On Saturday, a madman went on a stabbing spree in an Australian shopping mall, killing five women and a man before being shot dead by a police officer. Eight others including an infant survived their injuries. The parents of the 40-year-old perpetrator said he struggled with mental health issues since he was a teenager. He was still carrying out his spree when the cop arrived and took him out.
Odds are there weren’t many Australians shouting “Defund the police!” in the streets on Saturday. For those looking to assign blame, one thing’s for sure – it wasn’t the guns.
Speaking of guns, the Maine Legislature took up a handful of firearms-related bills last week. The Legislature is still kicking around a “red flag” bill that would allow a court to order the seizure of a person’s firearms without a mental health examination, versus the existing “yellow flag” law that requires a petition from a police officer and a mental health examination before police may seize the person's guns.
On Friday, the Maine Senate endorsed a bill that would require background checks for private gun sales, another bill that would require a 72-hour cooling-off period before a person is allowed to buy a firearm, and yet another that would ban so-called bump stocks, which are already banned under federal law. All these measures are being pushed in purported response to Robert Card’s mass shootings in Lewiston last October.
We currently have in place:
A Maine law and a federal law against possessing firearms after having been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility;
A “yellow flag” law that allows police to take a person into “protective custody” to initiate a court proceeding to seize the person’s firearms on probable cause that the person may be mentally ill and poses a likelihood of serious harm due to that condition;
A Maine bail law that allows judicial officers to set release conditions that include no possession of firearms or dangerous weapons and that require submission to searches to determine compliance;
A Maine crime that makes it illegal to punch another person in the face (assault);
A Maine crime that makes it illegal to communicate a threat to shoot a bunch of people, if the person communicating the threat consciously disregards a substantial risk that the natural and probable consequence of the threat, whether it occurs or not, is to place the person to whom the threat is communicated or the threatened person in reasonable fear that the crime will be committed (terrorizing);
Both a Maine and a federal statute that make it illegal to possess a firearm after being convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor or any crime punishable by a year or more of imprisonment (felony).
The last of these I mention not because Robert Card was previously convicted of a domestic violence offense or a felony – he was not – but to emphasize how little deterrence value there is in passing laws that make it illegal for certain people to possess firearms when those same people are bent on committing mass murder.
As for Robert Card, it appears that he in fact legally purchased all his firearms after passing federal background checks.
And yet, despite the fact that Robert Card spent two weeks in a mental health facility in New York last summer; despite the fact that Card’s friend reported to a Maine police officer about 6 weeks before Card’s mass shooting that Card punched him in the face (assault) and threatened to shoot up the Army Reserve facility in Saco and other places (terrorizing), and despite the fact that at least one Maine police officer, one Maine deputy sheriff, and one New Hampshire police officer were aware of all this, no applicable existing law was actually enforced so as to deprive Card of his firearms.
The appropriate thing to do now, we are told, is to pass a raft of new “common sense” gun laws: a “red flag” law, a cooling-off period for gun purchases, background checks for private gun sales and, in the way of a belt to go with the suspenders, a Maine prohibition on bump stocks to duplicate the existing federal law against bump stocks. Please forgive me for failing to see the “common sense” in this.
Common sense should require us to determine why our existing laws were not used to deprive Robert Card of his firearms before his killing spree, and to find fixes for any human errors that caused those laws not to be enforced against him. I have a hard time believing that just adding layer-upon-layer of new laws, some of which merely duplicate existing federal laws, will solve the problem.
A friend of mine recently told me it’s a waste of time to have an independent commission looking into Robert Card’s mass-shooting. He said he already knows what the problem is and the problem is obviously the guns. What we need to do, he figures, is mop-up the guns already in circulation like Australia did -- problem solved. He expresses what a lot of people believe who advocate for layer-upon-layer of new gun restrictions. A large portion of them just hate guns. They don’t understand guns. They don’t like the second amendment. They just want gun ownership restricted until private ownership of guns goes away.
Sure, there are also people who own guns, or who don’t own guns but are not opposed in principle to the private ownership of guns, who also favor more restrictions. But the majority of those pushing layer-upon-layer of new gun laws hate guns. While it’s fine for them to hate guns to their heart’s content, when it comes to mass killings of strangers, the problem is not the guns, or the knives, or the vehicles, or the materials the bombs are made of.
The problem is people acting on their impulses to commit mass-murder. For example: this past weekend’s mass-murdering Australian stabber; or the Black guy who drove through a mostly white people’s Christmas parade, killing six and injuring sixty-two in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 2021; or the jihadist who drove his truck onto a New York City bike path, killing eight and injuring another twelve in 2017; or the September 11 hijackers who killed two thousand nine hundred and ninety-six people with airplanes in 2001; or the Boston Marathon bombers who killed three and maimed and injured hundreds of others in 2013; or the suicide bomber who detonated himself at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing seventeen people and injuring one thousand and seventeen in 2017; or the Oklahoma City bomber who killed one hundred sixty-seven and injured seven hundred and fifty-nine in 1995.
People forget, or they never knew, that during one eighteen-month period during 1971-72 there were 2,500 bombings – about 5 a day – on U.S. soil. The death count was low, but that’s because the leftists who planted the bombs found it more politically expedient to destroy property and instill fear than to kill innocent civilians. For those who do have the intent to kill, that’s how easy it is to make bombs. In fact, the worst school massacre in U.S. history was carried out with bombs. Thirty-eight schoolchildren and 5 adults were killed with bombs at a school in Bath, Michigan, in 1927.
These days, it’s school shootings, not school bombings, that are a cultural thing. But before a 16-year-old kid shot up a schoolyard across from her house in San Diego, California, one Monday morning in 1979, killing the principal and a janitor and injuring eight kids and a responding police officer, we never used to hear much about school shootings. Asked why she did it, she told a reporter over the phone, “I don’t like Mondays.” Now that’s nihilism. It was shockingly reprehensible, not quickly followed-up by a bunch of emulators. It took 20 years to get to Columbine. Now the nihilists are everywhere.
The mass murderers have all got a grievance. For a lot of them, the grievance grows from nihilism and the apparent desire to expand the void that envelopes them. Others have ideological grievances rooted in politics or religion. This is the case with jihadists who seek to advance their agenda through terror. And then there are grievances rooted in psychotic delusions.
Nothing that the Maine Legislature is proposing at this point will address any of it more effectively than effective enforcement of existing laws would. The essential problems with the layer-them-on approach to gun restrictions are: (1) killers don’t tend to get hung up on legality; (2) things will always be available to criminals that the law-abiding shun when possessing them is illegal; and (3) where there’s a will there’s a way.
Stop adding layers of window dressing. The problem isn’t the guns, the knives, the vehicles, or the stuff that can be made into bombs. The problem is people with perceived grievances who seek to achieve personal or ideological justice through mass murder. How do you stop that?
By all means, keep stoking the cultural grievance-making machinery. Keep dividing everyone into the categories of either “oppressors” or “oppressed,” casting the “oppressed” as categorically good and the “oppressors” as categorically evil – Unity!!! Meanwhile, just add a half-dozen or so new layers of restrictions to existing gun laws, sit back and see how all that “common sense” works out for you.
Agree 150%.