Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 112

When The NRA Talks About Gun Safety, It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means.

With all the talk about how easy it is to get a gun through the internet, it figures that sooner or later gun dealers would start using wireless apps to spread the word about products, prices and where a gun nut should go if he wants to pick up another gun.  And the company that is kicking off this new venue is owned by a family now in its third generation of using media to promote guns.  The company, GunDealio, is the brainchild of Tom and Ryan Gresham, whose father and grandfather respectively was ‘Grits’ Gresham, who got into outdoor sports journalism and was host of the ABC television show, American Sportsman, from 1966 until 1979.

The new company is another offshoot of the Gresham media empire called GunTalk Media, which produces television and radio shows about guns and shooting and in particular is known for a radio show called GunTalk, which is syndicated nationally and usually plays Sunday afternoons on whatever AM talk-radio station captures the gun-owning crowd.

                The GunDealio app, which can be downloaded to iOS or Google, allows gun dealers to list whatever special deals will get customers into their stores.  As the number of app-holders grows, the plan is to let each gun shop push a notice or ad onto the mobile devices of everyone in the market area of that store, which means that as someone goes cruising down the street on the way to wherever they want to go, all of a sudden they’ll get a text or a pic which tells them to make a quick turn right in order to stop off and save thirty bucks on a new Glock.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Greshams or someone else would sooner or later come up with a mobile app that promotes the sale of guns.  Gun buyers are first and foremost hobbyists, they love to wander in and out of multiple stores and they’ll think nothing of taking off on a Saturday afternoon after they’ve finished the ‘honey-dos’ and driving fifty or a hundred miles to drop into two or three gun shops.

What I found interesting about the GunDealio story was not the use of mobile sales ‘push’ technology, which is becoming a standard part of sales and marketing strategies no matter what consumer product category is being discussed.  Rather, that I found interesting was the description of the mission of GunTalk Media which, according to the Greshams, produce shows that focus on “firearms, hunting and personal safety.”

Whoa!  Personal safety?  You mean media productions that explain the hows and whys of using guns in a safe way?  Just goes to show how little I really understand about an industry with which I have been involved for nearly forty years.  Because when the Greshams talk about ‘personal safety,’ they’re not talking about locking the guns or locking them away.  Actually, they get a fair share of advertising from companies that manufacture gun safes, but that has nothing to do with gun safety from their point of view.

What the Greshams mean when they use the term ‘gun safety’ is what the entire gun industry really means when they trot out that phrase, namely, how to use a gun to protect yourself from crime because –read the rest of this sentence closely – that’s the most important reason to own a gun.  I took a look at the last 10 podcasts listed on the show’s website, and half dealt primarily with products for self-defense.

Grandpa Gresham, who got the whole family into gun media in the first place, was an outspoken guy who wrote nine books on hunting and fishing and, as far as I can recall, never spoke about using guns for anything other than hunting and sport.  And that’s what the gun business was all about before the crazies took over the NRA and invented the stupid and cynical, but ultimately successful marketing strategy known as armed, self-defense.   Too bad the legacy of sportsmen like Grits Gresham is disappearing thanks to the efforts of people who bear his name.

A New CRS Report On Mass Shootings And The NRA Says Things Are Getting Better All The Time

Only the NRA and mad-dog sycophantic blowhards like John Lott could celebrate the latest study from the Congressional Research Service which shows that nearly 2,000 people were killed or injured in mass shootings between 1999 and 2013.  The NRA claimed that mass shootings were “rare,” despite the efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and his media allies to whip up fears about such events; Lott went right to work to make sure that we all understood that any increase in mass shootings were “statistically insignificant” over the fourteen years covered by the CRS report.

I find it a little sickening when a self-appointed bigmouth for the gun lobby dismisses the gun carnage in this country as ‘statistically insignificant.’  Because misrepresentations to the contrary, we are the only industrialized country that generates this type of crazy, homicidal behavior on a year in, year out basis, and the CRS study makes it indisputably clear that the frequency of these attacks is going up.  But before I explain how my reading of the report is at such variance with the way the report is characterized by the NRA, let’s examine the methodology and findings in detail.

Texas Tower

The FBI has always grouped mass murders into two categories: (1). ‘classic’ mass murders;  (2). ‘family’ mass murders.  The former involves a ‘mentally disordered individual’ whose victims are generally unrelated to him; the latter, often referred to as ‘familicide,’ grows out of a domestic dispute and usually involves both a partner and children.  The report highlights many analytical problems with this approach, and replaces it with a three-pronged categorization:  public, familicide and other felony shootings.  In a public shooting, at least one killing occurred in a public location whereas other felony shootings grew out of some underlying criminal activity; i.e., robbery, criminal competition, etc. Mass shootings of family-related individuals involved in criminal activity is defined as a felony event.

Of the 1,557 people killed in these three types of mass shootings, 37% were victims of familicide, 34% were victims of other felony shootings, and only 28% were mowed down in public venues.  I say ‘only’ because the NRA says the same thing in its summary of the CRS report; i.e., “only” 446 people were killed in public venues.  What the hell – that’s nothing.  The NRA then goes on to simply lie about the report when it states that “while anti-gun groups would like to portray mass shootings as being most often committed with ‘assault weapons,’ the CRS study found that between 1999 and 2013, less than 10 percent of mass shootings were committed with any firearm capable of using a detachable magazine holding more than 10 rounds.” That’s not what the report says.  It says that 27% of mass public shootings involved an ‘assault weapon,’ and since the average  number of murders in public shootings is 50% higher than the average  number of murders in either of the other two categories, it’s pretty hard to escape the possible link between the lethality of the weapon and the body count which then occurs.

Finally, as to the increase in mass shooting activity which both the NRA and mad-dog Lott are at pains to deny, since 1999 the national gun murder rate has steadily decreased by more than 50%.  The mass public shooting rate, on the other hand, spikes up and down, depending on whenever a particularly lethal event (e.g., Sandy Hook) takes place.  Over the fifteen-year period, however, the annual number of incidents has not dropped one bit and, in fact, shows a slight uptick over the final five years covered by the report.

To my mind, the most important finding in this study is that in 80% of all mass shootings, it appears that the shooter knew some or all of his victims before the event occurred.  This is in keeping with what is generally the case with homicides; i.e., it’s a personal affair.  What turns these arguments into mass murders?  The gun, nothing but the gun.

Want To Be Told That Guns Aren’t A Threat To Health? Publish Research Which Shows That They Are.

It didn’t take seventy-two hours following the publication of a reasoned and respectful JAMA editorial on physicians counseling patients about guns before the self-appointed NRA medical sycophant, Timothy Wheeler, issued his usual pronouncement that doctors represent the enemy when it comes to anything having to do with guns.  Actually, I blame the Hospital and Health Networks blog for letting Wheeler crawl out from underneath his proverbial rock, because the truth is that to present him as some kind of medical authority on gun violence is to grant him a level of professional credibility that he doesn’t deserve.

The JAMA editorial, co-authored by two noted gun researchers, Drs. Marion Betz and Garen Wintemute, represents a very important step forward in the discussion about doctors and guns.  It follows from a “call to action” issued in April by eight professional medical organizations (plus the American Bar Association) that urged physicians to become more engaged in the issue of gun violence,  notwithstanding the heavy-handed effort by the gun lobby to legally de-franchise medical professionals from any connection to this issue at all.

                The NRA has been pissing and moaning about public health and clinical views on gun violence for more than twenty years, and Wheeler is often quoted whenever relevant research is published and, in time-honored fashion, the media needs a comment from the “other side.”  I wouldn’t mind if Wheeler had ever conducted any research at all to justify his views on guns, but in fact he is a polemicist pure and simple whose pro-gun opinions come right out of the NRA playbook but are delivered with heightened authority because his name is followed by the initials ‘M.D.’

His latest salvo, written in response to the JAMA editorial, asserts that, “Physicians get no training in firearm mechanics, safety, or tactics in medical school or residency. They simply are not qualified to counsel patients about firearms.”  There was a time when physicians didn’t focus on health risks like obesity and tobacco companies routinely doctors inhaling a Lucky Strike cigarette in their ads. When the medical community decided that enough research had been conducted to classify obesity and tobacco as risks to health, doctors learned how to counsel patients by asking questions and, based on responses, dispensing appropriate medical advice.  Wheeler has never attempted to deny the reams of medical research that shows that the risks of gun ownership far outweigh the gains. Instead, he pompously and falsely accuses physicians of using that research to promote a ‘political’ point of view.

What kind of advice does Wheeler feel is appropriate for doctors to share with patients about guns?  You can find the answers in a book he published, Keeping Your Family Safe.  Most of the book is devoted to a warmed-over version of NRA training materials that describe how guns work, how they should be cleaned and how they should be stored.  Wheeler, incidentally, has absolutely no professional credentials in any of these areas, nor in self-defense laws and self-defense tactics, both of which are covered at length in this book.

I have absolutely no issue with anyone pushing guns as a means of self-defense; what offends me is the notion that guns represent the only or even the most effective way to respond to a possible or actual criminal event.  It’s not true, and there is no evidence-based research that proves it to be the case.  In fact, the latest research demonstrates that using a gun for self-protection is not only a rare event, but is no more effective than other protective actions, such as running away or calling 911.

After medicine took the lead in anti-smoking campaigns, the end result was that one out of two adults who smoked dropped to one out of five. Imagine what would happen to the gun industry if gun ownership followed a similar trend. If Wheeler wants to save the gun industry, he should stop pretending to be a medical expert and do what he does best, which is to figure out ways to sell guns.

What Do Doctors Need To Tell Patients About Guns? That Guns Are Lethal No Matter How Safe You Are.

This week the online version of JAMA contained an important editorial by two noted gun violence researchers.  Their editorial followed from a February “call to action” issued by the eight leading professional medical organizations promoting the idea of greater physician engagement in dealing with gun violence, notwithstanding the attempts by the NRA to legally de-legitimize the ability of doctors to talk to patients about guns.

The authors of the editorial, Drs. Marion Betz and Garen Wintemute, believe that physicians need to develop what they refer to as better ‘cultural competencies’ in order to overcome the alleged suspicions that gun owners harbor about medical professionals who try to talk about their ownership and/or use of guns.  I say ‘alleged’ because I have yet to see a single, bone-fide survey that actually quantifies the anti-physician attitudes the NRA has worked so hard to stir up. The fact that a group of red-meat Florida legislators say “yip’ every time that the NRA lobbyist Granny Hammer says ‘yap,’ doesn’t prove anything at all about how the average gun owner would feel if his doctor initiated a conversation about guns.

                Betz&Wintemute present no data on the attitudes of gun-owning patients but there are surveys of physicians which indicate that the majority of medical professionals don’t know enough about guns to feel comfortable raising the issue of gun violence within the context of clinical care.  And the authors are certainly correct in calling for the medical community to find ways to remedy their lack of communication skills. But with all due respect to the very important research conducted by Betz&Wintemute over the years, I am still not convinced that a growth of cultural competence in the area of gun violence should primarily focus, as they suggest, on counseling about the safe use and storage of guns.

In 2013, as the authors note, 117,894 men and women were killed or wounded with guns. But less than 15% of these injuries were considered accidents, or what the CDC calls unintentional events. Now don’t get me wrong: 17,369 accidental shootings is a serious health issue in and of itself.  And anything that can be done to lessen the impact of these events on the victims, their families and the medical system which has to respond to the problem should certainly be put into effect.  But what makes gun violence such a disturbing social and medical phenomenon is the fact that each year at least 100,000 among us make the conscious, often impulsive decision to pick up a gun and use it to shoot ourselves or someone else.  Last year the CDC called 24,000 Ebola cases in Central Africa an “epidemic.”  What do you call 100,000 cases of gun violence in the U.S. every year?  A day at the beach?

If the medical community is going to take a more dynamic approach to gun violence, I think that increasing communication skills regarding safe storage and gun safety is putting the cart before the horse.  Betz&Wintemute are correct in suggesting that effective counseling has to reflect the individualized nature of every clinical interaction, but the real problem that physicians face is not learning how to tell a gun-owning patient to lock up or lock away the guns; it’s learning how to identify patients who are prone to engage in gun violence, regardless of how they store their guns.

Adam Lanza’s mother dragged him from one shrink to another.  At no time did a medical professional ask why her home was virtually littered with guns.  Elliott Rodger, who shot 17 people in Isla Vista, California, had been seeing therapists since he was eight years old.  Not a single medical society has yet to adopt clinical guidelines to help physicians identify at-risk patients before they pull out a gun. Doctors are hardly the only group who can give advice on safe storage of guns.  But what only they can do is identify and treat risks to health.  And anyone who believes that a gun doesn’t represent a health risk doesn’t know much about either one.

We Can Solve Gun Violence Not By Getting Rid Of Guns, But By Getting Rid Of Doctors.

Sooner or later the gun-nut lobby would begin to notice that groups that want to do something about the 100,000 gun deaths and injuries that occur every year have begun talking about gun safety.  And while I’m not sure the issue is clearly understood by these groups, just the fact that they are moving into a space that has always been completely defined and owned by the NRA is enough to get the gun-nut noise machine off and running, the first salvo appearing in a statement from none other than Dr. Timothy Wheeler whose website, Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, can be counted on to promote every loony, pro-gun idea imaginable, whether it has anything to do with medicine or not.

Wheeler’s statement, “Gun Safety is the New Gun Control,” tells you exactly where the gun nuts are going with this issue; viz, that nothing anyone other than gun nuts say about gun safety should be taken seriously, because everyone else is simply trying to get rid of guns.  And since one of these safety campaigns comes out of the Everytown group, and since we all know who funds Everytown, what more proof do you need?

                I joined the NRA in 1955 and learned both sportsmanship and safety from the NRA instructor who met each week with my NRA-sponsored rifle club.  The NRA was formed as a training organization and you really can’t train people to shoot guns unless you also train them how to shoot guns safely.  Which the NRA has been doing since 1871.  And they do it very well.

But there’s one little problem with the NRA’s approach to training, namely (to use a medical term) it’s contraindicated by the organization’s endless and continuous attempt to sell gun ownership based on the idea that armed citizens protect us from crime.  It’s not true, it appeals to the most primitive human emotions of insecurity and fear, and it’s a cynical and dangerous effort to sell more guns.

When a gun is used to commit a suicide, a homicide, an injury or a threat, this constitutes an unsafe gun.  We make a mistake discussing gun safety with reference only to accidents, or what the CDC refers to as “unintentional” injuries from guns.  The NRA would like you to believe that suicide is an issue of mental health which has nothing to do with guns.  And homicides and assaults are crimes which also have nothing to do with guns.  After all, it’s not guns that kill people.  It’s people who kill people, right?

Last weekend, three people were killed and sixteen wounded by gun violence in New York City.  There were the usual flurry of news reports, a street-corner news conference featuring irate community activists, the as-always ‘we will do everything we can’ bromides from de Blasio and Bratton, and then business gets back to business.  If the media reported that three people had died over the weekend in New York City from Ebola, I can guarantee you that you could walk through Times Square today and you’d have the place to yourself.

When a virus that killed 30,000 people in Central Africa over one year is brought under control, we thank our lucky stars there’s something called the CDC.  When a noted clinician named Katherine Christoffel  refers to guns that kill 30,000 Americans every year as a virus, she’s attacked by a crackpot like Tim Wheeler as “reckless” and a “raving ideologue.”

There’s no question that different strategies are required to deal with accidental as opposed to intentional shootings.  There’s also no question that anyone who counsels gun owners needs to be mindful of their passion and enjoyment that is too often ignored when an argument heats up about guns. But if anyone thinks that pushing physicians out of the debate on what to do about 30,000+ gun deaths each year will make it easier to find a solution to this problem, then either they don’t think that gun violence is a problem or they should, in the words of my friend Jimmy Breslin, go lay brick.

 

 

Want To Bet That Guns Sales Will Remain Strong In The Years Ahead? I’m Not So Sure.

Far be it from me to inject a note of pessimism into the gun industry’s continued success in convincing America that guns are a benefit and not a risk.  After all, would anyone have predicted the recent Gallup poll which shows that a majority of us now believe that we need less, rather than more gun laws?  And how does the gun-control community deal with the latest research from Pew which shows that a majority of Americans now believe that guns keep us safe from crime?  And then there’s the proliferation of concealed-carry licenses which were virtually unknown in most places twenty years ago but are now issued without question in more than 40 states.  And let’s not forget, of course, the legal imprimatur handed to the gun industry with the Heller decision in 2008.

                While it’s been a tough, uphill battle for the gun-control movement of late, I’m not sure that anyone should consider throwing in the towel.  Because what’s really interesting about all those success indicators noted above is that they seem to be happening just at the point in which certain trends which might foreshadow a very rocky road ahead for the pro-gun community are beginning to emerge.  And don’t get me wrong – I’m not pro-gun or anti-gun.  I’m just, as always, trying to tell it like it is. And this is how it is.

At the same time that legally, socially and culturally gun ownership seem to be more mainstream, the number of Americans who own guns keeps going down.  The latest studies indicate that slightly more than one-third of American households contain a legal gun, but this percentage was as high as 53% in 1976.  And since the average American household has slid from 2.9 to 2.5 persons during this same period, even the absolute growth in the total population means that the number of Americans who have access to legal guns continues to go down.

Once we begin to qualify gun owners beyond the raw number who own guns, the trends become even more bleak.  The industry has made a valiant effort to build a market among women, minorities and new shooters in general, but the truth is that gun ownership is still largely a choice embraced by older, White men.  And it is precisely the older, White men who are lagging behind the growth of such demographics as single women, new immigrants and minorities – the latter groups responsible for the increase in America’s population as a whole.

But if there’s one trend that should concern the gun industry vis-à-vis the future of gun ownership, it’s a trend that isn’t tied to gun ownership at all.  Rather, it concerns how the millennial generation is shaping its view of the world which will ultimately determine what American society thinks about everything, including guns.  What Pew Research refers to as the “relative liberalism” of Millennials is a serious, long-term problem for the pro-gun community because if there’s one thing that defines and divides conservatives and liberals it’s the issue of guns.  I’m not saying there aren’t a few liberals out there like me who happen to be gun nuts in their spare time.  But I can’t remember the last time a member of the Democratic Party addressed a meeting of the NRA.

Here’s a new survey which should give the gun celebrants some pause:  Only 19% of the age group 18-29 gets their news from Fox; more than 50% learn what’s going on around them from NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Public TV, and another 10% rely on Jon Stewart or Colbert!  None of those media outlets are in any way or shape pro-gun, and this could be a decisive factor in determining the place of guns within our society in the years to come.

 

Are Mass Shootings More Frequent This Year? This Seems To Be The Case.

It looks like that if we learn anything from the Louisiana shooting, we’re going to learn that another shooter might have played the loopholed NICS system to his advantage and gotten his hands on a gun.  Back in 2006 Daniel Houser applied for a concealed-weapons permit in Alabama and was denied based on arson and domestic violence allegations.  In 2008 he was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital in Georgia and his then-wife convinced the court to have his guns removed from their home before he was released.  This action should have resulted in a denial when Houser purchased his killing gun in March, but the system only delayed his purchase by one day.

So here we go again.  There will be all kinds of hand-wringing and I-told-you-so’s about how and why NICS doesn’t work, followed by some vague mumblings in Congress about expanding background checks to private sales.  Meanwhile, officially the NRA will keep a low profile but their unofficial loudmouths will be out there reminding us again that we would all be safe from such carnage if we just got rid of gun-free zones.  The best comment came from Bobby Jindal, who’s desperately trying to keep his feet or at least his fingertips in the Presidential race: “Now is not the time to discuss gun control,” he said, although he didn’t set another time for the discussion to take place.

                Are multiple shootings (two dead and nine wounded in Louisiana) more common recently or are such events just being followed more closely by the digital press?  According to the Mass Shooting Tracker, it seems to be a combination of both.  So far this year their website lists 203 events in which four or more people were hit in the same location with gunfire that came from one or multiple shooters. Last year this website listed 283 total mass shootings so 2015 promises to exceed that rate by maybe 25%.  The good news is that ‘only’ 25% of the people hit with bullets in 2015 ended up dead, whereas 32% of the victims were killed in 2014. So the shooters are shooting less straight or maybe the trauma surgeons are perfecting their skills.

What impresses me about this website is exactly why it is being criticized by pro-NRA hucksters, namely, that it departs from the FBI definition of ‘mass shootings’ which counts only incidents in which four or more persons are killed.  The website cites the example of a mass shooting in 2012 where the gunman opened fire in a nightclub and killed only one person but a total of seventeen other people were struck by bullets, most of which came from guns carried by other patrons who were attempting to defend themselves.

Now here’s a perfect example of what happens when civilians carry guns into places that are not gun-free zones.  A gun goes off, then everyone starts banging away, and before you know it, there are injured bodies all over the place.  Remember the incident in Waco this past May when shooting erupted in the Twin Peaks restaurant and before it was over 9 bikers were killed and another 18 were treated for wounds?  I don’t recall whether the restaurant was a gun-free zone or not, but there were lots of guys in the food joint that day who obviously didn’t know and didn’t care.

We have a problem in this country called gun violence and we’re not going to solve it by ‘fixing’ a registration system that hasn’t changed in more than twenty years; it’s not going to be solved by putting the discussion off for another day; and it’s certainly not going to be solved by asking every law-abiding citizen to walk around with a gun.  It’s going to be solved when the idiots who claim to speak for gun owners finally come clean and admit that guns with 3-inch barrels can’t be used for hunting or sport.  At that point, a meaningful discussion about gun violence might take place.

 

 

 

The NSSF Believes That Walking Around With A Gun Is A Natural And Normal Thing.

It’s getting to the point that the slow but steady decline in the number of Americans who own guns appears to be provoking the gun industry and its advocates not just to promote the idea that a gun is the best and safest way for people to protect themselves, but to present concealed-carry as a natural and normal way to use guns.  The normalization of CCW can be found in a new online publication from the NSSF called First Shot News, The Newsletter for Beginning Shooters.  It contains seven articles, and five of the seven articles or videos focus on tactical shooting, which is a polite way of saying that you are going to use a gun to shoot someone else.

                Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that anybody who subscribes to any NSSF online newsletter is thinking of using a gun in an unsafe or illegal way.  And I’m also not saying that they will ever use a gun except to have an enjoyable afternoon on the range with some friends.  What I am saying, however, is that consumers are told that this particular consumer product is the best way to protect themselves and society at large from any kind of physical threat.  So you’re not just buying a gun to protect yourself, buying and carrying a gun is a civic good.

And here’s how that message is conveyed to new shooters by the NSSF.  David Dolbee begins his article on choosing a holster like this: “One of the primary reasons people begin shopping for a holster is because they’re planning to carry a firearm concealed.”  Another article on short-barreled pistols advises new shooters that short-barreled guns are necessary in order to carry-concealed, but because of their compactness they aren’t much fun to shoot.  There’s a “First Shoot Shooting Drill” presented by Claude Werner, the tactical professor, whose website includes a link to “Gun Battles to be Remembered,” and the featured article is by the First Shots manager, Tisma Juett, who has put together some 60 shooting “seminars” even though most of them will be held at just 6 or 7 different sites.

Tisma’s article starts off with the usual bromides about the importance of safe storage, but she gets right down to the nitty-gritty when she asks her readers “Have you considered how you safely store your firearm when carrying concealed?” And if you need a bit more help to understand the point of her remarks, she concludes her safety advice to new shooters by stating that “When time is of the essence, you need to know where your firearm is and how to draw it out of the holster and into a position to shoot safely and even quickly.”

When time is of the essence for what?  For defending yourself against the possibility that you might be the victim of a criminal attack?  I don’t care how many times John Lott, Gary Kleck and the other self-defense fetishists continue to re-invent the sick idea that guns prevent millions of crimes from taking place.  It’s sick because those arguments appeal to fear, have no basis in fact and increase risk.  The last time Lott trotted out that stupid argument he couldn’t make any real connection between CCW and rates of crime, ending up whining that the two trends were “associated” with one another, whatever that means.

It’s time for my friends in the gun-sense community to say it loud and clear: You can’t call for CCW on the one hand and call for gun safety on the other.  It’s a contradiction in terms and pro-gun organizations promoting such nonsense should be called to account for what they are really trying to do, namely, make concealed-carry a normal and natural activity so that people will buy more guns. But the truth is that walking around with a gun isn’t normal and natural unless you also happen to be wearing a law-enforcement shield.  And anyone who thinks otherwise should go back to the O.K. Corral.

It’s Not A Matter Of Good Guys Versus Bad Guys – It’s A Matter Of Life And Death.

So now it turns out that, despite what Trump and other publicity-mongering idiots are saying about Chattanooga, that the recruiting centers attacked by Mohammed Abdulazeez may not have been gun-free zones at all.  Nobody’s yet going completely on the record, and nobody knows all the facts, but it appears that at some point during the rampage, the incoming fire at the Navy Operational Support Center, which was the second location hit that day, may have been matched by outgoing fire from guns carried by a Navy Commander as well as by one of the slain Marines.

                The shooter was ultimately stopped in an exchange of gunfire between himself and local police who followed him from his first destination at a strip mall adjacent to an interchange on the Lee Highway to the Naval Reserve Base on the Annicola Highway that skirts the Tennessee River just north of the center of town.  There definitely was an exchange of gunfire between Abdulazeez and personnel at the Navy facility; it’s not clear whether the Glock pistol found on the body of one of the dead Marines had been fired in response to the attack.

How long did it take the NRA and the gun lobby to get their rhetorical guns-for-hire out there to denounce the gun-free policy at military facilities that was initiated by the first President Bush?  The shooting first started at 10:30 A.M. and ended within 30 minutes of when it began.  Within eight hours after the shooting ended, John Lott was on the Lars Larson radio show telling everyone that the shootings occurred because both locations were gun-free zones. He put it like this: “Time after time attackers go after targets where the victims can’t defend themselves.”

But in this case, legally or not, the victims not only could defend themselves but obviously tried to defend themselves.  And what ended the shooting was what always ends multiple shootings where an individual shoots people at more than one location – the cops who arrive in time and bring the situation to its tragic end.  In fact, the FBI studied 160 of these shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found exactly five events, 3% of the total, which ended because an armed citizen intervened.

I have no issue with anyone who decides that a particular facility, public or private, requires the presence of armed guards.  I would hate to see an armed guard standing outside my house of worship, but if the congregation decided they needed to pay for such protection, by all means let them pass around the collection plate again.  Ditto with any other place where people might feel they need protection, including armed force.  But the gun-free zone nonsense being promoted by the NRA and its sycophants like John Lott has nothing to do with going out and hiring competent, well-trained armed guards.  It’s just a shabby and cynical way to push concealed-carry and more gun sales.

Here’s how Lott expressed it on the Larson show: “There are now 13 million people who have concealed-carry permits.  They’re all over the place.  If you go to a restaurant or a bank there’s a good chance that somebody nearby you will have a gun.”  So what?  I don’t mean in any way, shape or form to besmirch the beloved memories of the servicemen whose lives ended tragically and needlessly in Chattanooga last week.  But several of them were carrying guns and may have used guns, but the rampage ended when the folks who are trained to use guns showed up at the scene.

I want to end with a comment directed at my friends in the gun-sense community who, along with everyone else, were shocked and horrified at the Chattanooga events.  You are engaged in a serious fight with adversaries who want you to believe that this is an argument about Constitutional rights. It’s not.  It’s an argument about life and death and their proposals to protect the former only increase the risk of the latter.

Why Should Doctors Ask Patients About Guns? Here’s Why.

Over a period of three days in June 2014, an agitated and obviously extremely upset young man named Christopher Hampton showed up seven times at hospitals in Fargo, ND, claiming that his roommate, who was also his cousin, was trying to poison him.  During one of the visits, Hampton was tested for poisons in his system but the tests showed only traces of marijuana and amphetamines.  He was told on several of these visits to seek psychiatric care but was not considered to be a danger to himself or anyone else.

On June 26, shortly following his last encounter with medical practitioners, Hampton went back to his apartment, grabbed a gun and shot his cousin to death.  At his trial, which is going on right now, Hampton had obviously regained his composure to the point that he was claiming self-defense and may testify that a series of arguments led up to a serious fracas in which he was victim, not assailant, and had no choice but to defend himself with a gun.  But the last witness to testify for the prosecution was a pathologist, Dr. Mark Kaponen, who noted that the entry wounds were in the back of the victim’s head, which is a pretty interesting way to shoot someone if you’re using a gun in self-defense.

                The way things are going, it looks like there will be somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 homicides committed this year with a gun.  And most of these shootings will involve perpetrators and victims who not only knew each other, but had been engaged in an argument or a series of arguments for hours, days or weeks leading up to the fatal event.   As Dr. Lester  Adelson put it in a classic article: “With its peculiar lethality, a gun converts a spat into a slaying and a quarrel into a killing.”  I actually prefer Walter Mosley’s more prosaic statement:  “If you carry a gun, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.”  Either way, the bottom line is that what we have in the Fargo homicide is a classic mixture of drugs, an argument and a gun.

But there was something else about this case that needs to be addressed and understood.  The fact is that the shooter, Christopher Hampton, certainly tried to draw attention to himself in the days leading up to the tragic event.  He visited health facilities six or seven times, he made it clear that he was concerned about his own welfare and safety, he may have made some pretty nutty statements about his cousin, but that was exactly the point.  People who walk into a medical facility under their own free will and say crazy, delusional things need to be taken seriously, not just told to ‘go home and relax.’ In fact, Hampton had previously been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder but stated that he had stopped taking his prescribed meds. How many red flags did this young man need to wave?

In fact, he waved one more, the reddest flag of all, because he told a cop just before the shooting that there were guns in the apartment and asked the cop to take them away.  The police officer decided there was no criminal activity going on and declined Hampton’s request to seize the guns. Two hours later, Hampton shot his cousin to death.

According to the NRA, there’s no reason for physicians to even ask patients about gun ownership unless the patient poses a clear health risk.  But how does a clinician know that a patient has stepped across that line?  How could anyone know for sure that Christopher Hampton’s delusional behavior would lead to a life-ending event?  The point is we don’t know, which is why doctors need the widest possible latitude in asking questions about the presence and use of guns.  And anyone who truly believes that physicians should not be concerned about guns is as delusional as Christopher Hampton the night he ended his cousin’s life.