Alphecca

Weekly Check on the Bias...

It would be hard to start this edition of the Weekly Check on the Bias without mentioning the horrendous school shooting in Red Lake, Minnesota yesterday. The police and FBI are still sorting it all out but here seem to be the facts so far:

A teenage student at Red Lake High School, Jeff Weise, was known as a loner who may have spent time visiting neo-Nazi websites, wore black, was teased by other students, and came from a tragic home. His mother suffered a brain injury in an automobile accident and was in a nursing home. His father committed suicide several years ago. The boy was living with his grandparents. His grandfather was a tribal policeman in the small community.

At some point yesterday, Weise took his grandfather's guns (two pistols and a shotgun) and murdered his grandparents (or grandfather and girlfriend in some reports). Then he went to his school and killed an unarmed security guard, entered the school and killed a teacher and five more students, injured at least a dozen others, and then took the coward's way out by killing himself.

According to one report I heard on NBC news, Weise was angry at students in the school for reporting him to the principal as having made a previous threat to shoot students. All of this is unconfirmed as I write this.

I'll only make the following observations since it's too early for the editorials and op-eds to appear decrying the lack of gun control as somehow having lead to this horror.

None of the newspaper or TV accounts are playing up the "gun" angle yet since it appears they were ordinary ones that don't fit the media's profile of "rapid spraying assault weapons" that they love to blather about.

Since the weapons were obtained at his grandfather's home, the usual mantras about "gun show loopholes" or gun makers "flooding the streets with guns" isn't being heard, either.

One curious quote appeared in today's New York Times:

Clyde Bellecourt, founder of the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement, said he could not "remember anything as tragic as this happening" on a reservation.

"Everyone in the Indian community is feeling really bad right now, whether they're a member of the Red Lake or not, we're all an extended family, we're all related," he said. "Usually this happens in places like Columbine, white schools, always somewhere else. We never hear that in our community."

Unfortunately no, Mr. Bellecourt, a disturbed young man can appear almost anywhere and wreck havoc on a community.

Thusly, we are left with a conclusion that the problem wasn't gun control but mental illness control. There were certainly enough clues. From today's Pioneer Press:

At least a dozen other students were wounded by the teenage gunman, identified by tribal members as Jeff Weise, a sophomore who enjoyed Marilyn Manson music and had expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler on various online forums.

[...]

In a couple of postings to a nationalist forum last year, Weise eerily foreshadowed Monday's events. He claimed last April that authorities had questioned him about alleged plans to "shoot up the school on 4/20, Hitlers (sic) birthday."

On Internet sites Weise sometimes used the names "Todesengel'' — German for "angel of death'' — or "NativeNazi."

And from the Evening Standard (UK):

A couple of his friends had said he was suicidal and had once said: "That would be cool if I shot up the school."

[...]

Weise posted a message on a Nazi website, which said: "Hello all. My name is Jeff Weise, a Native American from the Red Lake 'Indian' reservation in Minnesota.

"I'm interested in joining the group, as I support your ideals and even though I am young, I still want to join. What is the age requirement (if any)?"

If true, this eerily shadows the Columbine incident where there were previous threats not taken seriously enough.

I guess we'll see how it all plays out but my heart goes out to all of the victims and their families.

One might well ask how something like this can happen, where was the parental control? Well, we know in this case that his parents couldn't be there and most policemen are kept very busy, leaving a disturbed kid to his own devices such as an unsupervised computer. And there were probably no social workers from the school trying to find out what was bothering him. We may never know.

With a hat-tip to the always hyper-active (and excellent) pro-2A blogger Say Uncle my attention was drawn to this silly editorial from the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin which says:

While I am a full-fledged supporter of the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, I have a really hard time believing that our forefathers, when writing the Amendment, thought ordinary citizens would end up hiding behind it to own semi-automatic weapons.

The original reason these gentlemen added this amendment was because they believed citizens of the newly created United States of America deserved to defend themselves against an enemy, foreign or domestic.

Let's recall that at that point in time, we had just defeated the British Army and ended the tyranny on our soil by the government of Great Britain.

These founding fathers had in mind that each individual had the right to own their rifles or pistols, and, while they never specifically clarified what type of arms these are, I really cannot fathom that AK-47s and semi-automatic machine guns were what they had in mind.

Presumably the writer, Matt Werlein, is also a "full-fledged supporter" of the First Amendment. I might point out that the founding fathers crafted that one to allow open discourse on politics and the right of people to speak or to print news and opinions free from the control of government. They certainly didn't have in mind the free-flow of pornography, violent television shows and computer games, displaying the crucifix in a jar of urine, or burning the American flag. Does he think we should allow these examples of "free speech" to be banned? Neither do I. The First Amendment and the Second Amendment have served us well and they don't need to be "regulated".

He goes on to make many mistatements about firearms but Say Uncle dispatches with those.

There's other fallout from the recent violence in Wisconsin including a bill that would require all private gun sales to be reported to the police. From the Janesville Gazette (WI):

Three mothers of shooting victims are pushing for a law that would regulate gun sales by unlicensed gun sellers in Milwaukee County.

One of the mothers, Debra Fifer, is being backed by Sen. Spencer Coggs, D-Milwaukee. Coggs said he plans to introduce such a bill in the state Legislature and is looking for a co-sponsor.

The law would require county residents to register their guns and report gun sales between individuals with the state Department of Justice.

Fifer said the law would hold responsible whoever sold the gun to Jaki Marion, the man who shot and killed her son, Kirk Bickham Jr., and two other men outside a Milwaukee bar in 2003.

Bickham is serving three life-terms for the murders. That seems right to me and I wonder why Fifer thinks the person who sold him the gun should be liable? If I sell a car to someone and they then drive drunk and kill a family, should I be held liable? Of course not!

Fifer is also fighting a different sort of legislation working it's way through the Wisconsin Statehouse:

Fifer is also fighting a bill working its way through the Legislature that would largely ban injury and death lawsuits against gun manufacturers, dealers and importers and others.

That bill is working its way through the legislative process.

State Rep. Mark Pettis, R-Hertel, who introduced the bill, said it's necessary to prevent frivolous lawsuits that could put dealers and small gun manufacturers out of business.

The bill would also protect hunting clubs and shooting range owners from liability.

Gun control advocates have turned to lawsuits in the courts because they have failed to undermine gun owner rights through legislation, Pettis said.

[...]

Fifer said she supports gun owner rights. But she wants dealers and manufacturers held responsible when those weapons fall into the hands of children or others, such as convicted felons, who have no legal right to possess them.

If someone doesn't have a legal right to own a firearm, that is the responsibility of the law, not the manufacturer if he has made a legal product and distributed it legally. It is her type of thinking that makes such a bill necessary.

The last story once again takes us to South Africa. I've written and ranted about how new laws there make it all but impossible for the average law-abiding citizen to obtain a firearms permit (license). And just as we saw in England and Australia (where guns were all but banned) the crime rate is skyrocketing. From CNN:

South Africans are more likely to be shot than suffer any other kind of unnatural death as gun crime pushes the country's violent death rate to up to 8 times the global average, a study showed on Tuesday.

Firearms and alcohol were key culprits in the report by the Medical Research Council, providing a fresh illustration of the dangers of life in a country known for some of the highest rates of violent crime in the world.

The survey showed 48 percent of more than 22,000 unnatural deaths surveyed were caused by violence.

Firearms made up 28 per cent of the total and sharp force injuries such as stabbings accounted for 15 percent. Twelve percent of those suffering unnatural deaths were pedestrians hit by vehicles.

"A lot of these deaths take place in the home or on the streets," said researcher Richard Matzopoulos. "A firearm gets picked up. If there hadn't been a firearm in the house it wouldn't have been a fatality."

I included that last inane quote because, how does Matzopoulos know that there wouldn't have been a fatality? They could have used a knife, as 15% did. They could have run over them with the car or "brained them" with the bottle of alcohol that figures so prominently in his statistics. Since CNN didn't bother gathering any quotes other than from the writer of the press-release it's difficult to know what else is going on in these homes and on the streets.

I'd say, though, that with a rising crime-rate, maybe the answer is in criminal control, yah? Unmentioned is how many "unnatural deaths" were prevented with firearms, a common ploy also used by gun control advocates here in the U.S.

I'd better get this posted. You can hear me live later today on Cam's NRA Live. Thanks for stopping by!

Posted by Jeff Soyer at March 22, 2005 09:53 AM