Perhaps two hours before National Rifle Association executive Wayne LaPierre went on TV earlier this month to suggest lots of armed guards in schools as a solution for school shootings, Kimberly A. Scott was decorating for Christmas at Juniata Valley Gospel Church, near Hollidaysburg, Pa., 164 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.
It would seem that she and LaPierre were in different worlds, with his being the corridors of power in Washington, where he is perhaps the most powerful gun lobbyist in the capital’s history, and hers being the lovely, rolling hills of central Pennsylvania, with its hardwood forests and Juniata River and blue mountains.
But they were actually much closer than it seemed.
She was preparing for a children’s Christmas party. Anyone who goes to church knows the scene; someone has to do it for the children, and there are always good-hearted volunteers in small churches who step up.
LaPierre had kept his silence for a full week after the slaying of 20 young children and six teachers and support staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., by a man who used an AR-15 assault rifle to methodically murder his victims.
No one knows why the shooter did it, but people certainly know how.
An AR-15 will fire bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger. It is not the most powerful or lethal of rifles, but certainly very effective as a killing tool. Some 2 million of the weapons had been sold in the U.S. from 2000 to 2010, so there were plenty around. The killer took his rifle and two pistols from his mother. He shot her dead. She was a gun enthusiast.
While LaPierre was collecting his thoughts before the Dec. 21 TV event, another drama was playing out in Pennsylvania. According to The Altoona Mirror, a troubled man named Jeffrey Lee Michael, 44, of Hollidaysburg, began firing rounds through the window of the church. He killed Mrs. Scott, who was 58, then drove down Juniata Valley Road and killed a neighbor, William Rhodes, and then crashed head-on into the car of Rhodes’ father-in-law, Kenneth Lynn, and shot him to death, too.
Pennsylvania State Police rushed to the scene from Hollidaysburg, responding to 911 calls about gunshots. The Mirror reported that Michael, standing near his truck, fired shots through the windshields of both police cruisers. One trooper took glass from the exploding window in the face and eye. The other was shot in the chest but was protected by his bullet-resistant vest.
The troopers turned their cruisers toward the man and a third State Police car crashed into his truck, disabling it. Michael got out and shot again and the troopers shot him to death. It will take time, the authorities said, to figure out exactly why this happened. Michael, who had been talking about Mayan predictions of the end of times with his friends, had more than one firearm, but the State Police would not say how many or what kind. They were investigating.
As this mayhem was playing out, as those troopers were putting themselves in harm’s way, LaPierre in Washington was preparing to argue that the only solution to the gun problem is, actually, more guns, carried by trained security people in schools.
He also thought there should be better lists of the mentally ill so gun dealers will know not to sell firearms to them. There were some other points, too. He took no questions. Protesters disrupted the event twice, essentially calling the NRA a child killer.
Two tragedies a week apart in very different circumstances, both of them with mysteries and firearms at their center, helped drag the nation’s attention away from the metaphorical fiscal cliff debacle and toward a question that is a lot more important and difficult: How many guns is too many guns?
A confession. I own firearms. I joined the NRA years ago as part of a plan to write a magazine story about how it communicates. I never sold the story, but the big message I got during the experiment was that the NRA believes there is no such thing as too many guns.
The vast majority of us will never fire a gun in anger, even though we have them and know how to use them. The thought of plugging someone who breaks in to steal a DVD player or laptop to get some quick money simply doesn’t compute. We have alarm systems for protection, phones at the ready, good insurance and, in most cases, police who will respond to a 911 call with efficiency and determination.
We are neither bile-fueled nor directed by special voices that tell us what we should do. But for those who are, or who do hear those voices, guns are never far from reach.
LaPierre’s call for guards in school does nothing to address this big “how many guns” question. It just complicates it by giving way too much marksmanship credit to someone who might not be making much money and might not have had much training.
Even New York City cops are cautious about using firearms. There are too many stories about culprits being missed while innocent people down the way are wounded or slain. The thought of inviting firearms into 98,000 public schools (And what about private schools? Will they be protected, too?) on the grounds that they will be handled by trained shooters is just too ridiculous for serious debate.
LaPierre and his fellow NRA executives have worked themselves very far back into a corner on this issue by focusing only on the interests of the gun industry, which feeds them with financial support of all kinds because it wants to sell as many guns as it can, and Congress, where some members have turned cowering and bowing before the NRA into an art form.
But now the organization is standing in front of a nation that wants to know why these heartbreaking events continue to play out.
More than 300 million non-NRA-member Americans are left to ponder the murder of innocents in Newtown, Conn., and the last minute of life for a woman who only wanted to make a more perfect Christmas for the children at her church.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I know what it is not.
Charles M. Madigan is the presidential writer in residence at Roosevelt University.
