Is There a Right to Life? And I'm Not Talking About Abortion

Guns and Mental Illness

Editorial Page New York Times

Joe Nocera 

It is difficult to read stories about Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who went on a murderous spree in Isla Vista, Calif., last month, without feeling some empathy for his parents.

We know that his mother, alarmed by some of his misogynistic YouTube videos, made a call that resulted in the police visiting Rodger. The headline from that meeting was that Rodger, seemingly calm and collected, easily deflected the police’s attention. But there was surely a subtext: How worried — how desperate, really — must a mother be to believe the police should be called on her own son?

We also learned that on the day of his murderous rampage, his mother, having read the first few lines of his “manifesto,” had phoned his father, from whom she was divorced. In separate cars, they raced from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara hoping to stop what they feared was about to happen.

And then, on Monday, in a remarkably detailed article in The New York Times, we learned the rest of it. How Rodger was clearly a troubled soul before he even turned 8 years old. How his parents’ concern about his mental health was like a “shadow that hung over this Los Angeles family nearly every day of Elliot’s life.”

Constantly bullied and unable to fit in, he went through three high schools. In college, he tried to throw a girl off a ledge at a party — and was beaten up. (“I’m going to kill them,” he said to a neighbor afterward.) He finally retreated to some Internet sites that “drew sexually frustrated young men,” according to The Times.

Throughout, said one person who knew Rodger, “his mom did everything she could to help Elliot.” But what his parents never did was the one thing that might have prevented him from buying a gun: have him committed to a psychiatric facility. California’s tough gun laws notwithstanding, a background check would have caught him only if he had had in-patient mental health treatment, made a serious threat to an identifiable victim in the presence of a therapist, or had a criminal record. He had none of the above.

Should his parents have taken more steps to have him treated? Could they have? It is awfully hard to say, even in retrospect. On the one hand, there were plainly people who knew him who feared that he might someday harm others. On the other hand, those people weren’t psychiatrists. He was a loner, a misfit, whose parents were more fearful of how the world would treat their son than how their son would treat the world. And his mother, after all, did reach out for help, and the police responded and decided they had no cause to arrest him or even search his room, where his guns were hidden.

Once again, a mass killing has triggered calls for doing something to keep guns away from the mentally ill. And, once again, the realities of the situation convey how difficult a task that is. There are, after all, plenty of young, male, alienated loners — the now-standard description of mass shooters — but very few of them become killers.

And you can’t go around committing them all because a tiny handful might turn out to be killers. Indeed, the law is very clear on this point. In 1975,the Supreme Court ruled that nondangerous mentally ill people can’t be confined against their will if they can function without confinement. “In California, the bar is very high for people like Elliot,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who founded the Treatment Advocacy Center. In a sense, California’s commitment to freedom for the mentally ill conflicts with its background-check law.

Torrey believes that the country should involuntarily commit more mentally ill people, not only because they can sometimes commit acts of violence but because there are far more people who can’t function in the world than the mental health community likes to acknowledge.

In this, however, he is an outlier. The mainstream sentiment among mental health professionals is that there is no going back to the bad-old days when people who were capable of living on their own were locked up for years in mental hospitals. The truth is, the kind of symptoms Elliot Rodger showed were unlikely to get him confined in any case. And without a history of confinement, he had every legal right to buy a gun.

You read the stories about Elliot Rodger and it is easy to think: If this guy, with all his obvious problems, can slip through the cracks, then what hope is there of ever stopping mass shootings?

But, of course, there is another way of thinking about this. Instead of focusing on making it harder for the mentally ill to get guns, maybe we should be making it harder to get guns, period. Something to consider before the next mass shooting.

What Country Am I Living In?

Above image was taken from Google Images, but appeared in the December, 2013 issue of Guns & Ammo.

Hard to know how many people read about this in the paper, or heard about it on the news, but I was appalled when I read this story.  I understand that the magazine Guns & Ammo is owned by InterMedia Outdoors and they have control over what's published in their publications.  But firing employees like Dick Metcalf and Jim Bequette because of suggesting that there may be some common ground for gun advocates and gun control proponents is unconscionable.  Is this the old Russia where no dissident speech can be tolerated?

Dick Metcalf is an example to all Americans.  Stand up for what you believe.  Put your job on the line when you are faced with an issue so important that, literally, lives are at stake.  Hey!  Maybe elect Dick Metcalf to Congress!

Here's Joe Nocera's blog post about the Guns & Ammo-gate.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

When a Gun Advocate Dissents

By JOE NOCERA

Published: November 8, 2013 in NY Times

It’s not as if Dick Metcalf was some kind of gun control fanatic.

On the contrary, he’s a gun guy through and through, such an unyielding defender of the Second Amendment that last year he led the charge to push through a law giving the residents of Pike County, Ill., where he lives, the right to carry concealed guns without a permit. He called the practice “constitutional carry” rather than “concealed carry.”

In the early 1980s, he and a handful of friends started a successful gun club, called the Pike Adams Sportsmen’s Alliance, which is located on Metcalf’s farm in Barry, Ill. A few years later, he played an important role in lobbying for the federal Firearm Owners Protection Act, which loosened many of the gun restrictions that had become law after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. A friend of his told me that Metcalf had even written some of the language in the bill.

Mostly, though, Metcalf, 67, was known as a writer for magazines owned by InterMedia Outdoors, a publisher of gun periodicals that include the industry bible, Guns & Ammo. He did videos on subjects like “Guns for Family Home Defense” and wrote articles with headlines like“Smith & Wesson’s 12 Most Important Guns.”

It is perfectly understandable, then, that the gun world might be a little taken aback by Metcalf’s opinion piece in the December issue of Guns & Ammo calling for some modest gun regulation. “I firmly believe that all U.S. citizens have a right to keep and bear arms,” he wrote, “but I do not believe that they have a right to use them irresponsibly.” The article went on to call for mandatory training for gun owners. That’s all. Such limited regulation, he argued, did not constitute an infringement on anyone’s constitutional rights.

When people like me read an article like that, it seems momentarily possible that gun advocates and gun control advocates might be able to find some common ground. Much in the way that many gun control activists have come to accept the legitimacy of the Second Amendment — something that hasn’t always been the case — here was a man on the other side of the divide saying that some sensible regulation didn’t necessarily lead down a “slippery slope” to confiscation. If we are ever to have a sane gun policy, we desperately need people from both camps to meet somewhere in the middle.

But when people like me see the reaction from gun advocates to Metcalf’s tame proposal, it all seems hopeless again. Robert Farago, who maintains a blog called The Truth About Guns, started the ball rolling by linking to — and denouncing — Metcalf’s “diatribe.” He went on to describe the article as a “bone-headed, uninformed, patently obvious misinterpretation of the Second Amendment.” Other bloggers piled on. On the Guns & Ammo Facebook page, subscribers demanded Metcalf’s head, even as they canceled their subscriptions.

Finally, according to a blog post Metcalf wrote, two major gun manufacturers told InterMedia Outdoors that they would pull all their advertising if something wasn’t done. That’s all it took. Within 24 hours, Metcalf was permanently banned from the company’s publications. And the longtime editor of Guns & Ammo, Jim Bequette, who was planning to retire at the end of the year, was pushed out as well.

Before departing, however, Bequette wrote a groveling apology, which ran on the magazine’s website. He described his decision to publish Metcalf’s article as “a mistake” and took pains to remind readers that Guns & Ammo had always been the hardest of hard-liners. “It is no accident that when others in the gun culture counseled compromise in the past, hard-core thinkers...found a place and a voice in these pages,” he wrote. With that, capitulation was complete.

If you want to understand why so few gun owners are willing to stand up to the National Rifle Association, even though the majority disagree with the N.R.A.’s most extreme positions, here was a vivid example. Straying from the party line leads to vilification and condemnation that would give anybody pause.

My guess is that Dick Metcalf always knew what he was in for — all the more reason writing his article took guts. In the aftermath, he was the only one who could still hold his head up high. On a blog called The Outdoor Wire, he wrote a lengthy response to his critics. He didn’t back down one iota. Describing himself as “disappointed” at the reaction to his article, he added, “If a respected editor can be forced to resign and a controversial writer’s voice be shut down by a one-sided social-media and Internet outcry, virtually overnight, simply because they dared to open a discussion or ask questions about a politically sensitive issue...then I fear for the future of our industry, and for our Cause.”

Maybe there’s hope yet.

Weekend Gun Report - Did Your State Escape?

SEPTEMBER 23, 2013, 10:30 AM

Weekend Gun Report: September 20-22, 2013

What will Wayne LaPierre will say after each mass shooting, and how long will he wait to say it? It’s a question that’s turned into something of a media parlor game. On Sunday, LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, went on “Meet the Press” and blamed last Monday’s shooting at the Washington Navy Yard not on the ease with which someone so obviously mentally ill couldlegally purchase guns, but on a lack of security at the shooting site.

“How could anybody look at what happened this week and say there was enough security there?” he said. “In a post-9/11 world, a naval base within miles from Congress and the White House” was left “completely unprotected.”

So, of course, we need more good guys with guns.

“All these brave men and women that are trained in firearms, that signed up to serve in the military, they’re largely disarmed on our military bases,” he said. “When the good guys with guns got there, it stopped.”

What LaPierre doesn’t mention is that even when the good guys have guns, tragedies can occur.

Here is today’s report.

—Jennifer Mascia

Friday:

A 3-year-old boy is in critical condition after he accidentally shot himself in the chest with a handgun in Horseshoe Bay, Tex., Thursday. A 5-year-old was shot in the back and wounded on the northeast side of Indianapolis, Ind., Friday night. An 8-year-old boy was shot and wounded by his 11-year-old brother when a gun the two were playing with accidentally discharged in Gary, Ind., Thursday afternoon. A young girl was shot and killed on a Pensacola, Fla., street Thursday night.

24-year-old Monique Smith was shot five times after a football game in Memphis, Tenn., Thursday night, and her ex-boyfriend, 29-year-old Vernon Walton, was arrested at the scene. A 16-year-old boy was shot and wounded while leaving his apartment building in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, N.Y., early Thursday. Jason Scott McClay was found shot and killed in aisle 14 of the Rite Aid he managed in Chester, Pa., just before closing Thursday night.

Johnny Tinsey, 36; Rubin Austin, 25; and an unidentified 29-year-old woman were killed and 10 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago, Ill., late Thursday and early Friday. 24-year-old Jimmy Chandler was shot and killed in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, Calif., Thursday evening. A man was shot several times in Bakersfield, Calif., late Thursday. Zhonton Zhavet Berry, 27, was found dead of a gunshot wound in an apartment in east Charlotte, N.C., late Thursday.

Four people were wounded in three separate shootings in Newark, N.J., Thursday night. A 26-year-old man was shot in the leg in Jacksonville, Fla., Thursday night. 58-year-old Keith Stengel was shotand killed during a robbery in Fort Myers, Fla., Thursday evening. 35-year-old Barbara Mason was shot in the arm during an attempted rape in south Fort Myers early Friday. A 38-year-old man was killed and a 27-year-old man was seriously wounded in a shooting following an argument over two women at a home in Gifford, Fla., Friday afternoon.

Rod Bradway, a police officer in Indianapolis, Ind., was shot and killed while responding to a domestic disturbance on the city’s northwest side early Friday. Miguel Angel Contreras, 26, was shot and killed on the porch of his family’s home in southeast Austin, Tex., early Friday. A man was shot in the back after a verbal altercation in Watsonville, Calif., Friday afternoon. 26-year-old Sophon Kao and 24-year-old Jerry Chim were shot and killed and two women were wounded while celebrating a birthday in Long Beach, Calif., Friday night.

A 24-year-old man was killed and two people were injured, one critically, when someone opened fire on a party with a shotgun in Bozeman, Mont., early Friday. One person arrived at a northeastPortland, Ore., hospital with a gunshot wound Friday night. One person was shot several times and critically wounded in the parking lot of a community center in the Park Hill neighborhood of Denver, Colo., Friday evening.

Three people were shot and killed in an apparent robbery at a pawn shop in Danville, Ky., Friday morning, including the store’s owners, Michael Hockensmith, 34, and his wife Angela Hockensmith, 38, and a customer, Daniel P. Smith, 60. Two men were injured in a shooting at a shopping center in Louisville, Ky., Friday evening. A woman and a man were shot and wounded during a gun battle inMiddletown, Ohio, Friday afternoon.

Three people were wounded in a shooting in Elfrida, Ariz., early Friday. One person was critically wounded in a drive-by shooting in Miami, Fla., Friday afternoon. A man was shot and wounded inYork, Pa., Friday night. Jazz Beady, 26, who shot in the head in York on Sept. 13, died Friday, a week after he sustained his injuries. A man was shot in Salem, Va., Friday night. Logan Treguier, 20, was killed in a shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo., late Friday.

Three people were wounded in a shooting in Mesa, Ariz., Friday evening. Rick Hammad, 42, was shot and killed in Grand Rapids, Mich., late Friday. A state trooper was shot and wounded by a bank robber as he made his getaway in Dutzow, Mo., Friday morning. A man was found lying in a Taco Bell parking lot in Jackson, Tenn., with gunshot wounds to both legs Friday night. 50-year-old Joseph Gales was shot and killed in Bonita Springs, Fla., Friday morning.

A restaurant manager was shot after three masked gunmen forced their way into S & S Cafeteria in Macon, Ga., Friday night. 59-year-old Susan Brown was shot and killed in Arlington, Tex., Friday evening, and her husband, 51-year-old Ricky Lynn Brown, was arrested.

Saturday:

A 7-year-old was shot in the leg when someone fired on a house in the Pleasant Grove area of Dallas, Tex., Saturday night. Four people were shot and wounded at a nightclub in Palm Springs, Fla., early Saturday. Kristofer Nuland Stafford, 23, was shot and killed in a road rage incident in Las Vegas, Nev., early Saturday. Two men were wounded in a shooting in Atlantic City, N.J., early Saturday. A man was shot and killed near a park where children were playing in Miami Gardens, Fla., Saturday evening.

Timothy Bouder, 53, was shot in the head and neck and wounded after a quarrel over a woman in northwest Carlisle, Pa., Saturday afternoon. A woman and a man were killed in a shooting at an apartment complex in Eden Prairie, Minn., Saturday morning. Adriana Bonet, 25, was killed and 24-year-old Jonathan Rosario and 19-year-old Jaton Pearson were wounded when someone opened fire near a pizza place in Springfield, Mass., early Saturday.

A man was shot in a separate incident in Springfield Saturday night. Charles Johnson, 22, was shot and killed after an argument over a necklace at an apartment complex in Tulsa, Okla., Saturday afternoon. A double shooting in Daly City, Calif., Saturday night sent two people to the hospital, one of whom is in critical condition. Adrian Anderson, 23, was shot and killed while sitting on the front porch of a home in Long Branch, N.J., Saturday morning.

A woman was killed and her brother was wounded in a drive-by shooting in Inglewood, Calif., Saturday afternoon. A shooting left a man in critical condition in Fort Wayne, Ind., Saturday night. 20-year-old Donald Bernard Lewis was shot and killed on the campus of Savannah State University in Savannah, Ga., early Saturday. Darryl Jackson, 30, was shot in the foot and Cleon Norwood, 47, wasshot in the stomach when someone opened fire at a bar in Central Islip, Long Island, N.Y., Saturday morning.

Willie Casey Jr., 47, was shot and killed in an apartment in Augusta, Ga., early Saturday. A man died in a shooting at a Dallas, Tex., nightclub early Saturday. A man was shot multiple times on the east side of San Antonio, Tex., Saturday afternoon. Three men were wounded in a shooting in the 5th Ward of Paterson, N.J., early Saturday, just three blocks from the scene of the fatal shooting of a 33-year-old man 24 hours earlier.

A 43-year-old man was shot and wounded in Port Arthur, Tex., early Saturday. A man was shot and wounded in Hazelwood, Mo., early Saturday. A 39-year-old Arizona Department of Public Safety officer was shot multiple times during a traffic stop in Payson, Ariz., Saturday night. Three people were killed in three separate shootings within the span of a few hours in Compton, Calif., Saturday night into Sunday morning.

A 22-year-old man is in critical condition following a shooting in the Crescentville neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pa., Saturday night. A man and a woman were wounded in a drug-related shooting at a motel in Richland County, S.C., Saturday. Jordan Bounsinh, 22, was shot and killed after a fight escalated outside of a Mobil Gas Station in Rockford, Ill., early Saturday. Robert Jackson, 34, was shotand killed in the Woodmere neighborhood of Baltimore, Md., early Saturday.

A 35-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman were shot during an altercation in north Houston, Tex., Saturday night. 64-year-old Joseph A. Buck was shot and killed in Cooperstown, N.Y., early Saturday, and police arrested his son, 33-year-old Michael Buck. Robert Butler, 17, was found shot to death in Tallahassee, Fla., Saturday night. A “staff shooting death” took place at the federal prison inFairton, N.J., Saturday.

Sunday:

One person was killed and at least six people were injured when a fight escalated to gunfire in the Old Town area of Wichita, Kan., early Sunday. Two men and a woman were killed and four others were wounded in a shooting at the Elks Charity Lodge in Muskegon, Mich., early Sunday. Joseph Connell, 39, and Olga Connell, 46, who were married in June, were found shot to death in a Wilmington, Del., condominium early Sunday.

33-year-old Andres Lopez was killed and a woman was injured in a shooting in Fort Myers, Fla., Sunday morning. A nightclub valet was shot and killed and a security guard was wounded in Pico Rivera, Calif., early Sunday. Two men were shot in separate incidents in southeast Washington, D.C., Saturday and Sunday. A man was injured in a shooting during a fight at a frat party near Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Mich., early Sunday.

A 28-year-old man was shot several times in the Clifton Heights neighborhood of Louisville, Ky., early Sunday. A man was shot in the stomach and wounded near the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, La., Sunday evening. A 30-year-old man who was shot in the torso in Pasadena, Calif., early Sunday is not cooperating with police. 22-year-old Palagor Jobi was shot and killed outside a bar in Burnsville, Minn., early Sunday. A 40-year-old man was shot and critically wounded in north Philadelphia, Pa., Sunday evening.

A man was shot and killed near his home in New Cassel, Long Island, N.Y., Sunday afternoon. A 16-year-old boy was shot and seriously wounded in Greensboro, N.C., early Sunday. A 21-year-old man was killed and three others were wounded in a shooting near Hyde Park in St. Louis, Mo., early Sunday. 28-year-old Jonathan Gardner died after a bullet traveled through a wall and struck him in the chest in Columbus, Ohio, Sunday afternoon.

A woman was shot in the head and killed while driving in Columbia, S.C., Sunday morning. Three people were injured in a shooting at a Columbia club early Sunday. A 20-year-old woman and her 21-year-old brother were shot by the woman’s ex-boyfriend, who was later killed by police, in the Frankford section of Philadelphia, Pa., early Sunday. A man was shot and killed by a pedestrian he hit with his car in Kansas City, Mo., early Sunday.

Derrick Ross, 20, and his brother, Adam Ross, 23, were shot in Atlantic City, N.J., Sunday afternoon. A student at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in Princess Anne, Md., was wounded in an off-campus shooting early Sunday. A man was shot and critically wounded after an altercation with his neighbor in Fort Worth, Tex., early Sunday. Two people were hospitalized after a shooting inCharlotte, N.C., Sunday morning.

A man was shot and wounded in the parking lot of the Red Door Lounge in Colorado Springs, Colo., early Sunday. A man in his late teens was shot and wounded after someone opened fire at a Detroit, Mich., liquor store Sunday afternoon. At least 24 people were shot, five of them fatally, in Chicago, Ill., since Friday.

According to Slate’s gun-death tracker, an estimated 8,434 people have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown massacre on December 14, 2012.

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Colorado Recall Doesn't Change the Law

EDITORIAL

Hard Lessons of the Colorado Recall

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: September 11, 2013

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The Colorado Legislature showed good sense when it voted in March to require universal background checks in the sale of firearms and limits on magazine clips to 15 rounds.

Related

• Colorado Lawmakers Ousted in Recall Vote Over Gun Law(September 11, 2013)

Today's Editorials

• Editorial: Diplomacy as Deterrent(September 12, 2013)

• Editorial: More Mistakes at the N.S.A. (September 12, 2013)

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For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

On Tuesday, two state senators who supported the gun control laws lost recall votes in two small districts in Colorado. Their ousters were a disgraceful low point in punitive single-issue politicking by the gun lobby.

The two lawmakers — the Senate president, John Morse, and Senator Angela Giron — are exemplary models of responsible public service. As members of a resolute Democratic statehouse majority, the two showed more political courage in facing up to the gun mayhem afflicting the nation than the Congress did in April in its shameful retreat from tightening gun laws that allow tens of thousands of deaths each year.

The recalled lawmakers knew the gun lobby would pounce on their votes, but they stood up for the badly needed laws that Congress ducked. Mr. Morse, a former police chief, helped lead the charge against the battlefield-styled weapons used in the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and in Colorado’s own carnage last year at the Aurora movie theater.

The act of the Legislature and Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, represents an important transition in Colorado, long considered a bastion of rural gun rights. Urban interests and their politicians are more willing to push for sane gun controls; the background check law was supported by 80 percent of state residents polled. The task of the recall proponents, however, was made easier by a controversial ruling against mail balloting, normally heavily relied on by state voters.

The gun lobby is congratulating itself on this vote, aiming to use the recall as the ultimate warning against politicians who might abandon timorousness in the gun control debate. In truth, the recall fight showed that something sensible and stirring could emerge among politicians, at least in Colorado, even if two worthy incumbents were sacrificed. The state’s new laws survive, and Colorado residents are safer for them.

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