Sandy Hook Adieu

You know it’s over when all the notable politicians have taken their bows, this time draped in the winding cloth of Sandy Hook’s victims. On Sunday, a week after Christians, some of them, went to their churches to memorialize the resurrection of the Christ, and 15 weeks after Adam Lanza shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School armed to the teeth with weapons owned by his mother, whom he murdered with a still legal 22 caliber rifle, there slaughtering six heroic staff members of the school and twenty innocent children, the Hartford Courant ran on its Opinion page a series of columns surmounted by the eye catching headline, “Will This Stop More Newtowns?”

By “this” the Courant intended to indicate the anti-gun legislation newly passed by Connecticut’s General Assembly.

The mercifully short but emotionally inconvenient answer to the question is – “No.”

Possibly the most thoughtful column among the three featured on the paper’s Opinion front page was written by Colin McEnroe, who struggled manfully with the usual heart-mind dichotomy.

“He could not afford, also,” Mr. McEnroe wrote of emotionally overcome Republican leader John McKinney, “to lose the Battle of Who Cares More.”

Mr. McEnroe has been around the legislative block a few times in the course of his writing career and knows, as most of us do, that the chief battle – sometimes the onlybattle – that will secure a legislative victory is won by those who are most able to appeal to raw emotion -- and Sandy Hook has rubbed every emotion raw.

“The problem with most people,” said a philosopher full of years and wisdom (my mother, in fact) is that they think with their hearts and feel with their heads.”

I once brought her C.S. Lewis’ essay “Men Without Chests” to read. The point of the essay was that a heart properly belongs in the chest and not on the sleeve, where it might readily be shown by social deciders to those unpersuadable few as an incontrovertible ipsi dixit.

If only humankind, Mr. Lewis sighed, could manage to negotiate the perilous abyss between the heart and mind that is sometimes opened by the jagged and sharp events of life. Mr. Lewis thought, some think credulously, that Christianity might provide a bridge. So did Saint Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in Africa who argued against pagan Rome but wept when Rome fell. The human heart, Augustine knew, was rootless, in perpetual motion, and could find rest only through a sometimes treacherous return home: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

It is doubtful that the 20 year-old Mr. Lanza read much of Augustine or Lewis. His spiritual template was drawn from the murderous acts of Anders Breivik, who slaughtered more than 77 people in Norway. Did Mr. Breivik also wear his heart, such as it was, on his sleeve? Is there a pill one might take to move the heart and head where they belong?

There is something nearly pagan, certainly pre-Christian that hovers like a black halo around mass murder crimes and their consequences.

In the Golden Bough, Sir James Frazier recounts an Athenian sacrifice known as “the murder of the ox” or bouphonia. An ox is slaughtered with a knife to propitiate the gods of the harvest. The slaughtering instruments, axes and knives, are first washed in pure water by maidens, then sharpened on whetstones by men, after which they are given to the butchers who slaughter the ox. Following the ceremony, a trial is held by the king-judge to affix blame on behalf of the murdered ox. Ritualistically, all are accused: The water carriers shift blame to those who have sharpened the weapon; these point to the butchers as the guilty parties. And finally, the butchers lay blame upon the axes and the knives – which“accordingly are found guilty, condemned and cast into the sea.”

The pagan ritual – every bit detailed and precise as the seemingly endless political folderol following the murders in Sandy Hook – provide an example of homeopathic magic, during which human guilt is ascribed to inanimate objects such as, in the deliberations of our post-pagan General Assembly, a blameless rifle, found guilty and metaphorically cast into the sea.

Albert Jay Nock, one of the early influences on Bill Buckley, wondered in “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man” how a modern living in the 20^th century would know if the world were descending into a new Dark Age.

The mercifully brief answer to that question is – by the signs of the times.

What Didn’t They Know And Why Didn’t They Know It?

There has been a journalistic breakthrough in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass murder case.

It’s always a hopeful sign when journalists rub the sleepy seeds from their eyes and wake up.

Some in Connecticut appear to have been aroused by a story that first appeared in the New York Daily News – significantly NOT in any Connecticut media watering hole. A few days ago, Rick Green of the Hartford Courant speculated on his blog, “Maybe the state police owe us some official details about what happened — before we change laws and spend a lot of the public’s money.” In the future, after all the legislation affecting legal gun ownership has been rolled out, signed, sealed and delivered, the question foremost in everyone’s mind will be, “What didn’t they know and why didn’t’ they know it.”

“Everyone” would include the news community; the two governmental panels assigned, one by the governor and another by the General Assembly, to bring home the data on the basis of which legislators might produce a bill preventing future mass murders of mothers, school children and teachers; the many politicians, both in Connecticut and elsewhere, who have steadfastly insisted that Sandy Hook should be the impetus for legislation that will keep us safe from mass murderers; and most especially the families of the victims in Sandy Hook who, all along, have been hoping the General Assembly and governor might produce preventative legislation.

The journalistic breakthrough occurred in a story filed by Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News.

“What investigators found,” Mr. Lupica wrote, “was a chilling spreadsheet 7 feet long and 4 feet wide that required a special printer, a document that contained Lanza’s obsessive, extensive research — in nine-point font — about mass murders of the past, and even attempted murders.

“’We were told (Lanza) had around 500 people on this sheet,’ a law enforcement veteran told me Saturday night. ‘Names and the number of people killed and the weapons that were used, even the precise make and model of the weapons. It had to have taken years. It sounded like a doctoral thesis; that was the quality of the research.’”

Partial information about the “active murder investigation,” the often repeated formulation of Lieutenant Paul Vance of the Connecticut state police, leaked out of a conference in New Orleans, where people in the know, mostly police investigators, were sharing information with other people in the know. Up to this point, great pains had been taken to assure that authorized data remained bottled up. Most journalists live in the hope that the truth will out –eventually. The truth usually follows in the train of everything else; it’s often the last actor on the stage before the curtain is rung down.

Adam Lanza, it appeared from the New Orleans conference, was a studious killer well versed in the methods of other mass murderers. His beau ideal of the perfect mass murderer was Norway’s Anders Breivik. Connecticut Commentary first mentioned Mr. Breivik in a blog and column titled “Sandy HookShould Teach Us How To Think” way back in December.

Mr. Lanza apparently was trying to beat Mr. Breivik’s record of 77 dead. Owing to the arrival of first responders armed with substantial firepower, Mr. Lanza fell short of the mark he had set for himself, having committed suicide after murdering 27 people, including his mother. Newtown has since set aside enough money to provide all its schools with armed personnel.

The data that leaked out of the New Orleans conference is important. Diagnosis and data are always important for, say, doctors addressing a disease or legislators writing laws. A law is a prophylactic, a legal preventative. There are no fewer than three commissions charged with sifting through the Sandy Hook data so that legislators might write reasonable laws to prevent future Sandy Hooks. BUT THERE IS LITTLE AUTHORITAIVE DATA that any responsible legislator might consult in writing such a law.

And why not? Well, Mr. Vance will tell you that the “criminal investigation is ongoing.” It may be completed in June, long after all the insufficient prophylactic laws have been written. Will those legal remedies, based on partial or doubtful data be effective in achieving deterrence?

Mr. Breivik was not deterred by Norway’s capital punishment law because Norway has no such law. Connecticut abolished its capital punishment law shortly after a mass murder in Cheshire committed by newly released prisoners, only months before Mr. Lanza took up arms against his mother, 20 school children and 6 teachers.

The General Assembly is proposing to add to a long list of proscribe weapons yet another weapon, the AR-15, produced here in Connecticut and the most often purchased sporting rifle in the United States. Will that do the job? Grave doubts have been raised, not only by members of the NRA, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s bete noir of the moment. Most recently, U.S. Senate leader Harry Reid has doomed a federal ban on assault weapons, possibly over the hearty objections of Mr. Murphy and other Democrats in Connecticut who think that state laws prohibiting weapons are insufficient to stop importation from other states.

At the time he shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mr. Lanza was armed with two semi-automatic pistols – the weapon of choice in most cities, including Chicago, murder capital of the United States and the political nursery bed of President Barack Obama – and a shotgun (left in the car – WE THINK – “ongoing investigation,”don’t you know) that would have been as devastating as the Bushmaster rifle he used.

If Mr. Lanza had survived, Connecticut would not have been able to execute him, because there is no capital punishment law in Connecticut prescribing execution for mass murderers or terrorists. Should there be such a law? Tried on terrorist charges in Norway, Mr. Breivik was declared sane by a panel of five judges and sentenced to 21 years in prison, a sentence that can be repeatedly extended by 5 years so long as he is considered a threat to society.

The two repeat offenders who murdered a family in Cheshire could have received early release credits under a program initiated by Mike Lawlor, Governor Dannel Malloy’s Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning. Indeed under Mr. Lawlor’s early release Risk Reduction Credit Program, two separate prisoners given early release credits already have committed murders in Meriden and Manchester.

The unavailability of authorized hard data on Mr. Lanza’s multiple murder spree should alarm legislators who are poised to add to a growing list of banned weapons yet one more weapon in an effort to deter such crimes as have been committed by Mr. Lanza and Mr. Breivik. Are such legal placeboes palliatives rather than real solutions to real problems?

 

Everyone in Connecticut – those who fear for the safety of children, legislators, the families of the victims, the tribunes of the people -- should be insisting that the criminal report be released right now. Tomorrow will be too late.