Gun Regulation, Cho Seung-Hui, Warning Signs, and Grief Time
April 21st, 2007 | by Jersey McJones |I know some people are saying, “It’s too soon to talk about the implications of the VT shooting!,” and I know the Dems in congress are not going to try to take political advantage from the shooting to push for more stringent gun regulations in the middle of an election cycle, but I am going to talk about it anyway. In my humble opinion, the memory of those who died deserves it - and sooner than later. In our modern attention-deficient culture, if we wait too long, we’ll forget why this conversation is so important.
It has come to light that one of the guns Cho used in the massacre was purchased in February from an online gun purveyor, “thegunsource.com.” The ATF tracked the source and contacted the store owner, Eric Thompson. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune…
“It quite possibly is the worst nightmare,” Thompson said. “We follow all laws and regulations to make certain these things don’t happen. It’s unfortunate a madman like that can do something like this.”
Now, Thompson sounds like a decent guy; an American business owner who’s “follow(ing) all laws and regulations…,” and who now must be living in his “worst nightmare.” So, how could this happen? Could it be that “all” the “laws and regulations” aren’t enough? Ya’ think?
Thompson’s company transferred the gun to a Virginia pawnbroker who ostensibly ran the required background checks for Cho to receive the weapon, yet, from the Pierce County Herald…
“…the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has since learned that a judge in 2005 found that Cho posed an imminent danger to himself because of a mental illness. He had psychiatric treatment, but was not committed.”
So much for modern psychiatric treatment.
How could it be that a judge decided that Cho was an “imminent danger to himself” and not have had him committed? How could it be that a judge decided that Cho was an “imminent danger to himself” and yet Cho could pass a background check for an arms purchase? How could it be that a judge decided that Cho was an “imminent danger to himself” and yet Virginia Tech - a fine institution of higher learning - would let this guy in? Ya’ wonder?
From WVEC.COM…
“Virginia authorities have submitted the names of more than 80,000 people with legally certified mental health problems to the FBI to ensure they don’t buy guns. That’s more than any state in the country.
Unfortunately, the name of Seung-Hui Cho was not among them.
…Virginia State Police, which feeds the names to the FBI, never received Cho’s name because Virginia uses its own, more narrow standard for judging whether an individual’s mental illness merits a prohibition on gun purchases.”
80,000 channels and nothing on… There’s a lot of screwballs out there, and apparently they like Virginia.
The second gun was purchased in March. From the Etownian…
“The semiautomatic Glock, along with a 15-round magazine and 50 rounds of ammunition were purchased for $571 at Roanoke Firearms, a gun shop about 25 miles away from the Virginia Tech campus in Roanoke, Va., March 13.
…
When Cho purchased the handguns, he presented three forms of identification to John Markell, the store’s owner, and a state background check was run to ensure that he had no convictions on his record.
…
According to Time magazine, Cho was briefly hospitalized at St. Albans psychiatric hospital in Radford, Va., in December 2005, to treat possible mental illness. However, neither the campus police’s nor St. Alban’s records were referenced as a part of the background check.”
Campus Police? From WAPO…
“The (Virginia Tech Police) had investigated Cho for bothering two female classmates in 2005, Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said at a news conference. Cho had hinted at suicide shortly afterward and was temporarily committed, against his will, to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation.”
From WNBC…
“…With a credit card and a lie, Seung-Hui Cho was able to walk out of a pawnshop and a gun store with the handguns he later used to slaughter 32, and then kill himself. The state’s background check failed to turn up his history of mental illness in each of the two sales.
Other guns sold in Virginia have surfaced in significant numbers of crimes in New York and throughout the Northeast corridor — Washington, Philadelphia, New York — inspiring Mayor Michael Bloomberg to become a crusader against gun trafficking.
Virginia is a key source for illegal guns along the East Coast, as well as a target of gun control activists for lax enforcement of its laws, though they’re not the nation’s loosest. Bloomberg has taken on the issue and built a coalition with more than 200 mayors.
…In New York, four of five guns came from out of state. The single largest source for those out-of-state guns? Virginia (with Florida, North Carolina and Georgia right behind).
…The regulations broke down because Cho’s name was never sent to either state or federal databases as a prohibited buyer, despite a 2005 ruling by a special justice that found that his mental illness made him a danger to himself.
That ruling should have prohibited him from buying a gun anywhere in the country, according to federal rules that followed a 1968 law, according to the Brady Center.
…To get the guns, Cho had to say whether he had ever been found “mentally defective.”
(emphasis mine)
Say? SAY??? WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!
There are some very serious questions we need to be asking of ourselves. How could it be that a suicidal sociopath can legally buy a gun in America? How could it be that state, federal, and educational institutions can let a kid like Cho slip through the cracks? Just how many loonies like Cho are running around out there? What can we do about all this? NOW IS THE TIME TO ASK.
JMJ
10 Responses to “Gun Regulation, Cho Seung-Hui, Warning Signs, and Grief Time”
By Lazy Iguana on Apr 22, 2007 | Reply
The background checks do need to be overhauled. The fact that court found the guy to be a danger should have gone on some record. But in VA the checks are probably very close to the ones in FL - they check only for felony arrests / convictions, and current warrants. That is it. It is a very quick process. The form you fill out asks if you are currently on drugs, if you are getting mental treatment, if you have ever been convicted of treason, and so on. If you mess up and check a yes box then you can get another form and try again.
Really, I do not know what the big deal is to have more extensive background checks. The gun buyer can pay for his/her own check so there is no tax burden placed on anyone other than the gun buyers. And once you buy a gun, there needs to be some sort of National registry that indicates the guns you have. This way if at any point in the future you hear your neighbors dog talking to you, or become a felon, the authorities will know you have guns and can remove them from you. ALL private sales should follow the online gun store model and require a licensed dealer in your State to complete the sale. Just like you have to go to the tag agency to sell someone your old car. If I sell you a gun, then we should both have to go to a gun store and complete the sale there. The gun dealer could charge a modest amount for their time.
By the way, the ONLY way I would sell a gun is by going to a dealer. When I sell something like a gun, I want a paper trail that indicates it was sold. I do not want the cops knocking at my door asking about the armed robbery of the 7-11 down the street. Using a dealer as a middle man would protect me from whatever happens beyond that point. The buyer would have to do the BG check and wait the three days and so on.
These measures would still allow people that follow the law to have guns. Notice how nothing there limits type or number of weapons you can have.
By Jersey McJones on Apr 22, 2007 | Reply
Great points, LI. It really comes down to this - no right is absolute. There are limits on all rights. You have the right to “free speech,” but that does not include yelling “fire” in a crowed theater. You have the right of “religious expression,” but that does not include human sacrifices. You have the right of a “free press,” but that does not include the right to libel. It goes on and on. The asshole gun nuts in this country have to grow up and relaize that the current limits on the right to “bare arms” are just not enough.
JMJ
By Liberal Jarhead on Apr 22, 2007 | Reply
JMJ,
I’ve bought guns from The Gun Source and other online dealers. No difference in safeguards or accountability than from a local dealer; as you noted, the online dealer transfers the gun to a local seller, who then runs the same background check as if they were selling it.
If Cho was involuntarily hospitalized, he was committed - that fits the definition. If the state of Virginia didn’t submit his name to the feds, that’s where the safeguards broke down. So to fix that, Virginia needs to overhaul the process by which it takes the names of everyone who is declared a threat to self or others and passes them on. That referral to the feds needs to be an automatic, immediate, and integral part of what the court does.
Yes, he had to say whether he had ever been found mentally defective, but the main reason that’s there is so that if someone tries to lie their way past the system, they can be charged with making a false official statement when they get caught and prosecuted, rather than just getting turned down with no penalty for the attempt.
As I’ve written elsewhere over the last few days, I think we should go further and require shooter’s licenses based, like driver’s licenses, on proven competence as well as an absence of documented threat to public safety, either criminal or psychiatric, and similar laws against and penalties for shooting while intoxicated.
LI, I agree strongly about all sales going through a dealer for the record. But as long as we end up with administrations like this one in power, I vehemently disagree with the idea of a handy database telling them exactly who has what guns and therefore whose doors to knock on and what to look for if they decide to follow through on Bush’s crack (12/18/2002) about a dictatorship being the way to go as long as he gets to be the dictator. I absolutely do not trust people like Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Nixon, John Mitchell, Ed Meese, J. Edgar Hoover, etc. with that kind of information. One of the reasons the Founders included the Second Amendment was not only to enable the citizen militias of that day to help defend against foreign enemies, but also because they were too familiar with situations where people had to protect themselves against homegrown tyranny.
JMJ, I hope this doesn’t make me one of the asshole gun nuts?
By Lazy Iguana on Apr 23, 2007 | Reply
Liberal - I hear you there but honestly, nobody is going to “protect us from tyranny” with a 9mm pistol. Not when the federal government can send attack aircraft and tanks in.
The point is that if the government wanted to snatch power, they could. Would people really do anything about it? I have my doubts. As long as they could still use their money to buy large screen televisions and ipods and German sports cars - the average American will not care. shit the average American does not even bother to vote. This is the sad truth. This is why Bush has been able to pull off the crap he has pulled off. People just sat back and did nothing. The few that did were easy to write off. The majority of people just wanted to watch football on their hi-def LCD TV, not think.
A national gun database would allow courts to know if someone they are sending into treatment has a gun. I may buy a gun today legally (I already own a few by the way) and next year start to hear voices in my head. By the time the courts put my on the “can not buy” list it is too late.
It may not be the best solution - I admit that - but I do think there needs to be some method in place to allow for legitimate law enforcement use to remove guns from people legally deemed to be a danger to others.
By Liberal Jarhead on Apr 23, 2007 | Reply
LI,
Individuals with small arms could indeed make quite a difference - that’s a lot of what’s going on right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of the paradigm of 4th generation warfare is to render the massive firepower useless by making yourself as hard to find as possible or by making yourself a target against which those weapons can’t be used - that’s why the people our troops are fighting are operating mostly in the cities in Iraq and in the mountains in Afghanistan. It turns it into a war that can only be fought effectively by elite infantry and special forces - Army airborne, mountain troops and Rangers, Marine infantry, Navy Seals, Delta Force. I’m not fool enough to think that typical civilian gun owners would stand a chance against those guys (although there are a lot of old Marines and Army types like me around.) But there’s an awful lot of urban, mountainous, and otherwise 4GW-suitable ground in this country, more than could be covered - the government just doesn’t have enough of those guys even for the foreign messes they’ve gotten into, let alone trying to enforce martial law at home (and a lot of the troops would think hard about their oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and some would change sides.)
I see what you’re saying about the national gun database serving to get guns out of the hands of people who already have them before they are identified as dangerous - I don’t have another answer right now, but I still think trusting a government with this one’s history of abusing every power it has with that much power would be an irreversible mistake. We have to find another way.
Perhaps if somehow the database could be administered by a non-domestic entity, beyond the administration’s reach or jurisdiction, that was funded by gun owners? Then it could respond to queries in cases where the need was demonstrated, but would not be subject to DOJ fishing expeditions. Sounds goofy, but maybe something like that would do it. Or something else. Just don’t give that power to the same people who have declared that they can call anyone they wish an enemy combatant and disappear them; who have illegally abused the already too-broad powers given them by the Patriot Act and have declared that they will not obey laws forbidding them from reading our mail without a warrant; that have said that our Constitutional rights are really privileges and the Geneva Conventions are quaint and outdated. We cannot trust these people to do anything except everything they think they can get away with.
By Jersey McJones on Apr 23, 2007 | Reply
LJ,
“I’ve bought guns from The Gun Source…”
Small world!
“…Virginia needs to overhaul the process by which it takes the names of everyone who is declared a threat to self or others and passes them on. That referral to the feds needs to be an automatic, immediate, and integral part of what the court does.”
You said it! Right on!
“Yes, he had to say whether he had ever been found mentally defective, but the main reason that’s there is so that if someone tries to lie their way past the system, they can be charged with making a false official statement when they get caught and prosecuted, rather than just getting turned down with no penalty for the attempt.”
Good point - and vital to the prior one! I hadn’t even thought of that. Of course, the Virginia rules make the point moot.
I agree with the rest of your comment except thone about the database. I don’t think we should be picking and choosing which adminstration gets a database, though we could restrict how it’s used. Perhaps something like that would assuage you’re understandable concern. But we need that database, and we need to use it, if we are ever going to crack down on illegal sales of domestically produced and/or sold guns.
“JMJ, I hope this doesn’t make me one of the asshole gun nuts?”
Gun nut, maybe - asshole, no.
JMJ
By Lazy Iguana on Apr 24, 2007 | Reply
LJ - You could have a point there, with the 4GW stuff and all. But look at what has already taken place right under the nose of the NRA and all the “protectors of freedom”. EVERYTHING Bush has done is just fine and good. Secret courts? NO PROBLEM! Violation of every Amendment except the 2nd? NO PROBLEM!
Cause Bush gave us back high capacity magazines and AK-47s.
I really think that the powers that are could take over without having to fire a shot. The general public just does not care about anything beyond their short term pleasure.
It used to be “give me liberty or give me death” - now it is “Give me my I-Pod or else I will complain loudly”.
I think we are on the same page here
By Liberal Jarhead on Apr 25, 2007 | Reply
JMJ,
As my stepdad always used to say… I accept the nomination.
LI,
Yeah, I’m perplexed by most people’s myopia about anything beyond the comforts and distractions of the moment. The thing that gives me hope there is that there have been other times in the past when people decided they could walk over the American people because we were soft, selfish, complacent, and decadent, but when they tried, that self-absorbed society woke up and crushed them with a degree of resolve and thoroughness they had never imagined possible - the Axis powers made that mistake in World War II, and you could make a case that the Confederate states made that mistake about the North in the Civil War. It takes a lot to get the attention of this people, way too much sometimes, but once someone gets us angry they get pulverized no matter how long it takes or how much it costs in lives and money. I believe and hope that would happen in the event of a de facto coup d’etat.
The NRA is pretty unhappy with the Bushies, actually, because they (NRA) are pretty touchy about infringements on privacy and freedoms in general and they’ve seen too many high-handed actions by the DOJ under this administration affecting gun ownership. The NRA feels that the Bush administration has not been supportive enough.
I’ve often had the thought that it’s kind of funny how so many people on the left and the right unconsciously mirror each other. Each group will ferociously defend privacy and freedom in some matters and will equally fiercely demand that the government exert tighter controls in other areas. The only difference is which issues are which in their eyes. I wish there were more people who wanted the government to do less restricting and controlling of individuals overall, do more to provide a system wherein we collectively care for one another’s wellbeing, and treated corporations as existing to serve people rather than the other way around.
By Pagoda Troop on May 1, 2007 | Reply
Jarhead, advocating “gun control” of any sort takes you out of the crazy gun nut types.
On the other hand, 4GW doesn’t require firearms. The IEDs in Iraq show that. Hell, the Viet Cong were using bamboo (punji sticks) to bring down US armour in Viet Nam.
On the other hand, would an untrained Civvy stop a crazed gunman? Probably not, and lord knows what trouble might happen. I know if I were called in to deal with a gunman and I saw anyone with a weapon who was not in Uniform, they are a target. I will assume hostile until proven otherwise.
On the other hand, CS gas and pepper spray are available. Both can be used to control a hostile without resorting to lethal force.
By the way, tyranny at the time of the revolution was represented by the standing army. To quote James Madison “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” the solution “As the greatest danger is that of disunion of the states, it is necessary to guard against it by sufficient powers to the common government; and as the greatest danger to liberty is from large standing armies, it is best to prevent them by an effectual provision for a good militia.”
Of course, the militia needs to be under civilian control, not the groups the gun nuts call militias.
Their claims are roughly like Bill Clinton claiming to be a Viet Nam vet because he was subject to the draft (which the unorganised militia is).
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Book V, Ch. 1, contains an extended account of the Militia. It is there said: “Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty.” “In a militia, the character of the labourer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character; and in this distinction seems to consist the essential difference between those two different species of military force.”
So, you and I, as members of the professional military are the tools of tyrants!
Bet you never knew or would have guessed that!
In short, The Second Amendment links the right to keep and bear arms with the civic obligation to participate in a well-regulated militia (one set up under Article 1, Section 8). It has nothing to do with the use of firearms for self-defense, hunting or target shooting. Recognizing that the Second Amendment does not address these issues does not mean that Americans have no right to engage in all of those activities.
By Pagoda Troop on May 1, 2007 | Reply
Should have read Article 1, Section eight of the constitution.
HTF did that bloody smiley face get in there?