S.B. Leads Way in Gun Violence Prevention
Another Day, Another Mass Shooting
It was one of those throwaway lines that keeps rattling around my head. Maybe it was more a question. “How and when should government intervene in the lives of the strange?” The person asking it was Bernard Melekian, then the undersheriff of Santa Barbara County. He’s since moved uptown and is working for Santa Barbara County CEO Mona Miyasato. Melekian used the word “strange” to set the people to whom he was referring apart from people with mental illnesses. At the time of our conversation, a mass shooter had just opened fire at students attending Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, killing 17. There had to be a line, Melekian said, “between arresting people and doing nothing.”
Two weeks ago, another mass shooter opened fire, this time at a country-western bar in Thousand Oaks, said to be the third safest city in America. Counting his own, this shooter took 13 lives. Two weeks later, we still don’t know his motive, just as we still don’t know the motive of the gunman who killed 58 and wounded 422 at an outdoor country-music festival in Las Vegas. A public school principal in Michigan, we are told, is now arming his students with hockey pucks to defend themselves in the event of a mass shooting.
Where is Don Rickles when you need him?
