In considering the Arizona “Congress on your Corner” massacre, we have a complex issue of causation and blame to resolve. We are handicapped by not fully undersanding the mental state and motivations of Jared Loughner, thought we may have cause to suspect that his mental stability is in question. Beyond the questions regarding his sanity, however, and the hot debate regarding the role played by political invective in the event, there is the question of his access to the handgun and the extended magazine.
This is a valid question. If we consider the question of his sanity, or his poltical motivation, and if it were hypothetically conclude that Loughner were totally insane, or part of an assassination conspiracy, such conclusions would still not release us from consideration of the weaponry issue. Police will tell you that motive plus opportunity equals a crime. Even with plenty of motive, Loughner could not have killed six and severely injured a Congresswoman plus numerous others without the opportunity afforded by a 9mm handgun plus an extended clip. A knife or a baseball bat would not have been up to the job.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre of two years ago, in which a mentally ill student killed thirty two students and faculty in a college classroom building, we began to ask questions about mentally ill people and their access to guns. Seung Hui Cho appeared in a courtroom months before his rampage, and was there declared a “danger to himself” by a judge, and yet was later able to buy two handguns in a gun shop which he then used to deadly effect. Terrified students tempted to attack him hand to hand found that the two handguns enabled him to reload one weapon while using the other. A state commission after the massacre requested that background checks be imposed on weapon purchasing at Gun Shows in Virginia, but this has still not happened.
The access of mentally ill to gun purchasing remains an issue partly because of the difficulty of identifying mentally ill. But in some cases, the evidence is pretty clear but ignored. Jared Loughner had at least five altercations at Pima Community College in which police were summoned to a classroom or the library to deal with his confrontational attitude. Pima finally suspended Loughner, then sat down with his parents to tell them that he would not be allowed back until after he saw a mental health counsellor. The counselling apparently did not ever happen. We can assign blame to Jared’s parents perhaps, but society does not make it clear who has authority to label adults as mentally ill and in our litigious society, few non-relatives are willing to make up for the hesitation of parents to do their job.
We can ask the question, where is the logical point for society to step between a mentally ill person and a successful massacre? Is the key to identify the insane and provide them treatment? Fine, but society is not making the financial and informational investment to make that happen. Would a backup plan be to abridge gun rights only to the extent of imposing some form of sanity testing? Would it be appropriate to consider a long record of physical altercations and policing incidents a reason to put an adult on the Do Not Buy list instead of the present high hurdle of identifying every insane person in society?
There is an additional issue here, technically involving gun accessories. Are expanded ammunition clips like the one that allowed Loughner to fire 30 rounds from one weapon an invitation to mass murder? Is the convenience of allowing gun owners to save a few seconds at a firing range from switching magazines enough of a justification to keep these gun accessories widely available? Expanded ammo clips were illegal up to 2004, when Congress made them legal. Was this legalization a bad idea? Clearly, if Loughner had only had a ten round clip, he would have run out of bullets much earlier and would have been tackled by heroic bystanders in time to make his body count far lower. The legalization of extended ammo clips cost us human lives in this case.