We should hardly be surprised when one of them snaps, for whatever reason, and takes aim at a badge. The only surprise is that it doesn't happen more often.
Pass all the tough crime laws you want. Build bigger prisons. Heat up the electric chair.
It won't stop the killing. We are too late for that.
In tourist haven, mayor sticks to guns
June 27, 1990
Another reason to plan your family vacation for somewhere else: Miami Beach Mayor Alex Daoud has armed himself with four semiautomatic handguns and a night sight.
The ostensible reason for Daoud's private arsenal is "personal protection." Presumably the night sight is necessary in case the mayor is attacked by bats.
Like many of Daoud's recent dealings, the weapons acquisition raises questions about ethics. The companies from which he received the guns just happened to be competing for a big Miami Beach Police Department firearms contract. The firm that supplied him the most guns—three Sig Sauers—got a $153,000 city contract, with the help of Daoud's vote.
Maybe this is just another weird coincidence in a long string of weird coincidences that have put the mayor at the center of a federal investigation. Maybe he's just a friendly guy who can't say no to a good deal. Or maybe he's a shameless moocher and shakedown artist.
This is something for prosecutors to decide. An equally disturbing question for the public: Does South Florida really want another of its elected officials armed to the teeth?
Tourism officials can't be ecstatic with the revelation that the mayor of one of our major destination cities turns out to be a gun freak. The truth is, Daoud is not alone in his paramilitary passion. Remember when Joe Carollo was investigated for owning an Uzi?
The trend escalated when Rep. Al Gutman posed fetchingly for an NRA advertisement with his beloved .380 Beretta. Finally a South Florida officeholder was honest enough to admit that he didn't feel safe in his own community without a reliable semiautomatic.
Gutman's full-page appearance in national magazines made it respectable for other local politicians and civic leaders to arm themselves, often with unfortunate results.
One night a few years ago, Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez left a handgun inside a briefcase on the front seat of his car. It was stolen by a thief. Acting U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen has a fondness for more powerful weapons, particularly AR-15 assault-type rifles. He has lost two of them to local burglars.
And last year the former chairperson of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, Dorothy Weaver, reported that an Uzi was stolen from her bedroom. I don't know if Uzis are now the standard-issue weapon for all Chamber of Commerce members, but it would be interesting to do a survey.
If South Florida is such a safe and desirable place to live, why are all these big shots packing heat?
A clue, in Mayor Daoud's case, is the special serial number engraved on his new Glock handgun: 007. The man thinks he's a secret agent!
Former Beach police chief Ken Glassman recounted how Daoud frequently asked to practice on the police firing range. When the chief balked, Daoud proudly produced a photograph of himself firing automatic rifles on a gun range in Israel.
The Israelis (at least those who had never visited Dade County) must have been quite amazed that the mayor of an American city would be so proficient in military skills. Watching Daoud in action, they could only conclude that Florida must be a much more exciting place than they had heard.
Let's assume that Daoud imagines himself to be a real secret agent. Why did he get four handguns? Even James Bond carried only one at a time. Maybe the mayor wanted a gun for both ankles and both hips, in case he's ambushed by enemy commandos at Penrod's.
The image of a heavily armed Alex Daoud cruising the streets is unsettling. Current gun laws can't even protect us from known felons and deranged maniacs, much less macho mayors.
Politicians shouldn't be trusted with anything more lethal than a gavel.The way things go, it won't be long before a burglar steals Daoud's heavy artillery, which will then be turned against the innocent citizenry of Miami Beach.
Let's just hope it doesn't happen during a travel agents' convention.
Live or rerun, murder is now mainstream TV
January 31, 1993
Not so long ago, parents were being warned that their kids could sneak out and buy black-market videotapes of people being murdered.
Today, snuff films have gone mainstream. You can watch them on the nightly news.
With a Miami TV crew looking on, Emilio Nunez Jr. emptied a semiautomatic handgun into his ex-wife. The tape of the killing was broadcast repeatedly by local stations, often accompanied by insightful freeze-frame analysis.
Like everyone else, I sat and watched. Pop, pop, pop. As domestic homicides go, it was noteworthy mainly for the ironic location (a cemetery), and for the forensic convenience of a camera capturing the crime.
Naturally, the Nunez tape became a hot property. TV stations all over the country picked it up. Some chose not to show the shooting, but many did. This was followed by the usual wrenching debate about violence on television—what's newsworthy, what's gratuitous gore.
Down here, there wasn't much discussion about whether to air the footage. It was a legitimate local story, extreme even by South Florida's diseased standards.
Now the crime is old news, but you can still catch the video almost any evening on local TV. Nunez's capture, his extradition hearing, his arraignment, an interview with his family—each new event is an excuse to cue the murder tape one more time.
Most stations considerately have cut the part when Nunez stands over his ex-wife and pumps slug after slug into her body. Yet some stations continue to show the jarring first shot to the head, punctuated by the cries of the interviewer.
More chilling than the murder itself is the fact that most viewers, myself included, are tired of seeing it. The Nunez tape has been broadcast so often that it no longer shocks. It should, but it doesn't.
Television has given America a unique intimacy with real-life violence. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot on live TV It was the first murder my generation ever saw, and for a long time it was the only one. There was no such thing as Insta-cam.
The Zapruder film of John Kennedy's assassination now has been viewed by practically everybody, but for many years it was kept from the public because it was considered too horrible. These days nothing is too horrible.
Newscasters warned us that the Nunez video was graphic, but I don't know a soul who didn't watch it. Crime scenes always draw a crowd; hit-and-runs, holdups, lunatic sniper sprees. Video is the next best thing to being there.
Satellites feed the morbid craving. As if there's not enough carnage here in Florida, we now get nightly recaps of the bloodiest mayhem committed across the nation. Inundated visually, our shock threshold rises with each killing we see, whether live or on tape.
Gruesome at the time, the grainy black-and-white footage of Oswald's murder today seems prosaic. By contrast, Emilio Nunez's graveyard frenzy unfolds vividly, closeup and in living color. Even so, the impact wears off after the 13th or 14th viewing; probably sooner, for our kids.
We've seen so much that we've built up an unhealthy tolerance. Numbness sets in until there's a fresh fix. And we never need to wait too long.
On Thursday, police released the videotape of a Broward store clerk shooting a robber in the head. The incident occurred months ago, but who cares? They showed it on all the channels, again and again. As a bonus they played the 911 call, too.