Almost two months after the shootings in Tucson, Ariz., Colin Goddard, a survivor of the Virginia Tech massacre, is speaking to Arizona students about recovering from tragedy, as well as legislation that could help prevent gun violence on higher education campuses and elsewhere.
“What defines a community, what defines a group of people, isn’t the things that happen to them outside of their control — it’s how they choose to recognize and remember the people who were lost and injured that day and take steps to make it less likely to happen to someone else,” Goddard, 25, told HuffPost.
On April 16, 2007, the Virginia Tech shootings left 32 dead and 17 injured. Out of a class of 17, Goddard was one of seven students to survive. After graduating, he went to work on a documentary film about the massacre, “Living for 32”, and is promoting the documentary while serving as an assistant director of legislative affairs for the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence.
“The time for thoughts and prayers is over,” Goddard said. “Now it’s time to actually do something that would stop a future Jared Loughner,” the alleged Tucson shooter.
Such calls have not gone unheeded. Last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced legislation, supported by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, that would require all gunbuyers to undergo a background check and increase penalties for states that fail to comply with the rule. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) has already introduced legislation to make it illegal to bring a gun within 1,000 feet of a government official, and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) has announced a measure to limit the sale of high-capacity clips like the one used in the Arizona shootings.
The Huffington Post Nick Wing
First Posted: 02/ 3/11 05:19 PM Updated: 02/ 4/11 09:00 AM
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) hit back at New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week, suggesting that his undercover sting to expose lax Arizona firearms laws was an indication that he thought he’d already taken care of business at home.
“I find it interesting that he’s out here in Arizona solving our problems,” Brewer said in an interview on Fox News. “I guess he believes that he has solved all the problems in New York.”
The governor went on to explain that Arizona was a “big Second Amendment state,” and that she supported the current version of its firearms laws, a line similar to one she took in the immediate aftermath of the video’s release earlier this week.
Brewer then seemed to argue that both individual patrons, as well as merchants, should be working in conjunction to ensure that firearms laws were enforced.
“Those people that buy guns from private owners at a gun show have the responsibility, if they knowingly realize it, someone cannot pass a background check or if they suspect that maybe they are mentally incompetent, it is a state felony and a federal felony,” she said.
First Posted: 01/18/11 09:07 AM Updated: 01/18/11 09:47 AM
WASHINGTON — Despite powerful lobbying against any new gun-control measures by groups like the National Rifle Association, a new bipartisan poll shows that both gun owners and the general public support stronger measures to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and other potentially dangerous individuals.
The poll — conducted for the coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns, co-chaired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino — suggests that while far-reaching gun-control legislation seems unlikely to pass, some narrower measures may be able to earn bipartisan support.
“Large majorities of Americans agree with the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own guns, and Americans strongly oppose efforts to ban handguns,” said Bob Carpenter, vice president of American Viewpoint, the Republican polling firm that joined with Democratic firm Momentum Analysis to conduct the survey. “But Americans and gun owners feel with equal fervor that government must act to get every single record in the background-check system that belongs there and to ensure that every gun sale includes a background check. Most Americans view these goals, protecting gun rights for the law-abiding and keeping guns from criminals, as compatible.”
Some findings from the poll results, provided exclusively to The Huffington Post:
— 90 percent of Americans and 90 percent of gun owners support fixing gaps in government databases that are meant to prevent the mentally ill, drug abusers and others from buying guns.– 91 percent of Americans and 93 percent of gun owners support requiring federal agencies to share information about suspected dangerous persons or terrorists to prevent them from buying guns.
— 89 percent of Americans and 89 percent of gun owners support full funding of the law a unanimous Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed after the Virginia Tech shootings to put more records in the background-check database.
— 86 percent of Americans and 81 percent of gun owners support requiring all gun buyers to pass a background check, no matter where they buy the gun and no matter who they buy it from.
It was almost exactly a year ago at this time that a “controversial” report was released by the Department of Homeland Security. This finding, labeled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” explained that the lunatic fringe might use the recession and ascension of the first African-American president to recruit members and then plan violent attacks on the homeland.
Although this effort was initiated under the administration of George W. Bush, the usual bed-wetters on the Right–especially a large Oxycontin-laced, self-indulgent buffoon with the ever-appropriate name Rush–whined and hissed about how it was a political jihad.
Here we are a year later, and it is starting to feel very 1995 out there right now. While the Obama Administration and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle genuflect before the NRA, we are not only doing not nearly enough to keep high-power weaponry out of the hands of, for lack of a better word, “evil-doers,” but the NRA is leading state legislatures around by the nose in attempts to actually weaken gun laws we do have on the books. As it was aptly put in in an editorial in the Charleston, WV Gazette:
Almost any criminal, psycho, drunk, wife-basher, drug addict or other prohibited person can buy a pistol illegally at a gun show – no questions asked. Test after test has found that many gun show dealers, licensed or unlicensed, sell deadly weapons to practically anyone with money, evading federal laws that forbid sales to the unfit.
In fact, once the practices of these gun shows were exposed by undercover investigations, such as those planned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and his organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns (Disclosure: I consult for MAIG; I am speaking for me, and only me, in this piece, however), the response was not to make it harder for criminals, terrorists and the mentally unstable to get guns at gun shows. It was to try and pass legislation to make such investigations illegal. Brilliant plan! Sweep it under the rug, and it is sure to go away.
It is no matter, that as my friend Brian Rothenberg, Executive Director of Progress Ohio, has said, it is easier to get a gun at a gun show than cold medicine. Or that the recent shooting at the Pentagon, by an anti-government radical and mentally disturbed man named John Patrick Bedell, was able to occur because even after the state of California deemed him mentally unfit to have buy a gun, he just went to Nevada and bought em through the infamous gun show loophole.
No background check. No questions asked. And then off to shoot innocent people at the Pentagon.
Seriously, stop and watch this spooky video for a second (they even got the German music right!).
What has been the response to the crescendo of incidents like these over the past few months? The Obama Administration is missing in action. Meanwhile, Republican legislators, like Senator Tom Coburn, are actively trying to put guns in the hands of the mentally unbalanced. That’s right, Coburn tried to attach an amendment to the health care bill to restore gun rights to veterans declared “mentally incompetent.” Seriously, does the man, and the 45 who voted with him, remember Ft. Hood?
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