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March 2018
Could the Parkland massacre have been averted? Upon visiting the facts and circumstances leading up to the killings it sure looks like it could have. Since 2010 records show that authorities were called at least 45 times for reasons related to the killer, Nikolas Cruz, or his brother. Cruz reportedly posted a video on YouTube last year, under his own name, in which he stated that he wished to be “a professional school shooter”. This video was reported to the FBI, but inexplicably the agency couldn’t determine an identity. In 2016 a neighbor reported to the sheriffs office of an Instagram post in which Cruz expressed that “he planned to shoot up the school”. Additionally, in January of this year, a woman close to Cruz called the FBI informing them that Cruz had an arsenal of knives and guns and was “going to explode”, and she feared him “getting into a school and just shooting the place up”. Unbelievably, the FBI has admitted that they took no action on this tip, and closed the case in an hour.
No one would dispute that Nikolas Cruz never should have been able to attain any kind of firearm. However, this tragedy was not a result of lack of gun laws, but rather a lack of one missed opportunity after another by law enforcement. If the authorities involved had acted upon the glaring evidence presented to them the gun laws in place should have prevented Cruz from legally obtaining any firearms.
Understandably, when a tragedy occurs people look for answers to prevent a reoccurrence. Making certain types of firearms illegal is not the answer. According to a 2016 study by the University of Pittsburgh, which analyzed the origins of firearms recovered by police in 2008 from crime scenes in Pittsburgh, illegal gun ownership accounted for the vast majority, 79%, of all of the gun crimes. Proving the point that criminals do not care about laws, and can find their way around them.
Many on the left cite the buyback and gun bans in Australia and Great Britain as something the United States should replicate. A study by Leah Libresco and her colleagues at the left-leaning FiveThirtyEight website, published by the Washington Post in 2017, found that neither Australia nor Great Britain experienced drops in mass shooting or other gun related crime that could be attributed to the gun buybacks or ban. Librseco et al. analyzed the 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the U.S. In an article entitled “ I used to think Gun Control was the Answer. My Research told me otherwise”. The study found that broad gun control restrictions would make little difference in preventing gun violence. She concluded that “the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence”.
It has been proposed by many that there should be a ban on “assault weapons”. This sounds reasonable…if you have little understanding of what this classification means. “Assault weapon” is an invented classification that has no technical meaning. Assault weapons are not military-style machine guns, which they are often conflated with, which are banned. An assault weapon is actually any semi –automatic gun (you must pull the trigger each time to dislodge a bullet) with certain cosmetic features in common with fully automatic military-style weapons. According to an independent study commissioned by the National Institute of Justice in 2004, the firearms that an assault weapon ban would outlaw were used in only 2% of gun crimes.
Assault weapons actually were banned from 1994-2004. There was a sunset provision, and in 2004 the legislation was not renewed. Illustrating the ineffectiveness of the legislation five years into the ban, in 1999, the horrific Columbine High school massacre occurred, as well as two other mass shootings. Furthermore, the 2004 Institute of Justice report concluded that “Should it be renewed, the bans effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWS (assault weapons) were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban”. ProPublica reported in 2014 that gun violence experts agree that the ten- year assault weapon ban was not effective. According to Philip Cook and Kristin Foss, Duke University public policy experts. In a quote from their book, “the Gun Debate: What everyone needs to know”, “there is no compelling evidence that it saved lives”.
In 2016 there were 35,000 gun-related deaths in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). More than 2/3 of these deaths were from suicide. Less than 2% came from mass shootings. Interestingly, 98.4% of the mass shooting occurred in gun-free zones. According to FBI data out of the total of 11,961 people who were murdered in 2014, only 248 were killed with any kind of rifle. In comparison, 1,567 were killed with a knife.
After a shooter killed 26 people at a church in Texas last year it was learned that the Air Force never reported his prior criminal convictions to the NICS – the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System. If they had he would have been prevented from legally obtaining firearms. Interestingly, the NRA member hero who helped stop this deadly rampage, Stephen Willeford, did so with an “assault weapon”, an Ar-15. In an interview on CRTV’s “Louder with Crowder” he stated that, “If I had run out of the house with a pistol and faced a bullet proof vest and Kevlar and helmets, it might have been futile.”
While banning so-called assault weapons would be meaningless legislation, enacted just for the sake of “doing something”, other proposals under consideration have some merit. In December the house passed the Fix NICS Act of 2017. It has bipartisan support, and hopefully it will move forward in the senate. If enacted the Fix NICS Act would incentivize federal and state agencies to report criminal records to the National Criminal Background Check System. This legislation should help to act as a roadblock to prevent a convicted criminal from ever legally obtaining firearms.
According to a study in the January 2017 edition of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, based on a sample of 1,613 gun owners, 22% obtained their firearm without a background check. When purchases between friends and family are excluded the number drops to 15%. Some internet sellers (only 3% of gun owners according to a December 2017 Quinnipiac poll said they obtained a gun from an on-line seller), and private sellers, are not required to be licensed in some states, and are not required by federal law to run a background check. This allows a small minority of gun purchases to legally transpire without a background check. This is often referred to as the “gun-show loophole”, but it applies more broadly to unlicensed sellers wherever the transaction occurs. A 2013 proposal co-sponsored by Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), the Manchin-Toomey Amendment would close this loophole, leaving the exemption for friends and family. This legislation does not have much bipartisan support and failed to pass in the senate five years ago, even four Democrats voted against its passage, but, while not a panacea, it is certainly a proposal worth revisiting.
To help prevent another tragic shooting more protection to the students in our schools should be provided. According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, from the 1950’s to the present 98.4% of mass shootings have occurred in gun-free zones. Armed guards, and in some cases, willing and properly trained armed teachers could prevent or mitigate another school tragedy such as the one in Parkland.
Cultural issues, such as the break- down of the family unit, most certainly play a role in criminal behavior and lethal gun crimes, as does mental health issues in self-inflicted gun- shots. Unfortunately, there is no panacea Washington action that can legislate away these societal ills. But, at the local level, programs to identify at-risk youth, and depressed men could also help to mitigate the gun violence in our country.
