Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 106

A New VPC Report Helps Demolish The Argument That Guns Protect Us From Crime.

The Violence Policy Center has just released its latest report that covers shootings by concealed-carry licensees since 2007. And while it’s impossible to come up with any kind of comprehensive number that tells us how many times legally-armed citizens yank out a piece and shoot themselves or someone else, the bottom line is that this project is a welcome antidote to the NRA-inspired nonsense about how people walking around with guns protect us from violence and crime.

If it were just the case that the pro-gun gang used the armed citizen la-la to sell more guns, it certainly wouldn’t upset me very much.  After all, every legal product deserves a good marketing scheme, even if it’s a scheme developed out of whole cloth.  But this year the virtue of an armed citizenry has been elevated to a new, almost sanctified level by the entire field of Republican Presidential candidates who are using the ‘more guns = less crime’ argument to make sure that sensible reforms like expanded background checks never get discussed at all.  “New laws won’t do anything at all,“ Donald Shlump tells us, while he preens about having a concealed-gun permit even though he won’t reveal if he actually carries or ever practices shooting a gun.

                According to the VPC report, at least 763 people have been shot to death by legally-armed citizens over the last eight years.  Now this is a pretty puny number when compared to the millions of crimes that are allegedly prevented because so many people are walking around with guns.  But if you think we have no idea about the accuracy of the VPC data, let me hasten to assure you that the pro-gun gang bases their claims about the value of an armed citizenry on no data at all.  The only thing they can point to is the 1994 article by Gary Kleck which has been discredited so many times that even the criticisms are getting a little stale.  And when Kleck went online earlier this year to defend his numbers, he backed away from his original claims.

Now you would think that if a national political party has designated  concealed-carry as its wedge issue in a Presidential year, the least they would do is conduct a survey to see if what they are claiming is really true.  If it turns out that the Kleck research is as bogus as I suspect, they just don’t have to tell anyone about a new poll.  On the other hand, were Kleck or someone else to do an updated study which shows that concealed-carry really was an effective and efficient way to defend against crime, just imagine what this would do for the Republicans if this information was injected into the Presidential campaign.  After all, the Democrats have clearly decided to use gun control as their wedge issue in the coming months, so all the more reason why the Republicans should try to outflank the opposition by proving once and for all that being armed is a good thing.

There’s only one little problem.  Armed citizens don’t protect us from crime.  And the reason is because crime and concealed-carry have nothing to do with each other.  Has there been a significant increase in CCW over the last few years?  Yes.  Do all these new CCW-holders live in localities where most crime occurs?  No.  The increase in concealed-carry applications has been most noticeable in places where legal gun-owners live which are, for the most part, white, small-town or smaller city localities – places where very little violent crime ever takes place.

In defending the recent spate of Republican gun-nuttery, the half-baked intellectual Thomas Sowell insisted it was reasonable to own a 30-shot rifle magazine in order to repel home invasions by three or more thugs.  Sowell might qualify his remarkable flight from reality by looking at what the BJS says are the odds of such events happening in neighborhoods where people own guns.  The odds are zero to none.

 

Question From Milwaukee: Can Private Gun Sellers Be Sued For Negligence Too?

I’ve had some time to think about the Milwaukee case, and as the owner of a gun shop, I’m not sure that the importance of that case is fully understood.  It’s also unclear whether the defendant will appeal the verdict to a higher court; a few of the more rabid pro-gun bloggers were already at work this morning saying that a pro-gun SCOTUS would reverse the ruling, which only shows what those ‘experts’ know about law.

               Everyone keeps talking about how this case, for the first time, undercuts the 2005 federal law that immunized the gun industry against torts.  Actually, that’s not really true.  The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act followed from a long battle between the Clinton Administration and the gun industry over whether gun makers and dealers could be held liable for gun violence if a gun was used criminally even though it first entered the market through a legal sale. The PLCAA however, did not shield gun dealers from civil suits in cases of negligence or cases in which the seller violated federal laws by the manner in which he transferred the gun.

Earlier this year a gun dealer in Alaska faced a similar suit brought by the family of a shooting victim who was murdered by a man who walked out of the gun shop with a rifle without first doing any paperwork at all. In this case, however, the owner of the gun shop convinced the jury that he played no role in the transfer of the rifle and, in fact, contacted the police as soon as he discovered the unauthorized disappearance of the gun. So the negligence question obviously comes down to the issue of intent, not just whether something bad is done with a gun.

Now here’s where things get a little tricky.  The PLCAA shields manufacturers and dealers, the latter referred to as ‘sellers’ in the law.  And a ‘seller’ is defined as someone who is ‘engaged in the business’ of selling ammunition or arms.  Which means that this law immunizes FFL license-holders because the only way you can ‘engage’ in firearms commerce is if you possess a dealer’s license issued by the ATF.

Later this week I am meeting a friend of mine who is going to sell me his Winchester 9422 rifle for five hundred bucks.  It’s an original 9422, never been shot, still in the box, and when he asked his grown sons whether they wanted the rifle they both said to him, “We don’t want that old crap.”  So he’s selling it to me and since we both live in the same state we don’t have to do a transfer in a gun shop at all.  My friend goes to a state website, fills out a private transfer form with his name and mine, and that’s the end of that. Fine.

Now what happens if I take this gun, walk across the street to the neighbor whose dog keeps crapping all over my lawn, shoot his dog and, for good measure, drill one through him?  Can’t my neighbor’s family sue my friend for selling me the gun?  Your damn right they can, and btw, these kinds of transfers go on all the time.  Because the fact is that most states don’t require any kind of paperwork to be done when a gun changes hands

Let’s go back to the case in Milwaukee for a moment.  Sure, the two dopes engaged in a straw sale but the dealer was negligent because he didn’t follow the law.  The moment the gun left his shop and moved from Dope A to Dope B, the latter dope was only violating a law that said he was too young to own a gun. The two cops were shot at a much later date.

Is extending background checks to cover private transactions the only way to keep guns from moving from legal to illegal hands?  The Milwaukee verdict, it seems to me, creates the possibility that lawsuits for negligent private sales might work just as well.

The GVP Wins A Big One In Milwaukee And There’s More To Come.

Remember the NRA’s favorite slogan?  The one that goes, “Gun don’t kill people, people kill people?”  Well a jury in Milwaukee decided that it was the gun, in this case a gun sold to one jerk who actually bought it for another jerk who then pulled it out and shot two Milwaukee cops back in 2009.  Luckily the cops lived, even though they sustained serious injuries; the shooter’s sitting in a cage for the next eighty years or so. As for the guy who bought the gun, he got two years for participating in a ‘straw sale.’  The Brady Campaign helped the cops bring the suit.

                Coincidentally, the very same day of the verdict, the Democratic Presidential candidates spent nine minutes of their first debate sparring about gun control, and I noticed that Shlump Trump didn’t mention this segment of the debate at all in the snarky comments he tweeting to his infantile fan club. The nation’s Number One Clown may “love” the 2nd Amendment, but the Milwaukee verdict tells a much different tale when it comes to how the average American thinks about guns.

I wasn’t in the courtroom so what I know about the trial is second-hand, but the charge against the gun shop, Badger Guns, was that the store was ‘negligent’ in selling the gun to someone who was buying it for someone else, and this negligence then led to the shooting of the cops.  Prosecutors charged that the shop employee should have known that he was engaging in a ‘straw’ sale because the buyer kept making mistakes as he filled out the 4473, even at first stating that he was not the ‘actual’ buyer of the gun, and that no attempt was made to verify the straw buyer’s real address.

The defense claimed, on the other hand, that the gun shop was ‘set up’ because the straw buyer and the real buyer had conspired to deceive the store regarding the true identity of the person who would ultimately receive the gun.  In effect, the store was duped; hence, no negligence on its part in the later shooting of the cops.  This gun shop, incidentally, has been on the radar screen for a long time, having been the source of more than 500 crime guns in one year alone.

The bottom line in the Milwaukee case is that the average American jury is no longer enamored of the NRA and no more forgiving when it comes to violence caused by guns.  There have just been too many shootings and too much pro-gun belligerence from the NRA and other gun-nut groups like the bunch in Texas who go marching around in public showing off their guns.  Alex Yablon summed it up nicely in today’s article in The Trace:  “The NRA has a group of reliable single-issue voters who can be counted on to show up to the ballot box. The thing is, they’re always there.”  And it’s not as if the next mass shooting will motivate more people to join the NRA.

Gun rights voters have become this year’s favorite morality play for the Republicans who can’t win national elections unless they find a niche, social issue to motivate their base.  They used to have gay marriage but that’s disappeared.  They can still gin up anger over illegal immigration but new immigrants now represent too many votes.  And as for abortion, Republicans have been sitting in the White House for 23 of the 42 years since Rio v. Wade in 1973 and a woman’s right to choose is still law of the land.

When it comes to social issues, the Republicans talk big and act small.  And I think this is exactly what will happen going forward in the debate over guns.  Because once Democratic politicians realize that the NRA can’t stop background checks at the state level or lawsuits against guys who sell guns, you’ll see gun control inexorably moving forward in state after state.  Remember that 37 states already declared gay marriage lawful before the SCOTUS agreed.

Is There A Connection Between Gun Violence And Mental Illness? That’s Not The Right Question To Ask.

Over the last several months, the intersection of horrific shootings and Presidential politics has once again ignited the debate over mental illness and guns.  After Sandy Hook, the pro-gun forces took the position that mass shootings could be stopped if we ‘fixed’ the mental health system.  In the wake of Roseburg, however, even that tepid (and meaningless) strategy has been abandoned by the gun gang and their Republican allies with Shlump Trump advising us that too many mentally-ill people “slip through the cracks.”  Meanwhile, mental health professionals and researchers continue to hold to the belief that, with the exception of suicide, that there is little, if any connection between mental illness and violent behavior involving guns.

               What both sides seem to be saying is there’s no real solution to the problem of gun violence from a mental health perspective, because either there are too many crazies walking around or there’s no necessary connection between being mentally ill and using a gun in a violent way .  But deciding that a certain kind of behavior does or doesn’t reflect mental illness is one thing; understanding the behavior itself is something else.

If the evidence about gun violence tells us anything, it’s that using a gun to hurt yourself or someone else is an overwhelmingly impulsive act.  It is impulsive because in perhaps 90% of all gun violence, the shooter and victim not only knew each other before the gun was pulled out, but there had been continuous and angry or abusive contact between the two parties often for a lengthy period of time.  Obviously this is the case in gun suicides, which comprises two-thirds of all gun mortality; it’s true in most gun homicides, particularly for every gun homicide that grows out of a domestic dispute.  As for gun morbidity, which is so noticeable between the ages 15 and 25, most of the young men who present themselves in ERs and clinics with gun violence injuries previously sought medical assistance for other, less lethal injuries committed by the same assailants again and again.

Gun violence is not the usual way in which disputes are settled. In situations where two people get involved in a continuous dispute, four out of five of these arguments are eventually resolved violently or not – and here’s the critical point – without anyone pulling out a gun.  As Lester Adelson says in what remains the most brilliant article ever written about gun violence: “With its peculiar lethality a gun converts a spat into a slaying and an argument into a killing.”  But for every act of gun violence there are hundreds, no doubt thousands of spats and arguments that do not end up with someone being shot with a gun. And for the 20,000 law-abiding gun owners who use a gun to end their own lives each year, there are tens of thousands of seriously-depressed men and women who obtain counseling and assistance without ever thinking of taking out a gun.

Gun violence, particularly mass shootings, tears deep wounds in our cultural and emotional frameworks and shouldn’t be the subject of nonsensical and cynical sloganeering by entertainers masquerading as Presidential candidates who spend a few months on the national media circuit shamelessly promoting their names.  By the same token, those who are genuinely trying to do something to eliminate gun violence need to understand what is really at issue when it comes to defining a response to this national shame.

The word ‘impulsive’ means that someone engages in behavior without first spending one second considering the consequences of the act.  The good news is that nearly all of us learn how to express anger, even rage, without yanking out a gun.  Pardon the pun, but we still don’t know have a good fix on the trigger mechanism that turns violent behavior into gun-violent behavior. And if you want to yank out a piece, believe me, it will be there to yank out. Believe me.

The NRA May Think It Owns The Gun Debate But The Other Side Is Waking Up.

One of the things I’ve trained myself to do is a weekly check of the NRA-ILA website, because as don Corleone advised his son Michael, you always have to keep your enemies closer than your friends. And while I don’t consider myself and the NRA to be enemies necessarily, I do consider their continued attempts to push a very radical, pro-gun agenda to be shortsighted and ill-advised.  When I joined the NRA in 1955, it was an organization devoted to training, gun history and outdoor life.  It still devotes time, energy and resources to those activities, but the organization’s major thrust today is to promote the notion of armed citizens which I believe does nothing except increase risk.

                The real reason I’m against the NRA’s push for concealed-carry is that, believe it or not, I think CCW laws for the most part actually threaten rather than strengthen the 2nd-Amendment right to own a gun.  I say that for the following reasons.  First, the 2008 Heller decision specifically and explicitly limited private ownership to guns kept in the home, and I don’t care if all these so-called 2nd Amendment ‘absolutists’ want to yap about their God-given right to walk around with a gun, the law says otherwise, period, end of debate.  Second, Heller also vested in government the right to regulate, and there has not been a single challenge to Heller that has denied the public authority from having the last word when it comes to how, why and when people can carry or use guns.

Finally and most important, a majority, in fact a large majority of Americans don’t own guns.  That’s not true in Western states like Montana, the Dakotas or Idaho, which together have a total population 4.4 million, which is less than the body count for Brooklyn and Queens.  The moment you move into populous states however, particularly on the two coasts where more than 100 million live, per capita gun ownership begins to drop down to one out of four or one out of five.  And despite the whining of Mother Loesch about all those millions of Moms who own guns, that’s about as near to reality as how effectively she teaches her kids by keeping them at home.

Most Americans are in favor of gun ownership, as long as guns are kept out of the wrong hands.  And the only way that will happen is to let the public authority create and enforce laws that restrict gun ownership to folks who play by the rules; and I’m not talking about the rules that govern everyday conduct, I’m talking about the rules that regulate the ownership of guns.  Which is why it’s absurd that the NRA would be campaigning against background checks while, at the same time saying that every law-abiding citizen should own and carry a gun.  It’s a contradictory message and, unless you’re a diehard gun owner, it makes no sense.

This is why I found it interesting that the NRA-ILA website carried a story this week criticizing a recent report which once again found that upwards of 40% of all gun transfers occur without a background check – a loophole that has been mentioned by just about everyone who wants to see an end to violence caused by guns.  The evidence for this claim is an old survey conducted in 1994 which, according to the NRA, cannot be used to measure “anything about the American people with only 251 respondents in a survey.”  This is the same NRA that has been telling us that armed citizens prevent “millions” of crimes from being committed every year.  Where does this evidence comes from?  Another 1994 survey whose respondents numbered 221!

The NRA will never have a problem convincing gun owners that what it says about guns is sacred and true.  But the recent shootings in Virginia and Oregon may have turned the tide and 200 million non-gun owners may be asking themselves what they can do.

Want To Produce A Video On Offensive Comments About Guns? Just Listen To Carson, Trump, Fiorina, Bush, Et. Al.

Last year a photographer named Dana Spaeth-Williams put out a three-minute video consisting of a bunch of stills of kids holding placards which together delivered a standard and benign series of statements about the risk of guns.  Nothing that was said on the video hasn’t been said on thousands of other YouTube videos, none of the portraits of the children were inflammatory, provocative or anything like that.  The music was spare and haunting, the black-white contrast was artistic as could be; the video was as much a work of art as it was a political statement about gun violence today.  Evidently the video was also posted on Yahoo, AOL and MSNBC.

                To date the YouTube video has been viewed 32,115 times, which isn’t a game-breaker for YouTube by any means. It has also attracted 263 comments and garnered 337 ‘likes’ and 158 ‘dislikes;’ again, numbers which indicate that neither the pro-gun nor the anti-gun crowd is responding to the video in droves.  Nevertheless, Ms. Spaeth-Williams has produced another video, again with a lovely musical background, which is simply a series of comments that were made about the original video since it went live.  To sum up, the comments are about as nasty, ugly and (it goes without saying) stupid as they can be.  As much as we like to think we are an educated, advanced and cultured society, there are certainly some among us who still believe they can contribute to a conversation by saying the worst, most profanity-laced rants, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the topic at hand.

The second video states that the comments were culled from “thousands” of comments received from pro-gun extremists, and while I didn’t look at comments on Yahoo, AOL or MSNBC, I did read all the postings on YouTube which, I assume, would have been similar to what appeared wherever the video could be seen.  Were there lots of loony, nasty and indecipherable comments?  Of course.  Did some of the bloggers compete with one another to see who could say the nastiest, coarsest things?  Of course.  Did many of the most ‘extreme’ comments appear to be the work of teen-agers who love to say on the internet what they can’t say out loud in their 7th grade class?  Of course.

But what I found most interesting were the numerous comments that were positive, favorable and not just a quick pat on the back, but often contained serious efforts to talk about the content and impact of the video’s message, along with its clear attempt to be considered as a piece of art. In fact, I don’t recall seeing as many thoughtful and respectful reactions to any other gun-control message that has been posted online, which only proves once again that if you elevate the level of your content, you tend to elevate the level of people who respond.

Did the crazy, loony and offensive pro-gun comments upset me?  Not a bit.  Comments like “You left wing libernuts should be the first ones in the encampments like the Jews”  don’t bother me because the guy who wrote it talks to the same two or three people every day and nobody really cares what he thinks or says. Meanwhile, a guy who says the same thing to CNN is favored by nearly one out of five likely national Republican voters to be the next President of the United States. Can I really blame some poor, pathetic shut-in sitting in front of his computer all day making anti-Semitic rants when Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon no less, dismisses criticisms from a leading Jewish civil rights organization as “foolishness?” But we all know that Jews = Liberals so what does Carson stand to lose?

Hey Dana, want to make another video containing extreme and offensive statements about guns? Just splice together the words of Carson, Trump, Fiorina, Bush and all the other Republicans who have decided that protecting the 2nd Amendment is the most important problem facing America today.

 

Want To End Gun Violence? Just Keep Showing The Numbers.

I participated in my first anti-war demonstration in 1964.  Johnson had just announced the first, major troop commitment to Southeast Asia, I thought he was going to drag us into an unwinnable war, so about twenty of us walked around Times Square one day after school handing out leaflets, shouting some slogans and having a good time.  Everyone who walked past us was polite, a few actually took a leaflet, most said they had never heard of Viet Nam.  What happened over the following nine years was that public opinion shifted from not knowing, to not caring, to being concerned and finally, to being against the War.

Know when public opinion really began to shift?  When the television networks ended their nightly news broadcasts with a graphic that showed how many U.S. soldiers had been killed in Nam.  The networks did the same thing again in 1980 when each night’s news broadcast ended with a graphic showing how many days the hostages had been in captivity in Iran.  Remember who won the 1980 election?  It wasn’t the guy who couldn’t get the hostages out of jail.

                The same thing now seems to be happening when it comes to mobilizing people against the violence caused by guns.  And while the major media outlets haven’t yet caught on, the ‘daily count’ has spread throughout the internet, and sooner or later it will be picked up by the networks as well.  Or it won’t matter whether the numbers make CNN or MSNBC because increasingly we depend on ‘alternate’ internet media for our information anyhow.

The granddaddy of in-your-face gun violence calculators is the Gun Violence Archive, which was first mounted in 2013. Mother Jones has presented data and graphics over the years, ditto the Center for American Progress.  Joe Nocera and Jennifer Mascia kept up a running count for The New York Times.  But the Gun Violence Archive was the first attempt to go beyond media anecdotes and try to assemble a comprehensive, real-time analysis of all violence committed with guns.  And this is an important point, because the data from government agencies like the CDC and the FBI is either several years behind, or skewed in ways that don’t give a true picture of the damage caused by guns, or both. What you get from the GVA is a comprehensive picture of the toll of gun violence; no ifs, ands or buts.

The GVA has been joined by a crowd sourced website, the Mass Shooting Tracker, which counts all shootings in which four people are hit by bullets, whether any of them are killed or not.  This is an important element in the gun violence debate, because the FBI only counts mass shootings if four or more people are killed at the same time.  Not only does the FBI definition seriously underestimate the carnage and costs of gun violence, but it also doesn’t count shootings in which one of the victims is the shooter himself.  But this is an absurd and arbitrary way to analyze gun violence, and the MST sets it straight. You can read a good story about GVA and MST by Jennifer Mascia in the current issue of Trace.

Leave it to the pro-gun gang, of course, to try and come up with reasons why the gun-violence calculators are nothing more than “pure propaganda,” as one red-meat story claimed.  It turns out that the MST mistakenly listed 2 shootings out of 498 in 2013 involving pellet guns.  If this is the best example of the MST “padding” its numbers, the pro-gun crowd better look somewhere else.

The biggest problem facing the GVP community is enlisting and mobilizing the ‘average’ person in the debate about guns.  These websites will help turn the tide because numbers really do tell a story that goes beyond words.  When I handed out anti-war leaflets in 1964 I didn’t imagine that CBS would ever run a daily tally on how many U.S. troops had died.  But they did.  And the war came to an end.

 

 

 

Ben Carson Knows For A Fact That Jews Could Have Stopped The Holocaust If They Had Been Armed.

It’s been almost twelve hours since a shooting took place on the campus of Northern Arizona University, killing one student and wounding three others, and the pro-gun noisemakers have yet to point out that the campus is a ‘gun-free’ zone.  But if it turns out that guns aren’t allowed on the campus, I guarantee you that we’ll shortly be hearing from John  Lott, Dana Loesch and the other self-appointed Ministers of Personal Protection that once again we have failed as a society to exercise the proper response to violence, namely, to let everyone walk around with a gun.

                Actually, I should have known that even though it’s too early for him to have made a specific statement about the incident at NAU, we could count on America’s leading expert on self-defense against gun violence, Dr. Ben Carson, to say something so stupid that it really makes me wonder if he understands just how dumb he really is.  I’m referring to a comment he made yesterday on CNN in which he mentioned that the passengers on United 93 may have prevented even worse damage by rushing the terrorists who had hijacked the plane and, in the resultant melee, forcing it down in Pennsylvania rather than allowing it to crash into some other, heavily-populated site. Of course the Flight 93 passengers didn’t have guns, but neither did the hijackers, a minor point that Carson simply ignored.  But the reason he even mentioned the 2001 tragedy was to bolster his belief that anyone who is unarmed is vulnerable, and his proof of this belief is the ‘fact’ that six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis because they didn’t have guns.

This has been a quasi-official line of the NRA for a number of years, and received its formal enshrinement in a book written by the NRA counsel, Stephen Halbrook, Gun Control in the Third Reich. Halbrook argues that Jews might have been able to prevent the Holocaust had they not been disarmed by the Nazi regime in 1938.  But what he fails to mention is that the Nazis made no effort to disarm anyone else after they came to power and yet the fact that 99% of the German population were entitled to own guns did not result in any attempt by civilians to rise up against the Third Reich. The Anti-Defamation League reacted to Carson’s statement with their usual polite response, calling his comments “historically inaccurate and offensive.”  It was worse than that.  They were the product of a deranged, sick mind who is stooping to the lowest common denominator of human intelligence to try and gin up a few votes.

The argument over whether this campus or that campus is a gun-free zone is not just playing out because the pro-gun gang wants everyone to walk around armed.  It’s part and parcel of an ongoing strategy to promote guns on college campuses to get young people into ownership of guns.  As usual, the campaign is being led by Grandma Marian Hammer in the Gunshine State – the place where all laws that make it easier to own guns are first beta-tested before the campaign moves on to other states.  And you can be sure that Granny Hammer is walking around today telling all her friends in the Florida Legislature that what happened in Oregon and Arizona is proof that colleges shouldn’t be gun-free zones.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  My friends in the GVP movement need to stop being so darn polite. They need to stop worrying about protecting the 2nd Amendment and they need to stop worrying about upholding gun rights.  Most of all, they need to stop being concerned about offending anyone who actually believes that a jerk and low-life like Ben Carson should be part of the national gun debate.  I’m totally in favor of gun ownership without restrictions when it comes to hunting or sport.  Otherwise, America should be completely a gun-free zone. And Ben Carson should go lay brick.

Follow The Money Said Deep Throat. And You Can Follow The NRA’s Money With This New Website.

There’s a new website in town called NRACONGRESS.COM and it’s one you should check out.  Based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, along with some other resources, the site gives a dollar-and-cents breakdown for every penny the NRA has delivered to current members of Congress during their tenures in DC, along with their NRA rating and recent votes on key bills.

                What a surprise to learn that of the 241 Congressional members who have ever received any money at all from the NRA, 234 are Republicans.  But the 114th Congress counts 301 red members, which means that 60 Republicans in the House and Senate have never received any NRA money at all.  I find this somewhat puzzling because the Republicans hold a 4-seat majority in the Senate and a 30-seat margin in the House.  If all the Democrats supported a gun-control measure, they could get it to Obama’s desk if they only picked up half of the Republicans who don’t receive any dough from the NRA.  I thought that when it comes to gun issues, money buys votes.

On the other hand, maybe there are other reasons why the NRA wins more than it loses on Capitol Hill.  For example, the last several days have witnessed one heckuva political firestorm in the House chamber with the open rebellion of the Tea Party’s ‘liberty caucus’ which resulted not only in the resignation of Speaker John Boehner, but then the quick self-elimination of his supposed successor, Kevin McCarthy, who quit even before his candidacy was put to a vote.  You would think that the most conservative members of the House Republicans would benefit from NRA largesse, but only 25 of the 40 liberty caucus members have ever received NRA support, and their totals average about half of what other House and Senate members have received from the NRA. I can’t imagine that any of these ultra-right politicians vote against the NRA; yet 40% of them, according to the NRACONGRESS website, have never received a dime.

What the list of NRA recipients seems to show, more than anything else, is that what really counts in DC when it comes to picking up cash is seniority.  For example, the Number One NRA money hog is Rep. Don Young from Alaska, who has received $104,650, the only member with a tab in excess of 100 grand.  But Young has been sitting in the House since 1973, which means he has been re-elected 21 times.  And that works out to just under $5 grand each time the election rolls around.  Hell, they’re getting him cheap.  Ken Calvert, who represents the 42nd C.D. in California has been on the take to the tune of fifty big ones, but he’s rolled through 11 electoral contests which also works out to less than five grand each time. Hal Rogers from Kentucky has been re-elected 16 times, so the $59,200 that he’s bankrolled from the NRA looks like chump-change to me.

One thing that’s clear from the website is that, with a couple of exceptions, there’s no love lost between the Democratic Party and the NRA.  And while the total amount of cash that the NRA spreads around at the Federal level is peanuts when compared to what comes in from lobbies representing lawyers, bankers and insurance agents, the pro-gun money floating around Congress is ten times as much as what is spent by the other side.

But I’m not so sure that the imbalance between NRA versus GVP money means all that much when it comes to counting votes. A quick back-and-forth between NRACONGRESS.COM and the 2014 election results shows that of the 18 ‘swing’ House races won by Republicans, only 2 of those candidates received any money from the NRA. Which means the NRA was not a real player when it came to deciding the contests that moved the House from blue to red.  Is a national fundraising effort by the GVP community to re-establish a 2016 Democratic House majority within reach?

Know What Ben? It’s Time For You To Shut Up.

Ben Carson isn’t the first physician to run for President and, in fact, isn’t the only doctor trying to get into the White House in 2016.  He may be the only board-certified doctor, because it’s not clear whether Rand Paul is certified or not.  Carson certainly is.  All the more reason that when he says something which violates the Hippocratic Oath we should ask whether he has the credentials even to claim that he’s a bone-fide physician, never mind credentials to be the next President of the United States.

Let me make one thing clear about the Hippocratic Oath.  It’s not mandatory either to subscribe to it or to follow it.  There are some medical schools that don’t, in fact, administer the oath to new graduates, there are also various versions of the oath floating around.  But the Hippocratic Oath is a reminder that medicine is a profession whose effective practice requires attention not just to science and learning, but to compassion and ethics as well.  After all, we vest the responsibility and often the authority for making life and death decisions within the medical profession.   So it’s heartening to know that this profession expects its members to think and behave according to certain basic and well-tested rules.

                And rule number one is: Do No Harm.  Now these words aren’t, in fact, found in the text of the oath itself.  But ask any physician to tell you what it means to subscribe to the Hippocratic Oath and he or she will state either those exact words or words to that effect. Which brings us to the recent statements made by Ben Carson following the slaughter at Umpqua Community College that produced a sickening amount of harm.

The first statement was on Ben’s Facebook page, although he scrubbed it when the responses began pouring in.  Nevertheless, here’s the exact quote:  “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.”  In other words, if Carson was practicing in a locality that had very strict gun-control laws like, for example, Washington, D.C., he would claim that the inability of a D.C. resident to carry around a handgun was a greater medical risk than if that same individual was brought into the ER with a bullet lodged in his head. So much for Carson’s ability to stratify gun violence risk, adopt the proper medical response and thereby reduce harm.

Just to make sure that ol’ Ben keeps his bone fides alive with the pro-gun crowd, he then went on CBS and said that if he were facing a mass shooter, the first thing he would do is put up a fight.  He would also advise other people in the vicinity to do the same thing. Of course macho man Carson has absolutely no idea of the degree to which such behavior increases risk, and if you don’t believe me, just take a look at the active shooter guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security: Run, hide, if all else fails, fight.

Every time Carson opens his mouth about gun violence, he says something that increases risk.  If he wants to say something stupid, that’s fine.  But when he advises people to do something that increases risk, he’s not just being dumb, he’s violating the Hippocratic Oath.  The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has posted a petition asking Carson to apologize to the survivors and victims’ families at Roseburg because of the comments he made on Facebook and ABC.  The petition says that Carson’s remarks are “offensive and beyond the pale.”

I think it’s now time for the medical community to tell their colleague Ben Carson that he should stop putting the initials ‘M.D’ after his name. Because no doctor who takes his work seriously would make statements like that. Ben doesn’t  just offend the Umpqua survivors, he offends the profession which he claims to represent.  Shut up Ben, just shut the f***up.