Where Is the Law?

Laurie Dann’s history of bizarre and often aggressive behavior was no secret to a lot of people, among them some law-enforcement officials. As recently as last week federal authorities sought her after getting complaints that she made threatening calls to members of her ex-husband’s family. Laurie Dann also owned a collection of handguns. For at least one of these she held a police permit. Last Friday morning Dann took her guns to Hubbard Woods Elementary School in Winnetka, Ill., and began shooting. One second-grader was killed. Five schoolmates were wounded. Minutes later Dann wounded an adult in a nearby home. Finally she turned a gun on herself, ending a day of tragedy and a life of turmoil and mental torment.

Over the weekend came further reports of Dann’s aberrant behavior, involving gifts of poisoned food to students at a nearby college and to several homes where she had once worked as a baby-sitter. Over the weekend clergymen and psychiatrists groped for an understanding of this explosion of violence. Many things in the Dann case remain to be considered. Not the least of these is how someone with her long and obvious record of aberrant public behavior could so easily get her hands on guns, and even obtain a permit recognizing her claimed need to own a weapon.

We present this as something calling for consideration rather than demanding an answer, because the answer of course is obvious. Again it has been made sickeningly clear that virtually anyone in our society can get a gun or even a whole armory of guns almost for the asking, with no proof of necessity required and no test of responsibility imposed. Opponents of gun controls can be expected to respond to the horror in Winnetka with their usual specious argument about the constitutional right of Americans to own guns. But where is the law giving sociopaths the right to arm themselves so that they can murder innocent children?