Category: Newtown

bit.ly/VFLfwR The Ryan Lanza on Facebook is not the shooter. He’s posting, which makes him alive.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) December 14, 2012

BREAKING: There’s more than one Ryan Lanza

— Alex Bruns (@ABBruns) December 14, 2012

so aperently im getting spammed bc someone with the same name as me killed some ppl… wtf?

— Ryan Lanza (@Ryan__Lanza) December 14, 2012

In the immediate aftermath of the Newton massacre, media outlets rushed to push out the name and online identity of the alleged shooter without verifying them:

Fox News [on Friday] broadcast multiple Facebook photos of one Ryan Lanza, claiming he was the same Ryan Lanza law enforcement officials had identified as the gunman in today’s shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school. In addition, FoxNews.com posted one of the photos to its homepage above the headline, “Gunman ID’d in School Massacre.” That photo was also widely circulated by online news outlets via Twitter and posted by BuzzFeed, which noted that the Facebook profile included a check-in in Newtown (his hometown, according to the Facebook page).

As Ryan’s name and Facebook photo made the rounds, his responses on Facebook were captured via screenshots by some of his friends, then shared on Twitter to prove he was not the shooter. Then other Ryan Lanzas were confused for the one from Newtown. Now of course we know the actual shooter was Adam Lanza, Ryan’s younger brother. At the Dish, we decided to wait the weekend out before analyzing the possible details about potential motives or reasons for this massacre of innocents. Looks like restraint wasn’t the worst option. But I’ve been through these cycles before, and have some scar tissue for rushing to judgment. Matt Lewis fumes over Friday’s coverage:

[W]hen it comes time for moralizing, the media predictably assumes the availability of guns is the problem, without considering how journalists themselves might be contributing to the coarsening of our already-violent society. The entertainment-media complex promotes and glamorizes violence — for profit — in film and on TV. Meanwhile, the news media ensures that killers get the attention and fame they so desperately crave. To be sure, a transparent society demands reporting newsworthy incidents — and this definitely qualifies. But it should be done responsibly. And that is not what we have witnessed. We have instead a feeding frenzy that is all about beating the competition — not disseminating information.

Blumenthal reviews polling on it. Two important points:

First, while support for stricter gun laws has declined in the polls across several measures, Americans remain roughly evenly divided on the issue. The Pew Research Center found about equal numbers of Americans preferring to protect "the right to own guns" (46 percent) and to "control gun ownership" (47 percent). A modest increase in the second category would be enough to create majority support for stricter gun laws.

Second, there is broader support among Americans for incremental changes to gun laws. Polls by CNN and YouGov earlier this year found overwhelming support for several specific gun control policies: background checks, bans on gun sales to those with mental health problems, waiting periods before gun purchases and a national registry of gun ownership.

Harry Enten's advice to gun control advocates:

More then three in four, or 76%, of Americans want laws "requiring gun owners to register their guns with the local government". And 60% of Americans are against "high-capacity or extended ammunition clips". Gun control advocates would be wise to push proposals that implement these two gun control policies. They have majority support that can only grow after Newtown. It would be more difficult for Republican senators to oppose them – as they did with a bill to ban high-capacity clips this past July, when Democratic senators introduced legislation.

Nate Cohn believes that gun control could be a winning issue for Democrats:

At the very least, the fact that Democrats can win nationally without southeastern Ohio or West Virginia means that they can address gun control without fear of jeopardizing the presidency. After all, national polls show the public roughly divided on the issue, even though Democrats haven't even argued for gun control in twelve years. But if Democrats are savvy enough to stress popular measures like an assault weapons ban, which commands the support of approximately 60 percent of voters, it could also help them consolidate their gains among suburban women. Of course, it's been a very long time since gun control was championed by Democrats, and it will require the party to realize that the conventional wisdom on gun control politics is out of date. Democrats do not need to be afraid of angering voters who they have already lost, stand no chance of recovering, and no longer need to win presidential elections. Perhaps the tragedy in Newtown will prompt an overdue reassessment.

 

Ambinder asks:

I take self-defense seriously. But getting a gun should be at least as hard as getting a driver's license. A citizen who wants a gun and a concealed carry permit should go through exactly the same training and recertification as a cop would… it's easier to get a gun as a citizen than as a cop.

Patrick Radden Keefe also wants better gun laws:

One obvious change would be to mandate a criminal background check for all gun purchases.

Under the Brady Act, federally licensed gun retailers are required to do a background check before selling a customer a firearm. But an estimated forty per cent of gun sales today are "private" sales not involving a licensed dealer: these transactions take place at gun shows, in parking lots, and increasingly, on the Internet. (One site, gunbroker.com, reported two billion dollars in sales this year.) Private sales do not require a background check, and because there is no mechanism for the A.T.F. to collect or maintain records on these sales, they are virtually untraceable. There are bills pending on Capitol Hill that would force checks for all sales, and there is considerable bipartisan support for this kind of measure. According to some recent polling conducted by Frank Luntz, seventy-four per cent of N.R.A. members and eighty-seven per cent of non-N.R.A. gun owners support requiring criminal background checks for anyone purchasing a gun.

Amy Sullivan sounds the alarm:

As of today, there have been 70 mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and 2012, leaving 543 people dead (assuming the reports of 27 fatalities from today's shootings are correct.) Seven of those 70 shootings occurred this year. Sixty-eight of those 543 victims were killed this year. If the scenes of horror and heartbreak are now familiar, it's because the past six years have been particularly bloody. Fully 45% of the victims of mass shootings in America over the past three decades were killed since 2007. That is a crisis.

Opening quote:

To all the families, first responders, to the community of Newtown, clergy, guests, scripture tells us, “Do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly, we are being renewed day by day. For light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all, so we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven not built by human hands.”

Full transcript here. Commentary to come tomorrow. But some initial reactions from readers:

“Are we prepared that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” Devastating. I started bawling. The most powerful statement I have ever heard uttered from him or any politician. Ever.

Another also seizes upon that line:

But freedom is not even what needs to be traded to win better control over gun safety. This is the way the gun lobby wants to frame it, in terms of freedom. But really it is merely the convenience and pleasure of gun hobbyists – not a glorious noble freedom – that is being preserved at the cost of these awful innocent deaths.

Nobody complains that their automotive freedom is under threat, yet automobile owners tolerate a host of limitations in the power of their equipment, licensing, registration and insurance requirements, safety standards, and rules of the road when enjoying the freedom of personal transportation. In both cases we entrust adults to own and operate dangerous equipment, but only gun owners scream and howl at the tiniest burden of inconvenience for the sake of safety and aid to law enforcement investigators. It does not kill the freedom to own guns to ask owners to comply with standards for safety reasons. It only adds a little to the cost of that freedom. What we must ask is if that small cost is worth the lives of these innocent babes.

People attend a prayer service to reflect on the violence at the Sandy Hook School at a church on December 15, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty six people were shot dead, including twenty children, after a gunman identified as Adam Lanza opened fire in the school. Lanza also reportedly had committed suicide at the scene. A 28th person, believed to be Nancy Lanza was found dead in a house in town, was also believed to have been shot by Adam Lanza. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

I've been finding it hard to find words to post about Sandy Hook. What words could possibly suffice? And to tell the truth, I just cannot myself begin to have a debate about anything, even though I completely understand the emotions expressed in this extraordinary reader thread. I am just numb.

The facts are also inevitably confused, rumors abounding, and mistakes in getting the details right so likely that we're simply going to wait until all verified facts are in. Then perhaps we can debate with some evidence we can rely on. That takes time.

But two videos tell us so much. The first: a montage from the local paper's photography. It's a dystopian scene – the cars piled up in the street, the simple body language of parents whose agony is simply beyond expression. The woman in the freeze frame below herself looks frozen, walking into a future she cannot yet know, her arms at her side, her face looking toward the horror:

And then this interview with Diane Sawyer with a teacher … well, such a teacher is a kind of angel:

We will find out soon enough the why and how in greater detail. But lets focus on the actions of those defending the children, their courage and tenacity in the face of the unspeakable:

Among those killed was the school's well-liked principal, Dawn Hochsprung. Town officials said she died while lunging at the gunman in an attempt to overtake him. A woman who worked at the school was wounded.

Maryann Jacob, a clerk in the school library, was in there with 18 fourth-graders when they heard a commotion and gunfire outside the room. She had the youngsters crawl into a storage room, and they locked the door and barricaded it with a file cabinet. There happened to be materials for coloring, "so we set them up with paper and crayons."

Let's focus on the actions and heroism of the victims, rather than on the easy evil of a soul gone horribly wrong. May God forgive him. But may we also remember that even amid fathomless evil and violence, love stood tall as well.

(Photo: A sign reads 'God Bless the Families' outside of a home near the Sandy Hook School on December 15, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. By Don Emmert/AFP/Getty.)

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely –and why?

We're still reminded–: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.

– Rainer Maria Rilke.

(Photo: Parents leave Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with their children on Friday, December 14, 2012. By John Woike/Hartford Courant/MCT via Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

My boys are about the same age as the victims – 7 and 5. The immediacy of this morning is very real and utterly horrific. My spouse emailed me to say she cried in her office. My personal, emotional reaction to this story, is that I am done – done with the absolutists whose only contribution to the conversation is that there be no comprise, that it be all or nothing. I am done. Period. It is time to have the conversation again, to break the Second Amendment taboo and have a civic conversation. I suspect patience/tolerance towards the far right will be in short supply. The blood of innocents is a deeply rooted, ancient, psychological thing. And these were innocents in the purest sense.

I am very far away in Seattle, but this kindles a certain sadness and fury I have not had since 9/11. This has to change. My heart tells me the response will likewise be primal and communal. Maybe I am completely/emotionally wrong. Yet, it is in these moments when the tide turns and public sentiment sweeps away barriers that the day before seemed so strong – this feels like one of those moments. Today is not the day … but tomorrow may be.

Another:

Guns don't kill people – people do. By the same token, planes don't kill people – people flying them into buildings do. And yet, I recall that we immediately and decisively worked to keep deranged people from gaining possession of planes when a handful of those people used them as tools of mass murder; indeed, we made it much more difficult for the overwhelming majority of peaceful, law-abiding citizens to board a plane.

Another:

If the mass-murder of children isn't enough to actually do something about gun control, I don't know if we'll ever have the courage to do anything.

At least start with background checks, eliminating the gun-show loophole. Then an assault-weapons ban would be nice. Nothing good can come from unstable people having guns. And you don't hunt deer or protect your family with assault-weapons. If you like cool gadgets, get a PS3, or noise-cancelling headphones, or something.

Today, as you noted, there was also an elementary school assault in China, where private gun ownership is prohibited. Some kids were horribly injured by the knife attack, but no one was killed. Guns do make it much easier to kill people. The defense of "Guns don't kill people. People kill people" needs to be retired. It's as idiotic as "Fried food doesn't make you fat … unless you eat it."

I know it's easy to say guns aren't the problem if you haven't been in this situation. But people need to put themselves in the shoes of the children who survived, who will live the rest of their lives with the scar of losing their best friends while their social development was just beginning. And think of the parents, some of whom may not have other children and may not be able to have another in the future. Their children were everything to them. Their lives were built for and around these kids who were stolen from them by a lunatic with a near military-grade weapon. And the teachers, many of whom grow to love and care for their students almost as if they are their own.

If you don't think we need more gun control, try to see it from the perspective of these kids and parents. That's a good rule, not only in this situation, but for life in general. Try to see things from the perspective of the victims, not the unaffected.

Another:

I've been reading the comments and comparisons of today's massacre with the attack in China, and I've got to tell you it only adds to the sadness and disgust I'm feeling. I think anyone making that comparison is missing a fundamental point. Do we want to be a society that compares itself to China and feels somehow absolved by coming up only slightly short, regardless of the weapon employed? I've spent time there – China is an insecure, deeply troubled society with a lot of violence bubbling beneath the surface. What makes me sick is that we are increasingly the same way.

As I drove around today, my day off, all I felt was sadness and disgust listening to the radio. The complete unwillingness to reflect on why this country is so full of violence. I could never feel anything but contempt for the asshole who did this, but the truth is we are a nation of assholes. I include myself in that. Most radio stations I heard could only be bothered to touch on this massacre of children for a moment or two before getting back to the critical topic of football. That wonderful game full of violence that has no regard for the well being of the young men who play it. It was such an apt representation of the priorities of our country. I watch it too, but at least I'm willing to examine it.

The radio stations that did discuss the killings were quick to blame silent doctors for protecting the crazies, then followed the obligatory self congratulation about how so many Americans are decent and come together at times like this. No where to be found was any discussion of why we breed such violence, what sicknesses in our collective unconscious give rise to such soaring levels of senselessness. I live in Baltimore, I hear it everyday. A murder everyday, often of children, and we're still such a great town because we've got the Ravens and what a great season the Orioles had. Sports are just one example of many, many childish distractions that we use to ever avoid looking in the mirror.

I'm a conservative in the vein you are, and I still think this country is exceptional, but our heads are too far up our own asses to look at why we kill each other at exceptionally high rates. If even the massacre of innocent children won't wake us up, it's because we've become a nation of children!

Another looks to the right-wing blogosphere:

Only Drudge headlines the atrocity in Newton.  There is a Fox news clip buried deep on the National Review's front page.  Nothing on The Corner.  Nothing on Michelle Malkin.  Nothing on Red State (I don't think, best as I could tell from the front of the paywall).  

Did I cherry pick the right wing sites?  Yes.  Did I want some response, even if it would opine something (again) about the danger of jumping to conclusions, about people killing people, about guns as necessary machines of defense?  Yes.  Why?  TWENTY CHILDREN ARE MURDERED IN A KINDERGARTEN CLASSROOM and half of the bloggers on our political spectrum are not reporting it!   I can picture these people, definitely horrified by the killings, but also slapping their heads thinking "Aw jeez, not again, these crazies are really giving us a bad name," all the while constructing some appropriately sympathetic-but-not-damaging-to-their-benefactors column. It's good to think before you type.  But sometimes, it's good to just think - and I really hope that that is what these defenders of guns-for-all are doing.

Another reacts to Obama's press conference:

This paragraph carries more weight than it seems at first glance:

As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it is an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.

Tying the American habit of shooting strangers in public spaces with the American street crime epidemic is the first step towards bringing conversations about all crime together under a single rubric. Which means its the first step towards serious discussions about controlling guns. Maybe.

Another:

I also want to say one thing about the president crying. My first thought when I saw it happen was that that is no way for a president to respond. I don't buy all that "president is father of the nation" bunk, but I do think in situations like this, there is more truth to it than at other times. I thought he should be a source of stability and calm, and when he cried he was betraying that responsibility. 

Yet, after that initial reaction, I began to think the opposite. This is a president who has had to console families after the Giffords shooting, the Aurora shootings, and others, and now he is faced with the unambiguously and overwhelmingly senseless murder of kindergarteners. There really isn't anything more sorrowful and lamentable than that, and composure wouldn't have been an apt response in my view. (Now if he tumbles into a pit of dispair, that's another thing.)

I'm not sure if he's been criticized or of he will be, but I think it would be senseless to expect anyone, even the president, to present a false sense of composure in the face of something so clearly tragic and inhumane.

It revealed why I love this president as a human being. Another:

After all these years of hearing from politicians of both parties – both publicly and personally, in response to my letters – that there's nothing we can do, I can't tell you what it meant to me to see even a small indication that the President Obama might genuinely take responsibility for preventing future school shootings and get other elected officials to do the same.  These are public institutions, and we need to figure out how to make people safer there, to say nothing of the broader problem of gun violence in this country.  We probably don't want to see our public officials crying most of the time, but watching our president fight back tears gave me hope, and in that moment I truly loved him for that.

Another notes a news item from Michigan:

Changes to the concealed weapons law passed the [GOP-controlled] state House and Senate late Thursday, allowing trained gun owners to carry their weapons in formerly forbidden places, such as schools, day care centers, stadiums and churches.

No word post-Newtown on whether the Republican governor will veto it. I'd bet against it.

Blog reax here.

(Photo: Scene outside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman opened fire inside the school killing 27 people, including 18 children. By Howard Simmons/NY Daily News via Getty Images)

Fallows wonders when America will learn its lesson:

Guns don't attack children; psychopaths and sadists do. But guns uniquely allow a psychopath to wreak death and devastation on such a large scale so quickly and easily. America is the only country in which this happens again — and again and again. You can look it up.

Ezra adds:

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that’s unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t "too soon." It’s much too late.

Eugene Volokh rounds up instances of citizens with guns confronting shooters:

[I]t appears that civilians armed with guns are sometimes willing to intervene to stop someone who had just committed a mass shooting in public. In what fraction of mass shootings would such interventions happen, if gun possession were allowed in the places where the shootings happen? We don’t know. In what fraction would interventions prevent more killings and injuries, as opposed to capturing or killing the murderer after he’s already done? We don’t know. In what fraction would interventions lead to more injuries to bystanders? Again, we don’t know.

Finally, always keep in mind that mass shootings in public places should not be the main focus in the gun debate, whether for gun control or gun decontrol: They on average account for much less than 1% of all homicides in the U.S., and are unusually hard to stop through gun control laws (since the killer is bent on committing a publicly visible murder and is thus unlikely to be much deterred by gun control law, or by the prospect of encountering an armed bystander).

Tom Jacobs reviews research on gun control:

[I]f you hear the argument "Gun control wouldn’t have prevented tragedies like the one in Connecticut," the answer is: That’s probably true. But it would lessen the likelihood of a lot of other, smaller tragedies that receive less publicity, but still cause enormous pain.

Frum weighs in: