Part one of this report discussed the menace of a new generation of synthetic designer drugs from China causing a public health crisis in Europe. In America, in the last two years, enterprising rogue Chinese chemists have introduced hundreds of these new chemical combinations into the market.

This plague in America  is steadily growing worse.  Law enforcement and medical experts believe that the tens of thousands of reported cases in hospitals in the last year are just the tip of the iceberg. These numbers have essentially doubled just in the last year. The rate of reporting by the agencies like DAWN, which records emergency room admissions, and NFLIS, which keeps track of law enforcement laboratory tests on drugs, is a bleak harbinger of things to come.

Unless aggressive action is taken, we can expect the same panic the British are experiencing from this onslaught. On a more optimistic note, there are positive steps that can be taken and virtually all individuals and groups can have a role in this defense. This part will outline a strategy which can meet this oncoming crisis.

Parents —– Since the victims are largely teenagers living at home, the first line of defense has to be the parents. At a minimum all parents of teens and pre-teens should have a frank and two-sided conversation to educate their children on the life-threatening effects of these drugs, which are deceptively packaged and marketed as a “legal high.”

Teens think they are immortal and the prospect of some exciting new forbidden experience can be irresistible. Information and misinformation about the synthetics are spread by friends and acquaintances, and the availability is cheap and accessible. Many of these new consumers are naïve about drugs in general, as well as their dangers.

A teenage boy in North Dakota is currently facing murder charges because he gave a single tablet of a synthetic drug to a friend. The friend died shortly after ingesting it at a party. The consequences of such single acts are beyond the comprehension of most teens.

Read more »

Daryl McCrary

DETROIT — Daryl McCrary is no stranger to the world of violence.

Having spent 21 years with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) he’s worked in places like Los Angeles and Baltimore. He’s gone undercover, he’s bought guns on the street and investigated gangs and violent crime.

As acting head of ATF in Detroit since October, McCrary says Detroit is as violent as any city in America, and more violent than many.

He says while he’s seen criminals in other cities modify their activity to try and avoid detection — and ultimately prison — Detroit criminals haven’t really bent much. He calls them “prideful” when it comes to street survival.

“Drive-by shootings. Home invasions. Aggravated assaults. I see a lot of things that I consider to be a throwback” to the old days.

No better example of the dangers in the city was the shootout last week between members of an ATF task force and a murder suspect they were trying to arrest near Linwood and Hooker on the city’s west side. The task force boxed in the suspect’s car. When officers approached, the suspect opened fire. One Detroit police officer on the task force was shot twice in the leg. Another Detroit cop on the task force suffered what was first thought to be gunshot wounds to the head.

But Deadline Detroit reported Sunday night that the officer may have actually been hit in the head by metal fragments, perhaps from a car, that came from a bullet striking the vehicle. The officer remains hospitalized. The suspect, Matthew Joseph, 23, was killed in the shootout.

To read more including a Q & A click here.

In 1991, an unemployed printer named David Ranta was convicted of killing a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn.

Last week, Ranta was released from the maximum-security prison in which he’d spent nearly 22 years, after almost every piece of evidence used to convict him fell away. The New York Times reported that the lead detectives on the case “broke rule after rule” — they “kept few written records, coached a witness and took Mr. Ranta’s confession under what a judge described as highly dubious circumstances.”

Ross Parker was chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit for 8 years and worked as an AUSA for 28 in that office.

Cyber information is not the only thing the Chinese are stealing from the United States. A new generation of synthetic designer drugs is robbing the physical and mental health of thousands of American teenagers. In the last two years enterprising rogue Chinese chemists have introduced hundreds of these new chemical combinations into the American market.

Although the motive is crassly profit-oriented rather than something even more sinister, the effect is sadly the same. Emergency room admissions and law enforcement reports reveal a looming public health crisis unlike that caused by any preceding class of drugs.

And there is often little either group can do about it as they struggle to react to the problem.

A dizzying variety of medical and psychological problems are listed in recent reports.

A Hawaii man tried to throw his girlfriend off the 11th floor balcony of their apartment building.

A Kentucky woman threw her two-year old son from her car onto the highway because she believed him to be a demon.

A Mississippi man stabbed himself repeatedly in the abdomen with a hunting knife to remove wires he thought were inside his body.

The list of bizarre and tragic stories of behavior caused by the psychoactive drugs goes on and on and on.

Just when the public and law enforcement were beginning to grab a hold on the problems caused by cathinones (“bath salts”) and cannabinoids (“spice,” incorrectly referred to as synthetic marijuana), Chinese laboratories have unleashed modified chemical compounds beyond the practical and legal reach of all but the most sophisticated law enforcement authorities. The public, parents, and teachers, are almost completely unaware of the new drug problem that is unfolding. Medical professionals who treat these kids in hospitals are just becoming aware of the problem.

Drug analogues and chemical compounds altered to avoid enforcement are not a new phenomenon. Since heroin was made illegal in the 1920s, amoral profiteers have developed related and uncontrolled substances whose effects mimic, or even exceed, those of the illegal substance.

Efforts to modify illegal drugs are unwittingly assisted by legitimate, academic researchers studying psychoactive drugs for medical purposes who then publish the results of their research. A current example is a Purdue University professor studying the effect such compounds have on brain receptors in animals. His scientific publications are immediately co-opted by renegade chemists who use the knowledge to create new “legal” drugs to sell to their customers.

About a decade ago rogue chemists from China and elsewhere started using similar research to develop drugs such as bath salts and spice. The market developed in a generally westerly direction into Russia, then Europe, and finally to the United States.

These drugs were cheap. They were beyond law enforcement, and easily accessible through the internet. Middlemen wholesalers sold them in gas stations, convenience and liquor stores, and smoke shops. They were advertised as plant food, incense, and other purposes for which they had no actual utility. In fact, the substances have no legitimate medical or industrial application. For example, “bath salts” is just a street name and has nothing in common with those colorful little granules you put in your bathtub to make it bubbly. The sellers side-stepped even a misdemeanor FDA violation by printing “not for human consumption” on the brightly colored packaging–sometimes adding a cartoon character to appeal to youthful customers.

Read more »

Prologue

By Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy

He sat in the back of a black SUV wearing blue jeans, handcuffs, and a scowl. After sixteen years on the run, Whitey Bulger had returned to the South Boston waterfront, to a town that had changed so much that he stared uncomprehendingly out the window. He no longer really belonged in this place, where once he had wielded such power, and nothing about it now belonged to him. The city’s history had outrun him, even as his own had caught up with him.

The case against Whitey had originated in the old downtown courthouse named for John McCormack, the US Speaker of the House who was instrumental in building the South Boston housing project where Whitey grew up. Now he was on his way to the new federal courthouse on the Southie waterfront named for one of his neighbors from that housing project, Joseph Moakley, the longtime congressman. When he was a young bank robber, driving an Oldsmobile convertible at a time when hardly anyone in the neighborhood could afford a car, Whitey would pull over if he saw Moakley’s mother walking home with groceries and give her a lift.

It was a small world, Whitey’s world.

The courthouse was just up the street from the spot where, in 1982, Whitey used a rifle to kill a hoodlum named Brian Halloran who had tried to turn him in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Halloran had stumbled into the crosshairs because he didn’t know that the FBI was willing to let him die to protect their secret, that Whitey was their informant. An innocent man, a truck driver named Michael Donahue, had also fallen that day, killed by the same spray of bullets—and now his family was waiting inside the courthouse, waiting to lay eyes on the man who had ripped hope from their lives twenty-nine years before.

The faded, peeling waterfront where Whitey Bulger gunned down those two men was long gone, replaced while he was on the lam by sprawling restaurants, gleaming bars, and high-rise hotels that cater to the young and the moneyed, the new Bostonians for whom the name Bulger means little or nothing. As he eyed this shiny new section of town, Whitey said a few words to his guards about the stunning transformation, about the new Boston he didn’t know.

As the SUV pulled into the courthouse’s underground garage, a Coast Guard boat idled in Boston Harbor, behind the courthouse, an officer manning a machine gun mounted on deck, an almost ludicrous show of force. The idea that anyone would mount a daring or suicidal operation to kill or spring Whitey was preposterous. Sixty-five when he fled, Whitey was eighty-one years old now, and everybody had turned on him—everybody except his girlfriend, Cathy Greig; his immediate family; and John Connolly, the FBI agent who grew up with the Bulgers in the projects and then used his badge to protect the Bulger name. Greig, who had been captured along with Whitey in Santa Monica, was in custody in the courthouse, too. Connolly was also locked up, doing forty years in Florida for helping Whitey kill a potential witness, someone who could have exposed Whitey’s Faustian partnership with the FBI decades earlier. Whitey’s younger brother Bill was a few miles away, getting ready to leave his South Boston home for the short drive to the courthouse.

Whitey rode the elevator to the fifth floor, surrounded by deputy US Marshals who kept their sunglasses on indoors. As he waited in an anteroom for his case to be called, Michael Donahue’s widow, Patricia, sat in Courtroom 10 with her three sons, Michael Jr., Shawn, and Tommy, who had grown up without a father. The special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston walked in and took an empty seat on the right side of the gallery, directly in front of the Donahues, but said nothing to them. He didn’t know them, or any of the families of Whitey’s victims, who sat clustered together.

When Whitey shuffled into the courtroom, he quickly spotted his brother Bill out in the spectators’ gallery and mouthed a cheerful hello even before he made it to the defendant’s table. For many years one of the most powerful politicians in Massachusetts, Bill smiled and nodded back.

Whitey Bulger

Whitey’s $822,198 in cash, hidden in the wall of his apartment in Santa Monica, was of no use to him now. The thirty guns hidden in those same walls proved useless, relics of a time when he’d always had a gun within easy reach. There had been no defiant, bloody standoff with the law before his arrest, a drama that would have better served his legend. His years of gunplay behind him, the old man had surrendered quietly and almost with a smile. The Whitey Bulger standing there in the courtroom, in his ill-fitting blue jeans, white smock, and sneakers, looked like any other casually dressed octogenarian or a Southern California retiree, which is what he had been just a few days before.

Over the next few weeks, there would be more court appearances as the feds tried to figure out what to do with him. Each time, the black SUV drove him up the Southeast Expressway, the main road into Boston, taking him past some of the spots where he had buried his secrets. To the right, next to a railway bridge over the Neponset River, were the soggy graves of Debra Davis and Tommy King. A little farther up, under the sand at Tenean Beach, there was Paulie McGonagle’s. Off to the left of the highway, beneath some mounds of dirt across from the firefighters’ hall, there was the oversize makeshift grave that held Deborah Hussey and Bucky Barrett and John McIntyre. They were just six of the nineteen people Whitey was charged with killing.

Whitey hid the bodies to lessen the risk of prosecution. It’s never good business to leave a corpse behind: no body, no case. But he also did it to preserve his image in the Town, as South Boston natives call their neighborhood. It was especially important to Whitey that his role in the demise of the two women remain hidden. He was a criminal, he would readily admit, but he was an honorable criminal. Gangsters with scruples don’t kill women, and Whitey insists to this day that he did not kill Debra Davis or Deborah Hussey. He says the last years of his life will be spent clearing his name, not just in the killing of the women but in this whole matter of his being an FBI informant. “I never put one person in prison in my life,” he claimed in a letter to a friend.

This is the illusion Whitey lived by and where his legend as the good bad guy began. He will most likely die in prison, no matter how he plays his final hand. Nothing seems more certain to die there with him than that legend.

***

There have been other books written about Whitey Bulger, many of them told through the eyes of people who worked for him or pretended to. Other, more serious accounts were written when knowledge of Whitey was limited or, in some cases, incomplete or incorrect. This book aims to provide the first complete and authoritative accounting of this man, of his rise, reign, and final reckoning. We aim, in short, to present Whitey in full. Many descriptions of him, and much of the lore about him, have traded in caricature, making him a two-dimensional figure more monstrous than human, if you hate him, more human than monster, if you don’t. Whitey was more complicated, more compelling, more frightening than that.

In the sixteen years that he was on the run, Whitey’s place in the public consciousness seemed to grow less, not more, nuanced. Popular culture cluttered public perception, as it evolved in his absence. Myth overgrew reality. Frank Costello, the venal, scheming Southie mob boss played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s film The Departed, was loosely based on Whitey. Costello was a sociopath, devoid of conscience or redeeming values, with blood literally dripping from his hands. Nicholson’s captivating and brilliant portrayal didn’t really capture the man it was modeled on. Others painted with an even broader brush. One former criminal associate wrote a book describing Whitey as a closet homosexual who once had a liaison with the actor Sal Mineo. The FBI, which used and protected him for decades, suddenly described the fugitive Whitey as a pervert who had sex with girls as young as twelve. After he disappeared, Whitey’s portrayal evolved from that of a cunning criminal to a sleaze.

A closer inspection of Whitey’s life reveals a more intriguing character, a strange and complex amalgam of the depraved and the blandly conventional. If Whitey spent his youth running away from the warmth and stability of his family home, he spent much of his adult life trying to re-create something he saw as a traditional, nurturing domestic environment. That he did so while maintaining two separate households with two separate women is just one of the many incongruities that define him. Whitey saw no contradiction in slaughtering someone with a machine gun and then, an hour later, sitting down to dinner with one of his mistresses and her children. At those nightly family dinners, he insisted that no one answer the phone should it ring during the meal and lectured the kids on staying away from bad influences.

He considered himself more paternal than pathological, nothing like the other bad guys. Yes, he was a criminal, but to hear him tell it he only hurt those who threatened his business. Whitey, though, was expert at blurring that line. Two accomplished men assisted in this preening self-portrait: Bill Bulger, who could never fully face what a menace his brother was, and one of Bill’s protégés, FBI agent John Connolly. Connolly cast Whitey as an indispensable ally in the FBI’s war against the Mafia. The truth was otherwise; almost everything Whitey knew about the Mafia he gleaned from his partner, Steve Flemmi, who enjoyed similar protection from Connolly and the FBI. Connolly reaped the rewards of being one of the FBI’s top Mafia fighters, but his ulterior motive was to ensure that the Bulgers, the family he’d grown up with and which had helped him in his formative years, would not suffer the ignominy of seeing Whitey publicly accused of sordid crimes. To understand why Connolly would risk his career and ultimately his freedom to protect the good name of the Bulger family is to understand South Boston, whose residents valued loyalty to family, neighbors and neighborhood over all else. Like the waterfront Whitey came home to, that South Boston is largely gone today, a victim of demographics and time. It is the town Whitey looked for out the window of that black SUV but didn’t see.

Steve Flemmi/dateline nbc

If this book is the first comprehensive biography of Whitey Bulger, it is also a social history of a time in Boston when a life like Whitey’s was possible. It begins during Roosevelt’s New Deal, which brought the Bulgers to South Boston in the first place, and encompasses the years when the city’s working-class enclaves were still places where political loyalty ensured jobs and social mobility, the years when the Irish took full control of Boston’s politics and sought control of its criminal rackets, too. Whitey’s rise also embraced the divisive era of court-ordered integration of the city’s schools, when those working-class enclaves felt besieged as never before. Whitey joined that struggle, waging a symbolic, sometimes violent battle on behalf of Southie—a story this book tells for the first time. Whitey Bulger also encompasses the years during which ethnic divisions pitted Irish and Italian gangsters against each other, a fight the FBI joined on the side of the Irish, enabling Whitey’s rise and ultimate hegemony. Whitey, in fact, is facing criminal charges now only because a confederation of Massachusetts State Police, Boston police, and federal drug agents dared to challenge the FBI’s role as the nation’s, and the region’s, premier law enforcement agency.

And so, in his own bloody way, Whitey Bulger’s life was fused with the modern history of the city. During his career he became one of its most recognizable icons. Boston is the city of John Adams, John Kennedy, and Ted Williams, but there are few names better known or more deeply associated with the city than Bulger’s. Certainly he is Boston’s most infamous criminal. After his capture, he suggested to a friend that he might have now replaced Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly as the most intriguing of Alcatraz’s former denizens. He might be right. And yet so much of what is known about him is crudely embellished or simply wrong.

We grounded our understanding of Whitey Bulger in our decades of covering his career as reporters for the Boston Globe and other Boston media, but not with any direct input from our subject or his family. Whitey Bulger refused to be interviewed by the authors. He ignored letters written by us to him in jail. Indeed, Whitey was more than uncooperative; he was outright hostile to this project, as he spelled out in letters to a friend from his Alcatraz years. Whitey will never forgive the Globe for the way it covered the court-ordered busing that desegregated Boston’s public schools and championed it on its editorial pages. Busing, he maintains, ruined South Boston. He has said he hates Shelley Murphy for writing stories about him and his brother Bill that were, in his view, hurtful to his family. He also considers her a traitor: Murphy grew up in Dorchester, attended South Boston High School, and was herself caught up in the busing crisis. She has also broken many of the most important stories about Whitey over the years. Kevin Cullen, part of the Globe team that outed Whitey as an FBI informant in 1988, was, Whitey said, “another lowlife…who has lied about my family and me.” Cullen lived in South Boston through much of Whitey’s reign, and many of his relatives still live there.

We believe Whitey saw a request for an interview for this book not as an attempt to get his side of the story but as a threat. “I hate the Globe,” he wrote to a friend. “Shelley, Cullen . . . they will twist my words and sensationalize it.” Despite his cynicism about our motives, we have sought to be fair to Whitey in this book, though of course there is no diminishing his crimes. We have tried, above all, to describe him in all his complexity.

The public record about Whitey has changed considerably, and deepened greatly, over the last decade, when the first books about Whitey Bulger appeared. The passage of time has made it easier to parse what is true and what isn’t. Many who once lived in fear of speaking publicly now open up about him. We grounded much of this book in the accounts of some of the principals in Whitey’s life, including some of his key criminal comrades. Their still vivid recollections help to flesh out long-ago scenes and dialogue. Also, some of those principals—Whitey’s criminal associates Steve Flemmi, John Martorano, Kevin Weeks—have testified repeatedly in court, making it possible to corroborate their claims in interviews with their sworn testimony. We have made every effort to verify their words and deeds, but there are times when they are the only source for what was said or done. Their recollections are detailed—almost photographic, in many cases—and they ring true, or we wouldn’t have used them. But the reader, like the authors, should bear in mind that these are what they are—recollections, from men, in some cases, with mixed motives. Others—including Weeks; Patrick Nee, one of Whitey’s rivals turned associate; and Teresa Stanley, Whitey’s girlfriend of thirty years—gave multiple interviews to the authors. Richard Sunday, Whitey’s prison friend, gave the authors many interviews and access to a series of letters Whitey sent him after his June 2011 arrest, which serve as a window into Whitey’s own version of his story and his thinking.

But the bulk of the book is based on the authors’ long and detailed knowledge of Whitey Bulger, the fruit of more than twenty-five years of reporting on his exploits, interviewing the FBI agents who protected him, the criminals who worked with him, the lawmen who hunted him down, and the families he destroyed. We have covered dozens of hearings and trials, from Boston to Miami to Los Angeles, and followed his story from Massachusetts to Florida to Ireland to Louisiana to California to Iceland. It is an account made richer by interviews with some of those who spent time in prison with Whitey and by the examination of thousands of pages from his prison file. It is a story bolstered by interviews with those whom Whitey and Catherine Greig met and befriended during their sixteen years on the run, from the bayous of Louisiana to a modest apartment complex a few blocks from the beach in Santa Monica. And it is a story underwritten by the institutional authority of the Boston Globe, which first exposed Whitey’s deal with the FBI and has driven understanding of the narrative of his life ever since.

More than anything, this book tries to capture the contradictions that fill in the silhouette that is Whitey Bulger—a man who considered himself a patriot even as he used murder and the threat of it to amass a fortune, a man who could fall asleep moments after killing someone but couldn’t watch a sick dog be put down, a man who held loyalty to be the highest moral value even as he traded damning information about friends to the FBI. There is great sweep and nuance to his story, but it is striking, in the end, how small Whitey’s world was, just a couple of miles, as the crow flies, from the soggy graves of Neponset to City Point, where Whitey regularly had dinner at the home of his politician brother. It is an epic tale with many characters, but one ultimately sketched on a very small canvas.

Shortly after his arrest in June 2011, Whitey was flown by Coast Guard helicopter from his jail cell in Plymouth, south of Boston, to the waterfront courthouse, giving him an aerial view of the shoreline. Those old graves had been dug up, the bodies exhumed, while Whitey hid in open view on the other side of the country. Now he was back in South Boston, his hometown, in chains, made to answer for those bodies and thirteen others. As he looked down from the helicopter, it may have dawned on him that he might still be in charge in his corner of this world if he had never stepped beyond those few square miles where all the shakedowns and killings were plotted and carried out, where Whitey first met his FBI handler, where, for all his misdeeds, he was embraced and not shunned by his brothers and sisters, his nieces and nephews, and his women.

Inside that narrow space, he was untouchable, protected by a tradition of neighborhood loyalty fostered on the stoops of that housing project in Southie, protected by the arrogance and corruption of an FBI and a Justice Department that tolerated murder as an acceptable price of doing effective law enforcement. His capture after a worldwide manhunt that was, by turns, intense and incurious, epic and inept, put the spotlight back on the life, the legends, the lies and the myths, on families protected and families ruined, on the neighborhood where loyalty was everything and where now, for him, it was nothing.

Reprinted from Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice by Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy. Copyright (c) 2013 by Globe Newspaper Company, Inc. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.

John Perren

John G. Perren, assistant director of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) Directorate, who has been at the forefront of the FBI war on terrorism, has been named ticklethewire.com’s Fed Of The Year for 2012.

Perren, whose tenure has been extended beyond the FBI’s mandatory retirement age, has been with the bureau since 1987.

Perren earns the award for a variety of reason. First off, someone would be hard pressed to find a more dedicated FBI agent. Additionally, he’s well respected by his colleagues, and has been known as a fair and good boss over the years, important criteria in determining this award.

Perren has worked in a variety of positions. He was the acting assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office and was special agent in charge of counterterrorism at WFO, a position that included overseeing the Rapid Deployment Team of agents to the Middle East in probes involving attacks on U.S. citizens and American interests.

Perren was one of three On-Scene Commanders at the Pentagon following 9/11. From January to June of 2005, he was the On-Scene Commander for FBI Field Operations in Baghdad, with responsibility for over 125 FBI personnel in Iraq.

In his current position, he heads up a program the FBI describes as detecting, deterring, and defeating ” acts of domestic terrorism, as well as the actual or threatened use of weapons of mass destruction.”

Perren is the fifth recipient of the ticklethewire.com award and the second FBI agent to receive it.

Last year, Thomas Brandon, the acting number two person at ATF was the recipient.

Previous recipients have included Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (2008), Warren Bamford, who headed the Boston FBI (2009) and Joseph Evans, regional director for the DEA’s North and Central Americas Region in Mexico City (2010).

Michael Mason is a retired Executive Assistant Director of the FBI.

Mike Mason/fbi photo

However, in the wake of this tragedy we need to ensure we come together to present thoughtful and effective ideas to reduce the probability of such an act ever occurring again. Arming teachers is categorically not a recommendation that should enjoy any consideration at all.

The probability of having an active shooter incident at any particular school is infinitesimally small. The ridiculous suggestion of arming teachers would actually increase that probability simply by virtue of putting thousands of guns in schools which today have none.

There is a huge difference between handing someone a gun and ensuring they receive the proper training to effectively engage that gun when required to do so.

Training is not a once and done endeavor, it must be continuous, and be required.  It is difficult enough to hit a paper target that is not shooting back at you.

Imagine the average teacher having to use that gun under the most adverse circumstances imaginable. We expect Ms. Jones, a great, compassionate, effective teacher, to now become an extension of the police department’s SWAT team?

We expect her to run to the sound of gun fire, through all the chaos and noise and effectively use that gun that has been locked in her drawer for the past 11 years? Really, can there be a more absurd notion circulating around the country.

Owning a gun and genuinely being prepared, psychologically and physically, to use it are two entirely different concepts.

I carried a gun for 23 years and in that time only experience one occasion during which I thought I was going to have to shoot another man. I did not think, “Go ahead…make my day.”

I clearly remember thinking, “Please don’t make me shoot you.” Although I was committed to doing so, I remain grateful to this day I did not have to shoot that individual. My point is that the concept of going from teacher one moment to effectively deploying deadly force in the next moment goes far beyond simply having access to a firearm.

The mass shooting in Connecticut absolutely demands that we address the issue of gun control. It is equally important that we not simply react, but rather engage in intelligent, thoughtful discussions to develop solutions that will genuinely impact this horrendous situation. Arming teachers is simply a dumb idea which deserves not a second more of serious consideration.