Sad news over the weekend from Washington, DC, where a former Bush administration official killed his son and then himself with a shotgun after an argument.
William H. Lash III, 45, was an assistant secretary of commerce from 2001 until last year, then returned to teach at George Mason University Law School in Arlington, where he had begun as a professor in 1994. His wife, Sharon K. Zackula, fled the house before the shootings, and police said yesterday they were not sure what ignited the murder-suicide in a first-floor bedroom.
Friends and neighbors described Lash as devoted to his only child, William H. Lash IV, who was autistic. Will Lash had just completed sixth grade at Haycock Elementary School in the Falls Church area, Fairfax school officials said. The father and son could often be seen side by side on the swing set in their back yard, one neighbor said, and the pair often attended Washington Nationals baseball games.
Police said they had not been summoned this year to the blue expanded Cape Cod-style home on Pathfinder Lane in the West McLean neighborhood. There was no record of any domestic complaints. Neighbors said the family kept a low profile.
But shortly before 10 p.m. Thursday, police said, Lash and Zackula had a dispute and Zackula ran from the house and called police. Zackula was not hurt, but the dispute was physical enough that police later obtained a warrant charging Lash with domestic assault, Officer Richard Henry said.
Lash never knew about the warrant. When three or four officers arrived at 9:55 p.m., Henry said, they knocked on several doors but got no answer. Within 10 minutes, while trying to decide their next move, the officers heard two gunshots from inside the house, Henry said.
Truly a tragedy, and a sign that no gun is ever safe, even if it’s owned by a “law-abiding gun owner.” It’s likely Lash purchased that weapon for protection, but obviously it did exactly the opposite for him and his family.
Of course, this being Gun Guys, we have even more to the story for you. Later in the original article, this quote caught our eye. Lash worked, as we said above, at George Mason University Law School, and the reporter from the Washington Post got a touching quote from the dean there about Lash.
Daniel D. Polsby, dean of GMU’s law school, said, “This thing just doesn’t belong to the normal range of human experience, and we’re all just heartbroken for his family, his community and for ourselves.”
…”He was a wonderful colleague, lively and full of ideas, full of energy,” Polsby said. “I would describe him as an engaged and articulate person, not at all the sort of person whose last act would be what it appears to have been.”
Polsby? Daniel Polsby? The same Daniel Polsby who has prided himself on being notoriously against a solution to gun violence? The same Daniel Polsby who believes, according a paper he wrote a few years ago, that gun violence is a result not of guns, but of who’s holding them? (emphasis ours)
In a democracy, public policy is tailored to what people believe, no matter what the facts might be. For weapons policy, the point is not the connection between guns and extreme violence, or between gun-control laws and the prevalence of guns, but rather how people see the connection. We know that many crimes, murder and robbery especially, are committed with guns — many more, both proportionately and absolutely, than in the Eisenhower decade. In recent years, the homicide-victimization rates for young males, especially young black males, have skyrocketed, with most of the increase attributable to firearms wounds. We also know that guns have been increasing their market share as a means of suicide.
But are these trends the byproduct of there simply being too many guns available to people? And would banning handguns or assault rifles reduce this availability and thereby drive down rates of murder and suicide? If your answer to these questions is “yes,” then cheerleading for gun rights will look mighty like cheering for murder and suicide and opposing common decency. But “yes” is the wrong answer, at least without a load of qualifications. Firearms violence does not correlate with how many guns there are in a given population; it correlates with how they are distributed in that population — that is, who has them and for what purpose.
By that reasoning, we should have never let Lash have a gun, right? Then there’s the piece Polsby wrote for Reason in 1996, in which he argues (completely ignoring the “well-regulated” clause of the Second Amendment), that middle class “elites” like Lash should never go without their guns.
It is especially easy to empathize with the policy intuitions of this elite if one is a member of it. But our instincts about firearms are wrong. We upper-middle-class opinion leaders misunderstand the world; we abide in safety behind a ring of steel. Police officers and security guards keep and bear our arms for us, so that we do not remember how constantly we need them.
Good thing Lash had his weapon, then, right? Not really. And finally, we’ve got a PBS panel with Polsby in which he talks about what the real reason for gun violence is– those terrible “criminals” and their guns. (emp. ours again)
MR. POLSBY: If the central question is whether gun control can reduce crime, the prior question is whether gun control laws can reduce guns or the number of them or the market share that they have in the commission of violent crimes.
It’s extraordinary to me how little evidence there is on that prior question. We know that people, individuals differ very markedly in terms of their disposition to comply with the law, and thiscompliance question, it seems to me, is really crucial because peoplethat don’t want to comply with the law, gun control laws or the laws that forbid committing other crimes with guns, are the people thatwe’re really worried about. By far, most guns that are out there are innocuous in terms of crime.
Lash’s gun was pretty “innocuous,” too– right up until he used it to end two lives, his son’s and his own.
We can only hope that seeing a tragedy like this up close has the small consolation of changing Polsby’s clearly mistaken opinions on the sources of gun violence. The presence of guns in any situation is a dire threat, and because our country is flooded with them, we will unfortunately continue to see incidents like this one claim the lives of our citizens. The solution is clear, to everyone but Polsby, it seems: The sooner we get guns off of our streets, the sooner we’ll see an end to the bloodshed.
