GUNSENSE

PROFESSOR WILBANKS & HIS FAMILY: ANOTHER AMERICAN MURDER-SUICIDE

Professor James Wilbanks was the shooter—that much we know. And he was also an Assistant Professor of Management at the College of Business, University of Arkansas-Little Rock. And a part of me wishes I didn't know that.

On Friday, February 20, he shot his wife, his sister, his two dogs, and himself. He also set his house on fire.

According to Capt. Hansard of the Maumelle police, "the case is now closed."

Our first business, and it is a business that we know all too well, is to mourn this tragedy. Of course, we will never really know what caused the Professor to take this horrendous path in his life, so our only defensible responses are those of compassion and, as time passes, prevention.

We wish his friends and his family, as well as his colleagues at the College of Business in Little Rock, the strength to find peace in the coming days.

Professor Wilbanks

We will eventually want to know if there were any warning signs that we might use, indicators that will allow us to recognize others who pose similar risks to our communities and to our schools. Prevention should always be the first line of defense, particularly when our students are concerned, and strengthening these preventive measures should always be our priority.

After all, we know these stories too well—over the same weekend, there were murder-suicides in Georgia, New York, and Missouri, as well as here in Arkansas.

We even have a name for it now; it's called "familicide."

But Arkansans surely took special notice of this story, not only because it concerns a Professor in the Arkansas system, but also because guns have been much on the minds of all Arkansans since the 90th General Assembly convened in January.

In that Assembly, there are currently bills to allow guns on college campuses, in parking lots, in polling places; to allow 18-year old veterans to obtain concealed-carry licenses; to allow gun-owners to stand their ground if they feel threatened. Have I missed anything? Probably.

So it is also our duty to ponder the future that our General Assembly is designing for us—a future with guns in places where once their presence was insulting to our shared and hard-won civility: in our schools, in our polling places, in our parking lots at work, and even in our churches. Now, all around us, we can feel that civility unraveling. 

Professor Wilbanks

Next, we have been told, our college and university students should be able to carry their firearms to class.

We are becoming an uncivil nation.

America is already one of the most heavily armed countries in the world, and the most violent among developed nations, and yet some of our legislators seem frantically trying to add more firearms to the few places where they have historically been unwelcome. It borders on manic legislation, but it is, in my opinion, a very dangerous mania to indulge.

The photographs here of Professor Wilbanks, released this morning by The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus, are from his Instagram account, and they are publicly available to those who have the free app. In the picture above, he is wielding an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW, for short), the work-horse light machine gun of the American military since the US invasion of Panama in 1989. From the backdrop in the photograph, Professor Wilbanks would seem to be at one of the so-called "machine-gun" boutiques in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Machine Gun Experience, advertised in the photograph, offers shooting scenarios that allow their patrons to fire automatic weapons in imaginary engagements, such as "Spec Ops," "SWAT," or even "D-Day."

The other range mentioned on the backdrop, Discount Firearms—Las Vegas, offers its customers similar fantasy-focused missions.

Playing army, in effect, for adults. Battle-rattle for civilians.

If you've never looked at these sites, or were even unaware of these fantasy shooting-boutiques, you will learn a great deal about America's militarized gun-culture by paying them a visit. And even more importantly, you will see how the gun industry is marketing and selling its lethal product.

We owe it to Professor Wilbanks, to his family, and to all of our loved ones, to understand more about this culture, its genesis, its development, and its effect on our citizens.

But we start with this observation: far too many people in our country are dying from gun-violence, and we must bring all of our resources to bear on this national disgrace.

And we take action, having made that observation, by joining together to resist those legislators who would put at grave risk the security of our college campuses.

 

 

 

 

NEW TWEETS TO TWEET WITH—HB 1077, AMENDED, RIDES AGAIN

If you are interested in tweeting your opposition to the amended version of Charlie Collins's HB 1077 (the bill to put guns on Arkansas college and university campuses), we have put together a simple tweet-sheet for your convenience here.

Please tweet these—and share them—as you see fit between now and Thursday morning, February 26, when the bill is scheduled to be heard.

We will keep you posted if and when the situation changes.

And as always, many thanks for your support.

 

ARKANSAS GUNS ON CAMPUS BILL TO REAPPEAR AS EARLY AS 2.26.15

ALERT FOR ALL ARKANSAS FACULTY, STAFF, STUDENTS, AND CITIZENS

Charlie Collins’s HB 1077, the bill to allow faculty & staff to carry concealed weapons on Arkansas college and university campuses, might re-appear, amended, in the Education Committee as early as Thursday, February 26. We need all concerned faculty, students, staff, and citizens to send emails to the following committee members, expressing your opinions about this legislation. Our initial success in stalling this bill occurred partly because of the outpouring of resistance against it, and we deeply appreciate your willingness to take the time from your busy schedule to express your opinions on this vital issue. Here are the names and emails of three committee members that you might contact. Thanks in advance for your time and effort.

Representative Bruce Cozart (Committee Chair): bruce.cozart@arkansashouse.org 

Representative Charlotte Douglas: charlotte.douglas@arkansashouse.org 

Representative Bill Gossage: bill@billgossage.com

  

Related articles

Charlie Collins & the Nra Ride Into Arkansas

FAYETTEVILLE VIGIL FOR CHAPEL HILL STUDENTS

The great Congressman John Lewis wrote in his brief memoir and meditation on social change, Across that Bridge (2012): 

During the Civil Rights Movement, our struggle was not about politics. It was about seeing a philosophy made manifest in our society that recognized the inextricable connection we have to each other (7).

Politics, of course, was one of the forms that the Civil Rights struggle took. But the real struggle, and the inspiration behind most social-justice movements, concerns our attempt to recognize and honor what Congressman Lewis calls this "inextricable connection" that we have to one another. 

Recognizing this connection, understanding its profound complexity, and finally realizing our place within this living network of value and vision—that has been the goal of our major wisdom traditions that have influenced the human community from century to century.

And so on Thursday, February 19, we will come together at 6:30 p.m. near the fountain between Mullins Library and the Arkansas Student Union to honor the inextricable connection that we share with Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha, the three UNC students who were tragically murdered on February 10th.

I urge you to attend this gathering if at all possible. Simply being there, implicitly recognizing the hatred and violence that we all must confront on a daily basis, marks a powerful first step toward finding workable responses to these problems.

Let me close my invitation with the American historian and social activist Howard Zinn. He provides the fundamental logic that lies behind the very human urge that we all feel—and sometimes tragically resist—to help others even in the smallest ways:

We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. 

So let's undertake a small act on Thursday, February 19, 2015. Let's get together and embody for our community that "inextricable connection" that we have to each other.

If we can do that, it will have been a good day.

And the world needs more good days, right?

A Facebook page has been set up for this event. You can find it here.

I hope to see you there.

—Sidney Burris, Professor, University of Arkansas

 

 

 

CONCEAL-CARRY LICENSEES: NEW NUMBERS SHOULD GIVE US PAUSE

The Violence Policy Center, for decades one of our countries most respected advocates for gun-violence prevention, released in February a startling set of numbers regarding concealed-carry licensees. These numbers ought to influence dramatically our final estimation of HB1077, the bill introduced by Representative Charlie Collins that would allow faculty and staff to carry their weapons on Arkansas college campuses.

The Center discovered that from May 2007 to February 2015, concealed-carry licensees were responsible for at least 722 murders and 28 mass-shootings. (Read the recent New York Times editorial on these findings here.)

Before you pull out your calculator and start figuring the yearly or monthly or daily kill-rates, consider the phrase, at least? Why this troubling phrase? 

It's troubling because we don't know the real numbers. It's troubling because the NRA doesn't want us to know these numbers. Because the NRA in conjunction with Congress has prohibited for two decades the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on gun-violence.  And even though this ban was supposedly lifted two years ago, the CDC still cannot get funding from Congress to undertake the work that so desperately needs to be done on this debilitating problem. 

So the VPC's numbers come only from news outlets and the very limited state data that is publicly available. The real numbers, then, are higher.

That's why the NRA has blocked access to the facts.

But how much higher is anybody's guess. So one of the many tragedies surrounding this suppression of data is that we have little reliable information about the extent of concealed-carry gun-violence, information that we should have before enacting any legislation that relies upon such license-holders to secure the safety of our children.

That's just common sense.

The point to all of this? We now know, at least, that our preconception of these licensees—law-abiding, upstanding gun-handlers—was simply mistaken. Many of them, of course, are exactly that: law-abiding and upstanding. But now we know that a number of them, a number larger than we had expected, are not.

So we simply don't know how widespread gun-violence is among concealed-carry license holders. But we do know this: it is more extensive than we had expected.

The conclusion is obvious: we shouldn't entrust these people with the safety of our students until we correct this mistake and obtain a clearer picture of their profile. They are, after all, the very people that we are allowing to carry guns into our classrooms.

In light of this new evidence, a few questions come to mind.

• Are we ready to grant this under-researched and armed population instant and legal access to our students, faculty, and staff?
• Do we want them carrying concealed firearms into our classes, departmental meetings, hallways, cafeterias, and libraries?
• Have we ever granted such potentially dangerous liberties to such an ill-defined, under-studied, and untrained group of citizens who are carrying lethal weapons?
• Are we ready to carry out this experiment—currently being attempted by 1.2% of our college campuses—with our children?

Let's take a deep breath before we act so rashly, particularly on behalf of campuses that have never once experienced the problem the bill is designed to solve.

Our children are worth the extra effort.

 

 

Related articles

Charlie Collins & the Nra Ride Into Arkansas

THANKS TO REPRESENTATIVE LEDING FOR LISTENING

In case you ever wondered about the efficacy of letting your Representatives know where you stand on the issues, check out the tweet below that was posted by Representative Greg Leding this morning. Our individual voices matter, and when we think about the minimal effort it requires nowadays to express them, we have little choice but say what we think about the issues that matter the most to us.

And thanks to Representative Leding, not only for listening, but also for letting us know that he's listening. 

That matters. That empowers. In short, that rocks.

Since Tuesday evening, I've received more than 400 emails from Arkansans thanking me for my vote against guns on campuses. #ARleg #HB1077

— Greg Leding (@gregleding) February 12, 2015

 

CHARLIE COLLINS & THE NRA RIDE INTO ARKANSAS

HB 1077, the bill that would have armed faculty and staff on Arkansas college campuses, failed in committee on Thursday, February 5. The vote split, 10-10, needing eleven votes to pass. The bill would have replaced Act 226 (2013), which offered the Boards of Trustees the sensible option of deciding for themselves whether their campuses would allow guns. After all, the Boards are in the business of governance, and they have acquitted their task admirably over the years. We have a public higher-education system that we all justifiably point to with pride. And it's getting stronger every year, despite the struggles facing higher education across the country, and particularly in the south.

In fact, during the two years that the law was on the books, every Board voted to prohibit their faculty and staff from carrying concealed handguns. The will of the people most directly affected by this legislation spoke clearly and with one voice: no amateur carry on our campuses.

Most of us suspected that the bill would resurface in some form after Thursday's defeat. Two
pieces of information have appeared recently that are important.

1. This bill was supported by the NRA, the gun-industry's most powerful lobby. In their announcement, the NRA both praised Representative Collins, "who worked tirelessly to promote this legislation." The NRA also promised to work with Representative Collins to further their plans to place guns on college campuses.
2. Representative Collins, in an interview Friday, said that he might re-work the current bill, reaching out to current members of the Education Committee, or as he said, "I might just add in some things expanding concealed carry to other locations that have nothing to do with colleges," a move that could justify his sending it to a committee that is stacked with Republicans sympathetic the NRA's agenda. That wouldn't be difficult to do.

Let's make absolutely certain that we understand what is happening here: if Collins can't get the Boards of Trustees to opt into his law, which they have unanimously and resolutely refused to do, then he'll take away (in HB 1077) the Boards' power to govern themselves and their colleges; and if he can't convince his committee to approve his bill, then he'll change the committee to one that conforms to his and the NRA's agenda.

Isn't there a relevant story about the little boy who, when things didn't go his way, took his ball and went home?

Except Representative Collins and the NRA aren't going home. They're moving into the state of Arkansas, lock, stock, and barrel, and I'm not speaking figuratively.

Governmental over-reach, centralized power, and the beltway agendas of the NRA, one of the nation's most powerful lobbies—these are the watchwords that govern this kind of legislative behavior. 

And if this legislation is successful, our state will be the poorer for it.

For more information as it becomes available, follow me on Twitter, @sidburris, and check by my Facebook page, Gunsense.

CARRY ON: HOWARD ZINN, SOCIAL REFORM, AND WHITE PRIVILEGE

As I was finishing up Howard Zinn's autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, I found this paragraph, and it glowed:

Over the years I have made many visits to prisoners, including a day spent in Block Nine, the maximum-security cell block of the notorious Walpole prison in Massachusetts. I have taught classes in several prisons. I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problems of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed—which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished (150).

Coming, as it does, at the end of Chapter 11, and with only four short chapters left in the book, the paragraph moves the American prison system to the hub, to the roundhouse, of the problems that sicken and diminish us, both as a culture and as a nation: poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed.

Prison reform, of course, is an old and venerable item on the social-reform docket. And with the arrival of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow (2012), our notion of systemic racison expanded exponentially, and with a sense of urgency too. Zinn would have loved this book. His work in prisons, years before Alexander's book, and his time spent there as an imprisoned activist and teacher, showed him what many like him—white, hyper-educated— already knew, but had not seen first-hand: that prisons are an index to the American Book of Shame.

Zinn looks to prisons, then, not to ogle or other those who have committed the worst, most sensationalistic crimes, but to understand how our culture generated the conditions that gave rise to those crimes. Zinn did not seek to excuse these offenders, nor to free them, but to understand the forces that shaped them, and to begin the work that would lead from such understanding to meaningful reform.

Zinn did much of that work in his classrooms.  He did what he could, and as I tell my students, that's a worthy epitaph for all of us.

Reading the autobiography, I realized that Zinn and activists like him, who grew up poor, but whose hard work and intelligence were duly rewarded, found ways to work productively with the opportunities extended to him. Never mind that Zinn's activism seemed almost genetic it lay so deeply within him, and never mind that few of us will approach his unique combination of activism, writing, and classroom instruction. One of Zinn's most useful gifts to us, however, lies in his open and evolving life, and in how he managed the various ingredients of that life, often in the public arena, to his and to his students' advantage.

Zinn never commented on the truth that smolders just below everything he did, but his life bore constant witness to it: privilege is pernicious when it insulates the privileged from the human suffering that, at times, they have been complicit in creating.  

Remember: at any time after he left Spelman College, his first teaching job, he could have disappeared into the ivy jungle. But he didn't. Zinn found a way to use his career, or to recast it, so that while he did his job—teaching, writing—he saw to it that these duties developed his compassion.  And this compassion led to his own brand of activism. 

His life, in fact, seems to have embodied a very simple, class-room based formula:  "If I learn more about Subject A in the classroom, then I will be better able to help solve Problem B in the world. And it works the other way around too: as I learn more about Problem B, Problem B will then help shape the contours of Subject A, which will then shape the curriculum that I choose to study and teach."

It's not a new idea. "Knowledge," Booker T. Washington stated flatly, "must be harnessed to the things of real life."

This is a very difficult model to enact, particularly in the humanities, because it trades on one of the most troublesome saws in humanistic education: make it relevant!

But as hesitant as I am to base Shakespeare's worth on his relevancy at any given moment in our country's history, I am equally certain, as I read Zinn, that we make ourselves responsible members of the community only by bringing our teaching and our education directly into a fruitful conjunction with the society it serves. 

And so for those of us who admire Zinn and are inclined to attempt a small portion of what he did, we might as well begin to judge our ourselves, and our teaching, by how well we reconstruct that bridge between the so-called monuments of history, literature, art, and music and the lives that we all lead, day in and day out. 

What we learn and what we use—we shouldn't restrict the former because the latter seems not to require it. We should model our lives, in fact, on the vast resources, the most innovative articulations of living, that the past has left to us. And just what are those "innovative articulations?"

We get to judge, and we get to make the case for our selections. And rendering those judgments and making those cases ought to be a large part of what we do in the classroom.

Look very carefully at the leaders of any benevolent social movement—from Christ to Aung Sang Suu Kyi, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama—and you will see a similar model of efficiency. Wisdom traditions transformed powerfully into paths of reform—that's a powerful model.

From the teacher's perspective, it sounds like this: What we choose to teach will directly impact the world around us, but that world, which we define according to its most pressing needs, must directly impact and expand what we choose to teach. And so that world must also redefine what we teach; and re-evaluate it.

And we must teach our students how to redefine and re-evaluate these materials for themselves.

It's a process, this birth and sustenance of a responsible citizen.

A final note. Zinn was always an unapologetic cheerleader for social movements and, more specifically, for the energy that rises from them. Here he is in an earlier chapter called, "The Last Teach-In," describing that energy:

While we were an embattled minority, it was thrilling to imagine that the beautiful humanity of so many of the people we encountered in the movement (forgetting its dogmatists, its bureaucrats, the power-seekers, the humorless ones) represented the future. It seemed there could be some day a world of just such people, the kind you work with, share everything with, have fun with, trust with your life (122).

That is the energy that we all bring to the causes that engage us, or that we should bring to them, from gun-violence prevention to racial justice to climate change. And to all the vast areas that lie between them, around them, and embedded within them.

But lest we forget, Zinn reminds us: it is this powerful energy that always unites us, even when our chapter titles and our reform groups go by different names and demand different terms of allegiance. Nowadays, much social reform depends on shunning the universalism and idealism that at times characterized the work that Zinn and others from his generation undertook, both in the Civil Rights and the anti-war movements of the Sixties.

There is nothing wrong with revealing the hidden biases and power-grabs that get smuggled in under the idealist banner. Anybody can build a Trojan horse, and many of us have unwittingly done so. And older activists must realize that the process of self-definition, of defining one's group in contrast to other groups, initiates all lasting reform movements. 

But I also learned this from Zinn: these movements, as unlike each other as they are, feed off a particular, unique, and common human energy.

It is a social energy, according to Zinn, a "thrilling" social energy that you "work with, share everything with . . . [and] trust with your life." 

Once we lose this sense of shared work, however widely separated are the fields that host our work, we lose one of our strongest assets. 

AND THEN THERE WERE TEN: THANKS TO OUR LEGISLATORS!

Yesterday, February 5, 2015, was an important day for higher education in the state of Arkansas. The House Education Committee held a lengthy discussion of HB 1077, the bill sponsored by Representative Charlie Collins that would allow properly licensed faculty and staff to carry concealed weapons on our public campuses.

The final roll call split along party lines, 10-10, and Representative Cozart, Chair of the Committee, cast the deciding vote against the bill.

After the committee finished its discussion, fifteen members of the general public offered their own opinions: eleven spoke against the bill, and four supported it. UA-LR Chancellor Joel Anderson ended the public testimony with a clear-headed and articulate analysis of the weaknesses both of the bill and the ideas behind the bill. 

The majority of those who spoke against the bill were Arkansas students, and they acquitted themselves extremely well. They spoke with clear knowledge of the legislation and pride in the institutions they either represented or aspired to attend.

I was proud of each and every one of them.

This was not an easy vote for our representatives, but having listened closely to the debate and discussion, I am convinced that all of them are deeply concerned for the safety of our campuses. Finally, however, the decision allows our various Boards of Trustees to continue the work they were originally commissioned to do—advise, govern, and direct our institutions of higher learning in the state of Arkansas.

I am happy with yesterday's outcome, and I have written those who voted against this bill to tell them how much I appreciate their strong stand in support of educational self-governance, a core value that we sacrifice at great peril.

If you would like to write them as well, you will find their email addresses linked to their names below.

Sheilla Lampkin | Greg Leding | Reginald Murdock | James Ratliff | John Walker | Scott Baltz |

Mark McElroy | Charles Armstrong | Warwick Sabin | Michael John Gray

 

ARKANSAS GUNS ON CAMPUS: AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL ARKANSAS FACULTY, STAFF, AND PARENTS!

HB 1077 (concealed carry for licensed faculty and staff on Arkansas public college and university campuses) is scheduled to be heard tomorrow morning (Thursday, February 5, 2015) in the Arkansas House Education Committee. This bill is extremely important because it removes our Boards of Trustees’ ability to opt out of the current law that makes faculty-and-staff carry optional.

This bill was drafted, in my opinion, specifically to prohibit our Boards, who twice opted out of the law, from governing on this particular issue.

So it represents precisely the kind of governmental overreach that I believe all of us interested in higher education—as well as in fair, representational government—must resist.

Therefore it is important that all of us voice our opinions, wherever they may fall, on this matter. 

My current information is that Representatives Deffenbaugh, Douglas, Gray, Lampkin, and Ratliff are listening. Below you will find their full information.

Please take the time to let these elected officials know where you stand on this vital issue.

If you wish to visit the full Committee page, you can do so here.

Gary Deffenbaugh (R., District 79 )

Charlotte Douglas (R., District 75)

Michael John Gray (D., District 47)

Sheilla E. Lampkin (D., District 9)

James Ratliff (D., District 60)

Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.

—Sidney Burris, Professor, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville