On Valentine’s Day in 2018, a teenager entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland (FL) and killed 14 students and three staff members as well as injuring another 17 people. Reports about his history of disturbing behavior were ignored, and he legally purchased the AR-15 rifle he used for the attack. Students and families inundating the state Capitol led to a new law barring sales of rifles and other long guns to people under age 21 and a “red-flag” provision allowing law enforcement officials to seek permission from judges to temporarily force people to turn over weapons if they are deemed threats to themselves or others.
Parkland students led the formation of the March for Our Lives organization; they held marches across the U.S. promoting stricter gun safety regulations. They have far to go, but David Hogg, one of the students at the school at the time, said that the red-flag law foiled an unknown number of violent incidents, including in his own family. They used the red-flag law when Hogg’s mother received a death threat, “F with the NRA and you’ll be DOA.” The threatening person was forced to give up his firearms. Hogg said:
“The law that we passed in Florida may have stopped me from having to bury my own mother.”
The number of children exposed to gun violence at school has almost doubled from the 187,000 before the shooting in Parkland to a total of 338,000. In just 2022, 43,000 students were exposed to gun violence in their schools.
Despite myths of bullied loners, shooters have no archetype. Their ages go from six years old to 74, and the recent killer in Lansing was 43. Yet 74 percent of school shooting killings since 1999 were by males between the ages of 15 and 20. Of the shooters, 96 percent are male, most intend to harm specific people, and they show no signs of debilitating mental illness such as psychosis or schizophrenia. White shooters fire in predominantly White schools, and Black shooters fire in predominantly Black ones. Of the 132 shootings since Columbine (1989) in which the source of the weapons is publicly identified, 86 percent came from shooters’ homes or those of other relatives or friends.
Suggestions for preventing school shootings are usually more armed guards, more metal detectors, more cameras, more bulletproof windows, more drills, more guns, more therapists, and more thoughts and prayers. Responsibility for schools to stop shootings is pushed by the $3.1 billion a year industry of largely unproved security systems. More armed security guards? In only two instances of 366 shootings did a resource officer gun down an active shooter. In nine shootings, however, the attacker stopped because of a malfunctioning weapon or his inability to handle the gun.
Better suggestions:
The ability to quickly lock school doors. Teachers couldn’t lock doors from the inside at the Uvalde (TX) school where students and staff members were shot on May 24, 2022.
Following tips about the attackers’ plans. The nonprofit co-founded by parents who lost children in Newtown (CT), Sandy Hook Promise, started the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System, allowing people to privately submit safety concerns through a computer, phone, or app. The organization reported at least 13 planned school shootings prevented, over 100 other acts of potential campus violence blocked, and at least 406 children contemplating suicide receiving help before killing themselves. The service is free, but only 950 districts out of over 13,000 have signed up. In the recent Virginia shooting by a six-year-old, the administration was warned but didn’t pursue the tip that he had brought a gun to school.
Lax gun laws allow some shooters to acquire weapons themselves, such as the Uvalde killer who bought two semiautomatic rifles days after his 18th birthday, but others come from negligent people who don’t secure their weapons. The parents of the six-year-old said they kept the gun on a “high shelf.” In 24 years, adult owners criminally charged only ten times because they didn’t lock up their firearms. And only 23 states and D.C. have regulations to secure weapons.
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), the youngest member of Congress elected at the age of 25, was a top organizer for March for Our Lives and centered his campaign on issues important to young voters: ending gun violence, addressing climate change, protecting abortion rights, and supporting Medicare for all. He defeated 72-year-old Calvin Wimbish, retired Army Green Beret, for the seat vacated by Val Demings when she resigned to unsuccessfully run against Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Frost calls himself a “survivor” of gun violence in Orlando when he was 19.
AG Merrick Garland commissioned the first comprehensive study of criminal gun trafficking in over 20 years from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Findings:
- Firearms are now more quickly used in crimes because of a reduced turnaround between a crime and when the gun was purchased.
- Fifty-four percent of guns recovered in crime scenes in 2021 were purchased within three years, double the increase of time since 2019. This indicates illegal gun trafficking or a straw purchase in which a legally-purchased gun is sold to some who cannot legally possess guns.
- Most guns used in crimes changed hands after their purchases.
- Over 1.07 million firearms were reported stolen between 2017 and 2021, almost 96 percent of them from private individuals.
- Handguns recovered in crimes and submitted for tracing by law enforcement agencies increased from 62 percent in 2017 to 75 percent in 2020. And of the more than 1.3 million pistols used in crimes traced between 2017 and 2021, 19.6 percent were manufactured by Glock.
- A spike in conversion devices enabling a semiautomatic gun to fire like a machine gun is accompanied by the growing seizure of ghost guns, privately-made firearms hard to trace. Between 2012 and 2016, the ATF retrieved 814 converted guns; the number jumped to 5,414 in the next five years. The ATF traced over 19,000 privately-made firearms in 2021, over double the number from the year before.
In 2021, only 47.2% of law enforcement agencies (8,679 out of 17,981 agencies) tracked firearms used in crimes, and only 259 cities were signed up with National Integrated Ballistic Information Network sites which analyze ballistic information.
Florida’s GOP, including its Gov. Ron DeSantis, believes in concealed gun carry without permits, but secretly DeSantis wants gun bans for his personal protection. Recently discovered emails reveal his campaign asked a city agency to ban guns at his victory celebration after his 2022 reelection so people wouldn’t know he wanted the ban. The venue refused without a directive from the renter (DeSantis’ campaign), and DeSantis used metal detectors, a practice he has followed since then, much to the dismay of his so-called Second Amendment supporters. Gun activists also oppose the permitless concealed gun carry; they want it to include open carry without permits.
The myth that only a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun doesn’t hold up. From 2000 to 2021, under three percent of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back. Instead, police or bystanders more commonly subdued the attacker, or police killed the person. In one-fourth of the shootings, the attacker left the area.
Valentine’s Day is a good time to consider the “pink tax,” the higher price women must pay for products and services than men pay—dry cleaning, haircuts, razors, jeans, deodorant, even children’s toys. Underwear is an area in which the government forces women to pay more: tariffs for men’s undies average 11.5 percent; those for women is 15.5 percent. This difference is similar for all clothing. In 2015, women’s clothing cost $2.77 billion more for women’s clothing than men’s because of U.S. gendered import taxes.
Income also plays a part in costs—high prices for the poor. Expensive silk underwear garments for women have tariffs at 2.1 percent and 0.9 percent for me. Polyesters have the highest tariffs: 16 percent for women and 14.9 percent for men.
For the fourth time, Rep. Jackie Spier (R-CA) introduced a Pink Tax Repeal Act last June. Almost 30 years ago, she started her battle in California, and her Gender Tax Repeal Act bill illegalized differences in prices for services. Her fight in the House began with the 2015 study from New York City, “From Cradle to Cane: The Cost of Being a Female Consumer.” A review of 800 products among 90 brands found women paid more for items in 30 of the 35 categories. Since then, New York City and Miami-Dade County also made this pink tax for services illegal.
Women also pay taxes on menstrual hygiene products in 22 states because the items are classified as nonessential goods. The discussion of pink tax laws still uses the discrepancy in higher prices for women from a 1993 study, much less than the current difference. Meanwhile, the GOP weaponization subcommittee hasn’t mentioned addressing the weaponization of gender costs. Republicans are too busy focusing on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Valentine’s Day celebration goes back to Roman times as Ailsa Chang explained on NPR. For the mid-February feast of Lupercalia, men sacrificed goats and a dog, made thongs from goat skins, and ran through Rome wearing them while whipping women with goat hide straps. Women encouraged them, believing it would boost fertility. In another story, Catholics honored martyred Christians named Valentine, killed by the Roman emperor in the third century.
Happy Valentine’s Day!