Bacon's Rebellion

Via Slate comes a facsimile of the papers which called for the hospitalization of Cho Seung-Hui as he “present[ed] an imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for self and is incapable of volunteering or unwilling to volunteer for treatment.”

I’m agnostic on gun control — I see the merits of both points of view. So, I don’t necessarily embrace the point of view of Pierre LeMieux with the Independent Institute, but I find it worthy of discussion. In an essay published yesterday, he argues:

Contrast the horrific Virginia Tech shootings with the January 2002 killings at Virginia’s Appalachian Law School. Within minutes of shooting three people in the dean’s office, disgruntled student Peter Odighizuwa was stopped by two students who had retrieved handguns from their cars. They disarmed the killer and turned him over to the police.

In other words, in society of armed citizens, a crazed killer might manage to kill two or three people, but somebody would take him out before the body count reached 32. I’m not sure if that scenario would have worked at Virginia Tech — Cho had shrewdly chained the doors to Norris Hall shut. Students would not have been able to run out to their cars. But Lemieux’s larger point is worth contemplating.

In a similar vein of the guns-don’t-kill-people, people-kill-people argument, it has been noted that the male citizens of Switzerland are required to serve in the military and required to keep weapons stored in their houses, but the Swiss have a low homicide rate. Which leads me to ask, is the high homicide rate in the United States due to our easy access to guns, or is it due to something perverse about our culture — perhaps the increasingly pervasive attitude that everyone should display or vent their emotions rather than rein them in… or the cult of victimization that encourages people to lash out at others rather than look within… or, as noted by Norm Leahy yesterday (“Cockburn’s Chemicals“), the ubiquitious prescription of anti-depressant drugs?

Finally, I would ask, if misfits like Cho Seung-Hui had been cut off from access to guns, would that have stopped them from killing people? All we have to do is look to the Middle East to find an alternative model for committing mass murder: car bombs and suicide bombs. Bomb-making instructions can be found on the Internet. How long will it be before some whack job decides to exact his vengeance with a bomb? Timothy McVeigh pulled it off and the death toll was far higher than in Blacksburg.

Again, I’m not arguing a particular point of view here. I’m just asking questions. My suspicion is that there simply are no easy answers.

Sens. Kenneth Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, and Thomas Norment Jr., R-James City, have been cleared of conflict-of-interest charges by the Senate Ethics Advisory Panel.

David Nixon, a Roanoke lawyer and Republican activist had filed a complaint noting that the two prominent lawmakers were employed by Kaufman and Canoles, the leading law firm in Hampton Roads, which represents a number of clients that acquire land through eminent domain. The involvement of Stolle and Norment in shaping eminent domain legislation, Nixon charged, amounted to a conflict of interest.

The panel disagreed — unanimously. Reports Christina Nuckols with the Virginian-Pilot:

“This was a frivolous action that was calculated to try to prevent two senior legislators from voting on an important issue,” Stolle said. Stolle and Norment abstained earlier this year when the Senate voted on eminent domain bills. Stolle said he is not sure that those abstentions affected the final outcome of the legislation.

Nixon’s argument was long on suggestion but short on specifics. (See my previous post, “The Case Against Norment: Suggestive but Not Yet Persuasive.”) The evidence of a conflict of interest did not seem compelling to me when I wrote, and it obviously didn’t seem compelling to the panelists who cleared Norment and Stolle.

However, Nixon probed into relationships that are well worth highlighting. Norment, who has carried water for Dominion on matters of electric deregulation and reregulation, has significant holdings of Dominion stock (valued between $50,000 and $250,000, according to the Virginia Public Access Project), and accepted a Dominion invitation to go on a hunting trip in 2001. Furthermore, according to VPAP, he has received $11,800 in campaign contributions from Dominion during the current reporting cycle.

It seems undeniable that Norment is cozy with Virginia’s biggest power company, and also that he was one of the company’s most dependable allies while Dominion was steering legislation potentially worth billions of dollars through the General Assembly. There’s nothing illegal or unethical about his connections, but they are something that voters might want to bear in mind when they consider whom they want representing them.

Writing in Counterpunch, confirmed man of the left Alexander Cockburn offers his jarring, almost anarchist, take on the murders at Virginia Tech last week. It’s a lengthy piece, and one that will, no doubt, raise more than a few hackles. But sifting through it all, and in a way following-up on Jim’s post from earlier, there is this:

What should be banned from campuses are not weapons but prescriptions for antidepressants. Eric Harris, co-slayer (with Dylan Klebold) of twelve students and a teacher in the Columbine school shootings in 1999, was on Luvox, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) of the same class as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. Initially Harris had been prescribed Zoloft, but told his doctor he was having suicidal and homicidal fantasies. So the doc shifted him to Luvox.

16-year Jeff Weise, who killed 10 schoolmates at Red Lake High School on an Indian Reservation in 2005 was on Prozac. The manufacturer said 4 per cent of children in one of its tests of Luvox developed short-term mania. Other studies of the SSRI anti-depressants have claimed they have a 15 per cent chance of prompting suicidal or homicidal reactions.

Cho Seung-Hui was on a prescription drug for his psychological problems. What exactly it was not yet been disclosed, though the likelihood of it being an anti-depressant is high, since doctors on campuses dispense prescriptions for them like confetti.

Later, Cockburn has a “sampler” of spree-killers and their link to anti-depressants. Was the presence or absence of such drugs a factor in the most recent murders as it appears they may have been in previous cases?

Since the morning of April 16, Virginia Tech students, professors and administrators have displayed extraordinary dignity in the face of one of the nation’s great tragedies. My respect for the institution and those who are part of it has increased immeasurably. I can only hope that I, if faced with a comparable horror, would acquit myself as well.

Although punditry is my business, I have largely withheld commentary about the public policy implications of the shooting rampage for two reasons: First, I thought it appropriate to let the mourners bury the bodies of their loved ones before pontificating on the meaning of it all, and second I wanted to see more facts emerge. We do no honor to the fallen by jumping to conclusions based on preconceived notions. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has done precisely the right thing by setting up an independent review panel to inquire into the April 16 tragedy and the events leading up to it.

Presumably, the review panel will endeavor to determine if the rampage could have been prevented, and what it will take to prevent another such incident from reoccurring. The panel’s inquiries undoubtedly will follow many of the same trails blazed by journalists investigating the massacre: Were Virginia’s gun laws tight enough? Is Virginia’s system for treating the mentally ill too lax and unaccountable?

To my mind, the central question is this: How was it possible for someone as mentally unstable as Cho Seung-Hui to acquire two guns? In 2005, a Montgomery County magistrate had found the student to be a danger to himself and others. But, according to Bill McElway with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, state and federal authorities disagree over whether such a finding restricted Cho’s right to purchase a gun.

After the magistrate found Cho to be a danger, McElway reports, he was detained for assessment at a county mental facility, then released the next day. State law did not permit him to be institutionalized: He was to be provided the least restrictive appropriate form of medical care: in his case, outpatient treatment. Because he was released, authorities did not deem him to have been “admitted” to a mental facility. Writes McElway:

That means no record of the person’s assessment, even if the person is found to be mentally ill and a danger, is forwarded to law-enforcement agencies for background check purposes.

So, the “obvious” remedy is to tighten up reporting requirements for mentally ill patients. If future Chos are found to be a danger, that information should be conveyed to law enforcement officials and should be grounds for blocking the purchase of hand guns.

But it’s not quite so simple. The desire to restrict the rights of crazy people to acquire hand guns — a restriction that I totally support, incidentally — will run smack into the rights of the mentally ill. I dare say that the review panel will uncover a host of advocates who work tirelessly to expand the privacy rights of the mentally ill, to avoid actions that would stigmatize them and to require due process before institutionalizing them against their will or depriving them of other civil rights. Cho fell through the cracks, I hypothesize, because a broad-based social movement dedicated to taking the mentally ill out of institutions and integrating them back into society has worked diligently to expand their rights.

We might well find that the problem in Cho’s case wasn’t insufficiently tight gun laws, or inadequate spending on mental health care. As Walt Kelly said, “We have found the enemy and it is us” — our culture and legal system, which gives primacy of the rights of individuals, including those of the mentally ill, over the collective good. Should the review panel find that to be the case, the “obvious” solution isn’t so obvious at all.

Yesterday, a Senate ethics board heard allegations that Senators Thomas K. Norment, R-Williamsburg and Kenneth W. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach have engaged in a conflict of interest when legislating property rights. According to Roanoke lawyer G. David Nixon, the two powerful lawmakers have a conflict because they either represent clients that acquire property through eminent domain or engage in rainmaking activity for clients that do.

(See our coverage of this issue in “Is There a Conflict of Interest in the State Senate?” and “The Case Against Norment: Suggestive But Not Persuasive.”

The panel, headed by former James Madison University President Ronald E. Carrier, met five hours. Norment testified before the group, according to an article by Jeff Schapiro in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. (Schapiro did not say whether Stolle testified.) The panel is required to rule on the allegations in June.

One of the more obscure laws to emerge from the 2007 General Assembly allows local school boards to work out deals with private schools to transport their students on the same buses. Predictably, this common-sense measure was opposed by the Virginia School Boards Association on the grounds that public money should not “subsidize” private education. (Don’t you love that attitude? What? Save money? Not if it means helping those stinkin’ private schools!) But, as the Daily Press observes in an editorial today, the idea makes a lot of sense.

Any time public school buses are driving with empty seats, those buses have unused capacity. If public school systems can generate revenue from filling those seats, it comes out ahead. As the DP writes:

John Sugg writes in Reason magazine that southern states are leading the way in doling out incentives to lure businesses:

Consider three deals finalized in 1995, all of them in North Carolina. This End Up, a furniture manufacturer, accepted $230,000 and other incentives from the state for a new plant near Fayetteville that would employ 200 people; then it closed a Raleigh plant that employed 150. Quaker Oats received $98,000 for a new 98-worker plant near Asheville; then it closed another North Carolina operation where 70 people worked. Seffi Industries took $300,000 and promised to create 300 new jobs. It not only failed to open a new plant or hire a single new person but a few months later went out of business altogether.
Trendy businesses—particularly technology firms—have the greatest leverage in demanding government subsidies. In February, for example, biofuel manufacturer Range Fuels, based on lit?tle more than its word that it could deliver a economically competitive product, was offered $6 million in state cash, a 97-acre tract in central Georgia, and a set of tax abatements. At best, the company will employ 70 people.

Other beneficiaries of business welfare in??clude low-tech factories in the mid-South; call centers in the Tampa Bay area; auto manufacturers in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia; and biotech firms in Florida and North Carolina. Publicly financed sports stadiums are common across the nation, and the South is no exception. Tampa built Raymond James Stadium for the Buccaneers a decade ago as part of a deal that will divert $1 billion in taxpayer money to team owner Malcolm Glazer over 30 years. Glazer, in a style common to team owners, threatened to move the football team if he didn’t get a new stadium. To win voter approval for a bond issue to finance the project, city officials attached it to a referendum providing money to alleviate crowding in the city’s schools. The stadium was built long before most of the new schools.

My libertarian impulse is to look at such giveaways as just another example of graft, and Sugg goes on to make the argument that incentives can lead to corruption, though it is not exactly widespread (as far as I know).

The one example he cites that really got me, though, was the money chase for the NASCAR hall of fame. Virginia was in the thick of that race, too, with promises to give NASCAR millions of dollars (including a “large taxpayer investment”) if only they would locate the Hall in Henrico.

While the bid wasn’t accepted, the willingness of state and local government to toss around taxpayer funds for big business prizes still seems to be the preferred magic bullet in economic development. Sugg’s interviews people who say that it’s not the incentives that matter most, but the quality of the workforce, infrastructure and the general business climate. That’s where the attention (and the money) ought to be spent.

The Wren Cross controversy may be settled for now, but a growing number of William & Mary alumni are convinced that the cross episode is merely a symptom of a larger problem: President Gene Nichol. Seth Freedland at The Daily Press reports on a movement to pressure the Board of Visitors not to renew Nichols’ contract when it expires next summer.

The article quotes Victor K. Biebighauser, a ’75 alumnus and a steady 20-year contributor to the university who pulled the plug on his annual contributions after the cross caper. Though partially molified, he said he would not make up for his missed donation with any more money than usual. Another alumnus, Andrew McRoberts, Class of ’87, said he did not expect to resume contributing anytime soon.

Such dissatisfaction follows on the heels of an announcement by James W. McGlothlin that he would withdraw a $12 million donation. If Nichol can’t regain the confidence of alumni, W&M fund-raising efforts are doomed to falter. And when a university president can’t raise money, like University of Richmond President William Cooper, he won’t last long.

In the age of websites, blogs and e-mail, alumni can mobilize in protest against unpopular university administrators far more readily than in the past. No longer can a university president control the flow of information. As an example: Lance Kyle, class of ’89 and an Arlington resident, has e-mailed a copy of his letter to Rector Michael Powell denouncing Nichol, which I am re-publishing on this blog. (You can read the full text here.) Here’s a choice selection:

What is equally disturbing his how Nichol is demonstrating the same pattern at William & Mary as he did at Colorado and Chapel Hill. While Nichol was dean at Colorado, the law school fell 12 points … in the USN&WR rankings and almost lost its ABA accreditation while at Chapel Hill it fell 8 points. At both schools, the local papers were filled with op-eds by disgruntled alumni, students and taxpayers admonishing Nichol to “focus on building and managing the law school instead of his personal, radical agenda.” The same thing is happening at William & Mary and red flags are everywhere. The stakeholders are complaining while W&M falls further behind its peers in terms of applicant stats (SATs are flat and GPAs are falling) and fundraising growth not to mention the NACUBO endowment ratings. … All of this will translate into lower rankings and devalued diplomas.

Writes Kyle elsewhere: “W&M desperately needed a superstar fundraiser but instead got a failed politician who is saddling the school with meaningless expenses.”

I don’t know how fair these charges are but they are serious — and they are being heard. Clearly Nichol has aroused the alumni, and the antagonism appears to be growing. Let us hope that he doesn’t wind up destroying this eminent institution as a result.

On May 3, 2007, the Virginia Conservation Network (VCN) will honor individuals and organizations within the Commonwealth who have set themselves apart as leaders in conservation and sustainability. The event, which will include a performance by the Capitol Steps, will take place at the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond. The evening will begin with a reception for sponsors and awardees at 5:30, followed by the awards presentation at 7:00 and Capitol Steps performance at 7:30.

Richard Cizik, nationally known evangelical leader, will be honored with the award for Individual Leadership within the Faith Community on the Issue of Global Warming & Sustainability. Cizik will make brief remarks about his work raising the profile of global climate change within the faith community.

For ticket information, click here.