"Laws Failing To Keep Guns Out Of Hands Of Disturbed," said the Chicago Tribune.
"Suspect Had History Of Bizarre Acts."
The stories weren't about Stephen Phillip Kazmierczak of the Northern Illinois University killings or Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech but a 30-year-old former babysitter named Laurie Dann in Winnetka, IL, a suburb north of Chicago.
On May 20, 1988 Dann shot six students at Hubbard Woods Elementary School, one of whom died, and another man before killing herself and ushered in the era of the school shooting.
Like Kazmierczak and Cho, Dann had a pronounced history of mental illness, exhibited warning signs of gun violence and bought all her weapons legally and in compliance with prevailing gun laws.
But when the gun lobby descended upon Winnetka and surrounding suburbs that were considering handgun bans after the violence, its intimidation quotient wasn't what it is today.
Gun advocate Susan Craig was booed off the stage and shown the door after "screaming that criminals will make their own guns anyway," and that the "handgun ban will hurt people," at a town meeting at New Trier East, the high school from which Dann graduated, reported the Chicago Sun-Times
Leaflets circulated by the gun lobby a month after the Dann shootings that claimed, "If Jews had been armed they could have fought the Nazis," were debunked by Rabbi Harold Kudan of Temple Am Shalom in Glencoe, a nearby suburb, at a different public meeting.
"If Jews had guns in Nazi Germany, no one would have survived. It would have been an excuse for Nazis to kill with even greater abandon," he told the assemblage, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Nor has the community's position softened.
In 2004, Hubbard Woods School officials withdrew an invitation for First Lady Laura Bush to read to children at the school where the shooting occurred because of the Bush administration's lax stance on gun control.
Of course it is doubtful Laura Bush would appear at Crane High School on Chicago's West Side to read to the kids. Even students need a police escort to get to Crane these days thanks to a fatal shooting on school grounds in March.
In April Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Father Michael Pfleger, a popular South Side priest, and hundreds of public school students convened at the State of Illinois building in Chicago's Loop to protest gun violence that has killed 21 Chicago Public School students this year.
Even though gun violence at city schools looks different from affluent ones--it tends to be caused by gangs not the mentally ill and no one prescribes "arming" the students as a "solution"-- the legal verities are actually the same:
In both cases the concerns of parents, teachers, doctors, paramedics, police, clergy, social workers, local politicians, mayors and police chiefs are overridden by a few obdurate state lawmakers who are untouched and unperturbed by gun violence.
Can anyone name one gun control law that has saved an innocent life? This should be an easy question as there are over 20,000 state and federal laws to choose from.
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rural usa (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments [8 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Apr 21, 2008 at 12:42:01 PM
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