Dog Like Me
We’ve all heard about six degrees of separation, the notion that
everybody on planet Earth is a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend no
more than six times removed. Here in Santa Barbara, it’s more like
two, maybe three. If even that. Nothing brought this so painfully
close to home than last week’s mass murder at the Post Office
sorting plant in Goleta. Sherie Higgins, the mother of Maleka
Brinley-Higgins Pineda—one of the shooter’s seven victims—worked at
The Independent for many years, writing music reviews about hip-hop
and reggae. As a young teen, Maleka was in and out of the Indy
offices, giving anyone who cared to notice an invigorating blast of
sly mischief. At Maleka’s funeral on Tuesday, one my kids’
babysitters was sitting by the gravesite with Maleka’s family. The
mother of one of my daughter’s best friends went to school with
Maleka and counted her a good friend. Another of my daughter’s
classmate’s father used to encounter the shooter as part of his job
on a regular basis, and she rarely passed up the chance to chew his
head off. And it turns out a longtime friend of mine happened to
have lived right next door to the shooter.
Santa Barbara’s dramatically foreshortened degrees of separation
is what makes this town still work despite the growing gulf between
those who’ve got and those who’ve got squat. This certainly was in
evidence at Maleka’s funeral, a rare and genuinely multi-ethnic
refutation of the killer’s weird racial delusions. Looking around
at the 400 or more people circling the gravesite, you could not
help but connect the dots: one degree, two degrees, and so on. At
the same time, you couldn’t help but wonder at all the dots not
being connected.
The most obvious question, of course, is how could a certified
whack job like Jennifer Sanmarco—while in the full throes of an
accelerating psychotic fury—legally purchase a handgun? In 2003,
Sanmarco was placed in a three-day involuntary psychiatric hold
following an on-the-job breakdown so serious she had to be gurneyed
out of the Post Office with a sheriff’s escort. Still, she was
allowed to purchase a 9mm handgun from a New Mexican pawn shop.
This was no car-trunk sale in a deserted parking lot. Everything
was perfectly by-the-book and strictly legal. Despite her obvious
mental illness, Sanmarco passed the federally mandated two-day
background screening test as administered in the Land of
Enchantment. According to federal gun-control law, a judge would
have had to legally certify that Sanmarco was a “mental
defective”—nice language—for the pawnshop clerk to turn her down on
psychological grounds. And for a judge to make that finding under
federal law, it would not have been enough that she was placed on a
three-day hold against her will. Sanmarco would have to been
formally committed to a mental institution to qualify as a
“defective.” Based on my own relatives—and that’s just one degree
of separation, by the way—I’m here to tell you this standard makes
no sense.
Thankfully, the state of California does things differently. Had
she tried to buy the gun in California, Sanmarco would have failed
the background check. In California, it’s against the law to sell a
gun to anyone placed on a three-day hold within five years of the
event unless a judge says otherwise. In a less irrational world,
maybe someone would plug this loophole. But in the current
political climate, gun control lobbyists have all but given up
everything but holding on to what they already have. You can
understand why. In Florida, the legislature will debate a National
Rifle Association-sponsored bill that would make it a felony for
employers to prohibit their employees from bringing loaded guns to
work in their cars and trucks. A felony! Critics of this bill have
pointed out the grim but startling fact that murder ranks as the
number-one cause of workplace death for women.
The other obvious issue is mental-health spending. Despite
recent proclamations by the Bush administration that it takes
mental health seriously, the facts are to the contrary. It’s as if
he’s intent on driving us all crazy while removing our seat belts
at the same time. Under the Bush White House, the dollars allocated
to mental health treatment and prevention have been dwindling and
will continue to do so. Concern over the fate of the mentally
ill—and whether they could get their medication prescriptions
filled— prompted no less than 20 governors to declare states of
emergency in response to Bush’s recent Medicare reform fiasco. Will
they have to declare states of emergency again, in light of the $36
billion Bush has proposed cutting from Medicare, the government
insurance program that underwrites the cost of pharmaceuticals for
many of our mentally ill? And finally, Bush has proposed absolute
cuts—as opposed to reducing the rate of increase—for the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. None of this is
good news.
The simple fact is none of this will bring Maleka
Brinley-Higgins Pineda—or any of Sanmarcos’s other victims—back.
It’s also a fact that most mentally ill people are not violent, but
the popular notion that they are prevents many from seeking the
help they need. It’s probably true that even with proper funding
and care available, many mentally ill people will refuse to take
their medications. It’s part of their sickness. It’s also the case
there are ways around even the tightest gun control laws. Had
Sanmarco failed her background check, no doubt she could have
bought a gun the old-fashioned way—on the black market. We will
always have mentally ill people. We will always have guns. We just
don’t have to make it so easy for the two to come together in so
deadly a combustion. That’s an obvious dot to connect, no matter
how many degrees of separation are involved.
for the higher new taxes.
