|
|
|
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
By Armando Vega
Staff Writer
What is it about school shootings
that are so endemic to
America? I’ve talked to foreign
students who are perplexed that
guns are so readily available in
this country and that shootings
are so common. Some people
have wondered aloud if this is a
cultural phenomenon unique to
America, marking remarks about“another American school shooting.”
Some have said that there was
nothing we could do, that unlike
the signs surrounding Virginia
Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho,
this attack had come from out
of the blue. Yet deeper research
reveals that while there was no
way of knowing what Steven
Kazmierczak, widely regarded
as an involved and hard-working
student, would do on Feb. 14,
it isn’t quite true that there was
nothing that could be done to
prevent this from happening.
Northern Illinois University’s
Police Chief Donald Grady has
said Kazmierczak’s behavior had
become erratic in the weeks prior
to the shooting, apparently according
to reports from friends
and family. He’d been inducted
into a psychiatric treatment center
in Chicago by his parents,
where one employee has said he
would cut himself and resisted
taking medications. He received
a psychological discharge from
the Army after serving a sixmonth
stint. Kazmierczak had
passed the criminal background
checks when purchasing a shotgun
and three handguns from
the same Champaign gun store
over several intervals, but more
troubling was his possession of a
firearms owner ID card.
The application for these IDs
asks: “In the past five years haveyou been a patient in any
medical facility or part of any medical facility
used primarily for the care
or treatment of persons for mental
illness?” It’s not clear when
Steven Kazmierczak was issued
the card, but questions arise
when considering the situation.
If he’d been issued the card prior
to his admission to the psychiatric
facility in Chicago, shouldn’t
his admittance to such have nullified
the card, which then could
have become apparent during
the background checks? Was the
card issued after his admittance,
with the State Police or other
collaborating agencies unable to
determine that Kazmierczak had
lied on the application?
In our gun-lax culture, was
he simply one of those few individuals
with histories highlighting
mental-health issues who,
for whatever reason, were determined
as satisfactory enough to
warrant the card? Why does the
question on the application only
make mention of mental health
facilities?
This question does not sufficiently ferret out all the information
available on the public
record regarding an individual’s
mental health, as evidenced by
the fact that Kazmierczak had
also received the psychological
discharge from the Army.
According to a report by
Deanna Bellandi of the Associated
Press, in a disturbing twist of
irony, Kazmierczak had obtained
handgun accessories from the
same “Green Bay-based Internet
gun dealer who sold a weapon to
the Virginia Tech shooter.” Eric
Thompson had sold two 9mm
Glock magazines, and a holster
for the weapon, through his website
www.topglock.com on February
4th. Seung-Hui Cho had
purchased a Walther .22 from
another of Thompson’s websites,
www.thegunstore.com.
Unavoidably, one facet of our
task in dealing with America’s
endemic crisis of school violence
is tackling the issue of gun-control
legislation. Both Seung-Hui
Cho and Steven Kazmierczak
had obtained all weapons used
during their rampages through
legal channels. I am not advocating
blanket gun-restrictions
on citizens (the strawman conservatives
tag as the aim of all
gun-control legislation).
Like so many other issues,
if the words of the Progressive
voice had been heeded long-ago,
our country would be safer today.
Now it looks like any sort of gun
control legislation would be more
complex than ever. According to
the Small Arms Survey 2007, a
report under the auspices of the
Geneva-based Graduate Institute
of International Studies, the United
States is easily the most heavily
armed country in the world.
There are nine guns for every ten
citizens of this country. “About
4.5 million of the 8 million new
guns manufactured worldwide
each year are purchased in the
United States,” states the report.
There are simply too many guns
at this point to allow for simple
solutions, but there are starting
points.
Here in Illinois, according to
the State Journal-Register, legislation
is being attempted which “would prohibit multiple sales of
handguns within a 30 day period.
[Senate Bill 102] has been stalled
for almost a year.” The identical
House Bill 4393 is still under
consideration in the House. This
to me seems like very sensible
legislation. Of course, some
have differing opinions.
Representative Rich Myers,
a Republican from Colchester,
stated “Every time an incident
like this occurs, you hear more
and more people talk about additional
gun-control laws. I thinkwhen you really look at the situation,
it was the individual, not
the gun.” This is the traditional,
yet patently flawed analogy employed
by critics of gun-control
legislation. A comparable analogy
would be to state that in instances
of vehicular manslaughter,
it’s the individual, through
recklessness or malice, who’s at
fault and not the vehicle, and
that is precisely why we have
statutes compelling individuals
to enroll in high school driver’s
education, undergo supervised
driving sessions, and take a final driving test prior to being
issued a license. Again, those of
us advocating for gun-control
legislation would largely abstain
from overtly onerous restrictions
inhibiting “law-abiding” citizens
from acquiring munitions.
“People can get as many guns
as they want,” says State Senator
Mattie Hunter (D-Chicago).“There should be a cooling-off
period to allow authorities the
time to do more extensive mental-health and criminal background
checks. Most of the
people purchasing more than one
gun a month don’t qualify for the
first gun.”
What we want are reasonable
restrictions impeding access to
guns for individuals who have no
business seeking to acquire them.
In Illinois, handguns and long
guns do not legally require registration
with authorities (except
in some select municipalities),
and non-residents can purchase
weapons from state gun shows
with no waiting period. To be
fair however, for the most part Illinois’ existing gun-control legislation
is reasonable. Unfortunately,
gun-control legislation cannot
prove effective at the state level
with fifty different variations of
law, and the impossibility of preventing
guns from crossing stateborders
nationwide; the issue isone that demanded comprehensive,
lasting, and meaningful
federal action decades ago.
A more difficult task is understanding
the cultural and psychological
implications of rampant
school shootings, and trying to
ameliorate those factors. According
to Sheryl Frye, a former
UIS counselor now working on
Northern Illinois University’s
campus, it’s not professional for
a counselor to make assumptions
about the motives behind
someone’s behavior when they
have never met the person. However,
are there general implications
and conclusions that can be
drawn from these episodes? Is it
relevant that in the months prior
to the shooting
Kazmierczak had gotten what
some would call satanic tattoos: a
menacing, bloody doll on a tricycle,
a pentagram, a flaming skull
impaled by a sword? Should
the media neglect to report on
the identity of these shooters to
deny them the sort of notoriety
so many of them posthumously
seek?
Will the copycat shooters
have less of an incentive if we
deny these barbarians a chance at
being held “martyrs” in the public
eye, as some of them seem to
suppose themselves to be? To be
sure, this would do less to prevent
gunmen motivated by sheer
resentment, but it’s a start. With
those individuals is outreach, or
perhaps social habituation programs,
called for?
These are all difficult questions,
but ones that we need to
address. In memory of the fallen
at NIU, if we are truly committed
to preventing such loss of life in
the future to the best that we are
able, we should resolve ourselves
to consider any policy and leave
nothing off the table in our proposals
to end the crisis of school
shootings in America.
