President Donald Trump recently called to the White House
one of his most acerbic critics, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, to chat about gun
control and school safety; the two are not at all the same thing. Murphy could
hardly refuse. Trump wanted Murphy to shape, in concert with others, a national
package that might help to prevent the slaughter of innocents in schools and
also the victims of gun violence in our large cities, the nation’s shooting
galleries, a “comprehensive” reform of gun laws that would ameliorate
conditions in cities such as Chicago, former President Barack Obama’s abandoned
haunt, and school kids left at the mercy of gun toting mass murderers.
Murphy and his confederate in the congress, Connecticut
Senator Dick Blumenthal, had persistently denounced Trump as “eccentric,” and
touched with madness, accusations laundered through Connecticut’s media that have
been temporarily shelved now that the madman is making cooing gestures in
Murphy’s direction; for, really, how could a madman be both mad, when he is fighting excessive
regulations, business destroying taxes, and the baneful effects of a dying
Obamacare wreck, and yet sane when he is cooing in the
direction of Murphy and Blumenthal on the matter of gun control?
Trump strongly indicated what he wanted. The comprehensive reforms he had in mind would include an
expansion of FBI background checks for gun purchasers. “We are determined,”
Trump said, “to turn grief into action.”
Guns should immediately be taken from the mentally ill,
Trump said: “…take the guns first, go through the legal process later.” This is
the equivalent of the old Western maxim: “shoot first and ask questions later.”
One can expect stiff resistance on this reform, not from the demagogued
National Rifle Association (NRA), but from the American Civil Liberty Union
(ACLU), which is likely to argue: If you can’t demonstrate before a judge that
Mary Smith, who has no prior police record, is indeed mentally ill, then she
ought to be left in peace with her lawful purchases. It is not altogether
certain Murphy would favor the infiltration of sanctuary cities in Connecticut
by armed federales looking to deprive illegal aliens with presumed mental problems
of their illegally acquired weapons. And, of course, none of the proposals made
by Murphy and Blumenthal would touch the circulation of already illegal weapons
in the nation’s forgotten cities, such as shoot’em’up Chicago or Hartford,
Connecticut.
According to an account in CTMirror,
“Murphy repeatedly warned Trump against underestimating the gun lobby’s clout.”
The Trump response to political push-back was typically Trumping: not to worry,
Trump pushes back harder: After the meeting, “Murphy also said he was surprised
by the president’s willingness to back so many changes to federal gun laws
‘forcefully’ and by the president’s ‘tone.’ He was very dismissive of the gun
lobby.”
Murphy said Trump had “outflanked” Democrats encouraging
other states to copy Connecticut’s response to school shootings by restricting
guns. When Trump said he would favor allowing state courts to take away guns
from those who are a danger to themselves and others without first obtaining a
warrant, Murphy demurred: “I don’t think I can support that,” he said. Indeed,
Murphy, whose campaign coffers currently are bursting with more than $5
million, likely has not received many campaign contributions from the NRA, but the
ACLU and those who support its agenda possibly are more generous contributors,
and the The ACLU is no less powerful a lobby than the NRA.
Years after Dawn Hochsprung,
the heroic principal of Sandy Hook Elementary school, stepped unarmed into a
killing corridor to confront Adam Lanza, armed with a semi-automatic AR15 and two
semi-automatic handguns – Lanza had left a Izhmash Saiga 12-gauge semiautomatic
shotgun in trunk of a car he had taken from his mother, whom he murdered with a
22 rifle – we are still pondering
the question “does gun restriction alone” make schools safer? Murphy and
Blumenthal have devoted most of their energies in combating the NRA lobby and banning
specific firearms, but not the 22 rifle he used to shoot his mother. There are two problems with this non-comprehensive solution:
1) restrictive gun laws do not prevent the violent in our society from
illegally acquiring guns and other assault weapons; 2) focusing most of the nation's attention on gun restrictions is dangerously misleading, because school safety
depends chiefly on hardening schools from assaults such as occurred in Sandy
Hook and most recently at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.
According to a recent Hartford Courant report,
“Nearly half the school districts in the state [of Connecticut] are violating
at least some aspect of the law requiring them to submit school security
information.” The law was passed more than five years ago, in response to the Sandy
Hook shooting. And of course we know that the transfer of information from schools to an indifferent state will not shield some future heroic Hochsprung from some future Lanza. Harden the schools. Adopt the threat mitigation method of child protection created in Israel and adopted by the Indiana Department of Education.
But no... as Connecticut’s two senators, now joined by an allegedly eccentric president
touched by madness, might say: First take the guns, then make safe the schools
and cities – maybe.
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