Mostly Cloudy / 38° FJohn Eby: Trying to make sense of a senseless tragedy
It doesn’t make much sense to me that a bottle of shampoo can’t be carried onto an airplane, yet mentally ill people can buy semi-automatic weapons. But then I’m the guy wondering if we borrowed money from China to have that White House state dinner for President Hu Jintao.
Mainstream politicians from both parties, from President Obama to Speaker John Boehner and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, seem to be measuring their words and striving for less charged rhetoric and a softer political tone without limiting free speech. Mark Halperin in Time magazine even goes so far as to suggest politicians find the courage to “move from denouncing hostile rhetoric broadly to the steeper step of calling out members of their own clan.”
There is a cruel irony in that moderate Congresswoman and gun owner Gabrielle Giffords read aloud the First Amendment to the Constitution as one of her last public acts before being shot in the head Jan. 8 in Tucson.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, the right of Americans to peaceably assemble and petition their government. She was largely lost in the cacophony which enveloped cable about the limits and excesses of free speech.
As for the Second Amendment, where does it grant the right to bear assault weapons?
This makes no sense to me.
More than two decades ago, in 1989, conservative Judge Robert Bork said the Second Amendment guaranteed “the right of states to form militias, not for individuals to bear arms,” though the National Rifle Association certainly disagrees and no longer seems to have to contend with traditional push back from Democrats.
In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled local governments cannot impose strict gun-control provisions. A madman in this Old West state could enter a gun store, purchase a Glock 19 pistol and carry it about, concealed, without a permit, into a bar, a church or catch a cab to a political rally outside a Safeway grocery store on a Saturday morning in broad daylight.
Arizona’s one of three such states. You know Alaska’s another. Vermont’s the third.
Fifteen seconds, 30 bullets in a clip, six dead in a country that in a study of 23 high-income countries had 80 percent of gun deaths. Talking heads turned on Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for going too far decrying extremist rhetoric, but it felt right when he said it.
We began to learn about Dallas Green’s (he managed the Phillies to the 1980 World Series title) granddaughter, Christina Green, 9, born on 9/11.
“Princess” to her dad, John, who scouts for the Dodgers.
She liked baseball (second base as the lone girl on her Little League team), Beyonce, music, swimming and dance and asked to volunteer at a soup kitchen for Christmas.
The third grader’s election to student council at Mesa Verde Elementary helped put her chest in harm’s way at Congress on Your Corner in the parking lot of La Toscana Village strip shopping center. She’s one of eight children and teens who die from gun violence every day.
For some reason, I’m embarrassed her killer played saxophone in the school band, like me.
But he quit, drank heavily and did drugs, including hallucinogens. He lost jobs at Quiznos and an animal shelter because he wouldn’t or couldn’t take direction. Now this paranoid, voice-hearing, possible schizophrenic rejected by the Army and a community college failure (outbursts of hysterical laughter scared classmates) is rewarded with the cover of Time magazine.
In the now-familiar maniacal photo, he leers like The Joker.
Not Christina or her five ill-fated friends —John Roll, 63, a federal judge; Phyllis Schneck, 79, a retired great-grandmother from New Jersey active in her church and as a volunteer; Gabe Zimmerman, 30, Giffords’ engaged outreach director; Dorothy “Dot” Morris, 76, who moved from Reno with her high school sweetheart she married 55 years ago; and Dorwan Stoddard, 76, a former construction worker and daily church volunteer who shields his wife Mavy from the shooting. This makes no sense to me, either. Phyllis especially pierces my heart because this lifelong Republican went to impart encouraging words for her Democratic representative.
I never utter the names of these violent Voldemorts, not after Columbine, not after Virginia Tech, not since John Lennon.
He’s harbored a grudge against Giffords since an encounter when she brushed off a nonsensical question — in 2007, the year Jordan graduated from high school, George W. Bush lived at the White House, Hillary Clinton was frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nod, trailed 30 points by a freshman Illinois senator with a funny name, Barack Obama, and Gov. Sarah Palin was unknown except to Alaska. The Virginia Tech massacre of 33, including the shooter, occurred in 2007. Yet deranged college students still fall through the cracks only to emerge toting guns.
David Von Drehle wades wisely through the minefield opened by an “unhinged young man at war with normal … it’s not one side against the other. It’s both sides against normal. Right or left, their genius is for dramatizing trivial things; there is no other way to remain outraged 24/7 … It is a climate of their own creation, ginned up on both extremes for the purpose of keeping their (relatively small) audiences in a state of perpetual alarm … When the cabal is allowed to define political reality, the result is dysfunctional government.” I read that studies suggest that the broader culture, including political climate, can affect the content of a psychotic person’s delusions, including what an agitated person perceives as threats.
Normal needs to fight back, like on the that dark Tuesday when Christina was born when ordinary folks stormed the cockpit of a hijacked jet which crashed in Pennsylvania instead of into a Washington landmark.
Like the guy who cracked a folding chair across the madman’s back. Staggered, retired U.S. Army colonel Bill Bader, seizes him by the arm and forces him to the pavement despite blood streaming from a head wound.
A woman, Patricia Maisch, pries the clip from the gunman’s hand as he tries to reload, to use a pet Palin political word.
Enter Steve Rayle, who throws himself across the midsection of madness, and Joseph Zamudo, who dashes over from Walgreens and falls on his legs.
Her intern, Daniel Hernandez, cradles her upright in his lap so she won’t choke to death on her own blood.
They should occupy the cover of Time magazine.
The NRA, which equates any restriction with rampant tyranny, always suggests if everyone’s armed to the teeth, we’ll be safer, but once again we are shown the fallacy of that argument.
The NRA graded Giffords a D for coupling support of the Second Amendment with being reasonable.
Contrary to the whipped-up frenzy that this progressive Chicago Democrat intended to confiscate your arsenal, he’s skirted the issue and even signed two laws expanding gun access in national parks and on Amtrak trains.
A Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence report graded the president an F for gun control leadership.
Back when he still styled himself a compassionate conservative, George W. Bush vowed to extend Bill Clinton’s 10-year assault-weapons ban of 1994, but let it expire in 2004.
Should rhetoric be toned down? Brown University President Ruth Simmons says we should “cease the incessant vilification of others based on their beliefs” because it “does have very, very damaging effects on young people.”
“The blessing of freedom requires work and commitment by those who would enjoy it,” Bush’s homeland security adviser Fran Townsend says. “It requires that we listen. It requires that we challenge ideas with better alternatives and not with force, violence and weapons.”
“If we stop trying to exploit it for political purposes,” David Gergen said, “and instead seize upon it as a fresh chance to change our culture of violence — too much hate, too many guns, too many killings. The bitterness in politics is part of this larger trouble,” since there is no evidence it prompted” the madman.
“The finger-pointing should stop. We knew long before Tucson that it must be cleaned up … America will always be rough and tumble — that’s in our DNA — but generations past have proved we can also be a noble people.”
When normal rises up from the CNN-watching middle and says enough to the ideologue extremes tuned to Fox or MSNBC, look out, because the silent majority has numbers on its side.
Recall there was a time when Oprah and Jerry Springer put on the same sleazy sort of show, but she cleaned up her act, aimed for a higher plane, started an influential book club and now presides over her own network.
He’s still the former mayor of Cincinnati.
Interesting thing about China. In 2010, we spent $729 billion on the military, compared to their $78 billion, yet they have 2.3 million active personnel to our 1.6 million.
We do lead them 11-0 in aircraft carriers.
John Eby is Daily News managing editor. E-mail him at john.eby@leaderpub.com.
