Author: hankkalet

I missed President Barack Obama’s speech, but have since read it in The Washington Post. While it has gotten some very positive reviews, something about what I read left me empty. A friend found some of his comments — about how we do a poor job taking care of our children and the like — to be insensitive and solipsistic. I think she’s right.

But what disturbed me more was his sudden claim that we need to finally take meaningful action, as though he has been powerless for since January 20, 2009, to do anything.

Since I’ve been president, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings, fourth time we’ve hugged survivors, the fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims.

And in between, there have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and in big cities all across America, victims whose — much of the time their only fault was being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.

We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.

Surely, we can. But why hasn’t he until now? Why reference the shootings in his speech, but say nothing of gun control or an assault weapons ban?

His speech won plaudits from a lot of liberals, but he has been in office 1,426 days and in that time there have been at least 15 mass shootings, including Friday’s massacre. From Think Progress:

December 11, 2012. On Tuesday, 22-year-old Jacob Tyler Roberts killed 2 people and himself with a stolen rifle in Clackamas Town Center, Oregon. His motive is unknown.

September 27, 2012. Five were shot to death by 36-year-old Andrew Engeldinger at Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis, MN. Three others were wounded. Engeldinger went on a rampage after losing his job, ultimately killing himself.

August 5, 2012. Six Sikh temple members were killed when 40-year-old US Army veteran Wade Michael Page opened fire in a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Four others were injured, and Page killed himself.

July 20, 2012. During the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, CO, 24-year-old James Holmes killed 12 people and wounded 58. Holmes was arrested outside the theater.

May 29, 2012. Ian Stawicki opened fire on Cafe Racer Espresso in Seattle, WA, killing 5 and himself after a citywide manhunt.

April 6, 2012. Jake England, 19, and Alvin Watts, 32, shot 5 black men in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in racially motivated shooting spree. Three died.

April 2, 2012. A former student, 43-year-old One L. Goh killed 7 people at Oikos University, a Korean Christian college in Oakland, CA. The shooting was the sixth-deadliest school massacre in the US and the deadliest attack on a school since the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.

October 14, 2011. Eight people died in a shooting at Salon Meritage hair salon in Seal Beach, CA. The gunman, 41-year-old Scott Evans Dekraai, killed six women and two men dead, while just one woman survived. It was Orange County’s deadliest mass killing.

September 6, 2011. Eduardo Sencion, 32, entered an IHOP restaurant in Carson City, NV and shot 12 people. Five died, including three National Guard members.

January 8, 2011. Former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head when 22-year-old Jared Loughner opened fire on an event she was holding at a Safeway market in Tucson, AZ. Six people died, including Arizona District Court Chief Judge John Roll, one of Giffords’ staffers, and a 9-year-old girl. 19 total were shot. Loughner has been sentenced to seven life terms plus 140 years, without parole.

August 3, 2010. Omar S. Thornton, 34, gunned down Hartford Beer Distributor in Manchester, CT after getting caught stealing beer. Nine were killed, including Thornton, and two were injured.

November 5, 2009. Forty-three people were shot by Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan at the Fort Hood army base in Texas. Hasan reportedly yelled “Allahu Akbar!” before opening fire, killing 13 and wounding 29 others.

April 3, 2009. Jiverly Wong, 41, opened fire at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York before committing suicide. He killed 13 people and wounded 4.

March 29, 2009. Eight people died in a shooting at the Pinelake Health and Rehab nursing home in Carthage, NC. The gunman, 45-year-old Robert Stewart, was targeting his estranged wife who worked at the home and survived. Stewart was sentenced to life in prison.

That is a rather large death toll and, while Obama has given the perfunctory responses in each case, the circumstances that allowed for each of these mass killings to occur remained in place. Guns remain far too easy to get and our mental health system remains underfunded and the victim of disregard.

I don’t doubt the emotion in his speech, or that he meant what he was saying. But his historical amnesia — especially his own failures in response to these earlier shootings — mirrors the amnesia of the rest of the Washington political class, one that has relegated the debate over guns to the scrap heap and has left social services and the safety net low on the priority list.

Given yesterday’s terrible events, I thought it might be worth reprinting a column I wrote back in 1999 in The Progressive Populist. Some of the references are dated, but the basic point, unfortunately, remains valid.

Violence Strikes
Close to Home

Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, violence begetting violence, ending with dead teenagers in the library of a suburban high school. Perhaps we should have expected it, this rash of shootings, the bloodshed.

Perhaps.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be outraged, shouldn’t demand answers, shouldn’t take that difficult look within ourselves.

Even now, nearly two months after the shooting in Littleton, Colo., we seem at sea about what happened. We want to blame music, movies, television, video games, anything but the simple premise that we are a violent culture becoming more and more violent everyday.

This is a story about guns, about brute force, about a culture that respects and demands violence in its everyday interactions. This is the story of American society, played out at a high school in the Midwest. The story of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., of Bethel, Alaska, of Jonesboro, Ark., and Wyoming, Del. This is the story of kids with guns, of a culture of privilege and power and the powerless and the violent methods we’ve sanctioned to level the playing fields.

The story of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and the shootings at Columbine High School, according to various press reports, begins with a school culture in which the more popular students, the stronger students, the jocks preyed upon the weaker students and outsiders, pushing them into lockers and generally harassing them.

“Jocks pushed them against lockers, yelled ‘faggot’ and ‘loser’ at them while they ate lunch in the cafeteria,” according to Rolling Stone. “One day a few weeks before the killings, Dylan, Eric and Brooks Brown (a friend) were standing out on Pierce Street near the school, having a smoke, when a car full of jocks rolled by. A bottle came flying from the car and shattered at the feet of the three boys.”

This is the kind of thing that happens everyday at high schools across the country. It is the kind of atmosphere that allowed the teen-aged football players in Glen Ridge, N.J., to believe they could rape a mentally retarded classmate, that they could perform savage acts upon her, that they could do so with impunity. It is the kind of attitude that allowed members of California’s teen-age Spur Posse to play its abusive games of sexual conquest and to view their female victims as little more than collateral damage in their escapades.

It is the legacy of the bully, a legacy we seem willing to accept and even endorse, its sinister effects seeping into our political and economic cultures, our films and music and television, our everyday dealings with just about everyone with whom we must interact.

It is visible in the way New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani deals with his critics as he lashes out at protesters and reporters, calling them names, questioning their motives and almost never taking the time to listen to their questions or offer answers. It is visible in the way police departments across the country storm their inner cities as if they were invading superpowers.

It is a Republican Party moving to circumvent the will of the voters during an ugly and divisive impeachment proceeding, a Democratic president bombing Iraq and Serbia, turning to the violent option and abandoning any notion of diplomacy, negotiation or compromise to make his point heard.

It is Chainsaw Al Dunlap methodically dismantling companies without regard for the people who work for them, the cities in which they are located or anything other than the quick and dirty profit.

It is the swagger of the professional athlete, the rock and rap star, the pictures of the privileged enjoying privilege on television, in the movies, in music videos.

This is not to excuse the Littleton killers. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are the ones who pulled the triggers, are the ones who left 13 people and themselves dead at Columbine High School. They bear the ultimate responsibility.

But there is no doubt in my mind that we helped create the killers that Klebold and Harris were to become.

Not because they listened to Rammstein or KMFDM, or because they played Doom or watched the films of Quentin Tarantino. That would be too easy.

This violent streak is part of our American mythology, is central to the legend we’ve created about our westward expansion, our growth as a superpower. We believe we always should meet might with might, strength with strength and violence with violence.

John Wayne’s strong, silent avenger, Clint Eastwood’s no-name gunslinger, Dirty Harry, Rambo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme are the products of our dysfunctional imaginations. So are hard-core speed metal and gansta rap, video games and the panoply of violent entertainments proliferating through our economy. They are not the genesis of our violent culture. They do not create the violence in which our society wallows. They are a reflection of the depth to which violence has become a part of us.

And when you add easy access to firepower, an ability to buy guns — not just handguns, but assault rifles and all manner of weapons — on the black market or at gun shows, then conflagration almost seems inevitable.

Anywhere.

Which is why it is so scary.

Our best hope is not to impose restrictions on films and music, to scale back the First Amendment or deny artistic or press freedoms. That will do little to stem the violence.

Our best hope is to impose restrictions on the manufacture and distribution of guns, to stop the open sale of fire power at gun shows, to limit the kinds of guns companies can produce, to limit the possibility that weapons can get into the hands of teens like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.

In the United States, a lone gunman opens fire in a school, killing 26, plus himself (and his mother before he left home). In China, a mentally deranged man attacks a school with a knife. There were 22 injured, but no deaths.

I’m justing saying.

As the nation tries to make some sense of the senseless death of 28 people in Connecticut — 20 of them elementary school children — one thing seems clear to me: easy access to guns is at least partially to blame.

Adam Lanza carried two handguns and an assault rifle into the school. They were legally registered, and opened fire. It was quick and efficient and deadly.

The scene, as described by The New York Times:

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

Hundreds of terrified parents arrived as their sobbing children were led out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in a wooded corner of Newtown, Conn. By then, all of the victims had been shot and most were dead, and the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, had committed suicide. The children killed were said to be 5 to 10 years old.

He entered the school with some serious firepower:

Law enforcement officials said the weapons used by the gunman were a Sig Sauer and a Glock, both handguns. The police also found a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine.

The shooting, which comes on the heals of another mass shooting in Oregon earlier in the week, is the second deadliest in the United States. It should be a wake-up call to those who refuse to view guns as a main reason that gun violence is so bloody.

Lanza, who apparently had serious mental health problems, is solely to blame — he hatched his plan, marched himself to the school and pulled the triggers. But what if he did not have access to such powerful weapons. What if — to engage in a thought experiment — he had access only to a baseball bat or knife? Can we truly say that yesterday’s tragedy would have been as deadly?

Some will say — and have, this is not a straw man argument — that what happened yesterday could have been prevented or at least tempered had someone else in the school been carrying a gun. This is absurd. Lanza was heavily armed and on a suicide mission; it’s possible our theoretical gun-toting staffer might have gotten off a kill shot to prevent what happened, but more likely the staffer would have been gunned down quickly and mercilessly. A single police officer on site might have helped, but again not likely. The only way for the arm-everyone logic to work would be to have an armed cadre of trained officers on site at all times — something our taxpaying public would never go for.

We still do not know the specifics on how the guns were purchased — as I said, they were legally registered — or why Lanza’s mother felt it necessary to possess a semi-automatic rifle and two automatic pistols that, when taken together, could unleash such a barrage of death in so short a time. Personally, I’m having great difficulty understanding why anyone would need such firepower.

Melissa Harris-Perry, a columnist for The Nation and host of the Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, put it rather plainly yesterday on Now with Alex Wagner.

What I would caution–and I think it’s part of the lesson we learn as parents, and that we also have to learn as a country, vis-á-vis our children–is that we cannot make them safe at all times. And so we have to be careful about the reaction being, ‘Let’s build a moat, and a wall, and a metal detector around our whole worlds.’ We can, however, change the structural realities in which they exist that make them safer because there would be fewer available guns… we can’t exclusively lead with our hearts. We must also lead with our heads as we start thinking about reasonable reactions to this.

Serious and reasonable changes to the “structural realities” must include a re-evaluation of the national gun culture. Despite what the NRA says, guns do kill people.

Michigan’s state Legislature has approved a measure designed to weaken the state’s unions.

As reported in the Detroit News, a Republican-backed bill that would make Michigan the 24th right-to-work state in the country. The legislation — which is expected to be signed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder — would end the requirement that employees
join unions in their workplace or “pay fees comparable to union dues to be employed.”

Supporters have argued that the legislation would expand worker freedom, but the legislation is likely to have the opposite effect, undercutting what is left of union power and lessening unions’ ability to negotiate for workers.

The bill essentially would allow workers to forego joining — and funding –unions in their workplace, but would still allow them to enjoy whatever benefits the union might be able to win at the bargaining table. Essentially, this would mean that two people on the same assembly line would earn the same wages and get the same pension and health benefits, but only the union member would be contributing to the organization that makes those benefits possible.

Despite the rhetoric, workers are not the winners here. They’re the losers. Big business and the Republican Party — they’re the real winners.