Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 113

There’s Nothing Like Openly Carrying A Handgun To Protect Us Against Everything – Real Or Imagined.

In the weeks following the unspeakable gun violence in Charleston, there was one public voice notably absent, namely, the NRA.  As opposed to the belligerent screed from Wayne-o after Sandy Hook, this time America’s “oldest civil rights organization” kept their collectives mouths shut.  Well, almost all of them did, and the one exception was Charlie Cotton, a Board member from Texas, who quickly posted a statement blaming Clementa Pinckney for hastening his own demise because of his opposition to guns, and then just as quickly took the post down.

                Good ol’ Charlie epitomizes the Mark Twain saying, “it’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”  And if you don’t believe me, here’s a few samples of other Cotton comments obligingly sent to me by a friend.  In February, he supported a bill that would have eliminated corporal punishment in Texas public schools with this gem: “a good paddling in school may keep me from having to put a bullet into him later.”  He once referred to Black-on-Black shootings as “thug on thug,” and in case the readers of his blog didn’t get the not-so-veiled, racist comment he added, “cops know what I really mean.”

In addition to proving his stupidity on issues far and wide, Cotton has also been a driving force behind the NRA-backed gun legislation in the Lone Star State, including the recent law that legalizes “open carry” of handguns in public venues.  The open-carry question has a contentious history in Texas; just last year the NRA publicly scolded a group of Texans who were parading around a fast-food outlet with AR rifles in plain sight, but the ensuing uproar on the part of open-carry activists forced the NRA to back down.

For our boy Charlie, the zeal of open-carry proponents in Texas has been a difficult fence to straddle, given the ambivalence of the NRA towards the spectacle of open-carry demonstrations on the one hand, while not wanting to piss off the open-carry fringe on the other.  In 2013, when then-candidate Greg Abbott was willing to support whatever loony idea would get him a few more votes in the race for Governor, he endorsed the idea of open-carry of handguns, and ol’ Charlie pulled a classic on-the-one-hand-this-but-on-the-other-hand- that, by supporting the legislation but warning Open Carry Texas and other nut-job groups that sitting in Starbucks dangling AR-15s might lead to public “panic.”

Now that open carry of handguns is legal in Texas, our boy Charlie Cotton still finds himself in something of a predicament, because it’s not quite clear what mainstream America thinks about turning every American city into the O.K. Corral.  The NRA’s post-Charleston silence is a pretty clear indication that the whole notion of gun ownership may still be up for grabs, 2nd Amendment or no 2nd Amendment.  And this came home to me last night when a friend sent me ol’ Charlie’s latest comment about open carry on his blog, in which he claimed he was still in favor of concealed carry because letting everyone know that you own a handgun might result in you being “attacked or burglarized” if a thug who saw the gun decided to follow you home. For that matter, sitting in IHOP with an unconcealed handgun would make you an immediate target if a “6-man hi-jack team” hits the store intending to do something other than ordering waffles and grits.

Did Charles Cotton, who happens to be a licensed attorney, actually make a public statement conjuring up the image of an IHOP invasion by a “hi-jack team?”  Let’s not forget that Texas is where a serious internet discussion is being carried on by residents who truly believe that a Pentagon-directed military exercise called Jade Helm is actually the beginning of a federal invasion of Texas, followed by martial law and the seizure of all guns.  If Charlie Cotton and the NRA have decided they need such paranoid lunatics to promote the ownership of guns, the gun-sense movement is much closer to victory than they believe.

 

 

Here’s A New Chapter In The Great DGU War.

The latest salvo in the DGU War has been shot off, and this barrage may go a long way to permanently cripple the argument that guns are used several million times each year (ergo, Defensive Gun Use)to prevent crimes.  DGU has been the rallying-cry of the ‘armed citizen’ and concealed-carry movements since the gun industry decided that personal protection would replace hunting as a way to sell guns.  And any time a politician wants to pander to a right-wing base (and there’s going to be lots of such pandering over the next 16 months), he can always prove his love of the 2nd Amendment by  insisting that gun ownership protects property and saves lives.

                The idea that guns are used each year to prevent millions of crimes was invented by a criminologist, Gary Kleck, who published a survey in 1995 of 225 respondents that was immediately promoted by the pro-gun community and still remains the so-called proof that a gun in hand every day keeps the criminal away.  I say ‘invented’ not because of the significant analytical lapses that have been pointed out again and again, but for the very simple reason that he did not ask the respondents to describe in any way, shape or form the actual crime for which their access to a gun kept from taking place.  What Kleck only learned is that some 220 people thought they were going to be the victims of a crime, not that any crime could or did take place.

Now you would think that testing the ability of people who randomly answered their telephone to create a make-believe scenario about something that may or may not have happened would be dismissed out of hand as just so much intellectual junk.  But I don’t remember the last time pro-gun folks argued for an extension of concealed-carry onto college campuses or other public venues without citing Kleck or other proponents of DGU.

A long-time critic of Kleck has just published a new DGU study that uses as its inclusion criteria an admission by the survey respondent that an attempted or completed crime actually occurred.  And the survey data, drawn from the National Crime Victimization Survey, goes to great lengths to validate that what the respondent says about the criminal incident can more or less assumed to be true.  And this survey, based on interviews covering 14,000 criminal events, is that defensive gun use before or during the commission of a real crime is a pretty rare event.  Not only did a DGU occur in less than 1% of the total crimes (127 events) but the result when the victim used any kind of defensive action was basically the same as when the victim defended himself or herself with a gun.

You can get details of the study in today’s article in The Trace, written by the Armed With Reason duo, DeFilippis and Hughes, who tangled with Kleck earlier this year. They make a persuasive case for the strength of the analysis in this new piece, but I suspect that the pro-gun noise machine will reject their arguments, as well as defend Kleck’s DGU nonsense on the following grounds.  First, they will argue that since Kleck asked respondents about whether they used a gun to stop a crime before it occurred, comparing such behavior to situations when a gun was used after the crime began to take place is to make a comparison that simply isn’t fair.

The second and to me much more important reason why pro-gun and DGU proponents will dismiss this new work is that, when all is said and done, these folks have no interest in any discussion about guns that is rooted in evidence-based facts.  I don’t know what Kleck was thinking when he devised (and still defends) a survey which made no attempt whatsoever to validate what people said, but his work comes in handy when it comes to selling guns.

Want To Know Why You Should Carry A Gun? Ask Governor Abbott.

For twenty years I have been listening to the nonsense about how ‘armed citizens’ make us safe.  And alongside this fantasy has been the companion stupidity, namely, that it’s not just that carrying a gun is a good thing, but carrying a gun in plain sight is even better.  Be advised, incidentally, that there is not a single piece of credible research which proves either of these safety strategies to be true.  But where is it written that a public policy or the statements of a public official need to be backed up by credible research?  Or any research, for that matter.

Just this week the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, assured the good citizens of the Sovereign State of Texas that he would personally make sure that an upcoming military exercise called Jade Helm, was not, in fact, an “invasion” of Texas by Federal armed forces.  You can’t blame Texans for being worried about the Federal government coming in with troops to do whatever they are planning to do.  After all, remember Waco?  And since Abbott’s predecessor, Jim Perry, used to regularly shoot his mouth off about plans for Texas to secede for the second time, who knows?

Greg Abbott

Getting back to Abbott, as I said, he’s been a leading proponent of open-carry laws and just last month signed a bill that allows Texans to openly display handguns in most public places throughout the state.  The law exempts college campuses from open carry, but a bill that would close this loophole will probably be passed later this year. Earlier this year the NRA actually demonstrated a brief moment of sanity by advising its members to ‘stand down’ and stop openly carrying guns in restaurants and other public places; this brief display of fortitude, however, was reversed within two days with a public apology from the NRA to all its gun-totin’ members in the Lone Star State.

If Governor Abbott believes that pandering to the open carry crowd is going to keep Texas from moving politically from red to blue, he might be in for a big surprise.  The increase of Hispanics in Texas has become so great that they could represent a majority of the electorate in 2016 – assuming that every eligible voter actually registers and shows up to vote.  And when it comes to gun ownership, Hispanics don’t seem to be enamored of the 2nd Amendment in a way that bodes positive for the gun industry in Texas or anywhere else.  Despite an endless barrage of noise about how “new” shooters like women and minorities are swelling gun-owning ranks, the fact is that gun ownership is still concentrated in the same demographic where it has always lived, namely, older White men in rural areas, second-tier cities and smaller towns.

Which is why I found a tweet by Abbott sent to me by a friend last night so interesting and deserving of a comment today.  Because for the first time since the whole ‘armed citizen’ rubbish started being promoted twenty years ago, someone has finally come out and explained the real reason why the NRA and the gun industry want you to walk around carrying a gun.

Abbott’s tweet, pasted up on July 8, was in response to a message from a guy named Rupert Ellis announcing to the world that he was about to open his first gun shop in Texas, although it appears that the shop won’t probably be open to the public for another few months.  But sending an announcement to the Governor is a clever way to drum up some publicity, particularly when the Governor actually responds!  And here is Abbott’s response:  “Welcome to the gun business.  I hope open carry boosts sales.”

Bingo! Greg Abbott has finally done what no single pro-gun organization or gun nut has ever done, namely, admitted that the real reason for promoting the notion of the ‘armed citizen’ is to boost the sale of guns.  Congratulations Mister Governor, you’re the only honest one out there.

A Modest Suggestion To Memorialize Victims Of Gun Violence

Yesterday I read about a new project of the Equal Justice Initiative organization to place memorial markers at the 4,000 sites where Blacks were lynched in the South.  This project follows from the Initiative’s publication of a , Lynching in America, that documents 3,959 lynchings between 1877 and 1950, at least 700 more than previously known.  As I read the interview with Bryan Stevenson, who founded and heads the EJI, it awoke the emotions I felt when I first viewed plaques on buildings in Paris memorializing Jews who were sent East by the Nazis and never seen again.

Bryan Stevenson

So in the words of Jonathan Swift, I want to make a modest suggestion to the folks who have committed themselves to bringing an end to gun violence in the United States.  And this suggestion is aimed primarily at organizations and individuals who are working against gun violence in communities where the human toll from guns – Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, DC – is a ceaseless and unending event.  Why not consider placing a permanent memorial marker where someone has been gunned down?  The markers in Paris are no bigger in many cases than six or eight inches wide; a gun-violence plaque that size could easily be affixed to a wall or a tree.  And I’m thinking this might be an interesting way to draw more attention to the scourge of gun violence, in particular because it would build a permanent consciousness about what gun violence really means.

Last week I drove through the North End of Springfield, MA, where the gun murder rate this year will probably be the highest of any city its size in the United States.  As I went past a particular corner, I could tell from the yellow tape, the cop cars, the onlookers, the ambulances and the body covered by a sheet, that a shooting had taken place within just a few minutes before I arrived at the scene.  I drove past that same corner thirty minutes later and everything that had marked the spot as a murder scene was gone; someone walking down that block for the first time that day would never know that a human life had brutally and tragically ended on that sidewalk the very same day.

Physically memorializing the place where someone was gunned down would not only raise and retain consciousness about gun violence, it would also be an appropriate way to counteract the pro-gun argument about guns which rests on the notion that most perpetrators and victims of gun violence, particularly inner-city gun violence, are criminals who got what they deserved.

That argument happens to be often tinged with racism and is simply wrong.  Don’t be fooled by the fact that a majority of gun shooters and victims are, chronologically, young adults (although many are still in their teens).  Mentally and emotionally, they are kids.  And like all kids they are impulsive and have no awareness of risk.  They carry guns because it’s “cool,” or because some older kid told them they should carry a gun, or for some other stupid, childlike reason.  But most killings and injuries from guns do not occur during the commission of other crimes.  To quote the brilliant Lester Adelson, “With its particular lethality, a gun converts a spat into a slaying and a quarrel into a killing.”

In memorializing the victims of this particular form of infantile senselessness, we aren’t paying homage to the work of street criminals and thugs.  We are saying that every human life is sacred, everyone needs to feel safe, and people who lose their lives to guns deserve to be remembered by the community in which they lived.  There’s one block in Springfield – Franklin Street – where two people were murdered in two successive May weeks. The first victim, a woman, was remembered two days later when classmates from the commercial college she attended released some balloons in her name.  Now the street’s back to “normal” until the next killing takes place.

What’s The Best Way To Defend Yourself? A Gun Or An Iphone.

This morning’s email feed from The Trace contained a link to an article in the online Forbes Magazine about the sale of a new iPhone case that looks like a gun.  The article wasn’t particularly positive about the product; in fact, it was downright negative, listing 15 different reasons why something could go “very, very wrong” for anyone who paid $51 for what appears to be something made in Japan or at least shipped from Japan.  The Gun Grip Case as it’s called is evidently no longer for sale on this particular website, which features all kinds of products from Japan, but a competitive product for $24.99 has already appeared in another online store.

                God Bless America – if there’s something out there – anything – which costs money, you’ll find someone in our great country who’s willing to buy it. But aside from our desire to shop until we drop, I found the content and tone of the article somewhat disquieting because why should an organization like Forbes which is committed hook, line and sinker to free enterprise look so negatively at someone’s attempt to make a legal buck?

And the reason may lie in the fact that the Forbes reporter, Tara Haelle, spends most of the story interviewing an attorney named Emanuel Kapelsohn, who is identified as the Vice President of something called the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors, which is sponsored by just about every major gun and ammunition manufacturer around.  Kapelsohn is quoted as saying that the Gun Grip Case is a “stupid, stupid, stupid product that should never be sold,” and the article then goes on to list no less than 15 reasons to support Kapelsohn’s point of view.  Here’s a couple of real doozies right off the list:

Someone could mistake the iPhone for a real gun.  Huh? They could?  It sure as hell doesn’t look like a gun to me.  Actually it looks like exactly what it is: an iPhone stuck on a plastic gun.
A cop could shoot someone waving it around or pulling it out of their pocket or purse. I thought that cops had to be able to pass a vision test in order to be a cop.
A cop could injure or kill a bystander in attempting to address the perceived threat. See # 2 just above.

And in case these reasons aren’t enough to keep this product off the market, Kapelsohn who is also an attorney is quoted as saying that the company making this product will “absolutely be sued out of existence.”  Has Kopelsohn ever gone into Wal Mart and noticed all the air-soft guns that look a lot more like a real gun than anything that this Japanese company is trying to sell?  For that matter, how come gun companies haven’t been sued out of existence in states that allow residents to walk round with real guns that aren’t concealed?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that Kopelsohn’s concerns aren’t genuine or real.  What I am saying is that the problem isn’t whether or not someone can walk around with a droid or any other kind of gadget that looks like a gun.  The problem is that people are walking around with the real thing in their pocket and if somebody pulled one of those out and waved it around, Kopelsohn would no doubt have the same concerns.

Or would he?  One of the corporate sponsors of his training organization is an outfit called Team One.  And they run training classes for all kinds of shooting skills, including one course called “Concealed Carry Instructor Workshop,” which is described as a course that “is designed to merge combative handgun techniques with everyday carry and concealment of the personal handgun.”

I love the idea that Kopelsohn’s organization is sponsored by a training company like Team One. Frankly, I’d rather be sitting next to someone whose iPad is attached to a plastic gun than someone with the real thing in their pocket just waiting to engage in ‘combative handgun techniques.’

Even When The NRA Fudges The Facts, It Doesn’t Really Matter At All.

I just received my weekly email call to arms from Chris Cox, who runs the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action.  It’s not really a call to arms, it’s a call to my wallet so that the NRA can continue to protect my 2nd-Amendment rights.  And this week’s appeal has a cute twist to it because it solicits me to take a poll called the 2015 Gun Rights Action Survey.  So in the interests (to quote don Corleone) in keeping my friends close but my enemies closer, I opened up the poll and I want to share the questions with you.

Basically the poll asks me whether I support or oppose laws that have been introduced at the federal level and in various states.  The answers will go a long way, according to Cox, to refute the lies told by Obama, Hilary, Mike and the rest of the gun-grabbing gang which, if left unchallenged, would surely result in my guns being taken away.

Chris Cox, NRA-ILA

Here’s a question which illustrates the kind of ‘lie’ the gun grabbers want me to accept: “Do you support or oppose H.R. 1217 – a new proposal in Congress that would implement Barack Obama’s national gun registration scheme?”  Of course I oppose it. What freedom-loving American wouldn’t oppose it?  How dare Obama try to set up a national registration that will then lead to confiscation, right?

Duhhh . . . wrong.  Because if you take the trouble to actually read the text of H.R. 1217, you’ll discover that the bill does nothing of the kind.  In fact, what it does is provide money to help states update the mental health records that they are supposed to send to NICS, a policy that the NRA has been supporting for years.  Remember Wayne-o’s demand after Sandy Hook that we need to “fix” the mental health system at the same time we put an armed guard in every school? I got news for you – that’s exactly what this bill does.

H.R. 1217 was introduced by Peter King (R-NY), who got a ‘D’ rating from the NRA because he voted for a bill that would have provided some scant, and I mean scant regulation over gun show operators.  He also voted for several bills that would have made gun dealers liable for the “criminal misuse” of any gun they sold, and he also voted ‘yes’ to require NICS background checks to be completed within 24 hours if the gun was purchased at a gun show. So King is hardly any kind of rock-ribbed gun grabber, but tell that to the folks who work for the NRA-ILA.

In any case, his H.R. 1217 bill does the following: it gives grants to states “to improve the automation and transmittal of mental health records and criminal history dispositions.” There’s some other boilerplate language but that’s what the bill does.  Period.  Want to know what it doesn’t do? It doesn’t “allow the establishment, directly or indirectly, of a federal firearms registry.”  Now I’m not paraphrasing or summarizing the bill – I’m quoting the language directly.

So how does a piece of legislation that specifically prohibits the creation of a ‘federal firearms registry’ turn into a bill that would “implement Barack Obama’s national gun registration scheme?”  I’ll tell you how.  It happens because Chris Cox simply lied.  Period.  End of story.  And want to know why he can lie with such impunity?  Because nobody who gets this email is going to read it anyway, nobody other than a few miserable contrarians como yo.

The NRA has done a superb job creating an army of devoted and loud followers who not only believe everything they’re told, but want to believe it, no questions asked.  And they know they can depend on the NRA to stick up for their gun rights, even if they catch Chris Cox in a little lie.  The problem with gun-safety advocates is they believe their concerns about gun violence should align with the facts.  It’s time to wake up to the fact that the other side doesn’t care.

Gun Nuts Discover The Trace And Guess Who Wins?

It took about three weeks for The Trace to earn its first rave review from the gun-nut community in the form of a rant delivered by Larry Keane, a Senior Vice President at the NSSF.  And it only took Larry less than two sentences to deliver what is always the first and foremost reason why something, anything is a threat to all those nice folks who own guns, namely, the word Bloomberg which works every time.  Come to think of it, I can’t recall any statement by the NSSF over the last several years about alleged threats to gun ownership that hasn’t mentioned the word Bloomberg, unless the statement substituted the word Obama for Bloomberg, although many NSSF rants about threats to gun ownership usually mention both.

Since this online newspaper got some start-up dough from Bloomberg, there’s no question that you can’t trust anything it says.  And gun owners, according to Keane, are wise to the nefarious ways of Bloomberg because they know just how biased and anti-gun he is.  The proof that the pro-gun community is savvy to the Bloomberg anti-gun strategy is the fact that The Trace “has readers outraged over one-sided reporting on issues and reckless disregard for facts.” Which is an interesting statement coming from Keane since nowhere on the Trace website do we find any statement from readers at all.

                I guess what Keane is referring to is The Trace Facebook page which, like all Facebook pages, does allow visitors to make statements about content that is posted on the site.  So in the interests of fairness, I thought I would test the NSSF’s claim about the degree to which readers are “outraged” by all this one-sided, anti-gun reportage spewed forth by the Bloomberg cabal on this new site.  I chose as my test of Keane’s assertion a link back to a story about the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s plan to melt down 3,400 guns seized over the past year, a Facebook posting which in the following 15 hours received almost 80 comments from viewers of the page.

Before I share the results of my little survey, I should say that there aren’t many things that piss off gun-nuts more than the destruction of guns.  After all, we know that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  So why get rid of the guns?  I’ll tell you why: because the Los Angeles County Sheriff is caving into pressure from gun-grabbers like Bloomberg who want to get rid of all the guns.  And what better way to get rid of guns than to melt them down? That being the case, if readers are truly “outraged” by the anti-gun bias of The Trace, we should certainly find this outrage expressed in the comments posted on their Facebook page.

So I read all the comments about the gun meltdown and if this story provoked reader “outrage,” all I can say is that I’d love to see my weekly Huffington column generate such an outrageous response.  Here’s an example of the kind of outraged reader comments posted on the site, beginning with the initial comment to which five other readers then made a response:

Comment:  The Los Angeles police department should sell those guns and distribute the proceeds to various crime diversion programs. …

Response #1: You honestly believe that is the solution

Response #2:  NO ! Read the article , the whole idea is to destroy the guns SO THAT they cannot be used against innocent people ever again !!

Response #3: The point is to get guns off the street DA

Response #4: My point exactly.

Response #5: So, selling guns to people who can pass background checks automatically means these guns will be used against innocent people? Basically, gun owners that can pass background checks are “guilty until proven innocent”.

 

Some outrage, right?  And what I have reproduced above is fairly typical of the comments attached to every story posted by The Trace.  The NSSF won’t ever admit that a gun story can be published which would generate thoughtful, intelligent and respectful comments from both sides, because they don’t want the gun debate to be based on informed opinion or facts.  Which is exactly what makes The Trace such a threat to gun-nut promoters like Larry Keane.

 

 

 

 

Want To Take On The NRA? Make Sure You Know The Facts.

I bought my first real gun when I was twelve years old, have maybe owned 300 to 400 guns since.  Don’t ask me why I’m a gun nut, I just am.  Now a report has been issued which, for the first time, attempts to quantify the size of the gun nut population, or what is called social gun culture.  And based on a ‘nationally representative’ survey of 4,000 respondents, the number of gun nuts is roughly 14 million, which is based on what the survey believes to be 13.7% of the 100 million Americans who own guns.

Wowee – Kazowee!! Can there really be 14 million other gun nuts like me?  If this were true, I’d have lots more gun shows to visit every weekend, lots more gun shops with guns I just have to own.  The problem, however, is that I don’t think these numbers are true because I’m not persuaded that the survey questions which elicited the data are the questions that should have been asked.

              To begin, the survey reports that 29.1% of the respondents answered ‘yes’ to one of six questions used as indicators to capture the number of people who own guns.  One of the questions asked whether the respondent had attended a gun safety course; another asked whether the respondent advocated gun safety.  I happen to live in the only state (MA) that requires a safety course prior to the purchase of any kind of gun, a majority of states require no course at all, so the response to this question from a ‘nationally representative’ sample is meaningless at best.  As for advocating responsible gun ownership, 606 answered ‘yes’ and 3,394 answered ‘no.’  Since 1,200 respondents are presumed to own guns, does this mean that at least half of all gun owners would say they were against responsible ownership of guns?  Give me a break.

As to the overall number of gun owners and, by extrapolation, the number of those owners who are gun nuts, again I don’t get the warm and fuzzies from the manner in which the research team analyzed the results.  Again, the survey was based on a ‘nationally representative’ sample, so I have to assume that every respondent lived at a different address. Which means that the 29.1% who were identified in the survey as gun owners was really a count of households which contained guns, and not a count of individual gun owners themselves.  If the survey counted gun-owning households, then the 29.1% figure would be similar to what other polls have recently found.  And if 14% of these households contained one gun nut, then we are down to around 4 million of us gun nuts, which happens to be the official membership figure claimed by the NRA. And yes, I’m a Life Member of the NRA.

Don’t get me wrong.  My criticisms of the report should not be taken as a lack of respect for the work and diligence of the research team which conducted the survey and analyzed its results.  My concern, rather, is the degree to which the attempt to define gun culture and the behavior of gun owners may not reflect a clear understanding of what guns mean to the people who own guns, use guns and define themselves in terms of guns.

Want to figure out who likes guns?  Ask how often someone has been in a gun shop over the past six months.  Because people who make multiple trips to a gun shop really enjoy their guns.  Dropping “the wife” off at Wal Mart and spending a half hour playing with guns is a much better indicator of gun culture than whether someone bases their opinion about someone else because the latter person does or doesn’t own guns.

If understanding gun culture, in the words of the report, is important for developing “prudent” gun policies, then you’re stepping on the NRA’s turf in a very big and direct way.  So you better make sure that your information is fundamentally correct.  In this respect, the new report falls a bit short.

 

They’ll Do It Every Time: CDC Gun Research Gets Defunded Again.

“Listen, the CDC is there to look at diseases that need to be dealt with to protect the public health. I’m sorry, but a gun is not a disease. And guns don’t kill people; people do. And when people use weapons in a horrible way, we should condemn the actions of the individual, not blame the action on some weapon. Listen, there are hundreds of millions of weapons in America. They’re there. And they’re going to be there. They’re protected under the Second Amendment.”

And who said that?  Not Wayne-o of the NRA, not that bunch from Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, and certainly not one of the five SCOTUS justices who decided back in 2008 that the 2nd Amendment gave Americans the Constitutional right to own guns.  It was, in fact, stated last Thursday by John Boehner, Speaker of the House, to explain why he and his colleagues voted against CDC-funded gun research for the thirty-eighth time since the CDC was first defunded back in 1998.

                Now you can accuse John Boehner of lots of things, but being an expert on Constitutional law isn’t one of them.  So when he makes a comment about what the Constitution protects and doesn’t protect, at best you have to take it with a grain of salt, at worst there’s a good chance that he’s dead wrong.  In the case of what he said about the 2nd Amendment, it’s not so much that he’s right or wrong; it’s more that he’s just mouthing what he’s been told to say by whichever friendly NRA lobbyist told him to say it.  And in this respect he’s saying what he and his colleagues have been saying ever since the NRA decided to use the ‘guns don’t kill people’ slogan as an unofficial tag-line on bumper stickers and other promotions, even though the phrase has been floating around popular culture since nobody knows when.

I happen to be writing a book on the 2nd Amendment at the moment, so I have read Scalia’s majority opinion more times than I can count.  But in light of Boehner’s comment, I went back to the text once again, just to make sure that I hadn’t missed something or misunderstood what Scalia actually said.  Because the fact that the SCOTUS decided that guns are “protected” doesn’t explain exactly what the 2nd Amendment actually protects, and for that explanation we have to go back and refer to the 2008 Heller decision again. And here’s exactly what it says: “In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”

Now it turns out that in 2013, the last year for which we have complete data according to the FBI, 281 Americans were justifiably killed by other Americans, of whom 223 were killed with guns.  Most of these killings occurred during the commission of another crime, usually but not always an assault. Which is exactly what the 2nd Amendment protects, namely, the justifiable use of a gun for self-defense. Now if someone would like to explain to me how the Constitution protects the 11,000 murders, 20,000 suicides and the 60,000 assaults that occur each year with guns, I’m all ears.

In 1980, only 11% of all motorists wore seatbelts, but by 2000 mandatory seatbelt laws probably saved upwards of 10,000 lives every year.  This remarkable change in driving habits and safety laws occurred because of safety research conducted by the CDC.  Did you ever hear the AAA say that “cars don’t kill people, people kill people?” Nobody would ever say something so stupid or dumb.  But John Boehner gets away with it every time he and his colleagues cave in to pressure from the NRA and vote to defund CDC research on guns.  Of course we all know that gun research is just a smokescreen for taking away all our guns.  Ever notice how CDC research got rid of all those cars?

 

 

Sorry, But The NRA’s Notion Of Gun Safety Just Doesn’t Work.

One of the big changes in the gun debate is the degree to which advocacy organizations like Moms Demand Action and Brady have started moving into the safety space.  Shannon et les filles have launched a program called Be Smart, Brady wants to cut gun deaths in half by 2025 with their ASK campaign, suddenly a field that the NRA and the NSSF had all to themselves has attracted a new and vigorous group of gun safety campaigners who have the money and the experience to make their views count.

But if Moms and Brady are going to level the safety playing field, I think they need to really understand what the current gun safety problem is all about.  Because both groups seem to be looking at gun safety in a way not much different from how gun safety has been defined and taught by the NRA, and I happen to think that the NRA  approach ducks the biggest safety problem of all.

                Shannon’s program asks parents to try and keep their guns secure, keep the guns out of the hands of vulnerable people like those suffering from depression, keep the guns locked up or locked away at all times.  Brady focuses on one issue, also promoted by Moms, that parents should always ask other parents whether there is an unlocked gun where the kids are going to play. The NRA would never endorse the idea of parents communicating with other parents about guns ownership, but locking guns up or locking them away, what the NRA calls storing guns “so they are not accessible to untrained or unauthorized persons” is a standard M.O. announced in every NRA course.

Keeping guns secure in the home, making sure that kids can’t access guns under any circumstances is all well and good, and don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that Shannon’s gals and the Brady Campaign are now engaged in safety programs as an aspect of their involvement in the gun debate.  But all that notwithstanding, I still don’t believe that ‘lock ‘em up, lock ‘em away’ is either sufficient or necessary for responding to the safety risk posed by guns.  Because as long as the gun industry and its supporters continue to promote gun ownership primarily as a means of self-defense, by definition you can’t defend yourself with a gun if it’s locked up or locked away.

The problem becomes even more vexing because the 2008 Heller decision, which proclaimed a constitutional right to private ownership of guns, was based on what Scalia called, the “tradition” of keeping a handgun in the home for self-defense.  In fact, the Court’s Number One Gun Nut invented this so-called tradition out of whole cloth, unless he really believes that a cynical marketing ploy to compensate for the decline in hunting after the 1980s constitutes some kind of traditional belief.  Be that as it may, if you’re going to walk around in the daytime with a concealed weapon and then leave it out on the end-table when you go to sleep at night, you can’t lock it up or lock it away.

And this is where I think Shannon’s ladies and the Brady folks need a message that more clearly distinguishes their notion of safety from the nonsense being peddled by the NRA.  And why do I call the NRA safety message nonsense?  Here’s a quote from the 2011 edition of Home Firearm Safety, a book the NRA has been selling for twenty-five years: “A gun stored primarily for personal protection must be ready for immediate use.  As a general rule, a gun stored for any purpose other than personal protection should never be loaded in the home.”  My italics and thanks a lot.

One week after Sandy Hook, Wayne-o belligerently reminded America that a bad guy with a gun could only be stopped by a good guy with a gun. Which means we need a lot of good guys walking around and lying down to sleep with their loaded, unlocked guns.  Sorry, but that doesn’t sound all that safe to me.