Print out if you do not have a copy from class
Highlight the vocabulary in the article. Define the vocabulary on separate sheet of paper
Answer the questions. On the article, highlight where you found the answer and put the number of the question in the margin.
The article must be turned in with the questions and vocabulary.
Reason
Policy Responses to the Roanoke Shooting: 1) Mass Disarmament or 2) Mass Disarmament
The New York Times editorial about yesterday's horrifying shooting in Roanoke, Virginia, is predictably lame, exhibiting the wishful thinking and vague prescriptions that characterize the anti-gun movement. "Easily available guns offer troubled Americans the power to act out their grievances in public," the Times observes. "The power to be seen killing innocents with one of the guns so easily obtained around the country proves irresistible as the ultimate outlet for an individual's frustration and rage." The paper complains that "guns are ubiquitous and easy to acquire," with an "estimated 300 million guns in America owned by a third of the population, far more per capita than any other modern nation." What is to be done? The Times does not say. "There are too many guns," the editorial concludes, "and too little national will to do anything about them."
If the problem is "too many guns," the solution presumably involves reducing the number of guns. Mass confiscation of firearms would require more than "national will." It would require ignoring the Constitution, including not just the Second Amendment but also the Fourth and the Fifth. Perhaps that is why the Times does not spell out the logical implications of its argument.
There are similar problems with making guns less "easily available." ABC News reports that Vester Lee Flanagan II, the man who murdered WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward on live TV, legally bought the Glock pistol he used at a Virginia gun store. "Despite Flanagan's workplace struggles and his employers' suggestion that he seek medical attention," ABC says, alluding to an employee assistance program referral, "he did not fail any of the benchmarks for purchasing a handgun." He had "no known criminal record," and he apparently was never committed to a mental hospital. An obvious response, recommended by Parker's grieving father, is to expand the criteria for stripping people of their Second Amendment rights. "I'm not going to let this issue drop," Andy Parker said during a Fox News interview last night. "We've got to do something about crazy people getting guns."
The problem is that, once you expand the definition of "crazy people" beyond the current standard of forcible psychiatric treatment, it's not clear where you stop. People who knew Flanagan during his stint at WDBJ, where he worked under the professional name Bryce Williams, described him as "unhappy," touchy, "volatile," paranoid, perennially disgruntled, and "difficult to work with." In retrospect, those traits look like clear warning signs, and they are in fact common among mass shooters. But they are also common, period, and people who exhibit them rarely become murderers.
"We can point to all the warning signs we missed," Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, an expert on mass murder, told the Associated Press last year. "But they're yellow flags. They're not red flags until blood is spilled." Any law that tried to disarm people like Flanagan would inevitably disarm many innocent, harmless people.
What would the new criteria look like? Should everyone who is fired because he has trouble getting along with his coworkers lose his Second Amendment rights? What about people with a short fuse, people whose employers refer them for counseling, or people who make dubious allegations of racism or homophobia? Perhaps the net should be cast even wider, to cover anyone who has ever qualified for a psychiatric diagnosis (something like half the population, according to one estimate). When you think about the details, "stronger mental health screenings for prospective gun owners," as ABC describes Andy Parker's proposal, begin to look a lot like the mass disarmament that The New York Times would like to see. Neither is feasible or desirable.
Readability Score: 12.3
The New York Times
Killings of Journalists Bring Gun Violence to Dark New Level
It is an increasingly horrific fact of life and death in the United States that easily available guns offer troubled Americans the power to act out their grievances in public. This trend, dramatized in recent years by macabre shootings in schools, churches, movie theaters and workplaces, was taken to a dark new level on Wednesday in southwestern Virginia by a disturbed former reporter who chose not only to murder two journalists as they reported live for a television station that had fired him, but also to record and broadcast the crime on social media.
By the numbers, the shooting was routine for this nation — three dead when the gunman finally killed himself hours after walking up and aiming at a TV reporter and her cameraman, as they broadcast a routine live interview to their WDBJ audience. What was distinctive and disturbing about this tragedy was the staging, how he filmed it and how quickly he made sure to alert his social media followers to watch the clip that showed him aiming a pistol point-blank at the two innocents and then shooting them with repeated volleys of gunfire.
“I filmed the shooting see Facebook,” the gunman announced to his followers on Twitter. Many did before the grisly recording was taken down.
The questioning that follows the shootings that routinely scar, yet only occasionally shock, a nation grown hard to them include the question of motive: Why would he do such a terrible thing? In so many cases, and certainly in this premeditated massacre, the answer seems to be that, amid a mass of unfathomable grievances, the power to be seen killing innocents with one of the guns so easily obtained around the country proves irresistible as the ultimate outlet for an individual’s frustration and rage. In this case, the outlet provided by social media appears to have whetted his murderous appetites.
Many politicians will focus on the gunman’s troubled personality and try to cast this shooting as a summons for better mental health care, certainly not gun control. Yet that ignores a grim reality: the estimated 300 million guns in America owned by a third of the population, far more per capita than any other modern nation. Guns are ubiquitous and easy to acquire, as statehouse politicians, particularly Republicans, genuflect to the gun lobby to weaken, not tighten, gun safety.
We all know no change is likely, for all the social media grotesquerie. The woeful truth underlying this latest shooting is more mundane than alarming. There are too many guns, and too little national will to do anything about them.
Readability Score: 14.6
Readability Score: 12.3
Read both articles posted on izzit.org today before answering the following questions.
1. Define: grievances, macabre, premeditated, ubiquitous, per capita, genuflect, grotesquerie, mundane, characterize, implications, criteria, dubious
2. The New York Times editorial states that people committing murders in public is increasingly a fact of life, and says “what was distinctive and disturbing about this tragedy [the Roanoke shooting] was the staging.” Why do highly public shootings create so much more anxiety, for many, than the thousands of other murders each year? Why might people who otherwise feel safe from crime feel vulnerable to these kinds of shootings?
3. What is the Times’ explanation for why mass shooters would do such a terrible thing? How do guns themselves relate to the shooters’ motivation, in the Times’ view? What evidence, if any, does the Times provide for this claim?
4. How is social media related to the Roanoke killer’s motives, in the Times’ view? If this is true, should government crack down on social media? Why or why not?
5. According to the Times, rejecting gun control as a solution “ignores a grim reality” of “the estimated 300 million guns in America owned by a third of the population.” What conclusion does the Times want us to draw from the fact that so many Americans own guns? Why do they consider this grim? Do they think it is unfortunate that any Americans own guns, or just that the number is so large?
6. Is Jacob Sullum right that the Times is vague about what to do about guns? If so, does this matter? Why or why not?
7. Is there a way to drastically reduce the number of guns in America without having the government confiscate them? Explain.
8. Why does Jacob Sullum say confiscating guns would require disregarding the Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments? Is he right? Explain.
9. What are some reasons people want to own guns?
10. What kinds of mental problems can justify preventing someone from owning a gun?
11. What criteria should the law uphold for determining who can own a gun?
12. Suppose we want to keep guns out of the hands of people with perpetual grievances, frustration and rage, to prevent them from acting these out in the form of a mass shooting. Suppose that we aren’t worried that this is unfair to aggrieved people who aren’t going to commit mass murders. Is there any way to precisely and legally define the kind of people this would apply to?
13. Why is it difficult to detect and act on warning signs before a mass shooting? Who can respond to warning signs, and how?
