In what is becoming all too familiar, another gun was fired in an American school. This time it was an AK47 in Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Gerogia. According to USA Today, the suspect is a white male in his 20’s and was taken into custody immediately. No injuries have been reported.
This incident comes as the national gun debate and outrage had died down, leaving the nation with no preventative solutions to tragedies such as Newtown. This also comes in the wake of a report from the sunlightfoundation.com which claims the following:
Of the 435 members of the new House, 205 – or 47 percent – received some money from the NRA during the last campaign. More than half have taken NRA money at some point in their career. Of the Senate’s 100 members, 42 received contributions this past cycle and exactly half have received contributions at some point in their career. All told, 88 percent of Republicans now in Congress have received a contribution from the NRA at some point in their career, as have 11 percent of Democrats.
An unexplainable dysfunction surrounding gun legislation, especially after Newtown, immediately becomes clear; it is always money. The man in custody brought an AK47 into an American school, a rational and well governed country would immediately put the plans into place to prevent such a thing. This should be treated as a national emergency, our leaders should not rest until they have a solution.
I’m not one of those “get rid of the guns” types, but there certainly has to be some middle ground between a ban on firearms and a man walking into a school with an assault rifle. Every time this happens, and Congress remains paralyzed by greed and cowardice, America suffers. The next time a child tragically dies by gunfire, we know whose hands will really be soiled.
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Please consider the following:
•The “AK47” rifle you mention is not an “assault rifle.” It is a semi-automatic rifle. Not fully automatic, and not the same as the kinds of rifles used by military and paramilitary forces across the specter of modern armed conflicts. Fully automatic rifles are extremely regulated in the United States and in many states completely banned. Furthermore, the term “assault rifle” is a political term, new to the public lexicon, and perpetuated to demonize firearms. Assault is a behavior. An individual can assault somebody. A gun cannot. No one calls a knife an assault knife or a rapist knife when a violent crime is committed using one.
•This article insinuates that nothing is being done to restrict guns. This is simply not true. Since Newton numerous states have passed the strictest gun control legislation this country has ever seen including CT, CO, HI, NY, and local municipalities. Further, states such as CA have been implementing sweeping confiscation programs; collecting thousands of firearms from citizens who registered their firearms and have been deems to be disqualified from owning by the state government. (Which is similar to what is being set up in NY).
•The NRA has a giant PAC. Just like the Brady Campaign. Just like “Mayors Against Illegal Guns. All PACs exist to do it make political endorsements, conduct campaign work, and fund candidates who are aligned with your agenda and goals. All organizations with PACs do this. Why not take the bias out of your article and talk about Brady PAC contributions to show how level the playing field actually is? The NRA has a strong history of compromising and supporting gun control legislation. For example, they supported the NFA of 1968. Many law abiding gun owners do not blindly follow the NRA and do not believe they are the end-all-be-all when it comes to second amendment civil rights.
•This article also suggests no one is doing anything to keep the children safe. In reality, politico has banned guns on school grounds. In other words, criminals who don’t care about laws and use guns to hurt people know and understand that schools are filled with unarmed easy targets. This has been scrutinized by many as being bad public policy.
•There is no middle ground between banning guns and a criminal walking into a school with a gun with the intent to kill innocent children and if there is there are already plenty of laws already on the book. There are laws against murder. However, bad people exist. Always have. Always will. Focusing on this solely a “gun issue” when it is a “criminal justice issue” will not lead you to solutions.
•Further, there is no middle ground between banning guns and a criminal walking into a school because the leadership in this country peddling gun control aren’t interested in compromise. They are interested in banning civilian firearm ownership and eliminating the basic human right to self defense.
•Look what happened in your home-state (NY) when politicians declare that a school shooting in CT prompts an emergency response. A law was passed with ZERO public input, potential violating social workers and other mental health professional’s client-patient confidentiality privileges and numerous other problems.
I am a social worker.
I am a licensed concealed carry permit holder.
I am a former owner of an AK47-type civilian semi-automatic rifle.
I have never been convicted of a crime and my guns have never “assaulted” anyone. However, I do rest assured knowing that should I ever need to defend my life or the life of my family that I have the means and training to do so, and do so effectively. (Within the parameters of my constitutional guaranteed birthright and my basic human right to self defense.)
Before I reply I want to offer to publish your post in a separate rebuttal post on SJS just as mine was. It’s detailed and contains valid viewpoints. Just because I don’t agree with all of it does not mean it is not valid. If you want to take me up on it email me: matt@socialjusticesolutions.org.
Let me take this one by one: The difference between semi-automatic and automatic in regards to this story is trivial. The semantics of the word rifle are moving away from my main point which is that Congress is doing nothing on a Federal level to combat an emerging crisis. Would this be any less dangerous or horrific if in either case? I am aware of the new legislation in NYS for it’s good and bad ( A lot of thing I do not agree with, especially the burden placed on social workers). A State by State approach will not solve this problem nationwide. Any legislator who takes a 100% stance, including those on the left who want to ban guns all together are a part of the problem. My main point with the NRA contributions is that money is dictating the decision making, not conscience. I also read an article recently that found that gun voting stance correlating nicely with the amount of firearms stores in that person’s district.
The laws I am asking for, and I am by no means an expert, are stricter background checks and a longer waiting period. I would especially like to see these checks extend into the mental health treatment of the family members who live in a home with firearms. This is in response to the Newtown shooter and the latest Michael Hill who has a long history of mental issues. I am interested in finding out where he got the gun which brings me to my next point.
The Newtown shooter got the gun from his mother who was also worried about protecting her children. Now, I said very clearly I am not against banning guns. This is what worries me based on your reasoning. From this article: http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/are-you-safer-owning-a-gun-for-home-protection-b9912440z1-207958831.html
“In a 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study, he pointed out that there is a better chance that the gun meant for protection will be used in domestic violence, suicide or to injure a child.
“Believe me when I tell you this. The victims are not the bad guys. It’s usually someone that the owner of the gun cares about,” he said. “My research showed that a gun owner was 43 times more likely to shoot and kill a family member than that he’d shoot and kill anybody else.
And there are tons of other studies that show that having a gun puts a family in more danger for having the gun then the protection it offers against home invasion. I am open to data that suggest otherwise and I am especially interested in knowing how many home invasions were thwarted due to the home owner having a gun.
Lastly, analyzing this as just a criminal problem ignores the mental illness is both cases and ignores the fact that the US locks up more of its citizens than any other nation, we are clearly very tough on crime. Given that, what we are doing in regards to criminals isn’t working as these sort of incidents appear to happen monthly now.
I want to close with by thanking you for your reply, this is the debate that should be happening in Congress. The same offer I began with, to publish your piece stands.. I am not calling for a ban on guns, I am calling for Congress to start governing in real-time with their conscience rather than with their wallet or a fixed ideological approach. Neither of the later have any place in good government.
Thanks for taking the time to dive below the surface on this issue and keeping an open mind to differing views.
My initial response to your article focused on bias that I picked up in your article. Words have meaning, and language is very important, powerful, and can be crafted to solicit a predetermined or desired response. For example, calling a rifle a “hunting rifle” sounds a lot less severe than an “AK47, military-style high-powered assault rifle.” Further, the phrase “AK47” implies that a rifle is fully automatic, which in many instances could be the line of demarcation between a rifle that is possessed legally and a rifle that is possessed illegally; which in the case of your original article could be significant. In other words, if the gentleman was a felon, and purchased his rifle on the black market, the potential proposed solution to that problem might look a lot different than if he purchased the rifle through legal means, and perhaps didn’t get flagged on the NICS background check system.
When it comes to money in politics, tying the NRA’s PAC spending with a criminal gun act and blaming them and members of congress for the blood of victims of a criminal gun act is absurd. I think something you may want to pay mind to is the fact that many members of congress believe in the constitution, which includes the second amendment, which they took an oath of office to protect. Although they may take contributions from the NRA, the majority of congress takes money from anyone who will offer it to them. Many members simply don’t want further encroachments into civil rights of Americans and it has nothing to do with money. This is a broad systemic issue that is completely separate from the gun debate, and other PAC’s like the Brady Campaign and initiatives funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg do the very same thing.
Why would you even want the federal government to take action? You ought to judge them by what they do rather than what they say. While the Obama administration and key members of the legislature are peddling a gun control/confiscation agenda, the federal government is arming to the teeth domestically with drones, armored tanks, fully automatic rifles, and billions upon billions of rounds of new and surplus ammunition and are conducting massive gun confiscation and top-off drills (which includes agencies like the IRS, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, Etc.) The government needs all these weapons for domestic use while simultaneously pushing to disarm the civilian population, under the guise of public safety. A government that has a monopoly on force creates a potentially dangerous situation which historically doesn’t end well for the masses. Moreover, we have a justice department that has intentionally allowed full- and semi-automatic rifles and grenades to fall into the hands of drug criminals, which were in turn used to kill countless innocent people, including American border patrol agents. They were caught red handed and no one got in trouble. But for some reason “Fast and Furious” is not part of the current debate, and those people killed are somehow less important than the children of Newtown.
The Newton shooter was not of age to own a firearm, was on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (which may be more to blame in mass shootings than firearms), murdered his mother to obtain firearms, and targeted small children in a government-sponsored gun free zone (where he knew nobody would have the means to resist). Disarming law abiding citizens in an effort to prevent somebody from killing them and illegally acquiring their firearms in order to commit acts of violence seems like bad public policy to me. Norway virtually banned civilian firearm ownership. But that didn’t stop Anders Behring Breivik from illegally acquiring weapons and stalking and killing 69 people… slowly… before somebody with a gun could arrive on scene and engage him.
Targeting mental health service recipients is a slippery slope. There are already laws preventing those who have been committed to a mental health institution from possessing firearms. How would you like to see this taken a step further in the future? As you surely know, in your home-state a law abiding gun owner was recently disarmed under the SAFE ACT by law enforcement for being on prescription anti-anxiety medication. Service members and veterans all over the country are being disgraced by being flagged on NICS checks for having a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis. They can man a .50 machine gun mounted to a helicopter in Iraq, but when they get home they are treated like a felon when they submit their pistol permit application; which is often denied.
I live in a part of the country where brave law enforcement officers put their lives on the line to catch gun criminals and local DA’s cut deals to put the gun criminals back on the streets with no jail time. There is a correlation between releasing those gun criminals and repeat violent attempts. So you’re spot on that our criminal justice response is not working.
When it comes to statistics, I firmly believe the statistics you provided are severely flawed. I can provide you sound research which imperially documents the societal benefits of civilian firearm ownership including sources such as Harvard University and the FBI. Further, bear in mind, for every news report that features a violent gun crime there are more than 60 incidents where a gun was used to prevent a crime, without a trigger ever being pulled or somebody getting hurt. For example, a woman is statistically less likely to have a rape attempt completed if she resists with a gun. A civilian lawfully and responsibly using guns to prevent a crime, in which no one is hurt, is not sensational or sexy and often is not covered by the media.
You and I have covered a lot of ground and laid out a lot of information. I would be happy to author something for you under my attached pseudonym or feel free to use what I have already provided. If there is one thing you take from my words, I encourage you to stay aware of the fact that a lot of money is being spent pushing a gun control agenda, and while some people want to ban guns because they genuinely care about people and don’t want them to get hurt, the endgame of the gun control agenda is not in the best interest of the American people, and has nothing to do with public safety. There are feasible, common sense, and concrete things that can be done to curtail gun violence but disarming Joe Six-Pack is not only going to divide this nation more than it already is, but it is not going to prevent further gun crime.
I had left a comment and it got deleted somehow, not sure if you read it. A piece exploring the evidence for having a gun and safety would be great for our audience who generally leans left being social workers. I could take your initial post and merge it with the second in some way if you like. Please email me: matt@socialjusticesolutions.org so we can discuss how you want it attributed ect…
Fortunately, no one was hurt, thanks to the courage and quick thinking of a clerical worker at the school who kept the gunman occupied and distracted until the Atlanta PD got there. One of my concerns when something like this occurs is that the perpetrator will be found to have a mental health history, leaving folks in the mental health system vulnerable to scapegoating. Makes it easier for the NRA to stonewall gun regulations by profiling individuals presumably mentally ill and ipso facto violent. Everybody, particularly the kids and their teachers, dodged another bullet.
Agreed Jack, and they will.
I’m not sure I can take Sherman Wisely very seriously after reading the first in that series of bullets he posted.
An AK47 is, in fact, an assault rifle. It is used by most military organizations around the world as it is a reliable weapon that rarely jams. The fact that it is semi-automatic is because the version purchased by Mr. Wisely was intentionally made to be that way. With a simple modification to the weapon, it too can be fully automatic. If you want to characterize an assault rifle by its ability to function in a burst-fire or automatic variant, then go ahead, but current military techniques, tactics, and procedures continue to support the idea that semi-automatic is the preferred method for engaging enemy forces.
Credibility aside, I think the point that Matt was trying to make was that this IS, in fact, a criminal justice issue, or at least an issue which requires legislators do something instead of continually bicker over partisan issues. Maybe if we got together and looked at the causes of these problems, we could safely navigate a compromise that doesn’t outright ban guns, but also protects people from their malevolent use.
Thanks Don, nice to have your support and expertise. I hope your doing well and staying safe….