Henry J. Stern
April 25, 2007

Nine days after the Virginia Tech massacre, a line has been drawn in the sand.
 
The left says that the prime cause of the tragedy is the easy availability of guns, the right blames inadequate diagnosis of obvious lunatics.   Both sides are correct, and their viewpoints, although different, are not necessarily contradictory.
 
The fact that someone deemed dangerous by a psychiatrist can nonetheless buy a deadly weapon is frightening.  There is a Federal law forbidding such transactions but, unless there is a national computerized database, how is a gun dealer to know a customer's psychiatric history.

 A bill to correct this situation by requiring states to place relevant information in a database is called the Our Lady of Peace Act. It was named for a Catholic church in Lynbrook, in Nassau County church. where a gunman shot and killed a priest and a worshipper on March 12, 2002.  The killer was chased to a nearby house and captured in the room he rented there after a seven-hour standoff with the police.  At trial, he pleaded not guilty but was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life imprisonment.  In searching his room, the police found a "kill list" with 24 names.
 
A New York Times article by Bruce Lambert eight days after the double murders g reported the following facts::

Mr. Troy was hospitalized at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan in April [2001] after he was detained for unusual     behavior at Pennsylvania Station… After Bellevue, Mr. Troy went to his parents'  home in Hicksville, N.Y., where his mother had a prior order of protection against him. The family called the police, who took him to Nassau University Medical Center, where he had previously been hospitalized.  Doctors there wanted to keep him for an extended period, but he demanded a hearing, and a Nassau County judge freed him.

Bellevue had already alerted the Nassau Department of Mental Health, requesting 'intensive case management' for Mr. Troy, including regular monitoring by a caseworker, and an investigation of what other outpatient care he needed.  Such procedures are required for mentally ill patients deemed potentially harmful under what is known as Kendra's Law, adopted by the state in 1999 after Kendra Webdale was pushed to her death on a subway track by a schizophrenic who had been rebuffed seeking treatment.

But the understaffed mental health agency put Mr. Troy's case on a waiting list for three or four months.  Eventually, a case worker looked for Mr. Troy but did not find him, and the case was closed.

 
The Our Lady of Peace Act was introduced in the Senate by Chuck Schumer and in the House by Carolyn McCarthy, whose own husband was shot to death, along with five other people, on a Long Island Railroad commuter train on December 7, 1993. Ms. McCarthy, who became well known in the county through her efforts to promote gun control, was elected to Congress in 1996, and has been re-elected five times.  The Our Lady of Peace bill passed the House on October 15, 2002, just seven months after the church shooting.  It never came to a vote in the Senate, which has many members from smaller and Western states, where any kind of gun control is treated like the bubonic plague.
 
The two articles I wrote last week on the Virginia Tech massacre generated an unusually large numbers of reader comments, which we published on our blog.   You can reach the blog by going to our homepage, www.nycivic.org, and clicking on StarBlog.  Then find the article you want to write about (they are in chronological order, with the most recent first.) 
 
The reaction we received from the psychiatric community to the article was interesting.  A number of professionals wrote in on the difficulty of accurately predicting human behavior.  That is undoubtedly true, and we are certain that there are borderline cases, and there are other cases where reasonable people would conclude, on the basis of the evidence, that the risk of violent behavior was minimal. 

But Cho had every symptom of mental illness, and to call that  one wrong was a tragic and needless error.  Students and teachers at the school spoke openly of the possibility that Cho would become a mass killer.   If the kids knew, why didn't the M.D.s?  We hope the investigation finds the truth about the blunder, but we never underestimate the ability of bureaucrats to obfuscate, justify and rationalize the most egregious errors they have made.
 
Here is another, more lyrical, view of the Blacksburg tragedy from a man who would be commander in chief:

There's also another kind of violence... It's not necessarily physical violence but that the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways... [Don] Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models...  It may be quiet, it may not surface to the same level of the tragedy [at Virginia Tech]... but it is violence nonethesame [sic]... There's the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country...There is the violence of children, whose voices are not heard, in communities that are ignored. Who don't have access to a decent education, who are surrounded by drugs and crime and a lack of hope. So there's a lot of different forms of violence in our society...---Barack Obama

GO AND CATCH A FALLING STAR.    MAKES NO DIFFERENCE WHAT YOU ARE.

Governor Spitzer was wise to keep his word by introducing gay marriage as a program bill, and then put it near the back end of his legislative agenda.  Without regard to its merits, the proposal unites Republicans in the negative, and is a wedge issue for Democrats, some of whom come from religious backgrounds or backward districts where they are still unaware that marriage is a matter of love and commitment, unrelated to which organs of reproduction are original equipment at the time of one’s birth. On the other hand, why should people be denied happiness and fulfillment simply because of their plumbing?


SPITZER RESUMES ATTACK ON STATE SENATE,
SELECTING THE ISSUE OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE
 
The Governor yesterday appears to have declared war on Senator Bruno again over the issue of campaign finance.  That is unfortunate. The Senator may be threatened by a federal indictment, but as long as he is Senate leader he has enormous influence on what happens, and his decisions will affect the outcome of many issues, some of which are more important to the people of New York State than a campaign finance law that is sure to be circumvented.. 

Speaker Silver is getting a free ride out of this squabbling, for as long as Bruno is blocking 'reform', he doesn't have to.   Watch the dynamics change if the Democrats get control of  the Senate in 2009, and the new majority leader turns out to be more responsive to the Governor's wishes than the Assembly speaker.  One can never underestimate the political skill of the speaker, or overestimate his ethical standards.  Nonetheless, he appears to be in compliance with state law, and can any man be expected to be more ethical than state law requires?   We think so.  Do you?

 
 
#368  4.25.07  1213wds