The Redhunter

We'll hear that the "gun lobby" is what is stopping "sensible gun control". Yet a lobby is nothing more than the sum total of the individuals that contribute to it. In this case, the gun lobby consists of millions of Americans who are members of the NRA or similar organizations and vote for pro-gun candidates. The simple fact is that the anti-gunners have not been able to mobilize voters to a degree anywhere near that of pro-gun organizations.

We'll also hear that those dastardly "high capacity" magazines are to blame. In this case Cho used a Glock 9mm and .22 semi-auto pistols. The capacity of the former is 17 rounds with the standard magazine. It is possible to pass a law that would restrict sales of magazines with greater than say 6 or 7 rounds (the capacity of a 1911A1). But anyone who has fired an automatic pistol knows how easy it is to change magazines; it is an operation that can be completed in a few seconds, much faster than someone could "rush" the shooter.

Some will even tell us that we need to ban handguns altogether. They're living in a fantasy world; it just isn't going to happen.

More seriously is the issue of Cho's derangement and why he didn't show up in any of the databases that are checked as part of any gun purchase. From what I've been able to gather, Cho was never actually institutionalized but only at an outpatient clinic, which is why he didn't show up on the relevant database(more information on Cho's situation here). Whether we want to include outpatient files in gun background checks is, I think, as much of a civil rights issue as it is a gun control one.

Also is the issue of gun sales to non-citizens. Cho held a green card, which doesn't prevent him from getting a gun. I'm not up on the law here, but if as I think it's true that we don't deny green card holders any other part of the Bill of Rights, so don't see how we can deny them their Second Amendment rights. But I might be wrong here, and icertainly it is something we can discuss.

Mostly, though, the "gun control is the problem" argument fails the test of correlation. If lack of gun control is related to crime, then we should have had higher crime prior to the late 1960s than we do today. Yet the opposite is the case. We basically had no gun laws on the books before the late 1960s, yet crime was dramatically lower. The crime rate underwent a dramatic rise in the 1960s, just as the time gun laws were being put on the books. The crime wave of the 1930s was nothing compared to what we experience today. Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd were pikers compared to today's criminals. The Valentine's Day Massacre was huge at the time but today would be a 2 or 3 day story.

The Issue

The issue, I think, is how an obviously disturbed individual was allowed to remain on campus. That Cho was nuts is obvious just from reading his plays. News stories routinely say that he "seethed with rage" . Professors and students alike were afraid of him.

While it's easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback, it is nevertheless disturbing that despite all the signs nothing was done.

But from what I've been able to gather nothing was done because nothing could be done. We as a society made a decision some decades ago that our mental health laws needed serious reform. We decided that too many people had been unjustly incarcerated because they were declared insane, and that it was better to err on the side of letting them go. Liberals saw it as a civil-rights issue, and conservatives saw it as a chance to save money on mental hospitals. So we're all to blame.

Jennifer Roback Morse summed up the problem

Until someone commits a crime, it is usually not possible to take actions that would prevent him from hurting himself or others. We don’t have facilities for people who pose a threat to others, but who haven’t done anything yet. Many mentally ill people cycle between homelessness and the county jail, incarcerated for petty crimes, but receiving no long-term help. The Treatment Advocacy Center, based in Arlington Virginia, estimates that as many as a third of the homeless suffer from either bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia. But we can’t make the mentally ill take their medications, even if those medications can mean the difference between a rational person who can function normally and a delusional person who is a danger to others.

As to what should be done, she has I think some useful suggestions as to how to get started

What would be constructive is an honest discussion about how a free society should face the reality of mental illness. It is not a protection of civil liberties to redefine the mentally ill as if they were rational and able to make informed decisions about their care and treatment, even when they are obviously not. As we can see from the Virginia Tech massacre, it is not consistent with public safety to wait until a mentally ill person has committed a crime. It is not “personal responsibility” to expect the families of mentally ill people to take care of them themselves. This means turning their homes into a 24-hours-a-day mental institution, staffed by relatives who never get training, help, or a day off.

The ever-insightful Peggy Noonan offers a more straightforward analysis; we lack common sense.

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.

Surely she is right, but still one cannot help but to have sympathy for the administrators who did nothing. If they had thrown Cho out of school they would have undoubtably faced a lawsuit.

It would seem, therefore, that a reform of our mental health laws are in order.

Also Not The Issue

Note what I did not say was the issue; a lack of money. The problem is not that we don't have enough "services", although we will undoubtably hear this line from what we'll call the mental-health lobby.

The problem was not that Cho didn't have access to a therapist. The problem was that it was legally impossible to separate him from vulnerable students and professors, or, for that matter, from society at large.

Right to Carry

I am a big believer in right-to-carry, although I have never exercised it myself. Virginia, like most states in recent decades, has a law in which any law abiding citizen may obtain a conceiled carry permit after going through a special class and passing a proficiency test. However, the Virginia Tech administrators banned guns from their campus, as was their right. Was this a wise decision?

The answer, I think, is that while it was a dumb decison we cannot say had students and professors been allowed to carry firearms Cho's shooting spree would have been stopped. Yes there have been shooting sprees in other schools that were stopped by armed administrators or teachers. But while allowing teachers and (in college) students to be armed may be a good idea, it isn't really the issue.

What About the Culture?

It is a serious concern that negative aspects of American culture played a role in Cho's decison to go on a shooting rampage. If a combination of mental illness and access to guns led to shooting sprees, we'd have seen this sort of thing every month in the seconed half of the 20th century. As mentioned earlier, there were virtually no restrictions on who could buy guns before the late 1960s. College attendance skyrocketed after World War II in the wake of the GI bill. Yet Columbine-type shootings seem to be a thing of the present. Why?

One can't help be be a bit taken aback by the glorification of violence in so much of our society. From TV and movies to video games, wild senseless violence seems absolutely out-of-control. At least in the old movies when people were killed it seemed to be for a reason, even when it was gangsters doing the shooting. Now it's just "how many people can we kill" in a move or video game.

In the wake of the VA Tech massacre, the Wall Street Journal reprinted "No Guardrails: August 1968 and the death of self-restraint", an editorial that first ran in 1993. Here's the money section

We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won't like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals--university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators--who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.

With great rhetorical firepower, books, magazines, opinion columns and editorials defended each succeeding act of defiance--against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.

It was the death of self-restraint. It wasn't so much a situation of rules being violated as it was that basic concepts of acceptable behavior were thrown out the window.

In the End

Changing the culture is something we should and must work for but is necessarily long-term. As such it cannot be our only task.

We must work to change a system in which those-in-charge cannot get rid of obviously idisturbed individuals. A debate over civil rights is a necessity. If we give administrators too much power the potential for abuse is enormous. Yet the current situation cannot be allowed to stand.

Gun control is not the issue or problem. Right to carry is necessary, but won't really solve the problem either. The problems are in our culture and the inability of administrators to make common-sense decisions. We need to change what we must change.

Update I - The Media

I don't know how I forgot to write about this aspect of it but as we all know Cho desperately wanted his act carried on TV. In a highly controversial decision, NBC obliged. Tongue-in-cheek, columnist Jack Kelly asked that if we're going to ignore the Second Amendment in our quest for safety why worry about the First Amendment (I can't find a link to this column, it was in the Sunday Washington Times and they didn't have a link on their site. I also can't find the exact quote on the Volokh Conspiracy)

"A practical, connonsense way of reduciing gun violence - especially in schools - would be a federal law prohibiting, or at least seriously limiting, the interstate reporting of serious gun crimes like Virginia Tech for five working days," suggsted a poster at the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog devoted to legal issues.

No one seriously is proposing to violate the First Amendment in this way. "Person from Porlock" was parodying the enthusiasm of journalists for gun control legislation.

Absolutists on the First Amendment are rarely so absolute on the Second.

Update II: "False Posturing and Real Threats"

Mark Steyn hits it out of the park today. Here's the money section

I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already "fear guns," at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

But you can't do that at Virginia Tech. Instead the administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they have created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so.

The "gun-free zone" turned out to be a fraud -- not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.

Bingo