Grief Gone Bad

The terror of random deadly violence wreaks havoc with the public peace as well as the private. Most of us mercifully never have to know for ourselves the misery it brings to the lives of the surviving families. Common decency counsels giving a grieving family its privacy, a measure of regard for the tragedy of a young life lost to a madman’s murderous spree. But Los Angeles Times writer Robin Abcarian didn’t miss the recent opportunity to pick at the scabs of a father’s emotional wounds in the service of gun prohibition.

A week before the anniversary of the Isla Vista (California) mass shooting, whose victims included Christopher Michaels-Martinez, Abcarian wrote this story about the young man’s father, attorney Richard Martinez.

Abcarian has shown that same callousness before. In another story last year she cruelly mused that ex-Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi had it coming when he innocently made a wrong turn at the Mexican border and wound up in a Mexican prison. His crime was having three guns and 400 rounds of ammo in his truck, which in the United States is about right for a pleasant day at the range.

But in Mexico it was enough to get him in serious legal trouble, since he wasn’t a connected public official or career criminal. And to Abcarian’s hoplophobic mind it was conclusive evidence that Tahmooressi was ready to “to take out an entire town square,” as she put it.

Martinez, sadly, was a willing participant in parading his broken heart. He now travels the country aiming his fury at millions of innocent people he never met, who never had anything to do with his son’s death—America’s 100 million gun owners. His gun control activism against the innocent is grief gone bad, a misdirected attempt to either find meaning in or avenge his son’s death.

Richard Martinez is not the first family member of a victim of crime to go off the rails. In recently becoming affiliated with multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg’s latest money-fueled gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, he joins Sarah Brady, former U.S. Representatives Carolyn McCarthy and Gabrielle Giffords, and other lesser known tragic figures who have offered their passion for exploitation by gun control activists like Bloomberg and their media sympathizers.

Nor is the undifferentiated rage of a grieving parent limited in the target of its damage. In 1984 Libby Zion, the daughter of an influential New York City lawyer and journalist, died in an emergency room, allegedly the victim of mistakes made by resident physicians. Her father, convinced that the doctors in training had erred because of overwork and lack of sleep, undertook a years-long crusade to mandate limits on work hours for doctors in training. In the process he used his prominent position to mount personal attacks on the doctors who had cared for his daughter, maliciously and wrongfully accusing them of murder.

Few Americans are aware of the fundamental damage done to medical and surgical training programs done by Zion’s selfish rampage. Interns and residents are now by policy sent home from their hospital workplaces after an 80-hour weekly limit on working (i.e. learning). Learning has suffered as more surgical residents feel unprepared for unsupervised practice after their five years in residency. Such is the unintended result of grief-driven anger when it is heedlessly allowed to determine policy.

The damage done by the Sarah Bradys and Richard Martinezes is similarly careless. Consumed by their grief to the point of recklessness, they attempt to sway lawmakers and the public with the brute force of the misery they wear like a badge. They consider it a license to go after the National Rifle Association, gun owners, politicians, and anyone else who stands in their way.

Occasionally the errant mind of the family member approaches the bizarre, as in the case of yet another Bloomberg hire and former New York Times blogger, Jennifer Mascia. Her self-disclosed story of victimization as the child of a mob hit man and his enabling wife is sad enough. It’s not hard to see how such a childhood taints adult emotional health. Mascia’s misdirected reaction to learning that her father shot his victims to death was to blame not her viciously criminal father, but the tool he misused—the gun.

Thus was Mascia able to parlay a crippled emotional persona into a regular position as blogger at the New York Times, writing for the short-lived “The Gun Report.” Defunct since June 2014, the blog was a compendium of media reports of shootings interspersed with ant-gun rights screeds.

One falsehood-riddled report about Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership required correcting in our own blog. Mascia drew not on any personal knowledge of gun owners or America’s tradition of gun ownership, but on her deep well of warped emotions shaped by growing up as the daughter of a career murderer and his enabling wife. The Times editors apparently considered Mascia’s perverted view a plus on her resume.

According to Al Jazeera, Mascia’s new position at Everytown for Gun Safety will allow her to continue her mission, fueled by Bloomberg’s billions. (I venture this prediction: it too will fail, because like Bloomberg’s original failed AstroTurf project it will be revealed as a fraud.)

If there is a bright side to this sick symbiosis between victims and media exploiters, it is that Americans have apparently had enough. Media consumers seem more and more aware of the overt anti-gun rights agenda of the big outlets. They tend to discount them, preferring to believe instead what their own eyes increasingly tell them—that there are tens of millions of American gun owners who manage to get through each day without shooting anyone. And they don’t appreciate being tarred with the crimes of a handful of psychotic killers.

 

—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.

All DRGO articles by Timothy Wheeler, MD.