Thursday - April 19, 2007
System Breakdown
The system let us down ... again. What you see in the image below is complete, total madness. You see it all the time in faces in Gaza, Baghdad, Kosovo, Darfur and other garden spots overseas. The problem I have is that this appeared in America - supposedly the most civilized, highly advanced, free and open society on the planet.
We have laws and a system of law enforcement and government to protect us against this kind of animal - and make no mistake, this is an animal, raging against society. It seems like every few years we fall victim to some mentally deranged perp like this individual, Timothy McVeigh, Charles Manson, Son Of Sam, etc. And every time we go through this same hand-wringing, navel-gazing exercise wherein we struggle with events and try to cope with grief while we promise that we’ll change things so that it never happens again.
Ain’t gonna happen, people. The fact is our laws and the system we have in place to identify and help creepy people like this are broken. They are walking around in your town and mine every day just waiting for that little voice in their head to give the “go” signal. Is this an “American problem”. Not by any means. In fact, we’re probably better at catching people like this before they do harm than any other country in the world. That’s why the rest of the world recoils in shock when it happens here.
What’s really hard to understand is the fact that this young man had it all. A comfortable existence in an upper middle-class family, being educated at one of the finest colleges in the world, surrounded by friendly students and living in a society that gave him every freedom to do whatever he wanted to do with his life. Instead of taking advantage of all of this and making something of himself, something went wrong inside his head and all he saw was hatred of everything around him.
Why? Good question - and whose answer we will probably never know since this young man was kind enough to off himself after raging against everyone within easy reach. And yet we have a system of psychiatrists, social workers, counselors to help keep people like this from going over the edge - and we have the best medical system in the world to treat them.
We also have one of the most sophisticated law enforcement systems in the world that allows firearms vendors to collect information from a prospective buyer, phone it in and within fifteen minutes a background check is done prior to allowing the sale to continue. If the buyer has a criminal record or is not a US citizen or has been treated for mental illness or even simply been dishonorably discharged from the military the sale is forbidden. I know - I’ve filled out that form many times when purchasing firearms. So how did this deranged creature fall through the cracks?
It all comes down to privacy and the sheer volume of data. First, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) says your medical records and history are in a lock box and no one, not even law enforcement, can access them without your permission. Second, to run a complete background check to verify everything you put down on the firearms purchase application would, in reality even with today’s modern databases, take several days because military records are stored in one place, criminal records are scattered across 50 states and Washington and citizenship and immigration records are stored in other places in those 50 states and Washington.
Now we come to the crux of the matter. The Second Amendment says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Hey, I’m all for that. The alternative is to have all of the honest citizens turn in their legally owned firearms and trust the government to protect us. Take a deep breath and see how many things you can find wrong with that last sentence. I count four. No, this government we are supposed to entrust our safety to is the same government that requires 24-hour protection of the President and Vice President, including a bullet-proof limousine and armed bodyguards for Senators like Ted Kennedy. If they don’t trust themselves why should we?
So what do we do? Probably not much of anything except talk and talk and talk. To make the system safer we would have to give up privacy in our medical records and allow the government to interconnect all of the law enforcement, birth, death, immigration and personal registration databases for faster, more thorough retrieval - which would be a monumental task to begin with since most of those databases are in different formats and can’t talk to each other easily. Even if they could be interconnected and streamlined, it would leave the door open for abuse by government officials who could view everything about you in a flash. Big Brother.
Is there a solution? I think so. We need to stop thinking like victims, as some here have said. Professor Librescu at Virginia Tech showed what one man can do against evil. If we all adopted the attitude that we are NOT going to go quietly into that good night we would stand a much better chance of surviving incidents like this. That used to be the American spirit anyway - something we seem to have lost in this pampered, jaded, cynical society of the 21st century.
My advice for all of you reading this is to buy a firearm, learn how to use it, wrap your head around the attitude that you’re not going to go down quietly before any monsters lurking out there and while you’re at it ... keep an eye on that person next to you. Yeah. That one.
“If Students Were Armed They Could Fight Back”
ROANOKE, VA (TELEGRAPH-UK) - 2:23am BST 19/04/2007
What vexes John Markell most about the Virginia Tech massacre is not that he sold the killer one of his guns but that none of the victims was able to shoot back. “I shoot with those people at the university - the professors, the deans, the grad students - and they shoot good,” he said, fiddling with the same model handgun as that used in the killings.
The owner of Roanoke Firearms, a packed armoury of shotguns, assault rifles and handguns a half-hour drive from the university, said that his daughter graduated from Virginia Tech 10 years ago. “What aggravates me is that my daughter is a heck of a shot and she has a concealed weapon permit but nobody is allowed to carry a gun on campus,” he said.
Mr Markell, 58, has a well-rehearsed answer to whether he feels any responsibility for the 33 deaths. He doesn’t. “We’ve been here eight years and sold 16,000 guns,” he said. “Six have been used in the commission of a crime - four murders and two suicides.
It was the student’s first and only visit and he was wholly unremarkable, said Mr Markell. “The fellow who served him barely recognised his picture when he was showed it yesterday.”
Cho paid $571 (£285) for the chunky black Glock - a police favourite and one of Mr Markell’s biggest sellers - with a credit card in a 10-minute process Mr Markell describes tellingly as the “instant background check”.
Cho produced a Virginian drivers’ licence, his alien residency card and a cheque book printed with his address. The accompanying call to the state police to check his history can delay a sale for up to three days, said Mr Markell.
But while Cho’s behaviour was so disturbing that both fellow students and Lucinda Roy, the university’s former head of English, contacted police, evidently none of this was flagged up in the few minutes that an officer spent running his name through the police computer.
Unless he had committed a serious misdemeanour, the check wouldn’t be held up by police, experts said yesterday. The Roanoke gun store also included a rack of lethal-looking assault rifles. These couldn’t have been bought by Cho as he wasn’t a US citizen, Mr Markell said.
- More ...
Posted by The Skipper
on 04/19/2007 at 04:14 AM
Filed Under: • Crime •
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