The gun control debate is endless — but we can do something right now in response to Sandy Hook

Salt Lake Tribune photo by Danny Chan  La

It was well past midnight when the coroner began to take away the bodies.

The Trolley Square shopping center massacre, on Feb. 12, 2007, occurred just a few blocks north of my home in Salt Lake City. I was quickly dispatched to the scene by my then-employer, The Salt Lake Tribune, and I remained there until long after the five murder victims had been taken to the morgue.

Then, as now, the tragedy quickly prompted a conversation about the role of guns in our society.

Except then, in the aftermath of the heroics of an off-duty police officer who engaged the gunman until fellow officers could arrive to assist, the conversation was about how much worse it could have been if there hadn’t been a concealed weapon carrier dining at the mall on that terrible night.

Gun control advocates — of which I am one — generally forget about Trolley Square when debating the need to limit access to personal firearms. They ignore the fact that, in the seconds before Officer Ken Hammond’s intervention, the gunman killed five people, while in the terrifying minutes that followed no other innocent bystanders were harmed.

Gun ownership advocates — of which I am one — often suggest that any concealed weapons carrier could have and would have done what Hammond did. That’s a laughable contention in a state where concealed carry permits are available to just about anyone for a few bucks after a four-hour class that doesn’t require would-be permit holders to demonstrate they can actually handle a gun.

Let’s get real. This debate’s not taking us anywhere anyway. There are enough non-military firearms in this nation to arm every man, woman and child. And even if legislation could address the ridiculously vast stockpiles of private guns and ammunition in this nation, it would not pass Constitutional muster in a Supreme Court that, in recent years, has broadly struck down state and local gun control measures.

The lesson of Trolley Square, a lesson that we can and should apply in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, is not that we need more or less gun control, or more or fewer concealed firearms. Rather, the lesson is, and should be, that it’s good to have well-trained people in the right place at the right time.

And at least when it comes to public schools, that is something we can do right away, without legislation, without political belligerence, without waiting for the courts to opine and without spending a single penny more than we already do on school safety.

At this moment, three blocks from Trolley Square, a fortress is rising. The $125 million Salt Lake City Public Safety Building is being built, in part, because the city’s police department has outgrown its older downtown digs.

You might think police work is an outside-in endeavor — in other words, most of the work is done outside the office. In reality, even patrol officers spend a significant amount of their time in the office, writing reports and tending to other administrative duties. So a lot of space in our city’s new public safety building will look like space in any other office building — long rows and columns of cubicles, at which will hunch dozens of cops at a time as they tend to the pencil-pushing parts of policing.

That’s work that can be done anywhere. Including a small office in any — and every — public school in the country.

That’s good policy anyway. Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice has promoted Community Oriented Policing, a set of guidelines that, among other things, seek to create community partnerships and disperse officers geographically across a jurisdiction (much as elementary, middle and high schools are distributed across a community.)

Already, some legislators are talking about placing more school resource officers — police men and women assigned full-time to a specific school to help maintain order and safety — in public schools. That’s a nice idea — and an expensive one. And according to a report by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, a lot of resource officer time is taken up doing work that could (and sometimes should) be done by teachers and administrators.

By contrast, non-resource officers assigned to complete their paperwork on a set schedule in a school-based office would cost their communities nothing. They would provide presence, and — if necessary — a rapid response to problems of significance at and around the school. On most days, they would simply use a small desk or office to do what they’d be doing anyway. And on very bad days, they would be a well-trained person in the right place at the right time.

There is no single solution to this terrible problem. But the gun control debate is endless and winless. Satellite police offices can be in our schools tomorrow. And should be.

Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Utah State University, and is the father of a kindergarten student in the Salt Lake City School District.  

An open letter to ACLU director Anthony Romero

Anthony Romero
Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union

Dear Mr. Romero,

After a decade as a full-time journalist in the employ of a large media company, I bought myself a bit of freedom last year when I accepted a university faculty job.

Freed of professional expectations that limited my civic and political participation, I had been considering resurrecting an ACLU membership that began as president of my high school chapter.

Then I received a letter from the ACLU warning of "right-wing extremists at the highest levels of government." And I'm reconsidering.

I accept and embrace the ACLU's generally left-leaning social tilt. And I know you didn't actually write this fund-raising letter.

But since your name is on it, I thought I'd let you know what a big turn-off this is.

Having served as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Navy and later as a newspaper correspondent in Iraq, I know a little something about extremists. We can argue semantics, I'm sure, but the bottom line is this: To me, and many Americans I know who are generally supportive of the ACLU's mission and objectives, that word carries some pretty grave connotations. I've lost friends and colleagues to extremists. They died in horrible ways. 

There are lots of jackasses in our government. I suppose I tend to think they're stacked a little more deeply on the right side of the aisle. They say stupid shit. They're working to limit the rights and freedoms of some of my closest friends. Catch me at the pub, and you'll hear me say some pretty nasty things about them.

But there are some words I won't use. Because really, pray tell, who "at the highest levels" of our government qualifies to be called "an extremist"? Care to name names?

Look, I understand it plays well to the base. But in my view the ACLU shouldn't have a base. The ACLU has, and does, and should continue to speak for all Americans. Liberals and conservatives. Right wing wackos and leftist idiots. In many cases, it has stood for the rights of actual, no-semantics-about-it extremists — and I commend the bravery and compassion and patriotism of an organization that has, for nearly a century, brazenly stood for justice and fairness even when it was roundly unpopular to do so.

That is powerful, compelling and attractive. So may I humbly suggest you leave the political histrionics to the politicians? The ACLU's record should speak for itself.      

Respectfully,
Matthew D. LaPlante

Meles’ legacy: Stability, not peace

Children play under a billboard celebrating Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's leadership. (Matthew D. LaPlante)

Economically, culturally, ethnically and religiously, Ethiopia is as diverse a nation as it gets on this planet. It also rests, geographically, in the middle of a region that is as unstable as any on the globe.

But for more than two decades under the leadership of Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia has remained a stable and growing economic and political power. Its capital, Addis Ababa, doubles as the seat for the African Union. Its economy has grown at an average annual rate of nearly 10 percent over the past decade. And for the United States, Ethiopia has provided a base of operations for spies, commandos and drones en route Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.

How vital has Meles been to this stability? We will soon find out. Ethiopian State Television reported Tuesday what many in the land of hope and heartbreak had feared since Meles disappeared from pubic view two months ago. The prime minister is dead. And so begins the first peaceful transfer of power in half a century.

At least, that is how it appears.

Meles dropped out of sight before the African Union summit in Addis two months ago. Rumors immediately circulated that he had died. But officials from the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which owns nearly every seat in the Ethiopian parliament, said he was fine. They shut down a newspaper that reported otherwise, thereby shutting down nearly all domestic reporting on the state of the president’s health. 

And, for the most part, nothing much changed. Ethiopians went to work and school. They played soccer in the streets of Meskal Square. They ran in the rain in Awassa. They reveled, as they do every four years, in the Summer Olympic games. It’s unclear whether protests by tens of thousands of Ethiopian Muslims, who have long been denied the right to practice many versions of Islam, were enflamed by Meles’ departure, but the well-executed demonstrations were most certainly not prompted by it.

Life went on.

Imagine, for a moment, that Barack Obama disappeared and the Democratic Party simply said, for two months, that he was “sick, but recovering” and “soon to be back” but provided no proof that he was even alive until, at last, his death was announced through the party apparatus. (A more accurate political example, since Ethiopia is governed by parliamentary system, would in Britain’s David Cameron and his Conservative Party, but either way, the idea is the same — the party is flexing its muscles and the people are cowering.)

That, of course, is no way to govern. But for those whose biggest concern is for a stable Ethiopia it is, at least for now, a sign that things are indeed stable.

Reporting in Ethiopia, last month, I sat with a docent at the Red Terror Martyrs’ Memorial Museum, where the smell of decay pervades a room of glass cases filled with the skulls and bones of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s victims. “Is this why Ethiopians can tolerate Meles’ dictatorship?” I asked. “Is it because they remember when things were much worse?”

“You must understand, my friend,” he said, eyes shifting to the armed police officer who stood watch at the front door. “I spent many years in prison in those days. I have no interest in…”

He stopped, placed his hand on my shoulder and lifted himself from the bench. “What we say here is ‘never again.’ And that is all I can say to you today.”

It would be unfair to say that Meles ruled by fear alone — he was responsible for implementing policies and reforms that brought Ethiopia out from Mengistu’s shadow, through a terrible famine and into the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation’s modern history.

But it would be unconscionable to suggest that Meles didn’t enlist his nation’s ghosts to his terrifying advantage. Under his leadership, tens of thousands of dissenters went to prison. Hundreds were killed. Journalists and teachers lived in fear.

Was it better than Mengistu? Certainly. Was it necessary? Perhaps. Many Ethiopians think so, at least.

Meles once awkwardly quipped that he “would kill” for the opportunity to hand over power peacefully. But that never would have happened. Even if Meles had lived through 2015, when he was planning to step down from leadership, there would have been no peaceful transition of power, for peace and stability are not the same thing.

Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University. His article, “Ethiopians contemplate a nation without Prime Minister Meles Zenawi” appeared in The Washington Post on Aug. 8.

Romney's religion doesn't matter — his beliefs do

When I was growing up in California, some of my best friends were Mormon.

When I joined the Navy, some of my closest shipmates were, too.

When I got to college in Oregon, one of my closest friends was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And now that I live in Salt Lake City (the “mothership,” as one of my LDS associates called it when I announced my impending move) you can, of course, be certain that many of my friends, neighbors, colleagues and students are garment-wearin’, 10-percent tithin’, Tabernacle singin' adherents of the Latter-day Saint movement.

Absolutely none of that makes it impossible that I might harbor discriminatory feelings toward the elders and sisters of the LDS faith — no more so than my telling you that I have some black friends would make it impossible for me to be racist or that having female friends makes it impossible for me to be sexist.

All that bit of personal history tells you — and all it is intended to tell you — is that I’ve been around Mormons for a long time.

And like millions of other Americans who have been around Mormons for a long time, I can tell you that they’re really not as strange, and certainly not so scary, as a lot of non-Mormons make them out to be.

Which is to say that Mitt Romney’s religion is no stranger to me than the protestant faith of my parents, than the Catholic faith of my grandparents, or than the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or Jewish faiths of many of my friends.

All religions are strange to the unexposed. Then, after a while, none of that strangeness really matters. If you are good to your family, to your community and to your world, and if your religion, however strange it might at first seem, helps you be that way, then what is the harm?

And, of course, we have a right — a right so fundamental that our founders made it part of the very first amendment to our Constitution — to believe whatever we damn well want about God’s presence in this world and in our lives.

That’s why many (including, apparently, Romney’s likely opponent in the 2012 presidential election) agree that it would be unfair to question how Romney’s religion would impact his presidency.

But they are wrong. A candidate’s religious beliefs — and his or her adherence to those beliefs — are a fundamentally vital question, for there is little that so informs one’s worldview and decision-making as faith.

Consider: Some people believe the Bible is a good book and a great guide for living. Some people believe it is the word of God. And some people believe it is the literal, unassailable word of God. Among the latter group there are those, like the apologetics from the Answers In Genesis organization, who believe “the creation of the Earth and animals (including the dinosaurs) occurred only thousands of years ago (perhaps only 6000!), not millions of years. Thus, if the Bible is right (and it is!), dinosaurs must have lived within the past thousands of years… Evolutionists declare that no man ever lived alongside dinosaurs. The Bible, however, makes it plain that dinosaurs and people must have lived together.”

It’s one thing to have faith. It’s another to be delusional. And people who believe in this way have chosen faith over science, belief over reason, and devotion over evidence.

That doesn’t make them bad. It doesn’t even make them stupid. But it does tell you something important about their rationality and their wisdom. That, in turn, tells you something about how they might govern. And that should most certainly affect your vote.

For the record, no one has suggested that Romney believes that we once walked dinosaurs. He does, however, claim membership in a church founded in part on the belief that several lost tribes of Israel set up shop in the Americas, where they built great societies, waged war and ultimately died off.

As an allegory, the Book of Mormon stories about the Lamanites and the Nephites can be extremely valuable, even beautiful. These stories can inform the lives of adherents in a way that help them lead more moral lives.

But there’s no archeological or genetic evidence supporting the Mormon claim (shifting, as it has been over the last century as apologists seek to explain the history of the faith) that there were Jews on this here land.

It is no vice to have faith that the Book of Mormon is true, in the sense that it may be inspired by a higher power. Who can say it isn’t?

But having faith that it is true, in the sense that it is literally accurate, is another matter entirely. It is fair to ask Romney what he believes. And it is fair to expect an answer.

Mormons call their church’s president a living prophet — the “seer and revelator” of their faith. If he believed he were inspired by Heavenly Father to do so, Thomas S. Monson could at this very moment order that all Mormons stop what they’re doing and do the hokey pokey.

And they would. Lots of them. But not all of them.

Would Romney? It is fair now (as it was when John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960) to demand an explanation — and evidence — of how much credence and deference a candidate gives to his religious leaders, and where the line is drawn.

What do we already know about where it is drawn for Romney? Well, to take what he has said at face value (which admittedly has become more difficult as of late) Romney was saddened by his church’s historic denial of the priesthood (a right and responsibility held by nearly all adult male members) to blacks. But by his own admission, he never considered leaving his church over its discriminatory practices and he didn’t protest against its policies. Rather, he accepted the church’s edict as the word of God until, in June of 1978 (when Romney was 31 years old,) then-President Spencer Kimball had a revelation that male members of African descent could indeed be full participants in the faith.

A lot has changed, both in the LDS church and presumably in Romney, since 1978. But much has not: Female members of every race continue to hold subservient roles; no revelation has yet to open the priesthood to women. Nor can gays and lesbians who engage in open, honest, committed, healthy and sexual relationships even hold membership in the church.

Not all Mormons believe this is the way their church should be. Many are actively working to change the church from within — to encourage “a new revelation” that honors equality among God’s children.

So absolutely none of this should be taken to mean that a Mormon should not be president. I know a few priesthood-holding Mormons for whom I would vote long before I would push a button to give our current president another term.

But those individuals would answer, without objection, legitimate questions about how their faith reflects their judgment and informs their decision-making. And Romney should too.

Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University.