If there is anyplace in the country where you should be able to find that mythical “good guy with a gun” it would be Colorado Springs, Colorado. The city is home to more than eighty religious organizations of various stripes, many of them conservative evangelicals. Perhaps the most notorious is James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family.” There is a very large military presence in the area including the United States Air Force Academy. The Academy has recently been in the news because of revelations that evangelical Christian cadets make it a practice to harass and intimidate cadets who are not of a like mind. So, why wouldn’t you expect to find a really good Christian “good guy with a gun” well trained by the military in a city like Colorado Springs?
So, where was this guy on Saturday morning (October 31, 2015) when Noah Jacob Harpham went walking down the street near downtown Colorado Springs with an AR 15 rifle and a pistol and carried out yet another “mass shooting” in the United States. (It seems that “mass shooting” has become the common reference for incidents of gun violence in which three or more victims are shot.) Maybe the good guys sleep-in on Saturday mornings. But truth be told, I don’t even think that Wayne LaPierre, the NRA mouthpiece for the gun manufacturers’ lobby, believes his own lies about the good guy with a gun.
Noah Jacob Harpham killed three people, Andrew Alan Myers, Jennifer Michelle Vasquez and Christina Rose Baccus-Gallela, before he was killed in a gun battle with the local police. (It should be noted that the police response to a man with a gun call may have been delayed because of Colorado’s “open carry” law.)
There are still not many details available about the shooter but a picture is beginning to emerge. He apparently saw himself as a loser. His mother, writing about her own battle with the bottle, said that he saw himself as the “burnt toast” of the family. It seems that he tried to dull his feelings of low self-esteem with booze. The sketchy news reports that are available at this time suggest that he may have just completed or was currently involved in a recovery program. And, his father may have been under the influence of the cult-like leader of the Bethany Church in Redding, California, Bill Johnson. I’m sure that that didn’t help Noah much. And, on top of all that, he may have recently broken up with a girl friend.
So, there was no good guy to stop Harpham when he went off the rails. But the truth is that there are a lot of people who have a hard life, even harder than his, and they never kill anyone. Now, the good guy is a joke, a really, really bad joke—he never shows up. But the reason Harpham killed, while many others like him never do, is that he had guns, two of them.
It’s the guns folks! If we are serious about reducing these incidents of mass killings, murders, suicides and accidental gun deaths and injuries, we have to drastically reduce the number of guns and the easy access to guns in our society. There is no reason to believe that Harpham would not have been able to buy a gun even if we had adequate background checks on gun purchasers. He was only a depressed alcoholic, like many other people in the country who never commit murders.
So, how do we reduce the number of guns that are out there? Here’s one way. One of the guns that Harpham used was an AR 15. The AR 15 was designed as a military assault rifle in the late 1950s and later modified to become the widely used military weapon, the M-16. No one except active duty military personnel and police (on rare occasions) should have access to a military rifle like the AR 15. We should have laws that ban the manufacture, sale and use of these types of military weapons to the general public.
No, this is not in contradiction with the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The widely held mis-belief that the Second Amendment allows any idiot to keep and bear any type of firearm he wishes is based on a lie promoted by the gun-lobby. We should stop looking at the Second Amendment as a “right.” It was never intended as a right. It was intended as a constitutional obligation to serve in a militia when called into service by the government. There was no standing army and no arsenals in 1789. A militia, citizens with their own firearms, was necessary to protect the new nation from any number of possible calamities.
It’s time for us to end this crazy romance with guns in our society and push back against the lies of the gun industry that only serve to enable would be killers.