The price we pay

Twenty four years ago today, Patrick Purdy fired a Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifle into the playground at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, Calif., killing five children and wounding 29 others and a teacher — then killed himself.

Law enforcement authorities said Purdy was upset that Asian immigrants were taking whites' jobs. All of the children killed and some of the wounded were Cambodian or Vietnamese immigrants.

His wasn't the first school shooting, of course. Ten years before, a teenager named Brenda Ann Spencer shot into a schoolyard from her house in San Diego, picking off students and teachers like a sniper. Asked why, she said, "I don't like Mondays." Her reason became infamous as the impetus for The Boomtown Rats' hit.

Tori Amos' plaintive version of that song keened from my computer for days following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, when Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adult staff members after killing his mother.

We can see no reasons, because there are no reasons.

Brenda Ann Spencer was not the first school shooter, either. Adam Lanza wasn't the last; police believe a 16-year-old Taft High School student last week shot two other students in the south San Joaquin Valley town. On Tuesday a student shot an administrator and then himself at a St. Louis business school; police say a man in southeastern Kentucky Tuesday killed his girlfriend and her relatives at a community college, with a gun he bought that day.

That's just school shootings. A burglary suspect on Tuesday shot a Galt police officer a half-hour south of us, then shot himself to death.

Just some of the killings by firearms in the United States, which the FBI tabbed at 8,583 in 2011. An average of 23 killings by firearms each day. A classroom's worth.

In my short life as an editorial cartoonist, the Stockton shootings and their aftermath took up a good share of my attention — just as the Sandy Hook killings focus us today.

So … where are we going?

President Obama yesterday unveiled a list of $500 million in proposals to reduce gun violence, such as restoring bans on assault weapons, invigorating background checks, reducing bullets in clips, and buttressing mental health services.

Consider it the latest large volley in a firefight of statistics and particulars and semantics and invective and lunacy that will mushroom.

After the Sandy Hook killings, the National Rifle Association called for armed personnel in all schools. Teachers in parts of Utah and Texas and Ohio have begun firearms training. Posses in a part of Arizona are ready to take gun positions at public schools.

I'm imagining some of the ways that would play out:

• the day a teacher forgets to lock the gun away and remove a bullet from the chamber, and a student finds a new toy for recess …
• the morning a teacher fumbles to unlock the protected firearm, then the protected ammunition, as a shooter moves closer down the hall unimpeded …
• a school district announces it can't possibly pay for music education and teacher target practice, so tubas get tossed …
• shooters outgun armed school personnel (which happened at Columbine High School) …
• school and law enforcement officers announce at a future news conference that thanks to quick action by armed teachers, only three people died instead of nine … though, again, three people died …

Meanwhile, Americans flock to the gun shops and shows, buying the assault weapons and ammo, driving up their prices. Some of the buying derives from fear that the government will take away the weapons, and it's easier to lose what you don't have in the first place. And harder to defend.

Gun owners — their own well-regulated militias — dig in against any and all enemies, their triggers becoming ever more sensitive.

Maybe it's true, as the NRA says, that the saturation of violent video games and movies is what makes people shoot other people. Millions play and watch every day, and far more violent fare than the outdated films NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre cited.

Even if all shooters get their motivation from these media, though, the fact remains: They get the guns easily. It doesn't matter what kind, where from, how many bullets; they get the guns easily.

Guns become the logical, terminal extension of anger or confusion or delusion. Find a way to keep the guns away, maybe people won't get hurt or die.

In the months and years to come, push and shove and shout and condemn will leave us all right back where we are. Guns will still be easy to get.

I keep returning to a line in The West Wing, in which a congressman who's gay explains why he remains in the Republican Party — whose policies disparage him.

"I never understood why you gun control people don't all join the NRA," the congressman says. "They've got two million members. You bring three million to the next meeting, call a vote. All those in favor of tossing guns ... bam! Move on." 

Josh Lyman, the president's deputy chief of staff, derides the congressman's change-from-within strategy as unworkable.

I guess Josh is right.

I think we'll just have to live with the idea that the sanctity of the Second Amendment comes at a cost — 23 people killed every day by guns in the United States. Teachers and their little students occasionally, albeit tragically, shot and killed.

It's the price we pay.

The lesson today is how to die.

Guns versus mutter

Two beacons for radical change crossed this week, one gone cold, the other burning hot.

•••

Robert Bork died. He's why Supreme Court nominees don't say much more than "We gotta play 'em one game at a time" and "I'm just happy to be here" and equivalent clichés during Senate confirmation hearings.

Because when Bork opened his mouth during his hearing, out spilled arrogance and contempt for all of us. Supposedly charming in social settings, Bork might have made it onto the court were it not for his public demeanor — he somehow had popular support — and would have died on the bench trying to put all women back in skirts with minimum hem, and everyone back to before civil rights.

Bork was one of the original "originalists" who argued that we must follow the Constitution as its creators intended. By the looks of his Shaker beard and wild ringletted hair, he could have been one of those creators.

President Nixon's hatchet man in firing Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox (when attorney General Elliot Richardson refused and resigned in protest), Bork was a Harvard professor specializing in antitrust law — which he opposed.

He also opposed your right to privacy, because it's not explicit in the Constitution. Nor is civil rights, he said, though a poll tax, designed to prohibit blacks from voting, wouldn't OK; it wasn't in the original Constitution, just the 24th Amendment, I suppose.

"In the subsequent quarter-century," after most of the Senate voted against his confirmation in 1987, The New Yorker said, "Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along."

Ahhh, Bork and Ollie … key players in the Reagan administration, second
only to the Nixon administration for its dark melodrama …

To paying choirs, he was a libertarian who preached against individualism, and railed against our social sins ruining the country — sins sent forth by the free market he loved, even if it wasn't free enough. He tried to turn back time and tide rather than deal with the inexorable change.

"Bork" became a verb in his time, meaning to vilify publicly. Better to bork than be borked, I guess.

•••

In sincerity and silliness, debate over what the country does next after Sandy Hook still burns hot.

California's retired teachers' investment program plans to divest itself of a company that owns a gun maker (noble and immediate, though why didn't it do so long before?). Gun owner advocates, led now by the National Rifle Association, continue to urge we arm teachers, or at least post an armed guard at every school. Armored children's backpacks are selling briskly at $200 per.

NRA director Wayne LaPierre blamed violent video games and movies and said today the next Adam Lanza is planning an attack on a school. (Buy more guns, by the way! Become a member, before it's too late!) As much as I hate the video games — what's fun about shooting people, even for pretend? — I doubt they're the cause. How many millions play? Are we going to enforce ideas now?

News reports this week remind me that Patrick Purdy's Stockton schoolyard shooting in 1989 prompted a ban on assault weapons — that wasn't enacted until 1994, and not without guarantees to lift the ban in 2004, nor without loopholes that guaranteed assault weapons could still be sold legally.

The Bushmaster assault weapon — one was used at Sandy Hook — is popular, I learned, because the makers stripped it clean of all the features that would have banned it under that 1994 law. It's sleek and cool and fun, I've heard gun advocates say more than once.

Of mental health, President Obama said access to it should be at least as easy as access to guns. California's Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg urges early mental health treatment.

That's it so far.

Talk should shift almost entirely to mental health, not just in money to provide it but in the way we all think about it. And certainly not just for people who would shoot up a school.

Suicides in the U.S. military run almost one a day now, and most who kill themselves never deployed, never saw battle, as we expect. Many face isolation in the military, and try to survive in a culture that frames mental issues as weaknesses.

But as far as we know — and we don't know what we don't know — the Adam Lanza got his weapons from his mom, who would likely have gone through meetings and training to procure them. They were legal; the shooter got them by some means, and police say he shot his mom before driving to the school. His mental health was known, his troubles known, as far as we can tell. His mother was trying to do something about it.

That's where the talk should focus.

Some of the reaction this week is … reactionary. In what is shaping up to be an Internet meme, dads of elementary school children are donning their military or police uniforms and standing guard outside their children's schools. It's a sincere Hands-Across-America gesture that poses troubling questions:

• How long are you planning to stand guard?
• Are you armed? Please say no.
• If you aren't armed, how are you planning to stop an attack?
• Who are you? How do we know?

Already, at least one self-appointed guard may not be the Marine he claimed, and the gesture suddenly becomes absurd.

At the school where I teach a weekly art lesson, nothing had changed, to my surprise. The office staff sits far back from the front counter. Most of the time they don't ask who I am with my cart full of papers. I fill out my adhesive nametag, sign in on the visitor log, and sign out while I'm at it, since it's easier to go straight back to my car after the lesson.

It's no different now, a week after the Sandy Hook shooting. In fact, I forgot to peel off my nametag yesterday; it was still sitting there on the label sheet when I thought twice and went back to the office, just to see if anyone noticed. No, still there. No, no one looked up to see me pass.

Maybe that's as it should be. Horrible as it is, statistics show school shootings are rare, the danger extremely low. That's small to no comfort.

The real epidemic, requiring radical change, remains our mental health.

Fire arms

The first thought, one of many, I drew for The Stockton Record after a mass shooting at
Cleveland Elementary School nearly 24 years ago.

Every grownup hoping for children, I suppose, collides at least once with the idea: What's the point?

Into this world?

My collision came in 1989, when a troubled young man named Patrick Purdy opened fire with an assault rifle on a Stockton, Calif. elementary school playground, an hour south of where we live. He killed five children and wounded 29 more, and a teacher, before killing himself.

The killings riveted the nation with a notion too horrible to imagine. School children, playing.

How naïve we were.

Since then, of course, the slaughters continue, the body counts rise, as if a contest is under way; Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Oikos University in Oakland, Calif. Now the murder of 20 children and six adults — teachers — last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. That's just some of the schools, just some of the 62 mass shootings in the United States since 1982.

Not to mention about 30 people across the United States murdered every day by guns.

Patrick Purdy's onslaught was, if you'll forgive the worst possible analogy, child's play.

With the Sandy Hook murders, it's easy for me now to expect that at any time in America, someone with mental illness, someone unmoored by drugs or alcohol, someone mis-wired for social mores, someone unable to control anger or depression, someone lacking or losing a sense of right and wrong, will slaughter innocents.

Just add a gun.

What will it take, now, to prevent it? Are 20 little first graders enough? Do we need more little ones to die? Need they be younger still? A preschool, perhaps?

What will be — another poor word choice — the trigger?

Though I don't know the answer to this, I know it can't be more of that same. That would mean we are indeed waiting for something worse to happen, more of the same. President Obama told the Newtown folk Sunday he would "use whatever power this office holds" to prevent tragedies. But what?

My search for answer only snags more troublesome questions, which circle back to Sandy Hook.

Limit the number and kind of guns in the United States? Most people who own guns are reasonable, I get it. Hunters I've met are extremely safe, extremely respectful of their weapons, almost to the point of making me wonder why they bother to hunt.

I just can't understand why reasonable people would own handguns and assault weapons, designed for killing humans in large number. I've never reconciled how having one would keep me safe without also — and more likely — putting me in grave danger.

Why would anyone, for instance, want a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle, the kind used to kill those at Sandy Hook? "Why should anyone want a Ferrari?" someone named Philip Van Cleave answered. He's the head of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, and he said in the Washington Post that Bushmasters "are absolutely a blast to shoot with. They're fast. They're accurate."

I wonder if he said that in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. I wonder if he realizes how he sounds.

Guns flourish in the United States, enough for almost everyone to have one, and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed our right, by the awkward sentence construction of the Second Amendment. Regulations are already in place to make purchases difficult — Connecticut's is one of the nation's most stringent — and to prohibit their sale to people who exhibit mental illness, but they don't work and people who shouldn't have guns get them anyway. Laws were supposed to emasculate assault weapons, but a rivet here and semantics there, and the National Rifle Association and gun advocates have restored their firepower.

Even if somehow the most reasonable laws come forth to keep guns out of the hands of those who would kill others, they would only affect guns yet unmade. Millions are still out there.

Arm everyone? Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, among others, proposed arming teachers and principals. Gohmert said he wishes Sandy Hook's principal had an M4 (a military assault weapon) and "takes his head off." More arms, not fewer, will solve our problems, they say.

Imagine a teacher, already trying to master the manifold skills needed to produce educated, happy children, also training in tactical weapons. Imagine states and the federal government, already unable to provide all districts with enough books, paper, pencils, let alone the resources for excellence that children deserve, paying for that training. Imagine the gunfights in the hallways among the unstable and untrained and unstained.

• Odd aside — wouldn't you think by now weapons technology would have come up with something deadlier and easier to use than a gun? I mean, how long has the gun been the go-to weapon in war — 250, 300 years? Each era of war won by those with better guns, but no one has invented something better — or worse — than a gun?

Ban bullets? Comedian Chris Rock had it right when he once said bullets should cost $5,000, that bullet control is the answer. One push now is to ban large clips and limit access to ammunition; the odd result, I guess, is that only nine children would be killed in the next shooting, rather than 20?

Maybe it weakens the arms we already have. Maybe more likely people who want to shoot a lot of bullets will still find a way to do so.

Help the helpless? Salvation lies within. As the camps entrench over gun control, all can agree our mental healthcare is woeful. The only problem we can really hope to solve is the most difficult.

Our anger and grief are misdirected. It's not the guns we should focus on in that horrible killing. It's the young man who killed, in the place he killed.

We must be part of a sea-change, bringing mental illness to light rather than shunting it to dark corners, depriving it of our care and our money. Stories are emerging of the struggle the killer's family made in raising their son.

Read the heartbreaking story of another mom who finds help for her young son so hard to find, and dreads what will come of him. Soon you'll also find criticism of that mom, denouncing her fate, denying her veracity, and we are back where we started, not helping. Instead, waiting.

Some say the killing is pure evil, the result of sin, of God removed from our schools. As in, did the devil assign the killer to shoot up a school made weak by lack of prayer? Prayer can't hurt — prayer of mourning, prayer of supplication — but consigning the horror to an act of evil serves instead to free us from the responsibility of doing anything about it.

I fear we'll tire of this, and inertia will ensue.

But then I think of my own children, growing and going places in their lives.

Whether because he was first born or just built with keen emotions, our son especially embraced the world as wonderfully dangerous, or the other way around. Almost every new thing he learned became a new thing to wonder at and be wary of. He worried a lot. Come elementary school, he felt stress, and it manifested in peculiar repeated twisting of his arms and hands, a repeated sideways nod of his head, and a lot of blinking. The tics slowed about this time of year, disappeared by spring and resumed with the new school year.

Once, when both our kids were young, about the age of the first graders at Sandy Hook, we had signed them up for summer day camp in the park across the street. It was ideal; they'd play and swim each weekday for most of the summer, and I'd get work done from home.

Not a week into camp our son, already frightened of cigarette smoke, too much sun, and all the things he had heard us say were harmful and that he decided could kill him immediately, was in a bathroom stall when some older kids came in from the park and began smoking. Our son decided he was about to die, suddenly and alone and unnoticed in that stall, and when he didn't, he absolutely refused ever to return to camp.

Even the mere suggestion he give camp another try ignited yelling tantrums and flailing of limbs, so I stopped suggesting and he stayed at home. It took me months to find out why, because it took our son that long to tell my wife his problem — imagine all the possibilities I pondered.

Now I'm trying to imagine our son as this little boy again, already fraught with a first grader's heavy regard for the world, trying to understand a troubled man firing and firing a high-powered weapon.

We can't do nothing.

Raising our children is our first job, President Obama told the people of Newtown Sunday. "If we don't get that right," he said,  "then we aren't getting anything right."