Start the Presses: Elliot Rodger, Burbank guns and the Glendale Gun Show
About a year ago, the Glendale City Council moved to ban gun shows on public property, shelving the decades-old confab at the Civic Auditorium.
Those on the dais argued that the city’s tacit approval — by being the show’s landlord — simply put out the wrong message, and had the potential to give, God forbid, Glendale a tremendous black eye if anything horrific occurred with a weapon purchased there.
At the time, the News-Press editorial board — of which I am a member — stated this was a pointless move, a faux balm to sooth a city reeling from the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn.
Now, we as a nation are again reeling, this time over the massacre of young adults — again murdered using legally obtained weapons. One was purchased at Gun World in Burbank.
The coverage and analysis following the killings was so predictable it almost seemed to be following a script, showcasing how deeply divided we are as a nation.
Some pointed out that Elliot Rodger murdered three of his victims by knife, speciously wondering why no one is calling for “knife control.” Others used the tragedy to call attention to the failures of the mental health system, violence against women, or the role (rich) white-male privilege and violent video games played.
It goes on. Tea-party icon and professional idiot Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, jumped into the fray, telling grieving parents in Santa Barbara that “your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
Wurzelbacher, whose insecurity over being forgotten must have prompted such an outrageous statement, represents part of the nation whose fervor regarding the 2nd Amendment is essentially religious, and those who disagree with his interpretation are heretics; that is, they are not only wrong, but evil.
Everyone, though, is missing the point. It is not guns or knives that murder, as they say, but people. Why did Rodger do what he did? Because he wanted attention. Narcissism and mental illness caused this.
Rodger was under the care of a therapist. It didn’t help. He directed a 137-page rant against women who wouldn’t sleep with him, but he killed more men. He is held up as the prime example of “rich white boy done wrong,” but identified as mixed-race. His guns were bought legally in one of the most restrictive gun-buying states in America.
So what do we do? Give up? We can’t. We simply must keep weapons out of the hands of the psychotic and the criminal, and our laws and political will have to reflect this.
The death, horror and pain in Newtown and Isla Vista are stains against each of us. It is also a mark of shame against our politicians, whose complacency, or outright cowardice, in the face of the National Rifle Assn. helped us down this particular path to perdition.
According to a HuffPo/YouGov poll, held shortly after the shooting, nearly 80 percent of Americans favor a universal background check for gun buyers. If you think the tragedy had an effect on the poll, think again: That overwhelming majority has been essentially unchanged since March. Yet it is not a law, in part due to the bullying and belligerent behavior of the special-interest NRA.
But beyond a clearly popular universal background check law, we also need laws that make it easier for mental health professionals to block their unbalanced, violent or narcissistic patients from owning guns.
We also need our teachers, public safety officials, and, yes, all of us, to be better attuned to people like Rodger, to watch for the warning signs. After all, as it has been pointed out, they were there.
A 137-page homicidal manifesto doesn’t materialize overnight.
--
DAN EVANS is the editor. He can be reached at (818) 637-3234 or dan.evans@latimes.com.