Newtown an american tragedy pdf

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Gun Control Can Prevent School Shootings School Safety. 2016. COPYRIGHT 2016 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text:

Article Commentary

Matt Bennett, "The Promise: The Families of Sandy Hook and the Long Road to Gun Safety," Brookings Institution, July 11, 2013. www.brookings.edu. Copyright © 2013 The Brookings Institution. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.

"Beyond the headlines there is a steady daily tally of violence that is mainly ignored in the press."

Matt Bennett is cofounder and senior vice president for public affairs of Third Way; he served as an adviser on gun policy to Sandy Hook Promise, an organization that advocates mental health and wellness as it relates to gun safety. In the following viewpoint, Bennett discusses his work with the families of the children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The families are lobbying for gun control legislation to restrict firearm sales and to close loopholes that allow people to obtain guns at gun shows or online without having background checks. Bennett says that the legislative process is very difficult because of strong opposition from the gun lobby. However, he believes that the Sandy Hook families can help make legislation possible and that better gun control laws can reduce gun violence.

As you read, consider the following questions:

What are some possible sources of the American passion for guns, according to Bennett?1. According to the viewpoint, who is Wayne LaPierre, and what is his importance in the gun control debate?2. Why is Bennett hopeful, even though the Sandy Hook families failed to get legislation passed?3.

It was the saddest roll call I've ever heard. "I'm Nelba; my daughter's name is Ana; she was six." "I'm Mark; my son's name was Daniel; he was seven." "I'm Nicole; my son's name is Dylan; he's six."

Sandy Hook Families for Gun Control

And on it went, as we sat around the table of a sterile conference room at a DC law firm, the confused and confusing mix of tenses signaling the freshness of loss, the impossibility of comprehending it yet. It was late January 2013, barely a month after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and these were the families of some of the victims. Eleven of them had somehow summoned the strength to come to Washington to meet privately with Vice President [Joe] Biden, members of Congress and cabinet members. But they weren't here simply to accept high-level condolences. They had come to listen and to learn about mental health and school safety policy. And they were preparing to wade into some of the roughest waters in American politics: the gun debate.

I was there to help them navigate those waters. The families' DC-based advisor had invited my organization, Third Way—a group deeply involved with efforts to change the gun laws—to give them a sense of what they were in for.

At that moment, with teddy bears still adorning makeshift shrines all over Newtown, [Connecticut,] it seemed that progress on gun safety would be inevitable. President [Barack] Obama had given a resolute speech in Connecticut vowing to fight for change, and members of Congress seemed to be reacting more like parents than politicians. Senator Joe Manchin, a gun-owning Democrat from West Virginia, said on television what many Americans were saying at their kitchen tables: "They are killing our babies; this has got to stop."

As Joe Manchin knew, however, it was never going to be that simple. Time and again, high-profile gun crimes—from assassinations to mass shootings—had seemed to galvanize public opinion. Yet time and again, this sense of urgency had faded, as the gun lobby slowed momentum in Congress to a crawl and then, often, to a halt.

I stood before the Sandy Hook families on that day in January to brief them on the basics of gun policy and politics. These are smart, educated people. They assumed that, in the wake of this horror, Congress would pass some long-overdue gun safety measures. By then, however, this much was already clear to the political classes: There wasn't going to be a renewed ban on assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition magazines, no matter how wrenching the scene in Newtown. Congress just didn't have the courage to take such a step. The Senate wouldn't pass it, and the House

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wouldn't even consider it.

When I broke this news to the families, one of the mothers let me know, gently but firmly, that I had screwed up. "Don't tell us what can't be done, because we just aren't prepared to hear that," she said. "Tell us that it could take time, which we can accept, because we're in this for the long haul. And tell us what we can do now to honor the memory of our children."

The Sandy Hook Promise

Never before had the families of the victims of a gun massacre come together with such a focused commitment to bring about legislative and social change to Washington. The group I was meeting with, Sandy Hook Promise (SHP), had gotten its start in Newtown in the days after the murders. It began as a gathering in one family's kitchen, with grief-stricken friends and neighbors of the victims vowing to support their community and to do something good for the country in the wake of such an overwhelming tragedy. Their "promise" was to listen and to learn, to promote dialogue, and to pursue "common sense solutions" in the areas of mental health, school safety and gun responsibility.

Staffed by a sea of volunteers from Newtown and led by a few business professionals who took leave from their jobs to run it, SHP grew with astonishing speed into a sophisticated, effective organization. They enlisted a highly respected Washington consultant, Ricki Seidman, to guide them, and she quickly assembled a team of advisors. Within weeks of the funerals, the staff and volunteers from the community, along with many of the victims' families themselves, were already working the corridors of power in Hartford. Eventually, they partnered with Governor Dannel Malloy on a strong new gun safety bill for Connecticut that flew through the legislature and was signed into law less than three months after the murders. At the same time, they began coming to Washington, where they were hoping to achieve a similar result in Congress.

Tim Makris, the father of a Sandy Hook Elementary fourth grader who was not hurt in the shootings, is a cofounder of SHP and runs it day to day. He and the other leaders of SHP were building the ship as it sailed, putting together an office, staffing it with volunteers, raising money, hiring consultants, tending to the many needs of the Sandy Hook community, and providing a support group for families of the victims as well as for those they call the "survivors"—the 12 kids who made it out alive from the two classrooms that were under attack.

At the same time, Makris and the others, including some of the victims' families themselves, were getting a crash course on Senate procedure, gun policy and, most of all, gun politics. They were beginning to appreciate the degree of moral authority they would wield in this debate—and also the severe limits on this unwanted new power....

So Many Guns in America, So Many Ways to Get Them

The question of how to make the country safer from the carnage of gun violence is vital, because the assassinations and mass murders that galvanize our attention every so often actually account for only a small percentage of gun-related deaths. Beyond the headlines there is a steady daily tally of violence that is mainly ignored in the press. The total number of gun deaths per year is about 31,000. This includes roughly 11,400 murders, 19,000 suicides and 600 accidental shootings—more than 10 firearms deaths per 100,000 people every year. By contrast, Japan, which has strict gun control laws, has 0.07 per 100,000, and Switzerland, where most citizens have guns in the home, has 3.84. In addition to deaths, the U.S. has about 80,000 firearms-related injuries annually and 500,000 crimes involving a firearm every year—about one per minute.

Because there is no national database of guns or gun owners, no one knows how many guns are in private hands in the U.S. According to polling, the rate of gun ownership (the percentage of households containing one or more firearms) has actually been falling over the last two decades, but the total number of guns in private possession has gone up sharply, from 200 million in 1994 to somewhere between 270 and 300 million today.

When we compare ourselves to other countries (using the latest data, from the 2007 Small Arms Survey), we find that the U.S. has by far the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world: 88 guns per 100 people. (Next on the list is Yemen, at 55 guns per 100.) At the conservative estimate of 270 million guns, Americans have stockpiled almost half of the privately owned firearms in the world.

The overwhelming majority of those guns are in the possession of responsible, law-abiding adults. But that leaves plenty that are not. The question confronting lawmakers is how to stop a legal product from getting into the hands of those who would use it for illegal purposes.

The answer begins with understanding where criminals get their guns, and we actually know a lot about that. First, in 90 percent of gun crimes, the firearm has changed hands at least once since the original sale, meaning that someone other than the first dealer provided the gun to the criminal. Second, about one-third of the guns involved in crime have crossed state lines, despite the federal prohibition against moving guns interstate. Third, the most common age of those who commit crimes with guns is 19, followed by 20, followed by 18, despite the fact that licensed dealers are not permitted to sell handguns to anyone under 21 (and virtually all gun crimes are committed with handguns). Taken together, these data suggest that crime guns tend to come from an interstate network of gun traffickers that moves guns out of the legal market and into the hands of criminals and minors. The traffickers who provide these crime guns get them from dealers (often through the use of "straw" purchasers who go through the background check for others), from theft, or from unregulated "private sales" at gun shows or through the Internet.

The patterns and sources of crime gun trafficking have been well known for a long time. Then representative [Chuck] Schumer was issuing reports about the so-called "iron highway" of black-market firearms as far back as 1996. But his was a lonely voice, and few put any effort into erecting roadblocks to stem the flow of this traffic.

The massacre at Columbine High School in 1999 changed that by spotlighting a main on-ramp to this highway: gun shows. One of the guns used by those underage killers was obtained for them by a girlfriend who was unaware of their plan. She bought it from an unlicensed seller at a gun show, and after the attack she testified that she would not have gone through with the transaction had she been asked to submit to a background

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check....

A Burning Passion for Guns

Because of what they have gone through, you would assume that the Sandy Hook families would be greeted with universal demonstrations of respect, kindness and sympathy, even by those who disagree with the legislative goals they are pursuing. But you would be wrong. When two of the families went to Hartford for a state legislative hearing in late January, some gun rights proponents made national news by heckling Neil Heslin, whose son Jesse was killed in the massacre. Dozens of activists in the crowd shouted "Second Amendment!" as Heslin testified.

The outbursts in the Connecticut capitol drew widespread opprobrium. Yet this was hardly the worst of what the families have suffered at the hands of some gun rights supporters. Indeed, a full-fledged conspiracy theory was hatched in the fevered fantasies of some Second Amendment absolutists. They accused the families of creating a "hoax," of faking the deaths of their children and adult loved ones. Facebook pages and YouTube channels were launched to "prove" this proposition. And some of the families received calls, e-mails and letters insisting that they were actors and liars, playing their part in an Obama-led scheme to abrogate gun rights.

This harassment of families in the midst of their deepest grief added a new level of barbarity to the debate over guns in America. And it made clear that for some, guns are a flashpoint in our politics that burns as hot as anything we have seen since the civil rights movement.

It is not clear where all of this passion comes from, because the headwaters of the American gun culture have never been discovered. It could be our frontier spirit; it could be our libertarian ethos; it could be the Second Amendment itself. Whatever the source, Americans in much of the country have developed the belief that gun ownership is somewhere on the continuum between being a legal privilege and a nearly sacred right.

Approximately 100 million adults live in a home with a gun. (The term "gun owner" can be slippery when it comes to family-owned firearms.) They break down roughly into three groups: those who own guns mainly for sport, those who own guns for protection, and those who own guns as a bulwark against government tyranny.

Numerous polls show that the overwhelming majority of people in the first two groups (sport shooters and home protectors) are comfortable with the kinds of commonsense restrictions on gun ownership advocated by the Sandy Hook parents. The third group, however, is made up of what we could call the "constitutionalists." Though a distinct minority, this group has come to control the terms of the gun debate, exercising a power that vastly exceeds their numbers. Their principal mechanism for wielding this power is, of course, the NRA [National Rifle Association of America].

The NRA

The National Rifle Association is nearly 150 years old and claims a membership of 4.5 million. For most of its history, the NRA was a stolid, safety-oriented group.... They handed out safe shooter patches to summer campers and worked on land conservation. At the annual NRA convention in 1977, however, the "Cincinnati Revolution" upended those traditions. Constitutionalists ousted the old leadership and installed a new, hard-line regime focused on the absolute protection of gun rights and broader conservative political activism.

Who these constitutionalists are and how many they number we don't know with any certainty. Some are anti-government conspiracy theorists who believe that the "black helicopters" are coming to take their guns. In the 1990s, the most radical of these formed so-called "militias" that refused to pay taxes or honor gun laws. They were the catalyst for the sieges and shootings at Ruby Ridge [site of a deadly confrontation and siege in northern Idaho in 1992 between a white separatist and federal marshals that resulted in three deaths] and Waco [referring to the siege of a Waco, Texas, compound belonging to a religious group known as the Branch Davidians by federal and state law enforcement and U.S. military in 1993], and they spawned Timothy McVeigh, the main bomber of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.

While most constitutionalists do not advocate violence, they are resolute about gun rights and gun ownership. They believe that gun laws actually make communities less safe by disarming the good guys. Post-Newtown, this was reflected in the NRA's central proposal, which was to put armed guards in schools and to give teachers gun training. And they reject any gun safety measure, no matter how small, as a Second Amendment violation. When they join the NRA, the constitutionalists subscribe not to American Rifleman, the NRA's magazine for mainstream sport shooters; they get America's 1st Freedom, the NRA's hard-line journal for its most committed core.

By 1991, when staff lobbyist Wayne LaPierre ascended to the post of executive vice president, the NRA had become the uncompromising political behemoth we know today. LaPierre has remained in power ever since, while the more ceremonial post of NRA president has rotated. Sometimes they have camera-ready presidents like Charlton Heston; at the moment they have James Porter, an ultraconservative Alabama lawyer who calls the Civil War "the War of Northern Aggression."

The NRA under LaPierre has never deviated from its goals, never softened its tone, no matter what the context. Only seven months after 9/11 [referring to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States], LaPierre gave a speech at the NRA convention where he attacked Americans for Gun Safety [AGS] for trying to "hijack your freedom and take a box-cutter to the Constitution." "That's political terrorism," he thundered, "and it's a far greater threat to your freedom than any foreign force."

The NRA's political bullying extends beyond its rhetoric. When AGS recruited [U.S. senator] John McCain to work with us on the gun show loophole legislation, the NRA turned on him. Despite his previous A-rating, the NRA attacked him publicly and threatened him with political war in private. They've done the same with countless other lawmakers, and they have made enemies; former president George H.W. Bush quit the group in disgust in 1995 when LaPierre called federal agents "jack-booted thugs ... wearing Nazi helmets and black storm trooper uniforms."

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Similar bullying—of friends who don't toe the line—occurs even within the gun industry. When the iconic firearms manufacturer Smith & Wesson agreed to a deal with the [Bill] Clinton administration on the issue of trigger locks, the NRA called for a boycott. Smith & Wesson sales dropped 40 percent, after which the company went private, fired its management and abrogated its agreement with the White House.

The gun industry's trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation [NSSF], has followed the NRA's lead on all things political. As a result, the NSSF has refused to endorse the Senate gun safety bill. That might not be surprising if it weren't for one fact: the NSSF headquarters is in Newtown, Connecticut—less than three miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Sandy Hook Families: Still in the Arena

In the months between the Sandy Hook shootings and the April gun bill debate in the Senate, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer were back in the saddle again, working to cut a deal that could survive an NRA onslaught. From the White House, the vice president was corralling the gun safety groups, coaxing the lawmakers and cajoling the public. In the Senate, Schumer was running the inside game, trying to find an NRA-approved Republican to make a match with his NRA-friendly Democrat, Joe Manchin.

On the eve of the Senate debate, they succeeded. Pat Toomey, a conservative Pennsylvania Republican, agreed to cosponsor legislation with Manchin that would close the gun show and Internet loopholes. The announcement of the Manchin-Toomey amendment helped overcome a filibuster, with 16 Republicans joining most Democrats in voting to proceed to the debate.

That week, Tim Makris and a sizable group of SHP families were in town to lobby. The level of their newfound sophistication about Washington and gun policy was impressive. After they were briefed on the contents of Manchin-Toomey, they immediately began pressing target senators to support the bill. They were told time and again that the bill would never have progressed this far without them and that they had much to be proud of.

It's often the case that some of the most effective advocates in American politics are people who have a personal stake in an issue. Those seeking funding for serious diseases, including nearly every variety of cancer, have perfected the art of cause-based lobbying. They bring people who are suffering from the illness, photos of family members lost to it, testimonials to the pain and misery endured by their loved ones, and PowerPoints replete with statistics and data. They are routinely granted audiences with congressional staff members to make their case.

But it is a rare thing for such advocates to be granted time with almost any senator they ask to meet—rarer still for them to be able to move even the most jaded of these lawmakers to tears by bringing out a photo of a smiling six-year-old child. Yet that keeps happening with the Sandy Hook families. Vice President Biden has remarked that it is impossible to meet with these families and not become emotional "unless you're made of stone." Indeed, almost every meeting they do results in senators and members of Congress weeping as they hear the stories of Newtown.

But these families don't want sympathy. They want a bill signed into law, and that was not to be—at least not yet. Mounting a furious lobbying campaign, the NRA held onto all but four Republicans and enough wayward Democrats (four) that the final 54-46 tally on April 17 fell six votes short of the threshold necessary to send the amendment on for a majority-rules, up-or-down vote.

Public reaction has been swift and surprising. For the first time in the modern history of the debate, a gun safety vote has had a negative impact on the approval rating of senators voting "no" (even in red and purple states like Alaska, Arizona and New Hampshire) and a positive impact on red- state senators voting "yes" (Louisiana and North Carolina).

In that political shift, there is hope. Most of those who voted "no" surely know that they did the wrong thing by opposing the expansion of background checks in commercial settings. If they believe they erred not just morally and substantively but politically, they will change. Many are pushing them to do so, including New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and his group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which brings deep policy expertise and massive financial resources to the fight. Others, including Vice President Biden, Senators Manchin and Schumer, former representative Gabby Giffords [who was shot in the head from near point-blank range at an event in Tucson, AZ] and her group Americans for Responsible Solutions, Third Way, the Center for American Progress, and the Brady Campaign [to Prevent Gun Violence], are also pressing the case.

Still in the arena as well are the families of Sandy Hook. Despite the glare of a spotlight that has forced them to repeatedly relive their darkest hour and subjected them to a stunning level of personal vitriol, they continue to come to Washington, meet with senators and talk to the press. They accepted early on that this was a long road—that a 20-year gridlock on gun policy was not likely to change in an instant.

The motto of Sandy Hook Promise is "Our hearts are broken; Our spirit is not." And the extraordinary generosity of spirit that these brave people bring to this nasty, brutish political debate could, in the end, make all the difference.

Books

Nils Böckler, Thorsten Seeger, Peter Sitzer, and Wilhelm Heitmeyer, eds. School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies, and Concepts for Prevention. New York: Springer, 2012. Dave F. Brown Why America's Public Schools Are the Best Place for Kids: Reality vs. Negative Perceptions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012. Jeffrey W. Cohen and Robert A. Brooks Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014.

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Jarrett Conaway, ed. Public and School Safety: Risk Assessment, Perceptions and Management Strategies. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2014. E. Scott Dunlap, ed. The Comprehensive Handbook of School Safety. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013. Lawrence Fennelly and Marianna Perry The Handbook for School Safety and Security: Best Practices and Procedures. Waltham, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2014. James Alan Fox and Harvey Burstein Violence and Security on Campus: From Preschool Through College. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Annette Fuentes Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse. New York: Verso, 2011. Maegan E. Hauserman, ed. A Look at School Crime Safety. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. Ted Hayes If It's Predictable, It's Preventable: More than 2,000 Ways to Improve the Safety and Security in Your School. Mineral Point, WI: Little Creek Press, 2013. Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen Bully: An Action Plan for Teachers, Parents, and Communities to Combat the Bullying Crisis. New York: Weinstein Books, 2012. Shane R. Jimerson, Amanda B. Nickerson, Matthew J. Mayer, and Michael J. Furlong, eds. Handbook of School Violence and School Safety: International Research and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2012. Judith Kafka The History of "Zero Tolerance" in American Public Schooling. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Jessie Klein The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America's Schools. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Paul Langan Bullying in Schools: What You Need to Know. West Berlin, NJ: Townsend Press, 2011. Peter Langman School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Peter Langman Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Matthew Lysiak Newtown: An American Tragedy. New York: Gallery, 2013. David C. May School Safety in the United States: A Reasoned Look at the Rhetoric. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2014. Kathleen Nolan Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Brian Schoonover Zero Tolerance Discipline Policies: The History, Implementation, and Controversy of Zero Tolerance Policies in Student Codes of Conduct. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009. Marc Thibault A Comprehensive School Safety Planning Manual. Frederick, MD: America Star Books, 2013. Paul Timm School Security: How to Build and Strengthen a School Safety Program. Waltham, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2014. Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, eds. Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Periodicals

Dewey G. Cornell "Gun Violence and Mass Shootings—Myths, Facts and Solutions," Washington Post, June 11, 2014. Every Town for Gun Safety "150 School Shootings in America Since 2013," October 3, 2015. Ashley Fantz, Lindsey Knight, and Kevin Wang "A Closer Look: How Many Newtown-Like School Shootings Since Sandy Hook?," CNN, June 19, 2014. Husna Haq "Should Public Schools Teach How to Use Guns? Yes, Say South Carolina Legislators," Christian Science Monitor, January 8, 2015. Patrick Lewis "Gun Safety Would Increase If It Was Taught in Our Schools," Wyoming Tribune Eagle, May 7, 2015. Moms Demand Action and Mayors Against Illegal Guns "Analysis of School Shootings: December 15, 2012-February 10, 2014," February 12, 2014. Bob Owens "Why Aren't We Teaching Firearm Safety in School?," Bearing Arms, July 24, 2014. Suzi Parker "Should Public Schools Teach Kids How to Handle Guns?" TakePart, February 20, 2013. Michele Richinick "Gun Violence in Schools Among Parents' Main Concerns," MSNBC, August 12, 2014. Valerie Strauss "The Alarming Number of School Shootings Since 2012 Killings in Newtown," Washington Post, December 10, 2014.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Bennett, Matt. "Gun Control Can Prevent School Shootings." School Safety, edited by Noah Berlatsky, Greenhaven Press, 2016. Opposing

Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ3010981211/OVIC?u=txshracd2500&sid=OVIC&xid=41c7a78f. Accessed 19 Sept. 2018. Originally published as "The Promise: The Families of Sandy Hook and the Long Road to Gun Safety," www.brookings.edu, 11 July 2013.

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