Futility pervades debate on guns
WASHINGTON — In the week since the mass shooting in Oregon that took the lives of nine college students and the gunman who killed them, one bill has been introduced in Congress to address gun violence — a proposal to establish June as Gun Violence Awareness Month.
Its author is Democratic U.S. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting delegate from the District of Columbia, who readily admits it won’t stop the plague of mass shootings like the one at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., where President Barack Obama is traveling Friday.
“It’s a bill I guarantee you won’t do anything besides what I’m asking you to do,” she told a group of college students at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.
“It calls attention to gun violence in our country and the do-nothing Congress.”
That sense of weariness has marked the new political debate about guns, notable for expressions of futility within the White House, Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, where GOP poll leader Donald Trump said the shootings will continue “no matter what.”
With the gun debate seemingly frozen in time, some activists on both sides appear to be broadening their lenses to mental health strategies, particularly those that might make existing federally-mandated background checks more effective, or make it easier to take guns away from markedly disturbed and potentially violent people before they act.
“There’s a wide swath of common real estate between people who disagree on the politics of gun control and don’t disagree that we need to remove guns from really dangerous people,” said Duke University psychiatry professor Jeffrey Swanson, an expert on laws and policies to reduce gun violence.
‘Exhausting, traumatizing’
In the political gridlock of Congress, a group of Democratic senators gathered Thursday to lament that they have little hope of getting Republicans or the powerful National Rifle Association to go along with long-debated proposals to restrict so-called “assault rifles” or broaden background checks to private gun sales.
Even after Newtown, Conn., where a 20-year-old gunman killed 20 young elementary school children and six adult staff members in 2012, gun-control activists have been unable to enact any significant new federal firearms restrictions.
“It’s exhausting and traumatizing to see shooting after shooting and inaction after inaction,” said Sarah Clements, a 19-year-old Georgetown University student whose mother, a second-grade teacher, survived the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Republican leaders in Congress are not backing down on their commitment to protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. They’re backed by gun-rights activists who argue that the mass shootings, which Obama decried as “routine” last week, have more to do with broader societal ills than access to guns.
“When the community isn’t involved, or the family isn’t involved, we look to lawmakers to fix our social and medical problems, and the only tools lawmakers have are to make laws,” said Alice Tripp, a lobbyist for the Texas State Rifle Association, an affiliate of the NRA. “The politics of guns is not going to fix mental health or social problems.”
But while the two sides have become more entrenched in their positions on gun control, some Republicans have started to push mental health reforms as a bipartisan way forward.
A new measure championed by Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, would beef up programs to identify and treat people with mental illnesses who come in contact with the criminal justice system.
“For the family and friends of those who lost loved ones last week, like so many others who have lost their children and their friends and their siblings to one of these shootings, we know the emotions are still raw and real,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor Thursday.
That was the opening to Cornyn’s pitch for his Mental Health and Safe Communities Act, which would give authorities more treatment options for dealing with potentially dangerous people with mental illnesses.
“Some of our Democratic colleagues have said that they’re going to introduce some gun control legislation that we all know has been tried before and cannot pass this chamber,” Corny said. “What we need … is a broad consensus to try to get something done that can bring people together, and I believe my legislation can do that by addressing the root cause of some of these horrific events.”
‘Era of the lone gunman’
Some also point to recently enacted laws in Texas, California, Connecticut and Indiana that give police — in some cases at the behest of family members — more authority to temporarily seize weapons from people undergoing mental crises.
Advocates welcome the new efforts, which echo administration vows to expand mental health programs in the wake of Newtown. But they stress that better treatment options are no substitute for curbs on the easy and widespread availability of firearms.
“More resources for mental illness are certainly a good thing, but that alone is not going to address the issue of access to guns,” said Lindsay Nichols, a senior attorney with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The Texas law, signed by former Gov. Rick Perry, has been praised by police chiefs as a valuable enforcement tool. But it is hardly seen as way to head off attacks by mentally disturbed gunmen who have yet to come in contact with the law.
At a moment in time that Norton calls “the era of the lone gunman,” there is still little agreement about how to keep dangerously mentally ill people from getting guns.
Gun control advocates have vowed to intensify their push for universal background checks, a measure that polls show has broad public support.
“We’re trying to change the rubric of the debate, and part of the rubric is to keep guns out of dangerous hands,” said Morton Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “Background checks are a part of that.”
Meanwhile, gun rights activists question the effectiveness of so-called “back checks” in detecting the sort of angry, alienated young men so often at the center of mass shootings. They note that most mental health records, even if they exist, are guarded by privacy laws.
Under federal law, individuals adjudicated as “mentally defective” or involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities are disqualified from owning or purchasing firearms.
But those cases don’t always get reported, and mental health advocates emphasize that the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent or dangerous.
One reform that gets widespread agreement is the need for states to more quickly transmit information on court adjudications and civil commitments to NICS, the federal firearms database used to determine whether prospective gun buyers are eligible to buy firearms.
It was that failing that helped Seung-Hui Cho fatally shoot 32 people before taking his own life at Virginia Tech in 2007. He had bought several pistols a little more than a year after being ordered by a judge to seek outpatient care over suicidal remarks he made to his roommates.
Too little enforcement?
While Obama and other Democrats will try to rally support for new gun initiatives in the coming weeks and months, Republicans in the 2016 presidential field say they see too little enforcement of the gun laws that are already on the books, and that new laws are unlikely to help.
“No matter what you do — guns, no guns, it doesn’t matter — you have people that are mentally ill, and they’re going to come through the cracks, and they’re going to do things that people will not even believe are possible,” Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Caught in the stalemate, a group of college students, including several from Newtown, rallied with Norton on Capitol Hill this week to press for action.
“I am fully confident that we will come back here by the time my generation is running this country, and we will say, ‘What were we thinking 50 years ago?’ ” said Emma Iannini, from Newtown.
“How could we let the unabated carnage continue, shooting after shooting?”