Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 132

Why Do Gun Owners Love Their Guns? Not Because They Protect Us From Anything.

One thing about the gun debate I find interesting is how quickly and easily gun owners get riled up when politicians, or anyone else for that matter, begin talking about taking away their guns.  From the way they talk, you’d think the world was about to come to an end.  What was Heston’s famous line?  “From my cold, dead hands.”  Here’s a guy who made more forgettable movies than anyone could ever remember, but five words uttered at the NRA convention and he’s immortalized forevermore.

I see the same intensity of feelings in comments on my blog.  “You’re a traitor,” is one of the less-angry ones; “Mike the Gun Guy is Enemy #1,” crops up from time to time.  I have never once advocated any legislative or legal response to gun violence, but God forbid I say that maybe some of what the NRA claims to be true isn’t so true and you’d think I was calling for the confiscation of every, single gun.

                Maybe  I just don’t appreciate how gun owners think about their guns. So yesterday I decided to get a better understanding of the average gun owner by conducting a survey on how frequently gun guys (and gals) actually walk around with a gun.  After all, if you listen to the NRA, you quickly learn that nobody understands the problems faced by gun owners like they do, and nothing is more important to gun owners than being able to protect themselves and their loved ones by walking around with a gun.

So yesterday I sat down and sent an email to 650 people who took the required safety course from me that my state requires for issuance of the LTC.  And if they had, in fact, received the LTC, I asked them to tell me how often they carried a concealed weapon with the choices being: always, usually, sometimes, frequently or never at all.  Obviously, the folks who said they always or usually carried a concealed weapon were embodying Wayne LaPierre’s “good guys” dictum; the rest were pussies or worse.

Within 24 hours I received back more than 130 responses, of whom 102 stated they had received their LTC.  And how did the NRA do in convincing MR or MS gun-owner that they would be fulfilling a sacred trust by walking around with a gun?  Not very well, I’m afraid.  Only 29 of 97 LTC-holders reported that they ‘always’ or ‘usually’ carried a gun, of whom 22 were guys and 6 were gals.  The rest just weren’t convinced that they needed to carry a gun, and 53 of the respondents, 39 men and 10 women reported that they ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ carried a concealed weapon at all.

Now don’t get me wrong.  The latest numbers indicate that there are roughly 8 million active concealed-carry permits in the United States, so if the results of my poll are representative, that means there may be about 2 million people walking the highways and byways of our beloved country ready at any moment to yank out and use their guns.  But 2 million doesn’t even represent 1% of the country’s population so it’s not like there’s some huge, gun-toting army out there just waiting to protect the rest of us from the criminal hordes.

On the other hand, a couple of million people who believe that something’s about to happen in DC that will directly affect them can make a lot of noise.  They can contact their Representatives, or make a telephone call, or send a nasty email to me.  I have never done any of those things because I can’t recall that Congress ever debated a law which would have any direct impact on me.  But the NRA, to their credit, has managed to make its membership feel that any discussion about gun control is a discussion about them.  Why pass up the opportunity to let everyone know what is the most important thing to you?  I wouldn’t, that’s for damn sure.

Want To Get Gunned Down? Go To Target.

Last week the mega-chain Target joined Chipotle and Starbucks in making their stores places where customers have a good chance of getting gunned down.  At least this is what the NRA believes will happen now that the company’s CEO announced that Target shoppers should leave their guns at home.  Everyone remembers the NRA’s reaction after Sandy Hook, namely, that schools that were gun-free zones invited kooks like Adam Lanza to walk in and start blasting away.  But the notion that public space is safer if people don’t walk around with guns seems to be spreading and it’s interesting that the NRA’s response so far to Target’s new policy has been no response at all.

The gun industry is not only encountering some push-back to its notion of guns as being the best way for citizens to protect themselves against crime; they can’t even get their facts straight about whether there’s any connection between gun ownership and criminal activity at all.  The NSSF just posted a video which announces that “gun crimes have fallen dramatically over the past 20 years,” except the graphic that accompanies this statement shows that the entire decline took place between 1993 and 2000, which was before Obama went into the White House and gun sales soared.

               Despite what John Lott says, there’s no proof that higher levels of gun violence occur in gun-free zones.  And the evidence that protecting yourself with a gun may actually be less safe than using other protective methods to thwart a criminal attack – yelling, punching, running away – comes from, of all people, a scholar named Gary Kleck who first “discovered” that arming ourselves made us better able to stop crime.  Kleck published a study in 1995 which, based on answers collected from interviews with 213 respondents, claimed that people used guns to prevent more than 2 million crimes from being committed each year.  But in 1994 he submitted a report to the Department of Justice in which he found that defensive methods other than guns actually resulted in fewer injuries from criminal attacks.  He didn’t mention these findings when he began touting the benefits of armed resistance the following year.

And neither did the NRA.  Ever since the mid-1990’s the gun lobby has been tirelessly beating the drums for expanding concealed carry, as well as for diminishing the list of locations where guns cannot be found.  Their latest victory was Georgia, where a new law took effect July 1 which expands the right to carry a gun in locations that serve alcohol, houses of worship and government facilities, as long as the owners of the affected properties don’t object.

The campaign to promote carrying guns in public places took a big step backwards, however, with the decision by Target to ask gun-toting shoppers to stay out of their stores.  The announcement was worded in a way that did not absolutely ban concealed-carry in states which, unlike Georgia, don’t give property-owners the right to restrict the presence of guns.  But when Target said that guns are at odds with the “family-friendly” atmosphere they try to maintain, they weren’t just sending a message to gun owners, they were sending a clear message to the gun lobby as well.

Despite twenty years of unending appeals to fears of crime and the utility of owning guns, the NRA and its allies have failed to convince a majority of Americans that walking into a public place with a gun in your pocket is the smart thing to do.  What they have done is to provoke a grass-roots backlash organized and funded by a guy with lots of bucks whose efforts to get Americans behind the notion of less guns equals more safety may just begin to pay off.

Do Guns Protect Us From Crime? The Guy Who Says ‘Yes’ Actually Means ‘No.’

For the last twenty years the gun lobby has been promoting more concealed-carry and more gun ownership in general by spreading the idea that guns protect us from crime.  This pitch is even more pronounced as they go after new consumer markets like women and African-Americans, populations that have traditionally resisted gun ownership but are also considered to be more vulnerable to criminal attacks for reasons of gender or where they happen to live.

This whole notion about guns being used to thwart crime first took off in an article published by the criminologist Gary Kleck in 1995.  Kleck previously published Point Blank, a book presented as a balanced corrective to the gun debate because  “each side simplifies, caricatures, and sometimes willfully distorts the arguments of the other, setting up and knocking down their respective straw men with ease.”  But his article on defensive gun use departed from this balanced point of view, totally dismissing the modest estimates of defensive gun use (DGU) of most previous scholarship and advancing a much higher number based on a telephone survey conducted by his own marketing firm.

Just as Kleck’s findings on DGUs were seized upon by the pro-gun lobby as “proof” that gun ownership was a positive response to crime, so he was attacked by gun control advocates who felt that his argument was overwhelmingly biased towards helping the spread of  CCW, as well as the sale of more guns.  It should be noted that the NRA, in the aftermath of Brady and the assault weapons ban, began softening its long-time reliance on sporting uses of guns and turned instead to actors like Charlton Heston whose TV ads for the gun lobby called the streets of DC “the most dangerous place in the world,” particularly if an unarmed person walked them at night.

At the same time Kleck published his findings on DGUs, he also published research that, in the main, contradicts everything he claimed to be beneficial about DGUs.  I am referring to a report he submitted to the Institute of Justice in 1994 on self-protection and rape which, curiously, was never cited in his DGU article that was published the following year. In this report he did the one thing that I felt largely discounted his claims to the social utility of carrying a gun by comparing the results of resistance to rapes by victims who didn’t us a gun but resorted to other resistance behaviors, such as physically resisting without a gun, yelling, trying to get a third party’s attention or resisting with a weapon other than a gun.

Guess what?  It turns out that Kleck’s own research demonstrates that rape and assault victims who used methods other than guns to resist an attack not only were as successful in their efforts as they were when they used guns, but in some types of resistance actually sustained fewer injuries than when they defended themselves with guns.  To quote Kleck: “Self-protective actions that appear to significantly reduce the risk of injury and serious injury include ‘attacking without weapon,’ ‘threatening p. without weapon,’ run away/hide,’ and ‘called the police.’” Of the 733 rape victims covered in this study, almost half who engaged in some form of self-protective behavior thwarted the actual rape.

It should be added, incidentally, that the data for this study was drawn from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a source that Kleck considered totally unreliable in buttressing  his claims about the validity of his research on DGUs.  But of course the real problem with Kleck’s study of defensive gun use is that his DGU survey didn’t deal with crime victims at all.  The respondents were asked whether having a gun on their person thwarted what otherwise might have been a criminal attack; a question which requires a gigantic leap of faith to even assume that the answers could be used to say anything about whether guns can protect us from crime. And Kleck, who started off trying to figure out what we know about guns, ends up just telling some of us what we want to believe, whether we really know it to be true or not.

 

Is Gun Control Un-American?

On Sunday I went out to play golf and caught up with the guy ahead of me at the 7th tee.  The 7th hole at this course is the No. 1 handicap, so it’s not unusual to spend some time waiting for the players ahead of you to struggle to the green before you start your own tortuous way up the fairway.  As I came alongside the player I noticed he was standing on the tee looking at his droid, and since he was dressed in a corporate-casual golf outfit, I jokingly said to him, “Well, you always have time to catch up with your emails when we get to this hole.”

“Oh no,” he replied, smiling, “I’m actually watching Costa Rica versus Greece.”  That’s right.  What was the hip thing for my generation to do on the golf course ten years ago – read our emails – has now been replaced by the World Cup.  And the fact that many of the matches are drawing larger viewing audiences than the World Series or the NBA should tell you how America is changing.  And don’t make the mistake of thinking that the popularity of soccer is due to the fact that we are being overrun by immigrants coming from countries where the real game of football is so-named because it’s played with the feet.

The truth is that soccer continues to grow in popularity because increasingly America is looking overseas for culture and lifestyle activities and even political ideas that were previously unknown or unpopular over here.  In 2002, roughly 60 percent of Americans believed that our culture was superior to all others; a Pew poll in 2011 found this number had dropped to less than 50 percent.  If you’re over 50, it’s still likely that your favorite sport isd baseball, the All-American pastime.  If you’re under 40, soccer is your favorite sport.

It’s partially the surge in Hispanic population that’s pushing these trends; but the real shift is among people under 30 – the Millennials – who just don’t buy into the traditional versions of the American Dream.  Of course this is also the first generation raised on the internet and gets the bulk of its information from video sources rather than print.  Which is another reason that younger Americans look to Europe because cell-phones, droids and new technologies in general were much more prevalent in the Old World before they started appearing in the New.

People who continue to promote American exceptionalism, the idea that we do it better because we do it different from everyone else, are having a hard time selling this message to the kids who are glued to their screens, big and little, watching the World Cup.  And what could be more exceptional than the 2nd Amendment and the Right to Bear Arms?  Most Europeans have absolutely no idea what it’s like to own a gun; they certainly can’t even imagine keeping a Glock in their pocket for self-defense.

It will be interesting to see whether younger people, as they get older, start moving towards a greater appreciation of traditional American values, thus turning away from Europe and, like previous generations, embrace things that makes the USA different and great.  This is certainly the line that the NRA and the gun industry is pitching at younger folks, and we’ll just have to wait to see how it plays out.  Meanwhile, all you gun guys out there – do you know the name of one player on the American World Cup team?  I don’t.

Cabela’s “Culture of Control”

mikethegunguy:

This is the best gun blog on the internet – including my blog.

Originally posted on jennifer dawn carlson:

This weekend, I found myself at a Michigan Cabela’s store: for those of you who haven’t entered a Cabela’s, this is America’s megachain for anything gun-related (they call themselves the “World’s Foremost Outfitter”). Cabela’s stores feature “Second Amendment Weekends” (I met Wayne LaPierre at one of them in 2010); offer guns ranging from pocket guns to hunting rifles to antique collectible revolvers; and have more gun accessories than you can probably wrap your mind around – specialty ammo, reloading equipment, targets, gun safes. This is the ‘gun industry’ on the ground – and it’s much more than just guns. This vast collection of goods represents a past-time, a hobby, and, especially for people who buy guns primarily for protection purposes, an entire orientation to safety and security.

Of course, guns, gun safes, ammunition, and so forth – these aren’t the only examples, or even the most ubiquitous examples, of security…

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Book Review: Negroes and the Gun

When we talk about gun violence and the African-American community, we invariably think of  Blacks as victims of gun homicides and assaults, categories in which Blacks are both perpetrators and victims to a degree far beyond their presence in the American population as a whole. And a week doesn’t go by without a meeting or demonstration in one inner-city neighborhood or the other calling for an end to this tragic state of affairs.

Now for the first time we have a statement about gun violence in which the author, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, rejects the notion that there are too many guns in the hands of Blacks, but rather that the guns are in the wrong hands.  Not only does Nicholas Johnson issue a call for Blacks to protect themselves against criminal attacks by acquiring and carrying guns, but he writes a long and detailed narrative about how Blacks used guns to defend themselves even while they were denied gun ownership because they were still slaves.

                Johnson begins this interesting and largely-unappreciated history with examples of defensive use of guns by Blacks even prior to the Civil War, including a mass resistance in Vicksburg in 1835, as well as multiple instances of Blacks protecting themselves with arms when they attempted to flee from the South.  The use of arms for self-protection by Blacks became even more pronounced in the decades following the end of Reconstruction, when Blacks were faced with continuous racial violence committed by the Ku Klux Klan and others intent on rolling back the gains made by African-Americans after the Civil War. The chapters that follow on Blacks and armed protection during the 1950’s and 60’s provide a needed balance to the non-violent approach of Dr. King and others, the prism through which the civil rights movement Is usually viewed.

The intent of the author, however, is not just to widen our understanding of Blacks and guns historically.  It is to use this history to mount an argument against what he calls the “modern orthodoxy” to eliminate gun violence by eliminating guns.  And since the preponderance of criminal gun violence involves the African-American community, Johnson is convinced that more gun control would leave the Black community even more defenseless and less able to protect its members against crime.  Of late the author has received strong support for this argument from the pro-gun lobby and in particular, the NRA. Even though the NRA’s membership is overwhelmingly White (and Southern White to be sure,) the message about guns being “hip” and “cool” is delivered by an African-American, Colion Noir, who jumbles video-game slang together with homilies about the ”right” to self-defense. It’s a blatant and so far unsuccessful attempt to capture the hearts, minds and wallets of non-gun demographics like millennials and Blacks, and Johnson’s argument about the futility of gun control is yet another attempt to justify more gun ownership, albeit from an academic point of view.

Johnson argues that since the only way to end gun violence is to get rid of guns, any plan to eliminate guns from private hands would just drive more guns into the hands of criminals for whom it would now be easier to prey on unarmed, law-abiding folks.  Better to give citizens the right and the opportunity to defend themselves, just as Blacks used guns to defend themselves since before they were even able to legally own guns.  Except it’s Johnson’s own research, admirably written, which shows that Blacks didn’t use arms to defend themselves from criminals, they used guns principally to assert or protect their political rights.  Klansmen who burned crosses on Black properties or burned down Black churches weren’t stealing property; they were trying to keep Blacks in a subservient or unequal political class. That’s hardly the same thing as shooting the robber or rapist who comes through the back door and Johnson should be willing to let the admirable history of the armed struggle for Black rights to stand on its own terms.

Book Review: Michael Waldman’s 2nd Amendment – A Biography

I started to read Michael Waldman’s book, The Second Amendment, A Biography, with a certain amount of trepidation, because if nothing else, here’s someone who hits the ground running when it comes to anything having to do with public policy. And whether its voting rights, or election financing reform, or same-sex marriage or just about any other domestic policy that liberals want to own, Waldman has been in the thick of the argument ever since he took over the Brennan Center in 2005.

Why trepidation?  Because although Waldman may have actually shot a rifle at least one time, let’s just say that he’s not much of a gun guy and his friends and policy associates don’t spend Friday afternoons popping some tops down at Franzey’s Bar & Grill.

Now don’t get me wrong.  You don’t have to be a gun guy to say something smart about guns.  But Waldman’s resume reads like the exact opposite of someone who would give gun owners a break, and let’s not forget that he runs a public policy institute named after a Supreme Court justice who probably would have been just as happy if the 2nd Amendment didn’t exist.  So I figured the book to be just another one of those “it’s time to defang the NRA” deals, with the usual elixir of anti-gun proposals like more background checks, another assault weapons ban and, for good measure, let’s get rid of all the damn things anyway.

                I was wrong.  Leaving aside the early chapters on the how’s and why’s the 2nd Amendment even got into the Constitution, the book’s real strength is Waldman’s ability to tie the narrative of recent gun jurisprudence to the general rightward drift of American politics and American law.  I have been waiting for someone to explain how judges like Scalia defend the notion of 2nd Amendment ‘originalism’ in order to promote a conservative, current-day agenda and Waldman nails this one to the wall. Going back to the 1980’s, he charts the confluence of conservative energies represented by politicized evangelicals, right-wing think tanks and specific-interest groups like the NRA, all combining to support a judicial agenda that seeks to roil back or dilute progressive programs and reforms.

It’s not so much that gun control is at the top of the progressive agenda; it ebbs and flows as high-profile shootings come and go.  But a majority of gun owners, particularly people for whom guns are a serious part of their life-styles, tend to be politically conservative anyway, so using fears of gun restrictions to enlist them in the anti-liberal crusade works every time.

A close reading of sources from the debates over the Bill of Rights makes clear that individual gun ownership represented the ability of citizens to protect and defend their political rights; rights to free speech, free assembly, due process and the like.  But the argument for gun ownership advanced by the NRA today, Olliver North’s appeals to patriotism notwithstanding, is based on the alleged social value of guns to protect us against crime.  The NRA would never argue that the Glock in my pocket should be used to stop cops from coming through the door, but they insist that the same Glock is my first line of defense when a bad guy breaks down that same door.

Waldman clearly understands that by using the 2nd Amendment to justify gun ownership as a defense against crime, the pro-gun community has successfully restated the history of the 2nd Amendment to buttress a contemporary social justification for owning guns. Neither will be readily undone as long as gun control advocates believe they can respond to this strategy by stating and restating the “facts.”  Remember “it’s the economy, stupid?”  Now “it’s the guns.”

Is The Argument Really About Guns?

For more than twenty years, the argument about guns has been going and forth.  But when all the intellectual saber-rattling dies down, we are left with one simple issue which needs to be explained: Do guns make us more or less safe?  According to public health researchers like Hemenway, Cook and Kellerman the answer is a resounding ‘no.’  On the other side, academics (Kleck) and non-academics (Lott) respond with a fervent ‘yes.’  And what the research of both groups allegedly proves becomes the public stance of the anti-gun and pro-gun advocacy groups like Brady and the NRA.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is what the argument is really all about. Or to put it more precisely, can we ever resolve the argument over guns as long as we cast it in those terms?  Because the one thing I have noticed in the more than 20,000 comments that I have received at Huffington Post and my own blog is not so much that people disagree with me, which is what I would expect, but the degree to which each side seems to be speaking a languages that the other side cannot understand.  When pro-gun activists talk about their “God-given right” to own a gun, anti-gunners shake their rhetorical heads in disbelief.  When people who want more gun control say that guns do more harm than good, they are accused of wanting to make America defenseless in the face of a criminal tide.

There’s no way that two sides this far apart will ever find a common ground to discuss the issue of gun violence, let alone figure out a way to make things change.  And whether we want to admit it or not, 31,000 gun deaths and 50,000 gun injuries each year cannot simply be wished away.  But it seems to me that there might be a way to find a common language and a common set of definitions that will work for both sides if we stop emphasizing the difference because I own a gun and you don’t, and instead look at things that are the same for both groups, gun owners and non-gun owners alike.

Dick Heller

Because the truth is that whether we believe that guns will or won’t protect us from things we fear, we all have the same fears, whether we express those fears through gun ownership or not.  Women, for example, are less inclined (by a wide margin) than men to own guns, but they are just as afraid, if not more afraid, of crime.  Kids in poor neighborhoods are much more likely than suburban kids to carry guns, but every youngster is afraid of the neighborhood bully who comes sauntering down the street. So the real question is not whether the gun is an answer to our fears, the question we all have to answer is what to do about fear itself.

And the problem is that no amount of research or data or any other set of objective facts is going to compensate for our fears, because fears can’t be overcome by appealing to some well-researched facts.  You can tell me from today to next year that I’ll be safer making that trip by plane than in my car, but the moment we have wheels up I get a little nervous feeling that has never appeared when I flip over the ignition of my Ford.

If we could only begin to understand that while gun ownership may divide us, the fears that make some (like me) own a gun are common to us all.  At which point perhaps both sides in the gun debate might begin speaking a language that the other side would understand.  And then it would become a true debate rather than yelling past each other the way we do today.

America Goes To War And Takes Its Guns

Most of the design and engineering advances that created modern small arms came through the development of military weapons, both rifles like the Springfield 03 or handguns like John Browning’s Colt 1911. And whether it was the M-1 Garand that General Patton called the “greatest battle implement ever devised,” or the Winchester repeating carbine that the U.S. Cavalry carried against the Indians, it’s safe to say that guns played an important role in just about every war that America fought.

It should therefore come as no surprise that guns are once again playing an essential, if not a pivotal role in what is perhaps America’s longest-lasting war.  I’m not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan, although both of those conflicts have dragged on far too long.  I’m talking instead about America’s “culture” war for which guns and gun ownership have come to define both the ebb and flow of the conflict as well as the basic attitudes of both sides.

Guns were first tied to the culture war when Charlton Heston became NRA President in  1998.  Heston and other members of his Hollywood generation began turning conservative when Ronald Reagan, won the Presidency in 1980. But while Reagan boosted conservative fortunes he was always ambivalent about the culture war; kept evangelicals at arm’s length, was never seen inside a church, and rarely, if ever, invoked the virtues and values of gun ownership or membership in the NRA.  In fact, along with Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, Reagan sent a letter to the House of Representatives in 1994 advocating an assault-rifle ban that was enacted later in the year.

Until the 2008 election of Obama, the culture war embraced issues like abortion and gay rights, both of which took precedence over guns.  And even though Bill Clinton blamed the 1994 Republican Congressional sweep and the 2000 defeat of Al Gore on the power of the NRA, the outcome of both elections couldn’t be tied specifically to anything having to do with guns.

The ascendency of guns in the cultural war didn’t reflect so much the growing power of the gun-owning lobby as it was the result of conservative shifts away from other issues for which they simply could not muster enough votes to win.  On abortion, for example, the nation appears evenly split but Rowe v. Wade is now forty years old and as women continue to move forward in the workplace and the professions, a woman’s right to choose seems fairly secure.  As for the gay issue, 19 states have now legalized same-sex marriage and last year the SCOTUS invalidated the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act which opens the door for many more states to lift their own gay marriage bans.

                So as the older, hot-button cultural issues gradually wither away (remember something called English as the official language?), gun ownership and gun “rights” move to center stage.  And guns are a perfect means to build support for conservative cultural warriors because their ownership, after all, is enshrined in the most holy of all cultural holies, the Bill of Rights.  Even the leader of the liberals, whether he means it or not, is forced to sing hosannas to the 2nd Amendment as his shock-troops prepare to do battle against the other side.

The problem with cultural conflicts is they cannot be resolved with reference to facts.  Because as Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky pointed out long before the culture war rose to the level of conflict that we see today, people make decisions about things like gun ownership not because they understand or even care about whether a gun can or cannot protect them from harm, but whether ownership of a gun either supports or conflicts with their world view.  If both sides in the gun debate don’t find a way to resolve their arguments by reconciling larger cultural issues, it will drag on the way the Chaco War dragged on between Paraguay and Bolivia over a border that neither country could even find.

Gun Violence? Time To Pass A Law

We may soon see a resumption of the gun debate that followed Sandy Hook because rumors continue to float around that another attempt will be made to widen background checks or enact some other form of additional gun controls.  To that end the Violence Policy Center just published a study about what they believe to be a causal link between gun ownership, lax firearms laws and gun homicides.

I have seen studies that tie our relatively high gun-homicide rate to per capita gun ownership on the one hand and little or no gun regulation at the state level on the other. But this is the first study which combines both sets of data and uses them to explain very high versus very low gun homicide rates throughout the USA.  And what the VPC report shows is that states with low per capita gun ownership and strong laws have low rates of gun homicides, whereas states with high per capita gun ownership and lax laws have gun homicide rates that are 6 times higher than the states with strong gun-control laws.

                Based on the evidence, Josh Sugarmann, who runs the VPC, says that “Gun violence is preventable, and states can pass effective laws that will dramatically reduce gun death and injury.”  Which may be a logical deduction from the evidence gathered and published by the VPC, but it flies in the face of reality when we talk about gun-control regulations in localities or states.

The truth is that states with “lax” gun laws simply reflect the fact that most of the residents in those locations own guns and don’t particularly want to see more controls.  The most recent surveys put national gun ownership at less than 40% of all households, but the figures in the VPC report for gun ownership in Western and Southern states are, if anything, too low to be true.

Back in 1981, a local roustabout and bully named Ken McElroy was shot to death by “persons unknown” as he sat in his truck on the main street of Skidmore, MO.  One of the reasons that local police, state police and the FBI could never pin the murder on anyone (he was actually shot by at least two people in full view of most of the townspeople) was because the calibers of the bullets recovered from McElroy’s body could have come from countless rifles owned by residents of the town.  The daylight murder, vigilante-style in Skidmore was unusual; the existence of so many weapons in a rural, Midwestern community was and still is the norm.

Whenever the talk turns to gun homicides, we point the finger at large, inner-city ghettos like Chicago, New Orleans or Washington, D.C. And while it’s true that more than 60% of the victims and perpetrators of gun homicides are minority youths ages 16-34, it’s a mistake to believe that the elevated level of gun homicides in the United States is just a function of big-city, ghetto life.  Last year the same Violence Policy Center found that the most dangerous city in America was, of all places, Omaha, Nebraska which, in 2010 had an African-American gun homicide rate of 34 per 100,000 although the statewide rate put Nebraska down near the bottom of the national list. In Springfield, MA, a city with only 150 residents, the 2013 gun homicide rate was 12, while overall the Massachusetts rate was less than 4.

It’s all very well and good to say that gun violence will go down if we pass more laws, as if getting people to stop using guns to shoot themselves or others is such a simple fix.  There’s really no way that one shoe fits all when it comes to strengthening laws against the misuse of guns, I don’t care whether the shoe is crafted at the state level or at Washington, DC.