowed to mine my driveway in the name of self-defense. And, in many states at least, there are waiting periods and background checks.
If one woman in New Jersey is killed while waiting for a weapons permit, that makes waiting periods illegitimate… but the kid who bought a handgun and shot his mother with it the same afternoon doesn’t make no-waiting-period illegitimate?
Whiskey—what I was suggesting (not declaring!) is that if Adam Lanza’s mother had had to go to training and be licensed for the specific class(s) of weapons she owned, some of that training could and would include instructions as to the safe handling and storage of weapons. Perhaps, under the system I’m suggesting, it would include encouragement to seriously evaluate whether everyone living in your house is trustworthy around guns? She did realize something was wrong with her kid—and while no one could predict a mass murder, she might have been moved to take steps to secure the guns by the much more common threat of suicide?
In other words, the owner of the guns in question—Lanza’s mother—would perhaps be somewhat more likely to do one of the things that might have stopped (or at least slowed) her son. Notice all the wiggle words—people still do stupid things, and she wasn’t a very rational woman. Still, the NRA offers classes in firearms safety, presumably because they, as the experts, believe that education does help people make better decisions. (Incidentally, I would be perfectly happy to have the NRA do the training and the licensing—it wouldn’t have to be the government.)
If a crazy person needed to be licensed before he could buy a gun, it would slow him down a little, offering everyone more time to pick up on the problem before it became a threat. He would be in a class with firearms instructors who might notice that something was amiss. OR, he might decide that this is too much hassle, and decide to carry out his massacre with a knife… in which case, the chances are extremely good that the body count would be much reduced. No?
Really? Did Lanza’s mother do all the stuff? I really should look this up.
Anyway, if you support licensing and training requirements, and no ban, then we agree.
Ta-dah!
Well, but I’m not arguing that there’s a way to stop any and all mass murders, just that we might be able to stop some of them— the way licensing and training when it comes to cars prevents some number of tragedies.
And what about my argument that we put more obstacles in the way of someone who needs oxycontin, antibiotics and hypodermic syringes, with which he could only hurt himself, than we put in the way of one who would like to buy a weapon with which he could hurt a whole lot of other people?
Kate, it’s very difficult to have an honest discussion when you don’t maintain your own arguments. You had proposed, in a vague and unsupported theory, that waiting periods wouldn’t really matter all that much. I gave a single example (and there are many more) to illustrate that they do, in fact, involve a tradeoff. For you to then mischaracterize my response as “that makes waiting periods illegitimate” requires you to ignore your own words as well as mine.
There are clearly tradeoffs to waiting periods. Nice to see you acknowledge it. It would be nicer if you owned up to the fact that it was you, and not me, who first suggested otherwise.
I agree with you about nearly all of this, James—but I haven’t been defending the President or the Left, nor citing them as sources. As it happens, I think the number of black murder victims is unconscionable. I think the “Black Lives Matter” movement’s disinterest in those crimes and victims reveals the moral and intellectual vacuity of the movement and its fans and followers.
As for the concealed carry possibility—doesn’t Oregon have concealed carry? And; concealed carry doesn’t mean trained, alert and paying attention. I agree that if you had a competent person on hand, and he or she got lucky, it would have been wonderful. (Gun ownership, sadly, is not synonymous with gun competence, however).
All those things, besides the .50 caliber machine gun, are “ordnance”, not “arms”, according to the meanings of those words at the time the amendment was passed.
Kate,
I don’t think this is an argument against concealed carry but an argument for it. You are admitting that it would be very effective if those that were carrying had adequate training. As nothing else is effective whatsoever, I think we ought to give NRA a donation right now so they can continue their training programs and improve them.
In Israel and elsewhere we are facing lunatics on another scale. They are insanely committed to their desire to kill. The madmen have military level weapons and are being trained to use them for perverse intent. Now is not the time to disarm the populace. Now is the time to give the populace the training that will make them the defensive force that is needed.
Regards,
Jim
I am much less sanguine that a class would change people’s behavior in how they treat guns. You either respect that guns are dangerous and not toys, or you don’t. Lanza’s mother was either unaware of how dangerous her son was or was in denial about it. Either way, I don’t buy that a class would have made her act differently. Nothing in a firearms class is going to make her re-evaluate how she felt about her son. It’s not uncommon for us to have blind spots about our family members.
Assuming that fire arms instructors would notice something wrong when many of the people who know them don’t, that still doesn’t answer the question of how crazy is crazy? Are they taking firearms courses or psych exams? There are different levels of insanity, and some can function in society without being overtly crazy. Are schizophrenics never allowed to own guns because of the potential they could stop taking their medication? Manic depressives? What about those with undiagnosed mental illness who are on an up cycle and not exhibiting symptoms? What of those who were competent when they purchased and were licensed but have slipped into dementia? Are we going to monitor them and take their guns away? By what apparatus are we going to do this? Why is this a federal issue and not a state issue? I know several people who have no business handling firearms because they’re reckless and careless, but they aren’t crazy. They could focus long enough to pass a class and get licensed, but they wouldn’t care once they got their license. Not all shooters are crazy. Some are quite sane and calculating having embraced hatred and evil. Licensing and training isn’t going to screen them out.
I’ll go back to my main point again. If we are proposing these changes in response to prior events in order to prevent them from happening again, then the changes we propose have to have actually been able to prevent them. Licensing and training do not meet that criteria although they can have their own value which would make them worthwhile. If they don’t prevent the problem from recurring, though, I have to question why we’re doing it. Is there another agenda at work, or are we just making ourselves feel better that we “did” something even though it won’t have any effect?
Licensing and training requirements do not stop anyone from getting behind the wheel and driving a car. It provides for liability after the fact in an accident and culpability if caught by an officer if driving without one. In my misspent youth, I had to take retake driving classes to reduce the speeding points on my record. Being licensed didn’t get me to slow down. Having to pay hefty speeding fines did. Some of the other individuals in the class had been caught driving on an expired license. One fellow had a book length driving record including DUIs. All licensed, all negligent. One had no license and had been busted for driving without one because he needed a way to get to work. It is not the licensing that prevents crime but respect for the law in the first place. Mass murderers have shown they do not respect the law nor human life so piling more laws on top seems to be an effort in futility. Additionally, a licensing scheme of the nature you proposed precludes anyone ever buying a firearm as a gift again. Nor does it account for private sales that aren’t recorded now. From a practical standpoint these are high hurdles to clear to ever effectively implement this kind of system without invoking a police state.
These are all good points—thank you, guys. I was on the plane today, and saw a CNN (?) report on A.L.I.C.E. training, designed to teach people how to react to an active shooter situation. It was upsetting to watch, not because of the training part, but because they used realistic video of a guy walking into an office in one part, a warehouse in another, and a school in a third, and opening fire. What was most clear to me was how quickly a guy with a gun can make a lot of people dead. It was so incredibly fast. I had an image (awful) of myself at the range, shooting the AR with my wardens; if even as inadequate a shooter as I am decided to turn my weapon away from the targets and toward the line, I could have killed everyone in the class —I know I could—even though they all also had guns not just on their person, but in their hands. Surprise is a powerful ally. So depressing.
Another question arose for me while I was driving home from the airport; one issue that police officers face is that bad guys take their guns away from them. We use holsters that require two weird little extra motions before the pistol can be withdrawn; if someone is openly carrying a sidearm in, say, the supermarket checkout line, what’s to stop someone from reaching over and taking it from him? In other words, if police officers get shot with their own weapons, might armed civilians also get shot with their own weapons?
Who is going to train all of us? To what standard will we all be trained? Who is going to pay for it, and who is going to make us do it?
Also; I’ve been listening to Thomas Sowell’s book The Vision of the Anointed. He talks about how the Anointed (lefties, in his version) declare a crisis, demand government programs with the goal of alleviating the crisis, and then, when the crisis is not alleviated, but rather gets worse, declare that the original goal wasn’t the real goal and, in any case, things would have been even worse if it weren’t for their government program which, by the way, needs more funding.
You may not mean it to, but your “we face a horrible foe” sounds like a declaration of a crisis. And the solution you propose sounds like a government program; at least, any training program sufficient to turn the population of the U.S. into an effective resistance force is going to require the resources of the government and some degree of governmental coercion, isn’t it?
Are you sure that the crisis a.) exists and b.) is getting worse not better?
Okay. You’re right.
Is that true? That’s cool—I didn’t know that. So what counted as an “arm?” Muskets, right? And those old-time pistols. what about a cannon?