“The gunman purchased two guns used in the attack seven and eight days prior to the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.
“The shooter purchased 33 guns in the 12 months leading up to the October 2017 attack that killed 61 the Las Vegas music festival
“The El Paso, Texas, Walmart shooter purchased an AK-style rifle several weeks before killing 23 people in August 2019.
“And, in the two mass shootings that unfolded over the past two weeks, both suspected shooters purchased weapons shortly before their attacks.
“The suspect in the Atlanta-area spa shootings purchased a 9mm semi-automatic pistol hours before he used it to kill eight people on March 16.
“The suspect in the King Soopers attack in Boulder, Colorado, bought a Ruger AR-556 pistol six days before he killed 10 people on March 23, according to the arrest warrant affidavit. Police recovered a rifle and handgun at the scene but didn't indicate if either was the Ruger.”
(Marlene Lenthang. “Gun waiting period laws in spotlight after Atlanta, Boulder shootings.” https://abcnews.go.com/US/gun-waiting-period-laws-spotlight-atlanta-boulder-shootings/story?id=76651676&cid=clicksource_4380645_5_three_posts_card_hed. ABC News. March 26, 2021.)
Note:
In the Boulder case, days earlier, a judge struck down an ordinance that banned assault rifles and high-capacity magazines in Boulder, citing a state law prohibiting local gun bans. A lawsuit challenging Boulder’s ordinances had the backing of the NRA, which said the ruling gave “law-abiding gun owners something to celebrate.”
Shooter Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was prone to sudden rage and was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to probation for attacking a high school classmate, law enforcement officials and former associates said. Colorado has a universal background check law covering almost all gun sales, but that misdemeanor would not have prevented him from purchasing a weapon, experts said. Had he been convicted of a felony, his purchase would’ve been barred under federal law. Alissa is charged with 10 counts of murder.
In Atlanta, Robert Aaron Long purchased a 9 mm handgun just hours before going on a shooting rampage at three massage businesses in the Atlanta area, police said. A lawyer for the gun shop said it complies with federal background check laws. Georgia, like the majority of states, has no waiting period to obtain a gun. Long claimed to have a “sex addiction,” police said, and he spent time at an addiction recovery facility last year. Federal law bans guns for people who are “unlawful users of or addicted to a controlled substance” or who’ve been court ordered to a mental health or substance abuse treatment facility, but doesn’t mention treatment for other compulsions as a barrier to ownership. Long is charged with eight counts of murder.
(Michael R. Sisak. “Mass shooters exploited gun laws, loopholes before carnage.” Associated Press. March 26, 2021.)
Heavy-Duty Firearm Fetish
Seamus McGraw, a journalist and the author of From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter, says, “Shooters 'fetishize' heavy duty firearms and give off warning signs of violence, He continued …
"There are specific types of weapons that these guys are drawn to, and they're marketed with the idea that these will turn you into Rambo. Guns have become a cultural touchstone for these killers."
(Marlene Lenthang. “Gun waiting period laws in spotlight after Atlanta, Boulder shootings.” ABC News. March 26, 2021.)
McGraw claims last-minute gun purchase is absolutely a pattern of American mass shooters. He claims …
“You go from fixation to ideation to the last phase of planning. And in the planning, you will see that the weapons were acquired, almost always legally, within a fairly close time frame to the incident itself."
Need of a “Trigger”
Elizabeth Neumann, a former Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary, told ABC News shooters tend to be “vulnerable individuals that can become radicalized and mobilize to violence" when triggered by a stressful event. She explained …
“It's not predictive. It's possible individuals who decide to commit these attacks thought about it for quite some time, but didn't have the triggering moment. When they get to that point, then they're out looking for the guns, and that could explain why we're seeing people buy it at the last minute."
(Marlene Lenthang. “Gun waiting period laws in spotlight after Atlanta, Boulder shootings.” ABC News. March 26, 2021.)
Statista Research Department (March 23, 2021) reported 82 of the mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and March 2021 involved weapons which were obtained legally; a clear majority. Only 16 incidents involved guns that were obtained illegally.
However, and It's a Big However …
What should be legal? A database (February 2020) from The Violence Project provides some insight into the history of mass shooting and what measures, if any, could affect them. Researchers there conducted a detailed study of 167 mass shootings resulting in 1,202 deaths that have occurred in the U.S. since 1966.
The Los Angeles Times cross-referenced their data with five types of gun control proposals. The analysis revealed that if all of these policies had been in effect at the federal level, they would have had the potential to prevent 146 out of 167 shootings, including all but one shooting in the past five years.
Here are five types of gun laws and which shootings they could have addressed.
1. Ban on straw purchases
This measure seeks to stop someone from buying a gun for someone else.
2. Safe storage requirement
Firearms would have to be kept in a locked box when not in use. This law aims to prevent unauthorized people, like children, from accessing firearms.
3. Assault weapons ban
This would prohibit the sale of many high-powered rifles.An assault weapons ban expired in 2004. The new ban would have included semiautomatic weapons that weren’t in the 1994 law, including the rifle used at Sandy Hook, but the effort failed.
4. Mandatory background checks
Unlicensed dealers would be required to vet prospective buyers with the FBI. Private sellers, such as those at gun shows, are not required to run a background check on purchasers.
5. Red flag law
A red flag law is a gun control law that permits police or family members to petition a state court to order the temporary removal of firearms from a person who may present a danger to others or themselves.
(Rahul Mukherkee. “How many mass shootings might have been prevented by stronger gun laws?” The Los Angeles Times. February 28, 2020.)
A 2016 study conducted by The American Journal of Medicine showed that the United States has more firearm-related homicides and suicides than any other high-income country, with Americans ten times more likely to die by a firearm-related death than people in 22 other developed countries.
Overall, results showed that the U.S., which has the most firearms per capita in the world, suffers disproportionately from firearms compared with other high-income countries. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that our firearms are killing us rather than protecting us.
(Jane Grochowski, Publisher. “Gun Deaths in U.S. Remain Highest Among High-Income Nations Americans are Ten Times More Likely to Die from Firearms Than Citizens of Other Developed Countries.” The American Journal of Medicine. Elsevier. February 01, 2016.)
Although legislative regulations have had some measurable effect on reducing gun violence in the United States, critics have identified certain loopholes and inadequacies within these laws that jeopardize public health and enable many people to obtain guns who may not otherwise meet the legal requirements to do so.
For example, private collectors can elude a requirement of the Brady Law by purchasing firearms from an unlicensed seller who does not perform background checks. This provision is often referred to as the “gun show loophole,” although these sales can take place elsewhere, including over the Internet.
A study of gun owners conducted by researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University in 2015 found that such purchases accounted for about one-fifth of total gun sales among those surveyed. Federal law and more than twenty states allow juveniles to purchase long guns, which include rifles and shotguns, from an unlicensed firearms dealer. Child safety advocates further note that a federal law to prevent children from accessing guns in the home, such as legislation requiring gun owners to store guns unloaded in a locked location, does not exist.
Additionally, inconsistent reporting and underfunding for NICS has resulted in an insufficient database that lacks substantial data in many categories, especially in non-felony areas such as mental health and domestic violence.
("Gun Control." Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection. Gale. 2018.)
The Future Without Immediate Action
Time reports that police and gun violence experts agree, warning that large-scale mass shootings – apart from the gun violence that has plagued U.S. cities through the pandemic – are inevitable as the weather warms and more people get vaccinated, enabling large gatherings in public spaces. Some worry the attacks could return at a higher frequency, citing record gun sales in 2020.
“My fear was that we would start to see these mass shootings again when we started to go out in public, and that is exactly what is happening,” says Shannon Watts, who founded the gun-control advocacy group Moms Demand Action.
“We’re the only high-income country where recovering from a pandemic means shooting tragedies resume in public.”
– Shannon Watts
“We can expect that these kinds of shootings will unfortunately become more prevalent,” says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank. “This is what normal has come to be like in America.”
“According to Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, hard times could cause more people to feel angry or to blame others for their misfortune, which could lead to violence.”
And, unfortunately, those shooters will probably be rushing to gun stores to purchase their prized, sexy, “killer” weapons. With reopening society as their trigger and the obvious Freudian connection of sexuality – the imagery of shooting bullets through a cylindrical barrel is hard to ignore – stirring their impressionable (and often impaired) minds, we should enact proactive measures to save innocent lives now.
Joseph M. Pierre, M.D. – Health Sciences Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Acting Chief of Mental Health Community Care Systems at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System – explains …
“This is especially true when we acknowledge that the most gun violence and nearly every case of mass shooting is perpetrated by men. Thinking along those lines seems to be consistent with the observation that gun violence among men — especially in the context of mass shootings where perpetrators are haven mostly been white — is sometimes about compensating for feelings of impotence with fantasies of revenge that, more often than not, end in suicide or the perpetrator being killed by law enforcement. Going out with a bang, if you will.”
(Joe Pierre. “Guns in America: What's Freud and Sex Got to Do With It?” Psychology Today. May 19, 2028.)
The ubiquity of guns in popular culture normalizes the use of firearms and gun violence in our lives. Isn't it about time to address this problem? We must consider that when killers, psychopaths, and the mentally ill rush to buy guns to commit unspeakable crimes, settle scores, and mindlessly attack innocent people that something is terribly wrong. To live through mass shooting after mass shooting, see the purchase of guns skyrocket, and to declare, “The only thing that stops a bed guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun A Bad Guy With A Gun Is A Good Guy With A Gun.”
This good guy-bad guy oversimplification – of causes and solutions – is a major reason we have been in a standoff over how to effectively address these mass casualty shootings. That claim is clearly and demonstrably false. It can be refuted by a counterexample in which a bad guy with a gun was stopped by a good woman with a Bible, a Christian book, and the virtues of faith, hope, and love.
Such a simplistic view of human nature is also actually too optimistic. Even the best of us are flawed. At times, the presence of a gun can exacerbate our flaws. Just consider the highly-publicized case of George Zimmerman, who was put on trial for shooting and killing teenager Trayvon Martin.
John Donohue, law professor at Stanford University and co-author of a National Bureau of Economic Research study that examined how gun violence coincides with the ability for individuals to carry concealed weapons, known as Right To Carry (RTC) laws, says, “Possessing a gun likely encouraged Zimmerman to confront Martin. In many cases, the “good guys” are encouraged to be more aggressive because they are armed.
The mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, did not affirm that view. There was a good guy with a gun just outside the school when the bad guy with a gun started murdering people. The good guy with the gun wasn’t the solution. He didn’t stop it. What the Parkland school shooting exposes is the fallacy in LaPierre’s argument: This is not a simple problem. And it does not have a simple solution like arming more people.
We need to enact strong laws and policies to help keep guns out of the wrong hands and limit access to highly dangerous weapons of war.
Consider the following:
An FBI study of 160 active-shooting incidents from 2000 to 2013 found that only one was stopped by an individual with a valid firearms permit. In contrast, 21 incidents were stopped by unarmed citizens.
Armed citizens can worsen the outcome of a mass shooting. During the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, an armed bystander misidentified the perpetrator and almost shot the wrong person.
Expansive concealed carry permitting laws are linked to an increase in violent crime. A 2017 study by researchers at Stanford University found that, 10 years after enacting these laws, states experienced a 13 percent to 15 percent rise in violent crimes.
Using a gun for defense during a robbery has no significant benefits. A 2015 analysis by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health of the National Crime Victimization Survey found that the likelihood of sustaining an injury during a robbery was nearly identical between people who attempted to defend themselves with a gun and those who took no defensive action.
A gun is more likely to be stolen than used to stop a crime. According to a CAP analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey, guns are nearly twice as likely to be stolen than to be used for self-defense.
(David Goldman. “Myth vs. Fact: Debunking the Gun Lobby’s Favorite Talking Points.” American Progress. AP. October 5, 2017.)
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