Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 100

In The GVP-NRA Contest, GVP Will Win.

I have been involved in the gun business since 1965, which is longer than most of the people have been alive who follow me here and on Huffington Post.  And that is because in 1965 I went down to North Carolina to work for my great-Uncle Ben who owned something called the Imperial Metal Products Co., where he manufactured a little 22-caliber revolver called the IMP.  The gun held five rounds but the effective capacity was far less, because by the third shot either the 2-inch barrel would fall off or the cylinder would crack in half.  This Saturday Night Special sold for about thirty bucks in pawn shops all over the South, and when GCA68 ended Ben’s life as a gun maker he became the Smith & Wesson law enforcement distributor for North Carolina and sold plenty of better-made revolvers to the cops.

              So there’s very little about guns and the gun business that I don’t know, and in that regard when I say that the GVP movement is soon going to eclipse the NRA, it’s not a feeling based just on hope or whimsy, it reflects what I have seen and heard over the past fifty years. The truth is that when it comes to guns as an issue of public safety, until the last couple of years the NRA had the playing field all to itself.  Every once in a great while there would be a little public dust-up, like after good ol’ Charlie Whitman climbed the Texas Tower in 1966 and killed or wounded more than 45 people in a 90-minute spree.  Or again in 1969 when the cops and the Black Panthers in Los Angeles exchanged several thousand rounds of gunfire from which, unbelievably, no one was killed. But the deliberations leading up to GCA68 hardly, if ever made front-page news, and even the gun bills passed by Clinton in 1994 were hardly front-page stories except perhaps on the day of the votes.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that the NRA is a paper tiger that will roll over and play dead every time a new GVP initiative comes down the line.  To the contrary, since the mid-90’s the gun gang has scored some notable victories, in particular a rewriting of CCW laws in nearly every state, a law gagging doctors in Florida and three other states, and a public mood shift towards more support for 2nd Amendment rights.  And of course let’s not forget the biggest victory of all, namely the 2008 Heller decision by gun-nut Scalia which says that the 2nd Amendment protects private ownership of guns once and for all.

Notwithstanding the above, I still believe that the GVP’s time has come.  First, anyone who pretends that GVP is not a strong, widespread and growing grassroots movement is either a pro-gun sycophantic noisemaker paid to say otherwise, or is blind, deaf and dumb. And let’s not forget that much of the GVP organizational activity has only been spurred since the massacre at Sandy Hook. Second, for the first time in all time we have a national Presidential candidate who is not only calling for a national GVP movement, but promises to lead it if she is elected in 2016.  And let’s not forget the remarkable GVP ads that ran yesterday during NBA games.  Nothing the NRA will ever push out on its silly video channel will ever achieve even a fraction of the audience that heard Carmelo Anthony or Chris Paul.

Last week the NRA put out a statement reminding its members that Obama, Hillary, The New York Times and every other liberal politician and publication is basically anti-gun.  They have been running this same message for the last twenty years.  But often there hasn’t been much of a response from the other side.  For the first time in my 50 years of watching the gun industry, the GVP message is loud, continuous and clear.  And it’s going to get louder, of that I’m sure.

 

Women Are Getting Into Shooting, But Not In The Way That Keli Goff Wants You To Believe.

Whether she knows it or not, feature writer for The Beast, Keli Goff, has just published an article about the alleged increase of women in the shooting sport which reads right out of the NRA-NSSF playbook on how to win friends and influence people about guns without knowing anything about guns.  Keli has unquestioned liberal credentials and a piece she did last year on guns and ghetto crime said all the right things from a GVP perspective, but this time she seems to have gone into the deep water and I’m not sure that her life-jacket can keep her afloat.

              Keli begins by noting what we all know, namely, that recent surveys show that the popular mood has shifted from gun control to gun rights, and since women have historically been more supportive of gun control than men, Keli uses the shift from gun control to gun rights as proof that women are increasingly interested in guns.

Of course making assumptions about the relationship between public opinion surveys and buying habits is one thing; proving a connection is something else.  But having obviously done well in Journalism 101, Keli knows that she needs to come up with some real numbers in order to prove her point.  And since the FBI doesn’t track or aggregate gender data from the NICS checks (I know, because I asked the FBI for this data) and at least 40% of all gun transactions occur without any background check at all (I believe this figure to be correct), Keli has no choice but to support her argument by going to what she hopes will be a credible, second-hand source.

And what source does she use?  The NRA, which is about as reliable a source for valid information about the gun business as Exxon would be a valid source for the effects of global warming.  So it should come as no surprise to the readers of Keli’s column that the NRA claimed that between 2004 and 2011 there had been a 77% increase in the number of women who own guns.  Now even if this number is true, all it really reflects is that before 2004 the participation of women in the shooting sports was virtually nil.

It would be wrong to assume there hasn’t been an uptick in female ownership of guns. After all, more than 40% of all households now count women as the primary earner and traditional male-female gender roles continue to blur or disappear.  If there has been any slight increase in lady shooters, however, it is largely due to the unending attempt by the gun industry to use right-wing noisemakers like Dana Loesch and the slightly over-the-hill Sarah Palin to promote female ownership of guns.

Know what’s really changed as regards women and guns? It’s the degree to which women have moved to the forefront of the effort to limit, not expand gun ownership, a subject that Keli Goff handles in a rather disjointed and unfair way.  To be sure she was careful to grab a few quotes from two female GVP activists, Donna Dees Thomases and Colette Martin, but she then contrasts the alleged growth of female gun owners to a “lack of momentum” in the gun-control movement of today.

Let me break the news to you gently, Ms. Goff.  I have been involved with guns since 1965 and I have never seen a GVP movement as determined, widespread and active as what I now see.  And whether it’s Colette, Donna, Shannon and so many others, what stands out in the current GVP environment is the energy, activity and public presence of women who want to see gun violence come to an end.

Keli – your story is not just short on facts, it’s a slap in the face to women whose efforts have levelled the playing field with the NRA. Your article represents quickie, digital journalism at its worst, and other than wishing you a Merry Christmas, there’s nothing more to say.

The NBA Takes On The NRA And I’ll Take The Short Odds On The NBA.

You may recall that before he was appointed Attorney General that Eric Holder gave an interview in which he said that the way to deal with gun violence was to tell kids that guns “weren’t cool.”  That statement a storm of acrimony from the NRA and its various noisemaking minions, all of whom were committed to a strategy that promoted guns to millennials and other non-traditional gun-owning demographics on the basis that they were cool.

              Probably the most outrageous attempt to sell this nonsense has been the video antics of an African-American lawyer who calls himself Colion Noir, who has been prancing around on the NRA video channel coming up with all kinds of hip and cool reasons why we should all own and carry guns.  The folks who write his scripts have come up with some kind of concocted blather about using guns for self-defense, but what’s really going on here is an effort by the NRA to capture the hearts and minds of younger minority folks, most of whom don’t appear to be all that interested in guns.

Of course the truth is that Colion Noir and the NRA in general have about as much to do with defining “cool” as the veritable man in the moon.  Most NRA members are older, White men who listen to country music and live in Southern states and smaller, Midwestern towns.  They represent a demographic that’s about as far away from anything hip and cool as could ever be imagined; getting this audience to respond to an inner-city, jive-talking Black dude would be tantamount to bringing back the Miles Davis Quintet to play the weekly barn dance at Grand Old Opry in Tennessee.

Which is why I sat up and really took notice yesterday when a group of NBA players announced that they were joining with Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown to run ads on messages about gun violence that will appear during a series of marquee games that will air on Christmas Day. The ads will feature NBA players like the Warriors’ Stephen Curry and the Clippers’ Steve Paul, along with testimonies from survivors of shootings and relatives of folks killed by guns.

I knew something was when I noticed that Spike Lee was becoming very visible on the gun violence issue, particularly when he and Al Sharpton announced a gun violence initiative following the premiere of Spike’s new movie, Chi-Raq, which is all about gun violence on Chicago’s South Side.  At that press conference, Spike and the Reverend Al pledged to hold a series of summit meeting in various cities, but you can’t begin to compare the impact of such meetings to the power and force of the ads that will appear on national tv.

These ads represent a level of interest and concern that could be (pardon my pun) a real game-changer when it comes to the national discussion abut guns. Because the people featured on these ads don’t represent cynical politicians scurrying around for votes by lamenting the loss of our ‘freedoms,’ they don’t represent noisemakers for the manufacturers who want to sell guns, and they certainly don’t represent some amateur-hour video huckster who wants you to think he’s a real dude because his skin color happens to be something other than white.

I never thought that gun violence was about race, or poverty, or inner-city life or anything of that sort.  I always thought that gun violence was about one thing and one thing only: guns.  And the remarkable thing about this effort is that every person who appears in these ads says something about guns and what guns have done to their lives and to the lives of people they love and used to love.

I’m going to catch these ads on Christmas because I want the ratings of these games to reflect how I feel about gun violence. And I don’t think it would be a bad idea if someone (hint, hint) would let us all know when future ads will appear.

 

Does Gun Violence = American Exceptionalism? Sure Does, Particularly In The South.

If you find yourself in a discussion with someone who doesn’t think that gun violence is a problem, just refer them to Jennifer Mascia’s great article in The Trace where she aggregates the data for 2015.  Or better yet, memorize some of her statistics and repeat them to the person with whom you are talking and if he doesn’t admit that we do have a gun violence problem, he can go lay brick.  Because along with some very nifty graphics, Jennifer really does look at a variety of data points that clearly illustrate how far we still have to go to change a gun violence trend that shows little, if any signs of ending soon.

Bottom line according to Ms. Mascia: 2015 is going to be a “bloody year.” And it’s not ‘mass shootings’ or domestic terrorist attacks that account for all that blood being spilled; it’s the day in, day out random shootings that claim two children every day, fifteen black men every day and more than 50 suicides every day.  No wonder Trump and the other Republican clowns don’t want any more gun laws.  After all, if you make it more difficult for people to get their hands on guns, thus making it more difficult for them to shoot themselves or someone else, you can kiss this particular form of American exceptionalism goodbye, right?

But in looking at the numbers, I’m not so sure that our affinity for gun violence is necessarily an American problem. Because like so many other things, there are some remarkable regional variations in gun violence rates, and when you break the problem down on a regional basis, just as the numbers begin to change, so maybe the discussion about gun violence needs to change as well.

In 2005, according to the CDC, 30,694 Americans were killed by guns.  This number covers every type of gun violence – homicide, suicide, unintentional injury – and it’s probably somewhat less than the real total but the CDC is as close as we can get (although the numbers from the CDC-Wonder database are slightly more accurate).  In 2014 the total was 33,599 and estimates from the GVA folks point towards another increase this year.  In 2005, the Southern census region accounted for 44% of all gun deaths; in 2014 the South accounted for 46%.  The South, incidentally, is the only part of the country in which the percentage of gun deaths is higher than the percentage of the country’s population as a whole.  Further, while the gun violence rate between 2005 and 2014 fell in the Northeast and the West and stayed just about even in the Midwest, in the South it rose by 4%. If gun violence is an exceptional American phenomenon, it’s particularly exceptional in the South.

There is one other category of gun violence which is remarkably exceptional in the South, and that’s when the shooter points the gun at himself.  We can be gender-specific here because 90% of gun suicides are committed by men. And where do most of these events occur?  In the South.  In 2005, the South accounted for 44% of all gun suicides, it rose to 46% in 2014.  Meanwhile, the percentage of gun suicides in every other region has not changed over the last ten years, even though on an overall basis, gun suicides now account for 65% of all suicides, whereas they were 40% of suicides in 2005.

I’m not sure why the South has such a love affair with gun violence, but if the Southern numbers on gun violence were similar to the rest of the country, America’s most exceptional social phenomenon would look very different indeed.  And don’t make the mistake of thinking that the South’s exceptionalism just reflects the disparity in gun violence between Blacks and Whites.  What is the only region of the country where the percentage of Whites killed by guns is higher than the percentage of Americans living in that region as a whole?  Where else?

HAVE A HAPPY AND SAFE HOLIDAY AND IF YOU GO TO A PARTY, PLEASE LEAVE THE GUN AT HOME.

The 11th Circuit Creates A Fiction To Justify Gagging Florida Doctors Who Talk About Guns.

Nobody in the GVP or medical communities (except Rand Paul) is happy with the decision by the 11th Circuit to continue upholding the Docs-Glock statute enacted in the Gunshine State.  But there was a comment in the latest decision which may, in the long run, make the argument in support of the law null and void. But before I explain why I think there may be a silver lining, I should spend a few words discussing where the case stands right now.

              As you probably know, the original law was enacted in 2011 and similar statutes have been introduced but not voted in at least 12 other states.  Basically the law prohibits physicians from asking patients about gun ownership unless the physician believes that access to guns poses an immediate health risk. But by asking physicians to limit inquiries about any matter unless they have already decided that such inquiries might reveal a medical risk is to stand the entire methodology for assessing patient health on its head.

The pro-gun bunch has been trying to push medicine out of the gun debate ever since physicians first began talking about guns as risk to health.  The gun industry continues to pretend that we should ignore endless studies which show that gun ownership is linked to increases in both homicide and suicide rates; in fact, they promote the fiction that guns are a positive social element because it’s an armed citizenry that protects us from violence and crime.

Much of the latest decision upholding the Florida law simply repeats the rather dubious claims about 2nd Amendment rights that littered the original 11th Circuit majority decision handed down last year.  In that decision, the two-to-one majority hearing the case decided that asking a patient whether he or she owned a gun put the physician in the position of deciding whether that particular patient should have guns at all; hence, a restriction on the Constitutional right to own a gun.

This seems to me and to most scholars who have examined the decision to be a stretch.  And not just a little bit.  After all, Florida law doesn’t prohibit doctors from asking patients if they engage in sex, even though sexual activity is protected under the Constitutional rights to privacy that were enunciated in Roe versus Wade. But the reason that the doctor’s 1st Amendment right to ask any and all questions is trumped by the 2nd Amendment is really based on the fact that “the balance of power between doctor and patient will often make a patient feel as if he has no choice but to listen and answer a doctor’s questions.” Hence the 11th Circuit is protecting the patient who otherwise might feel vulnerable or threatened in asserting his 2nd Amendment rights.

Judge Gerald Tojflat (who wrote the majority decision) was fresh out of law school in 1963 when the Nobel prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow published a paper in which he claimed that health care could not be understood as just another form of market economics because of the special relationship that existed between the seller (doctor) and purchaser (patient) of health products, procedures and advice.  Basically Arrow argued that patients could not exercise market decisions when choosing a doctor because of the physician’s superior knowledge and special skills.

That was 1963.  This is almost 2016. I don’t know which planet Judge Gerald Tjoflat inhabits, but he’s simply out of step with modern times. The idea that the average patient walks into a doctor’s office believing that he can’t or won’t speak up at every possible moment during a medical exam may have been typical of the doctor-patient relationship when Tjoflat was just starting his legal career, but it sure as hell isn’t true today.

Between the internet, alternative medicine, patient-centered care, patient’s bill of rights, and HIPAA, Judge Tjoflat’s notion that today’s patient feels vulnerable and helpless in relation to his physician is a relic of the distant past.  But he also probably believes that guns protect us from crime.

 

And The Winner For The Dumbest Comment Made (So Far) About Guns Is Rick Santorum.

It’s time for me to issue a challenge to all my GVP friends: Which politician has said the dumbest thing about gun violence?  I don’t want to wait until next November because, frankly, some of these guys say things that are so dumb that if we waited another ten months to announce the results, the list would stretch from here to the moon.  Or at least from here to Fairfax, VA, if you know what I mean.  So what I’m going to do is post a dumbness comment whenever a particularly stupid thing comes out of one of the mouths of the clowns who actually believe they should be elected to lead the Free World, or whatever we are calling ourselves these days.  And the dumbest remark I can come up with right now popped out of the mouth yesterday of Rick Santorum, who is evidently still running for President, at least this is what he claimed he was doing in an interview on MSNBC.

When Santorum ran against Romney for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012, most of his campaign rallies were held at Evangelical churches and other conservative Christian conclaves because he spent his entire Senate career talking about nothing except ‘family values,’ which basically meant being the loudest anti-abortion voice in the U.S. Senate and really nothing else.  Since Trump has been married three times, I guess that Santorum figures the Evangelical, or at least the white Evangelical vote is up for grabs, so why not pitch the family values message again and, in the process, make sure to remind everyone that you are pro-gun?

              Actually, I think the MSNBC co-host, Mika Brzezinski kind of got it wrong when she started off by telling Santorum that she thought he was a ‘smart guy,’ although maybe she was just being polite.  Anyway, she then asked Santorum, who had challenged American Muslims to confront extremism within their own community, how come he wasn’t challenging white men to come forward since it was white men who were ‘wreaking havoc’ with mass killings virtually all the time?

And here came Santorum’s response which I am nominating as the dumbest statement on guns that I have heard this year.  It all gets back to family values, according to Rick, and the fact that most of the crimes involving guns are caused by people who come from broken families headed by single Moms.  I’m paraphrasing slightly, but the bottom line is that what Santorum refers to as the ‘inanimate object,” a.k.a. the gun, has nothing to do with gun violence. It’s all about those kids from broken homes who don’t get proper guidance, a problem that Santorum claims he has been working on for ‘many years.’

Now let’s be honest, Rick.  When you were in the Senate, you didn’t get an A+ from the NRA for the way you voted on gun control because you had any interest at all in curbing deaths and injuries caused by guns.  In fact, according to you, none of the 100,000 gun deaths and injuries had anything to do with guns, it was and is because of the breakdown of the family, something that can only be reversed if we all pledge to adhere to your nostrum of ‘family values,’ whatever that means or doesn’t mean.

What really makes Santorum’s answer so embarrassingly dumb is not the fact that he didn’t answer the question.  It’s the fact that he didn’t answer the question by shifting the discussion to where he feels most comfortable, namely, reminding us that every social problem can be solved if we just had Ozzie and Harriet sitting in every American home.  Santorum continues to pretend that the definition of a ‘family’ can only be based on a concocted fantasy that certainly doesn’t exist today and probably never really existed at all. The truth is that gun violence comes in many different forms and grows out of many different social circumstances but it always starts with a gun.

Does It Really Matter How We Define Mass Shootings? I Don’t Think So.

When it comes to mass shootings, or I should say what to do about mass shootings, the argument is usually between pro-gun folks versus GVP folks and the argument usually turns on whether or not these shootings occur in what are called ‘gun-free’ zones.  The pro-gun strategy for dealing with mass shootings is the usual pro-gun solution for all gun violence; namely, respond with more violence in the form of arming civilians and getting rid of ‘gun-free’ zones.  The GVP strategy is, well, there isn’t a single strategy because what’s the point of trying to figure out what to do about something that we seem unable to define?

               The latest contribution to the GVP mass shooting discussion comes from Mark Follman, a Mother Jones editor, who has become a major voice in the mass shooting debate since attending the annual conference of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) at Disneyland this past August where 700 attendees talked their heads off about what to do to deal with the threat of mass shootings.  Threat assessment has become big business and the scenario painted by threat assessment companies is scary enough to convince just about anyone that we need to take all threats seriously.  Here’s why threat assessment is so important, as described by a company called At-Risk International, which provides security to “companies, individuals and families who face threats in the workplace, at home, on vacation, around the world. Kidnappers. Stalkers. Terrorists. The list goes on and on.”

The truth is that ATAP is basically a trade association representing private security companies that have transitioned from local outfits offering guard services and other basic security protections to international companies like Kroll Security, which gained notoriety when it was hired to find the personal assets of various deposed dictators like Ferdinand Marcos and Jean-Claude Duvalier. Companies like Kroll and At-Risk have been financial beneficiaries of the War on Terror for obvious reasons, so why not add another notch to the ever-expanding list of threats by protecting us from mass shooters?

Maybe an ATAP-certified threat assessment professional convinced the Disney Corporation to ban toy guns and install metal detectors at its theme parks, but if we perceive that mass shootings are on the rise and, as Follman argues, such perceptions will generate “undue fear and bad policies,” then perhaps it really is time for GVP activists to define mass shootings in a consistent and logical way.  Follman himself claims there have been four mass shootings in 2015, the Feds say there have been six, but the Shooting Tracker website says there have been nearly one every day, and of course it’s this inflated number that ends up driving the debate.

The main difference between Follman and the Feds versus the Shooting Tracker is that the latter counts multiple persons hit with bullets from the same gun whether they survived or not, whereas Mother Jones and the FBI only consider a mass shooting to have occurred when at least three or four persons get killed.  As a result, of course, mass shootings that occur in public places like Umpqua CC and San Bernardino get all the attention because the shooters go to public locations where, to paraphrase Willy Sutton, that’s where you find lots of people.

But I happen to believe that if we are concerned with eliminating mass shootings as an aspect of overall gun violence, the approach of Shooting Tracker and others who don’t distinguish between dead and injured is the way to go. And the reason I believe the GVP community should adopt this latter definition is because there’s a good chance that many mass shootings result in fewer killed than wounded simply because skilled trauma surgeons save many shooting victims who otherwise would wind up dead.

In the last nine mass shootings over just 11 days, according to the Shooting Tracker, 7 were killed and 30 were wounded but survived.  And we’re spending our talents and energies wondering how to label such events?

 

 

 

 

 

Where Do Crime Guns Come From? Not Necessarily From Where You Think.

My friends at The Trace have just published a document that has floated around gun circles since it first appeared in 2003 as an affidavit in a liability case against the gun industry that was one of a number of class-action torts which came to a crashing end in 2005.  Bob Ricker, the deposition’s author, had been an NRA attorney and gun-industry lobbyist who then went over to the ‘other side’ and began working in favor of more stringent industry regulations as a way to keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’

              Much of what is in this document was similar to what the Clinton Administration said about the gun industry when it tried to get gun makers to adopt better self-policing in return for an immunity from class-action suits.  This effort ultimately went nowhere, but much of what Ricker claims to have been standard practice in the industry has influenced discussions within the GVP community, along with shaping strategies that are followed by GVP advocate to this day.  Which therefore leads me to ask two questions: (1). What does Ricker actually say, and (2). Is what he says really true?

Here’s the key point as quoted from the affidavit itself: “The firearms industry has long known that the diversion of firearms from legal channels to the black market occurs principally at the distributor/dealer level.” Not only does the firearms industry know this, but so does everyone else.  And the fact that the industry, according to Ricker, had not taken “constructive voluntary action to prevent firearms from ending up in the illegal gun market” is, in and of itself, neither here nor there.  The reason it’s neither here nor there is that the one, voluntary action that Ricker mentions (Par. 12 of the affidavit) is that manufacturers and wholesalers could more closely monitor the sales practices of dealers, rather than just shipping guns to anyone with a valid FFL.

Ricker’s affidavit goes on to tie better policing of FFL business practices to the illegal diversion of guns to criminal hands through straw sales, gun shows and the like.  The only problem is that while we have all heard about ‘bad apple’ dealers as well as the proliferation of unregulated internet sales as two sources of illegal guns, nobody including the ATF has ever come up with an evidence-based number for exactly how many guns move from legal to illegal commercial channels each year.  Garen Wintemute estimates that as many as 40,000 straw sales were attempted annually, but he has no data on how many of those attempts actually result in a gun moving from an FFL’s inventory into illegal hands.

Let’s play devil’s advocate for a minute and pretend that all of those 40,000 attempted straw sales go through.  Sounds like a lot of guns going into the wrong hands, doesn’t it?  In fact, it’s a pittance compared to the way in which most guns in this country wind up in the wrong hands, and I don’t notice anyone talking about that issue at all.

Back in 1994, Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig published the most comprehensive survey on gun ownership that I have ever seen. Now if the Nobel Prize Committee decided to give an award for gun research, it would have to go to Phil Cook.  He not only practically invented the entire field of gun violence research, but his work, then and now, is impeccable and should be accepted without question as the best of breed.

And what did he learn about how guns get into the wrong hands?  He learned that perhaps as many as 600,000 guns were stolen every year, this at a time when the total number of guns owned by Americans was 50% less than it is now!  Are you telling me that we can have a substantive conversation about reducing gun violence without asking how to prevent the theft of guns? Gun theft isn’t the elephant in the GVP living room, it’s the whole house.

 

Do Americans Spend A Lot Of Time Thinking About Guns? An Interesting Answer From Google.

My friend David Yamane runs a pro-gun blog called Gun Culture 2.0.  In fact, what he really does for a living is teach sociology in North Carolina, and this year gave a course on the sociology of guns which included a trip to a shooting range, along with lectures on just about every facet of the gun world, along with off-line arguments with me.  Make no mistake about it, Yamane’s a pro-gun guy.  But he’s also a smart guy, a diligent researcher and someone who’s not afraid of the facts.  Which makes him somewhat unique among pro-gun folks, most of whom are about as interested in evidence-based discussions as I’m interested in staying on my diet.

In any case, he’s just published some very interesting data on his website that was inspired by a bit of internet research conducted by his wife.  The research consisted of a state-by-state listing of all Google searches performed in 2015, which caught Mrs. Yamane’s attention because one of the most popular search terms listed for their state of North Carolina was “concealed weapons permit.”  And it turns out that this term was also one of the most popular search terms in Florida.  And then it turns out that if one takes the trouble to read through the popular search terms for all 50 states, the term doesn’t appear anywhere else.

Now wait a minute.  Didn’t we just go through two months of Republican Presidential clap-trap in which every one of those clowns endorsed the idea of carrying a gun?  Didn’t Donald Trump proclaim his own preference for concealed-carry after the Virginia shooting of two journalists followed by the Umpqua mess?  I don’t ever remember anything having to do with guns playing such a central role in any political campaign, and yet the issue at the center of the argument hardly gets a ripple at all.

And it’s not as if the Republican campaign was absent from the Google search engine.  In fact, Trump and other Republican candidates were mentioned 16 times in the most popular internet searches, which was 6% of all Google search terms – to put that into perspective, ISIS was searched exactly twice. I should add, incidentally, that one-third of the search terms for Presidential candidates were racked up in New Hampshire, which should hardly surprise given the fact that the Granite State probably suffered through more political visits than all other 49 states combined.  Bear in mind that the Google listings did not break down each term by specific number of searches; it just listed the most popular searches in each state.

While concealed-carry was obviously on the minds of residents in North Carolina and Florida, there were a few other states where something having to do with guns was also a popular search term.  The term ‘2nd Amendment’ was popular in Arizona, ‘mass shootings, in Colorado, ‘gun control’ in Idaho, ‘right to keep and bear arms’ in Missouri, and believe it or not, ‘NRA’ in Tennessee.  Wyoming must be a real gun-nut state because of the 6 most popular search terms ‘guns’ and ‘AR-15’ both made the list.

So the bottom line is that of the most popular 250 Google search terms throughout the United States, something having to do with guns made the list 3% of the time.  Again, be advised that I don’t have specific metrics for each term; for all I know maybe residents in Wyoming searched for AR-15s more than five million times.  But since the state’s total population is less than 600,000, this work would have kept every man jack, woman and child busy in Wyoming for a long time.  Get it?

I think the data presented by David Yamane (and his wife) is an important contribution to the GVP debate. Because if nothing else, it perhaps reflects the fact that guns aren’t quite the mainstream issue that the NRA would like you to believe. And if that’s the case, is it really all that important whether Donald Trump walks around with a gun?

 

 

 

How Many Guns In America? Maybe Not As Many As You Think.

Now that The New York Times has decided to become a major player in the gun debate – they even have editorial writers attending gun shows – we better make sure that all our facts are straight and our arguments correct when it comes to explaining violence caused by guns.  Now I’m not concerned with getting facts from my friends on the gun nut side because like all gun nuts, including myself, we just want to hold onto our guns.  But it’s my friends in the GVP community dialoging with the newspaper that sets the gold standard for fact-checking who need to make sure they get it right.  So over the next couple of weeks I’m going to look at some of the evidence the GVP folks bring to bear in discussing guns, and I’m starting today with the most basic question of all, namely, just how many guns do Americans really own?

              We are told again and again that the size of the civilian arsenal is somewhere above 300 million and climbing fast.  Since we don’t have anything close to universal (or even partial) gun registration, this number comes from a somewhat creative extrapolation combining guns that are manufactured and imported (both of which must be reported to the ATF), plus estimates of how many guns were floating around before the ATF started compiling and publishing their numbers in 1986.  The base number that is used by researchers on both sides comes from a survey of gun owners conducted for the National Institute of Justice in 1994.  This study concluded that the civilian arsenal stood at 192 million guns which, when one adds in the annual numbers from the ATF since that date, gets us up to the 300-plus million that is bandied around today.

Both the gun nuts and the GVP are quite happy promoting a massive gun ownership number that continues to increase.  After all, if you’re the NRA, America’s oldest civil rights organization, the more guns owned by Americans, the more guns are just another mainstream, consumer product, all the more reason why we shouldn’t do anything about guns. On the other hand, the GVP community would find its recent organizational momentum slowing if, all of a sudden, gun ownership really started going down.  What does seem to be declining is the percentage of American households which contain guns – from what appears to have been maybe half of all American homes in the 1970s now appears to be roughly thirty percent.

The problem in figuring out the size of the civilian stock is that the surveys assume that once a gun gets into the civilian arsenal, it should always be counted as if it still exists and, more to the point, could be a factor in the link between the size of the arsenal and our extraordinary rates of gun injuries and gun crimes.  But anyone who ipso facto assumes this to be true may know very little about guns.

According to the NIJ report, roughly one-quarter of all guns owned in 1994 were inherited or received as gifts, a percentage which is probably higher today as the proportion of gun owners continues to go down.  Know what these guns tend to be?  Old, useless junk.  I can’t tell you how many times the kids walk into my shop with a broken or rusted gun that’s been lying around the old man’s basement and now that the old man’s carted off to the nursing home or the cemetery, the old lady says to the kids, “get rid of the goddamn guns.” The average age of privately-owned guns in the NIJ report was 13+ years, which means that for every gun recently purchased, another one was at least a quarter-century old.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not denying the obvious connection between 300 million guns and 100,000 gun injuries and deaths every year.  But if we believe that controlling those guns will reduce gun violence, we should understand which guns need to be controlled.

 

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