Cleaning up after wet dreams of a Good Gun

Partha Chakraborty-

Partha Chakraborty

Partha Chakraborty is an Indian-born immigrant; a naturalized US Citizen since 2018. Educated in India and at Cornell University, Partha is currently an entrepreneur in water technologies, Blockchain, and wealth management in the US and in India. The views expressed are his own.

Fourth grader Miah Cerrillo was in the connected classrooms of 111 & 112 of the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, just before lunch hours. She and others were watching “Lilo & Stitch” while finishing up classwork. In the traumatic next hour, Ms. Cerrillo lay on the floor, smeared in the blood of a dear friend trying to act dead, while over 100 rounds of live ammunition rang out from the barrels of a deranged eighteen -year old’s semiautomatic. As nineteen children and two adults (teachers Ms. Eva Mireles and Ms. Irma Garcia) lay dead or dying, a female student called 9-1-1 three times begging “Please send the police now.”

Unbeknownst to her, police were only feet away, not. Just across in the hallway, nineteen armed officers were waiting for their commander, Officer Pete Arredondo, to greenlight going inside. Gunman Salvador Rolando Ramos, 18, came across an officer even before he entered the building, somehow the officer failed to notice him as armed and dangerous. Five minutes later seven officers entered the building and followed Ramos to the door of those two rooms, Ramos fired through a closed door and grazed two officers. Officer Arredondo took a call that it was no longer an active shooter situation that requires them to stop the kill – a disastrously false narrative, but convenient as it became known later that his team was scared of going in. Outside the building parents massed anxious to find out about their wards inside, got testy when it was obvious that police were not going in, a mother with two kids inside was handcuffed. Shortly before 1PM local time, a full 77 minutes after Ramos entered the school, Federal agents from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BorTRAC) and other units unlocked the door, were fired upon by Ramos hiding inside a closet, returned the fire and killed him. In doing so, they defied a protocol as they were not in command, and standing order was to wait for more back-up to arrive.

Ramos, who legally bought two guns he used in the carnage legally just a week back (a day after he turned 18) also bought 375 rounds a day later, posted pictures of his guns on Instagram and may have alluded to his deadly intentions in private chats with several people. He was a resident of Uvalde and a former student of the Uvalde High School, had no criminal record, frequently got into fistfights, openly abused small animals and live-streamed such incidents and would often drive around at night shooting strangers with a BB gun and egging cars. He would livestream threatening to rape girls and shoot up schools, post videos on social media arguing with his mom calling her the “b” word. Ten days before the shooting he posted a private message “10 more days…”, when asked by somebody “Are you going to shoot up a school or something?” Ramos messaged “No, stop asking dumb questions. You’ll see”. Ramos started the shooting spree first by shooting his grandma, driving a truck without a license to the school and crashing it in a ditch outside, shooting bystanders at random before entering the school through a side-door left propped open by a teacher to go out to fetch her cellphone.

As I research the day’s events, I am appalled at the missed clues everywhere. Ramos came from a troubled home and was prone to unprovoked violence and acts of deliberate cruelty, or indifference at best. At Yubo, a livestream chat, his outpourings of directed vitriol were reported, but went unaddressed. His private messages gave enough early clues, even specific ones, but were private and ignored. He could, and did, literally walk up and buy an assault weapon and enough ammunition to kill hundreds; he proudly showed off his purchase on social media. A patrol officer arrived on scene before Ramos entered the building, they crossed paths but somehow the officer did not notice him. The side door was left propped open, giving him easy access in an otherwise single-access compound.

Who dropped the ball? The answer, unquestionably, leads to local police officers. For over 90 minutes local law enforcement machinery was involved with what went on, mostly as a bystander. At least thirty armed officers were within a hundred feet radius of the shooter, nineteen of them lined just outside the locked room. They were confronted by angry parents waiting to hear from their wards, and spent their precious time quelling irate parents – not neutralizing the shooter. Parents were seen rescuing kids from other rooms through the windows, no attempt was made to storm the room Ramos was in through the window.

We all keep hearing about the lore of “good guy with a gun meets a bad guy with a gun”. Uvalde’s school shooting proves it patently false. Over thirty “good guns” (over 100 if you count all their weapons at disposal) were within firing range for almost an hour while the shooter rang out dozens of rounds at trapped little kids. In Parkland, FL an armed officer was inside the campus when nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz shot dead seventeen people in 2018, but chose to not confront the shooter. Over a thousand highly trained and heavily armed active-duty soldiers could not stop Fort Hood massacre. In a not-so-distant past, New York’s finest got involved in a shootout in broad daylight and injured nine innocent bystanders to disarm a single armed man. A single, or few, good gun even if present have to wait for back-up including SWAT teams, advanced shields and other lethal weapons of higher capacity. There has not been a single recorded event in the United States where a man armed with a semiautomatic was confronted by a “good gun”, in and by itself, and neutralized. Sometimes “good gun fallacy” notches it up by calling for arming of teachers and admins. Ignoring costs, if we cannot depend on trained police officers to do the right thing in crunch time, how can teachers be trusted to do the same? Short of a wild west gunslinging that ratchets up casualty, “good gun” prophecy achieves absolutely nothing. Neither does other usual suspects, including social media, movies, mental health and others. In none of these, the US is far from the middle of the pack for industrialized western nations, yet the US is exceptional in being an outlier in both frequency and fatalities with the nonchalance with which we treat guns.

Gun violence is a story of numbers, really big ones. There are four hundred million guns in the country, a median family can have six of them. In 2020 over forty-five thousand deaths occurred from firearm-related injuries. Beyond eye-catching mass-casualty events, gun violence is an epidemic that is eating the country from the inside. More young people die of firearm related incidents, than in car accidents. Only about 1 percent of gun-related deaths meet FBI’s “active shooter” criterion, almost sixty percent deaths are suicides and over thirty percent are homicides not from active shooter incidents (e.g., from domestic violence). The epidemic reaches women and men in blue too – most of the incidences of police shooting happen when the target is armed or reasonably believed to be armed (over a thousand of 1055 recorded fatalities in 2021). Gun violence, and fatalities, occur overwhelmingly not from assault style weapons, but when they do these events are big enough to catch the headlines.

Something’s gotta give.

Most immigrants, especially recent ones, arrive in this country fleeing gun-violence, either gangs or the cartel, or in the killing fields somewhere. Many were raised in cultures that are repulsed by presence of guns in public domain, a holdover from their violent and traumatic past. I find myself in the second category. I am not opposed to guns; I did encourage my son to pick up shooting skills as part of his Boy Scout regimen. I strongly support a muscular foreign policy and all that comes with it, including a disciplined, highly trained and well-resourced military under civilian control. However, one aspect of American Exceptionalism that always bothered me, it still does, is the flippant attitude to presence of firearms in a large part of the society. That said, I always look for low-hanging-fruits in any particularly contentious issue; thankfully there are plenty of them.

A small percentage of gun dealers contribute, knowingly and deliberately, an overwhelming percentage of illegal gun trades; there is no reason we cannot forcefully put a stop to this madness. “Gun-show loophole” is only partly true – the problem comes from people who habitually sell (multiple) guns to complete strangers, regardless of venue. They are not required to do background checks, and that puts federally licensed dealers at a disadvantage as they must do these checks. There is no reason these people cannot be called a dealer and be subject to the same requirements, thereby leveling the playing field. Over ninety percent of existing gun owners agree on the strengthening of the background check system and that hits a wall when it comes to governance issues around health records. There must be a way to temporarily add people to National Instant Check System by certified clinicians involved in their care. Healthcare professionals should be free to ask if there is a gun at home and probe if requisite attention is paid to its safe-keeping. Public health professionals and gun-rights groups must be brought under the same rubric to initiate large-scale awareness programs about the dangers of gun ownership and safe-keeping. Inner-city environments need to look into violence interrupters who can leverage their own past to track territorial disputes, power vacuums, the emergence of new factions and other occurrences that need immediate intervention to prevent an escalation into a shooting spree. People under 21 must be made to wait a reasonable time before they actually can take delivery of a gun purchase, families with guns used in mass calamity need be held accountable, access to high-capacity weapons need be more restrained.

The biggest change will come from a change in attitude. Just owning a gun, even a long gun, and professing to love shooting sports, does not make anyone a bad person per se. Urging prudence in new gun sales, especially for high-capacity ones, does not make one a “gun grabber”. Gun violence is a societal and public health problem and should be viewed as such. Commonsense measures, and bringing maximalist opposition views together, can achieve most of what everybody accepts needs to be done – reduce gun-related deaths. It needs to be studied far better than we have done. And it needs to be done with empathy.

Easier said than done, but we must start today. Can we?

 

[Photo courtesy: The Santa Clara County Gun Buyback at the Milpitas Community Center on May 22, 2022.]