To curb gun problem, turn to mom

By Tim Egan

Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2015 | 2 a.m.

It passed with little notice when an 11-year-old boy shot and killed an 8-year-old girl this month in Tennessee; he shot her because she wouldn’t show him her puppy. The boy used his family’s 12-gauge shotgun to kill the second-grader.

It passed, as these events do in a country that accepts more than 33,000 deaths by gunfire every year, because we now live by an Onion headline that’s long ceased to be satirical: “‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens.”

The mass shooting in Roseburg, Ore., was followed by cowardice and rationalizations from leading politicians and would-be politicians. Donald Trump, who has an answer for everything, said nothing could be done because “it’s the mind that does the shooting.” Jeb Bush shrugged and said, “Stuff happens.”

And Ben Carson implied that the nine victims in the community college massacre were somewhat to blame because of their passivity during a split-second of life-ending horror. Carson was ignorant of the actions of an Army veteran, Chris Mintz, who tried to stop the Roseburg killer and was shot seven times.

Carson, who is a crackpot on political issues, then claimed absolutist gun rights are more important than human lives: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.”

So don’t look for solutions from the political system, which can’t even produce a background check measure supported by 90 percent of citizens. The system is not only broken, but rigged on behalf of a lobby of fanatics who control one political party, forcing it to respond to mass killings with ever more incoherent statements.

We should look, instead, to the mothers of America. The politics have to be replaced by the personal.

Can we blame the mother of Adam Lanza, who let a mentally disturbed child arm himself to the teeth just before he slaughtered 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Conn.? The home was an arsenal, supplied in part by the mother.

Can we blame the mother of the Oregon shooter for letting her troubled son surround himself with 14 guns? Like Lanza, the attacker was a loner, with imaginary enemies, suicidal at times. What reasonable person would allow him to assemble more than a dozen guns, including assault rifles?

Oh, but it’s a chance to bond, mother and child over guns. There are so many nonlethal ways to bond — hike, cook, give the child a camera and tell him to capture life. Yes, the Roseburg shooter was an adult. He could legally buy his own weapons. Still, he was living with his mother, the one person who should know him better than anyone. She may have been blinded by her own obsession with guns, as evidenced from her social media postings.

Only in a country with a pathological refusal to recognize the truth about weapons and deaths would parents arm their mentally unstable children.

In two-thirds of the nation’s school shootings, the attackers used guns from the home or a relative’s residence. Shootings rank near the top as a leading cause of death among children and teens, and 60 percent of those occur in the home.

But just as we can fault mothers in many cases, we can look to them for our salvation. Take it from Liza Long, a Boise, Idaho, mother of three, who produced a blog, “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” that went viral after the 2012 Newtown shootings. “I live with a son who is mentally ill,” she wrote. “I love my son. But he terrifies me.” She says she would never have a gun in her home.

To be clear, mental illness does not equal violence. But having guns around people who are likely to do harm to themselves or others is madness. And it can be stopped.

What about the fathers? Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said the Oregon shooter’s father, divorced and absent for some time from his son, was “a failure” who “owes us all an apology.” Fathers certainly have an equal responsibility. But it’s the mothers, in most cases, who know the names of their children’s teachers, understand their deepest fears and have a unique relationship.

A group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, was formed after the Newtown carnage. It’s a good counter to the creepy cultists of the gun culture. Their best appeal is likely to be one of reason to the hearts of fellow mothers rather than to heartless politicians at the legislative level.

President Barack Obama tried Oct. 9 to console some of the mothers in Oregon whose children were murdered in a community college writing class. He followed in the footsteps of Robert F. Kennedy, who was in Roseburg 47 years ago, warning about violent people buying guns through the mail. A few weeks later, he was assassinated by a crazed gunman. Nothing’s changed.

In embracing the mothers, the president who never knew a father can be part of a new effort — a personal plea to those who don’t need the gun lobby’s permission to do the right thing.

Timothy Egan is a columnist for The New York Times.