History > 2013 > USA > Gun violence (II)

Sleeping With Guns

April 27, 2013
The New York Times
By BRUCE HOLBERT

NINE MILE FALLS, Wash.

THE summer before my sophomore year in high school, I moved into my father’s house. My father had remarried and the only unoccupied bedroom in his house was the gun room. Against one wall was a gun case he had built in high school, and beside it were two empty refrigerators stocked with rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. My bed’s headboard resided against the other wall and, above it, a resigned-looking, marble-eyed, five-point mule deer’s head with a fedora on its antler rack.

The room had no windows, so the smell of gun oil filled my senses at least eight hours each day. It clung to my clothes like smoke, and like a smoker’s cigarettes, it became my smell. No one in my high school noticed. We all smelled like something: motorheads of motor oil, farm kids of wheat chaff and cow dung, athletes like footballs and grass, dopers like the other kind of grass.

It did not appear to anyone — including me — that residing within my family’s weapons cache might affect my life. Together, my three brothers own at least a dozen weapons and have yet to harm anyone with them. Despite their guns (or, arguably, because of them), they are quite peaceable. As for me, I have three guns, one inherited and two gifts, and I’m hardly a zealot. In fact I never had much interest in guns. Yet it is I who killed a man.

It was the second week in August, a Friday the 13th, in fact, in 1982. I was with a group of college roommates who were getting ready to go to the Omak Stampede and Suicide Race. Three of us piled into a red Vega parked outside a friend’s house in Okanogan, Wash., me in the back seat. The driver, who worked with the county sheriff’s department, offered me his service revolver to examine. I turned the weapon onto its side, pointed it toward the door. The barrel, however, slipped when I shifted my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty, and turned the gun toward the driver’s seat. When I let the hammer fall, the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing. When I pulled the hammer back a second time it fired a live round.

My friend, Doug, slumped in the driver’s seat, dying, and another friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat, raced into the house for the phone.

The house sat beside one edge of a river valley and I knew that between the orchard at the opposite side and the next town was 20 miles of rock and pine. I was a cross-country champion in high school. I could run through the woods and find my way to my cousins, who lived far into the mountains. I could easily disappear. But I remained where I was, mindful that even if I ran, I would escape nothing. So, when the sirens finally whirred and the colored lights tumbled over the yard and the doors of the cruisers opened and a police sergeant asked who was responsible, I raised my hand and patted my chest and was arrested.

Though the charges against me were eventually dropped, I have since been given diagnoses of a range of maladies, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and adult attention deficit disorders. The pharmacists fill the appropriate prescriptions, which temporarily salve my conscience, but serve neither my story nor the truth.

Where I grew up, masculinity involved schooling a mean dog to guard your truck or skipping the ignition spark to fire the points, and, of course, handling guns of all kinds. I was barely proficient in any of these areas. I understood what was expected of me and responded as best I could, but did so with distance that would, I hoped, keep me from being a total fraud in my own eyes.

Like many other young men, I mythologized guns and the ideas of manhood associated with them.

The gun lobby likes to say guns don’t kill people, people do. And they’re right, of course. I killed my friend; no one else did; no mechanism did. But this oversimplifies matters (as does the gun control advocates’ position that eliminating weapons will end violent crime).

My friend was killed by a man who misunderstood guns, who imagined that comfort with — and affection for — guns was a vital component of manhood. I did not recognize a gun for what it was: a machine constructed for a purpose, one in which I had no real interest. I treated a tool as an essential part of my identity, and the result is a dead man and a grieving family and a survivor numbed by guilt whose story lacks anything resembling a proper ending.

Bruce Holbert is the author of the novel “Lonesome Animals.”

    Sleeping With Guns, NYT, 27.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/i-killed-my-friend.html

Gun Victims Vow to Press On

in State Legislatures and Political Campaigns

April 19, 2013
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — Moments after the Senate defeated gun legislation this week, Patricia Maisch, a 64-year-old Tucson woman who helped stop the 2011 massacre there, stood up in the gallery and shouted “Shame on you!” at the lawmakers below. The next day, still furious, she recorded “robocall” messages for the advocacy group Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Mrs. Maisch has no background in politics. But she does have a passion for gun control acquired on Jan. 8, 2011, when she grabbed an ammunition clip away from the gunman who fatally shot 6 people and wounded 13, including her congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords.

“A lot of our legislators have blood on their hands,” Mrs. Maisch said Friday before leaving Washington on a train for New York, where she was scheduled to appear on a weekend talk show. “We will work to remove seated senators who choose to be the shills of the gun lobby.”

Mrs. Maisch, whose gallery outburst prompted Capitol police officers to escort her from the building, is among dozens of gun violence survivors and family members who descended on Washington to push for a measure to extend background checks on some gun purchases. Now that their lobbying blitz is behind them and the legislative debate is over in the Senate, the victims’ advocates are forging ahead with new tactics and plotting their next moves. They hope to revive the bill, while pushing for new state laws and campaigning against politicians opposed to gun control.

Many, like Peter Read, 50, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel whose daughter Mary Karen was killed in the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, have been fighting for stricter gun measures since long before Adam Lanza killed 20 children and 6 adults at a school in Newtown, Conn., in December. They are accustomed to hearing lawmakers say no. “We are not going away,” Mr. Read said.

Some, like Andrew Goddard and Lori Haas, Virginia residents who met after their children were wounded at Virginia Tech, have already been lobbying their state legislature. On Friday, Ms. Haas was headed to a vigil outside the office of Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican leader, to recite the names of the dead.

Others, like Pam Simon, a former aide to Ms. Giffords who was wounded in Tucson, are still focused on Washington. Ms. Simon turned up Thursday in the office of Senator Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, for a coffee intended for constituents. Ms. Ayotte voted against the background check measure because, she said, it would “place unnecessary burdens on law-abiding gun owners.” Ms. Simon pressed Ms. Ayotte; a video of their encounter was posted by ThinkProgress.org.

And some, like Dan Gross, whose brother was shot in the head in 1997 on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, are looking inward, re-examining a strategy that has for decades been rooted in grief.

Mr. Gross, a former advertising executive, is the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. If gun legislation is to succeed, he said, groups like his must change social norms around guns, much like Mothers Against Drunk Driving changed norms around alcohol.

“As long as this is positioned as an issue that’s just about victims, it’s not going to work,” he said. “Victims have been a very important part of the story, but so is, ‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.’ ”

Not all the victims of gun violence and their families favor tighter gun laws. At least one Newtown parent, Mark Mattioli, whose 8-year-old son was killed, sided with the National Rifle Association in opposing the background check measure. But at least a dozen of the victims and family members who fanned out across the Capitol complex this week — organized by groups like the Brady Campaign and Mayors Against Illegal Guns — said they believed that the bill would have been a good first step.

They had arrived in Washington in an optimistic mood. The Newtown parents had practically shamed senators into bringing the background check measure up for a vote, and after decades of gun control losses, many believed that they were on the verge of a big victory. But they were soon reminded that in the complex gun politics of Washington, being a victim is not enough to get legislation passed.

For Mr. Read, that lesson was searing. Wearing a gray business suit with a picture of Mary Karen on his lapel, he arrived at a vigil outside the Capitol on Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, to recite the names of the dead — including his own daughter, a clarinet player and an aspiring educator who was 19 when she died.

Hours later, traipsing through the hallways with other parents and victims, he stumbled on Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona. Mr. Flake had just announced his opposition to the background check measure, and when the senator cited Black’s Law Dictionary in explaining his stance, Mr. Read grew testy.

“I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not a senator, and I don’t have Black’s Law Dictionary,” Mr. Read told him. “But I do have this picture of my daughter.”

Now Mr. Flake is on the gun control advocates’ target list. One of the telephone messages that Mrs. Maisch recorded Thursday, in which she said Mr. Flake had “buckled to extremists,” was intended for his constituents.

Critics of the gun control movement say its advocacy groups are capitalizing on grief by courting vulnerable victims and families. But Mr. Gross, the Brady Campaign president, said his group tried to be “delicate and sensitive” in its recruitment efforts. He said the families often sought out the advocacy groups.

“They all feel like they’re part of a club that nobody wanted to be part of,” he said.

That is particularly true of Mrs. Maisch and Bill Badger, a retired Army colonel, who met in the Tucson mayhem. Despite a gunshot wound to the head, Mr. Badger managed to subdue the gunman. Mrs. Maisch grabbed the ammunition clip and ran into a grocery store to get a towel to clean Mr. Badger’s wound. Today they are so close that people mistake them for brother and sister.

Mrs. Maisch, who owns a heating and air-conditioning business, was on the way to the airport Friday to fly home to Tucson, she said, when MSNBC called to invite her to be a Sunday guest. As she changed course and headed for the Amtrak station, she reflected on the week’s events. Mayors Against Illegal Guns was planning protests for Saturday at senators’ home offices, as well as a Twitter campaign, with the hashtag #shameonyou, based on her rallying cry.

The outburst was spontaneous — she had planned simply to walk out quietly, she said — but she said she had no regrets.

“Those senators disregarded the will of the people,” Mrs. Maisch said. “I feel like my disregarding that one small rule was nothing compared to what they disregarded.”

    Gun Victims Vow to Press On in State Legislatures and Political Campaigns, NYT, 19.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/
    politics/gun-victims-vow-to-press-on-in-state-legislatures-and-political-campaigns.html

A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip

April 17, 2013
The New York Times
By GABRIELLE GIFFORDS

WASHINGTON

SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.

I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.

People have told me that I’m courageous, but I have seen greater courage. Gabe Zimmerman, my friend and staff member in whose honor we dedicated a room in the United States Capitol this week, saw me shot in the head and saw the shooter turn his gunfire on others. Gabe ran toward me as I lay bleeding. Toward gunfire. And then the gunman shot him, and then Gabe died. His body lay on the pavement in front of the Safeway for hours.

I have thought a lot about why Gabe ran toward me when he could have run away. Service was part of his life, but it was also his job. The senators who voted against background checks for online and gun-show sales, and those who voted against checks to screen out would-be gun buyers with mental illness, failed to do their job.

They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.

They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.

This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.

Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.

Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic representative from Arizona from 2007 to 2012, is a founder of Americans for Responsible Solutions, which focuses on gun violence.

    A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip, NYT, 17.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/opinion/a-senate-in-the-gun-lobbys-grip.html

Criminalizing Children at School

April 18, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The National Rifle Association and President Obama responded to the Newtown, Conn., shootings by recommending that more police officers be placed in the nation’s schools. But a growing body of research suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, a larger police presence in schools generally does little to improve safety. It can also create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds — like cutting class or talking back — that once would have been dealt with by the principal.

Stationing police in schools, while common today, was virtually unknown during the 1970s. Things began to change with the surge of juvenile crime during the ’80s, followed by an overreaction among school officials. Then came the 1999 Columbine High School shooting outside Denver, which prompted a surge in financing for specially trained police. In the mid-1970s, police patrolled about 1 percent of schools. By 2008, the figure was 40 percent.

The belief that police officers automatically make schools safer was challenged in a 2011 study that compared federal crime data of schools that had police officers with schools that did not. It found that the presence of the officers did not drive down crime. The study — by Chongmin Na of The University of Houston, Clear Lake, and Denise Gottfredson of the University of Maryland — also found that with police in the buildings, routine disciplinary problems began to be treated as criminal justice problems, increasing the likelihood of arrests.

Children as young as 12 have been treated as criminals for shoving matches and even adolescent misconduct like cursing in school. This is worrisome because young people who spend time in adult jails are more likely to have problems with law enforcement later on. Moreover, federal data suggest a pattern of discrimination in the arrests, with black and Hispanic children more likely to be affected than their white peers.

In Texas, civil rights groups filed a federal complaint against the school district in the town of Bryan. The lawyers say African-American students are four times as likely as other students to be charged with misdemeanors, which can carry fines up to $500 and lead to jail time for disrupting class or using foul language.

The criminalization of misbehavior so alarmed the New York City Council that, in 2010, it passed the Student Safety Act, which requires detailed police reports on which students are arrested and why. (Data from the 2011-12 school year show that black students are being disproportionately arrested and suspended.)

Some critics now want to require greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming. Elsewhere in the country, judges, lawmakers and children’s advocates have been working hard to dismantle what they have begun to call the school-to-prison pipeline.

Given the growing criticism, districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.

    Criminalizing Children at School, NYT, 18.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/criminalizing-children-at-school.html

A Missouri School Trains Its Teachers

to Carry Guns, and Most Parents Approve

April 14, 2013
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON

WEST PLAINS, Mo. — At 8:30 on a cloudy, frigid morning late last month in this folksy Ozark town, the superintendent of an area school strolled through the glass doors of the local newspaper office to deliver a news release.

Hours later, the content of that release produced a front-page headline in The West Plains Daily Quill that caught residents off guard: “At Fairview School Some Employees Now Carry Concealed Weapons.”

That was how most parents of Fairview students learned that the school had trained some of its staff members to carry weapons, and the reaction was loud — and mostly gleeful.

“Sooo very glad to hear this,” a woman whose grandchildren attend Fairview posted on the Facebook page of The Quill, adding, “All schools in America should do this.”

As federal and state legislators continue to debate gun control and school safety measures in the months after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., communities around the country are wasting little time taking safety issues into their own hands. Some schools have hired armed guards. Others have implemented buzzer systems at their doors.

Very few have gone so far as training teachers and other faculty members to carry weapons, and support for such measures seems to be lukewarm. Bills to allow school employees to arm themselves are stalling in most of the roughly two dozen states where they were introduced this year.

But the community making up the 600-student Fairview School, where a sign at the main entrance reads “Drug Free Gun Free School Zone,” represents a culture in which the idea of guns in classrooms is not necessarily intimidating. Hunting a variety of game like deer and turkey is as routine a form of recreation here in the craggy, wooded Ozarks of south-central Missouri as beer and baseball is in some parts of the nation.

By the time they are 6, many young boys and girls already have learned how to safely handle a weapon and have shot their first deer. Some live in homes where guns are not under lock and key, or on vast prairies where they shoot skeet with their families.

Sherri Roy, who has four children at the school, said in an interview that she “was really pleased” that some staff members were armed.

“If I didn’t know anything about guns, if I wasn’t raised with it, I’m sure I would be more uncomfortable,” she said. “But in this area guns are pretty much a normal, everyday part of your life.”

But even in a place where hunting rifles are a staple of most households, attitudes about armed teachers are diverse.

Fairview is one of five schools on the outskirts of West Plains, serving families mostly living outside the city. Administrators at some of the other rural schools have shunned the idea of allowing staff members to carry guns.

Though it would take the Howell County Sheriff’s Department at least 15 minutes to respond to any trouble at Glenwood School on the outskirts of West Plains, Karen Moffis, the principal, said that allowing employees to carry guns would be more dangerous than beneficial. Instead, the school is looking to better secure its entrances and is considering hiring an armed guard, she said.

And it is not that she is uncomfortable around guns — she got her first when she was 6 years old. A teacher at the school gives lessons on firearms safety on campus after hours.

“Traditionally in this area, schools have already been a very safe and welcoming community,” Ms. Moffis said. Referring to teachers having guns in the classroom, she added, “Nobody’s ever thought about needing that kind of thing at school.”

Fairview, which runs from kindergarten through eighth grade, is a lot like any other grammar school. Colorful linoleum tiles line the floors, projects made of construction paper are taped to the walls, and the cafeteria, on a recent day, reeked of nachos.

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown that killed 26 people, administrators at Fairview said some parents approached them about allowing teachers to carry guns. Becky Wright-Welty, whose 13-year-old son attends the school, said she asked the Fairview School District’s board members: “What are we doing about security? I want to know.”

One of the biggest concerns of administrators and parents was that the quickest the sheriff’s department could reach Fairview, the district’s only school, would be nine minutes.

The school board, which includes a former county sheriff, worked out the details of liability coverage with Fairview’s insurance provider. Then, at an open meeting in late February, it authorized some of the school employees to undergo a training program that would certify them to carry guns on campus.

Those employees took a 40-hour course during spring break last month through a company called Shield Solutions, whose instructors included local SWAT team members. The training, which was paid for by the school, included firearms and situational drills. The employees, who have furnished their own guns, each also had to pass a background check, a drug test and a mental evaluation — all of which must be repeated annually, as well as additional firearms training and recertification.

“It’s not a ‘Well, here’s your gun; carry it,’ ” said Vic Williams, the Fairview superintendent. “It’s very closely monitored. It’s not a Clint Eastwood-type deal.”

At the first school board meeting after spring break, the board sanctioned those who had passed the training — and were then also considered Shield Solutions employees — to carry weapons at school. Most of West Plains learned the news from the front-page article in The Quill on March 21. Four days later, the district sent a letter to parents addressing concerns.

“I was really upset more about the way it happened, the back door,” said Eileen Wilson, 53, adding that she was considering removing her daughter, who is autistic, from Fairview. “I just don’t think something of this magnitude is something you just put out in a press release. ‘Oh, by the way, we got 10 people packing weapons now in school.’ ”

School officials would not say how many employees were armed or who they were. They maintained that the process was transparent.

“I didn’t think about it being that groundbreaking,” Dea Daniel, a board member, said of the discussion to train teachers on guns. “That same meeting we talked about how we could secure our windows or our doors. There was a lot of discussion. That was just one of the many safety issues we talked about.”

With few exceptions, school officials said, parents have reacted positively.

One of the school employees who carries a gun said in an interview that “it was a little strange putting it on the first couple days,” but that it had come to feel normal carrying the gun in school.

“You put your pants on, you put your belt on, that’s just what you do,” the employee said on the condition of anonymity. “Nothing awkward about it at all. I’ve been hugged many times before and since, and it’s never been any kind of an issue or question.”

    A Missouri School Trains Its Teachers to Carry Guns, and Most Parents Approve, NYT, 14.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/us/missouri-school-trains-teachers-to-carry-guns.html

Rifts in Both Parties

Complicate Odds for Gun Measure

April 14, 2013
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and JONATHAN WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — Deep divisions within both parties over a bipartisan measure to extend background checks for gun buyers are threatening its chances as the Senate this week begins debating the first broad gun control legislation in nearly 20 years.

In spite of a vote last Thursday in favor of debating new gun measures, some Democrats who are facing re-election next year in conservative states have already said they will not vote for the background check measure offered by Senators Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, forcing Democrats to look desperately across the aisle to fill the gaps.

Republicans, in the meantime, are bitterly torn between moderates who feel pressure to respond to polls showing a majority of Americans in support of some new gun regulations and conservatives who are deeply opposed to them.

Further, an impending immigration bill may force Republicans to choose between softening their stance on either immigration or guns, but not both.

Sixty-eight senators, pressured by the families of those killed in gun violence, came together last week to overcome a filibuster threat that would have quashed the debate on a broader gun bill. But many of those votes are clearly not translating into yes votes for the only background check measure that has attracted bipartisan support.

“We’ve got some work to do,” Mr. Manchin said in an interview Sunday. “You’ve got some very close Democratic colleagues who are having some difficulties, and our Republican colleagues are trying to get comfortable.”

On Sunday, a small gun rights group, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, came out in favor of the Toomey-Manchin amendment, prompting Mr. Manchin to say he hoped the endorsement would help win more yes votes. Also on Sunday, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said he was inclined to support the measure; his vote, should it be yes, could bring along others and push the bill toward the 60 votes needed for final passage. .

And supporters of gun safety legislation, including President Obama, plan to campaign all week to win over some lawmakers who have expressed misgivings. Public pressure to pass gun legislation is also intensifying, with the families of the people killed in the Newtown, Conn., school massacre last year waging a highly public, and potent, campaign to win over lawmakers.

But an accounting of likely votes shows how difficult it could be to pass new gun legislation.

Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, says he will vote against the measure, and at least three other Democrats are expected to join him in trying to defeat it, including Heidi Heitkamp, a freshman senator from North Dakota. Some left-leaning Democrats may also balk because of the gun-rights provisions that have been added to the bill to entice Republicans.

Among the 16 Republicans who joined 50 Democrats and two independents in voting last week to proceed to consideration of gun legislation, roughly seven have already decided not to support the measure. Another half-dozen Republicans who voted to proceed on the bill remain ambivalent.

The Republican Senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bob Corker of Tennessee, all of whom voted to proceed on the bill, are no votes right now, and several others are expected to also vote down the amendment on Tuesday, the expected day of the vote.

It is also unclear whether Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, a likely yes vote who has been largely absent in the 113th Congress, would show up for the crucial vote this week.

Mr. Manchin, who spent much of last week buttonholing colleagues at the Senate gym and giving out handwritten pleas for support on the Senate floor, said he felt certain that people who read the bill would find their objections quelled. “The thing is, the easiest vote for me or any senator to make is ‘no,’ ” he said.

The Republican conflict came to the fore last week during a closed-door luncheon for Senate Republicans, when Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, eyes blazing, stood up and complained about a series of attack ads that she was facing back home from a gun-rights group with deep ties to Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky.

Ms. Collins, who faces re-election next year, said the gun ads were an example of the kind of internal Republican warfare that has hindered the party in Senate races the last two elections. She supports the amendments and other components of the new gun regulations legislation, and she released a lengthy statement on Sunday explaining her thinking.

Her comments, according to several Republican aides, ignited a tense debate, similar to many the party has faced since its loss in the race for the White House last year. Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, stood to say he had been raising money for Ms. Collins’ re-election, only to watch her have to spend it to defend herself against the attack from the gun group, which has been directed at other members as well.

Ms. Collins warned her colleagues that if she loses a primary to a strong opponent with gun-rights credentials, it could well cost the party her seat.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a freshman ally of Mr. Paul’s, jumped in to promise he had nothing to do with the group, according to officials briefed on the event. Then Mr. Paul, feeling attacked, stormed out. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Paul did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

The Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, is facing his own re-election race and appears to have ceded leadership on the gun issue to more junior senators, Mr. Cruz, on the pro-gun group side of the debate, and Senator Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois, who supports new regulations.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, said the senator had encouraged the search for compromise. “Senator McConnell’s views on the Second Amendment have been consistent throughout his career,” he said. “He encourages his members to be involved and actually believes in broader member involvement, not less.”

Should the background check amendment fail, a broader package of new gun legislation would continue to the Senate floor, but wounded. It would increase penalties for illegal gun sales, stop some trafficking and improve mental health reporting.

This amendment was set to replace the background check provision of the original legislation, which would also create harsher penalties for the so-called straw purchasing of guns, in which people buy guns for others who are not able to do so legally. Subsequent amendments, dealing with mental health, a ban on assault weapons and other issues, are expected in the days ahead before a vote on the overall measure.

Both Mr. Manchin and Mr. Toomey spent much of the weekend pleading with their colleagues for support. Former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically wounded in a mass shooting, will be in the Capitol this week pressing members on their votes.

Mr. McCain, who is involved in potential new immigration legislation, offered Mr. Manchin and Mr. Toomey their best hope on Sunday. “Eighty percent of the American people want to see a better background checks procedure,” he said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “I am very favorably disposed.”

Many Republicans who are considering supporting changes to the immigration system may see little upside to supporting the gun legislation as well.

“One of the reasons Republicans don’t have a governing majority is that we often pick the wrong fights,” Mr. Alexander said in speech in Lewisburg, Tenn., on Friday night. “Voting to prevent a debate on gun rights is an argument Republicans will lose with the American people. Defending Second Amendment rights is an argument Republicans will win with the American people.”

Mr. Manchin said he would continue to try to persuade his colleagues. “If you believe in something you have to work for it,” he said. “If you don’t you have to question why we are here.”

    Rifts in Both Parties Complicate Odds for Gun Measure, NYT, 14.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/us/politics/
    party-rifts-complicate-chances-for-gun-bill-passage.html

The Rugged Road for Gun Control

April 11, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

As families of the victims of the Newtown, Conn., massacre watched from the Senate gallery on Thursday, 68 senators, including 16 Republicans, voted to break a conservative filibuster to allow debate to begin on a bill that would expand background checks for most gun sales.

That a procedural vote was considered a breakthrough demonstrated how hard it has been to get even the most fundamental, common-sense reform of the nation’s inadequate gun laws past the gun lobby. Groups like the National Rifle Association still don’t want a background-check bill to come to a vote, but at least a few Republicans (and almost all Democrats) recognized how popular the bill is, and how politically unwise it would be to kill the effort before it reached the Senate floor.

The next steps are even more treacherous, and Thursday’s coalition will quickly begin to dwindle. There are several more potential filibusters to break, and the most extreme anti-gun-control senators — like Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah — are likely to erect procedural hurdles wherever they can.

The bill’s supporters in Congress are most worried about the amendment process, which begins next week. Some of the amendments to be offered would be vital to gun control, like the compromise announced Wednesday to expand background checks to buyers at gun shows and on the Internet. There will also be amendments to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which would help reduce mass shootings, but these are unlikely to overcome the gun lobby’s opposition.

That lobby has lined up several senators to do its bidding by offering amendments that will pose a real threat to the background-check bill. The worst — a huge priority of the N.R.A. — would require every state to honor the concealed-handgun permits of other states, overriding their own restrictions. That would allow a resident of Florida, where deliberately lax laws have given out such permits to hundreds of felons, to carry a concealed gun in New York or Connecticut, where the laws are much more strict and sane.

If this amendment were to be attached to the background-check bill — and there may be enough votes to make that happen — the underlying bill would no longer be worth passing.

Another potential killer amendment, sponsored by Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, would reverse current law and allow people who have been involuntarily committed to mental institutions to own guns, a ludicrous undermining of the background-check system. Only those who are found to be an “imminent danger” would be prevented from owning guns, even though that standard isn’t required in many states to commit people to institutions.

Other proposed amendments would lift the ban on gun ownership by mentally ill veterans; supersede some existing state bans on assault weapons; and declare that all weapons restrictions violate the Second Amendment.

Democratic leaders are trying to prevent some of these dangerous amendments from ever reaching the floor, and many will have trouble getting the necessary 60 votes. But Thursday’s brief victory of common sense has shaken the antiregulation extremists, who are quickly gearing up to make the road ahead as difficult as possible.

    The Rugged Road for Gun Control, NYT, 11.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/opinion/the-rugged-road-for-gun-control.html

Psychiatrist Reported Suspect

in Theater Shooting as Threat

April 4, 2013
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

DENVER — A month before James E. Holmes was accused of carrying out a mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater, his university psychiatrist reported that Mr. Holmes had been having homicidal thoughts and was harassing her in e-mails and text messages, according to documents released Thursday.

The trove of search warrants unsealed more than eight months after the shooting brought to light some new details of Mr. Holmes’s arrest, the arsenal he had assembled and the apartment that he wired with explosive booby traps.

When the police were able to defuse the traps and search his apartment, they found ammunition and explosives, role-playing computer games and a Batman mask, according to the documents. They also found more than 40 bottles and cans of beer, two bottles of rum and whiskey, and medications that included sedatives and antidepressants.

Mr. Holmes had been a neuroscience student at the University of Colorado Denver, but by last June he had effectively dropped out of his graduate program. After meeting with Mr. Holmes in June, the university psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, was so concerned that she contacted the campus police about her worries, according to the documents.

Officer Lynn Whitten reported that she deactivated Mr. Holmes’s student identification card on June 12, after receiving the complaint.

Mr. Holmes, 25, is accused of killing 12 people and wounding scores more during a July 20 midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.” He was arrested just outside the theater, dressed in black combat gear. When officers asked him whether anyone else was with him, he replied, according to the newly released documents, “It is just me.”

    Psychiatrist Reported Suspect in Theater Shooting as Threat, 4.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/us/aurora-suspect-was-threat-psychiatrist-said.html

Rewrite the Second Amendment

April 4, 2013
The New York Times
By ZACHARY ELKINS

AUSTIN, Tex.

THE elementary-school shootings in Newtown, Conn., in December produced two polar public reactions: fear among some Americans that the federal government will restrict gun rights, and hope among others that it will actually do so. Colorado, New York State and, most recently, Connecticut have clamped down on guns, while states like Texas, where I live, are considering legislation that would try to block the enforcement of federal gun regulations. The uncertain approach to guns is good for no one, except perhaps for gunmakers, whose sales have skyrocketed.

Lost in this confusion and anxiety is the possibility that a basic consensus on guns exists among Americans. Opinion polls suggest that a majority recognize a right to bear arms, subject to reasonable regulations protecting public safety. This strong dual commitment, if clarified and entrenched in our Constitution, could reassure most, though not all, of us.

Before you mock the idea of a constitutional amendment, consider that hardly anyone is happy with our unstable status quo: gun enthusiasts fear their rights are under constant threat; gun-control advocates point to the danger of illegal guns and easy access to firearms.

It is actually quite unusual for gun rights to be included in a constitution. In our historical study of constitutions, my colleagues and I identified only 15 constitutions (in nine countries) that had ever included an explicit right to bear arms. Almost all of these constitutions have been in Latin America, and most were from the 19th century. Only three countries — Guatemala, Mexico and the United States — have a constitutional right to arms. Of the 15, ours is the only one that does not explicitly include a restrictive condition. Of course, many Americans, and a minority of the Supreme Court, believe that our “militia clause” amounts to one such a restriction — an interpretation the court rejected in 2008 when it ruled that the Second Amendment protected the individual right to bear arms.

What would happen if our right to gun ownership were explicitly protected and balanced against a concern for public safety?

Laws to permit the carrying of concealed weapons are on the rise, but even the most ardent gun-rights advocates would not argue that owners should be free to carry, say, AK-47’s as they walk down the street. One of the most conservative justices, Antonin Scalia, in an opinion in the 2008 case, Heller v. District of Columbia, agreed with common-sense limitations like bans on guns in schools and government buildings.

Most Americans are committed to the Constitution and rely on the courts to adapt our antique highest law to modern technological and cultural developments. Many of us trust the judiciary to balance rights against the inevitable restrictions on them. But we are left with the awkward, irresolvable phrasing of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

“What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ do you not understand?” the gun-rights advocate asks. “What part of ‘a well regulated Militia’ do you not understand?” goes the retort.

Partly because of this ambiguity, the Second Amendment seemed almost irrelevant for most of our history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many American towns and states regulated guns. In the deadly confrontation at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Ariz., in 1881, Wyatt Earp was enforcing a ban on carrying guns in public.

But in the 1980s, a movement to interpret the amendment as promoting the right to bear arms for self-defense emerged. It reached an apotheosis of sorts in the 2008 case, which struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns. It was the first time the court had ever restricted gun regulation, but the 5-to-4 vote also suggests that the decision is not fixed doctrine.

This constitutional uncertainty should suggest to both sides the possibility of agreeing on a formal clarification of the constitutional text. Zealots will scoff, but many reasonable people would find reassurance in a revised Second Amendment that was properly balanced. Those who propose responsible limits, like background checks, would welcome constitutional support for common-sense safeguards. Those who worry about the slippery slope of encroachments on gun rights would find comfort in an explicit reassertion and reinforcement of the general right to bear arms.

Of course, even an uncontroversial constitutional amendment requires a minor miracle. The last time our Constitution changed, with the ratification of the 27th Amendment in 1992, it took a 10-year campaign (begun by a University of Texas undergraduate) to resuscitate an amendment that Congress had submitted to the states for ratification more than 200 years earlier.

A new gun-rights amendment would need to articulate a basic consensus that would let both sides claim victory. The alternative is more violent rhetoric — and more deadly violence.

Zachary Elkins is an associate professor of government at the University of Texas, a director of the Comparative Constitutions Project and an author of “The Endurance of National Constitutions.”

    Rewrite the Second Amendment, NYT, 4.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/opinion/rewrite-the-second-amendment.html

The Damage Wrought by the Gun Lobby

April 4, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama is being shouted down by the gun lobby. He and Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. have spent weeks crisscrossing the country, making a forceful case for a package of laws that would reduce gun violence. At every stop, including one on Wednesday in Denver, he has demanded that Congress require universal background checks, ban assault weapons and large ammunition magazines, and prohibit gun trafficking. He has invoked the bloodshed in Newtown, Conn., and the daily toll that adds up to 30,000 gun deaths a year.

“If there is just one step we can take to prevent more Americans from knowing the pain that some of the families who are here have known, don’t we have an obligation to try?” he asked in Denver. “Don’t we have an obligation to try?”

But the president has been unable to break through the blockade set up by one of the most powerful and relentless lobbies in Washington. The assault weapons battle has already been lost, and it is increasingly doubtful that there will be enough votes in the Senate to support the expansion of background checks, the centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s agenda. (Sixty votes will be required to break the filibuster promised by the most extreme Republican senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah.) Even the gun trafficking provision, which seemed the easiest to pass, is being torn apart by the National Rifle Association, which put forward a substitute version that would eviscerate the prohibition on straw purchases of guns.

The gun lobby is a combination of forces that includes manufacturers, hunters and hobbyists, political opportunists, and a fanatically active faction that believes guns are needed to fight off the conquest of freedom by the government. That faction is represented by the group Gun Owners of America, which has spent the months since Newtown doing tremendous damage, insisting that expanded background checks will lead to a gun registry that will assist a secret plan by the president to seize every firearm.

This is the group that said the blood of Newtown was on the hands of lawmakers who create gun-free zones around schools. Its executive director, Larry Pratt, considers the United States government to be largely unconstitutional, and says that gun rights come directly from God. “When we’re talking about firearms,” he said in 2010, “we’re not really talking about a right but an obligation, as creatures of God, to protect the life that was given them.”

And yet this twisted radicalism is playing an outsized role in the current debate. As Jennifer Steinhauer reported in The Times on Thursday, the gun group’s demands helped pressure Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to back out of negotiations on the background-check bill, depriving it of crucial Republican support. The group has helped push the N.R.A. and several members of Congress further to the right, and Republicans say fear of its retribution is preventing a deal.

Polls show that more than 80 percent of Americans support universal background checks, but where are those Americans in this debate? The best-organized voices that officials have heard are those thwarting common sense on guns, forcing lawmakers to curl up and cower. As Mr. Obama recently admonished those who have remained passive in this fight, “tears aren’t enough.”

    The Damage Wrought by the Gun Lobby, NYT, 4.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/opinion/the-damage-wrought-by-the-gun-lobby.html

Gunfire Claims 2nd Prosecutor in Texas County

March 31, 2013
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ, MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

KAUFMAN, Tex. — After the daylight assassination of his deputy two months ago, Mike McLelland, the district attorney in largely rural Kaufman County, responded with a flash of angry bravado, denigrating the perpetrators as “scum” and vowing to hunt them down.

A former Army officer who served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, Mr. McLelland carried a gun and refused to be intimidated, according to a friend and the local news media, even as his wife expressed unease, worrying that her husband, too, could be in danger.

“I hope that the people that did this are watching, because we’re very confident that we’re going to find you,” he said at a news conference hours after his deputy was killed. “We’re going to pull you out of whatever hole you’re in. We’re going to bring you back and let the people of Kaufman County prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

On Saturday evening, the authorities found Mr. McLelland, 63, and his wife, Cynthia, 65, shot to death inside their home in Forney, Tex., in Kaufman County. The killings galvanized law enforcement officials and frightened and bewildered local residents, many of them still shaken by the shooting of the deputy, Mark E. Hasse, 57, on Jan. 31. That case remains unsolved.

The police said Sunday that they had increased security for local elected officials and would tighten security at the county courthouse. The courthouse was scheduled to be open Monday, but Mr. McLelland’s office will be closed.

“It’s unnerving to the law enforcement community, to the community at large,” Sheriff David A. Byrnes said at a news conference on Sunday. “That’s why we’re striving to assure the community that we are protecting public safety and will continue to do that.”

The authorities said it was too early to say if the deaths of Mr. McLelland and his wife were connected to the shooting of Mr. Hasse, the county’s lead felony prosecutor. But the killings of two prosecutors in a county of 106,000 people in less than eight weeks appeared to many officials to be more than a coincidence.

“I’m really trying to stress for people to remain calm,” said Mayor Darren Rozell of Forney, about 15 miles northwest of Kaufman, the county seat. “This appeared to be a targeted attack and not a random attack.”

A law enforcement official said investigators believed that the shootings of the two prosecutors were related, but appeared to have been carried out by different people, perhaps from the same group or with the same affiliation. Shell casings were recovered in the shootings of the McLellands, but not in the shooting of Mr. Hasse, indicating that his killer or killers had more experience, the official said.

Officials from several local, state and federal agencies — including the F.B.I., the Texas Rangers and the Kaufman County sheriff’s office — were working on the case. Sheriff Byrnes told reporters that deputies had been called to Mr. McLelland’s residence shortly after 6 p.m. Saturday, and that the bodies were discovered inside. He would not say if there were any signs of forced entry.

In the shooting of Mr. Hasse, the authorities said, one or two gunmen got out of a gray or silver sedan, opened fire and fled. Witnesses told investigators that the killer or killers appeared to have had their faces covered and wore black clothing and tactical-style vests. No arrests have been made, and investigators from nine agencies had been searching for leads.

Mr. McLelland told The Associated Press less than two weeks ago that he carried a gun at all times since Mr. Hasse’s killing, even when he walked his dog. He said he had urged his employees to remain alert. “The people in my line of work are going to have to get better at it, because they’re going to need it more in the future,” he said in the interview with The A.P.

“I’m ahead of everybody else because, basically, I’m a soldier,” he said, referring to his 23-year career in the Army.

Tonya J. Ratcliff, the Kaufman County tax assessor and a friend of the McLellands, said the couple was vigilant, but did not obsess over their security.

“I didn’t have a sense that they were looking over their shoulders at any moment,” she said.

The McLellands had five children, one of whom is a Dallas police officer.

Mr. McLelland was raised on a ranch in Wortham, Tex., and “learned to cowboy at an early age,” according to his biography on the Kaufman County district attorney’s office Web site. He studied history at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to his Army service, he had been a criminal defense lawyer and a judge handling mental health cases.

Doug Lowe, the district attorney in nearby Anderson County, described his friend and fellow prosecutor as “one big, tough man” who loved his family, eating and justice, though not necessarily in that order. Mr. Lowe said Mr. McLelland’s death had caused widespread shock, but not panic, among North Texas prosecutors.

“We’re a tightknit group,” Mr. Lowe said. “It’s a blow not just to Kaufman, but to all Texas prosecutors. I don’t think anyone in my group will be in fear. We’re not going to let this stand in the way of getting the bad guys.”

But in Forney, a town of 15,000 about 20 miles from downtown Dallas that is known as the antiques capital of Texas, many residents were on edge. Amid the greenery of Mr. McLelland’s neighborhood, one man who lived a block from the prosecutor’s house said he had known Mr. McLelland well, but did not want to talk to a reporter out of fear for his safety.

Rebecca Bennett, who also lives in the area, said: “This is a very lovely, very peaceful neighborhood. If you hear a gunshot, it’s the Fourth of July or someone killing a snake.”

One of several angles investigators have been exploring is whether Mr. Hasse’s killing involved members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas prison gang. Prosecutors in Mr. McLelland’s office had assisted in investigations of the gang, including a recent case that had dealt a major blow to the group’s leadership.

In that case, federal authorities announced in November that a grand jury in Houston had indicted more than 30 senior leaders and other members of the whites-only gang on charges of conspiring to participate in a racketeering enterprise. Federal officials said the defendants were also charged with involvement in three murders, multiple attempted murders, kidnappings and assaults and conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and cocaine.

The indictments stemmed from an investigation led by a multiagency task force that included Kaufman County prosecutors and three other district attorneys offices. In December, the Texas Department of Public Safety issued a statewide bulletin warning officials that the Aryan Brotherhood was planning retaliation against law enforcement personnel who had helped secure the indictments.

Mr. Hasse was shot the same day that two members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas — Ben Christian Dillon, also known as “Tuff,” of Houston, and James Marshall Meldrum, also known as “Dirty,” of Dallas — pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in Federal District Court in Houston.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization in Alabama that tracks hate groups, described the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas as probably the most violent white-supremacist gang in the country. It is known to have carried out about 100 killings and 10 kidnappings since it was founded in the 1980s, he said. Leaders of the gang, which is not directly related to the larger Aryan Brotherhood, have instructed members to kill other members who have cooperated with law enforcement, and to bring back a finger to prove that it had been done, Mr. Potok said.

The authorities said there was no evidence so far that the group had been involved in the deaths of Mr. Hasse and the McLellands.

Investigators had also been pursuing any possible links between Mr. Hasse’s killing and the death of Tom Clements, the Colorado state prison chief, who was shot and killed at his home on March 19.

The suspect in Mr. Clements’s killing, Evan S. Ebel, 28, died after a high-speed chase and shootout with Texas police officers and sheriff’s deputies northwest of Dallas on March 21. There were a number reports that Mr. Ebel had joined a white-supremacist gang while in a Colorado prison, but the authorities said they were still investigating possible connections.

Law enforcement officers in Colorado Springs spoke Sunday with investigators in Texas, but officials said it was too early to tell whether the Colorado and Texas killings were connected. Still, Paula Presley, the undersheriff in El Paso County, Colo., called Mr. McLelland’s death “very, very concerning” and said it had raised an already heightened sense of alert in parts of Colorado.

Here in Kaufman, concern will now turn to personal safety like never before, some residents, said, particularly for government officials.

The prosecutors “were always involved in dangerous cases,” said Ms. Ratcliff, the McLellands’ friend. “That’s just part of everyday business for them.”

Now, she said, the question everyone seems to be asking is, “Who’s next?”

Manny Fernandez reported from Kaufman, and Michael Schwirtz

and Serge F. Kovaleski from New York.

Reporting was contributed by Jack Begg from New York,

Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, Jack Healy from Denver,

and Lauren D’Avolio from Kaufman.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article, in a quote taken from

The Associated Press, misspelled the surname of the Forney mayor.

He is Darren Rozell, not Rovell.

    Gunfire Claims 2nd Prosecutor in Texas County, NYT, 31.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/us/second-prosecutor-shot-to-death-in-texas-county.html

As Views Shift on Guns, Reid Corrals Senate

March 31, 2013
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — It was, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada ebulliently proclaimed, a “happy day for me” as he stood with Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, in 2010 at a new shooting range in Las Vegas made possible by federal money secured by Mr. Reid. “People who criticize this probably would criticize baseball,” Mr. Reid said before firing off a few rounds.

These days, Mr. Reid, the Senate majority leader, is far more likely to meet with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, an outspoken advocate of stricter gun control, than with Mr. LaPierre as he prepares to bring the most expansive package of gun safety legislation in a decade to the Senate floor over the next few weeks.

Mr. Reid’s evolution from a proponent of gun rights to the shepherd of legislation that would expand background checks, among other gun control measures, emerges from a complex web of political calculations that have come to define his leadership style over the last decade.

How tenacious Mr. Reid is willing to be — and whether he will extract votes one by one as he has for other big pieces of legislation — may well determine the fate of the measures.

Mr. Reid declined to be interviewed but answered questions by e-mail. “The families of Newtown and Aurora and the victims of gun violence everywhere deserve a vote on these issues,” Mr. Reid wrote. “We owe them a vote, and I will make sure they get a vote.” He added, “Only those who are afraid of a free and open debate would try to block it or shut it down.”

With guns, as with gay rights and immigration, Washington has observed in Mr. Reid an evolution — less flip-flops than slow dances to the left — that reflects shifting attitudes not only in his Democratic conference but also in Nevada, where Democrats have gained an edge in the last decade. Voter registration in the state has become increasingly Democratic as its population has swelled, and Barack Obama won the state twice, the only Democrat besides Bill Clinton to win the state in the last 40 years.

“Harry Reid is the most calculating individual I have ever covered in politics,” said Jon Ralston, editor of Ralston Reports, who has covered Nevada politics for three decades. “If he is making the right move for his members, he is making the right move for himself.”

Mr. Reid voted proudly against an assault weapons ban in both 1993 and 2004, even as most Senate Democrats voted for it, and voted for a successful 2005 measure that limited lawsuits against gun manufacturers and dealers for negligence. He has also long supported the N.R.A.

But now, in a demonstration of his loyalty to President Obama, Mr. Reid is helping him pursue his agenda for stemming gun violence. Many of the more senior members of his caucus, notably Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, also want these votes.

“He is doing what a leader needs to do,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, one of Mr. Reid’s protégées in the Senate, “to move the caucus forward so it stays in tune with where the American people are.”

Mr. Reid, aides said, is also motivated by both the personal angst he felt over the killing of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., last year, as well as the anger he feels toward the N.R.A., which was widely expected to endorse him in his 2010 re-election campaign but then declined to do so.

After the Senate returns from its recess next week, it will consider a bill that would expand background checks and increase penalties for so-called straw purchases, in which someone buys a gun for another person who is unable to buy one. Mr. Reid opted not to include in the bill a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines but plans to hold a separate vote on both measures. His hope was to not let the less popular measures jeopardize passage of the expanded background checks.

Mr. Reid is almost certain to vote in favor of at least some of the new gun safety measures, if not all of them.

It would not be the first time Mr. Reid had shifted his position on a significant public policy issue. For example, in 1993, Mr. Reid co-sponsored legislation that would have stripped the citizen rights from babies born to illegal immigrant mothers, and vigorously denounced immigrants from the floor. The bill did not make it out of the Judiciary Committee.

Just over a decade later, Mr. Reid apologized for the legislation, which he called “the low point of my governmental career,” and became a proponent of the Dream Act, which would give a pathway to citizenship to some children of illegal immigrants. Immigration reform was a centerpiece of his 2010 re-election campaign, against the advice of many of his political strategists.

Similarly, Mr. Reid voted for a 1993 measure that institutionalized the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay members of the military. But by 2009 he had became an opponent of the policy. That year, Mr. Reid, asked to support a moratorium on the practice, said he would go further and press for its repeal, an offhand statement that ignited the repeal efforts in his chamber.

During the 2010 lame-duck session, Mr. Reid repeatedly and vociferously pressed for the repeal, including making an emotional floor speech in which he said: “Discrimination has never served America well. When it applies to those who serve America in the armed forces, it is both disgraceful and counterproductive.”

When a move to repeal the policy failed on a procedural vote, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, went back to Mr. Reid and begged for a second vote, which he delivered, and the measure passed, with bipartisan support.

Like many Democrats — and a few Republicans — Mr. Reid has also re-evaluated his views on same-sex marriage. For years, Mr. Reid repeatedly said that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” and he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which denied federal marital benefits to gay couples. Only recently has Mr. Reid starting saying that gay and lesbian couples have the right to marry; he co-signed the amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to find the law unconstitutional. Gay marriage was banned in Nevada by initiative a decade ago and there is now a bill to repeal the ban before the State Legislature.

“He deserves a lot of credit for having the guts to stick his neck out,” Mr. Bloomberg, an independent, wrote in an e-mail, “especially on guns and immigration when others are worried about special-interest politics.”

Mr. Reid’s biggest struggle is to balance the needs of vulnerable Democrats who are up for re-election — especially moderate, long-serving members who are largely institutionalists — with the agendas of newcomers who lean farther to the left.

Since 2006, as larger-than-life Democrats like Senators Robert C. Byrd, Edward M. Kennedy and Daniel K. Inouye have died, Democrats have had a big influx of members pressing Mr. Reid toward a more aggressive and often liberal stance.

“My role is to listen to every single member of the caucus and understand where they are coming from,” Mr. Reid said by e-mail. “Everyone won’t be 100 percent happy all the time, but I try to make sure that all voices have input on the decision-making process, and understand the steps we are taking.”

This conflict came to the fore during discussions of changing the filibuster rules; Mr. Reid ultimately chose an approach that placed fewer limitations on a minority party’s ability to filibuster than the newer members wanted.

“The Democratic caucus is a progressive caucus,” said Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. “I think he leads us mostly the way we want to go. I think we all learned lessons on the filibuster.”

Mr. Reid remains an enigma of sorts in Washington, a quiet force whose voice is often barely audible, who skips Sunday talk shows in favor of church and lunch with his wife and remains, by all accounts, gaga for her after decades of marriage.

He is a man who relies on his members to do the routine prep work on bills until the time comes to marshal votes. He also prefers brief conversations to lengthy ones. “There isn’t one senator who doesn’t know when you talk to Harry Reid on the phone you better say what you have to say fast,” Ms. Murray said. “Many senators have found themselves talking after he has already hung up.”

    As Views Shift on Guns, Reid Corrals Senate, NYT, 31.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/us/politics/
    harry-reid-draws-on-political-calculus-as-he-leads-senate.html

Remarks by President Obama on Gun Violence

March 28, 2013
The New York Times

The following is the complete transcript of President Obama’s remarks

on gun violence on Thursday in Washington.

(Transcript courtesy of Federal News Service.)

KATERINA RODGAARD: Good morning.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Morning.

MS. RODGAARD: First, I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart the president, the vice president, for inviting me to speak here today. Never in a million years did I think an average citizen such as myself would ever get an opportunity like this.

My name is Katerina Rodgaard. I reside in suburban Maryland, and I am the mother of two beautiful young children. I have a unique background, both in the performing arts and in law.

I have been personally affected by gun violence. As a dance teacher, I lost one of my students at the massacre at Virginia Tech.

Reema Samaha was a bright, beautiful, talented dancer who lost her life. It was stolen from her at the age of 18. I will never forget her presence in my classes and her enthusiasm for dance.

As the mother of a first-grader, I cannot even look at my own daughter without thinking about the poor, innocent victims at Sandy Hook. My heart breaks for them and their families and the families of the eight children every day who are killed by guns in this country.

After losing Reema and seeing the horror at Sandy Hook, my reaction was that I no longer felt it was safe to raise a family in this country. I felt I either needed to leave the country or do something. As an attorney, I vowed to do something, because that -- I feel that my rights to feel safe in this country and the rights of our children to feel safe in this country are paramount and worth fighting for.

I have never been an activist before, but I have found a voice with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and I am proud and honored to help them fight for better laws in this country.

I am also honored to acknowledge Vice President Joe Biden, a strong proponent of gun violence prevention measures in the Senate for decades and now in the White House. He also an advocate for the rights of women and children. As mothers, we are eternally grateful for your support.

Enough is enough. The time to act is now.

I am now extremely honored to introduce to you the president of the United States of America, Barack Obama. (Applause.)

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause continues.) Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Katerina, for sharing your story. You know, Reema was lucky to have you as a teacher, and all of us are fortunate to have you here today. And I’m glad we had a chance to remember her.

Katerina, as you just heard, lost one of her most promising students in Virginia Tech, the shooting there that took place six years ago. And she and dozens of other moms and dads, all victims of gun violence, have come here today from across the country, united not only in grief and loss, but also in resolve and in courage and in a deep determination to do whatever they can as parents and as citizens to protect other kids and spare other families from the awful pain that they’ve endured.

As any of the families and friends who are today can tell you, the grief doesn’t ever go away. That loss, that pain sticks with you. It lingers on in places like Blacksburg and Tucson and Aurora. That anguish is still fresh in Newtown. It’s been barely a hundred days since 20 innocent children and six brave educators were taken from us by gun violence, including Grace McDonnell and Lauren Rousseau and Jesse Lewis, whose families are here today.

That agony burns deep in the families of thousands, thousands of Americans who’ve been stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun over these last hundred days, including Hadiya Pendleton, who was killed on her way to school less than two months ago and whose mom is also here today, everything they live for and hope for taken away in an instant.

We have moms on this stage whose children were killed as recently as 35 days ago.

I don’t think any of us who are parents can hear their stories and not think about our own daughters and our own sons and our own grandchildren. We all feel that it is our first impulse as parents to do everything we can to protect our children from harm, to make any sacrifice to keep them safe, to do what we have to do to give them a future where they can grow up and learn and explore and become the amazing people they’re destined to be.

That’s why in January, Joe Biden, leading a task force, came up with and I put forward a series of common-sense proposals to reduce the epidemic of gun violence and keep our kids safe. In my State of the Union address, I called on Congress to give these proposals a vote. And in just a couple of weeks, they will.

Earlier this month, the Senate advanced some of the most important reforms designed to reduce gun violence. All of them are consistent with the Second Amendment. None of them will infringe on the rights of responsible gun owners. What they will do is keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people who put others at risk. This is our best chance in more than a decade to take common-sense steps that will save lives.

As I said when I visited Newtown just over three months ago, if there is a step we can take that will save just one child, just one parent, just another town from experiencing the same grief that some of the moms and dads who are here have endured, then we should be doing it.

We have an obligation to try.

In the coming weeks, members of Congress will vote on whether we should require universal background checks for anyone who wants to buy a gun so that criminals or people with severe mental illnesses can’t get their hands on one. They’ll vote on tough new penalties for anyone who buys guns only to turn around and sell them to criminals. They’ll vote on a measure that would keep weapons of war and high- capacity ammunition magazines that facilitate these mass killings off our streets. They’ll get to vote on legislation that would help schools become safer and help people struggling with mental health problems to get the treatment that they need.

None of these ideas should be controversial. Why wouldn’t we want to make it more difficult for a dangerous person to get his or her hand on a gun? Why wouldn’t we want to close the loophole that allows as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases to take place without a background check? Why wouldn’t we do that?

And if you ask most Americans outside of Washington, including many gun owners, some of these ideas, they don’t consider them controversial. Right now, 90 percent of Americans -- 90 percent -- support background checks that will keep criminals and people who have been found to be a danger to themselves or others from buying a gun. More than 80 percent of Republicans agree. More than 80 percent of gun owners agree.

Think about that. How often do 90 percent of Americans agree on anything? (Laughter.) It never happens.

Many other reforms are supported by clear majorities of Americans. And I ask every American to find out where your member of Congress stands on these ideas. If they’re not part of that 90 percent who agree that we should make it harder for a criminal or somebody with a severe mental illness to buy a gun, then you should ask them, why not? Why are you part of the 10 percent?

There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t get this done. But the reason we’re talking about it here today is because it’s not done until it’s done.

And there some powerful voices on the other side that are interested in running up a clock of changing the subject or drowning out the majority of the American people to prevent any of these reforms from happening at all.

They’re doing everything they can to make all our progress collapse under the weight of fear and frustration or -- their assumption is, is that people will just forget about it. I read an article in the news just the other day wondering, is Washington -- has -- has Washington missed its opportunity because as time goes on after Newtown, somehow people start moving on and forgetting?

Let me tell you, the people here, they don’t forget. Grace’s dad is not forgetting. Hadiya’s mom hasn’t forgotten. The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we’ve moved on to other things -- that’s not who we are. That’s not who we are.

Now, I want to make sure every American is listening today. Less than a hundred days ago that happened.

And the entire country was shocked, and the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different.

Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.

If there’s one thing I’ve said consistently since I first ran for this office, nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change. And that’s why it’s so important that all these moms and dads are here today, but that’s also why it’s important that we’ve got grass-roots groups out there that got started and -- and are out there, mobilizing and organizing and keeping up the fight. That’s what it’s going to take to make this country safer -- going to take moms and dads and hunters and sportsmen and clergy and local officials, like the mayors who are here today, standing up and saying this time really is different, that we’re not just going to sit back and -- and wait until the next Newtown or the next Blacksburg or the next innocent, beautiful child is gunned down in a playground in Chicago or Philadelphia or Los Angeles before we summon the will to act.

Right now members of Congress are back home in their districts, and many of them are holding events where they can hear from their constituents. So I want everybody who’s listening to make yourself heard right now. If you think that checking someone’s criminal record before he can check out a gun show is common sense, you’ve got to make yourself heard. If you’re a responsible, law-abiding gun owner who wants to keep irresponsible, law-breaking individuals from abusing the right to bear arms by inflicting harm on a massive scale, speak up. We need your voices in this debate.

If you’re a mom like Katrina (sic), who wants to make this country safer, a stronger place for our children to learn and grow up, get together with other moms, like the ones here today, and raise your voices and make yourselves unmistakably heard.

We need everybody to remember how we felt a hundred days ago and make sure that what we said at that time wasn’t just a bunch of platitudes, that we meant it. You know, the desire to make a difference is what brought Corey Thornblatt (sp) here today. Corey (sp) grew up in Oklahoma, where her dad sold firearms at gun shows. And today she’s a mom and a teacher. And Corey (sp) said that after Newtown, she cried for days -- for the students who could have been her students, for the parents she could have known, for the teachers like her, who go to work every single day and love their kids and want them to succeed.

And Corey (sp) says, my heart was broken and I decided now was the time to act, to march, the time to petition, the time to make phone calls because tears were no longer enough.

And that’s my attitude. Tears aren’t enough. Expressions of sympathy aren’t enough. Speeches aren’t enough. We’ve cried enough. We’ve known enough heartbreak.

What we’re proposing is not radical. It’s not taking away anybody’s gun rights. It’s something that if we are serious, we will do.

And now’s the time to turn that heartbreak into something real. It won’t solve every problem. There will still be gun deaths, there will still be tragedies, there will still be violence, there will still be evil, but we can make a difference if not just the activists here on this stage but the general public, including responsible gun owners, say: You know what? We -- we can do better than this. We can do better to make sure that fewer parents have to endure the pain of losing a child to an act of violence.

That’s what this is about. And if enough people like Katrina (sp) and Corie (sp) and the rest of the parents who are here today get involved, and if enough members of Congress take a stand for cooperation and common sense and lead and don’t get squishy because time has passed and maybe it’s not on the news every single day, if that’s who we are, that’s our character that we’re willing to follow through on commitments that we say are important, commitments to each other and to our kids, then I’m confident we can make this country a safer place for all of them.

So thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless America.

Copyright © 2013 by Federal News Service, LLC, 1120 G Street NW, Suite 990, Washington, DC 20005-3801 USA. Federal News Service is a private firm not affiliated with the federal government. No portion of this transcript may be copied, sold or retransmitted without the written authority of Federal News Service, LLC. Copyright is not claimed as to any part of the original work prepared by a United States government officer or employee as a part of that person’s official duties. For information on subscribing to the FNS Transcripts Database or any other FNS product, please email info@fednews.com or call 1-202-347-1400.

    Remarks by President Obama on Gun Violence, NYT, 28.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/us/remarks-by-president-obama-on-gun-violence.html

Months After Massacre,

Obama Seeks to Regain Momentum on Gun Laws

March 28, 2013
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — With resistance to tougher gun laws stiffening in Congress, a visibly frustrated President Obama on Thursday implored lawmakers and the nation not to lose sight of the horrors of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn.

“The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we’ve moved on to other things?” Mr. Obama said in remarks at the White House, surrounded by relatives and friends of victims of gun violence, including some from Newtown. “That’s not who we are. That’s not who we are. And I want to make sure every American is listening today.”

The president has just a small window in which to persuade Congress to back a series of gun control measures that will come up for a vote in the Senate early next month. And his remarks, delivered in an impassioned and off-script manner, were aimed at reviving the impetus that gun-control advocates fear they are losing as more time passes since the shootings.

A filibuster threat is growing in the Senate. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has said a ban on certain styles of semiautomatic weapons is virtually assured of defeat. And a senior Republican senator who opposes the president’s efforts, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, is now floating a competing gun bill.

These complications only add to the strain surrounding negotiations over a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the background check system for gun purchases — talks that have so far drawn the support of only one Republican, Mark Kirk of Illinois.

As senators at the heart of those negotiations returned to their home states this week, their staffs continued to try to reach consensus back in Washington. But they have yet to produce anything more than an outline of what legislation might look like.

Mr. Obama’s appearance, from the East Room of the White House, suggested just how delicate the situation had become. Rather than read from teleprompters, he seemed to speak extemporaneously much of the time and expressed irritation in a way that he generally does not. At some moments, he paused and took a breath as if collecting himself and circled back to some of his points for emphasis.

“Shame on us if we’ve forgotten,” he said.“I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”

The renewed push by the president, who will travel to Colorado next week to rally support for new gun measures, is just one piece in a broader nationwide effort, timed to coincide with the two-week Congressional recess, by gun control groups like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s coalition.

At the same time, the National Rifle Association is activating its base, ensuring that Congressional offices and town hall meetings over the next week will be swamped with competing agendas on how to combat gun violence.

“What we face right now is the most dire threat to the association and to our freedom,” said Andrew Arulanandam, an N.R.A. spokesman.

Indeed, gun rights activists are being challenged by a highly coordinated and expensive effort to defeat them, not to mention a galvanized group of voters who were outraged by the Newtown shooting and have pledged to volunteer.

The Brady Campaign this week began a campaign to call and e-mail thousands of supporters, urging them to attend more than 150 Congressional town hall meetings, many in Republican-leaning states where Democrats are up for re-election.

“Basically we’re saying, ‘Drop everything. There’s a town hall tonight,’ ” said Brian Malte, the director of mobilization for the Brady Campaign.

People will be equipped with talking points like poll numbers that show 9 out of 10 Americans support universal background checks, including 7 out of 10 N.R.A. members. And they will be encouraged to ask their senators and representatives direct questions like, “Do you support universal background checks?” Mr. Bloomberg’s group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said it was convening 120 events across the nation in support of gun measures, including in Columbus, Ohio; Durham, N.C.; and Golden, Colo. The group began a $12 million ad campaign aimed at 15 senators this week.

“Americans want this, and today Americans are making their voices heard,” said the group’s chairman, John Feinblatt.

In at least two crucial cases, senators appear to be listening. Two of the senators who were the subjects of efforts of the mayors’ group, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Joe Donnelly of Indiana are now signaling their support for expanded background checks.

Other senators are digging in. Five Republican senators have now signed on to a pledge to filibuster “any additional gun restrictions.” They include Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas. On Thursday, Marco Rubio of Florida and James Inhofe of Oklahoma announced their intentions to join the filibuster as well.

As the gun control debate played out on Thursday, Connecticut officials unsealed several search warrants itemizing the enormous cache of guns, ammunition, knives and swords that were seized from the home and car of Adam Lanza, who shot and killed 20 first graders and 6 educators in Newtown last December.

David Wheeler, whose 6-year-old son, Benjamin, was killed in the massacre, said in an interview that he and his wife, Francine, hoped the details of the warrant would affect change in gun-control laws and in the communication among law enforcement officials about people who might pose a threat. “We’re starting to get tired of the insanity in Washington and Hartford,” he said. “It’s absolutely despicable, really. I would hope that some of these details will spark enough soul-searching to get something done.”

Details about the items seized at the Lanza home underscored the difficulty gun-control advocates face in Congress. Much of the arsenal would remain legal under even the most far-reaching gun-control measures being considered. But two of the guns Mr. Lanza brought with him to the school, the Bushmaster XM15-E2S he used in the killings, and a Saiga-12 shotgun found in his car, would be outlawed under the assault weapons ban proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.

Opponents of stronger gun-control laws have long said that new laws would arbitrarily single out certain weapons while ignoring issues like deficiencies in the mental health system. “The president asserts his new gun proposals will reduce violent crime, yet provides no evidence that these or any other law would have prevented tragedies such as Newtown,” Senator Lee said. “While having Congress vote on new gun laws may make the president feel like he’s doing something constructive, the proposals’ primary effect would be to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens.”

Mindful of the fact that passions are rising among gun rights activists as they seem to be ebbing in the other direction, Mr. Obama sought to draw on the emotion and revulsion around the Newtown shooting.

“We need everybody to remember how we felt 100 days ago and make sure that what we said at that time wasn’t just a bunch of platitudes, that we meant it,” he added. To lawmakers, he added sternly, “Don’t get squishy because time has passed and maybe it’s not on the news every single day.”

Michael Cooper contributed reporting from New York,

and Elizabeth Maker from Connecticut.

    Months After Massacre, Obama Seeks to Regain Momentum on Gun Laws, NYT, 28.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/us/politics/obama-makes-impassioned-plea-for-gun-control.html

Newtown Killer’s Obsessions, in Chilling Detail

March 28, 2013
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD, RAY RIVERA and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

Inside the rambling, pale-yellow Colonial-style home in a Connecticut suburb, Adam Lanza lived amid a stockpile of disparate weaponry and macabre keepsakes: several firearms, more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition, 11 knives, a starter pistol, a bayonet, 3 samurai swords. He saved photographs of what appeared to be a corpse smeared in blood and covered in plastic, as well as a newspaper clipping that chronicled a vicious shooting at Northern Illinois University.

A gun safe was in what investigators believed was his bedroom. Among his clothing was a military-style uniform. There was also a holiday card that contained a check made out to Mr. Lanza, 20, and signed by his mother. Investigators suggested that the money had been intended to buy a gun.

The disturbing details of Mr. Lanza’s possessions were disclosed on Thursday for the first time since he carried out the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., one of the deadliest school shootings in the nation’s history. The information was included in search warrants and related affidavits connected to the investigation into the Dec. 14 attack, when he killed 20 first graders, 6 educators, his mother and himself.

The inventory of the house, combined with interviews conducted over several weeks with law-enforcement officials and people who crossed paths with the Lanza family, afford a somewhat fuller picture of the dark corners of Mr. Lanza’s mind.

The interviews revealed that his mother, Nancy Lanza, confided to friends several years ago that her son, who classmates said had been found to have a type of autism, was faring poorly and being bullied in high school. More recently, he had cocooned himself in front of electronic game consoles in the basement of their home, playing warfare games.

The contents of the Lanza house are of intense interest because the lives of the family have been picked apart since the shootings, often yielding little insight. A clear understanding of Adam Lanza’s thinking and the texture of his relationship with his mother and others has yet to emerge. What pushed him to his brutality may never be discovered.

After killing his mother at their home on the morning of Dec. 14, Mr. Lanza drove to the grade school that he once attended and carried out the massacre in less than five minutes, according to the search warrant.

The rampage brought the nation and the world to tears and touched off a continuing national debate over gun control.

Stephen J. Sedensky III, the state’s attorney who is in charge of the investigation, said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Lanza shot his mother in the forehead with a .22-caliber rifle while she was in bed in her second-story bedroom.

At the school, he used a Bushmaster XM15-E2S semiautomatic rifle to fire 154 shots, the statement said. The police also found 10 30-round magazines for the gun, many of them partly or fully emptied.

Mr. Lanza also carried two semiautomatic handguns, one of which he used to kill himself. The police found a 12-gauge shotgun in the car he drove to the school.

The inventories attached to the warrants delineated pertinent items found by police in the home that Mr. Lanza shared with his mother, a two-story house with dark green shutters at 36 Yogananda Street in Newtown. Ms. Lanza was a gun enthusiast who often took her son to shooting ranges. She was divorced from his father, Peter Lanza, a General Electric executive.

The items included more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition bullets, some of them housed in a Planters peanut can and a Nike shoe box, and an array of weapons found in a brown safe and in bedroom closets. The lists mention four guns, including the shotgun found in the black Honda Civic that Mr. Lanza drove to Sandy Hook, and 70 shotgun shells found in the car. There were two rifles, including the one used to kill Nancy Lanza, as well as a BB gun and a starter pistol.

The police also found a certificate from the National Rifle Association bearing the name Adam Lanza. The type of certificate was not clear. The organization said on Thursday that Adam Lanza and Nancy Lanza were not members.

There was also a receipt from a shooting range in Oklahoma, an N.R.A. guide to the basics of pistol shooting and training manuals on the use of a variety of firearms, including a Bushmaster.

There were paper and cardboard gun targets, as well as a considerable amount of computer equipment and game consoles and equipment. There was a hard drive that appeared to have been deliberately smashed.

There were numerous books connected to autism. One was titled, “Born on a Blue Day — Inside the Mind of an Autistic Savant.”

Classmates of Mr. Lanza and others who knew the family have said he had an autism variant known as Asperger’s syndrome, though investigators have never confirmed that diagnosis. Even so, his association with the disorder has raised alarms among parents of children with the diagnosis, who have expressed concerns that the public might believe that those with autism are prone to violence.

Experts say people with autism spectrum disorders are often bullied in school and the workplace and frequently suffer from depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. But the experts also say there is no evidence that they are more inclined than any other group to commit violent crimes.

Though Mr. Lanza’s life remains mostly opaque, interviews in recent weeks show that he was a socially fragile individual captivated by warfare video games and bent on military service.

Marvin LaFontaine, 53, a mechanical engineer who considered himself a friend of Nancy Lanza from Kingston, N.H., where Ms. Lanza grew up, kept in touch with her chiefly by e-mail, Facebook and phone until 2010. He remembered that Adam Lanza deeply admired one of his mother’s brothers, a retired Kingston police officer named James Champion. Mr. LaFontaine said Mr. Lanza was keen on joining the military, as his uncle, Mr. Champion, had done.

“This all started when Adam was 3 or 4, and became more ingrained as Adam got older and ultimately decided that he wanted to become a Marine,” Mr. LaFontaine said.

Classmates said Mr. Lanza was smart but acutely shy, and was not known to have close friends. His mother frequently moved him in and out of school, and at times home-schooled him. Several years ago, when Mr. Lanza was in high school, Mr. LaFontaine said Ms. Lanza shared with him that “the problems with Adam were getting worse and that he was getting picked on and bullied and was starting to shut down.”

A Newtown rabbi who counseled the families of victims of the shooting said former classmates of Mr. Lanza had told him that Mr. Lanza was sometimes the object of ridicule in high school. Other classmates have said they did not recall instances of his being bullied.

Mr. LaFontaine said Ms. Lanza had been weighing a number of options, which included once again removing him from school, which she later did. Mr. Lanza left Newtown High School after 10th grade. For a time, he attended college.

Despite his issues, Mr. LaFontaine recalled, “Nancy was generally confident that he could beat this and grow up into a normal, confident man, and that she could help him to do that.”

He shared an e-mail in which she described how much she enjoyed living in Newtown, which is about 75 miles northeast of Times Square.

“People are so nice here,” she wrote. “I feel very lucky to have found a place where there is such a feeling of community.”

While the documents show that Mr. Lanza readily had access to weapons, a fact that was already known, by themselves they do not shed light on his motives, said Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University who has written several books on mass murders.

But in many school shootings, the killers were often bullied or ostracized by their classmates, “and the motive is revenge,” Mr. Levin said in a telephone interview.

And Mr. Lanza did have other traits in common with school gunmen, including social isolation and access to weapons and firearms training, Mr. Levin said. The clipping on the Northern Illinois shooting, Mr. Levin said, indicates that, like some mass murderers, he might have been inspired by past shootings.

Adam Lanza had cut off contact with his father and his older brother, Ryan Lanza, in recent years, according to various accounts.

David Burton, a former co-worker of Peter Lanza’s at General Electric who is now a lawyer in private practice, said Peter Lanza spoke rarely about Adam Lanza’s challenges.

Still, Mr. Burton recalled being at a Christmas party in 2010 or 2011 at which Peter Lanza’s eyes lit up upon learning that Mr. Burton’s wife was an educational consultant.

Peter Lanza peppered her with questions, Mr. Burton said.

“When Peter learned of her expertise, he brought up Adam to her, and was clearly looking for an educational solution for Adam,” Mr. Burton said. “She mentioned some boarding school options. It’s one of those things you look back and say we should’ve done more there. But then everybody gets busy and it doesn’t happen.”

Two law-enforcement officials who were initially involved in the investigation said in recent interviews that the Newtown police had never been called to the Lanza home for any disturbances, and that before the shootings the family was basically unknown to the authorities.

They said they believed that Mr. Lanza had spent most of his time in the basement of the home, primarily playing a warfare video game, “Call of Duty.” According to these officials, it also appeared that Mr. Lanza may have taken target practice in the basement.

In the documents released on Thursday, prosecutors redacted the names of witnesses interviewed by the police, but shared some of what they said.

The day of the shooting, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed a person who said Mr. Lanza rarely left his home. The witness considered Mr. Lanza to be a “shut-in and an avid gamer who plays ‘Call of Duty,’ amongst other games,” according to a law-enforcement affidavit accompanying the warrants. It also said the witness told agents “that school was Adam’s ‘life,’ ” referring to Sandy Hook Elementary School, which Adam Lanza had attended.

Additional material turned up in the searches might contain clues into Mr. Lanza’s thoughts in the days and weeks before the massacre, but their contents were not divulged. Police officers found seven journals written by Mr. Lanza, along with several of his drawings. The drawings were not described.

Beside three photographs of what appears to be a corpse, there was an article from The New York Times in February 2008, about a shooting at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill. In that shooting, Steven Kazmierczak killed 5 people and injured 21 on Valentine’s Day before he killed himself.

Whatever problems Adam Lanza may have had, the documents indicate that Nancy Lanza was comfortable with his being around guns.

The holiday card to Mr. Lanza from his mother contained a check that specified that the money was to buy a “C183 (Firearm),” the documents say.

The date and amount of the check are not listed. It was not clear if the reference to C183 contained a typographical error and was intended to mean a CZ83, which is a semiautomatic handgun.

The Hartford Courant previously reported that investigators had found news articles about the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik in a bedroom of Mr. Lanza’s. Mr. Breivik killed 77 people in two attacks in July 2011, most of them teenagers who were attending a summer camp.

Those articles were not mentioned in the documents released on Thursday.

The searches did turn up medical records, which are not identified, as well as some of Mr. Lanza’s school records.

Among the records was a report card for Adam Lanza from many years ago.

It was issued by Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Reporting was contributed by David M. Halbfinger, Sharon LaFraniere,

Marc Santora and Nate Schweber.

Lisa Schwartz and Jack Styczynski contributed research.

    Newtown Killer’s Obsessions, in Chilling Detail, NYT, 28.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/nyregion/
    search-warrants-reveal-items-seized-at-adam-lanzas-home.html

Before Attack,

Parents of Gunman Tried

to Address Son’s Strange Behavior

March 27, 2013
The New York Times
By SARAH GARRECHT GASSEN and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

TUCSON — The parents of Jared L. Loughner, the man who killed six people and wounded 13 others during a meet-and-greet event hosted by former Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, told the authorities after the mass shooting that they had become so concerned about their son’s strange behavior in the previous months that they had taken away his shotgun, insisted he get psychological counseling and had even begun to disable his car so that he could not go out at night, according to thousands of pages of documents related to the case released Wednesday.

The records, about 2,700 pages of police reports, witness statements and other material, detail the events leading up to the attack, from Mr. Loughner’s purchase of ammunition at a Walmart on the morning of the shooting to the response of Pima County Sheriff’s deputies to a bloody Safeway parking lot, where Mr. Loughner had been subdued by bystanders while reloading his 9-millimeter Glock semiautomatic.

The documents, released by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department after Freedom of Information requests from news organizations, reveal the depth of the worries that Mr. Loughner’s parents had about their son’s rapidly deteriorating psychological stability.

The parents, Amy and Randy Loughner, have not spoken publicly about the attack, for which Mr. Loughner, 24, was sentenced in November 2012 to seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years in prison. Mr. Loughner, who pleaded guilty to 19 federal charges, had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia after his arrest, but was deemed competent to agree to the plea deal. The arrangement makes him ineligible for parole or to appeal his conviction.

Two days after the January 2011 shooting, Randy Loughner told a group of F.B.I. and sheriff’s investigators that he had grown so worried about his son’s odd behavior in the months since Jared had been forced to withdraw from a community college because of campus officials’ fears about the safety of the staff and students that he had begun to keep his son in at night by rendering his Chevrolet Nova inoperable.

But, Randy Loughner told the investigators, he had not done so before the morning of the attack, when his son drove away at 6 a.m. to secretly buy ammunition for the Glock he purchased at a local sporting goods store about six weeks before.

When his son returned home a couple of hours later, Randy Loughner said, he questioned him about what he was carrying in his backpack, which prompted Jared Loughner to turn and run, eventually fleeing into the desert.

About two hours later, he had apparently used some of that ammunition, emptying a 33-round magazine in about 19 seconds, and killing, among others, a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl and seriously wounding Ms. Giffords, who was shot in the head at close range.

In her interviews with law enforcement officials, Amy Loughner described her son as a “loner” who talked to himself. She said she had insisted that he be tested for drugs because she believed he was using methamphetamine despite his denials. She told Pima County sheriff’s detectives that she and her husband had taken a shotgun away from their son in the months before the shooting and told him he needed to get psychological help.

“Sometimes you’d hear him in his room, like, having conversations,” Ms. Loughner said about her son during an interview with investigators. “And sometimes he would look like he was having a conversation with someone right there. Be talking to someone. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t.”

Ms. Loughner said that she told Jared that “he needed to go see someone about it” but that he never did. She told deputies, “His behavior is not normal.”

Ms. Loughner said her son had denied using methamphetamine, but had acknowledged smoking marijuana and trying cocaine.

A police report by one of the arresting deputies, whose full name was not disclosed in the documents, said that when he arrived in the Tucson supermarket parking lot where the January 2011 shooting had occurred moments before, two or three people were holding Mr. Loughner down on the ground. The officer said that after handcuffing Mr. Loughner he had found two fully loaded Glock ammunition magazines in Mr. Loughner’s pockets, along with a folding knife with a four-inch blade. The deputy said Mr. Loughner repeatedly said that he pleaded “the Fifth,” even though the deputy said he had not asked him any questions. The deputy said he had removed a pair of disposable earplugs that Mr. Loughner had been wearing during the shooting.

Once in custody, Mr. Loughner told F.B.I. agents that “I’d like to sign something, a paper,” according to a police report. When told he did not need to sign anything, he responded, “All righty,” the report said.

The documents chronicle several particularly chilling moments from the morning of the shooting. The first occurred when Mr. Loughner was stopped by a state Game and Fish officer for running a red light shortly after 7:30 a.m. According to the officer, when Mr. Loughner learned the officer was not going to give him a ticket, he began to cry. He then thanked the officer and shook his hand, explaining, “I’ve just had a rough time,” the officer told investigators.

Soon after, a clerk at a convenience store told an F.B.I. agent, Mr. Loughner came in and asked for them to call him a cab. As Mr. Loughner nervously waited, the clerk told the investigator, Mr. Loughner looked at a clock in the store and said aloud: “9:25. I still got time.” The cab eventually arrived, and within 45 minutes, Mr. Loughner had gunned down 19 people, killing six of them.

Sarah Garrecht Gassen reported from Tucson,

and Timothy Williams from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 27, 2013

Because of an editing error,

a headline with an earlier version of this article

stated incorrectly that the mother of the gunman in the Tucson shooting,

Jared L. Loughner, wanted him tested for drugs after the shooting.

She told the authorities that she had wanted her son drug-tested

before the attacks.

    Before Attack, Parents of Gunman Tried to Address Son’s Strange Behavior, NYT, 27.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/us/documents-2011-tucson-shooting-case-gabrielle-giffords.html

The Killing Chain

March 25, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS

Let’s say you were writing a novel about a homicide. You’d want to describe the killer’s neighborhood and family background. You’d want to describe his school, his culture and his gang.

You’d want to describe how he got into crime, his prior arrests, his prison time, his drug use and his relationship with his probation officer. You’d want to describe how he got the murder weapon, what sort of police presence there was the night of the killing and what incited the murder.

In other words you’d want to describe a long killing chain, a complex series of links leading up to the ultimate homicide.

Over the last 25 years, American authorities have tried to interrupt that killing chain at almost every link except one. In a hodgepodge but organic manner, there have been vast changes in proactive policing, mentoring programs, gang eradication programs, incarceration rates, cultural attitudes and so on. The only step in the killing chain that we haven’t really touched is gun acquisition. Federal gun control laws have become more permissive over the last several years.

This de facto approach — influencing the whole killing chain except gun acquisition — has nonetheless contributed to a phenomenal decline in violence. Murder rates over all have fallen by about 50 percent, back to levels not seen since the Kennedy administration. There are thousands of people alive today because homicide rates dropped so precipitously.

Now we are in the middle of another debate about violence. If we lived in a purely rational society, this debate would have started with a series of questions: What explains the tremendous drop in violence? How can we build on recent efforts to bring the murder rate even lower? These general questions would have led to a series of more specific questions about police procedures, probably the most direct way to prevent shootings.

For example, as Heather Mac Donald of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, points out, 75 percent of the shootings in Boston over the past 30 years have occurred in 4.5 percent of its area, while 88.5 percent of the city’s street segments had not had a single shooting. So how can we focus police resources on those few areas that host most of the killing?

Or as Robert Maranto of the University of Arkansas points out, in New York police chiefs and precinct leaders are held accountable for changes in the murder rate in their areas. New York has seen an 80 percent drop in the homicide rate. Why aren’t police officials held similarly accountable in many other cities?

But those questions are rarely asked. Instead, the national debate has focused on just one link in the killing chain, the acquisition of the gun.

Now I understand why the gun has taken center stage. The gun is the shocking fact at the moment of the murder. Also, many Americans are material determinists. In any moral question or frightening conflict, there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the human element and like to fixate on the material factor.

But the sad fact is that gun acquisition is probably the link on the killing chain least amenable to influence. We live in a country that already has something like 250 million guns floating around. It’s hard retroactively to get a grip on them.

Past efforts to control guns have not dramatically reduced violence. The Gun Control Act of 1968, the Brady Act of 1993 and the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 all failed to reduce homicides significantly. The Brady law, for example, led to a drop in suicides for those age 55 and older, but a 2000 study commissioned by the American Medical Association found that it did not lead to a reduction in the overall murder rate.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did an analysis of 51 studies of a series of gun control regulations. It could not find evidence to prove the effectiveness of gun control laws. A 2012 study conducted at Arizona State University and the University of Cincinnati found that waiting periods and background checks had little statistical effect on gun crimes.

Other studies have found more significant effects, but nothing like the impact we’ve seen from changing police procedures and other efforts up and down the killing chain.

If we could start the violence debate over, I’d begin with universal background checks. Acknowledge that on their own, these checks won’t accomplish much. (Drug dealers from Baltimore are not driving to West Virginia gun shows to acquire weaponry.) But use those checks as the first step in a series of policies to reinforce gun trafficking laws and reassert police control over the zones of concentrated violence.

We have a successful history of reducing violence by spreading efforts across the killing chain. We have a disappointing history of trying to reduce violence with a gun-obsessed approach. Let’s focus on what works.

    The Killing Chain, NYT, 25.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/opinion/brooks-the-killing-chain.html

Colorado Reels

After Killing of Top Official Over Prisons

March 20, 2013
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

DENVER — As Colorado’s governor signed a hard-won package of gun control measures on Wednesday, officials across the state were reeling from the seemingly inexplicable shooting death of the state’s prisons chief, who was gunned down at the front door of his home.

The killing of Tom Clements, a man described by friends and colleagues as a dedicated and thoughtful public servant, left state officials shaken and grasping for answers on Wednesday. State troopers increased security around the State Capitol, and some state workers said Mr. Clements’s death had put them on edge.

The state police said they had known of no specific threats against Mr. Clements before 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, when someone approached his house in the pine-fringed hills of the town of Monument, near Colorado Springs, and shot him as he answered the door. Into Wednesday night, investigators were still searching for any trace of his killer, but said they had no suspects or motive.

Officials with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office said they were looking for a “boxy” two-door car that had been spotted Tuesday night in the neighborhood, its engine running but with nobody inside.

They said Mr. Clements’s post, overseeing more than 20,000 inmates in Colorado’s prisons and parole system, might have made him a target.

Among his most prominent recent decisions, he denied a request this month from a prominent Saudi-born prisoner convicted of sexually abusing his housekeeper to serve the duration of his sentence in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Clements’s death came just hours before Colorado’s governor, John W. Hickenlooper, signed a bitterly divisive package of gun-control measures into law, capping weeks of tumultuous and emotional debate about gun ownership and violence in a state scarred by two mass shootings.

The news about Mr. Clements rippled through the Capitol, where lawmakers and crime victims had gathered to watch Mr. Hickenlooper sign the gun bills. Staff members asked one another, “Are you O.K.?” Tearful elected officials hugged and shared memories of Mr. Clements, 58, recalling his dedication in serving Colorado after a career with Missouri’s Department of Corrections.

Mr. Hickenlooper’s voice cracked as he spoke about Mr. Clements’s death. He called the shooting “an act of intimidation” that had cut down a thoughtful and deliberative man who had tried to reform Colorado’s prisons by reducing the number of inmates in solitary confinement.

“He did his job quietly and intently,” Mr. Hickenlooper said, joined by his cabinet and elected officials. “We are all grieving.” During his two years as head of Colorado’s prison system, Mr. Clements won praise from nearly everyone he met, from the governor to corrections officers, defense lawyers to former gang members.

The Rev. Leon Kelly, an antigang advocate who works to keep parolees from returning to prison, said Mr. Clements had embraced programs intended to prevent recidivism. Mr. Clements charmed Mr. Kelly’s 84-year-old mother so much that she put a photograph of him and her son on her dresser.

“He knew the job that needed to be done,” Mr. Kelly said. “He just jumped in with both feet hitting the ground.”

Mr. Clements held town-hall-style meetings with prison staffs. He tried to address the grievances of working long hours in a sometimes dangerous job. After he was seriously hurt in a bicycle accident, he climbed into a wheelchair last September to attend the funeral of a corrections officer who had been stabbed by an inmate.

Appointed by Mr. Hickenlooper in January 2011, Mr. Clements walked into a department facing budget cuts and a dwindling number of prisoners. He oversaw the closing of two prisons, a difficult process that can reverberate across communities that depend on the associated jobs and state money.

Mr. Hickenlooper said Mr. Clements had been supportive of the gun measures but was not “particularly active” during their emotional and contentious path toward passage.

The new laws require background checks for private gun sales in addition to the checks already mandated for purchases at shops and gun shows. They also ban ammunition magazines with more than 15 rounds, a feature that the governor said could turn “killers into killing machines.”

“If they’re slowed even for just a number of seconds, that allows someone to escape,” Mr. Hickenlooper said.

As he signed the bills, he was joined in his office by a handful of people who lost loved ones in shootings at Columbine High School in 1999, at an Aurora movie theater in July and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December.

“I started crying,” said Tom Mauser, who became a gun control advocate after his son Daniel was killed at Columbine.

Mr. Mauser wore a suit to the Capitol on Wednesday in a nod to the formality of the occasion. But on his feet were Daniel’s sneakers.

Dan Frosch contributed reporting.

    Colorado Reels After Killing of Top Official Over Prisons, NYT, 20.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/us/director-of-colorado-prisons-fatally-shot-at-home.html

For Some, Owning Guns

Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Liking Them

March 9, 2013
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

The national debate over firearms regulation is often presented as a battle of extremes: those who view any effort to tighten gun laws as an infringement of rights versus those who see guns as a menace to society.

But gun owners like Michael Kundu come from a largely unexplored middle ground — a place of nuance and contradiction.

Mr. Kundu is a master marksman from rural Washington who owns pistols and assault rifles for self-defense, all while claiming to detest the presence of guns in his life and in the broader American culture.

“I’d love to see all guns destroyed,” he said. “But I’m not giving up mine first.”

Mr. Kundu, 48, who works for the federal government, is a conflicted gun owner, one of many such Americans whom researchers and social scientists are just beginning to study as a potentially moderating influence in the escalating gun debate.

In Mr. Kundu’s case, the conflict is that he enjoys competitive shooting even as he perceives danger in what he describes as a local arms race that he feels powerless to escape.

Out of “common sense,” he said, he needs to be as armed as his neighbors, some of whom he describes as troublemakers with assault rifles. “It is so discouraging, so paranoia-inducing,” he said. “It makes one feel as though you’ve got to be continually vigilant and defensive instead of living your life free.”

Other gun owners interviewed for this article expressed similar reservations, citing their enjoyment of hunting or of introducing family members to the sport while expressing support for stricter gun control legislation. Mr. Kundu, for instance, supports a ban on the kind of assault weapon that he owns, a rifle manufactured by Panther Arms.

It is these voices of ambivalence that policy makers say are likely to be drowned out by the passion at the extreme ends.

“Their views don’t get represented in the debate, and it’s one of the consequences of the polarized nature of our politics,” said Patrick J. Egan, an assistant professor of politics and public policy at New York University. “If all sides had more of an incentive to moderate their arguments in a way that would be appealing to people like this, you could imagine it being a more constructive conversation than it currently is.”

Clearly, not all gun owners are Second Amendment absolutists. Many recent surveys show that majorities of gun owners do favor certain gun control proposals, like making private gun sales subject to background checks. But the extent to which gun owners feel of two minds about owning guns is something polls and surveys typically do not address.

“We’ve been struggling with this whole realm of issues — feelings about guns,” said Michael Dimock, the director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. “And that’s because we’ve talked a lot about gun policy, but not about gun culture.”

In a survey it began conducting last month, Pew for the first time asked gun-owning respondents “whether they enjoy having guns, whether they feel uncomfortable about them, and whether they feel safer for having them,” Mr. Dimock said. Those results are expected to be published in a coming report.

“I think it’s easy for a lot of people to assume that all gun owners oppose gun control and all nonowners favor it,” he said. “But our polling data suggests that the correlation is nothing like that. Rather, most Americans appear to have mixed feelings about gun laws.”

Kay H. Wilson, a blogger in Waco, Tex., who recently wrote a post about her “love-hate relationship with guns,” said, “We need people to speak up.” Ms. Wilson describes herself as “a pretty good dang shot” when she practices her aim at a family farm in West Texas, but also said, “I’m no lover of the personal handgun.”

While she and her husband, Richard, have a gun in their suburban home for personal protection, they store it and the bullets in separate rooms. And Ms. Wilson acknowledges that she would sooner throw her cat at an intruder than shoot someone. The gun does not make her feel safer.

“I believe that if I had a gun under my pillow ‘for protection’ from intruders,” she wrote in her blog, “the intruder could be upon me before I could wake up and they could possibly overpower and kill me.”

So why do the Wilsons, who favor stricter gun control, own a pistol?

“It’s there just in case,” said Mr. Wilson, 56, a chiropractor, who also owns an inherited heirloom rifle that has not been fired since he was a boy. “I think you have to be really smart and know what situations it might be useful for. In some situations, yes, you’d be better off not going for it.”

Sonia Wolff, a novelist in Los Angeles, felt compelled to buy a pistol a few years ago for self-defense, a decision she wrote about in The Los Angeles Times. “I had never wanted a gun,” the introduction states. “Now I own a Smith & Wesson revolver. Why?”

The short answer, she said in an interview, was, “When push comes to shove, I’d rather have one.”

But she added, “If I had my way in the best of all worlds, nobody would have a gun.”

Mr. Kundu, the competitive sharpshooter, agreed. “I’ve always thought the Second Amendment is secondary to everyone being able to feel safe and secure in their lives,” he said. “Fewer guns would lead to fewer deaths, there’s no question about that.”

Still, he has trained his wife and teenage sons on his firearms. “I insisted that they be proficient,” he said. “We put out wooden blocks and bricks so they could see how devastating and damaging a bullet can be.”

John Flores and Patricia Speed, a married couple in San Francisco, own two 9-millimeter handguns and a Winchester Model 70 rifle because they have recently come to enjoy shooting at ranges. They say they enjoy the concentration it takes to be a good marksman and find the practice relaxing.

But as first-time gun owners, they say they were shocked by how easily they bought the guns and feel uncomfortable about storing them — even unloaded in a locked safe — in their home.

“It freaked me out how easy it was to buy a gun,” said Ms. Speed, 30, a graphic designer. “I think it’s harder to get an iPhone than it is a gun. Now I’m a gun owner who believes there needs to be way more regulation.”

The couple does not talk much about their guns with other people, especially since the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults.

“Conversation becomes very antagonistic very quickly,” Ms. Speed said. “It’s hard to have a rational conversation when people are so emotional about it. I’ve just kept my mouth shut.”

Malia Wollan contributed reporting.

    For Some, Owning Guns Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Liking Them, NYT, 9.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/us/gun-owners-arent-always-gun-lovers.html

Share of Homes With Guns Shows 4-Decade Decline

March 9, 2013
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT GEBELOFF

The share of American households with guns has declined over the past four decades, a national survey shows, with some of the most surprising drops in the South and the Western mountain states, where guns are deeply embedded in the culture.

The gun ownership rate has fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s, according to data from the General Social Survey, a public opinion survey conducted every two years that asks a sample of American adults if they have guns at home, among other questions.

The rate has dropped in cities large and small, in suburbs and rural areas and in all regions of the country. It has fallen among households with children, and among those without. It has declined for households that say they are very happy, and for those that say they are not. It is down among churchgoers and those who never sit in pews.

The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s, according to the survey data, analyzed by The New York Times.

In 2012, the share of American households with guns was 34 percent, according to survey results released on Thursday. Researchers said the difference compared with 2010, when the rate was 32 percent, was not statistically significant.

The findings contrast with the impression left by a flurry of news reports about people rushing to buy guns and clearing shop shelves of assault rifles after the massacre last year at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

“There are all these claims that gun ownership is going through the roof,” said Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “But I suspect the increase in gun sales has been limited mostly to current gun owners. The most reputable surveys show a decline over time in the share of households with guns.”

That decline, which has been studied by researchers for years but is relatively unknown among the general public, suggests that even as the conversation on guns remains contentious, a broad shift away from gun ownership is under way in a growing number of American homes. It also raises questions about the future politics of gun control. Will efforts to regulate guns eventually meet with less resistance if they are increasingly concentrated in fewer hands — or more resistance?

Detailed data on gun ownership is scarce. Though some states reported household gun ownership rates in the 1990s, it was not until the early 2000s that questions on the presence of guns at home were asked on a broad federal public health survey of several hundred thousand people, making it possible to see the rates in all states.

But by the mid-2000s, the federal government stopped asking the questions, leaving researchers to rely on much smaller surveys, like the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC, a research center at the University of Chicago.

Measuring the level of gun ownership can be a vexing problem, with various recent national polls reporting rates between 35 percent and 52 percent. Responses can vary because the survey designs and the wording of questions differ.

But researchers say the survey done by the center at the University of Chicago is crucial because it has consistently tracked gun ownership since 1973, asking if respondents “happen to have in your home (or garage) any guns or revolvers.”

The center’s 2012 survey, conducted mostly in person but also by phone, involved interviews with about 2,000 people from March to September and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Gallup, which asks a similar question but has a different survey design, shows a higher ownership rate and a more moderate decrease. No national survey tracks the number of guns within households.

Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, said he was skeptical that there had been a decline in household ownership. He pointed to reports of increased gun sales, to long waits for gun safety training classes and to the growing number of background checks, which have surged since the late 1990s, as evidence that ownership is rising.

“I’m sure there are a lot of people who would love to make the case that there are fewer gun owners in this country, but the stories we’ve been hearing and the data we’ve been seeing simply don’t support that,” he said.

Tom W. Smith, the director of the General Social Survey, which is financed by the National Science Foundation, said he was confident in the trend. It lines up, he said, with two evolving patterns in American life: the decline of hunting and a sharp drop in violent crime, which has made the argument for self-protection much less urgent.

According to an analysis of the survey, only a quarter of men in 2012 said they hunted, compared with about 40 percent when the question was asked in 1977.

Mr. Smith acknowledged the rise in background checks, but said it was impossible to tell how many were for new gun owners. The checks are reported as one total that includes, for example, people buying their second or third gun, as well as those renewing concealed carry permits.

“If there was a national registry that recorded all firearm purchases, we’d have a full picture,” he said. “But there’s not, so we’ve got to put together pieces.”

The survey does not ask about the legality of guns in the home. Illegal guns are a factor in some areas but represent a very small fraction of ownership in the country, said Aaron Karp, an expert on gun policy at the Small Arms Survey in Geneva and at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. He said estimates of the total number of guns in the United States ranged from 280 million to 320 million.

The geographic patterns were some of the most surprising in the General Social Survey, researchers said. Gun ownership in both the South and the mountain region, which includes states like Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming, dropped to less than 40 percent of households this decade, down from 65 percent in the 1970s. The Northeast, where the household ownership rate is lowest, changed the least, at 22 percent this decade, compared with 29 percent in the 1970s.

Age groups presented another twist. While household ownership of guns among elderly Americans remained virtually unchanged from the 1970s to this decade at about 43 percent, ownership among young Americans plummeted. Household gun ownership among Americans under the age of 30 fell to 23 percent this decade from 47 percent in the 1970s. The survey showed a similar decline for Americans ages 30 to 44.

As for politics, the survey showed a steep drop in household gun ownership among Democrats and independents, and a very slight decline among Republicans. But the new data suggest a reversal among Republicans, with 51 percent since 2008 saying they have a gun in their home, up from 47 percent in surveys taken from 2000 through 2006. This leaves the Republican rate a bit below where it was in the 1970s, while ownership for Democrats is nearly half of what it was in that decade.

Researchers offered different theories for these trends.

Many Americans were introduced to guns through military service, which involved a large part of the population in the Vietnam War era, Dr. Webster said. Now that the Army is volunteer and a small fraction of the population, it is less a gateway for gun ownership, he said.

Urbanization also helped drive the decline. Rural areas, where gun ownership is the highest, are now home to about 17 percent of Americans, down from 27 percent in the 1970s. According to the survey, just 23 percent of households in cities owned guns in the 2000s, compared with 56 percent of households in rural areas. That was down from 70 percent of rural households in the 1970s.

The country’s changing demographics may also play a role. While the rate of gun ownership among women has remained relatively constant over the years at about 10 percent, which is less than one-third of the rate among men today, more women are heading households without men, another possible contributor to the decline in household gun ownership. Women living in households where there were guns that were not their own declined to a fifth in 2012 down from a third in 1980.

The increase of Hispanics as a share of the American population is also probably having an effect, as they are far less likely to own guns. In the survey results since 2000, about 14 percent of Hispanics reported having a gun in their house.

Allison Kopicki contributed reporting.

    Share of Homes With Guns Shows 4-Decade Decline, NYT, 9.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/us/rate-of-gun-ownership-is-down-survey-shows.html

After Rancorous Debate,

Colorado Senate Advances

Strict New Measures on Gun Control

March 9, 2013
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

DENVER — Colorado took a major step late Friday toward enacting some of the toughest new gun measures that have been introduced since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut touched off a national debate about gun control.

After more than 12 hours of emotional and bitterly divided debate, the Democratic-controlled State Senate gave preliminary approval to a package of gun bills. At its heart are measures that would require universal background checks for private gun sales and limit ammunition magazines to 15 rounds.

Other measures would create a fee for background checks; require those convicted of domestic abuse to surrender their firearms; and require residents applying for permits to carry concealed weapons to take in-person training classes, outlawing the handful of online-only courses now offered in the state.

If the bills win final approval — they must now survive a recorded vote from lawmakers this week — they would be Colorado’s first new firearms restrictions in more than a decade. Their passage in a state with a deep history and culture of hunting, sport shooting and gun ownership would also represent a significant victory for gun control advocates.

To Democrats, who now control both chambers of the Statehouse as well as the governor’s office, the measures are moderate solutions intended to stem a tide of gun violence and mass shootings, like the massacres at Columbine High School in 1999 and at an Aurora movie theater in July. Some Democrats spoke of being gun owners and hunters and said the new restrictions would not ban weapons or amount to the “gun grab” opponents warn of.

Unlike lawmakers in New York, Democrats here did not pursue a ban on assault-style rifles. And on Friday, they withdrew two bills that faced wavering support from fellow Democrats and unified opposition from Republicans. Those would have banned concealed weapons from college campuses and would have made some gun makers and dealers liable for deaths and injuries involving their firearms.

Republicans called the effort misguided and futile, saying the bills strip law-abiding gun owners of their Second Amendment rights while doing little to keep guns and bullets away from criminals. In speech after speech, hour after hour, they warned that the measures would drive businesses away, keep hunters at bay and ultimately be a political millstone for Democrats.

“I really believe this will represent an Alamo for freedom-loving Coloradans,” said Senator Greg Brophy, a Republican. “This is an immediate threat to them, and the backlash will be severe.”

Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, has said he will support the package.

Among those absent from the drama inside the State Capitol on Friday was Dave Hoover, a police sergeant whose nephew, A. J. Boik, was among the 12 people killed in Aurora. Since the shooting, Mr. Hoover has spoken out for new gun laws.

On Saturday morning, his feelings were bittersweet.

“You have to realize that none of this will ever bring back our family,” Mr. Hoover said. “We may have some responsible gun laws in our state now, but that doesn’t change what our family goes through every day. It’s good to see some change, and it’s good to see some people paying attention. It’s not going to do us any good. We’ve already gone through so much.”

    After Rancorous Debate,
    Colorado Senate Advances Strict New Measures on Gun Control,
    NYT, 9.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/us/colorado-senate-advances-strict-gun-control-measures.html

A State Backs Guns in Class for Teachers

March 8, 2013
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON

South Dakota became the first state in the nation to enact a law explicitly authorizing school employees to carry guns on the job, under a measure signed into law on Friday by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.

Passage of the law comes amid a passionate nationwide debate over arming teachers, stoked after 20 first graders died in an elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December. Shortly afterward, the National Rifle Association proposed a plan for armed security officers in every school, and legislation to allow school personnel to carry guns was introduced in about two dozen states. All those measures had stalled until now.

Several other states already have provisions in their laws — or no legal restrictions — that make it possible for teachers to possess guns in the classroom. In fact, a handful of school districts nationwide do have teachers who carry firearms. But South Dakota is the only known state with a statute that specifically authorizes teachers to possess a firearm in a K-12 school, according to Lauren Heintz, a research analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Representative Scott Craig, a freshman Republican in the South Dakota House who sponsored the bill, said he hoped the measure would shift the country’s discourse on school safety.

“Given the national attention to safety in schools, specifically in response to tragedies like in Connecticut, this is huge,” he said. He added that, hopefully, “dominoes will start to fall, people will see it’s reasonable, it’s safer than they think, it’s proactive and it’s preventive.”

The law leaves it up to school districts to decide whether to allow armed teachers. It remains to be seen, however, if many schools will permit guns in classrooms and whether the measure will reverberate nationwide. Mr. Daugaard, a Republican, said he did not think that many schools would take advantage of the option, but that it was important for them to have the choice available.

While many gun control advocates are horrified by the notion of guns in schools, Laura Cutilletta, a senior staff lawyer with the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that what South Dakota did would not spark a national trend. “For South Dakota to do this is less of a concern than if we saw it in Colorado or somewhere else like that,” she said, referring to states that have advocated for gun-control legislation.

Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, said the group supported the bill and lobbied for it in the South Dakota Legislature. “There’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all approach to keeping our children safe in schools,” he said. “It’s incumbent upon state and local governments to formulate and implement a plan to keep students safe.”

The law says that school districts may choose to allow a school employee, a hired security officer or a volunteer to serve as a “sentinel” who can carry a firearm in the school. The school district must receive the permission of its local law enforcement agency before carrying out the program. The law requires the sentinels to undergo training similar to what law enforcement officers receive.

“I think it does provide the same safety precautions that a citizen expects when a law enforcement officer enters onto a premises,” Mr. Daugaard said in an interview. He added that this law was more restrictive than those in other states that permit guns in schools.

South Dakota is a state with deep roots in hunting, where children start learning how to shoot BB guns when they are 8, skeet shoot with shotguns by age 14 and enter target shooting contests with .22-caliber semiautomatic rifles.

“Our kids start hunting here when they’re preteens,” said Kevin Jensen, who supports the bill and is the vice president of the Canton School Board in South Dakota. “We know guns. We respect guns.”

Opponents, which included state associations representing school boards and teachers, said the bill was rushed, did not make schools safer and ignored other approaches to safety.

Wade Pogany, the executive director of the Associated School Boards of South Dakota, said he believed more discussion was necessary before passing this bill. “If firearms are the best option that we have, I’ll stand down,” Dr. Pogany said. “But let’s not come into a heated, emotional debate about this and say this is the answer. This is premature.”

Supporters say the measure is important in a state where some schools are many miles away from emergency responders, who can take upward of 30 or 45 minutes to reach some areas.

But Don Kirkegaard, the superintendent of the Meade School District, which encompasses 11 schools over 3,200 square miles, said that although some of his institutions were isolated, he did not see any evidence to suggest that they would be safer if teachers were armed. Mr. Kirkegaard said that schools in more populated areas have been most affected by shootings.

“The likelihood of it happening in our rural attendant centers is not nearly as probable as it is in the urban city areas,” he said.

But his school district, like many others across the state and country, does employ an armed “resource officer” affiliated with the police who bounces between the schools. Opponents of the legislation said they would be more comfortable with providing resources to districts so they could hire law enforcement to protect the schools.

It is unclear how many school districts nationwide have teachers carrying guns. Hawaii and New Hampshire do not have any prohibition against carrying weapons on school property for those with concealed carry permits. Texas’s law against carrying weapons in school includes an exemption for people whom the school authorizes.

The Harrold Independent School District in Texas began allowing teachers to carry weapons in 2008. Utah is also said to have teachers who carry guns in the classroom, though they do not have to disclose it publicly. Supporters point out that there have been no accidents in states where teachers do carry guns.

But a couple of recent episodes could leave some people unsettled about firearms in schools.

A maintenance worker at an East Texas school that plans to allow its staff to carry guns accidentally shot himself during firearms safety training last month. And a police officer assigned to patrol a high school in a town north of New York City after the Newtown shooting was suspended this week because he accidentally fired his gun in the hallway during school hours.

    A State Backs Guns in Class for Teachers, NYT, 8.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/us/south-dakota-gun-law-classrooms.html

Suicide, With No Warning

March 8, 2013
The New York Times
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

TO his large, loving family and many friends, Kerry Lewiecki was an optimist and problem-solver, with a big laugh and impressive hugs. Early in the summer of 2010, he graduated from the University of Oregon with dual degrees in law and conflict resolution; invitations went out for his August wedding to his longtime girlfriend.

Then, just a few weeks later, within the span of a few hours, he bought a gun and shot and killed himself, at age 27. His father, Mike, a doctor in Albuquerque, who still chokes up when he recalls that day, said: “We had no clue he was desperate. I don’t think he’d ever shot a gun before.”

Support for stricter gun laws is growing, impelled by a year of grisly mass murders — at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., and, most recently, by a vengeful former policeman in California. Last month, President Obama kicked off a continuing national debate by proposing an array of new policies, including an assault weapons ban, an expansion of background checks and restrictions on high-capacity magazines.

But more than 60 percent of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, like Mr. Lewiecki’s. Reducing that statistic will most likely take different interventions than are currently proposed — like waiting periods and safe storage requirements — and those are not even on the table.

While background checks might turn up people with severe mental illness who have been prone to violence, gun suicides are often committed by people whose history doesn’t suggest a serious problem. In studies, a quarter to a third of those who killed themselves were not in contact with a psychiatrist at the time of death, and the majority were not on psychiatric medicines. “The first time the family may know of the distress is when they kill themselves,” said Dr. David Gunnell, a suicide epidemiologist at the University of Bristol in England. There may be no red flags and little forethought. To carry out a campus killing rampage, perpetrators collect weapons, identify victims and select locations. In contrast, suicides are often solitary, impulsive acts, experts say.

That is why a cornerstone of suicide prevention is simple: “restricting access to common and particularly lethal means for everyone — we know that’s effective,” said Dan Reidenberg, executive director of SAVE (Suicide Awareness and Voices of Education), a national suicide prevention group.

That means different things in different places. In Britain, suicide prevention efforts in the late 1990s involved banning the sales of large bottles of paracetamol (known as Tylenol in the United States), which had been used in tens of thousands of suicide attempts each year. When I was reporting from China a decade ago, rural officials responded to an epidemic of suicide among women by restricting pesticide sales.

In the United States, we build barriers on bridges, but have fewer barriers to the quick access to guns: “In the U.S. one of the most straightforward things to do to prevent suicide is to make firearms less accessible,” Dr. Gunnell said. The Lewiecki family believes that Kerry might well be alive if there had been a waiting period before purchase in Oregon. Studies suggest that far fewer American teenagers would commit suicide if gun owners were required to use trigger locks. Seventy-five percent of the guns used in youth suicides and unintentional injuries were accessible in the home or the home of a friend.

Psychiatrists first started focusing on how much the ready availability of lethal means affected suicide rates after a fortuitous experiment in England. When the country switched its heating from coal to natural gas in the 1970s, suicide rates plummeted, because the fumes were not as deadly; gas has a far lower carbon monoxide content. Sri Lanka developed the highest suicide rate in the world in the 1980s, following the introduction of pesticides on a mass scale. Once the government removed the most toxic compounds, like Paraquat (lethal in 70 percent of cases) suicide rates dropped 50 percent, though the number of attempts dropped by less.

Studies show that once a convenient lethal method is removed, many do not seek other options. “If people go to the Golden Gate Bridge and encounter a barrier, they don’t go to the Bay Bridge and try there,” Dr. Reidenberg said.

INDEED, many people who commit suicide are more momentarily desperate than classically depressed, experts say. In Sri Lanka, “pesticide was often taken after an argument with a parent or a spouse,” said Dr. Gunnell, who studied that epidemic.

Up to 50 percent of people who attempt suicide make the decision to do so within minutes to an hour before they act, studies have found. They may be depressed or have contemplated suicide, “but the final decision comes very quickly, and there’s often ambivalence up to the moment,” Dr. Reidenberg said.

Although SAVE has not taken a specific policy position on firearms, it maintains that guns, just like dangerous medicines, should be safely stored.

But putting time between a suicidal impulse and getting a loaded gun in hand may be hard to legislate in the United States. A 2008 Supreme Court decision struck down a Washington, D.C., law that required weapons to be stored disassembled or to have trigger locks on the grounds that the law interfered with the right to self-defense; a handful of states still mandate the safety features. While the 1993 Brady Violence Prevention Act required a five-day waiting period for a background check before firearms purchases, the provision expired in 1998 and checks are now done through the Internet-enabled National Instant Check System, in minutes.

Would a wait have deterred Kerry Lewiecki? In law school he had developed severe pain in his hands, arms and back that was not responding well to treatment. Despite that, he enjoyed weekends with his fiancée, and they spoke on the morning of his death. That same day he mailed books to his parents’ home, in preparation for a Father’s Day visit.

Said his father, “If it had not been so easy to buy a gun maybe he would have spoken with someone or woken up the next morning and heard the birds and felt better.”

Elisabeth Rosenthal is a reporter

on the environment and health for The New York Times.

    Suicide, With No Warning, NYT, 8.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/sunday-review/suicide-with-no-warning.html

The Latest Hurdle to Gun-Law Reform

February 26, 2013
The New York Times

Of all the proposals to reduce gun violence now pending in Congress, there was one that seemed most likely to bring the two parties together: requiring background checks for buyers in private gun sales. Republicans and Democrats said this measure would help keep guns out of the wrong hands, especially the proliferating handguns that now account for nearly three-quarters of gun deaths.

Gun-control groups made it their top priority, saying it would end a loophole that now allows 40 percent of sales to take place without oversight.

But that consensus is being threatened by a new demand from Republicans that would render the provision toothless. A deal on background checks may fall apart because Republicans don’t want any record to be kept of these private sales. They express a classic right-wing paranoia that the government might one day use these records to confiscate the guns of law-abiding Americans.

“There absolutely will not be record-keeping on legitimate, law-abiding gun owners in this country,” said Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma, on “Fox News Sunday.” “All they have to do is create a record-keeping, and that will kill this bill.”

There is, of course, record-keeping right now on legitimate law-abiding gun owners. Gun dealers are required to do background checks and to keep records. And Mr. Coburn has gone further than most in his party to reach agreement on a background check bill that would eliminate what is commonly called the “gun-show loophole” even though the exemption extends far beyond gun shows. Mr. Coburn has negotiated intensively with the bill’s Democratic sponsors, which makes his position on record-keeping particularly disappointing.

Without a record, there is no way of knowing whether a seller really conducted a background check or even if a transaction has taken place. That would put background checks on the honor system, and, given the widespread opposition to federal regulation among gun owners, it’s a safe bet the requirement would be ignored.

The dark and nonsensical fantasy that the United States government will one day transform itself into a jackbooted fascist state and seize American weaponry has long been peddled by the gun lobby to stir up donations to its cause. It is the reason the federal background check system is not allowed to keep records of people who are approved to buy guns — advocates claimed that doing so would lead to a national gun registry and thus a road map for the storm troopers to know whose door to kick down in their rabid search for a revolver.

But licensed dealers already have to keep records of their gun sales when they conduct background checks, which makes the opposition to the same requirement for private sellers particularly absurd. If those records — which are kept for the majority of gun sales — haven’t led to a registry, why should the expanded requirement?

The records are often extremely valuable to the police when trying to trace a weapon used to commit a crime, even though the lack of a national database makes such searches quite painstaking. Having records for private sales, particularly in the growing Internet market, would make the work of law enforcement easier.

It sounds as if this last-minute issue is simply a lame excuse to kill the bill for those lawmakers already under pressure from the National Rifle Association. For the sake of future gun victims, lawmakers should ignore this lobbying and pass a background-check bill with a strong requirement for keeping records.

    The Latest Hurdle to Gun-Law Reform, NYT, 26.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/the-latest-hurdle-to-gun-law-reform.html

Violent, Drunk and Holding a Gun

February 23, 2013
The New York Times

Multiple mass shootings by deranged young men have made keeping firearms out of the hands of mentally ill people a big part of the gun debate.

Given the enormity of those crimes, that is understandable. Federal law does, in fact, prohibit gun ownership by mentally ill people if a judge has found them to be dangerous or they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. President Obama has also issued executive orders to ensure that federal background checks include complete information on people barred from owning guns for mental health reasons and to clarify that federal law allows health care providers to report patients’ credible threats of violence to the authorities.

But a focus on mass murder, while critical, does not get at the broader issue of gun violence, including the hundreds of single-victim murders, suicides, nonfatal shootings and other gun crimes that occur daily in the United States. And focusing on the mentally ill, most of whom are not violent, overlooks people who are at demonstrably increased risk of committing violent crimes but are not barred by federal law from buying and having guns.

These would include people who have been convicted of violent misdemeanors including assaults, and those who are alcohol abusers. Unless guns are also kept from these high-risk people, preventable gun violence will continue.

VIOLENT MISDEMEANORS Federal law prohibits felons from buying and possessing firearms; it also bars people convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. But it permits gun purchase and ownership by people convicted of other violent misdemeanors, defined variously under state laws, including assault and battery, brandishing a weapon or making open, credible threats of violence. Many people convicted of violent misdemeanors were originally charged with felonies but then convicted of lesser charges because of plea bargains. And research shows that people who have been convicted of any misdemeanors and who then legally buy a handgun are more likely to commit crimes after that gun purchase than buyers with no prior convictions.

California provides a case study. It changed its law in 1991 to prohibit individuals convicted of violent misdemeanors from buying guns for 10 years after the conviction. Before that, a study showed that gun buyers with even a single prior misdemeanor conviction were nearly five times as likely as those with no criminal history to be arrested for gun-related or other violent crimes. After the law was enacted, a significant decrease in arrests was attributed to the denial of gun sales to people with misdemeanor records.

ALCOHOL ABUSE Federal law prohibits the purchase and possession of guns by anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” But the statute ignores alcohol abuse. That is also a mistake. The evidence linking alcohol abuse and gun-related violence is compelling. One study found that subjects who had ever been in trouble at work for drinking or were ever hospitalized for alcohol abuse were at increased risk of committing homicide and suicide.

Other studies also suggest that alcohol abuse is a factor in the association between gun ownership and the criminal justice system. The difficulty in policing alcohol abuse for purposes of gun control is that there is no precise definition of abuse. Pennsylvania, however, provides a useful example. It bars gun purchases by those who have been convicted of three or more drunken driving offenses within a five-year period. That criterion identifies drinkers with demonstrated tendencies toward recklessness and lawbreaking.

President Obama has instructed the Justice Department to review the federal prohibitions on gun ownership and to make legislative and executive recommendations “to ensure dangerous people aren’t slipping through the cracks.” The answers are already out there.

    Violent, Drunk and Holding a Gun, NYT, 23.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/violent-drunk-and-holding-a-gun.html

Four Are Dead

After a String of Shootings in California

February 19, 2013
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

TUSTIN, Calif. — A 20-year-old part-time college student was responsible for an hourlong early-morning shooting and carjacking rampage in Orange County on Tuesday that left four dead, including the gunman, the police said.

The man, Ali Syed, began shooting around 4:45 a.m. at the home where he lived with his parents in Ladera Ranch, officials said. He fired multiple times at a young woman in the house, killing her, and fled in his parents’ sport utility vehicle, they said.

Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, said the relationship between Mr. Syed and the victim, who was identified only as a woman in her 20s, had not been determined, nor was Mr. Syed’s motive in the killing clear.

But after leaving his parents’ home, Mr. Syed dispensed death and mercy with a baffling randomness, executing some victims with his shotgun while sparing others.

With his parents’ S.U.V. damaged and one tire flat, Mr. Syed parked outside a Denny’s restaurant, where a man in another car noticed Mr. Syed loading his shotgun, according to Chief Scott Jordan of the Tustin Police Department.

As the man drove through the parking lot to escape, the police said, Mr. Syed chased him on foot, shooting at the back of the car and hitting him in the back of the head. The man was later taken to a hospital, where his condition was not released.

Mr. Syed then approached another man, who was filling up at a nearby gas station. Chief Jordan said Mr. Syed told the man: “I killed somebody. Today is my last day. I don’t want to hurt you. Give me your keys.” The man complied, and Mr. Syed fled back onto the highway in the man’s pickup truck.

On State Route 55, a north-south freeway, he pulled over on the shoulder and fired at passing cars, hitting at least three vehicles and wounding one driver.

He left the freeway in nearby Santa Ana, where he got out of the truck and approached the driver of a BMW at a stop sign, carrying what witnesses said appeared to be a shotgun, according to the Santa Ana police. Mr. Syed ordered the driver out of the BMW, walked him to the curb with his hands behind his head and killed him, shooting multiple times in the back and head.

Mr. Syed drove the victim’s BMW back to Tustin, where he approached an employee at a construction site, and killed him on the spot, Chief Jordan said. As one of the victim’s co-workers approached, Mr. Syed told him to run. He shot the man in the arm as he did, took his vehicle and fled to the city of Orange, where the California Highway Patrol caught sight of Mr. Syed around 5:45 a.m.

Before any chase could ensue, though, Chief Jordan said, Mr. Syed left the freeway, hopped out of the car while it was still moving, placed the shotgun to his head and killed himself.

The shotgun, which was recovered from the scene, was registered to someone at the address in Ladera Ranch where Mr. Syed lived, said Mr. Amormino, the Sheriff’s Department spokesman, saying Mr. Syed had no prior criminal record.

At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, law enforcement officials tried to give assurances that the threat had passed. Interim Chief Carlos Rojas of the Santa Ana police said it was “senseless violence that hit our community today,” but added, “Mr. Syed is no longer a danger to anyone in Orange County.”

    Four Are Dead After a String of Shootings in California, NYT, 19.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/us/shooting-spree-in-california.html

Mindy McCready,

a Singer Long Troubled,

Dies at 37

February 18, 2013
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

Her life was one of those aching odysseys sermonized redundantly across the musical landscape in which she performed. The rocket rise to stardom. The volcanic men. The depression. The drugs and booze. The brushes with the law. The heartache. The suicide attempts.

Such were the tangled threads of the country music singer Mindy McCready, who could never seem to outrun life’s ill winds.

In an interview with The Associated Press three years ago, she summarized her stormy world as “a giant whirlwind of chaos all the time,” adding, “My entire life things have been attracted to me and vice versa that turn into chaotic nightmares or I create the chaos myself.”

On Sunday afternoon, the 37-year-old singer was found dead on the front porch of her house in Heber Springs, Ark., of what the police said appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Her death followed the most recent implosion of her personal life. Just last month, David Wilson, a music producer who was her boyfriend, was also found dead at their home from a gunshot wound. His death is still being investigated by the Cleburne County Sheriff’s Office. Ms. McCready had denied any involvement in it.

Earlier this month, her two young sons were removed by local authorities.

Long before the tumult and tragedy kicked in, she likened her narrative to a Cinderella story.

She was born Malinda Gayle McCready on Nov. 30, 1975, in Fort Myers, Fla. She began singing at her local church when she was 3, and took training for opera before gravitating to country music. As a teenager she would sing karaoke, favoring hits from the likes of Trisha Yearwood and Reba McEntire.

In 1994, she headed to Nashville, equipped with her karaoke tapes and a large reservoir of hope, and was soon signed to a recording contract. Within two years, she had her only No. 1 hit, a male chauvinism critique, “Guys Do It All the Time.” She said her kind of song was one where the women were equal to the men.

Her first album, “Ten Thousand Angels,” sold over two million copies. Soon she was singing at concerts alongside some of country’s megastars.

But dark clouds intervened and trailed her everywhere. In time, her record sales began to diminish as her personal struggles intensified.

She fought depression, and abused drugs and alcohol. In 2004, she was charged with fraudulently obtaining painkillers. In 2005, she was charged with drunken driving.

Her romantic life featured its own turmoil. In 2005, Billy McKnight, a fellow country singer with whom she would have a son, was charged with attempted murder after the police said he choked and beat her.

She served brief jail sentences in 2007 and 2008 for probation violations.

One more controversial episode was inserted in her résumé in 2008, when Roger Clemens came under investigation for using performance-enhancing drugs, and The Daily News reported that she had a romantic involvement with the pitcher starting when she was a teenager. He denied that they were anything more than friends.

Hounded by her demons, she tried to kill herself at least three times between 2005 and 2010.

In 2009, like some other troubled stars willing to allow the public to watch them repair themselves, she signed up to appear on the reality series “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew.” On one episode, she suffered a seizure.

In the last few years, four other cast members from that series have also died.

In the aftermath of her appearance, she spoke of reigniting her career. She mentioned writing a book and creating a reality show with her brothers. Her fifth and final album was released in 2010, titled, “I’m Still Here.”

But soon she found herself embroiled in a custody battle with her mother and Mr. McKnight over her eldest son. She settled down with Mr. Wilson in the rural town of Heber Springs, and had a son with him last year.

After Mr. Wilson’s death, according to published reports, her father became troubled by her behavior and her drinking. A judge ordered her to undergo evaluation and treatment. Her sons were removed from her care.

She was found on Sunday next to Mr. Wilson’s dog, a Dogo Argentino, that authorities believe she shot before killing herself.

In addition to her children, Zander, 6, and Zayne, 10 months, she is survived by her mother, Gayle Inge; her father, Tim McCready; two brothers, Josh McCready and Tim Jr.; a half-brother, Sky Phelan; and her stepfather, Michael Inge.

On Monday, radio stations were playing her hits, and other country stars were expressing their profound sadness.

    Mindy McCready, a Singer Long Troubled, Dies at 37, NYT, 18.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/arts/music/mindy-mccready-country-singer-dies-at-37.html

Colleges Become Major Front

in Fight Over Carrying Guns

February 16, 2013
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and SUSAN SAULNY

BOULDER, Colo. — Public colleges and universities have become a major front in the nation’s debate over guns as gun-rights advocates press to expand the right to carry concealed weapons, a campaign that gained steam after the 2007 shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, which left 33 people dead. And though guns remain banned from most state colleges, pro-gun forces, in a series of high-decibel legal and political battles, have made inroads on the issue in a handful of states, most recently Colorado.

But the clashes seem divorced from realities on campus. On both sides, arguments are built largely on anecdotal evidence and on behalf of a student population that shows little passion for the dispute. After a high-profile fight over guns at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a court ruling last winter forced the university to allow concealed weapons. Students and administrators said the new policy had made no noticeable difference in life on campus.

There has been no sign of a proliferation of guns, which are still prohibited in most dormitories. Although the university has offered a small number of housing units where students could keep guns, so far there have been no takers.

“I don’t think it’s a big concern for students,” said Rebecca Naccarato, 22, a senior from Pueblo. “I think students weren’t really even aware of how much noise there was about it.”

In 2004, the National Research Foundation reviewed extensive research and concluded that there was no clear evidence that making it easy for law-abiding people to carry concealed weapons increased or decreased violence. Still, that has not persuaded partisans on either side, and the debate flared again after mass killings like those last July at a theater in nearby Aurora and in December at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Opponents of allowing the carrying of concealed weapons say it increases the risk of accidents, and of ordinary confrontations escalating to lethal force. Supporters say it gives pause to criminals, and a fighting chance to potential victims.

“If you had asked students the morning of the Virginia Tech shooting if they feel safe, I’m almost positive all of them would have said yes, but just a couple of hours later, those students found out that feeling safe is not the same as being safe,” said David Burnett, a spokesman for Students for Concealed Carry, a group that was formed after that shooting and has campaigned to overturn college gun bans in several states, including Colorado. “And smaller crimes are as much a reason for self-defense as spree killings.”

Mr. Burnett, 27, is an emergency medical technician and a nursing student at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, where he leaves a .45-caliber Glock pistol in the glove box of his Toyota because it is prohibited in class. His group, which says it has members on 130 campuses nationwide, sued his university in 2010, and the State Supreme Court ruled that employees and students may leave guns in cars parked on campus. Students for Concealed Carry, which is made up of volunteers and says it has no connection to the National Rifle Association or other gun rights organizations, considered the ruling a partial victory in its larger effort.

At the other end of the spectrum are students like Julie A. Gavran, a doctoral candidate in Dallas who is a coordinator at Students for Gun-Free Schools, a national group also founded after the Virginia Tech shooting. She says that one night years ago, when she was an undergraduate at Ohio Dominican University, a fellow student in a dormitory hallway aimed a gun at her face and pulled the trigger. The gun either jammed or was not loaded, Ms. Gavran said, and she lived to tell her story.

“Schools are actually the safest place to be,” she said, “because not having easy access to guns maintains that environment.”

On the whole, colleges and universities are safe and getting safer. According to the federal government, college campuses averaged about 18 homicides nationwide per year over the last decade, and more than 90 percent of violent crime against college students takes place off campus. The police at the University of Colorado campus here, with 30,000 students, 7,000 staff members and countless visitors, say that the last gun crime, a robbery, occurred in 2011, and the last homicide in the 1980s.

But each college is different. One plaintiff in the University of Colorado case, Martha Altman, 47, said she often felt unsafe walking to and from her car at night while working at a university facility in Aurora and taking classes at the downtown Denver campus — areas that are riskier than the Boulder campus.

Gun-rights advocates also note that the few schools where concealed weapons have been allowed for years, like the Colorado State University campuses, have not had resulting problems.

There is no way to know how many students or staff members at the University of Colorado have concealed weapon permits, which can be issued only to people 21 or older, but both sides agree that the number is small. Estimates range from 50 to 150.

Several of those who have publicly acknowledged having a permit also have extensive gun training, being military veterans or former police officers. Elisa Dahlberg, a 31-year-old senior, is both. “This campus is relatively safe; however, that doesn’t mean somebody won’t lose it,” Ms. Dahlberg said. “I’m pretty small, and I feel like it levels the playing field.”

One factor affecting campus attitudes is that highly educated people are more likely to have anti-gun views. In a Pew Research Center survey released in December, 66 percent of people with postgraduate degrees said prioritizing gun control was more important than protecting gun rights.

The number of Americans owning guns has declined for decades, especially in a younger generation that has less military or hunting experience than its predecessors. About 12 percent of adults under 35 keep a gun at home, less than half the rate for their elders, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Ms. Gavran, the gun-free schools advocate, believes that the push to allow weapons on campus is an attempt by gun-rights groups to reverse that trend. “I honestly believe the N.R.A. is trying to get a new generation of gun owners,” she said, “and by pushing more laws that will allow them to freely carry guns wherever they want, they’re able to make a new generation more open to gun ownership.”

Most states either prohibit firearms on public campuses or leave it up to the colleges and universities, which nearly always opt to ban them.

In 2004, Utah enacted a law explicitly extending concealed carry rights to public colleges and universities. In 2011, Mississippi and Wisconsin adopted laws allowing varying degrees of concealed carry at those states’ universities, and that same year a state appeals court in Oregon struck down a policy banning guns from public universities there.

And it was last March that Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the University of Colorado had been violating a 2003 state law by prohibiting concealed weapons. The change drew fierce protests from editorial writers and faculty members, and some professors still have signs posted outside their offices asking people not to enter armed.

Since then, however, nearly all students interviewed here described shades of gray, addressing practical concerns more than ideals.

Julia Millon, 21, a senior from Boston, said that the possibility of guns in classrooms initially “creeped out a lot of people,” but that she and others had come to see it as “not a very big deal.” She dislikes the idea of concealed weapons on campus, though she does not object to them elsewhere.

“I’ve never felt the need to protect myself on campus,” she said. “I personally don’t see the point of it.”

    Colleges Become Major Front in Fight Over Carrying Guns, NYT, 16.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/education/
    gun-advocates-push-for-more-access-on-campus.html

Notes From a Gun Buyback

February 15, 2013
The New York Times
By JOE NOCERA

NEWARK

The first gun turned in at the Calvary Gospel Church, in Newark’s tough South Ward, was an old shotgun. It wasn’t sawed off, and it wasn’t semiautomatic. It was made for hunting. The person who brought it in was paid $150.

It was early Friday morning, the start of a two-day gun buyback being held in Essex County, at sites in Montclair, Newark and elsewhere. A few weeks ago, when a gun buyback was held in Mercer County (which includes Trenton), 2,604 guns were turned in, 700 of which were either illegally bought or illegally modified. Among the guns turned in was a rocket launcher.

Things were slow at Calvary Gospel. Though other sites, especially Montclair, were buzzing with activity, the dozen-plus Newark policemen in the Calvary Gospel gym were mostly killing time. Every so often, an officer would yell, “Incoming,” meaning that someone was bringing in a gun. The police would snap to attention.

Most of the gun sellers looked embarrassed. “This is awkward,” said a man turning in three guns, one of them an assault weapon. A Newark police veteran later told me that he and his team could often trace a gun bought at a buyback to a particular crime or a particular dealer in the South, where many of New Jersey’s illegal guns come from. But, because the gun buyback came with guaranteed amnesty, they couldn’t pursue it any further. I tried to talk to some of the gun sellers as they were leaving, but most of them just looked straight ahead and kept walking.

By 10 a.m., about 20 guns had been turned in, including a half-dozen semiautomatic pistols. Just then, Jeffrey Chiesa, New Jersey’s attorney general, and Carolyn Murray, the acting Essex County prosecutor, walked in. They were providing the cash being used to pay for the guns with money confiscated from drug busts and other crimes. (The sellers got paid on a sliding scale: from $25 for a BB gun up to $250 for an illegal weapon.) Chiesa made a point of thanking the pastor, the Rev. Steven Davis. “It’s important that people turn guns in at places they can trust,” he said.

There are plenty of critics of gun buybacks. They argue that people turn in guns that would never be used in a crime — like that hunting gun I saw early on. They say that criminals are hardly going to be tempted to hand over their guns because someone is waving a few hundreds dollars at them.

But Chiesa wasn’t buying it. “The governor,” he said, referring to Chris Christie, “has told us to use every means necessary to reduce gun violence, traditional and nontraditional. We have collected a lot of guns in these buybacks, many of which were acquired illegally. Anecdotally, we know it makes a difference.” Later, over the phone, Mayor Cory Booker of Newark told me that while he had been skeptical of buybacks before he took office, he was now a true believer. “I have seen the kind of weapons turned in, and I know we are preventing some gun violence,” he said.

Chiesa went to another Newark site, the Paradise Baptist Church, where he held a brief news conference. “What are you going to do with the guns?” a reporter asked him. “We will destroy them,” Chiesa said.

It’s actually a little more interesting than that. Shortly before noon, a woman named Jessica Mindich walked into Cavalry Gospel, accompanied by Sgt. Luke Laterza, a Newark ballistics officer. A striking, 42-year-old mother of two from upscale Connecticut, she was going to be the recipient of the guns bought during the buyback.

Mindich runs Jewelry For a Cause, a company that designs jewelry tailored for specific philanthropies. In December 2011, she heard Booker speak so movingly about the devastation caused by urban gun violence, that she came up with the idea of designing bracelets made from melted down guns.

Though she had no ties to Newark, she soon convinced the mayor and the Police Department to back her initiative. To get her started, the police gave her the metal from some guns that had been confiscated in long-forgotten cases. She had the guns melted down and designed slim bracelets that included the gun’s serial number. In the nearly three months she’s been selling them, she has raised enough money to donate $40,000 to Newark — to help finance the next buyback. She calls it “The Caliber Collection.”

Around 7:30 p.m., I heard from the attorney general’s office that the gun buyback would acquire 1,000 guns on Friday alone. Montclair was such a hotbed of gun selling, that the Newark police had decided to send some officers there to help out on Saturday.

Many hours earlier, as I prepared to head back to the office, I said to one of the officers, “I wish you success with your buyback.”

“If we get one gun off the street,” he replied, “we’ve succeeded.”

    Notes From a Gun Buyback, NYT, 15.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/opinion/nocera-notes-from-a-gun-buyback.html

Shooting in the Dark

February 11, 2013
The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY

The young men who opened fire at Columbine High School, at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and in other massacres had this in common: they were video gamers who seemed to be acting out some dark digital fantasy. It was as if all that exposure to computerized violence gave them the idea to go on a rampage — or at least fueled their urges.

But did it really?

Social scientists have been studying and debating the effects of media violence on behavior since the 1950s, and video games in particular since the 1980s. The issue is especially relevant today, because the games are more realistic and bloodier than ever, and because most American boys play them at some point. Girls play at lower rates and are significantly less likely to play violent games.

A burst of new research has begun to clarify what can and cannot be said about the effects of violent gaming. Playing the games can and does stir hostile urges and mildly aggressive behavior in the short term. Moreover, youngsters who develop a gaming habit can become slightly more aggressive — as measured by clashes with peers, for instance — at least over a period of a year or two.

Yet it is not at all clear whether, over longer periods, such a habit increases the likelihood that a person will commit a violent crime, like murder, rape, or assault, much less a Newtown-like massacre. (Such calculated rampages are too rare to study in any rigorous way, researchers agree.)

“I don’t know that a psychological study can ever answer that question definitively,” said Michael R. Ward, an economist at the University of Texas, Arlington. “We are left to glean what we can from the data and research on video game use that we have.”

The research falls into three categories: short-term laboratory experiments; longer-term studies, often based in schools; and correlation studies — between playing time and aggression, for instance, or between video game sales and trends in violent crime.

Lab experiments confirm what any gamer knows in his gut: playing games like “Call of Duty,” “Killzone 3” or “Battlefield 3” stirs the blood. In one recent study, Christopher Barlett, a psychologist at Iowa State University, led a research team that had 47 undergraduates play “Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance” for 15 minutes. Afterward, the team took various measures of arousal, both physical and psychological. It also tested whether the students would behave more aggressively, by having them dole out hot sauce to a fellow student who, they were told, did not like spicy food but had to swallow the sauce.

Sure enough, compared with a group who had played a nonviolent video game, those who had been engaged in “Mortal Kombat” were more aggressive across the board. They gave their fellow students significantly bigger portions of the hot sauce.

Many similar studies have found the same thing: A dose of violent gaming makes people act a little more rudely than they would otherwise, at least for a few minutes after playing.

It is far harder to determine whether cumulative exposure leads to real-world hostility over the long term. Some studies in schools have found that over time digital warriors get into increasing numbers of scrapes with peers — fights in the schoolyard, for example. In a report published last summer, psychologists at Brock University in Ontario found that longer periods of violent video game playing among high school students predicted a slightly higher number of such incidents over time.

“None of these extreme acts, like a school shooting, occurs because of only one risk factor; there are many factors, including feeling socially isolated, being bullied, and so on,” said Craig A. Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State University. “But if you look at the literature, I think it’s clear that violent media is one factor; it’s not the largest factor, but it’s also not the smallest.”

Most researchers in the field agree with Dr. Anderson, but not all of them. Some studies done in schools or elsewhere have found that it is aggressive children who are the most likely to be drawn to violent video games in the first place; they are self-selected to be in more schoolyard conflicts. And some studies are not able to control for outside factors, like family situation or mood problems.

“This is a pool of research that, so far, has not been very well done,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, associate professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University and a critic of the field whose own research has found no link. “I look at it and I can’t say what it means.”

Neither Dr. Ferguson, nor others interviewed in this article, receive money from the gaming industry.

Many psychologists argue that violent video games “socialize” children over time, prompting them to imitate the behavior of the game’s characters, the cartoonish machismo, the hair-trigger rage, the dismissive brutality. Children also imitate flesh and blood people in their lives, of course — parents, friends, teachers, siblings — and one question that researchers have not yet answered is when, exactly, a habit is so consuming that its influence trumps the socializing effects of other major figures in a child’s life.

That is, what constitutes a bad habit? In surveys about 80 percent of high school-age boys say they play video games, most of which are thought to be violent, and perhaps a third to a half of those players have had a habit of 10 hours a week or more.

The proliferation of violent video games has not coincided with spikes in youth violent crime. The number of violent youth offenders fell by more than half between 1994 and 2010, to 224 per 100,000 population, according to government statistics, while video game sales have more than doubled since 1996.

In a working paper now available online, Dr. Ward and two colleagues examined week-by-week sales data for violent video games, across a wide range of communities. Violence rates are seasonal, generally higher in summer than in winter; so are video game sales, which peak during the holidays. The researchers controlled for those trends and analyzed crime rates in the month or so after surges in sales, in communities with a high concentrations of young people, like college towns.

“We found that higher rates of violent video game sales related to a decrease in crimes, and especially violent crimes,” said Dr. Ward, whose co-authors were A. Scott Cunningham of Baylor University and Benjamin Engelstätter of the Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany.

No one knows for sure what these findings mean. It may be that playing video games for hours every day keeps people off the streets who would otherwise be getting into trouble. It could be that the games provide “an outlet” that satisfies violent urges in some players — a theory that many psychologists dismiss but that many players believe.

Or the two trends may be entirely unrelated.

“At the very least, parents should be aware of what’s in the games their kids are playing,” Dr. Anderson said, “and think of it from a socialization point of view: what kind of values, behavioral skills, and social scripts is the child learning?”

    Shooting in the Dark, NYT, 11.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/science/studying-the-effects-of-playing-violent-video-games.html

2 Maryland Students

Die in Murder-Suicide Shooting

February 12, 2013
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

A University of Maryland student shot his two roommates, one fatally, early Tuesday before killing himself outside the house they shared near the College Park campus, the authorities said.

The men, who were students at the university, had been arguing in the house’s front yard about a small fire that the gunman had started in the basement, according to the Prince George’s County Police Department.

As the argument grew more heated, the gunman shot his roommates before killing himself, said Julie Parker, a police spokeswoman.

The wounded student does not have life-threatening injuries. The names of the students have not yet been released.

Wallace Loh, the university’s president, said in a statement that “the University of Maryland community awoke this morning to heartbreak,” but added that “together, we will emerge from our collective sadness.”

    2 Maryland Students Die in Murder-Suicide Shooting, NYT, 12.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/us/2-maryland-students-die-in-murder-suicide-shooting.html

A Hospital Offers a Grisly Lesson on Gun Violence

February 6, 2013
The New York Times
By JON HURDLE

PHILADELPHIA — In a darkened classroom, 15 eighth graders gasped as a photograph appeared on the screen in front of them. It showed a dead man whose jaw had been destroyed by a shotgun blast, leaving the lower half of his face a shapeless, bloody mess.

Next came a picture of the bullet-perforated legs of someone who had been shot with an AK-47 assault rifle, and then one of the bloated abdomen of a gunshot victim with internal injuries so grievous that the patient had to be fitted with a colostomy bag to replace intestines that can no longer function normally.

These are among about 500 gunshot victims who are treated each year at Temple University Hospital, an institution in the heart of impoverished, crime-ridden North Philadelphia. While President Obama and Congressional leaders debate legislation intended to prevent mass killings like the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., the hospital is trying to slow the rate of street killings by helping teenagers understand the realities of gun violence.

The unusual program, called Cradle to Grave, brings in youths from across Philadelphia in the hope that an unflinching look at the effects that guns have in their community will deter young people from reaching for a gun to settle personal scores, and will help them recognize that gun violence is not the glamorous business sometimes depicted in television shows and rap music.

The program is open to all schools in the city, but about two-thirds of the participants were referred by officials from the juvenile justice system. Children younger than 13 are not normally admitted. So far, about 7,000 teenagers have participated since it began in 2006, and despite the graphic content, no parent has ever complained, said Scott P. Charles, the hospital’s trauma outreach coordinator.

“In seven and a half years, I have never had a parent say, ‘I can’t believe what you just showed my child,’ ” Mr. Charles said.

On a recent day the eighth graders, students from nearby Kenderton School, gathered around Mr. Charles at the start of a two-hour visit. Most said they knew someone who had been shot.

“Our goal here isn’t to scare you straight,” Mr. Charles told them. “We’re just trying to give you an education.”

According to police statistics, 331 people were killed in the city in 2012, equaling the highest total since 2008, and the fourth consecutive year of increase. Eighty-six percent of them were killed by firearms, the police say.

Still, the number of killings in the city of about 1.5 million residents has dropped from a high of 406 in 2006, when national news media started calling the city Killadelphia.

In a 2010 paper published in the medical journal Injury, Dr. Amy J. Goldberg, the hospital’s chief of trauma and surgical critical care, and others cited data showing that students’ inclination toward violence decreased after participating in the Cradle to Grave program, especially among those classified as having an “aggressive response to shame.”

“These results suggest that hospitals offer a unique opportunity to address the public health crisis posed by inner-city firearm violence,” the study said.

The program starts with a visit to the hospital’s trauma bay, the first stop for gunshot victims — half of them under 25 — who are brought to the hospital from North Philadelphia’s streets at an average rate of more than one a day.

As the 13- and 14-year-olds gathered around a gurney on a recent visit, Mr. Charles told the story of Lamont Adams, 16, who died at the hospital after being shot 14 times by another boy who believed Lamont had snitched about a street dice game that was broken up by police officers.

Lamont arrived in the trauma bay with 24 gunshot wounds, 10 more than the 14 rounds that had been emptied into him, because some of the shots had also exited his body, in some cases leaving indentations in the sidewalk, Mr. Charles told the students.

In case his verbal description was not sufficiently vivid, Mr. Charles asked Justin Robinson, 13, to play the part of Lamont. The boy lay down on an empty body bag. Mr. Charles attached 24 circular red stickers to Justin’s clothing to represent the wounds in Lamont’s body.

Mr. Charles told the students that the wounds he finds most moving were those in the boy’s hands. “He holds up his hands and begs the boy to stop shooting,” Mr. Charles said. “He had not prepared himself for how terrible this would be.”

The narrative was then taken up by Dr. Goldberg, who told the children that by the time Lamont arrived in the trauma bay, he was not breathing, so surgeons — without the use of anesthetics — quickly inserted a breathing tube into his windpipe.

Neither did he have a pulse but that did not stop the doctors from inserting a tube into his groin to replace the blood he was losing, and then to open his chest in the hope of restarting his heart — which turned out to have three or four holes in it, Dr. Goldberg said. She held up a stainless steel rib-spreader.

As the details of Lamont’s story unfolded, one girl struggled to keep her composure. Another hid her face in her friend’s shoulder. Lamont died about 15 minutes after arriving at the hospital, underscoring that prevention of gun violence is a lot better than trying to cure its effects, Dr. Goldberg concluded.

“Who do you think has the best chance of saving your life?” she asked the students. “You do.”

Despite the grisly images, most of the students said afterward that people should still be allowed to own guns for self-defense, although not assault weapons. Mahogany Johnson, 14, said she is in favor of a street ban on semiautomatic weapons like AK-47 assault rifles, which she said should be used “only in the woods.” Jabriel Steward, 14, said, “Everybody should be allowed to have one gun for protection, for self-defense.”

But Feliciana Asada, 14, said more students should be given the opportunity to participate in Cradle to Grave. “Programs like this need to be installed in schools,” she said.

    A Hospital Offers a Grisly Lesson on Gun Violence, NYT, 6.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/07philly.html

Hip-Hop Speaks to the Guns

February 6, 2013
The New York Times
By TA-NEHISI COATES

The work of the rapper Kendrick Lamar should enjoy heavy rotation in the White House these days. In this time of Tucson, Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., Lamar’s major-label debut album, “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” gives us a broad reckoning with the meaning of everyday gun violence unfolding far from the tragic spectacle. “Good Kid” has earned its share of praise from critics and hip-hop fans, but it perhaps has the most to offer to those shocked into action by the senseless massacres we’ve endured over the past few years.

This particular moment has shined a light on a gun lobby that argues for maximum firepower and minimum responsibility. If history is any judge the moment will pass, and most of us will find ourselves again lost in our daily and particular business. When that time comes, there will be others of us who live in places where senseless shootings remain a corrosive constant.

Lamar’s album begins in such a place and tells the story of a teenage boy pursuing a girl with a mix of affection and lust. The character’s ordinary ambition differs little from that of teenagers who once piled into their parents’ car and turned the drive-in into a bacchanal. But Lamar’s lover’s lane runs through gang-infested Compton, Calif., and the make-out point is a deathtrap.

Hip-hop originates in communities where such hazards are taken as given. Rappers generally depict themselves as masters, not victims, of the attending violence. Their music is not so much interested in exalting to our preferred values as constructing a fantasy wherein the author has total control and is utterly invulnerable.

When your life is besieged, the music is therapy, vicarious mastery in a world where you control virtually nothing, least of all the fate of your body. I had a friend in middle school who would play Rakim every morning because he knew there was a good chance that he would be jumped en route to or from school by the various crews that roamed the area. But, in his mind, the mask of rap machismo made him too many for them.

“Good Kid” is narrative told from behind the mask. Fantasies of rage and lust are present, but fear pervades Lamar’s world. He pitches himself not as “Compton’s Most Wanted” but as “Compton’s Human Sacrifice.” He loves the city, even as he acknowledges that the city is trying to kill him. “If Pirus and Crips all got along,” he says, “They’d probably gun me down by the end of this song.”

On one of the most affecting songs, “The Art of Peer Pressure,” he engages in a series of criminal escapades. It’s reminiscent of N.W.A.’s “Gangsta, Gangsta,” except that Lamar is not a supercriminal but a boy out to impress his friends. The character’s drug use is not so much a choice of pleasure as it is a puerile bid for attention: “Look at me,” he raps. “I got the blunt in my mouth.”

I must confess my bias. I grew up in Baltimore during a time when the city was in the thrall of crack and Saturday night specials. I’ve spent most of my life in neighborhoods suffering their disproportionate share of gun violence. In each of these places it was not simply the deaths that have stood out to me, but the way that death corrupted the most ordinary of rituals. On an average day in middle school, fully a third of my brain was obsessed with personal safety. I feared the block 10 times more than any pop quiz. My favorite show in those days was “The Wonder Years.” When Kevin Arnold went to visit his lost-found love Winnie Cooper, he simply hopped on his bike. In Baltimore, calling upon our Winnie Coopers meant gathering an entire crew. There was safety in numbers. Alone, we were targets.

The world I lived in, and the preserve of Lamar’s album, was created not by mindless nature but by public policy. It is understandable that in the wake of great tragedy we’d want to take a second look at those policies. But in some corners of America great tragedy has bloomed into a world that does not simply raise the ranks of the dead but shrinks the world of the survivors. “Good Kid” shows us how gun violence extends out beyond the actual guns.

Here is an album that people grappling with policy desperately need to hear. It does what art does best in that it bids the monotony of numbers to sing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is a guest columnist.

    Hip-Hop Speaks to the Guns, NYT, 6.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/opinion/coates-hip-hop-speaks-to-the-guns.html

President Claims Shooting as a Hobby,

and the White House Offers Evidence

February 2, 2013
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — When President Obama mentioned last week that he had picked up a new hobby — skeet shooting at Camp David — it was a surprising disclosure by a president whose main identification with guns these days is his effort to ban assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.

To some, Mr. Obama’s newfound enthusiasm for shooting clay pigeons — he said in an interview that he did it “all the time” at the presidential retreat — also seemed a bit suspicious.

So on Saturday, the White House tried to silence the skeptics by releasing a photograph of Mr. Obama shooting on the range at Camp David in August. The president, wearing protective glasses and ear-muffs, is squinting down the barrel of a shotgun moments after pulling the trigger. Smoke is shooting from the front of the gun.

The White House said the photo was taken on Aug. 4, Mr. Obama’s 51st birthday. But it offered no further details on whether his target practice was a regular hobby or a one-time event.

The notion of the president taking aim at targets flung into the air captivated some in the political and social media worlds at a time when he is pushing Congress to enact sweeping restrictions on high-capacity rifles and magazines.

Conservatives scoffed, comics mocked, a congresswoman challenged him to a skeet-shooting contest, a fake picture of an armed Mr. Obama circulated on the Internet, and the White House tried to make the whole matter go away.

“It was a surprise to a lot of people in the industry when we saw that and heard that,” said Michael Hampton Jr., the executive director of the National Skeet Shooting Association, whose 35,000 members do not include the president.

Mr. Obama is hardly the first politician to draw scorn for boasting of experience with guns. In 2007, during his first presidential campaign, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts was ridiculed when he said, “I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter — small varmints, if you will.” In 2004, John Kerry, then a presidential candidate and now secretary of state, was lampooned for showing up in camouflage to go hunting less than two weeks before the election.

The latest commotion has its origins in the interview Mr. Obama gave to The New Republic, now owned by Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder and former Obama campaign aide. In the interview, Franklin Foer, the magazine’s editor, referred to the fight over gun control and asked if the president had ever fired a gun.

“Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” Mr. Obama said.

“The whole family?” Mr. Foer asked.

“Not the girls,” he said, “but oftentimes guests of mine go up there. And I have a profound respect for the traditions of hunting that trace back in this country for generations. And I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake.”

Mr. Obama went on to say that the reality of guns in urban areas differs from that in rural areas. “So it’s trying to bridge those gaps that I think is going to be part of the biggest task over the next several months,” he said. “And that means that advocates of gun control have to do a little more listening than they do sometimes.”

The skeet-shooting comment caught many off guard because it is not something the president has talked about. While other presidents have used the skeet-shooting range at Camp David, database searches of Mr. Obama’s speeches and interviews turned up no mention of participating.

“I would refer you simply to his comments,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters who asked after the interview was published how often the president shoots. “I don’t know how often. He does go to Camp David with some regularity, but I’m not sure how often he’s done that.”

Asked why no one had seen a picture or heard about it before, Mr. Carney said, “Because when he goes to Camp David, he goes to spend time with his family and friends and relax, not to produce photographs.”

That did not satisfy the skeptics. The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column cast doubt on the claim, while Fox News quoted an unnamed person saying Mr. Obama had participated once during a Marine competition at Camp David but not “all the time.” Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, went on CNN to question the assertion.

“I tell you what I do think,” Ms. Blackburn said. “I think he should invite me to Camp David, and I’ll go skeet shooting with him and I bet I’ll beat him.”

Gun rights supporters said the president was evidently trying to reach out to gun owners to assuage their concerns about his legislative proposals.

“He clearly doesn’t get it,” said Chris Cox, the chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association. “But in his effort to pursue a political agenda, he apparently is willing to convince gun owners that he’s one of us, that he’s a Second Amendment supporter.”

Mr. Cox said no one was fooled. “Skeet shooting, whether you’ve done it or not, doesn’t make you a defender of the Second Amendment,” he said.

While White House officials privately dismissed skeptics by comparing them to “birthers” who doubted that Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, even some liberals found the skeet-shooting comment hard to believe.

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” made fun of Mr. Obama’s statement as well as those who doubted it. He essentially agreed with Mr. Cox that it was pointless for the president to try to reach out to gun rights supporters who do not believe him.

“The point is, Mr. President, what are you doing? Why try?” Mr. Stewart asked. “As far as most of your opponents go, no measure of detente, true or disingenuous, will ingratiate you to your opponents. It’s a fool’s errand.”

Indeed, the release of a single photo did not prove that the president went skeet shooting “all the time,” and in an age of skepticism, Mr. Obama’s team recognized it might not put the matter to rest. “Attn skeet birthers,” David Plouffe, the former White House senior adviser, wrote on Twitter as he posted a link to the photo. “Make our day — let the photoshop conspiracies begin!”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the type of weapon

that President Obama fired in a photo released Saturday

by the White House. It was a shotgun, not a rifle.

    President Claims Shooting as a Hobby, and the White House Offers Evidence, NYT, 2.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/us/politics/obamas-skeet-shooting-comments-draw-fire.html

The Most Wanted Gun in America

February 2, 2013
The New York Times
By NATASHA SINGER

PASADENA, Md.

THE phone rings again at Pasadena Pawn and Gun, and a familiar question comes down the line: “Got any ARs?”

The answer is no. Pasadena Pawn and Gun, a gun retailer and pawnshop 15 miles south of Baltimore, is pretty much sold out of America’s most wanted gun, the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. Since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., in December, the AR-15, the military-style weapon that the police say was used in the shootings, has been selling fast here and across the nation.

Before Newtown, the rifles sold for about $1,100, on average. Now some retailers charge twice that. At Pasadena Pawn, on the wall behind glass counters of handguns, are three dozen or so AR-15-style rifles. Dangling from nearly every one is a tag that says “Sold.”

“The AR-15, it’s kind of fashionable,” says Frank Loane Sr., the proprietor. His shop has a revolving waiting list for the rifles, and a handful of people are now on it. “The young generation likes them, the assault-looking guns.”

On one level, what is happening here and elsewhere simply reflects supply and demand. The gun industry has spent decades stoking demand for the AR-15 and rifles like it. Now, after the mass killings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, President Obama wants to reduce the supply. He has asked Congress for tougher controls, including a ban on what are commonly called “military-style assault weapons”; the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on gun violence last Wednesday. Many enthusiasts are rushing to buy one of the rifles now, in case the president prevails.

But how did gun makers stir up the demand for these particular guns in the first place? The answer is a story of shrewd advertising, aggressive marketing and savvy manufacturing — a virtual recasting of the place of guns in American life. With speed and skill, firearms manufacturers transformed a niche market for the AR-15 and similar rifles into a fast-growing profit center.

When certain rifles and features were banned under federal law from 1994 to 2004, gun makers tweaked their manufacturing specifications — and introduced more AR-15-style rifles than ever. With ads celebrating the rifle’s military connections, they lured a new and eager audience to weapons that, not long ago, few serious gun enthusiasts would buy.

It might seem remarkable, given the national conversation about gun control, but guns are a relatively small business in the United States. Sales of commercial guns and ammunition — as opposed to those sold to the military and police — amounted to about $5 billion in 2012. That’s less than half of the profits that Apple earned in the final 13 weeks of last year. But despite the headlines, and partly because of them, commercial gun sales are growing. Last year, they were up 16 percent industrywide, according to estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade association. Semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 are responsible for a significant share of that growth.

By now, many Americans probably recognize the AR-15, whether or not they recognize the term. Unlike its military counterpart, the M-16, the civilian AR-15 cannot spray a continuous stream of ammunition with one pull of the trigger. But, as a semiautomatic, it can fire individual bullets as fast as the trigger can be squeezed. By design, it looks and feels like something commandos might carry. That is part of its appeal, and of manufacturers’ pitch.

On one level, marketing military-style weapons to civilians is not so different from pitching professional sports equipment to high-school athletes. Garry James, the senior field editor at Guns & Ammo, says a military pedigree inspires consumer confidence in a gun’s reliability.

“Credibility of performance is what appeals to the firearms enthusiast,” Mr. James wrote in an e-mail.

Yet marketing combat-derived weapons to civilians is a risky business, particularly now. The industry itself has promoted the guns by using battle imagery and words like “assault” and “combat.” Bushmaster Firearms, a leading maker of AR-15-style guns, and whose rifles have been used in several mass shootings, features the Bushmaster ACR, short for adaptive combat rifle, on its Web site. “Forces of opposition, bow down,” part of the site says. All the same, gun makers say customers buy these weapons with peaceable intentions.

The AR-15 isn’t the first military-style weapon to gain a consumer following. After World War II, some people bought surplus German service rifles made by Mauser and repurposed them for hunting and competitive shooting. But the selling of the AR-15 represents the first mass marketing of a military-style semiautomatic rifle made by a number of different gun makers. Its success has led to an increasing militarization of the entire consumer firearms market, says Tom Diaz, a gun industry researcher and gun control advocate.

“It speaks to the fact that there are a lot of young men in the U.S. who will never be in the military but feel that male compulsion to warriorhood,” says Mr. Diaz, the author of “The Last Gun,” a forthcoming book on the industry. “Owning an assault weapon is a passport to that.”

A REMINGTON MODEL 870, a classic pump-action shotgun with an all-steel receiver and walnut stock, sits on a brown gingham tablecloth along with a slice of apple pie, a mug of coffee and an issue of the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

This is how guns were marketed in 1981. That year, the Remington 870 was featured on the back cover of the July issue of Guns & Ammo, in an ad that emphasized quality and durability. “The 870,” the ad read. “Still as American as apple pie.”

The front cover of the same issue showed something very different: a photograph of two gleaming black rifles, with the cover line: “The New Breed of Assault Rifle.”

That breed’s military antecedent, the M-16, developed by Colt, had been an American staple of the Vietnam War; soldiers had nicknamed it the “black rifle” for its anodized coating. But, by the 1980s, with the war ended and military orders waning, the industry was eager to find a market for the civilian AR-15. Many gun makers were under pressure as traditional customers like hunters were aging and young Americans were taking up other pursuits like computers and video games. Net domestic gun sales fell from more than five million guns in 1980 to fewer than four million in 1987, according to a report in 2000 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Some gun makers responded by advertising handguns for women. Others found success in adapting combat weapons for civilians. Colt, which had introduced an updated version of the M-16 for the military, began selling a similarly tweaked AR-15 for the consumer market. Some parts manufacturers started selling AR-15 parts to consumers who wanted to piece together their own rifles. Other companies imported semiautomatic Uzis, a version of the Israel Defense Force weapon, for civilian use.

The look and the gas-powered mechanisms of the new black rifles offended some gun enthusiasts, who viewed them as mere high-powered toys. Even magazines like Guns & Ammo, the Vogue of firearms, had to acknowledge the initial wariness of some readers.

“The dyed-in-the-wool deer hunter watching his domain being infiltrated by these black and gray guns assumes these ‘new generation’ hunters are merely fantasizing ‘war games’ and are playing ‘soldier,’ ” Art Blatt, a writer at Guns & Ammo, said in that 1981 issue. Mr. Blatt, now deceased, covered all types of firearms for the magazine and was himself a shotgun enthusiast.

But the gun media found ways to appeal to readers. In that 1981 article on the Colt AR-15 and similar firearms, Mr. Blatt invoked the rifles’ military pedigree, “spawned in the crucible of war.” He spoke of their military-level durability, speed and accuracy. In a 1983 cover article on “Bushmaster assault systems,” he noted that in tests on a human-size silhouette target 10 yards away, a Bushmaster with a full 30-round magazine could be “rapidly emptied into the lethal zone.”

The new rifles used ammunition — .223 caliber — that was considered too small for big-game hunting in most states. Before long, consumers were buying the guns for small game — “varmint hunting” — as well as recreational shooting called “plinking.”

Some gun writers were not entirely comfortable with the rifles. In his article on Bushmaster, Mr. Blatt wrote that the guns seemed “a mite too powerful and penetrating” for home defense. He recommended the Bushmaster for police SWAT teams “in close-quarter encounters with evildoers.”

Despite such reservations, the AR-15-style rifle — which is fast, modern, ergonomically designed, relatively easy to handle and produces little recoil — soon found a wide audience, be it Vietnam War veterans who had used the military version or first-time gun buyers.

“End users with minimal firearms exposure can learn to quickly become safe and proficient with the platform regardless of prior firearms experience,” Mr. James, the editor at Guns & Ammo, wrote in an e-mail.

Another feature of the AR-15 is that it can be easily personalized and accessorized.

“You can take the whole gun apart and replace any part you want to without special tools, without knowing a whole lot,” says Tim McDermott, a range officer at the Personal Defense and Handgun Safety Center in Raleigh, N.C. “They are Legos for guys.”

IN 1976, Richard Dyke, a Korean War veteran, bought a bankrupt gun maker in Bangor, Me., for $241,000. That business grew into Bushmaster Firearms, which quickly earned a following after target shooters began winning competitions with its rifles.

“That did give us prestige,” Mr. Dyke said in an interview with The New York Times in 2011. “Then we won law-enforcement contracts and started getting recognition in the trade press.” (Mr. Dyke later sold Bushmaster and started another gun company, Windham Weaponry. He declined to comment for this article).

Then, in 1994, the AR-15 hit a speed bump. Congress passed a 10-year ban on “assault weapons,” which legislators defined as semiautomatic rifles that included two or more specific features, like pistol-type handle grips and metal mounts, called bayonet lugs, to which bayonets could be attached. People who already owned such rifles were allowed to keep them.

The ban made the rifles only more desirable for some consumers. To meet the demand, gun makers removed prohibited features, like bayonet lugs, and marketed them as legal alternatives.

“It was unfortunately an industrywide event where companies were openly bragging about their ability to sell guns in circumvention of the law,” says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a research and gun-control advocacy group in Washington.

The industry produced an estimated one million modified AR-15-style rifles during the ban — more than it had produced of the original version in the previous decade — says Gary G. Mehalik, a former marketing executive at the National Shooting Sports Foundation and at Taurus USA, a handgun maker in Miami. He denied that gun makers circumvented the law.

“If you drive 40 miles an hour in a 40-mile-an-hour zone, are you exploiting a loophole or following the law?” Mr. Mehalik asked.

After the ban’s expiration, gun makers simply restored the once-prohibited features. Some companies added muscle to the rifles — to enthusiastic reviews in the gun media.

“Scoffed at for being a ‘poodle shooter,’ the AR has grown fangs and is now available in a variety of calibers including big bores,” said an article in Guns & Ammo in 2005. “Today’s ARs ride in an increasing number of patrol cars,” the article said, adding that the guns’ military counterparts “are turning live terrorists into dead ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Combat allusions increased in ads as well. In a 2008 issue of Guns & Ammo, an ad for Stag Arms, a leading AR-15-style rifle and parts maker, showed a photo of two policemen wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, carrying the black rifles. “Stag Arms rifles meet the highest standards of engineering precision and reliability,” the ad said. “Just ask these guys.”

An article about Stag Arms in the same issue described one of the company’s models as “a southpaw’s dream” and invoked “the role this rifle plays in combat.”

Mark Malkowski, the president of Stag Arms, declined to comment.

Mr. James, of Guns & Ammo, said his magazine devoted many articles to AR-15-style rifles because manufacturers over time had improved the guns and introduced a variety of accessories, thereby attracting readers’ attention.

“Guns & Ammo’s role in popularizing the platform is purely a function of reader interest and the platform’s unique adaptability for a wide range of sporting purposes,” Mr. James wrote.

Pressured by investors in the wake of Newtown, Cerberus Capital Management, a private investment firm that bought Bushmaster from Mr. Dyke and has built the nation’s largest gun company, the Freedom Group, announced that it would sell its gun interests. It has yet to find a buyer.

A WOMAN wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses and a make-my-day smirk aims a hefty black semiautomatic Benelli rifle at an unseen predator. “This baby handles prairie varmints or the kind that come uninvited through your door,” the Benelli Web site says of the rifle. “Chosen by the United States Marine Corps.”

Gun makers seem to be competing to roll out the next civilianized combat weapon. Today, one trendsetter in handguns is a new generation of semiautomatic pistols with large-capacity magazines and other features. An ad for a pistol from Taurus USA promoted it as “the extreme-duty next-generation handgun, created for Special Operations Personnel.”

Such marketing aside, the industry disavows a link between military-style guns and gun violence. Industry representatives, like the National Rifle Association, often fault news outlets for demonizing and mislabeling the rifles.

“As you should know, but your non-gun-owning friends probably don’t, the guns our opponents call ‘assault weapons’ are not ‘high-powered’ when compared to other firearms,” Chris W. Cox, the executive director of the N.R.A.’s Institute for Legislative Action, wrote in a 2009 article in American Rifleman, a monthly N.R.A. publication.

Some marketing executives take a different view, suggesting that the industry include warnings the way alcohol and cigarette ads do. In a blog post last month on Adage.com titled “In a Culture of Mass Shootings, the Ad Industry Shares the Blame,” David Morse, a contributor, recommended that gun makers develop “more responsible ways” to present their products.

“Should we be holding manufacturers accountable?” Mr. Morse, the C.E.O. of New American Dimensions, a multicultural marketing research firm, asked in a phone interview. “The marketing messages do share in the blame because the messages are picked up and misinterpreted by the wrong kind of people.”

    The Most Wanted Gun in America, NYT, 2.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/business/the-ar-15-the-most-wanted-gun-in-america.html

Dangerous Gun Myths

February 2, 2013
The New York Times

The debate over what to do to reduce gun violence in America hit an absurd low point on Wednesday when a Senate witness tried to portray a proposed new ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines as some sort of sexist plot that would disproportionately hurt vulnerable women and their children.

The witness was Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a right-wing public policy group that provides pseudofeminist support for extreme positions that are in fact dangerous to women. She told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the limits on firepower proposed by Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, would harm women because an assault weapon “in the hands of a young woman defending her babies in her home becomes a defense weapon.” She spoke of the “peace of mind” and “courage” a woman derives from “knowing she has a scary-looking gun” when she’s fighting violent criminals.

It is not at all clear where Ms. Trotter gained her insight into confrontations between women and heavily armed intruders, since it is not at all clear that sort of thing happens often. It is tempting to dismiss her notion that an AR-15 is a woman’s best friend as the kooky reflex response of someone ideologically opposed to gun control laws and who, in her case, has also been a vociferous opponent of the Violence Against Women Act, the 1994 law that assists women facing domestic violence.

But it is important to note that Ms. Trotter was chosen to testify by the committee’s Republican members, who will have a big say on what, if anything, Congress does on guns; and that her appearance before the committee was to give voice to the premise, however insupportable and dangerous it may be, that guns make women and children safer — and the more powerful the guns the better.

Ms. Trotter related the story of Sarah McKinley, an 18-year-old Oklahoma woman who shot and killed an intruder on New Year’s Eve 2011, when she was home alone with her baby. The story was telling, but not in the way she intended, as Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, pointed out. The woman was able to repel the intruder using an ordinary Remington 870 Express 12-gauge shotgun, which would not be banned under the proposed statute. She did not need a military-style weapon with a 30-round magazine.

But there is a more fundamental problem with the idea that guns actually protect the hearth and home. Guns rarely get used that way. In the 1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides.

The cost-benefit balance of having a gun in the home is especially negative for women, according to a 2011 review by David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Far from making women safer, a gun in the home is “a particularly strong risk factor” for female homicides and the intimidation of women.

In domestic violence situations, the risk of homicide for women increased eightfold when the abuser had access to firearms, according to a study published in The American Journal of Public Health in 2003. Further, there was “no clear evidence” that victims’ access to a gun reduced their risk of being killed. Another 2003 study, by Douglas Wiebe of the University of Pennsylvania, found that females living with a gun in the home were 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than females with no gun at home.

Regulating guns, on the other hand, can reduce that risk. An analysis by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that in states that required a background check for every handgun sale, women were killed by intimate partners at a much lower rate. Senator Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has used this fact to press the case for universal background checks, to make sure that domestic abusers legally prohibited from having guns cannot get them.

As for the children whose safety Ms. Trotter professes to be so concerned about, guns in the home greatly increase the risk of youth suicides. That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics has long urged parents to remove guns from their homes.

The idea that guns are essential to home defense and women’s safety is a myth. It should not be allowed to block the new gun controls that the country so obviously needs.

    Dangerous Gun Myths, NYT, 2.2.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/dangerous-gun-myths.html