"Rampage Killers"..NY Times scare article (long)

[DC]

The New York Times
April 11, 2000
RAMPAGE KILLERS / GETTING GUNS
The Mentally Ill Often Skirt a Landmark Federal Gun Control Law
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
SALT LAKE CITY -- With the voices inside her head ordering her to kill, Lisa
Duy walked into Doug's Shoot'n Sports here to buy a Smith & Wesson
9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol.
For Doug's, the biggest gun store in Utah, the transaction was routine. The
manager, Dave Larsen, called the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification to
run a background check on Ms. Duy, and the agency quickly approved the sale,
having found no record of felony convictions or mental illness.
In the basement shooting range, Mr. Larsen showed Ms. Duy, 24 and unemployed,
how to hold and fire the heavy stainless-steel gun. The only thing unusual,
he thought, was that as she left the store, headed for the bus stop outside,
she was wearing the shooting-range ear protectors he had lent her.
Less than two hours after leaving Doug's, on Jan. 14, 1999, Ms. Duy, ear
protectors still in place, walked into the studios of television station KSL
a few blocks from the Mormon Temple and began firing her new weapon. She shot
more than four dozen times in all, killing a young mother and wounding the
building manager.
What the background check had been unable to detect was that Ms. Duy
(pronounced dwee) had a long history of psychiatric problems, had in fact
been found to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and, only a year
before the check, had been committed to a mental hospital by a judge after
threatening to kill an F.B.I. agent, an encounter that sprang from her
delusions that the station was broadcasting information about her sex life.
Of the 100 episodes of rampage killings examined for this series by The New
York Times, none better illustrates than the case of Lisa Duy just how
difficult it can be to enforce a key provision of the nation's fundamental
gun control law. That provision prohibits people who have been involuntarily
committed to mental institutions from buying a handgun. But laws in most
states guard the privacy of the mentally ill, and to protect them from stigma
these statutes generally bar law-enforcement agencies from access to mental
health records.
As a result, gun background checks of people with psychiatric problems
typically fail to turn up their mental health history, a loophole that has
contributed to the wave of school and workplace shootings of the last decade.
In the 100 cases reviewed by The Times, the vast majority of them from the
last 10 years, half the killers were people with a history of serious mental
health problems, and at least eight had been involuntarily committed.
Now, fueled by those shootings, there is a growing debate pitting
public-safety concerns against the rights of the mentally ill. This March, in
the wake of the Duy shooting and another like it in April 1999, Utah became
one of the few states that give law-enforcement agencies mental health
information for background checks on prospective gun buyers. Connecticut
acted similarly last fall, after a state lottery employee with a history of
depression and psychiatric hospitalization killed four of his bosses and
committed suicide in 1998.
THE LOOPHOLE
Lisa Duy Lied, and No One Knew
he provision that bars handgun purchases by people who have ever been
involuntarily committed is more than 30 years old, dating from adoption of
the sweeping federal Gun Control Act of 1968.
These are frequently the most disturbed people, those forced into hospitals
because courts have determined that they may harm themselves or others.
But the provision is usually meaningless: over the years, the National Rifle
Association, mental health advocates and civil liberties groups have found
themselves on the same side of this issue, fighting independently to keep
agencies that conduct background checks from gaining access to information
about who has been committed.
At the time of her rampage, it was against the law in Utah for the court that
had committed Ms. Duy to tell a law-enforcement agency.
Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which conducts background checks
for the majority of states, has mental health records only on people treated
in Veterans Affairs hospitals, plus an assortment of 41 other individuals,
among its data on some 40 million people that the bureau now keeps for its
system of national instant criminal background checks.
So when Ms. Duy, completing a mandatory federal handgun application, answered
no to a question asking whether she had ever been committed, the Utah Bureau
of Criminal Identification had no mental health records in its database to
catch her lie.
"I don't understand how Lisa could buy a gun," said her mother, Khanh Duy,
who immigrated with the family from Vietnam by way of their ancestral China
in 1980, when Lisa was a little girl.
"Lisa is a good girl," Mrs. Duy said. "But she heard voices, and she had been
in the hospital."
Another case in which a person who had been involuntarily hospitalized was
able to buy a gun despite the federal law, and went on to kill with it, was
that of Gracie Verduzco, a 35-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who believed
she had a transmitter in her left ear that received messages from a
satellite.
Ms. Verduzco had been committed to mental hospitals three times, by judges in
both Arizona and, after she had threatened President Clinton, the District of
Columbia.
Yet she was able to buy a .38-caliber revolver at a pawnshop in Tucson, and
she used it to kill one person and wound four others at a post office and on
a highway there on May 21, 1998.
And near Atlanta, James Calvin Brady, a black man who believed a machine had
been implanted in his stomach that told him to kill white people, walked out
of the Georgia Regional Hospital, where he had been involuntarily committed,
and the same day bought a .38-caliber revolver at a pawnshop. The next day,
April 25, 1990, he killed one person and wounded four at a shopping mall.
Both Ms. Verduzco and Mr. Brady lied on their gun applications in denying
involuntary commitment, and there was no information to catch them.
The conflict between the rights of the mentally ill and the screening that
would help keep guns out of their reach can be a wrenching one.
Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah branch of the National
Alliance for the Mentally Ill, an organization of families of the disturbed,
has a daughter with schizophrenia who, like Ms. Duy, heard voices. One day
the voices told her to kill her mother, as a sacrifice to silence them. The
daughter's psychiatrist called the police, who arrested her.
"We family members have a real dilemma," Ms. Cottrell said. "I used to lie
awake at night worrying my daughter would buy a gun and carry out her
delusions. So I think people who have been involuntarily committed should be
in the computer for gun checks. But we have to be very careful we don't add
to the stigma against mental illness and make people afraid to seek
treatment."
According to a Justice Department study, about 150,000 people a year are
committed to mental institutions by court order in the United States, where
there are now perhaps 2.7 million people who have been involuntarily
committed at some point in their lives and are therefore barred by the
federal law from buying a handgun.
Few of these people commit murder, of course, and shootings by the mentally
ill account for only a tiny fraction of all homicides. Indeed, recent studies
have shown that the mentally ill are no more violent than other people --
except in two circumstances: when they are off their medications or have been
abusing drugs or alcohol.
In any case, highly publicized workplace and school shootings have now led
the authorities in nine states, including Connecticut and New Jersey but not
New York, to give their law-enforcement agencies some form of access to
mental health records. Officials in those states say they have been surprised
at the number of previously committed people who try to buy guns.
In Illinois, for instance, 3,699 people who applied for a gun card -- the
first step in buying a handgun there -- were turned down from 1996 to 1998
when records showed they had been either voluntarily or involuntarily
committed within the last five years, the legal test under Illinois law, said
Tim Da Rosa, deputy director of the state police. An additional 5,585 people
who were hospitalized from 1996 to 1998 were found to already possess gun
permits, which as a result were revoked.
But at the national level, as in most states, there has been no comparable
effort to create access to court commitment records for gun checks. That lack
of action is in stark contrast to the long effort by gun control groups and
the Clinton administration in winning enactment of the Brady law to create
databases screening out convicted felons, who, like the involuntarily
committed, were barred by the 1968 law from handgun purchases.
Some gun control advocates say privately that addressing the issue is simply
too touchy a matter.
They do not want to have to fight on two flanks at once, confronting liberals
who support the rights of the mentally ill while battling conservatives who
back the N.R.A.
One such advocate for the mentally ill is Michael Faenza, president of the
National Mental Health Association, who said that despite The Times's finding
that a number of the killers in the cases it reviewed had been able to buy
guns despite having been involuntarily hospitalized, he was opposed to any
law that would provide records on involuntary commitments for gun background
checks.
"People with mental illnesses," Mr. Faenza said, "should not be discriminated
against in any way.
If you did that, you would not reduce the violence, only create more stigma."
THE WOMAN
Voices of Torment, Hints of Rampage
isa Duy is a case study in how even a long record of psychosis, arrest,
assault, threats to kill and court-ordered hospitalization may not be enough
to stop a person from buying a gun. In Utah, no one, neither Ms. Duy's
psychiatrists nor her lawyers, not judges, the police or prosecutors, knew
her full story. It is this:
Until high school, young Lisa seemed to flourish.
Then, in the 10th grade, she started to hear voices telling her that other
students were spreading humiliating rumors about her sexual proclivities.
Late adolescence is a common age for onset of schizophrenia, and as Lisa got
older, the voices grew more tormenting, threatening to hurt her. She began to
have trouble focusing during conversation, unable to distinguish between what
people were actually telling her and what the voices were saying.
Schizophrenia, a disease that doctors believe has a strong genetic component,
had already been diagnosed in two of Lisa's older sisters, and she began to
worry that she too might be mentally ill.
In 1994, during her sophomore year at the University of Utah, her mother
finally took her to the emergency room of the university hospital. There she
reported that the voices made it hard to sleep, caused burning in her head
and had once led her to try to stab herself in the heart to silence them,
according to a later report by a psychologist, Stephen L. Golding, included
in court records in the shooting case.
The doctors sent her to Valley Mental Health, Utah's largest public mental
health network, where she was placed on Mellaril, an antipsychotic drug used
to treat schizophrenia, and on an antidepressant.
As doctors later acknowledged in reports related to the shooting, Mellaril
has strong side effects, and Ms. Duy suffered from increased agitation as
well as rapid involuntary movement of her arms and legs. Besides, the
medicine did not stop the voices, and so she often quit taking it. (Mellaril
did have one virtue, notes Ms. Cottrell, of the National Alliance for the
Mentally Ill: it is much cheaper than newer, more effective and less
troublesome antipsychotic drugs, and so Utah law requires that it be given to
indigent patients like Ms. Duy who require such medication.)
On Oct. 7, 1996, the police in West Valley City, a Salt Lake suburb, got a
call from a rock radio station, which said a woman holding a stick was
standing outside the studio and insisting that a disc jockey nicknamed Steve
Wonder was stalking her. Officer Mark VanRoosendaal arrived to find Ms. Duy's
face rigid with anger. Steve Wonder, she said, had placed a camera inside her
house and could read her mind. Not only that, he followed her everywhere,
broadcasting secret information about her, and had tried to run her off the
road.
Ms. Duy demanded to see the disc jockey, not realizing he had been standing
next to her during the police interview. When Ms. Duy refused to leave and
began hitting and kicking Officer VanRoosendaal and his partner, they
arrested her. "Just shoot me," she said, according to their report.
She was charged with stalking, disorderly conduct, assault, interfering with
a police officer and carrying a concealed weapon, a kitchen knife the police
found in her back pocket.
The charges were only misdemeanors, and, given her mental condition, a
psychologist raised questions about Ms. Duy's competence to stand trial. The
assistant West Valley City attorney handling the case, John Huber, did not
see any benefit to trying her, he said in an interview.
So he proposed a form of probation: a "diversion agreement" stipulated that
if Ms. Duy sought mental health treatment and avoided further trouble, all
the charges would be dismissed in two years.
When the two years were up, in November 1998, a secretary in Mr. Huber's
office checked to see if there were any further criminal charges against Ms.
Duy. The Bureau of Criminal Identification showed none, and so the charges
were dismissed.
It was two months before the shooting at the television station.
What Mr. Huber's office and the judge presiding over her case did not know
was that in the intervening period, in December 1997, Ms. Duy had threatened
to kill an F.B.I. agent after he declined to help her stop what she
maintained were broadcasts by the radio and television stations about her sex
life. The bureau investigated her, found that she had psychiatric problems
and had her doctors arrange for her to be picked up, an F.B.I. official said.
Ms. Duy was taken to the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of
Utah, a high-security hospital. After psychiatrists there found that she was
a danger to others -- the diagnosis was chronic paranoid schizophrenia --
Mike Evans, a mental health commissioner who acts as a civil court judge,
committed her for 90 days.
When the commitment period was up, Valley Mental Health went to court to get
it extended, arguing that Ms. Duy was still a danger to others and would stop
taking her medication, said Jed Ericksen, the assistant director of adult
services.
But Commissioner Evans refused, saying that after treatment, she no longer
appeared to pose an immediate danger to others, Mr. Ericksen recalled.
Ms. Duy's case file was sealed in accordance with privacy provisions of Utah
law, said Kim Zacherson, a clerk for Commissioner Evans. The commissioner
declined to discuss the case.
"If we had known about the threat against the F.B.I. and about her
court-ordered hospitalization, we would have taken it seriously," said Mr.
Huber, now the chief West Valley City attorney. "She was in violation of the
diversion agreement, so we would have reinstated our prosecution. And because
of her mental condition, we would probably have ended up seeking a further
court commitment, showing her pattern of dangerous behavior."
"This is a common problem we have, even in an era of all this technology,"
Mr. Huber said. "She was able to walk around free and buy a gun because of a
lack of communication between the mental health system and the criminal
justice system."
THE KILLING
A Timid Woman in a Man's World
he largest gun store in Utah is a squat cinder block structure in a strip
mall. There are racks of rifles on the walls, glass cases full of
semiautomatic pistols and the constant sound of gunfire from the basement
shooting range. Outside, the high, snow-covered Wasatch mountains loom like a
white fortress, and there is a sign saying Doug's Shoot'n Sports that shows a
man shaped like a bullet and wearing a Stetson hat drawing revolvers from
holsters on both hips.
Lisa Duy first came here to look for a gun in November 1998, two months
before the shooting, recalls Mr. Larsen, the manager. She was timid, but so
are a lot of women when they enter a gun store.
"It's a man's world," Mr. Larsen said, "kind of intimidating, so we tried to
be nice to her. She didn't act strange at all."
Ms. Duy did not know how to shoot, and so Mr. Larsen took her down to the
basement and offered instruction.
He did not see her again until January,
when she came back and picked out a 9-millimeter semiautomatic. She was
wearing a hooded sweatshirt hiding her head from view, says David Sorensen, a
customer who was standing next to her.
"She made me feel suspicious right away, with the hood," Mr. Sorensen said in
an interview, "and then when I glanced at her, she gave me this real scary
look." (Mr. Larsen recalls nothing particularly suspicious, saying it is
hardly uncommon to see people wearing hooded sweatshirts in January.)
It was too late that night for Mr. Larsen to call the Bureau of Criminal
Identification to run a background check, and so Ms. Duy came back the next
day. It took only a couple of minutes for her to be cleared: the bureau
checked its criminal-history records, its outstanding-warrants file and the
F.B.I.
database, but found no disqualifying information, said Joyce Carter, the
supervisor of the state agency's firearms section.
Ms. Duy then paid $285 for the gun and went back to the basement to practice
for an hour.
Mr. Larsen noticed on a television monitor that she was mishandling the gun,
holding it with only one hand and a limp wrist, so that the firing mechanism,
which needs to be held level, was likely to jam.
He went down to give her another lesson.
Ms. Duy was on a mission, she later told doctors who examined her. She needed
the gun because the voices had told her that the only way she could stop KSL
from reading her mind and informing all of Salt Lake City about her sex life
was to kill a woman who worked at the station as a broadcaster.
When she walked into the television station's reception area and began
shooting, it was like "going to a beautiful island and I was spreading
flowers at them, shooting at them," she later said.
Ultimately, after her gun had jammed and she had been subdued, Sgt. Don Bell
of the Salt Lake City police was assigned to interrogate her. He wondered how
anyone could have sold her the gun.
"You would not have had to be a rocket scientist to know this woman was not
your normal customer," said Sergeant Bell, the city's senior crisis
negotiator.
"She was swearing a lot, and all she wanted to know was whether the woman she
shot in the head was dead.
When I said no, she was only critically wounded at that point, Lisa said,
'Then this questioning is illegal.' "
The wounded woman did die later.
Her name was Anne Sleater, and she was not even a KSL employee. She was a
human resources manager in AT&T Wireless offices in the same building as the
station's studios.
A judge ruled that Ms. Duy was mentally incompetent to stand trial and
ordered her to the Utah State Hospital for treatment to restore her to
competence. She is still there, and doctors' reports suggest that there is
little chance she will ever be well enough to be tried.
THE AFTERMATH
Enough Is Enough, Some States Decide
ublic concern about mentally ill people's ability to buy guns was further
heightened here in Utah three months after the Duy shooting. Last April 15,
Sergei Babarin, a 70-year-old Russian immigrant who was off his medications
for schizophrenia and depression, killed two people and wounded five others
in the Mormon genealogical library. Gov. Michael O. Leavitt, a conservative
Republican, called for a special session of the Legislature to deal with the
issue raised by the two shootings.
Some advocates for the mentally ill, along with some judges, warned that
allowing law-enforcement officials access to mental health records would
infringe on the civil rights of emotionally troubled people. And the powerful
speaker of the Utah House of Representatives, Martin R.
Stephens, who has a long record of support for gun owners, said he was
against "legislation that will take away people's individual rights in the
name of a little personal safety."
But now, a year later, Utah has enacted a law requiring courts that commit
people to mental institutions to forward the information to the Bureau of
Criminal Identification. So that the confidentiality of the records is
safeguarded, the bureau can use the information only for gun checks, and
cannot share it with other government agencies.
Most of the nine states that now provide access to mental health information
for gun background checks have even more stringent safeguards.
In Illinois, the state police each day send a list of new gun-permit
applicants to the state's Department of Mental Health and Developmental
Disabilities, which checks the names against its database. This means the
state police have no direct look at the files of the mentally ill.
Connecticut has adopted a similar system, acting after an accountant with a
history of depression, suicide attempts and hospitalization killed four of
his bosses and then himself at offices of the state lottery in 1998.
But since the accountant, Matthew Beck, had been hospitalized voluntarily,
brought in on an emergency basis by his father and the police, and not by
court order, the law would not have applied to him or barred him from buying
a gun.
This raises a further troublesome issue, said Kay Redfield Jamison, a
professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
"Often there is not much medical difference between someone who is
voluntarily or involuntarily hospitalized," Dr. Jamison said. (Indeed, some
patients agree to be hospitalized to avoid court-ordered treatment.) At least
eight of the cases that The Times studied involved people who bought guns
after voluntary hospitalization, in addition to the eight cases of
involuntary commitment.
To fill this gap, Connecticut last year passed another law, the first of its
kind in the nation, that allows the police to obtain a court warrant to seize
any guns from a person who, in their judgment, is a danger to himself or
others.
Soon after the law took effect last fall, the police used it to confiscate
five guns from a man in North Branford who was depressed after being
suspended by his factory for an assault and had told officers he was going to
kill his neighbors and co-workers.
"We can't prove how many lives we may have saved," said Mike Dooty, the
deputy police chief in North Branford. "But in our eyes, this case had all
the telltale signs. As a police department, we usually don't get to see the
signs till after a tragedy has happened."
Reporting for this series was by Fox Butterfield, Ford Fessenden, William
Glaberson and Laurie Goodstein, with research assistance from Anthony Zirilli
and other members of the news research staff of The New York Times.



------------------
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" RKBA!

[Monkeyleg]

"Some gun control advocates say privately that addressing the issue is simply
too touchy a matter.
They do not want to have to fight on two flanks at once, confronting liberals
who support the rights of the mentally ill while battling conservatives who
back the N.R.A. "

Too touchy? Is it too touchy for Rep. Carolyn
McCarthy to admit that it was the killer of her husband, and not the killer's gun, that was sick?

Dick

[Dennis Olson]

Ultimately, after her gun had jammed and she had been subdued...

That statement is a LIE. She was subdued by a person with a CCW and a handgun of their own. The story was changed in the media.

And that is NO [color=#FF0000]█[/color][color=#FF0000]█[/color][color=#FF0000]█[/color][color=#FF0000]█[/color][color=#FF0000]█[/color].

[Jeff White]

This is more of an indictment of our mental health system then it is of guns.

Most of our "homeless" are people just like Lisa Duy. I seem to remember when people who couldn't care for themselves or be stable enough to remember to take their medication were kept in institutions. Society did this to keep these things from happening. In the early 80's there was a move to convey more rights to these people. The media did it's usual spin and showed the worst institutions and abuses, dug out some examples of people whose lives had been ruined by the "system" and put these people on the street.

Sure there were reforms that needed to be made, but once again we took the emotional approach and closed the institutions and created a whole new set of problems.

I'm not so sure that all of these were "unintended consequences". It seems that the care and treatment of these emotionally disturbed people (EDPs) has grown into a new field for professional advocates.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a return to the system portrayed in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" or saying that the mentally ill should have no rights. I'm just saying that we are reaping what was sewn when we drastically reformed everything in the early 80's.

Jeff

[Lavan]

You may want to look at my Sacto Bee letter to editor in the "Legal & Political" section. Their article stated that the overwhelming cause for most rampage killings is loss of job.

I hope Reagan/Bush/Clinton rot in hell.

[Mike in VA]

"People with mental illnesses," Mr. Faenza said, "should not be discriminated
against in any way. If you did that, you would not reduce the violence, only create more stigma."
Bull[color=#FF0000]█[/color][color=#FF0000]█[/color][color=#FF0000]█[/color][color=#FF0000]█[/color][color=#FF0000]█[/color]!!!!

Discriminate, from the Latin, discrimino, "to know the difference".

Well, hell, the mentally ill ARE different. That's why we don't want them to have guns, matches, or sharp objects. They are a danger to themselves and others. While most of us would agree that discrimination based on prejudice is wrong, discrimination based on knowledge is utterly necessary for survival and the normal functioning of society. Ms. Duy is indeed sick, but frankly, Mr. Faenza is sicker, as his grasp of reality seems weaker than Ms. Duy's, and his insistence that we all be as stupid as he is just boggles the mind. Mental health professional, my @$$.
M2

[sbryce]

Thanks for the article! This one hits a little close to home for me, because when Anne Sleater was shot on the fourth floor, I was on the fifth floor. As usual, there are a few inaccuracies in the article, the worst one being about Governor Michael O. Leavitt being a conservative.

Dennis, about Lisa Duy being apprehended by a CCW holder-that is the story that is circulating through the gun community here in Utah. I posted it here when I first came across TFL about a year ago. I have caught the person who started that story in a couple of lies. I don't know whether this story is another one of his lies.

[Libertarian]

When the insane get behind the wheel of a two ton weapon and us it to kill, it is barely a 10 second blip on the local news. Should driver's licensing be tightened up too? Or should involuntary commitals be entered into the NCIC data base? Nah! Let's just blame those nasty old guns and not worry about reality.

[Covert Mission]

This series (4 parts) in the NYT http://www.nytimes.com began on Sunday, with a profile of 100 killings analyzed thru database research. You can print the whole series from their website, just by registering (free) there. It's easy to find.

Some of the results are startling and important, like the facts that these killings constitute approximately 1/10 of one percent of all murders, and that half of them are done by mentally ill or unstable people. This is important, and lost in all the recent hysterical debate over guns. We are hysterical over events that are, in statistical terms, insignificant. Not in human terms, of course.

The NYT in part one posits that the easy availability of semi-auto weapons and hi-cap magazines is responsible for the increased deadliness of the attacks occurring after either the "late 80's" or 1993 (they use both time frames. You'll be interest to read my letter to their Forum online, below. I average the "number of deaths per incident" for both periods: the one before the alleged surge in "deadlier" semi-autos, and the period after. You'll enjoy the results:

To the NYT:

"I commend you for this detailed look at rampage killings. With the rabid and often uninformed debate after Columbine, virtually no one has focused on the facts you confirm: while very tragic, these events are aberrations and represent far less than 1% of all murders. Also, the degree to which mental illness and instability plays a role is startling, and points to the flawed state of mental health care in the U.S. These facts are lost amid the breathless media coverage and hyperbole. While we cannot predict random, vicious behavior, we are clearly not doing a very good job recognizing and acting on its' warning signs.

For example, there is strong evidence that Mark Barton was a murderer before his Atlanta rampage, and Jewish Center attacker Buford Furrow had documented mental problems well before the California assault, and yet authorities did not disarm him. These failures can't be blamed on the availability of guns. The insight you provide into the behavior of these killers is valuable.

I must disagree in part with you, though. You quote Tom Diaz, who says "You have dramatically increased the ability to inflict death and injury," to make the supposition that an increased availability and ownership of semiautomatic weapons (and high capacity magazines) since the late 1980's has increased the death toll per incident. While I am not a statistician or database journalist, but merely a gun enthusiast with a calculator, some of your numbers just don*t add up. Correct me if I am wrong. I did some simple averages of "deaths per incident" for various time periods, using your numbers.

First, the introduction to this story says that the total number of deaths in the 100 incidents you studied was 425. In totaling the numbers on your chart, I get a total of 430 deaths, which I used. I did not give Harris and Klebold credit individually for 13 deaths each, although you chart it that way
(misleading). You also give Charles Whitman credit for 14 killings in the body of the story, and 16 killings on the chart. I used 16 in my totals.

While I'm sure there are many ways to analyze this data, I chose a very simple one. In calculating an AVERAGE number of deaths per incident (since this series IS about killers), using the periods of time that you suggest, I get these results:

1993 to 1999 (the period of supposed increase in deaths, per you and the FBI)--AVERAGE deaths per incident: 206 total deaths, divided by 62 incidents, for an AVERAGE of 3.322 deaths per incident.

1949-1992 (lower semi-auto gun ownership period), AVERAGE deaths per incident: 224 total deaths, divided by 38 incidents, equals an AVERAGE of 5.894 deaths per incident.

Shifting the comparison time-frame, I get this:

1949-1987 (the period you cite being before the increase of semiautomatics): 132 deaths divided by 19 incidents equals an AVERAGE of 6.947 deaths per incident.

1988-1999 (the period of semi-auto growth you cite, since the "late 80's"): 298 total deaths divided by 81 incidents equals an AVERAGE of 3.679 deaths per incident.

From 1993 until Columbine, 1999, the total number of deaths was 152, divided by 52 incidents, for an average of 2.923 deaths per incident. That number was obviously skewed much higher by the toll from Columbine and Mark Barton's rampage, which were very atypical of the period, and high by any measure.

Clearly, the average number of deaths per incident BEFORE either the 1988 (the "late 80's" marker you cite), or the 1993 marker, is significantly higher-- nearly double, in one case-- than the later periods, either 1988-99 or 1993-99.

While I addressed only deaths, this dispels, for me, your theory that the increased availability of semi-automatic handguns and weapons is largely responsible for an increase in deaths per incident, because there is NO increase in the average number of deaths in the latter periods. Like the murder rate in general of late, it is lower. This would support the notion again that these are aberrational incidents which have a constant rate, far more so than routine killings which fluctuate due to other influences.

Gun control activists can't have it both ways. They like to cite recent gun laws like the Brady Law being responsible for the drop in homicides, and then claim that the "easy" availability of semi-autos is responsible for the alleged (but unproven) increased death toll of the recent rampage killings. Well, which one is it?

I am disappointed that you chose to concentrate exclusively on rampage killings with guns, although you cite that these killings occur "at a fairly constant level across time and cultures", with a VARIETY of weapons. Some of the most notorious and deadly mass or rampage killings have been with other weapons. Tim McVeigh, who seems to fit all the criteria for a rampage killer, used fertilizer and killed 168, a toll more than seven-fold greater than the largest gun killing you cite. There are numerous other incidents that have taken two to three times more lives than your largest examples.

The "will to kill" is the issue here, and not necessarily the specific tool used to complete it. One could theorize, for example, that lacking an available handgun, a mass killer could easily do just what Charles Whitman did in 1966, and use an assortment of far deadlier and more accurate high powered hunting rifles, which are rarely part of the gun debate. Or use fertilizer. Or gasoline. Or a vehicle. All items that have been used in mass killings, with great loss of life.



[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited April 11, 2000).]

[Covert Mission]

I have requested a reply on the NYT forum twice, to my post (above). Their reporters for this series are frequenting the board. No reply yet.

I take this to mean I've struck a nerve. If they could easily refute what I said, and my methodology, I think they would have by now. I'll keep you posted. I don't think their theory holds any water... that increased availability of hi-cap semi-autos may be responsible for (alleged) increased carnage. My number disagree completely.