Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 117

The NRA Better Get It’s Act Together About Gun Safety Or It’s Act Might Close Out Of Town.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have documented the fact that the discussion about gun safety is no longer owned by the NRA and, for the first time, appears to be involving organizations and viewpoints that one could hardly call pro-gun.  After all, when groups like the Brady Campaign and Everytown start talking about gun safety, it’s pretty hard to imagine that they share much in common with groups like the NRA.  And now we also have a major gun-safety initiative being rolled out by the Ad Council and the National Crime Prevention Council, again hardly folks whose raison d’etre has anything to do with promoting the ownership of guns.

I suspect that the folks sitting down at the NRA headquarters in Fairfax, VA aren’t crazy about the appearance of these organizations onto the gun-safety playing field because until now, they’ve had the safety discussion all to themselves.  After all, the NRA was founded in 1871as a firearms training organization by a former Army commander, George Wingate,  who lamented the fact that so many of the Union troops who fought in the Civil War came to fight with little or no shooting experience at all.  So the NRA comes by its commitment to gun safety honestly, and millions of young men and women have profited from NRA training courses over the last nearly 150 years.

                The problem with the NRA approach to gun safety, however, is that it reflects a mind-set about guns and shooting that is now completely out of date.  I joined the NRA in 1955 when I was eleven years old because I wanted to shoot real guns instead of my plastic toys and the NRA sponsored a shooting club that met each week in a shooting range located in the basement of my brother’s junior high.  Every Friday we were allowed to take one of the surplus 22-caliber training rifles home to clean it over the weekend, so I walked from the school to my house with the gun wrapped up in a cloth sack and tucked under my arm.  Was I living in Topeka, Kansas, or Abilene, Texas, or Fort Pierre, South Dakota?  I was actually born, raised and residing in the middle of Washington, D.C.  The rifle range was in McFarland Junior High School on Crittenden Street, named after a former Attorney General, and we lived on Hamilton Street, I don’t have to tell you after whom that street was named.  I went home with my little rifle by going up Georgia Avenue or 14th Street and it never occurred to me that walking home this way created any issue at all.

In order to join and shoot in the NRA club, I had to learn some basic gun safety rules.  And while I don’t remember what the rules actually said, I can tell you that the current safety rules on the NRA website were probably written before I ever shot a gun. According to the NRA, the best way to be safe with a gun is to always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction, always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot, and always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use. If you want, the NRA will happily send you these rules printed out on a nice piece of cardboard which you can distribute to all your shooting friends.

There’s only one little problem with these safety rules – they were developed long before the NRA started promoting the idea of carrying handguns around for self-defense. And unless the NRA comes up with a new set of safety rules that reflect the new CCW gospel, the NRA will not only find itself sharing the playing field when it comes to gun safety, but being elbowed off to one side. After all, if you’re going to carry a gun for self-defense, how could you imagine only loading it when you’re ready to shoot?  That might work at a shooting range, but it’s hardly a prescription for safely carrying a gun in the street.

When The Ad Council Starts Talking About Gun Safety, Everybody Listens.

I listen to AM Talk Radio because the programs help me get to sleep.  But the other night as I was dozing off to the local shock jock Rush wannabe, I was jolted awake by a 30-second public service announcement about gun safety presented by the Ad Council.  Now when the Ad Council runs a PSA on gun safety, you know that gun safety has become a mainstream issue. After all, we’re not talking about just another group that says nice things about worthwhile projects.  We’re talking about the outfit which started off selling War Bonds in 1941, then created Smokey the Bear, the March of Dimes, McGruff the Crime Dog and Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No among hundreds of other public service campaigns. Wow!

The gun-safety messages, which are hitting television and radio stations around the country (I heard the radio spot on a local Fox-affiliate station)were funded by a million-dollar grant from the Department of Justice that was awarded in 2013. The radio script has a no-nonsense voice stating that guns have to be kept away from “curious children, troubled teens, thieves, or anyone else who might misuse your gun.” The television ads are just as direct, and there are also graphics and digital ads, along with additional information on safe storage provided by the National Crime Prevention Council, another blue-ribbon advocacy group that partnered with the Ad Council to create and sponsor this campaign.

                A couple of years ago the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s lobbying group which runs the SHOT show, put together a little gun-safety video featuring the National Crime Prevention Council’s mascot, McGruff the Crime Dog, which could be sent out to school and community organizations, along with a Teacher’s Guide and a pledge for students to sign.  The pledge, of course, was the NRA’s Eddie Eagle stop – don’t touch – find an adult mantra, which has been floating around since God knows when and is still considered the gun-safety gospel by an industry which until now had the safety playing-field all to itself.

What I like about the Ad Council’s message, like the message being delivered by Melissa Joan Hart for Everytown, is not just the no-nonsense tone of the narration, but the degree to which both campaigns cut through the usual bromides about gun safety to really tell it like it is, specifically mentioning groups that are particularly vulnerable to unsafe guns, like young children and depressed teens.  And even more important, the Ad Council message is very simple: an unlocked gun is an unsafe gun.  Period.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Contrast this PSA with the latest effort by the NSSF to pretend that gun safety is of paramount concern.  It’s a video that runs more than 5 minutes featuring a competitive shooter, Julie Golob, who goes on and on about the “importance” of talking to your kids about guns. After several lengthy sermons about the difference between communicating with young children and teens, Julie actually mentions in 5 whole seconds that adults should set an example through “safe handling and proper storage” of their guns.  Nowhere is the word ‘lock’ mentioned, nowhere is anyone identified as being particularly vulnerable if guns are in the home.  I’m not casting aspersions at Ms. Golob for narrating a video so devoid of any reality about gun safety at all; it’s not her fault that she’s working for an organization for whom safety is secondary to selling guns.

All of a sudden the NRA and the NSSF are no longer controlling the game when it comes to discussions about gun safety; in fact they may find themselves on the sidelines while the Ad Council and other non-gun owning groups redefine how the game is played.  The gun industry’s going to have a problem trying to get everyone to walk around with a gun while trying at the same time to figure out how to keep the guns locked up or locked away.  Given the power, reach and authority of the Ad Council, this could be an interesting state of affairs.

 

Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership Are Actually Totally Irresponsible.

Sooner or later I knew that Tim Wheeler, who runs a blog called Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, would come out and say something that reveals how far away he is from thinking like a serious physician.  Or thinking like any kind of physician, for that matter.  Since he started his so-called organization, which is basically just a blog, he has spent his time promoting one stupid and/or senseless notion for the gun industry after another stupid and/or senseless notion.  From denying that physicians should question patients about guns, to advocating that physicians should hand out gun safety information that has never been reviewed by the medical academies, Wheeler pushes out opinions that pander to the lowest common mental denominator and misrepresent the role of doctors in dealing with health issues, guns or no guns.

Wheeler has now trained his sights on a situation in New Jersey where the legislature is thinking of amending a ‘smart gun’ law that was passed in 2002 but has never been implemented because no manufacturer could deliver a smart-gun product that both worked and was made available for retail sale. A brief attempt was made to sell one of these models in California, but the gun shop in question quickly removed the produce from its shelves when local gun nuts threatened a boycott of the store or worse.

                Wheeler refers to smart-gun technology as a “sweeping infringement” of the 2nd Amendment, a judgement obviously based on his expertise on the area of Constitutional law.  If he would bother to actually read the 2008 Heller decision, he might notice that Scalia explicitly states that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on … laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” [p. 54]  Notice the phrase, ‘commercial sale of arms,’ which even a jerk like Wheeler must know means that the government can decide what types of guns can and cannot be sold.

Smart guns were first hyped during the Clinton administration when the government awarded R&D grants to various inventors and entrepreneurs to develop new gun-safety technologies.  You can get a very complete overview of the history and development of smart-gun products by reading a report published by the Department of Justice in 2013. The report brought together representatives of federal agencies and test labs, law enforcement bodies, technology institutes, public health researchers, and was discussed with staff from Smith & Wesson, Colt, FN and Ruger, among others.

If Wheeler read the report, perhaps he would have noticed right up front that the primary group of users for whom such technology is being developed is “people responsible for public safety (i.e., law enforcement personnel.)” [P. 8]  I think that Wheeler only blogs about issues, like Heller, for which he hasn’t read the relevant texts, but why should a physician depend on anything other than his own opinions, correct?

Wheeler not only believes that smart-gun technology represents an ‘infringement’ on the 2nd Amendment, but worse, is a solution in search of a non-existent problem; i.e., accidental deaths of children from firearm misuse.  He refers to these deaths as “miniscule,” claiming a “few dozen” lives each year.   In fact, more than 75 children under the age of 18 died from accidental shootings in 2013, and more than 560 were treated for gunshot wounds.

But worse than understating the numbers is what this says about Wheler’s approach to medicine.  Let me break the news to him gently: physicians don’t define a medical problem by how many patients present a particular symptom during an exam.  The role of the physician, according to the Hippocratic Oath, is to reduce harm. And this applies to every single patient, whether the harm comes from something which is nearly universal, or is something that a physician might see only once.

Wheeler’s attempt to make readers believe that the severity of a problem is in any way based on its frequency is a conscious misstatement of the role of the physician and shows him to be the crackpot and gun industry mouthpiece that he really is.

Don’t Look Now, But Obama Ain’t The Only One Trying To Take Away Our Guns.

There’s a gun nut in Alabama named Mike Rogers who represents the 3rd Congressional District, an area which includes the town of Anniston.  And every gun nut like me knows Anniston because it’s the headquarters of the Civilian Marksmanship Program, aka the CMP.  One of the easiest ways to get certified as a gun nut is to buy a rifle from the CMP.  I bought two of the surplus M-1 Garands , one an original made at Springfield, the second a 1950’s makeover turned out by Harrington & Richardson located right up the road in Spencer, MA.

Congressman Rogers, like most Republicans, has no trouble pushing government spending if the money is somehow connected to the military and the result is to create civilian jobs.  So he’s attached an amendment to the 2016 military spending bill which changes the law covering the CMP. If the amendment stays in the bill, from now on civilians will not only be able to purchase rifles, but all “firearms” that the Army considers to be surplus and thus available for anyone to buy.  And it further turns out that the Army happens to be sitting on 100,000 old Colt 45 pistols that were first brought into service in 1911 and then replaced by the Beretta 9mm beginning in 1981.

                There are probably more pistols built on the Colt 1911 frame than any other handgun ever made.  Commercial models newly manufactured by various companies sell quite well; hundreds of thousands manufactured overseas have been imported back into the States.  I have probably owned at least a dozen Colt 1911s since I bought my first commercial model in 1976, but the ones that were made for the military and are stamped “United States Property” are few and far between.  As opposed to the M-1 Garand and Carbine, of which the Army has probably sold off several million guns, the pistol has never been made available to the civilian market, although on occasion one pops up here or there.

The problem that gun nut Rogers has encountered, however, is that the Army doesn’t appear willing to go along with his scheme.  Last week the military sent a memorandum to Congress citing concerns about public safety, accountability and possible violations of federal gun laws that needed “additional study” before the CMP’s charter could be revised.  In brief, the Army feels that these handguns, as opposed to CMP rifles, would be released to the public through unverified, online sales, therefore could not be traced by the ATF, and would therefore be a violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968. And don’t think that the Army made this up on its own because the document cites as its source for this information none other than the DOJ.

This document is a quintessential example of the blind leading the dumb, or maybe the other way around.  The CMP ships all its guns from and to federally-licensed dealers; purchasers must fill out a NICS background check form and agree that NICS must approve the transaction before the gun is released.  Judging by my experience when I bought my Garands, the CMP creates a larger paper trail for each transaction than anything done in the local shop. Incidentally, although the Army cites DOJ as the source for this misinformation, the DOJ no doubt was given this nonsense by those regulatory geniuses at the ATF.

Given the stink that was made over the ATF’s attempt to ban some 223 ammo, you would think that the gun lobby would be yelling and screaming about what is a bone fide violation of 2nd-Amendment rights.  But while some of the pro-gun blogs are blazing away, so far the NRA has uttered nary a peep.  And I’ll bet they continue to keep their mouths shut, because for all their talk about being the first line of ‘defense’ for gun owners’ rights, these stalwart defenders of the Constitution aren’t about to say jack when it’s the  Army and not Obama who wants to keep us from owning guns.

 

 

 

Want To Bet Against Background Checks? You Might Lose.

Score another win for the gun-sense team.  On Monday the Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, signed into law a bill that basically requires background checks for all gun transfers in the state. The measure is similar to the I-594 initiative that now requires universal background checks in neighboring Washington State.  So now, with a few exceptions, anyone living on the West Coast between Canada and Mexico must undergo the NICS background check process in order to buy, sell, or transfer a gun.

I wouldn’t necessarily take the short odds against background checks becoming law of the land, if only because although we usually think our country was settled east to west, in fact much of our culture has moved west to east. California was already settled by Spanish conquistadores and their descendants while Virginia, Massachusetts and the other colonies were still largely woods, and much of our modern culture first appeared on the West Coast in the form of movies and tv. I first heard of ‘health food’ when I went from New York to teach at Berkeley in 1976. And let’s not forget where Starbucks got started, ditto Ronald Reagan and the ‘modern conservative movement’ along with half-and-half.

                I have no issue with the notion that background checks keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’  I also don’t believe the nonsense thrown around by so-called 2nd-Amendment ‘absolutists’ that background checks are a violation of their constitutional rights. But we shouldn’t just assume that because the FBI says that slightly more than 1 million NICS transactions have been denied since the system became operational in 1998 that this somehow translates into one million guns being kept away from the ‘wrong hands,’ which means kept away from people who will use those guns to commit violence and crimes.

We really don’t know why violent crime rates, particularly gun crime rates, have dropped by 50% over the last twenty years.  And because we don’t know why this has occurred, it’s not clear that any of the solutions, including background checks, will result in gun violence dropping any more. I’m not suggesting that we should stop strengthening gun regulations just because, to parrot the NRA, criminals don’t obey laws.  If we used criminal response to laws as a criteria for judging the effectiveness of our legal codes, we would never pass a single statute at all.  What I am suggesting is that if we continue to define gun violence as a preventable public health issue, which is how we have been defining it since 1981, we should set realistic goals for reductions in gun violence and use these goals to judge the effectiveness of the policies and strategies that are espoused.

In fact, the CDC has adopted what they believe to be realistic goals for reductions in gun violence over the next five years.  These goals call for a 10% reduction by 2020 in gun homicides, non-fatal shootings and children bringing guns into schools.  I think the time has come for activists who are working to end gun violence to sit down, en masse, and figure out whether the CDC numbers are realistic, or need to be adjusted, or need to be replaced by a different set of criteria and a different set of goals.  And the gun industry should be invited to participate in this discussion as well.

The gun industry used to count on the fact that the upsurge in concern about gun violence which followed every high-profile shooting would quickly run its course.  Frankly, I thought the groundswell provoked by Sandy Hook would be over by the time the first anniversary of the tragedy rolled around.  But recent events in Washington State and Oregon have proven me wrong. And when it comes to public health policies, things have a way of taking on a momentum and a life of their own. As I said early on, I wouldn’t take the short odds against more gun regulations down the line.

 

 

Whether You’re Pro-Gun Or Anti-Gun, There’s Something You Can Buy To Help Your Cause.

No matter who really first said, “there’s a sucker born every minute,” I can tell you that nowhere is this more true than when it comes to guns.  The latest huckster-rich promotion can be heard on Sean Hannity’s radio show, which runs spots for something called defendfamily.com, a marketing effort for an organization U.S. Concealed Carry Association, which is owned by a Wisconsin-based company called Delta Defense that was founded by a guy named Tim Schmidt who believes in the “society-transforming power of the responsibly armed American.”

According to Hannity, who claims to be a member of the group, the odds are one out of five that your home will be invaded and your property stolen by someone who would otherwise be forced to retreat if you had access to a gun.  Now according to the FBI, there were 1.5 million home burglaries in 2013, and this includes roughly 1 million thefts in which the criminal didn’t have to enter the premises by unlawful means.  So let’s say that there were somewhere around 750,000 times in 2013 where someone broke in somewhere and therefore might have been thwarted in this effort had the guy or gal with the gun actually been home.  The last time I looked, there were somewhere around 125 million homes, and we’re not talking about apartments, just homes.  If Hannity is right, this means that at least 25 million of these homes will be locations where the criminals will try to break in; so I guess that the FBI’s crime numbers are off to the tune of some 24 million crimes.

                I hope you now understand why I refer to this whole issue of guns and crime as nothing more than a modern-day riff on the ‘huckster born every minute’ theme.  I’m not saying that a gun in the hands of someone who is adequately trained can’t make a difference in terms of personal defense.  I’m not saying that there are no examples of people who grabbed a gun and prevented something really dangerous from taking place.  What I am saying is that the gun industry has spent the last twenty years telling us over and over that walking around with a gun will make us all safe from crime, but when you examine the data even casually the argument falls apart.

The only problem, of course, is that hucksterism about guns protecting us from crime seems about equally matched by hucksterism promoting how to protect ourselves from guns.  Back in January a terrible shooting took place at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in which a cardiovascular surgeon was gunned down by a man who allegedly came to the hospital to complain about his mother’s care.  The incident sent shockwaves through the medical community and sent hospital CFO’s to their calculators to see if the budget had some spare cash to hire a company like Crisis Consultant Group to come in and bring everyone up to speed.

I know a 150-bed community hospital in the Northeast which recently laid out $80,000 for active shooting training, although Homeland Security will pay for a portion of the cost.  But there are 5,600 hospitals around the country, and if each hospital coughed up an average of $100K for this training, the medical system would have to absorb over $600 million bucks.  This entire cost, incidentally, would go to prevent roughly 25-30 shooting casualties each year.  Despite the NRA nonsense about the danger of gun-free zones, hospitals tend to be even safer than schools.

I’m not saying that everyone concerned about crime goes out and buys a gun.  I’m also not saying that every hospital will ante up the money to develop an anti-shooter plan.  What I am saying is that the response to gun violence is often as irrational as the violence itself, which doesn’t bode well for dealing with guns, or violence, or the connection between both.

 

The Be Smart Video On Sets A New Standard On Gun Safety.

This week a new gun safety campaign was launched by Everytown and Moms Demand Action called Be Smart, and you can usually judge the value of such efforts by the degree to which the pro-gun media weighs in on the other side.  They weighed in right away with multiple blogs and, as always, the infantile Breitbart response.  And one of the pro-gun bloggers got it right when she wrote that “allowing the anti-gun side to control the gun safety message is a big mistake.”

Until recently, the pro-gun gallery has owned the issue of gun safety, which they mostly define as keeping guns out of the ‘wrong’ hands, i.e., crooks, creeps and other undesirables who want access to guns for no other reason than to inflict harm.  The NRA has given a new hip-and-cool look to their Eddie Eagle program which has allegedly distributed millions of flyers although it’s unclear whether this effort has had any real impact at all. The NSSF gives away cable locks and has been running a public service campaign with the ATF about the danger of “straw” sales.  They also promote a competitive shooter with instructions for talking about gun safety with children, as if being a competitive shooter gives you the slightest credibility when it comes to knowing how to communicate with kids.

                Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not against any of the gun industry’s safety programs.  But opposing background checks for private gun transfers makes it pretty hard to argue that you’re all that worried about criminals and other disqualified individuals getting their hands on guns. The new Be Smart campaign, on the other hand,  goes beyond the usual arguments about gun safety that you get from both sides, and this is what makes it such an interesting and potentially effective effort which the gun folks better not simply deride or ignore.

The centerpiece of the program is a video narrated by Melissa Joan Hart, which for no other reason than she votes Republican makes it difficult for the pro-gun chorus to simply brand her as another liberal, gun-grabbing, Hollywood star.  But aside from the image, what we get are serious comments about issues the gun industry would rather you and I forget.  For example, there’s a very sober message about teen suicide and how much easier it is to commit suicide with a gun. For another, Melissa actually uses the phrase ‘risk factors’ when talking about gun-owning families where there is evidence of mental illness or substance abuse.  The most important comment, however, is when she notes that “kids are naturally curious,” and that a gun is therefore a risk unless it is locked up “one hundred percent of the time.”

I’m really happy to see these issues injected into the gun safety debate and let me break it to you gently:  Melissa’s being perfunctory when she mentions her concern about the 1.7 million kids living in homes where guns are loaded and unlocked.  It’s children living in every home where there is a gun who are at risk, because sooner or later every one of those guns will be left around. If you haven’t figured it out yet, let me break it to you gently:  We are human. We are careless. We forget.

The industry’s approach to gun safety is that they want it both ways.  People should own guns to defend themselves, but the reason guns are touted as the best defense against crime is because of their lethality and nothing else.  Sooner or later, if you are a gun-owner who believes that owning a gun makes you safe, that gun is going to be left out, unsecured and unlocked, which poses a risk to the kids.

I have a suggestion for trigger-heads who  get nervous giving up space in the gun-safety debate to folks who aren’t particularly enamored of guns.  Start talking about gun safety in a realistic way. Stop pretending that guns aren’t a risk just because we “always” lock them up or lock them away.  There’s still only one way to guarantee that you can’t have an accident with a gun.

 

Does A Gun Protect You From Crime? A New Study Says You Should Just Run Away.

If there is one issue more than any other which divides the two sides in the great gun argument, it’s whether guns are an effective deterrent against crime.  The controversy has been raging since advocacy for and against gun ownership escalated during the debate over the 1994 Brady bill and again when Clinton pushed through his omnibus bill on crime.  Basically the argument came down to what I call the social utility of gun ownership; i.e., do the risks of guns outweigh the benefits or is it the other way around?

The latest entry in this field is a study that analyzes more than 14,000 ‘personal contact’ crimes between 2007 and 2011, meaning that the victim and the perpetrator had some degree of contact during the crime incident itself.  The good news about this study is that it covers a very large number of criminal incidents; the bad news is that like all studies based on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, it is based solely on the testimonies of the victims themselves. Which means that the information cannot be corroborated by another source, but at least the respondent is asked to provide a great deal of specific information about what actually took place.

                The researchers, David Hemenway and Sara Solnick, have utilized the NCVS data to create what they call an ‘epidemiology’ of gun use, with the intention of trying to figure out the degree to which people used guns to protect themselves from crimes.  This issue of frequency has been the hot-button question in the gun argument over the past twenty years, spurred largely by Gary Kleck’s 1994 defensive gun use (DGU) study which claimed that Americans used guns to thwart crimes upwards of several million times each year. Kleck’s study was based on complete interviews with less than 125 respondents, none of whom were asked to define or describe the alleged criminal event which a gun helped them to forestall.  There was also no attempt to compare the outcome of using a gun to prevent a crime as opposed to other methods that individuals might use to make themselves safe from criminal attack.

This new study, on the other hand, seeks to address the gaps in Kleck’s work and the work of others, and the results, not surprisingly, cast the value of defensive gun use in a very different light. To begin, the number of times that people use guns as opposed to other ways of defending themselves is very slight; less than 1% of the 14,000 respondents used a gun against their attacker, whereas more than 40% defended themselves or their property in some other way. Men were three times more likely to use a gun to defend themselves, they were also more likely than women to get involved in DGUs away from the home, and men used guns more for defense against assaults while women favored using guns to protect their property from being damaged or taken away.

The important finding from the study, it seems to me, is not the relatively low frequency of DGUs as opposed to other self-defense methods, but the degree to which using a gun as a defense against crime reduces the chance of injury to the victim.  Slightly more than 4% of the victims were injured during the criminal incident, the percentage of injuries suffered by victims who used other ways to defend themselves was the same.  The bottom line is that a gun will protect you from crime, but it won’t protect you better than yelling for help, threatening to call police, or just running away.

On the other hand, what public health and other gun-safety advocates need to understand is that even if the data doesn’t support the idea, statistically speaking, that guns can protect us against crime, the fact is that many people believe that a gun is the most effective antidote to their fear of crime, and it’s often what we believe rather than what we know that determines the choices we make.

A Gala Event For A Good Cause: Brady Honors The Million Mom March.

Want to cough up some bucks for a worthy cause and spend an evening at one of America’s top hotels?  The folks at the Brady Center are kicking off this year’s ASK campaign with a gala banquet and fundraiser at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, at which time they will honor Donna Dees-Thomases who organized the Million Mom March on Washington, DC.  Her efforts brought three-quarters of a million people into the nation’s capital on June 5, 2000, and marked the beginning of  grass-roots campaigns to promote gun safety, gun safety laws and more discussion about gun violence, in particular, the impact of gun violence on kids.

                When the march was announced, the pro-gun gang swung into action, immediately launching their own campaign to convince everyone that they were first and foremost concerned about safe guns.  A group called Second Amendment Sisters sprang up, held a small counter-demonstration on the Mall, and Wayne LaPierre went on television to announce a million-dollar safety fund that the NRA would use to promote a gun safety program in the nation’s schools.

The ASK campaign is important for three reasons.  First, it’s a public health issue, and the NRA has gone out of its way to demonize pediatricians because the American Academy of Pediatrics had the audacity to suggest that guns were a risk to children’s health.  Rather than taking the halfway step of proposing that guns should be locked up or locked away, the AAP went so far in 1992 as to tell parents that they shouldn’t have guns around at all. This was the time when the NRA was girding up for battle against the Clinton gun-control schemes, so taking on the anti-gun pediatricians was fair game.  But pediatricians aren’t going to pretend that injuries from guns are a private affair. After all, there’s really no difference between locking up a gun and locking a kid into the seat of a car.

                The second reason that ASK is important is because it came out of the Million Mom March, and the march is a significant milestone in the development of grass-roots concerns about guns.  The gun-sense side bemoans the fact that the NRA has been in business for nearly 150 years, whereas the folks who want more sensible gun regulations have only been really active for less than three decades.  But the fact is that the NRA wasn’t all hot and bothered about legal or political threats to their existence until thirty years ago; even when the feds got into gun control in a big way in 1968 the NRA hardly made a peep. It’s true that the NRA has become a major player when it comes to political influence on Capitol Hill.  But it doesn’t take a century to build a serious and sustained campaign either for or against guns.

Finally, the third and most important reason to support ASK is the fact that every industry – guns, cars, communications to name a few, wants to make the product safety argument on its own terms. Most gun makers, car makers, or whatever makers, think first about sales and profits, with safety coming in a distant third, or fourth, or fifth.  In 2009 Toyota recalled almost five million vehicles after claiming they couldn’t find anything wrong with the brakes.  It turned out to be a problem with floor mats, not brakes, but either way, consumers weren’t going to accept the company’s word on whether their vehicles were safe.

I think it’s a very healthy thing for the gun industry to share discussions about safe use of guns even with people who aren’t particularly fond of guns.  The ASK campaign recognizes a simple truth, namely, that parents should talk to other parents about children having access to guns. Children are naturally curious. If you tell a child not to touch something they will grab it as quickly as they can.  But if a parent tells another parent to put away the guns, then there’s nothing for the kids to grab. Period.

 

It’s Only New York, But The NRA Better Not Ignore A New Voter Poll About Guns.

This week New Yorkers Against Gun Violence released a survey they commissioned of 600+ registered voters in New York State.  It’s part of an effort to promote new legislation that seeks to add additional safety measures to the SAFE law, which provoked lots of ire on the pro-gun side when Andy crashed it through the legislature shortly after Sandy Hook. The campaign is focused on a safe storage act known as Nicholas’s Law, named after a twelve-year old whose friend shot and killed him with an unlocked gun.

According to the NYAGV press release, the survey shows strong majority support for a wide range of gun-control issues beyond safe storage, including seizing guns from persons convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, microstamping of firearms sold in New York State, increased regulation  of dealers and limiting gun purchases to one every month.  With the exception of the last provision, a majority of gun owners also backed all the proposals, albeit by smaller margins of course.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo

Along with the specific gun-control proposals, the survey also asked both gun owners and non-gun owners about general attitudes toward the regulation of firearms.  Here again, both groups agreed that gun violence was a serious problem and that government had the right to set “reasonable”  regulations on gun ownership and gun use.

I am not surprised by these survey results, for the simple reason that New York is not a particularly gun-rich state.  And even though gun owners are probably in the majority in upstate, rural counties, if you conduct a survey in which respondents reflect percentages of New York State’s population living in large cities and suburban zones, you’re going to get most of your answers from people who, even if they own firearms, certainly don’t have the degree of enthusiasm or loyalty to the gun culture that you find in the South or rural parts of the Midwest.

That being said, when I looked at the cross-tabs for every question which break down responses by age, gender and race, the results of this survey raised some serious doubts in my mind as to what the future of gun ownership is really going to be.  Because what was interesting about the cross-tab responses was the degree to which for virtually every question, the groups that the gun folks have been trying hardest to persuade to join their ranks are exactly the groups who appear to be least interested in owning or, to put it bluntly, having anything to do with guns.

For example, in answer to this statement, “Having a gun in the home makes the occupants of that home safer,” a slightly majority (52%) disagreed.  This runs contrary to recent polls which show that a slight majority nationwide would agree.  But in New York nearly two-thirds of the female respondents disagreed, as did the Black and Latino respondents, as did the respondents ages 18 to 34.  As to whether to support reasonable gun regulations, roughly three-quarters of Blacks, Latinos and women agreed with this statement, but for the 18-34 age group the number was a whopping 82 percent!

Again, it needs to be remembered that these numbers would be different In states where most people own guns.  But I don’t think the gun folks should just write these numbers off because everyone knows that New Yorkers  don’t like guns.  Marketing campaigns to the contrary, women and minorities still don’t appear enamored of guns. Moreover, the fact that younger respondents exhibited the highest degree of approval for gun control and the lowest degree of support for the notion that guns protect us from crime tells me that the NRA and the pro-gun community may not be reaching the next generation of gun owners with a message that really works.  But that still leaves open the question of whether the other side can double down on the views of women, minorities and millennials to advance their agendas in gun-rich states.  New York ain’t exactly Dixie, right?