Saturday, June 16, 2012

Risk Management: Reflections on Firearms


Jim Castagnera: The Firearms Dilemma

After the U.S. Constitution was completed, some of the founders felt that the document --- devised after the predecessor Articles of Confederation failed to provide sufficient central authority to keep the newly liberated colonies from one another’s throats --- gave the federal government too much power. The upshot of this fear was the Bill of Rights, i.e., the first ten amendments. During the ensuing 200-plus years, each of the ten has produced volumes of court decisions and scholarly comments. The Second Amendment is no exception.

Amendment number two says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” What these few words really mean has been the source of considerable controversy, most recently on June 26, 2008, when a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices declared a District of Columbia gun-control law unconstitutional. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, stated, "In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense....”

One of the dissenting justices in this 5-4 decision, Justice John Paul Stevens, retorted that the court's judgment was "a strained and unpersuasive reading" which overturned longstanding precedent, and that the court had "bestowed a dramatic upheaval in the law." Stevens added that the Second Amendment was notable for the "omission of any statement of purpose related to the right to use firearms for hunting or personal self-defense,” such as is present in the Declaration of Rights in Pennsylvania.

Observers on both sides of the gun-control debate contend that the decision will stimulate a lot more legislation and litigation. Some prosecutors express concern that wily defense attorneys will find ways of reopening cases, where personal possession of weapons was an important issue. Gun-control advocates predict that the decision will energize gun-rights advocates to challenge more and more federal and state gun-control laws. One police officer commented on NPR that with this decision America has entered the Age of Rambo.

The National Rifle Association argues that “guns don’t kill; people do.” True… but most people who kill, kill with guns. Living on the edge of a city which logs some 400 homicides a year, mostly deaths by gunshot, I often wish that Philadelphia had the laws in place to somehow get the guns off the streets. But, like every attorney worth his salt, I see the other side of the case.

Since Nine-Eleven, America has become increasingly more security conscious. In the face of the excesses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanimo, the Supremes have shown themselves to be on the side of due process of law, handing the Bush Administration one defeat after another regarding prisoners’ rights to fair and speedy trials. Meanwhile, airports have become fortresses and boarding a plane can involve stripping oneself of laptop, liquid toiletries, belt, shoes, jacket, metal prosthesis, and pocket change. The federal government has begun the building of a billion-dollar fence along our southwestern border to keep the Mexicans out. And we are embroiled in two wars, one of which undoubtedly was entered in the midst of a fog of lies, e.g., that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with Al Qaeda. Last but not least, Congress appears about to enact legislation giving retroactive immunity to phone companies that cooperated in federal wiretaps since Nine-Eleven. All of the above suggest that on the scales of justice, civil liberties concerns currently are outweighed by national security considerations, and the Supreme Court may be the individual’s only true champion.

In “Casablanca” a German officer asks Rick if he can imagine the German army in New York City. Rick replies that there are some New York neighborhoods that are too dangerous for the Nazis to dare to invade. In “Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin” (1963), novelist Leon Uris made a similar point. He had one of his characters wonder out loud about how long the round up of Germany’s Jews by the Gestapo would have persisted had every Jewish man met his oppressors at the front door, pistol in hand, and taken at least one down with him. Echoing this point, some commentators on last year’s massacre at Virginia Tech have suggested that students and faculty should be encouraged to arm themselves.

While I don’t endorse that latter view, I can’t dismiss the Humphrey Bogart/Leon Uris argument that an armed populace might be a potent counterforce against government abuse of civil liberties, as well as --- ala Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller --- a source of self-defense against criminals.

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Honestly... I'm sick of writing about this topic

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/28/ohio-school-shooting-victim_n_1307438.html

One TV commentator this morning called the latest school shooting "unimaginable."  Unfortunately, it's become easy to imagine.

I've been writing about such shootings for years now:

http://www.todayscampus.com/articles/load.aspx?art=218

http://www.todayscampus.com/articles/load.aspx?art=227

http://www.todayscampus.com/articles/load.aspx?art=236

http://www.todayscampus.com/articles/load.aspx?art=238


SEPTEMBER 22, 2007

When Will All These Classroom Killings Stop?

A piece I wrote several months ago concerning a classroom shooting incident in Pennsylvania seems to be just a pertinent today:
When Will These Classroom Killings Stop?
By
Jim Castagnera
On Monday a crazy gunman opened fire in a Virginia Tech residence hall and a little later in a classroom across campus, killing some 30 people in what is being labeled “the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history.” The gunman subsequently was killed, bringing the death toll to 31. As I wrote this column, no one knew the murder’s motive.
Virginia Tech’s president was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions. The university is shocked and indeed horrified."
In 21st century America we have almost come to accept these horrible mass murders as natural disasters. This community has been hit by a hurricane. That one has been torn up by a tornado. Oh, and that one over there has been blasted by a madman with a gun. The Tech student body no doubt will be afforded free access to “grief counselors.”
We used to say, "Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it." Should we now say, "Everybody talks about gun violence, but no one does anything about it?" Living here in suburban Philadelphia, I watched as the City of Brotherly Love averaged one homicide per day in 2006. Philly passed the 100-homicide mark during the first quarter of ’07, suggesting it well may be on its way to breaking last year’s record. Here, too, students are, often as not, counted among the innocent victims of gun violence gone out of control.
Yeh, I know… guns don't kill people, people kill people. But these killers are better armed than ever before. When I was a Franklin and Marshall College student a lifetime ago, I witnessed plenty of fights, often of the town v. gown variety. A group of fraternity punks, such as myself, might get a bit rowdy in a local tavern. The blue-collar crowd at the opposite end of the bar might take umbrage. The upshot might then be a quick exchange of fisticuffs. On a rare occasion a knife or a broken bottle could come into play.
My point is: almost nobody carried a gun.
By contrast today, if you are confronted by a belligerent bar fly, run for your car.
Odds are better than even the guy is packing.
No need to look for trouble in a local bar, however. Virginia Tech is not the only school where guns have gotten into classrooms. Just last year a local high school student entered one of our county’s Catholic high schools, discharged his father’s AK-47, then shot himself. We could only be grateful that the troubled youth didn’t first kill his classmates, making Delaware County the scene of a new Columbine massacre.
The Canadian college professor, Marshall McLuhan - best known during my college days for saying "The medium is the message" - asserted that Americans live in "Bonanzaland," i.e., the Wild West of the 1880s. Well, folks, that time is long past. Our K-12 schools have rightly adopted zero-tolerance policies toward weapons in their halls and classrooms. Colleges, too, have clamped down on violence --- even the fisticuffs of my era.
Obviously, this isn’t enough.
Neither are grief counselors enough.
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution may give us all the right to bear arms… though some judges and scholars have questioned the Supreme Court’s reading of that bit of the Bill of Rights. Regardless of what rights we want to read into the Second Amendment, I say our daughters and sons have a higher right: to enjoy and benefit from their educations without looking over their shoulders and wondering whether today is the day their classroom is riddled with bullets.
I don’t have the answer, folks. I just know in my guts that, until we dispense with the grief counselors and the platitudes, and get mad as hell about travesties like this latest massacre at Virginia Tech, the killing is just going to continue.

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