Making Sense of the NIU Tragedy

Back in August 2008, Bullet Counter Points talked to journalist/author David Vann about a fascinating article he had just written for Esquire entitled “Portrait of the School Shooter as a Young Man.” The article dug into the past of Northern Illinois University (NIU) school shooter Steven Kazmierczak, and what it uncovered was truly frightening. Kazmierczak had attempted suicide three times, taken eight different medications for mental illness, and been institutionalized on five different occasions. Despite this history, he was still able to legally buy guns in Illinois and then kill 6 and wound 18 in a gruesome mass shooting at NIU on February 14, 2008.

But the information Vann had uncovered was far too extensive for just a magazine article. So he set about to write a full-length book about Kazmierczak and the massacre at NIU. It was released on October 20 and is titled Last Day on Earth (after a Marilyn Manson song that Kazmierczak listened to just before the shooting). We were able to ask Vann a few questions about his book and this horrific tragedy and here are his answers:

Going back to your original article in Esquire, why did you decide to learn more about Steven Kazmierczak and the horrific mass shooting at NIU?

I wanted to write an article about how armed suburban youth are. I inherited my father’s guns after he killed himself with a gun, when I was 13, and I led a double life in which I was a straight-A student by day, then wandering our neighborhood at night with his .300 magnum rifle (a rifle for hunting bears), shooting out streetlights and sighting in on the neighbors through their windows. I think it’s frightening how many kids and teens have access to guns in America, so I wanted to write about that. But my editor at Esquire suggested I look at Steve’s story, since he was an A student and everyone seemed very surprised by his shooting.

Why did you decide to contrast your own life with Kazmierczak’s in Last Day On Earth?

I wanted to try to answer the question of why Steve crossed the line and I didn’t. When I was 13, I was angry, alone, and had access to all these guns. Looking back, it seems possible I could have ended up killing someone, but I didn’t. I wanted to understand why I didn’t and why he did. What I found was that there were half a dozen strong influences on Steve’s life that made his shooting possible, influences I didn’t have in my own life. These included military service, time in the mental health system, libertarian politics, a mother who loved horror movies, etc.

The picture painted of Steve’s parents is one of indifference—two people who were more than happy to place their son’s care into other hands and be rid of him (He “was a pretty good guy,” was all his dad would say after the murders). But we know surprisingly little about Steve’s mom, who perhaps was the most powerful figure in his life. There are hints of serious mental health issues, but why is she so shrouded in mystery?

Steve’s sister Susan wouldn’t talk with me. I do have transcripts of all the interviews that law enforcement did with her, so I know everything she told police. And I asked Steve’s high school and junior high friends and girlfriends about his mother, and I have his own comments about his mother in his emails. He said, for instance, that she never forgave him, despite his earning nearly perfect grades in college. And, as I describe in the book, I have the accounts of his mental health history, in which he ran away from the institution in the Chicago area and begged his mother to take him back; accounts of his fights with her in which he called her a whore; his godfather’s claims that Steve’s mother was mentally ill, etc. So there is quite a bit about her in the book, and her death was perhaps the main event that precipitated his regressive slide into becoming a killer. But I wasn’t able to meet or interview her, since she was dead, and Susan wouldn’t talk with me, so I can’t provide a full portrait. I was very careful in the book not to make anything up or to try to draw conclusions that would go too far. I stuck to the 1,500 pages from the police file and the interviews, and the book, as a result, is a mountain of thousands of facts you can rely upon. But sticking to the facts also means there are gaps in the narrative.

Steve’s infatuation with violence starts perhaps earlier than his depression, with the abuse/sodomy of animals, shooting at cars, bombmaking, etc. Like the Columbine story, you wonder why no one picked up on these obvious red flags in his background—that perhaps he was not only a threat to himself, but others. Yet that element seems to be absent from his experience with mental health treatment as a teenager. How could they have missed it?

His parents knew he was mentally ill and asked the high school for help, but they refused. Soon afterward, Steve attempted suicide. In the bombmaking episode, which is earlier, in junior high, another kid was the instigator and had told a dozen kids how to make the bombs. The police saw Steve as a frightened, repentant kid. And the truth is that Steve was always afraid of getting into trouble and he wasn’t as scary as many of his friends. At least three kids in his neighborhood became drug dealers, for instance. There are so many violent, frightening kids in America, it was difficult for someone like Steve to stand out. Even in the end, after the shooting, many at NIU were surprised to learn the shooter was Steve because they had assumed the shooter must have been one of several other grad students who were scarier.

You hint briefly at Steven’s embrace of libertarianism as a factor that drove him to commit the murders. What role do you think it played?

Libertarianism favors the individual or small group above society and is therefore antithetical to most of what holds our society together. It’s very frightening. Most of our mass murderers have been libertarians. It’s the perfect political belief for them and fits well with Nietzche’s concept of the “superman,” someone above moral code. I don’t think Americans realize how frightening and dangerous libertarianism is. I would count it as the number one warning sign for a potential shooter, and it’s particularly dangerous when combined with former military service.

There is a fascinating chapter in your book where you talk about entering your neighbors’ houses during the day while they were away and looking for their guns. How often did you find them? Does it give you any perspective on the problem of gun theft today?

In 1980, it was very easy to get into someone’s house. Most people didn’t have answering machines yet, so I’d let the phone just keep ringing while I was in their house. And I didn’t have to break anything, because they all left their bathroom windows open a bit for air. I didn’t steal anything, but I did look through all their stuff, and they all kept their guns in the same places: in their closets or under their beds. It was very easy to find the guns, and they weren’t locked, and they had ammunition available. Nearly everyone had several guns in their home. The potential for gun theft is frightening, as is the access kids and teens have to guns. Even locked and hidden guns can be a problem. I know someone whose daughter committed suicide with a pistol that was locked with ammunition in a separate location. Over time, she was able to find the key to the lock and where the ammunition was kept.

What role does Steve’s taste for men play in his psychological make-up? Why did he hide his bisexuality/homosexuality so carefully? Did he reach a point where the sexuality of his partners no longer even mattered?

Last Day On Earth has much more information about Steve’s sex life than my Esquire article had, including the creepy emails he exchanged with one of his girlfriends which were a confusion of sex, mass murder, and racism. By the end, sexual despair was an important driving force for him and he was exhausting himself. One night, he had sex with at least three different women, for instance. He may have been sexually abused before junior high, but I wasn’t able to find any proof, only hints. Sex was secretive and shameful for him from the first, though, and he was attracted later to Marilyn Manson’s androgyny. He shaved his pubic hair and eyebrows and wanted to be dominated. He was with men in high school and also near the end, and part of his love of the movie “Fight Club” was a denial of his homosexuality (that movie is about the denial of homosexuality through a hyper-heterosexual alter-ego, played by Brad Pitt). Steve’s sister Susan is gay, and he told her near the end that he thought he might be gay, and I think this was a move in a good direction for him, accepting his sexuality, but it didn’t last long. He went back into denial. I want to be clear in this answer that I’m not saying homosexuality was a problem for him, only his denial and shame around it. And there’s too much in the book about his sexuality to really summarize effectively here.

Steve’s racism also had a conflicted feel to it, particularly since he apparently dated (and really cared for) an African American girl at one point.

I think Steve’s racism was an important part of how he was able to commit mass murder. As James Baldwin pointed out so well more than 50 years ago, you can’t be racist without hating yourself, and Steve’s final act was one of self-erasure in more ways than just his suicide and the killings, but also in staging it in the one place where he had succeeded and made something of himself. And racism is of course always conflicted. One of his college roommates reported to police that Steve struggled to recover from a former relationship with an African-American woman, a relationship that ended because of stress and strain over race.

Steve’s interaction with the military is almost exactly the situation we saw with Jared Loughner, the Tucson shooter. They bring these young men in, determine that they have severe problems, and then discharge without notifying any other federal agency of these issues. So both are free to buy guns legally—and in Steve’s case, he’s also been taught to kill without emotion because he’s completed Basic Training.

The Army realized Steve was a danger to himself and others, so they kept him in a psychiatric ward with precautions against suicide and then dumped him in his hometown, Elk Grove Village, without any notifications to anyone that he might be a danger. I think we should consider this a criminal act and work to prevent the military from doing it. People discharged from the military in this way also should of course never be able to buy a gun. But it’s important to remember the larger problem here. Most of our mass murderers who were old enough to have served in the military did. And this is because the military teaches not only how to kill a person with a gun but also how to do that killing without feeling anything, with no emotional or psychological response. Steve explained this to his best friend. He mentioned several times that he’d been trained to kill without feeling anything, and indeed in the mass murder he committed, he appeared to feel nothing at all. The teacher in the classroom said that when Steve pointed the pistol at him, it made him think of someone who’s painting a room and realized they’ve missed a spot.

Steve’s decision to go to NIU was a double-edged sword. On one level, it allowed him to leave his past behind to a degree and define a new, more satisfying life for himself. On another, as a therapist had warned, it allowed him to ignore his mental health issues and eventually led to a “hard crash.”

The mental health system did not serve Steve well. I think it only amplified his problems. And though one therapist did warn him against setting out too quickly, I hate to give the therapist any credit, because the fact is that Steve became worse in the mental health system, not better, and he did improve in all ways at NIU. I think there was no downside to his success at NIU, and I think if he could have stayed at NIU longer, without moving to the University of Illinois (UI), he might not ever have killed.

The double life Steve lived at NIU is fascinating. His professors and many of his friends knew him as this quiet, incredibly polite, well groomed young man who was thoughtful, sensitive, highly intelligent, and always eager to help other students. In reality, he spent much of his time obsessing over mass shootings, playing first person shooter video games, trolling for sex on the internet, fighting with his family, and agonizing over his mental illness. Only a select few knew about this side of him.

In the book, I describe the timing and all the transitions, and the timing is very important. When these professors and friends knew him, his life actually was better. And as his life took a dive, he was more removed from them and moved away at UI. The key is that he was regressing to who he was in high school and junior high, and that former life really was perfectly shaped for mass murder. His professors and friends at NIU, with the exception of Jessica Baty, didn’t know this past, so they couldn’t get the Steve they knew to fit with this killer. There was a 5-year gap they couldn’t cross. The FOID card he acquired for buying guns legally only checked the past 5 years for mental health history, so that system also couldn’t know who he really was. Background checks obviously have to go all the way back. If we learn one simple thing from his story, it should be that. But of course the gun nuts will howl and claim we’re taking away everything American.

In your life, you experienced a turning point when you were able to escape your teenage angst and let those emotions go. Kazmierczak seemed so close to that at one point in NIU after being given the Dean’s Award and graduating, only to fall into despondency and insanity again when he just can’t make it in a work environment and his mother dies. It’s perhaps the most tragic and powerful moment in your book—that thought of “what could have been.”

Steve had this tremendous drive to reshape himself—the true American dream—which is not really about money, but about the larger reshaping of identity and worth. And it’s amazing he could get that Deans’ Award after his terrible mental health history and the years in which it seemed he had no future at all. And I do think he almost made it. The combination, though, of his mother’s death and the move to UI was just too much. His last semester at NIU, his grades didn’t matter (they wouldn’t transfer over to UI), so he started going to the shooting range instead of classes. From my own experience of shooting things for three years after my father’s suicide—years in which I told everyone he had died of cancer since I was so ashamed of his suicide—I think that guns are a dangerous substitute. I don’t think guns are ever really about guns but always about something else; and those who want guns are in denial of that something else.

Another fascinating discovery is that Steve was a proud NRA member who bragged about this affiliation to his friends. Steve’s comment about Illinois’ FOID licensing system is also telling, particularly since it never stopped him from buying guns: “It’s back to the days of the Hitler regime. The government is trying to track us.” He reads gun magazines, indulges conspiracy theories about Timothy McVeigh, cites the Turner Diaries. This kid was fully submerged in the gun culture and its extreme ideology.

Steve’s views really were right in line with the views of the pro-gun lobby, with his libertarianism, paranoid beliefs about the federal government, desire for secrecy, love of guns, interest in crime, etc., but he actually thought it was ridiculous that he was able to buy a gun legally after his terrible mental health history. He wrote a paper titled “(NO) Crazies With Guns,” and here’s an excerpt: “I have only five words for you: From my cold, dead hands. Those words spoken by Charlton Heston, and immortalized by the popular press, have come to symbolize the pro-gun lobby’s arguably firm and unshakeable ideology with respect to their opposition to anti-gun (whether real or perceived) legislation. With that being said, what if those so-called cold, dead hands happen to not only contain a firearm, but also a half-filled bottle of anti-psychotic drugs?”

It’s a telling statement about our country that Steve and Seung-Hui Cho both purchased weapons/apparel from the same online gun dealer, Eric Thompson, who was totally unrepentant and went to Virginia Tech AFTER both tragedies to promote his business to students. You can’t help but think, too, of the t-shirts Steve wore—like the one of the handgun superimposed over the American flag.

The Glock 19, which Steve and Cho both used (and which Jared Loughner in Tucson also used), is made to kill a lot of people very reliably at close range in a short period of time. Mass murder is an American right, and there are lots of weapons to choose from: We have high-capacity handguns; short-barreled riot shotguns; assault rifles that can easily be converted to machine guns; .50-caliber sniper rifles, etc. It’s the Wild West but with better equipment. In some states, it’s now legal to wear a pistol on your hip in a bar. We just had a mass-murder in California yesterday, and we’re going to have more. One weekend while I was in DeKalb investigating, April 19-20, 2008, there were 36 separate shootings in Chicago, with 9 homicides. Weapons included an AK-47 assault rifle. Is it “media spin” to mention this?

What role did high-capacity ammunition magazines play in the NIU shooting?

Steve bought several 32-round magazines for the shooting but ended up not using them. I think this was because he wanted to begin with the “shock and awe” of the shotgun first, which wouldn’t kill anyone (he was using only birdshot) but would create confusion. In order to use the shotgun first, he had to tuck the pistols away, and I think there was no way of doing that easily with the longer magazines. But the Glock 19 has a high-enough capacity standard magazine to be very deadly. It killed everyone in Steve’s shooting, and it killed most of Cho’s victims at Virginia Tech. We should of course step back a moment and wonder why we want citizens to have high-capacity magazines. In what situation do we want a citizen to be able to kill a lot of people quickly, without having to change magazines? What is the situation, exactly, that the gun nuts are imagining? Invasion by zombies is the only one I can think of.

Steve told Jessica “If anything happens, don’t tell anyone about me.” And she hasn’t. It’s obvious in the book that disturbs you deeply. It’s the moment in The Last Day on Earth where it’s clear this book is personal to you. Your fury at her is barely veiled, and you go as far as to suggest that she is as mentally ill as he was. It’s almost as if you’re bitter at these people—Jessica and many of Steve’s other NIU friends—for defending someone they considered a friend even after he takes so many innocent lives in a cold-blooded way, even after all the facts about Steve’s past are laid bare to them. And yet even you express sympathy for Steve in the last two lines of your book.

I do have sympathy for all who were affected by Steve’s shooting, including Jessica. And as I mention in the book, I have sympathy for her especially because of the Valentine’s Day gifts he sent to her, one of them an engagement ring. She thought she was going to be proposed to, and instead he committed mass murder. But I don’t like lies, so I don’t like that she lied to me and tried to cover up the story. I don’t have any negative feelings toward his professors and fellow grad students at NIU. They really didn’t know who he was. He had reinvented himself in the previous five years and kept his past a secret from them. And I certainly have full sympathy for anyone going through suicide bereavement. I have sympathy, also, for Steve, who really struggled and almost succeeding in escaping his terrible past, and I think the end must have been bitter to him. But of course our sympathies in the end have to be with his victims—including the larger community affected—and by the time I finished writing the book, I couldn’t help but think of Steve as a monster, despite all my attempts to remain sympathetic. He planned the killing at least 11 days in advance, and he was chirpy in his emails and such right up to the end, so that makes him a monster.

It’s interesting that the owner of Tony’s Guns & Ammo, the place where Steve purchased some of his guns & ammo, voluntarily surrendered his Federal Firearms License after the murders. To your knowledge, what were the police or ATF investigating him for at that point?

It seems it was because Steve traded in his old guns at the store and Tony didn’t report this to police. I think it’s possible the ATF is hiding something, too, since their initial reports and all witness reports are consistent with a Remington 870 shotgun but they later claimed it was a Sportsman 48 (and perhaps this is what Tony put on the sales form). Perhaps they were just covering up the fact that gun forms could go through with the wrong model listed, or perhaps I just don’t have the full information, but it’s very strange.

What ultimately can we take from Kazmierczak’s story? Is there anything positive to learn from this tragedy? Could it have been prevented?

If the FOID card had checked lifelong mental health history instead of just five years of history, I think the shooting could have prevented, because I don’t believe Steve would have obtained firearms illegally. There are many other lessons we could learn from this shooting, also, as I’ve described above in answer to other questions. Because I had access to the full 1,500 pages of the police file, we have a very complete portrait that can help us identify risk factors. But the biggest risk factors (such as gun ownership, libertarianism, poverty, former military service, an interest in horror movies, etc.) are major currents in American culture, so unless we can change our entire nation in fundamental ways, we should expect many more shootings to come. One positive part about Steve’s story is seeing how close education came to preventing the shooting. Education does lead people away from all of the risk factors.

Getting to Know "Doc" Holliday

One of the great legends of the American Old West surrounds the 1881 shootout at the O.K. Corrall. The “winners” of this gun battle against the Clanton-McLaury gang—the Earp brothers and John Henry “Doc” Holliday—are still household names today because of popular films like “Tombstone” (1993) and “Wyatt Earp” (1994) and two recent books: “The Last Gunfight” by Jeff Guinn and “Doc” by Mary Doria Russell.

We were fortunate to catch up with Mary Doria Russell to ask her some questions about her new novel and the fascinating life of her lead character. Mary is the author of four previous best-sellers: The Sparrow, Children of God, A Thread of Grace, and Dreamers of the Day. Because of her historical knowledge about the Old West, and her familiarity with law enforcement (having grown up the daughter of a sheriff), she was able to provide valuable insight into the issue of gun violence and gun laws in the U.S. today.

What attracted you to the character of Doc Holliday?

I’m always interested borderlands, and in people who cross boundaries and defy categories. The characters in my novels are often migrants or foreigners, half-castes or marginal natives who don’t quite fit the place they're in and who have developed a somewhat distanced and ironic view of their world.

John Henry Holliday certainly fits that pattern, but it's important to realize that he was a real person—not just a fictional character—and he'd beaten some formidable odds simply by surviving infancy. He was born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1851 with a cleft palate and a cleft lip. His uncle, Dr. John Stiles Holliday, performed a successful surgical repair of that birth defect, although the achievement was kept private to protect the family's reputation for “good breeding”—a term taken literally until quite recently. [Editor’s Note: Mary has established the Doc Holliday Memorial Fund at The Smile Train, an organization that provides free cleft palate and cleft lip surgeries to children around the world. To contribute, go to www.MaryDoriaRussell.net and click on DONATE]. When the toddler began to talk, it was obvious that he would have a significant speech impediment, so his mother developed a form of speech therapy to improve his diction. Alice Holliday was also an accomplished pianist who began her son's lessons as soon as he could reach the keyboard.

The Hollidays were Georgia gentry, and John Henry was meant to be a minor aristocrat in a South that ceased to exist after the Civil War. Instead he went to the best dental school in the North, earning the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery when he was still only 20 years old. He was a skilled and serious professional who expected to live a quiet life in the East but just as he was beginning to establish his adult life, he was diagnosed with advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. So he went West in 1873, at the age of 22, hoping that the dry air and sunshine of the Great American Desert would restore his health.

Talk about crossing borders and never truly really fitting in!

In the movies, the “legendary gambler and gunman Doc Holliday” usually arrives in town with a bad reputation and a hooker named Big Nose Kate. The real John Henry Holliday had studied the Greek and Latin classics as well as rhetoric, history and mathematics. At the Philadelphia College of Dental Surgery, his coursework included metallurgy, chemistry, physiology, gross anatomy, dental histology, oral pathology, in addition to surgical practicum. Plus, he played classical piano!

Now, few of us have read Homer or Virgil in the original languages, but at least we've seen the movie “Troy” on television! We may not be able to play Chopin or Beethoven, but most of us know who they were. So if we'd been dropped into Dodge City in 1878, our frame of reference would be more like Doc Holliday's than Wyatt Earp's. With John Henry Holliday as the focus of the novel, I was able to write in a very different way about the frontier. That was the era of Western boomtowns and cattle drives and pioneers, but also of Tolstoy and Dickens and Flaubert, of the ballet “Coppelia” and the opera “Carmen.” Rockefeller had founded Standard Oil. Electric lights and the phonograph and the telephone were developed about the time that Doc Holliday met Wyatt Earp in Dodge City. John Henry Holliday's knowledge and sensibilities bridge those worlds for us.

How did Doc Holliday—an educated, talented, skilled man—become involved with violence and gunplay?

Reluctantly, and as rarely as possible! Keep in mind that this was a sick young man, a six-footer who never weighed much more than 150 and was closer to 100 pounds when he died at just 36. One of the few true things Bat Masterson said about John Henry Holliday was that Doc “could not have whipped a healthy 15-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fistfight.” As Doc himself told Wyatt Earp, “The only time I'm not nervous is when I'm working on someone's teeth.”

I believe Doc initially played up his dangerousness. Today, the same sort of scared, skinny boy in a rough neighborhood might try to seem more “gangsta” than he is. As time went on, however, Doc's reputation took on a life of its own. After the gunfight in Tombstone, the journalists of his day invented “The Infamous Gunman and Gambler Doc Holliday,” a character who could sell a lot more newspapers than Dr. John Henry Holliday, D.D.S.

There is so much mythology surrounding Holliday's marksmanship and the shootout at the O.K. Corral. How much of it is accurate?

The mythology isn't accurate, and neither was Doc! The most careful biographers—the ones who've gone over court records and contemporaneous newspaper reports to verify or debunk all the accusations—believe that John Henry Holliday was in five confirmed shooting affrays in his 15 years in the West.

At 3:00 A.M. on New Year’s Day in 1875, he and Charles Austin fired their pistols within Dallas city limits. While the peace was disturbed, neither man was hurt.

When Doc was 25, he was attacked and seriously wounded by Henry Kahn after a quarrel over cards, which Kahn started. Recovery took five months, and Doc needed a walking stick off and on for the rest of his life.

In 1880, a year before the famous gunfight, he got into an argument with the gambler Johnny Tyler over who was allowed to run card games in which Tombstone saloons. Milt Joyce decided to end the argument by picking Doc up bodily and flinging him into the street. Infuriated, Doc obtained a gun (it was illegal to carry one in Tombstone), returned to the saloon and emptied the revolver, hitting Joyce in the palm and a bartender in the big toe. I'm not downplaying those injuries—Milt Joyce almost lost the hand, and the bartender was lamed—but they are hardly evidence of deadly accuracy.

During the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Tom McLaury was hit in the chest by a shotgun blast at a distance of six feet; he is believed to be the only man John Henry Holliday ever killed. Again, accuracy was not an issue when the weapon is a scattergun at two yards.

Finally, in 1884, Billy Allen threatened to kill Doc over a $5 loan that Doc—destitute and very ill—couldn't pay back on time. When Allen came after him, Doc defended himself with a pistol, wounding Allen in the right upper arm, at close range. Doc feared for his life, so I'm guessing he didn't deliberately try to “wing” Allen. I think that was just the best he could do. At 122 pounds, he was sick and shaky; the pistol was heavy for him. It's important to note that Doc did everything he could to avoid that confrontation, including asking for an extension on the loan and then appealing to the Leadville, Colorado police for protection from Allen. They declined to get involved until after the shooting.

Allen went down and if it were a movie, Doc would have “finished the job.” In real life, with Allen disabled, he allowed himself to be arrested without protest and stood trial for attempted murder. Doc pointed out in court that Allen outweighed him by 50 pounds, and noted, “If he'd got hold of me, I'd have been a child in his hands.” The jury could see that was true, and quickly acquitted Holliday on grounds of self-defense.

That's it. Everything else is fiction. And no, he didn't really knife a guy, as depicted in the movie “Tombstone.”As his long-time companion Kate Harony wrote of Doc, “Being quiet, he never hunted trouble.”

Kate also disputed Doc's reputation as a drinker. “He was not a drunkard. He always kept a bottle near, but when he needed something for his pain, he would only take a small drink.” Bourbon is, in fact, effective for calming a cough and also helped mute the chest and bone pain he suffered throughout his adult life. Tuberculosis is an awful disease.

Americans typically think of “the Wild West” as a place where gun laws were weak and permissive. Is that what you found in your research for the novel Doc?

Well, it depends on when and where you're talking about. Typically, western boomtowns mushroomed into existence in a place that was generating gigantic piles of cash—the buffalo killing fields; gold and silver mining camps; a railroad under construction, etc. For the first two to three years in these places, there was a total absence of law just when the population consisted of minimally educated, testosterone-driven young men, most of whom had a family history of what we consider violent abuse today, but which came under the heading of “Spare the rod, spoil the child” back then.

Huge quantities of alcohol were made available by enterprising entrepreneurs, and there were few recreational alternatives to drinking. Whores, mostly young runaways or orphans, were vastly outnumbered and frequently fought over. Boredom, simmering rancor and the assiduous cultivation of grudges led to manly moments of indignation. Disagreements were likely to get physical. And the entire country was awash in firearms after the Civil War.

Then, as now, enraged young men used what came easily to hand. So it's true that in those first couple of years in any given settlement, there was a lot of gun violence and many deaths, though stand-up shoot-outs in the street are almost entirely a movie fantasy (the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was one of very few such fights in real life). Frontier shootings were nearly always the result of momentary fury, drunken foolishness, or plain clumsiness in a place where guns were as common as trousers.

Soon, however, a city government would be organized by local businessmen, who noticed that dead men make poor customers. In Dodge City, for example, it was illegal to discharge firearms within the city limits except on the Fourth of July and New Year's Day. The rest of the year, when you came into town, you were required to surrender your firearms in the first place you entered. Most public buildings had peg racks for the purpose and you were given a claim number; when you left town again, you could retrieve your gun. If you were discovered to be carrying a gun, and the police officer decided you were not on your way in or out of town, you would be arrested, jailed and fined. The police commonly pistol-whipped anyone who showed the slightest sign of resistance to being disarmed. Concussions must have been epidemic, but that was considered more humane than shooting the idiot.

During the cattle boom of the 1870s and '80s, all the Kansas cow towns had gun control ordinances, and those laws were enforced by men like Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan Earp; Ed, Bat and Jim Masterson; by Bill Tilghman and Dave Mather. They all had formidable reputations. Their presence on the police force made these laws stick, despite the fact that the towns were seasonally flooded by thousands of young cowboys with no head for liquor, intent on blowing three months' wages as quickly as possible in saloons, gambling halls, and brothels.

And while the gunfight in Tombstone had many causes, what finally set it off that afternoon was a misdemeanor: carrying firearms inside city limits.

Wyatt Earp is purported to have written, “Doc was a dentist not a lawman or an assassin, whom necessity made a gambler.” Do you agree with that assessment?

The whole quote is “Doc [Holliday] was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a gun that I ever knew.”

I suspect that whole quote is bogus, although Wyatt always defended Doc's good character. You can usually tell when a ghostwriter or a journalist put a colorful quote in Wyatt's mouth. Wyatt was not well educated and not terribly articulate.

If you want an authentic quote about Doc Holliday, I believe this one by Virgil Earp, who said, “Tales were told that [Doc] had murdered men in different parts of the country, that he had robbed and committed all kinds of crimes, and yet when people were asked how they knew it, they could only admit it was hearsay, and nothing of the kind could really be traced up to Doc's account.”

Unlike Wyatt and Morgan, Virgil never really warmed to Doc, but he was a fair man and that's a fair statement. Everyone who really knew Doc agreed that he was a fine dentist, a quiet person who bore his illness with fortitude, and a gentleman who was grateful for the smallest kindness when he was ill. And he was generous when he tipped!

Holliday was once asked if his killings had ever gotten on his conscience and was reported to have said, “I coughed my conscience up with my lungs, years ago.” But Kate Harony, his long-time companion, remembered a different Doc Holliday, saying that after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, he came back to their room and wept.


Again, the quote about Doc’s conscience is probably bogus. But, yes, Kate wrote that he came back to their room after the gunfight, sat on the side of the bed, and said over and over, “This is awful. This is just awful.” That was his private reaction to the only killing he ever did.

He was also horrified when the incident made national news. Soon after the gunfight, he wired his family in Georgia to assure them that he had been deputized before the event and was acting within the law, but the damage was done. The papers identified him as a professional gambler, and that was something he'd hidden from his family for years.

It's hard for us to understand now, but in those days, a professional gambler was beyond the pale. As John Henry Holliday's cousin Margaret Mitchell wrote in Gone with the Wind, “A man could gamble himself to poverty and still be a gentleman, but a professional gambler could never be anything but an outcast.” When John Henry Holliday's father found out his son was gambling professionally, he never spoke his son's name again. The Hollidays were besieged by reporters after the Tombstone event, and began to run them off by claiming that they were no relation to that man.

That was devastating for John Henry. He was profoundly ashamed of how his life turned out, but really—what were his alternatives? He'd arrived on the frontier just as the Crash of 1873 sent the country into a depression that lasted for years. Who had money for dental care? It was play cards, beg, steal, or starve in the street. So he played cards.

How did their participation in violence affect Holliday and the Earp family?

That's a difficult question to answer. And I'm not sure I should try, in the context of an interview like this. As a novelist, I can draw plausible conclusions about the mental states of the people I write about, but it's all conjecture.

We know that Nicholas Earp beat the daylights out of all his sons, and that had a big effect on all of them. Beaten boys often repeat the cycle: bullying others and abusing their own kids. Sometimes, however, they rebel against the abuse by becoming protective of others. Such men are often drawn to law enforcement, and the Earp brothers follow that pattern.

We also know that the older brothers—Newton, James and Virgil—served in the Union army during the Civil War. James was horribly wounded in battle and lost the use of his left arm. Newton and Virgil served until the end of the war. We now know that post-traumatic stress is common among combat veterans, but the older brothers' lives are not well documented and in any case, the symptoms of PTSD would not have been mentioned in their time. Wyatt, Morgan and Warren Earp were too young to enlist, as was John Henry Holliday, who was just 13 when the war ended. As mentioned above, he was severely injured and permanently lamed in 1877; we may presume that a gunshot wound like that would have had significant emotional aftereffects as well.

We do know, however, that the gunfight at the O.K. Corral changed the lives of everyone who participated—even peripherally—and all for the worse.

Tom and Frank McLaury were killed, as was Billy Clanton. Virgil and Morgan Earp were seriously wounded, and John Henry Holliday was grazed by a bullet; Wyatt was unscathed physically. Ike Clanton lost a beloved brother, and filed murder charges against the Earps and Holliday, who were only exonerated because—quite frankly—Wyatt and Virgil seem to have perjured themselves to protect Morgan and Doc. Sheriff John Behan has been denigrated as a coward and a conniver ever since the incident, and the men on both sides of the fight have been vilified for over a century.

Vendettas happen when people do not believe that the police or the courts can be relied on to serve justice. No justice, no peace. I think that is what happened in Arizona. Friends of those who died during the shoot-out decided the law wasn't going to punish the killers, so they took it on themselves. Virgil Earp was ambushed; a shotgun blast destroyed his arm. Morgan was shot in the back and died in Wyatt's arms. In reaction, Wyatt, Doc and several others hunted down those they held responsible for crippling Virgil and murdering Morgan. The Earp posse wore badges at the time, but Wyatt was certain the men would not be convicted if he brought them in for trial, so he gunned them down personally. We'd call those deaths “extra-judicial executions” today.

Wyatt was led to believe he'd be pardoned by the territorial governor, but that never happened. All the men in the Earp posse were wanted for murder the rest of their lives and had to flee across the Arizona border. Any arrest elsewhere could have resulted in extradition to Arizona, where they might be tried for murder, if not lynched. Direct retaliation was a constant threat for all of them. And they all had to deal with their (now deserved) reputation as killers.

For the next 50 years, Wyatt was suspicious of anyone who approached him. Even the little kids were unwelcome because he suspected “they just wanted to shake the hand of a killer.” Wyatt lived into his 80s, long enough to see the gunfight in Tombstone be turned into movie entertainment. He was really bitter about that.

What would the Earp brothers have thought of contemporary laws that allow cursorily screened individuals with a day-class in training (if that) to carry loaded, concealed handguns into bars?

I suspect Virgil would have snorted, "Idiots making laws for idiots..."

Wyatt might have thought, "That's going to set public order back 150 years."

And Morgan would have told Doc, "You've got to be more careful now. I can't always be around to protect you."

Have you or your family been impacted by gun violence or the threat of it?

Well, now, my father was a career cop. He was an MP in the Marines during the occupation of Japan, and later a village constable, a county deputy in a cruiser, a plain clothes detective, and an undercover narcotics officer. He also served five terms as the sheriff of DuPage County in Illinois, just west of Chicago. So I grew up with guns and cops. Police work was dinner table conversation in our house.

But I should point out that my father never once fired his gun in anger. That's typical. Most cops go their whole careers without pulling a trigger except at the gun range. If they do shoot someone, they're taken off active duty, there's an investigation, and every decision they ever made comes under scrutiny by people who have no idea what that job is really like.

Believe nothing you see in the movies or on TV. Nothing.

Do you still own a gun or have one in your house?

My dad always wanted me to keep a pistol in the house “for protection.” I always told him, “I believe in statistics. Any bullet fired in the middle of the night by a startled, stupefied homeowner is more likely to hit a family member, a pet, or a neighbor in the house next door than an alert intruder.”

A few years ago, my father—an ex-Marine, career policeman, five-term sheriff—was showing a pistol to one of the grandkids. It went off and the bullet went through the sliding glass door and into the neighbor's back yard. Dad was stunned and said, as people always do, “I was sure the gun wasn't loaded.”

It was: Q.E.D.

So no guns in my house. But I have a very ferocious dachshund.

A Winning Issue

It has already been well chronicled that gun control supporters fared well in the November 2 elections. As the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence pointed out, candidates who endorse common-sense gun laws won Senate races from both sides of the aisle. Victorious on Tuesday were the following Democrats: Barbara Boxer in California; Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand in New York, Ron Wyden in Oregon; Barbara Mikulski in Maryland; Daniel Inouye in Hawaii; Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut, Michael Bennet in Colorado; and Chris Coons in Delaware. Then there is the incoming Republican Senator from Illinois, Mark Kirk, who currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Task Force on Illegal Guns in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Much was made of the fact that the National Rifle Association (NRA) endorsed many Blue Dog Democrats running for re-election in the House, but the support of the gun lobby did little to improve their fortunes. Of the 49 Democratic incumbents who lost in the November 2 elections, 29 (59%) had an A rating from the NRA, 27 were endorsed by the NRA (55%), and 25 (51%) received financial support from the NRA. On the flip side, only three of the 101 Democratic House incumbents who co-sponsored legislation to close the Gun Show Loophole (H.R. 2324) lost on Tuesday. The loophole allows private individuals to sell firearms at gun shows without conducting background checks on purchasers or maintaining records of sale.

One particularly interesting House race took place in Virginia’s 11^th Congressional District, where first-term Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly faced off against Keith Fimian, a local businessman. The 11^th is as “an odd-shaped Congressional District stretching from the rural Virginia horse country near Warrenton, then meandering east through the battlefields at Bull Run, and finally racing north headlong towards the uber-metropolian suburbs of Fairfax and Arlington. Nestled near the armpit of the District lies the impressive headquarters of the National Rifle Association.” In 2009, the 11^th supported the Republican slate, voting for Bob McDonnell as Governor, Bill Bolling as Lieutenant Governor, and Ken Cuccinelli as Attorney General.

The NRA’s endorsement in its home district went to Fimian. The gun issue did not figure large in the race, however, until Fimian made the following controversial comments:

I think that at Virginia Tech, if one of those kids in one of those classrooms was packing heat, I think that would not have happened … The perpetrator of that crime would have thought twice before walking into a classroom if he thought there was any chance of someone being armed and preventing him from doing that.

Gerry Connolly immediately bucked the “conventional wisdom” among Democrats in rural and conservative districts that the gun control issue is “untouchable” and “a loser.” James Walkinshaw, Connolly's campaign manager, told the press that “Keith Fimian's extreme position on guns and outrageous comments about the Virginia Tech tragedy serve to show yet again that he is too extreme for Northern Virginia. Fimian's opposition to closing the Gun Show Loophole, his callous lack of regard for the victims of the tragedy, and belief that guns should be allowed on our schools and college campuses are way out of the mainstream.”

Survivors of the shooting at Virginia Tech also took great offense to Fimian’s remarks. Omar Samaha, who lost his sister Reema during the tragedy, appeared in a television ad sponsored by Americans United for Safe Streets (AUSS). "Ask Keith Fimian why he's protecting criminals, instead of protecting us,” he implored his fellow Virginians. Retired Lt. Col. Peter Read, whose daughter Mary was also killed, accepted an apology from Fimian for his remarks, but noted, “He has yet to decide his answer on the simple question of whether he'll support background checks for every gun sold at a gun show. I need my representative in Congress to know the answer to that question.”

The pressure to clarify his stance on these issues became so intense that Fimian’s campaign literally began to run from questions.

Overcoming a massive wave that saw the Republicans gain 60+ seats in the House, Connolly prevailed in the 11^th on Election Day. He currently holds a 935-vote lead over Fimian, with only 300 ballots left to be counted. As one voter told The Connection Newspapers, “I heard some comments that one of the candidates made about Virginia Tech, and I decided to come out and vote for the other guy.”

Even the blog Red NoVA had strong words on the matter: “Keith’s comments saying that if a student was ‘packing heat’ there would have been fewer deaths were incredibly insensitive and damaging to his cause … To make matters worse, this entire drama unfolded on every network news station in the DC region.”

Time will tell if other Democrats in the Commonwealth and across the country catch on, but public safety was clearly a boon to the party in an otherwise disastrous 2010 election. Resources also make a difference—AUSS spent $450,000 on ads and mailers in the VA-11 race and it paid off. Far from a liability, strong support for policies to keep guns out of the hands of criminals is a career booster.

No Heroes Here

Bills are currently pending in seven states (AZ, GA, MI, OH, OK, SC, TN) that would restrict the ability of America’s colleges and universities to regulate firearms on campus (at least five other states have considered similar legislation during the past year). The gun lobby continues to advocate for guns on campus despite overwhelming opposition from the American public, university officials, and organizations like the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators and American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Five stories from the past month go far in explaining why America’s colleges and universities have fought so hard to maintain their strict regulations regarding firearms:

• At 3:20 a.m. on February 19, Brian Mulder, 24, was smoking outside a residence hall at Northern Illinois University (NIU) when Zachary Isaacman, 22, attempted to follow a female resident into the building, “kind of like he was stalking her.” “It looked like she was nervous,” recalled Mulder, the president of the residence hall’s council. Isaacman, an NIU student who lives off-campus, began banging on windows and doors trying to get residents to let him in. Mulder told Isaacman he could not enter the hall because he was not a resident there and instructed him to “cut through the lagoon and go home.” At that point, Isaacman pulled out a handgun and pointed it at Mulder’s face. When Mulder moved to knock the gun away, Isaacman drew back and shot Mulder in the thigh. He was caught minutes later by campus police.
  
  Isaacman has been charged with two felony offenses (aggravated battery with a firearm and aggravated battery) and a misdemeanor (unlawful use of a weapon). University Police who searched his room at the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity house found at least one AK-47 assault rifle, a revolver, a shotgun, and a large amount of ammunition.
  
  Mulder, who is recovering after demonstrating great courage in fulfilling his duties, said, “I’m not really worried about my safety. There’s not a ton of people with guns around here. It just happened to be this one guy. I’m glad nobody else got hurt.”
  
  
• At 2:46 a.m. on February 27, officers from the Bloomington Police Department received a 911 call about an individual exposing a handgun at Kilroy’s Sports Bar. Arriving at the location, they found intoxicated Indiana University student Alexander Edward Brill surrounded by five bar employees in an alley outside the establishment.
  
  Moments earlier, Brill was reportedly talking to a woman he knew when he was confronted by five men, who verbally harassed him. Brill responded by drawing a loaded Smith & Wesson .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun and pointing it at a female employee of the bar. When a male employee tried to intervene, Brill pistol-whipped him with the weapon.
  
  Brill, who possesses a permit to carry a concealed handgun from the state of Indiana, faces three preliminary felony charges of pointing a firearm, battery while armed, and intimidation with a deadly weapon.
  
  
• On March 2, Ike Dean Atkins, 57, drove his wife to a class at Spartanburg Community College in South Carolina. As he waited for her in the parking area inside his car, Atkins, a concealed handgun permit holder, decided to clean his weapon. During this process, the gun accidentally discharged, shooting him in the hand. “Our concern is the safety of our students, faculty and staff, and emergency response was immediate and great,” said Cheri Anderson-Hucks, the college’s Director of Marketing and Public Relations. Atkins violated state law by having a gun on the school’s property and will be charged.
  
  
• Hours after purchasing a gun from the Dakota Territory Gun Show on March 6, University of North Dakota student Brad Uvelhor, 28, accidentally shot himself in the leg with the firearm on university property. It is a violation of the school’s policy to carry weapons on campus—all firearms must be checked in to the University Police Department—and Uvelhor could be charged.
  
  
• Jonathan Brett, a Western Connecticut State University student, was arrested in the early morning of March 18 after threatening a patron at Maxwell's Bar in Danbury, Connecticut. Brett allegedly argued with the patron about a woman, telling him, "You don't want me to take my gun out." Brett holds a valid concealed handgun permit from the state of Connecticut. It was illegal for him to have his Walther PPK 380 handgun in a bar. He has been charged with threatening, breach of peace, and possession of a handgun while intoxicated.
  
  

It is extremely fortunate that none of these events resulted in loss of life. Far from playing the “hero” in some fantasized conflict with a deranged criminal assailant, the “law-abiding gun owners” in these incidents were themselves the threat to the campus communities around them.

The Myth of the "Black Market"

The cities of Washington, D.C. and Chicago have been under siege in recent months by the National Rifle Association (NRA), which is attempting to overturn gun laws in both jurisdictions.

The NRA’s battle with Chicago has been in the courts, where the gun lobby is seeking to have the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment ruling in the case of D.C. V. Heller incorporated at the state level. This would have the practical effort of repealing Chicago’s handgun ban. After the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the NRA’s lawsuit, it appears headed to the Supreme Court on appeal.

D.C. v. Heller, of course, already repealed the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, but the Supreme Court’s ruling did not go far enough for the NRA. They are now seeking to have the city’s new, constitutional gun laws repealed through an amendment that was initially attached to the “D.C. House Voting Rights Act” by Senator John Ensign (R-NV). That bill has yet to be considered by the House of Representatives, and the amendment’s next likely target is the D.C. appropriations bill, which Congress will likely take up this summer.

Time and time again, the NRA has blamed violence in the two cities on their tough laws, despite evidence that shows that criminals are totally unable to acquire firearms inside Chicago and Washington. So why is it so easy for criminals and gun traffickers to get firearms outside the borders of cities? A fascinating new essay by David Kairys, a professor of Law at Temple University, provides some answers.

The essay, entitled “Why are Handguns So Accessible on Urban Streets?” is a chapter in the new book Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black and Male. Kairys argues that we need to avoid a “pervasive acceptance and strange sense that the extraordinary level of death and killing is a normal or inevitable aspect of life in urban America,” and that only after understanding why guns are so readily available in cities can we begin to correct the problem.

Kairys explains that “the market makes new handguns so easily available—often for less than one hundred dollars new, right out of the box—that it makes no sense to steal one.” In fact, “anyone who does not have a record can go to a licensed gun store in most states, legally buy as many handguns as he or she wants, and walk out the door with them.” Kairys also points out that there are no “meaningful limits on the resale of handguns,” because private individuals, unlike federally licensed gun dealers, are not required to run Brady background checks on purchasers.

In Kairys’ words: “The bottom line is this. Under federal law and the law of most states, any person so inclined can buy huge quantities of cheap, easily concealed handguns and sell them to others indiscriminately, often without violating any law and usually without having to worry about getting arrested, prosecuted or convicted. Nor are the identities of owners of handguns, or the persons to whom they transfer ownership, registered or maintained by government, unless state law so provides—and most do not.” Capitalizing on this weak regulation, gun manufacturers produce “more guns than could be sold to law-abiding people,” knowing full well their product will be distributed to criminals and other prohibited purchasers downstream.

So what can we do to address this problem? Kairys advocates for registering handguns and licensing handgun owners; adopting strong, clear and specific “straw purchase” laws that make all of the parties to a straw purpose criminally and civilly responsible; limiting multiple purchases of handguns in a given period; and providing large urban areas with the authority to regulate handguns within their borders. All of these measures would help to reduce the flow of handguns to criminals on America’s streets.

But most importantly, we must learn to overcome our own misconceptions of the problem. As Kairys writes, “the common image of an underground, illegal market is largely fictional.” The ability of dangerous people to easily obtain guns is the result of our weak gun laws, which do little to regulate the firearms industry. The good news? Significant progress can be made in reducing gun violence as soon as our elected officials are made to realize that “the loss of life, the economic and social costs, and the undermining of the safety and the quality of life in America are unacceptable.”

“I want to look in the eyes of our children and promise them that they will be safe.”

A new article from the April 2009 edition of the National Rifle Association’s flagship magazine, America’s First Freedom, demonstrates the gun lobby group’s unerring capacity to smear anyone who stands in their way, no matter how sensible and well-intentioned their views. The piece, entitled “Arne Duncan: Education at the Extremez,” is a scathing attack on the new Secretary of Education, whom author David Kopel describes as “the most extreme anti-gun member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet.”

What did Arne Duncan do to make the NRA so steamed? For starters, he was selected to receive a 2008 “Abraham Lincoln Award” from the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence (ICHV), a group that “advocates for policies designed to minimize the impact gun violence has on Illinois residents.” The award honors “individuals who have shown great political and personal courage in the fight to reduce gun violence …. [The award is] named for an Illinoisan who had the courage and conviction to work for change in our society. Abraham Lincoln was one of our greatest presidents, but tragically was a victim of gun violence.” Past ICHV Lincoln Award honorees have included mayors, members of the Illinois legislature, members of the U.S. Congress, and a U.S. President.

ICHV was recognizing Duncan, then the Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, as “a longstanding proponent of reducing gun violence,” and as a public servant who “work[ed] within the Chicago school system to help make schools and communities safer for students and their families.”

Duncan’s second sin, in the NRA’s eyes, was to state that it is an “undeniable fact that guns and kids don’t mix” at the ICHV Awards Ceremony that year. One would think that is simple common sense, but the NRA quickly portrayed the statement as “an attack on the Scholastic Clays Target Program, gun clubs with small-bore shooting teams for teenagers, and parents who take their children hunting.”

Duncan likely had a different type of hunting on his mind—during the 2007-08 school year, a record 34 Chicago Public School students were killed, the overwhelming majority with firearms. It was for this reason that Duncan refused to accept ICAHV’s Lincoln Award that evening, saying:

"I wish we could stand here today and declare victory over gun violence ... I want to look in the eyes of our children and promise them that they will be safe—and that their only concern is whether they did their homework, not whether they can walk to school. I wish we could preserve their innocence long enough to foster a love of learning instead of a fear of death. I wish that our society valued children more than it values violent rituals and traditions that might have been at home in a frontier society two centuries ago but make absolutely no sense today. I wish for all of these things—but none of them are yet true ... And so, while I am deeply honored to be here...I cannot accept your award. I don’t feel I have earned it. I don’t feel any of us have earned it. Instead I would ask us all to remember the horror and tragedy of children who live with death every day. I would ask us all to renew our commitment to reducing gun violence.”

While Duncan spoke that night about youth who had recently been killed in Chicago, the problem is certainly not limited to the state of Illinois. The NRA is apparently unaware of—or simply doesn’t care about—a series of gruesome shootings involving children that have occurred in the five months since Duncan attended the ICHV awards ceremony, including the following incidents:

“11-Year-Old Boy Kills Future Stepmother, Brother”
“Ohio Teen Convicted of Killing Mom Over Video Game”
“Angry Ohio Boy, 4, Shoots Baby Sitter”
“Brother Shot Girl in the Chest”
“12-year-old Arizona Boy Guilty in Mom’s Shooting”
“Boy, 8, Shot to Death in Massachusetts Gun Show Accident”
“Boy, 8, Admits Shooting Dad, Neighbor in Video”
“Father's Gunshot Kills Boy, 12”
“10 Year Old Killed, Brother and Father Charged”
“Real Gun Mistaken for a Toy; Girl Shoots Brother”

In the America’s First Freedom article, author Kopel also expresses outrage that Duncan spoke at a protest outside Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale, Illinois, on May 26, 2007. For those not familiar with Chuck’s Gun Shop, it is the leading supplier of firearms to criminals among all federally licensed gun dealers in America. From 1996-2000, 2,370 guns were traced from crime scenes to the store (to put that in perspective, only five other dealers in the entire country had more than 1,000 guns traced to crime during this period). Chuck’s sits in a suburb directly outside Chicago. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has confirmed that most of Chicago’s crime guns come from dealers in-state (“We are our own worst enemies as a dealer state,” said ATF agent Thomas Ahern of the Chicago Field Division). Criminals go outside Chicago to make purchases because the city’s gun laws have made it virtually impossible for them to get firearms there.

Interestingly, Kopel spends almost half the article commenting on an inappropriate and ill-advised remark that Chicago Pastor Michael Pfleger made at the protest, in a weak attempt to guilt Duncan by association. He curiously fails to identify others who spoke that day, like Annette Holt, the mother of a 16-year-old who was shot and killed on a Chicago Transit Authority bus days before the event as he heroically tried to save another patron. Perhaps a grieving mother like Holt, whose organization Purpose Over Pain supports a wide range of state and federal gun control measures, simply isn’t as convenient a target.

And the NRA might have another motive in defending Chuck’s Gun Shop. In 2006, the store won the NRA’s Dealer Recruiter of the Year Award for getting the most patrons to join the organization.

Americans like Arne Duncan who care deeply about the disproportionate toll that gun violence is taking on children in this country and want to do something about it? The only place they’re “extreme” is in the eyes of the National Rifle Association.

Looking a Gift Loophole in the Mouth

In July, Bullet Counter Points reported on the “Fire Sales Loophole,” which allows corrupt gun dealers who have had their licenses revoked by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to sell off their remaining inventory without conducting background checks or keeping records. That blog focused on a Chicago dealer who had his license revoked after committing 500 violations of federal law, and yet who was still permitted to transfer 200 guns from his "business inventory" into his "personal collection" of firearms. Those guns ended up on crime scenes in Canada after the dealer illegally trafficked them across the border and sold them off the books to gang members and others.

Now, an equally disturbing story comes to us from Michigan. On August 14, ATF agents and Michigan State Police troopers descended on the Gun Barn in Highland Township and confiscated more than 612 firearms from the store. The owners of the store, Gabriel Kish III and Deborah Summers, were arrested for dealing in firearms without a federal license.

The ATF had revoked Kish and Summers’ Federal Firearms License (FFL) in 2004 for violations of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Despite the threat they posed to public safety, the couple was then allowed to exploit the Fire Sales Loophole and sell off their remaining inventory without conducting background checks on purchasers or maintaining records of those sales.

Kish and Summers didn’t stop there, however. ATF soon received a tip that the couple was continuing to sell guns off the books even after depleting their remaining inventory. An investigation was launched, during which undercover agents were able to purchase firearms from Gun Barn—cash and carry, no questions asked. Now, after several years of dealing guns illegally, the couple has—finally—been put out of business for good.

ATF resident agent in charge Robin Shoemaker admitted that tracing the guns that were sold by Gun Barn after the store’s license was revoked will be difficult, if not impossible—because there is no paper trail whatsoever for the agency to follow in determining who bought them. Commented Special Agent Thomas Brandon from ATF’s Detroit Field Division: “The unlawful sale of firearms, especially dealing firearms without a license, can put guns into the hands of criminals, and put our communities at risk.”

That would seem so obvious that you’d think Congress would have taken action years ago to close the Fire Sales Loophole. Ever eager to please the gun lobby, however, they have yet to even consider legislation to do so. This has the 320 members of Mayors Against Illegal Guns up in arms (pardon the bad pun).

The tragedy is that the simple effort it would take to close the Fire Sales Loophole would do an enormous amount of good. The ATF has reported that just 1.2 percent of licensed dealers are the source of over 57 percent of guns found on crime scenes. Putting this small but dangerous group of bad apples out of business—immediately and permanently—would go far in drying up the gun pool that criminals swim in.

The Same Old Story

In the aftermath of the shooting at Northern Illinois University in February of this year, Americans struggled to understand how Steven Kazmierczak could have perpetrated such a terrible tragedy. National media outlets quoted close friends of Kazmierczak who described him as “probably the nicest, most caring person ever.” His professors said he was “a nice kid” and “extremely respectful.” NIU Police Chief Donald Grady said that law enforcement had "no indications at all this would be the type of person that would engage in such activity … There were no red flags.”

They were wrong.

A recent article in Esquire, published more than five months after the shooting, paints a far different picture. Unlike the sweet, award-winning graduate student that we heard about in February, Esquire writer David Vann tells the story of a troubled, volatile individual who was clearly a threat to himself and those around him.

The warning signs in Kazmierczak’s behavior date back to his childhood. In high school, he idolized serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, and was fascinated by Hitler and his crimes against humanity. Along with this obsession with violence, Kazmierczak developed severe mental health problems as a teenager. By the time he graduated from high school, Kazmierczak had attempted suicide three times, taken eight different medications for mental illness, and been institutionalized on five different occasions—including a stay at the Mary Hill Residence, a psychiatric hospital, where he spent nine months in in-patient care.

After leaving Mary Hill, Kazmierczak decided to join the Army. When it was found he had lied on an enlistment form, Kazmierczak was sent to the William Beaumont Army Medical Hospital’s psych ward. The Army then determined he was a potential danger to himself and others, and Kazmierczak was given an “uncharacterized” discharge and kicked out of the service.

After 22 troubled years, Kazmierczak arrived at Northern Illinois University, where he tried his best to conceal his past from his new peers, friends and mentors. However, his disturbing behavior continued. At NIU, Kazmierczak engaged in long, detailed conversations about school shootings with a friend on campus. When Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 fellow students at Virginia Tech, Kazmierczak was excited. He studied everything about Cho—his writings, his planning, his timing, and how he obtained his guns.

Not long thereafter, Kazmierczak began stockpiling his own weapons. In December 2006, he applied for a Firearms Owner Identification (FOID) The FOID application contained only one question that pertained to mental health. Kazmierczak was asked if he had been institutionalized in the past five years. He hadn’t been—and no further explanation was needed.

Having obtained his card, Kazmierczak purchased five handguns and two shotguns over the next 13 months from federally licensed firearm dealers. Then, on February 14, 2008, he entered NIU’s Cole Hall and killed six people (including himself) and wounded 18 others. Not long before the shooting, he told a former girlfriend, “If anything happens, don’t tell anyone about me” and “You can write a book about me some day.”

The truth is that Kazmierczak exhibited as many red flags as Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter. Six months earlier, the Virginia Tech Review Panel had published a report detailing Cho’s disturbing and lifelong struggles with mental illness. The report also included a list of recommendations on how to prevent such a tragedy from happening again—including measures to improve screening of gun purchasers.

Regrettably, the U.S. Congress and state legislatures have taken little action in the wake of the panel’s report to deny deranged shooters access to firepower.

Today, gun laws in Virginia and Illinois remain fundamentally unchanged. The current FOID card application in Illinois is nearly identical to the one that Kazmierczak sailed through in December 2006. And while Virginia clarified the process by which mental health records are transmitted to their State Police, loopholes remain open that allow prohibited purchasers and others to buy guns without undergoing a background check.

At the federal level, the picture is no more impressive. Last year, Congress passed the “NICS Improvement Act of 2007,” which was signed into law by President Bush. The bill was intended to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) by creating financial incentives for states to submit more disqualifying records to the federal database, including mental health records. Before it was passed, however, the National Rifle Association was permitted to make a number of detrimental additions. Contrary to its original purpose, the legislation will now require states who accept grant funding to create programs to restore firearm purchasing privileges to those previously restricted because of mental health disability. Moreover the bill has yet to be appropriated and no grant money has been disbursed. The bottom line, however, is that the U.S. Congress has not passed meaningful gun control legislation since 1997.

If the cases of Seung-Hui Cho and Steven Kazmierczak have taught us anything, it’s that red flags and warning signs do appear consistently among shooters before they engage in acts of mass destruction. What is needed is a screening process that effectively identifies these warning signs before individuals purchase handguns, assault weapons, and other firearms. A handful of states have effective laws that go beyond a simple computerized background check and thoroughly screen gun purchasers. New Jersey is a good example—the state conducts an actual background investigation on an applicant before licensing them to purchase a handgun. Moreover, the recent decision by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller expressly stated that background checks and licensing and registration laws were constitutional.

The question is, how much more bloodshed will it take until we implement such best practices on a national level to prevent terrible tragedies like the ones at Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech?

No License? No Problem.

For years, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has called attention to the problem of “bad apple” gun dealers who violate federal regulations and sell firearms that are later used in crimes. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) reports that just 1.2 percent of dealers are the source of over 57 percent of guns found on crime scenes.

A recent story demonstrates how easy it is for these “bad apples” to continue arming criminals even after ATF has revoked their licenses to sell firearms. The story focuses on Project Blackhawk, a two-year investigation of an organized gun and drug-smuggling ring between the United States and Canada. As part of the investigation, authorities traced more than 200 crime guns to one particular Chicago-area dealer, Ugur “Mike” Yildiz.

Yildiz was the owner of Chicagoland Bells, a gun shop in the suburbs of Chicago. In 2003, just one year after the store opened, ATF agents inspected it and found 500 violations of the Gun Control Act. Soon thereafter, the agency revoked Yildiz’s federal license to sell firearms. Instead of confiscating his remaining inventory, however, the ATF allowed Yildiz to transfer 200 guns from the store’s inventory to his personal collection of firearms. Yildiz then illegally smuggled these guns across the Canadian border and sold them to criminals and traffickers. Ontario police have seized 80 of Yildiz’s guns from gang members and have even connected one with an attempted murder.

Current law requires individuals “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms to possess a federal license, to conduct background checks on purchasers, and to keep records of sales so firearms can be subsequently traced if they are later used in crime. Private or “hobby” sellers, however, are exempt from these requirements under a loophole created by a 1986 law, the Firearm Owners Protection Act. Once Yildiz transferred his store’s guns to his “private collection,” he was able to evade government oversight altogether.

This is not the first time a bad apple dealer has exploited the Fire Sale Loophole. A similar situation occurred at Valley Gun Shop in Maryland in 2004. ATF recorded 900 violations of federal law by gun shop owner (and then-National Rifle Association Board member) Sandy Abrams and revoked his license to sell firearms. With legal assistance from the NRA, Abrams sued the federal government, seeking an order that would allow him to continue selling guns privately. The Bush Administration and the Department of Justice concurred with Abrams and announced in court papers that “when a dealer loses his license he can dispose of his inventory by selling those firearms” privately without being charged for illegal dealing in firearms. Through such unregulated private sales, Abrams continued to sell guns, one of which was an assault weapon later used by a criminal to shoot at police.

The NRA has worked with Members of Congress to codify the Fire Sale Loophole through the ATF Modernization and Reform Act. This legislation would enhance the ability of prohibited purchasers to obtain firearms without undergoing background checks.

Mayors around the country, however, have stood against the bill and are determined to close the Fire Sale Loophole for good. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston are the co-chairs of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition which joins over 320 mayors from 45 states in opposing unlawful gun trafficking. Their proposal to close this loophole is common sense. Dealers who repeatedly violate federal law clearly pose a threat to public safety and should not be allowed to sell firearms without processing any paperwork after their licenses have been revoked.

Gunning for our National Treasures

Our National Parks could become dangerous places if a group of 47 pro-gun senators have their way. In a December 2007 letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, Senators Mike Crapo (R-ID), Max Baucus (D-MT) and their colleagues requested the repeal of a Reagan-era regulation that prohibits guns from being transported through National Park lands unless they are unloaded and safety stored. Their proposed changes would allow concealed carry permit holders to carry their handguns on most National Park lands. Long guns, including assault weapons, could in many cases be openly carried.

Not content to wait for a response from the administration, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) will soon seek to attach an amendment to a related bill, S. 2483, to codify these changes in law and override the need for any executive action on the matter.

A broad coalition of conservation and environmental groups have stepped forward to oppose the Coburn amendment, including the National Park Rangers Lodge of the Fraternal order of Police, the National Parks Conservation Association, the National Park Rangers Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, the Association of National Park Rangers, and The Wilderness Society.

As stewards of our parks, these organizations understand that gun proliferation can only exacerbate the already pervasive effects of poaching and park destruction that threaten to permanently alter our national heritage. Without sensible gun regulations, individuals who would do harm to visitors, wildlife and park property will be able to more easily evade prosecution. Add to this the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and it becomes even more difficult to understand how Senator Coburn and his colleagues believe that loosening gun regulations will make our national parks safer.

This reminds us of a terrible story that appeared in the national news last year when an Illinois family was terrorized in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (land maintained by the National Forest Service) by a group of handgun and assault-rifle toting young men. In one night of alcohol-soaked and motorboat-aided revelry, these men harassed upwards of 80 people throughout the park, eventually forcing a man, his daughter, and his grandson to hide in the woods for fear of death. The men now face 79 criminal charges for their actions.

The last thing the people who maintain and protect our national parks need is politically-motivated legislative tinkering to make their jobs more difficult and complex. Badlands National Park Superintendent Paige Baker expresses this sentiment succinctly: “The system is working as it is. When people come out here, it's to look at the wildlife and the natural beauty, not to shoot."