(Editor’s note: The following commentary by award-winning Westport-based writer Jessica Bram was broadcast on Fairfield County Public Radio WSHU-FM.)
By Jessica Bram
Special to WestportNow
First there was this spring’s horrific rampage – a disaffected Virginia Tech student who was somehow able to legally purchase two handguns in gun shops, ammunition on eBay, and methodically murder 32 students and professors. And now this: another unhappy young man, this one just 19, opening fire in a shopping mall filled with holiday shoppers, killing eight and wounding five.
Apparently depressed from being fired from his job at McDonald’s and a recent breakup, he was rumored to have written a suicide note saying he would “go out in style.” Presumably he intended to find some relief by emulating “Die-Hard”-like movie action heroes with a loaded rifle – and the satisfaction of having his name in the news for a day or so, along with a list of the dead.
As I did after Columbine, and then again this spring, I find myself thinking about those silent young boys – the Cho Seung-Huis and Eric Harris’s and Dylan Klebolds, and a now this new boy in Omaha. I keep wondering how these boys could for so long have harbored such rage, and what could only be severe mental illness, and kept it a secret?
As a mother, I ask: what about their parents? Didn’t they have a clue, not even a hint, that the boys they had nurtured as toddlers, who had slept in their homes for most of their lives, taken showers down the hall, grabbed milk from the refrigerator – that these boys had the capacity, and most of all, the will, to commit these acts? Or are we seeing, again and again, some highly deranged hero worship of our culture’s new style of cowboy, shoot-‘em-up, action figures with automatic weapons and endless rounds of ammunition?
One thing I do know about sons, from raising three of my own. Boys, especially teenagers, are intensely private. Outgoing or shy, introverted or life-of-the-party, what they choose to share with their mother is on a strictly need-to-know basis. When my oldest son had his first high school girlfriend, I learned of it from the woman across the street with a daughter in David’s class. I learned that my ninth-grader Alex had officially joined the school newspaper when I read his name on the masthead.
It’s not easy, but I have disciplined myself to put aside my curiosity and respect my sons’ privacy. I sense that it’s something that boys simply need in order to become men. But it makes parenting teenage boys kind of like driving in the dark without headlights. On instinct most of the time, I can only sense that I’m heading in the right direction, and pray never to go too far off-road. Meantime, I hug my boys frequently whether they like it or not, and let them know I’m interested in their lives whether or not they choose to inform me.
Despite the endless analyses of these recent events which will now surely reappear in the press and elsewhere, I know that we will never fully unravel those mysteries to which our teenage sons fiercely cling. But I also know that as long as any unhappy young man can walk into a gun shop and emerge with a handgun and box of ammunition, none of us will ever be safe.
It’s certainly something to think about, however, you’re over simplifying your premise. If your intent is to keep guns away from the mentally ill then privacy laws that prevent hospitals and doctors from sharing that information with state agencies must be lifted or at least highly modified. In the case of, Seung-Hui Cho even though the University knew of his mental history and complaints from professor’s, still nothing could be divulged to even his roommates. The same for the state agency that oversees gun permits, they were not allowed to know of his mental health in granting a permit.
I want the public to be as safe as anyone from these disturbed individuals, but we have to realize it’s a multi-faceted problem and it must be addressed from many different angles. Not the knee jerk response, “outlaw guns”. I would, for arguments sake, entertain the fantasy of outlawing guns if you could tell me how you would keep them from criminals. I’ve yet to hear how the bad guys would comply. What we should be taking about, and Governor Rell is, and that is CRIME CONTROL. Whether it’s career criminals (and that term shouldn’t even exit) who perpetrate deadly home invasions or psycho’s who want “to go out in style”, everyone of them should be made an example of! Swift and serve punishment, no excuses, no sob stories, no revolving door justice with a slap on the wrist. And if anyone has been following what has been happening in the state house with regard to getting tough on crime, which includes a real parole board (not some lowly paid volunteers), a strict 3 strikes and you’re in for life and many other reforms. However, if you have been following this in the news then you know who is against these reforms, I’ll give you a hint, it ain’t the Republicans.
So before we start clamoring for gun control, lets start demanding crime control! I agree with Ms. Bram, enough is enough and something must be done.
So if you’re really serious about putting an end to this none sense, then call or write your legislatures.
Bram presents what may turn out to be the most difficult 21st century problem confronting all Americans.. Raho has some of the answer “crime control” but as he states the problem is “multi-facited…… and he is right……………
Dylan has it right, to paraphrase, “we have much knowledge,…. but no understanding.” We “lack ideas.”
My twentieth century professors cautioned me to keep an eye on males who had histories of bed wetting, fire setting and animal abuse… Advice that turn out to have a degree of reliability…..
For this 21st century which i am long on ideas but sort on time, i would add flat panel technoids and their two dimensional world where their fantasies ?) become operational in our three dimensional reality…………..
ron malone
ps my experience with gun contol has lead me to believe that there are more than enough laws… its the way they are implimented that is the problem..