The President's Plan to Protect our Children and our Communities by Reducing Gun Violence

A release on January 16th 2013 from The White House Office of the Press Secretary.      The PDF is here.

This lists four things the plan includes, what we might call Executive Branch Ideas (EBI).    A memo from the CEO, so to speak.   So we are going to eventually look at these four mentioned EBI in reverse order, from the viewpoint of the title --  that is, reducing gun violence in order to protect communities and children.   First though, let's think of the title of the press release and some other issues revolving around that  subject.

Communities and children; that would be everyone, right?   Well, no, not really, because what they seem to mean here is "doing something about guns" because of what some people (criminals, murderers, wackos) have done in high profile deadly tragedies.   Most recently and particularly, what was perpetrated in Newtown, Connecticut (about 60 miles NNE of New York City).  


To put a perspective on the EBI, in the context of taking "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this".  This being the actions of Adam Lanza the morning of Dec 14 2012.  We'll look at that first.

Adam Lanza was 20.  He did not have a criminal record. (Allegedly he had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, but the details are unclear.)  However either way, the weapons used belonged to his mother, who had purchased them legally.  

First, Lanza murdered his mother by shooting her at close range with one of her own weapons.   He took four of her weapons with him.   A rifle (.223  Bushmaster XM15-E2S), 2 pistols (10mm Glock 20, 9mm SIG P226) and a shotgun (Izhmash Saiga-12).    Lanza wasn't old enough to legally have the pistols, but he had just shot his mother in the head four times at home and was on his way to a school to commit more murder.

Leaving the shotgun in the car, Lanza proceeded to commit violent heartless cruel mass murder that morning between 9:35 and ~9:49. He slaughtered 20 children and 7 adults, firing some "50 to 100" rounds (an average of about 4 to 8 rounds a minute, 1 round every 7-15 seconds)  from mostly the rifle, often reloading it after firing 15 of the 30 rounds in a magazine.  He met no armed resistance.   When he saw that a police officer had entered the school and seen him, Lanza committed suicide with a pistol.

Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting


That was not the most deadly school-located mass murder ever; that dishonor belongs to Andrew Kehoe, in Michigan, in 1927.   Kehoe killed his wife by smashing her in the head.   He then "fire-bombed" his farm, and while that was happening, his timed explosives, dynamite and pyrotol, blew up the north wing of Bath Consolidated School.  (The timed explosives he planted in the south wing of the school failed to detonate however.)    As rescuers were working at the school, Kohoe drove up in his truck and called over the school superintendent.    During a struggle between the two over a rifle (bolt action .30 caliber Winchester Model 54 ) the weapon fired into the explosive- and shrapnel-filled truck, which explosion killed both of them, another two men, and a boy, as well as mortally wounding another man, and wounding a number of others.

Horrible and deadly. The official tally from the explosions was 44 dead and 58 injured.  

This was in a time before gangsters et al lead to the 1934 NFA.  In the late 1920s,  anyone that wanted to and had the money could just buy a machine gun for a couple hundred bucks, by mail or down at the hardware store, or might have brought one back from World War I.

The Bath School Disaster