Dance of the Reptiles (27 page)

The notion that firearms buyers have a constitutional right to anonymity is a fiction promoted by the NRA, and one consistently not embraced by the courts. The government already keeps track of the land we own, the people we marry, the children we have, and the money we make. Most reasonable citizens don’t have a problem providing their names when pawning or purchasing a handgun. But the NRA fuels its recruiting with rabid fear, not facts, and there’s no shortage of hayseed politicians who are eager to take its money and go rant for the cause.

It’s impossible to overstate the brainless lunacy of the proposed law, which would penalize police departments up to $5 million for keeping computerized gun lists.

Yet, at the same time, law-enforcement agencies would be allowed to obtain the very same firearm-sales and ownership information—but only on paper. What is now a 30-second
piece of keyboard detective work would become an all-day chore, requiring manual reviews of thousands of records.

Obviously, the intent of the law is to discourage gun tracking by police, especially in busy, understaffed departments. The result will be more unsolved crimes, less evidence upon which to prosecute violent criminals, and more acquittals in court.

And Republicans claim to be the law-and-order party?

Every armed robber, carjacker, and gangbanger in Florida will sleep easier, if Rep. Baxley and the others get their way.

May 8, 2005

With New Law, Shooters May Beat the Rap

If you’re a defense attorney in Florida, you’ve got to be excited by the new Protection of Persons and Property bill passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Jeb Bush.

This is the bogus “stand your ground” law that allows people to start shooting wherever they happen to be, whenever they happen to feel threatened. The measure was written by the National Rifle Association, but the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers couldn’t have done a slicker job.

Starting October 1, any person who is confronted has no “duty to retreat” and “has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm.…”

Every gangbanger in the state should write a thank-you note to the NRA. For years, street thugs have tried without much luck to use self-defense as an excuse for their bloody shoot-outs—and now it’s right there in the statute books: If you get fired at, dawg, you can fire back.

Better yet, the law is so purposefully slack that if you even imagine you’re going to be fired at, you can pull out your legally purchased AK-47 and open up. Your attorney will say you had a “reasonable belief” that you were in danger, and it’s hard to dispute. Being a gangster is a full-time dangerous gig.

Thanks to the nitwits in Tallahassee, the courts could be seeing a lot more cases in which self-defense is creatively invoked. “You don’t even have to be that creative,” quips Richard Sharpstein, a top Miami trial lawyer. He predicts “an enormous swell” in assault and homicide cases in which the main defense is self-defense.

Except for generating more political contributions from the NRA, passing the law was utterly pointless. Floridians have never been too shy about shooting each other. The motivation is more often an insult than a threat.

We’ve got one of the worst murder rates in the country, and the vast majority of those killings are committed by family members or acquaintances of the victims. In the relatively few cases where citizens have killed a menacing criminal, the justice system has been solid in its support. The head of the state prosecutors’ association said that he knows of no instance when a law-abiding person has been hauled to court for using deadly force to protect himself or his family—at home or elsewhere. Even the main sponsor of the new law, Rep. Dennis Baxley of Ocala, couldn’t cite a single case of a lawful firearm owner being locked up for shooting someone in self-defense. But Florida lawmakers seldom let the facts deter them from sucking up to rich special-interest lobbies such as the NRA.

By broadly expanding the so-called castle doctrine to public places—whether it’s the Publix, Dolphins stadium, or the neighborhood pub—the Legislature has opened what Sharpstein
calls a “Pandora’s box of excuses and justifications” for violent assault.

Deterrent? Yeah, right.

Long ago I interviewed a member of the infamous Outlaws motorcycle gang who was doing a prison stretch for fatally stabbing a man during a bar fight. Naturally, the Outlaw said he’d acted in self-defense, an argument that didn’t fly in court. “Today he probably wouldn’t even be charged,” says Fred Haddad, a prominent Broward defense attorney involved in the case.

Like Sharpstein, Haddad thinks the Legislature has made it easier to try the “self-defense” defense. “Where it’s really going to help is the cases of those who act first” and claim they feared for their safety, he says.

In the absence of any demonstrable need for broadening the self-defense provisions, Rep. Baxley and others were left to argue that it would be a powerful deterrent to criminals, who would henceforth be reluctant to accost potentially armed citizens in public places.

Oh, sure. The death penalty doesn’t deter these creeps. Mandatory hard time for using a gun doesn’t discourage them. They aren’t overly worried about the cops. But the remote possibility of being winged by a little old lady on her way to the ATM—that’s supposed to scare a hard-core badass into giving up his predatory ways and going straight.

Only in the inverted universe of Tallahassee would such laughable nonsense carry the day.

Implicitly encouraging armed citizens to “stand their ground” when they could get away doesn’t make the streets safer. It invites tragedy for the crime victims as well as bystanders. The bad guys surely aren’t scared. Ironically, more of them could be out on the streets because of the new
law, which will make it easier for shooters to beat the rap in court.

It was self-defense, Your Honor.

Honest.

April 22, 2007

Focus on the Victims, Not Their Disturbed Killer

Somewhere in the bowels of hell, Seung-Hui Cho must be smiling. He’s getting what he wanted: global infamy.

Now everybody with a TV set knows his name and his face. That sick little ditty bag that he sent to NBC did the trick.

Look at me, world! I’m the Virginia Tech killer!

In the news business, it’s unusual to receive a publicity packet from a dead person, much less a dead mass murderer. To help craft his legacy, Cho put together an ambitious multimedia presentation: photos, videos, and writings compiled in the six days before he murdered 32 students and faculty members and then shot himself.

NBC quickly turned over the material to investigators, but not before copying it. The contents are pretty much what you’d expect from a paranoid, homicidal, narcissistic nut job.

There’s the tediously hateful, vague, and meandering scribblings; the predictably rambling video loops in which the killer portrays himself as a long-suffering victim of unspecified injustices; and finally, the personal photo gallery complete with vainglorious self-portraits and the obligatory macho gun poses.

Certainly it’s shocking stuff, but it’s also a premeditated performance. Cho was still sane enough to know that because most of us could not fathom such a monstrous crime, we’d be
frantic to learn every possible detail about him. He was also sane enough to know that the media would go wild over his posthumously delivered press kit, which was mailed during a break in the shooting spree. Cho is not the first mass killer to have craved recognition, but he’s the first to successfully exploit DVD technology.

Back in the summer of 1966, Charlie Whitman had only a typewriter with which to attempt to explain what he was about to do. “I don’t really understand myself these days,” he wrote. “I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.”

Hours later, Whitman murdered his mother and then his wife. The next morning, the Florida-born former Marine took a high-powered arsenal to the top of the University of Texas Tower and shot 45 innocent people, killing 16.

Those of us old enough to remember that terrible day also remember the stunned bafflement pervading the nation. “Why?” was the question everybody was asking. Why in the world did Whitman do it?

In the typed suicide note, he complained of severe headaches and even requested that an autopsy be performed on his body to see if something was wrong. Medical examiners did find a brain tumor, although experts disagreed about whether that could have caused him to snap so violently.

Unlike Cho’s suicide messages, Whitman’s final notes were neither seething with anger nor laced with fantasies of persecution. He hinted at a difficult relationship with his father, yet he wrote adoringly of both his mother and his wife. In the end, the reason for Whitman’s sniping rampage remained a mystery. This is what was known beyond any doubt: He was a seriously screwed-up guy.

Which is ultimately all that will ever be known—and
all that really matters—about Seung-Hui Cho. He was demented, he was deluded, he was dangerous. End of story. I don’t care if he had a brain tumor or an impacted wisdom tooth. I don’t care if he had an adverse reaction to his medicines. I don’t particularly care about his childhood, his dorm life, or what songs he played on his iPod.

After all is said and done—and that day cannot come soon enough—Cho will go into the history books as another troubled loner with documented mental problems who walked into a gun shop and bought himself a headline.

As in the Whitman case, the incalculable misery inflicted by Cho has generated an almost desperate hunger for answers. NBC had no choice but to broadcast his disturbing photos and video rants; sketchy insight into the murderous mind is better than none at all. Cho surely was aware that once his self-promotional package hit the airwaves, his face would be everywhere, indelible and inescapable. As crazy as he was, he knew exactly what to feed the media beast.

So we sit through replay after replay of his toxic tirades on television. We pick up a newspaper or a magazine, and there’s the ubiquitous faux Rambo picture, a glowering Cho with his arms extended, a gun in each black-gloved hand. We get it, already. He was an angry and unwell young man who cracked up. He was also an evil publicity freak. Now that we know what we do about Cho, the choice falls to us. Mine is to change the channel whenever his face appears. Let him be infamous on someone else’s time.

Among the many who deserve more attention in death are those he executed for no reason: Ross Alameddine, Christopher Bishop, Brian Bluhm, Ryan Clark, Austin Cloyd, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, Daniel Perez Cueva, Kevin Granata, Mathew Gwaltney, Caitlin Hammaren, Jeremy Herbstritt, Rachel Hill, Emily Hilscher, Jarrett Lane, Matt La Porte,
Henry J. Lee, Liviu Librescu, G. V. Loganathan, Partahi Lumbantoruan, Lauren McCain, Daniel O’Neill, Juan Ortiz, Minal Panchal, Erin Peterson, Michael Pohle, Julia Pryde, Mary Karen Read, Reema Samaha, Waleed Mohammed Shaalan, Leslie Sherman, Maxine Turner, and Nicole White.

These are names worth remembering, lives worth examining.

That other guy? Just another sicko in a long bloody line.

April 13, 2008

Firearm Law Adds Danger to Workplace

Happiness is a warm gun in a steaming-hot car.

After years of wimping around, Florida lawmakers finally passed a law that will allow you to bring your favorite firearm to work, providing you leave it locked in your vehicle.

Last week, the Legislature approved the Preservation and Protection of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Motor Vehicles Act, otherwise known as the Disgruntled Workers’ Speedy Revenge and Retaliation Law.

In the past, deranged employees who wanted to mow down their boss and colleagues had to drive all the way home to fetch their guns. It was a waste of a perfectly good lunch hour, not to mention the gasoline.

Soon, however, any simmering paranoid with a concealed-weapons permit will legally be able to take his firearms to work. If a supervisor rebukes him for surfing porn sites, or a coworker makes fun of his mismatched socks, he can simply stroll out to the parking lot and retrieve his Glock or AK-47 (or both) to settle the grievance.

There will be no long ride home during which he might reconsider what he’s about to do, no time lost rummaging through closets in search of ammunition and clean camo
fatigues. Everything he needs for instant revenge will be waiting right there in his car, whenever the urge might arise.

Sissy liberals and even conservative business leaders say the new law is a recipe for mayhem, but they have no faith in the competence or judgment of Florida’s gun owners. Concealed-weapons permits have been issued to about 490,000 residents, not one of whom could possibly be volatile, schizoid, or even slightly unreliable. The standards are too exclusive, requiring a gun-safety course, a pulse, and a rap sheet free of nasty felonies.

The business lobby and state Chamber of Commerce successfully fought the new gun bill for three years, citing many violent workplace shootings committed by unhinged employees around the country. At last, though, the Republican-led Legislature and Gov. Charlie Crist have bowed to the wisdom of the National Rifle Association. While there was no public demand for bringing firearms to office buildings, malls, and other workplaces, the gun lobby recognized the urgent need—not to mention the obvious convenience—of having loaded weapons in the parking lot.

The bill was sponsored in the Senate by Durell Peaden, a Republican from the Panhandle town of Crestview, located on Route 90 between DeFuniak Springs and Milton. This must be a perilous stretch of highway, with robbers and thugs lurking behind every billboard—why else would Sen. Peaden have taken up the cause for putting more guns on the road?

It’s true that, statewide, crime statistics show that few motorists are randomly assaulted on the way to or from their jobs. And it’s also true that you’re far more likely to be accosted by someone who disapproves of the way you change lanes than by someone who wants to steal your BlackBerry.