For some children of the ’60s, the decade’s most traumatic crimes weren’t the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy or the martyrdom of Martin Luther King — or even the appalling 1963 Klan church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham. It wasn’t even the rape, torture and strangulation of eight student nurses by a psycho named Richard Speck in Chicago in mid-July of 1966.
The most terrifying violence came two weeks later when a former U.S. Marine named Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother before taking an arsenal to the University of Texas tower and shooting everyone he saw. By the time an Austin cop took him out, Whitman had killed 16 people and wounded 31.
As a kid growing up the Bay Area, I viewed Stanford’s Hoover Tower and the Campanile at UC Berkeley differently after that. One day, while walking by Saints Peter and Paul Church in North Beach, my dad said that Joe DiMaggio had gotten married there. My kid brother asked if a madman had ever used the cathedral as a perch to shoot people below in Washington Square. Parents assured their children with the only logic they could muster: Such crimes are rare, they said. This was true then. It’s not true anymore — and hasn’t been for a while.
As a cub police reporter in San Diego in 1979, I was on the scene for the first mass shooting at an American elementary school. The anomaly wasn’t only the choice of target, Cleveland Elementary School, but also that the shooter was a girl, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer.
The first mass shooting in a church took place the following year when a 46-year-old atheist walked into the First Baptist Church in Daingerfield, Texas, yelling “This is war!” It wasn’t war, but it seemed like hell to the parishioners cowering in the pews. Daingerfield and the Cleveland Elementary School revealed that no place was a sanctuary.
Since then, America has suffered through at least eight other such attacks on places of worship, one of them a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Three of these killers have professed racist, homophobic or white supremacist views; another hated Baptists. One was a Muslim angry about the killings at Temple Emanuel in Charleston, S.C.
The litany of colleges devastated by such crimes grows yearly. Everyone remembers the carnage at Virginia Tech, but have we forgotten the mass shootings at Northern Illinois University, Arizona, San Diego State, Umpqua Community College and Santa Monica College? Yes, Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary were shocks to the national psyche, but killers have slaughtered innocents at a host of other schools, including another Cleveland Elementary in California, this one in Stockton.
In 2012, after 12 movie-goers were gunned down in Aurora, Colorado, I wrote a four-part series examining the issue. Since then, four of the five deadliest shootings in U.S. history have taken place. Twenty-six dead in Newtown, Connecticut, including 20 kids ages 6 and 7. Forty-nine at the Pulse club in Orlando; 58 killed and more than 500 wounded in Las Vegas last month; 26 killed a week ago at a small Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
Speaking for millions of Americans, the time for business-as-usual is over. We need a national dialogue on this plague, followed by concrete action. It’s time to put everything on the table, and I do mean everything. Mass shootings are not a new phenomenon. But the death toll has become staggering, and the ripple effects to the society potentially debilitating. The entrenched battle lines between Democrats and Republican are killing this country. Resuscitating it will require liberals and conservatives to put their fellow Americans ahead of stale ideologies and mindless talking points.
In 1903 the streets of Winfield, Kansas were turned red by Spanish-American War veteran Gilbert Twigg. Twigg killed nine people and wounded many more at an outdoor concert before turning a revolver on himself. “The boys around town had referred to him as ‘Crazy’ Twigg,” the local paper reported later, “but no one thought he was dangerous.”
Today, we all know that mentally ill men with a proficiency with firearms, no job and a seething anger toward society are quite dangerous. So why such easy access to firearms? One reason is that our laws are too deferential to the rights of the mentally ill.
Charles Whitman suspected, correctly, that he had brain damage. He told his shrink he fantasized about shooting people from a tower. His therapist told no one. Aurora multiplex killer James Holmes told his psychiatrist that he had “homicidal thoughts” three or four times a day and that it was getting worse. She told no one. Jared Loughner, the Tucson shooter who wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford and 13 others while killing six, acted so oddly that some students and teachers refused to be in the same class with him. But he could buy guns. Let’s change that.
Here are other steps to consider:
• You don’t like how Donald Trump speaks about Muslim immigrants? I don’t, either. But let’s not pretend we don’t know who attacked the Pulse nightclub, Fort Hood, two Chattanooga military bases, the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, or who drove the deadly truck in New York City. The answer is Muslim immigrants or first-generation Muslims radicalized by Islamic extremist groups. The Trump administration wants stricter vetting of such people? Isn’t that an obvious need?
• You like the Second Amendment? I once did, too. But the arsenal Stephen Paddock took to the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas included weapons for a battlefield. If the National Rifle Association keeps defending the unlimited right of Americans to hoard such weapons, millennial generation voters already flocking to liberal candidates and causes will eventually repeal it. Take heed, NRA.
• What about existing gun laws — why aren’t they enforced? How was a dangerous convict like Devin Patrick Kelley able to purchase his guns after being cashiered from the U.S. Air Force and serving time for beating his wife and stepson? Slipped through the cracks, did he? We should have laws making such negligence a criminal offense.
• The Second Amendment isn’t the only constitutional hurdle we must confront. I’m a journalist who relies on the First Amendment for my livelihood. But is it time to set limits? Social scientists have known for 50 years that Americans’ unfettered access to violent programming contributes to aggressive behavior and copy-cat crimes. The Aurora shooter attended a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” with dyed hair and guns, having left chemical booby traps back in his apartment adorned with Batman posters. He told cops he was the Joker. So far, lawsuits targeting studios — and video game manufacturers — have not dented the production of such nihilistic fare. Plaintiff lawyers must keep trying. Remember, it took a while to bag Big Tobacco, too.
• Finally, what about the wall-to-wall news coverage of such events? It’s become clear to criminal justice experts that some sort of grim competition exists with these killers. Covering their crimes — covering the news — is not the same thing as producing mindlessly violent video games and is certainly protected by the First Amendment. Yet not everything that the news media can do is something it should do. Food for thought, colleagues.
Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington Bureau chief of RealClearPolitics.