CAP Action War Room

The UC Santa Barbara Shooting Renews Push For Stronger Gun Laws

Tragedy struck the Isla Vista community this Memorial Day weekend when a gunman opened fired at the UC Santa Barbara campus, killing six and wounding thirteen others before taking his own life. The shooter, Elliot Rodger, left YouTube videos and a 141-page manifesto describing his anger at women and sexual repression, vowing “retribution.” He also was receiving psychiatric treatment in the months prior to the rampage. Just weeks before the tragedy, seven Sheriff’s deputies responded to Rodger’s apartment after his mother reported concerns about Rodger’s mental state. The officers concluded that Rodger was not an imminent risk and did not conduct a search of his apartment. Writing in his manifesto discovered after the shooting, Rodger described the encounter: “If they had demanded to search my room that would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over.”

Because of the details of the gunman’s history, the incident has sparked a renewed debate about the relationship between mental illness, guns, and violence against women. In the online reaction to the tragedy, nothing has matched the conversation that began with a simple hashtag, #YesAllWomen, which reached a peak of 51,000 posts per hour. The hashtag is a response to a “Not all men” meme that’s surfaced over the past few months. “Not all men” is an objection that’s used to dismiss the issue of violence against women and misogyny in society, simply because not all men are like that.

Richard Martinez, the father of one of the victims, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, has turned immediately to criticize America’s gun laws and the politicians who refuse to change them. “Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA,” Martinez said less than 24 hours after losing his son. “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live?”

Meanwhile, as the victims’ families and community try to heal, and as the nation once again finds itself in the aftermath of a mass shooting, the question remains about what can be done to help prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening again. And while no single solution can prevent an instance of gun violence like this one, the fact is there are steps we can take. Here are just a few:

1. Do More To Keep Guns Out Of The Hands Of Seriously Mentally Ill People. Federal law prohibits certain people from possessing firearms, including those who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or have been adjudicated “mentally defective.” These prohibitions, and associated background checks, work: they’ve blocked more that 2.1 million prohibited persons. In particular, one study found that when Connecticut submitted mental illness records to the FBI background check system, it resulted in a 50 percent drop in violent crime by mentally ill persons in the state. But the current federal mental illness prohibition is under-inclusive and not sufficiently flexible. While mental health records in the FBI system have risen ten times since the Virginia Tech shooting (where the gunman would have been prohibited from buying a gun if his record had been submitted), millions more mental illness, fugitive, and domestic abuser records are still missing. And in many cases, mass shooters, like those in Tucson, AZ and Aurora, CO, have had significant mental illness histories that did not even trigger the current federal prohibition. There should therefore an intermediate step through which law enforcement can temporarily disarm individuals who appear to pose an imminent threat to public safety. If we take these steps – and require background checks on all gun sales – more shootings will be prevented.

2. Take Steps To Prevent Violence Against Women. Women are particularly vulnerable to gun violence, especially victims of domestic violence and stalking. In fact, more than one in three women will experience rape, violence, and/or stalking at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetimes. Access to firearms dramatically increases the risk that domestic abuse will turn fatal: the presence of a gun increases the risk of homicide of an intimate partner by eight times compared to households without guns and this risk increases by 20 times when there is a history of domestic violence in the family. Federal and state laws should be strengthened to better protect women from gun violence at the hands of dangerous abusers and stalkers.

BOTTOM LINE: There is no single solution to an instance of gun violence like the terrible events at UC Santa Barbara. But there are proven, evidence-based approaches to keep guns away from dangerous people that don’t sacrifice anybody’s Second Amendment rights. By implementing them, we can save lives of innocent Americans young and old and reduce the anguish from parents like Richard Martinez, left only to ask, “when will this insanity stop?”

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The pressure on a few of my staff at Avaaz is reaching a breaking point: they’ve received death threats, had their computers and emails hacked, been threatened on television and radio, and one even had his car tampered with! Our campaigner Wissam was detained at the Cairo airport while delivering our call to stop Egypt’s largest mass execution in recent history, taken into a windowless room and interrogated for hours — drilled with chillingly well-informed questions about his personal life, travel, and work with Avaaz!

I’ve gotten threatening messages and hacks, but nothing compared to the threats these campaigners face. Let’s stand behind these brave people who speak our community’s truth to power.

The threats will get worse as we become larger and more effective, taking on some of the most entrenched and powerful players on the planet. That’s why Avaaz needs to triple-reinforce our security systems, including legal counsel to stand ready for emergencies, media support to raise the alarm if people are threatened, better encryption, and the resources to move staff to a safe location when the pressure gets to be too much.

The campaign we’re running to Egypt right now — opposing the mass execution of hundreds of people — has been hugely powerful, reaching the highest levels of the government. Wissam had permission to enter Egypt and had a meeting scheduled with the Grand Mufti Allam, who has the moral power to stop the mass killings. This is why we came under attack — Wissam says the two generals who interrogated him knew everything about Avaaz, our campaign, and his own life and travel. The government was clearly watching us closely.

And as soon as Wissam was sent home, news outlets around the world from the Washington Post to Al-Arabiya picked up the story immediately, putting more pressure on the Egyptian government to act to protect human rights.

But we know the threats will get worse as we get more effective. Our people-powered campaigning has taken on the world’s worst actors directly, in ways that genuinely hurt them — from the Syrian and Russian regimes to Rupert Murdoch, Big Oil, and organized crime. The Syrian dictatorship even called our campaigner ‘the most dangerous man in the world’.

We’re not backing down, and our team is focused on winning the campaign in Egypt — but we also need to keep the team and the movement safe. That’s why there was broad legal, media, and diplomatic pressure lined up in case Wissam wasn’t freed in Cairo — and I want to make sure we always have what we need to respond to emergencies like these. With all of our small pledges added up now, we can:

• Build industrial-scale security and hire top technologists, so that no attack can stop us from campaigning.
• Increase the physical security of our most at-risk staff and action teams in places like Lebanon, Russia and Uganda.
• Have lawyers ready to leap into action to ensure we have the legal and diplomatic support needed when our team is under threat.
• Build a direct-response media team, which brings global attention to such incidents right away and ensures that the voices of the people aren’t silenced.
• Take a range of other actions to improve the security of our team and our members, such as installing home security systems and arranging transport when threats are imminent.

With 35 million members, we’ve become the largest global civic movement of our kind ever, and our campaigns pose a real threat to brutal regimes and corrupt corporations. Two years ago, our website came under massive attack, threatening our ability to keep campaigning. Our community came together and donated to protect it and now our tech systems are reinforced and fully prepared for almost any kind of cyber-attack. But now they’re coming after a few of our staff. Let’s prove that no matter what tactics they use, attacking our movement only makes us stronger.

With hope and gratitude,

Ricken and the Avaaz team

MORE INFORMATION:

Egypt: Stop the Mass Execution (Avaaz)
http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_mass_execution_loc/?fr

Egypt deports man lobbying against mass death sentences (Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/04/us-egypt-deported-idUSBREA330RY20140404

Egypt Bars Lebanese Man over Death Sentence Petition (Almanar)
http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/adetails.php?eid=144362&frid=21&seccatid=19&cid=21&fromval=1

Egypt bars Lebanese activist over death sentence petition (AlArabiya)
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/2014/04/04/Egypt-bars-Lebanese-activist-over-death-sentence-petition-.html

Hundreds of Egyptians Sentenced to Death in Killing of a Police Officer (NY Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/world/middleeast/529-egyptians-sentenced-to-death-in-killing-of-a-police-officer.html