Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 144

Guns for Good Guys, Guns for Bad Guys

Hot off the presses, my new book on gun violence.  Available on Kindle through this link and by Monday the print edition will be available too.

I wanted to write a book about guns that wouldn’t be the same-old, same-old stuff.  I also wanted to combine hard data with anecdotes drawn from my 35 years in the gun business. It’s a very different book and I’m sure you’ll like it.

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Oh Snap! Good Guy With A Gun Stops Bad Guy With A Gun (thegatewaypundit.com)
Guns and kids: the youngest casualties of America’s infatuation with firearms | Ana Marie Cox (theguardian.com)

Hunters and Conservationists: Why Don’t They Like Each Other? (2)

The argument between hunters and environmentalists isn’t about confliciting goals; it’s about conflicting communications, both within and without the advocacy groups that claim to speak for hunters and environmentalists.  But let’s go back to the beginning.

Hunting and conservation started at the same time and at the same place: hunters from the East who went West to hunt for recreation and then discovered that their activities were depleting or actually eliminating wild game.

It didn’t take long.  As early as the 1840′s, species like white-tail deer and wild turkey were disappearing, and by the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the bison herd was being reduced to a fraction of its former size.  When Teddy Roosevelt went into Wyoming to bag a grizzly, the only North American big game animal for which he didn’t yet have a trophy, he spent more than a week wandering around the Wind River Range before he even saw one.

According to the U.S. Census, America still had an open frontier and wilderness areas until 1890.  But for many game animals and birds, their frontier had long since been taken away.  It’s not surprising, therefore, that it was hunters like Roosevelt and George Grinnell who first called for conservation as a way of protecting wild species from unlimited exploitation at the hands of man. Both men were founders of the Audubon Society and the Boone & Crockett Club - advocacy for hunting and conservation was in tandem.

The strategic alliance between hunters and conservationists broke down in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.  The damage wasn’t done by the message (industrialization threatened environment) but the manner in which it was delivered.  The book was first serialized in The New Yorker magazine, then was a feature for the Book-of-the-Month-Club and shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.  If you were an educated, urban resident with no interest or involvement with hunting, you read and talked about Silent Spring.  If you were a hunter living on a farm or a small town, you never heard of Rachel Carson.

Carson’s book described what would happen to the natural environment without government regulation of industry.  Hunters, on the other hand, had been regulated for decades.  In fact, they had been instrumental in calling for regulations, writing regulations and putting up their hard-earned money to enforce them.  Hunters have been buying duck stamps since 1934 and this program along with excise tax revenues has pumped billions into habitat conservation.

You would have thought that hunters and environmentalists would have made common ground given the fact that both groups understood the need to protect the environment through government regulation.  But mis-communication quickly obliterated the commonalities between the two groups.  On the one hand, hunters wanted to preserve wildlife habitat so as to replenish animal and bird species.  On the other hand, environmentalists presumed that there was no distinction between a tree and a deer; they were both ‘wild,’ so they both needed to be protected.

It didn’t help matters that within a decade after the publication of Silent Spring, the hunters came to be represented by well-financed advocacy organizations, in particular the NRA, while the environmentalists fared just as well in developing and promoting well-financed advocacy groups, (ex. the Sierra Club.)

At the risk of provoking lots of snarky comments on both sides, let me quickly say that while advocacy organizations can play a very important role in getting a message out to a wide audience, they also have their own agendas which may or may not fit the needs and goals of the programs for which they advocate.  In the case of the NRA, their chief goal is to protect gun-owners from government efforts to regulate sale or ownership of guns.  Since hunters were the NRA’s chief constituency in the 1960′s, any regulation of hunting meant, by extension, a regulation of guns.  As for the Sierra Club and other environmental advocates, their success relied primarily on getting people who didn’t live in the ‘natural’ areas to visit or at least take an interest in such locations.  Neither of these agendas really responded to the issues raised by Roosevelt, Grinnell and the other hunters-turned-conservationists of the earlier period.

It is now clear that the greatest threat to wildlife comes not from the behavior of hunters, but from threats to habitat due to urbanization and economic development.  You would think that hunters and conservationists could respond to these threats as one voice, but, if anything, they seem more polarized than ever.  I would suggest that this polarization has nothing to do with habitat or wildlife; it has to do with a lack of reasonable discussion about the role of government and the options available to both sides in searching for a solution.

But when two ‘opposing’ groups seek a solution, by definition there has to be compromise.  We don’t seem to live in a period where compromise is valued or even sought.  To be continued in the next diary, and don’t forget to join our group: Hunters and Environmentalists.

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Why Don’t Hunters and Tree-Huggers Like Each Other?

Why do hunters and conservationists dislike each other? It wasn’t always that way. In fact, the modern American conservation movement that appeared in the 1880’s was started by hunters, chief among them our 26th President, Theodore Roosevelt. In the many books and articles that he authored about hunting and wilderness, Roosevelt tried to find a balance between conserving wilderness to protect animal habitat, while also allowing economic development of the frontier to move ahead.

But the world has changed and so have the battle lines between hunters on the one hand and conservationists on the other. Or have they?

For a moment, let’s put aside the vitriol and passion surrounding the proposed

Gun Violence: Who’s Killing Whom?

                If we really want to do something about gun violence, it’s time to sit down and have a sober, serious and thoughtful discussion based on facts.  Not based on opinions, not based on political agendas, and not based on rantings and ravings about the 2nd Amendment.  Based on facts.  Here goes:

Fact: 31,000 people died from gunshot wounds last year – 19,000+ suicides, 11,000+ homicides and 800+ accidents.  More children drowned in backyard pools than died from guns.

Fact:  90% of all gun deaths involve a handgun.  The “official” figures tend to over-count long guns because many death and crime reports do not actually describe the type of weapon.

Fact:  50% of gun suicide victims are white males, age 30-50, most legal gun owners.  60% of gun homicide victims are African-American males, age 17 – 30, most shot by other African-American males using illegal guns.

Fact:  If we deduct white male suicides and African-American homicides from the overall gun death rate, the U.S. gun death rate falls from 3.4 per 100,000 to 1.6, well below the gun death rate for such advanced countries as Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Luxembourg and Israel.  Note that our 1.6/100,000 rate is for a country in which the number of guns circulating amongst civilians exceeds the total of all guns found in the six countries listed above.

The U.S. does seem to be the one advanced country in which shootings involving mass or multiple victims occur on an episodic but not infrequent basis.  And it is these mass slaughters that invariably (but not always) ignites our debate over guns. But the numbers cited above have been published again and again, and the numbers testify to the fact that, with the exception of certain specific groups, we are a law-abiding and basically non-violent country.  Even with 250 million guns floating around.

So what should we do about gun violence?  First, we should tell the truth.  We should stop talking about the assault rifle “threat” on the one hand, and the protections afforded by “armed citizens” on the other.  The nut who walks into a movie theater or a classroom with an AR-15 is in no way typical of the people whose use of guns results in 30,000+ homicides and suicides each year.  For that matter, the guy or gal who takes a two-hour class in gun safety (if a class is even required) is about as ready to defend themselves with a gun as I’m ready to finally go on a real diet.

Telling the truth about gun violence also means telling the truth about the argument over guns.  And the truth is that it’s not really an argument about guns, it’s an argument about the role of government. We long ago decided that government should playa significant role in regulating behavior when the behavior in question impacts the common good.  Try starting an argument about seat belts. Or vaccinations.  Or the design of infant cribs.

The problem with regulating the behavior of gun owners is that there’s no common good because the majority of Americans don’t own guns.  So telling a large, well-organized and extremely vocal minority that they have to suffer more regulations isn’t going to win friends or influence people in the gun world. It’s just going to piss them off.

We know who’s shooting whom with guns.  We need to figure out how to regulate their behavior and the guns they use without worrying about everyone else. I have some ideas that I’ll share with you in blogs to come.

Conservation Begins With Wildlife

 

One of the issues that keeps coming up in the argument about banning lead ammunition is that substituting non-toxic materials for lead will drive up the price of ammunition, making it more difficult for the “average” gun owner to indulge in his hobby, be it hunting or target shooting.  There are even the usual conspiracy notions floating around the Internet that the effort to prohibit all lead ammunition is just another example of how the “elite” is looking to get rid of guns by pricing ammunition out of everyone’s budget.

Americans have been arguing about hunting and environment since the founding of the country.  Once British rule disappeared, many of the Colonial regulations and laws that governed hunting no longer applied, and many of these laws were repugnant to Americans because they represented a holdover from the English tradition that allowed only the upper classes to engage in outdoor sport.

But opening hunting to everyone, particularly commercial hunters, resulted in the depletion or extinction of many species.  As early as the 1840s, white-tail deer and wild turkeys were disappearing, then the passenger pigeon and the heath hen became extinct, and of course the great buffalo herd was reduced to a tiny fraction of its former size. By 1900, hunters and other outdoor enthusiasts realized that management of wild game was the only alternative to the complete loss of many species and the ending of hunting altogether.

Enter two visionaries: Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell.  Both were Easterners, Ivy Leaguers, elitists in every sense of the word.  Both were also captivated by wilderness and both purchased Western cattle ranches in 1884.  Grinnell had his first taste of the outdoors when he accompanied General George Custer to the Black Hills in 1874 (he wisely declined Custer’s invitation to take part in the 1876 expedition.)  Roosevelt’s father founded the Museum of Natural History in New York City and Theodore explored the Adirondacks as a teenager and also purchased a Western cattle ranch in 1884.

Grinnell, editor of Forest and Steam magazine, founded the Audubon Society in 1886.  The following year, Grinnell and Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club.  At this point, America’s foremost naturalist, Grinnell, and America’s foremost outdoorsman, Roosevelt, created the modern conservation movement. And what did these two men share besides a love of wilderness?  They shared a love of hunting.

Most of the original conservationists were hunters – Roosevelt, Grinnell, Audubon, Olmsted, Parkman, Pinchot.  Even Thoreau considered himself to be an “outdoorsman” (I am indebted to John Reiger for this information.)  Whether it was the establishment of nature sanctuaries, or the saving of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, or the creation of forest preserves, hunters instinctively understood the connection between preserving habitat and protecting animals.

These hunters turned conservation-activists also understood something else; namely, that to strike a balance between survival of animals on the one hand, and requirements of hunters on the other, both wildlife and hunting needed to be managed.  And management meant enlisting government at every level – local, state, federal – because wild animals, birds and fish all migrate. So an alliance developed between hunters, conservationists and government agencies that resulted in the creation of the National Parks System, the Migratory Bird Act, the Duck Stamp Act and the Robertson-Pittman Act which so far has pushed more than $2 billion into conservation and hunting programs.

This alliance no longer exists due to the polarization of the gun control debate.  If the NRA and the NSSF believe that the Federal Government is a threat to law-abiding shooters, they aren’t about to align themselves behind programs that might enlarge the ability of government agencies to control access to guns.  At the same time, environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Audubon believe that only the federal government has the resources to control environmental threats arising from new technologies for energy extraction.

Right now there is a hot contest in California (A.B. 711) over whether to ban all lead ammunition.  The NRA and its hunting allies like Boone & Crockett and Ducks Unlimited oppose the measure; the Audubon Society and its allies are promoting the ban on lead ammo in California and elsewhere.  These groups should not be fighting one another.  They should be sitting down together, acknowledging their common heritage and history, and finding ways to make sure that what Roosevelt and Grinnell said 125 years ago still holds true today: Conservation Begins With Wildlife. 

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Let’s Get The lead Out Of Ammo

                  The reason the NRA wins in Washington is because their opposition isn’t organized.  The opposition only comes to life when a terrible tragedy (Sandy Hook) occurs, and as soon as the posturing and pleading comes to an end, support for more gun control quickly disappears.  The NRA, on the other hand, never misses an opportunity to remind its members that the 2nd Amendment right to own guns must be constantly and continually defended.

                The problem is that people who support gun control usually don’t own guns.  But they do own something else.  What they own, and they share this ownership with gun owners by the way, is the world in which we live.  Whether we call ourselves environmentalists, preservationists, naturalists, ecologists, bird-watchers, tree-huggers, or just good, old-fashioned lovers of the outdoors, the number of people who support and enjoy the beauties and wonderment of nature dwarfs the NRA’s membership by far.

And now it appears that, for the very first time, these folks may be gearing up to challenge the NRA’s monopoly over discussions not about guns per se, but about the ways in which they are used.  I am referring  to the legislative battle in California over Assembly Bill 711 which bans all lead ammunition within the state. Previously lead ammunition was prohibited in areas inhabited by the California condor and certain other flyways; now environmentalists are attempting to extend the prohibition state-wide.

As expected, the NRA is using a combination of scare tactics (‘they’re really after your guns,’) pseudo-science (‘more animals die from road kills than from lead shot,’) and economic Armageddon (‘thousands of jobs are at stake,’) to spearhead the anti-711 crusade.  But the NRA’s campaign isn’t about what kind of ammunition will be used to shoot at game or targets per se.  It’s about who will set the terms and the tone for any discussion about guns.

The NRA has been very successful in making sure that government regulation over the gun industry, particularly the regulation of products, is minimal at best.  They know that if California bans all lead ammunition, that the regulatory virus will spread.  The country was settled East to West but new things tend to move from West to East.  Remember where half-and-half first started messing up coffee?  Remember a guy named Reagan?

The problem isn’t the lack of alternative, non-toxic materials.  The problem is the lack of communication between the two sides.  For example, we have banned lead-based paint and leaded gasoline, and nobody who wants to be taken seriously in any discussion about public health would question the Center for Disease Control’s recommendations on protecting children from exposure to lead.  Manufacturing lead ammunition creates the second highest consumption of lead, the 65 million metric tons used in 2012 ranking only behind the amount used in the manufacture of batteries.  But ammunition manufacturers have been petitioning the ATF for years without success to create realistic rules governing ammunition components that would allow non-toxic materials to be substituted for lead.

Here’s a real opportunity for the two sides to sit down, put the vitriol aside, and come up with a plan that satisfies both the public health risks of lead exposure on the one hand, and the ability of the ammo manufacturers to utilize non-toxic substances on the other.  And it wouldn’t have to involve any government regulation at all.  One of the NRA’s favorite symbols is our beloved bald eagle.  That bird lives today in great numbers because naturalists and environmentalists fought a long and difficult battle to get rid of DDT.  Why can’t we get together and do the same thing with lead?

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Do We Ever Talk About The Real Gun Violence?

With all the talk and counter-talk this year about gun violence, I’m not sure that we have actually looked at the real issue at all.  And the real issue goes like this.

Last year there were roughly 11,000 homicides, of which approximately 80% involved the use of guns. There’s endless talk about how the US is much more violent, and really much more gun violent than any other advanced country, and we need to do something about it.  The NRA says that we need more armed citizens.  The other side says we need less guns.  Neither side can point to any definitive data to prove their point, but when did facts ever get in the way of opinions anyhow?

I want to talk about another kind of gun violence, the kind we don’t talk about at all.  For every person who was shot with a gun in a criminal affair, more than two people (roughly 18,000) shot themselves with guns.  That’s right. Gun suicide is more than twice as common as gun homicide, and I don’t notice anything in all the proposed bills floating through Congress that mentions this issue.

The one thing that everyone in Washington seems to agree on is that we need to add mental health records to NICS.  Now maybe that would prevent some crazy person from buying a gun and walking onto a college campus to shoot at a whole bunch of people, but it would likely have little impact on gun suicides.  In the majority of suicides, the victim actually saw a health professional within the last two weeks of their life.  That’s the real problem with suicide; it’s a very impulsive, very private kind of behavior.

The private nature of suicide and mental health in general makes it even more difficult to understand the extent of the problem.  Coroners and medical examiners are very careful when it comes to dealing with homicides, but suicides are usually family affairs, so even the cause of death is frequently stated as something else.  For a country that is obsessed with health, we draw a line when it comes to mental health and we prefer at best to discuss it rarely, or at worst to ignore it completely.

Precisely because it’s private and impulsive, a gun is the perfect tool to use if someone decides to end their life.  You don’t have to find a rooftop that you can get to, you don’t have to figure out how to tie a good knot around your neck, you don’t have to cram a fistful of pills down your throat.  No wonder that guns are successful in 95% of the times they are used as a life-ending device, whereas hangings work only 50% of the time and more than 90% of pill overdoses result in a quick trip to the local hospital to have your stomach pumped out.

The NRA has gone off the deep end with this bizarre attempt to criminalize discussions between physicians and patients about the ownership of guns.  When a patient tells a physician that he is feeling depressed, the doctor always asks whether the depression has provoked life-ending thoughts.  And if the patient responds in the affirmative, how can the physician or other medical professional then not ask if the patient has access to a gun?  If anyone reads this last paragraph and feels obliged to respond with the obligatory defense of the 2nd Amendment, do me and the other readers a favor and don’t waste our time.

I agree with the NRA that people who use guns to commit crimes need to be held fully accountable for their behavior and for the damages caused by the gun.  But people who use guns to kill themselves can’t be held responsible because if they were able to think rationally, they wouldn‘t try to kill themselves in the first place.  If we need a national strategy to deal with gun violence, it’s a strategy to deal with suicide, and that’s a discussion that hasn’t yet occurred.

 

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Want To Stop Gun Violence? Here’s My Plan

There’s been an unending debate about how to curb gun violence so that we won’t experience more massacres like Sandy Hook.  Whether it’s expanding background checks, or banning hi-cap magazines, or adding mental health data to NICS, there’s no end to the proposals, strategies and  solutions.

But let’s be honest, the truth is that what the gun control folks really want is to get rid of the guns.  Yea, yea, I know that everyone supports the 2nd Amendment.  But the 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of gun ownership is about as important to Michael Bloomberg as the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom is to an atheist.  Not that Bloomberg with his billions or Obama with his press conferences have been able to accomplish anything.  But Mike the Gun Guy has a way they could get rid of all the guns without spending another dollar on campaign contributions or infringing on the 2nd Amendment at all.

Take a look at the monthly NICS totals published by the FBI.  The highest monthly number of NICS background checks ever recorded since the system went live in 1998 was December, 2012, when the FBI phone bank received 2,783,765 calls.  The previous month, November, was the first month that the system ever logged more than 2 million calls. Remember what happened in November, 2012?  Someone named Obama got re-elected.  Recall the date of Sandy Hook?  December 16.

Within a six-week period the most liberal, anti-gun President got to sleep in the White House for another four years, and then a mass killing took place that sparked immediate calls for more gun control.  From January 1 until March 31, NICS received another 7 million background check requests, and from November, 2012 through March 2013, total NICS calls almost hit 12 million. No wonder Smith & Wesson announced record revenues for the quarter ending April 30.

But a funny thing began to happen as the gun industry marched along. In May, following the defeat of Manchin-Toomey and other gun control schemes, NICS checks fell to 1,435,917 and in June dropped even further to 1,281,351. The June figure was the lowest since July 2011, and from what I hear and what I see in my shop, the figure for July will be lower still. In other words, since the high-point of last December, the drop is more than fifty percent!  Please don’t post a comment about how NICS numbers can’t be trusted because so many guns can be sold without a background check.  NICS obviously doesn’t cover all transactions, but it does cover virtually every new gun sold for the first time.  So the NICS number may not be absolutely correct, but it’s a very good gauge for understanding sales trends in the gun industry.

If the decline in NICS continues, the FBI will conduct less than a million monthly background checks within the next several months, and by year’s end we could be back down to the pre-9/11 days of George W. Bush.  Boom and bust is typical of the gun industry because spikes in sales are invariably the result of gun owners believing they won’t be able to buy more guns, rather than consumers entering the gun market for the first time.  Surveys seem to indicate that the number of households with guns keeps declining, while the number of guns owned by Americans keeps increasing.  Get it?

Gun sales have doubled from 2006 to 2012, but what the gun control crew should do to reduce the number of guns coming onto the market is to keep their mouths shut.  No more Dianne Feinstein press conferences, no more Michael Bloomberg “straw sales” videos, no more Joe Biden playing Joe Biden.  If gun owners stop worrying about “attacks” on the 2nd Amendment, they’ll stop buying guns.  Less guns out there, less guns get into the wrong hands.  The market can be a much more efficient way to regulate gun behavior than any government plan.

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Where Do The Numbers Come From In The Gun Control Debate?

Have you noticed how each side in the current argument about guns has a favorite statistic that they like to throw around?  For the NRA it’s the 2.5 million crimes that didn’t occur last year because more and more people use a gun to deter a crime.  For the President and his supporters it’s the 40% of all gun transfers that take place without a background check.  The NRA claims that their number “proves” that we would all be safer if everyone walked around with a gun.  The gun-control crowd says that their number “proves” that we need to expand background checks so that guns won’t end up in the wrong hands.  Does anyone know where these numbers come from?  Here’s the answer.

The NRA number comes from a telephone survey conducted by the criminologist Gary Kleck in 1994.  As for Obama, his number also comes from a 1994 telephone survey conducted by the sociologist Philip Cook.  Note that 1994 was the last time we had a national debate on guns that ended with passage of both Brady and the assault weapons ban.  Twenty years later we have a new debate but we’re using the same old numbers.  But it’s not that the numbers are old; they are flawed.

Let’s take Kleck’s numbers first.  No respondent was asked to prove that the incident could actually be independently verified.  Although 60% said the incident had “come to the attention of the police,” they were not asked whether it had actually been reported to the police or, for that matter, to anyone else.  Kleck’s explanation for this extraordinary lapse in methodology was that he assumed that many of the respondents might have been walking around either with guns they weren’t supposed to be carrying or were carrying guns in places where such behavior was prohibited.  But the survey didn’t seek to determine that issue either.  Did the people who claimed they used a gun to deter a crime really know what they were talking about?  Can we trust anyone to accurately describe an event without having some way of independently verifying  the truth of what they said? It’s a no-brainer to verify the results of a political poll.  Just wait for the election and then count the votes. But how do you verify something like whether someone really knew that a crime was going to take place?  Especially when the whole point is that the crime didn’t take place.

The methodology of Cook’s survey is not only as flawed as Kleck’s, but might even be worse. Cook asked his respondents if they knew how they acquired their weapon, and 60 percent said they “believed” they got it from a “licensed” dealer.  They ‘believed.’  Then the Department of Justice took this number and assumed that the other 40 percent who admitted to acquiring guns in this survey must have gotten them from someone else.  And this is the 40 percent who, twenty years later, still get their hands on guns without undergoing a background check.

By the way, there were no background checks in 1994.  The NICS system only became operational in 1995.  So nobody underwent a background check in 1994 and if Obama, Bloomberg and Manchin want to base their campaign for expanded background checks on the DOJ survey, they should be consistent and say that the rate of gun transfers without background checks today is 100 percent.  Because that was the rate in 1994.

Last but not least: Kleck’s survey was based on interviews with 225 people; Cook contacted 248.  A national political argument that has consumed the attention of the government, the media and God knows how many advocacy groups is based on discussions with less than 500 people.  Should we be at all surprised that we never found any WMDs in Iraq?

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The Gun Debate: Who’s Really Talking?

The last time we engaged in a gun debate that was as loud and time-consuming as what erupted after Sandy Hook was when the assault-weapons ban was enacted in 1994.  But there was no internet in 1994 so it’s impossible to compare what happened then to what is going on now.  The fact that a large number of “grass roots” gun control organizations have suddenly sprung into existence doesn’t necessarily mean that the country is more or less supportive of gun restrictions versus gun rights than it was twenty years ago.  There’s simply no way to compare the noise levels from one communication environment to the other.

What we can compare is the volume of pro-gun versus anti-gun sentiment through an analysis of social media to get some idea of which side might be outshouting the other.  Everybody has a Facebook page these days and people who “like” a particular page can receive content each time the page is updated or changed. The NRA has 2,463,000 ‘likes,’ the Sandy Hook Promise organization has 60,000. Glock’s Facebook page is liked by 567,000, Mayor Bloomberg with his billions has found some way to register a whopping 18,000,  Remington has 870,000 and the Brady Campaign, which has been around since before the 1994 debate, has amassed a grand total of 57,000.  If we use Facebook to estimate grass-roots support for pro versus anti-gun positions, the gun folks outnumber their opponents by 10 to 1.

The Facebook connections made by gun people are so much higher than the anti-gun Facebook connections that we appear to be playing in different arenas. Perhaps we are. What usually goes unmentioned when we talk about guns is understanding the real motivation of gun owners.  Maybe they are hunters, maybe they are target shooters, or maybe they really believe that a gun will protect them from crime.  But in most cases gun owners are hobbyists and their hobby is guns.  They think about guns, they buy guns, they trade guns.  Don’t believe me?  Walk around a gun show and you could be walking around a ham radio show, a model train show, or a computer show.

Guns are a lot more important to people who own them than to people who don’t.  That’s why people who don’t own guns join gun control Facebook pages in much smaller numbers because the passion and the interest just isn’t there.  They’ll tell a telephone pollster that they support background checks, but they’re not going to lose any sleep if the law isn’t changed.  The fact that some young kids get murdered by a “nut” who gets his hands on a gun just doesn’t support the idea that a lawful hobby should all of a sudden become more difficult to pursue.

In the age of digital communication it doesn’t take much to secure a presence in the public debate.  All you need is a URL, a website, Facebook page and Twitter account and you’re good to go. An organization called Moms Rising recently brought 5 groups together on their blog to issue statements about gun violence, including the Children’s Defense Fund whose President, Marian Wright Edelman, is one of my personal heroes.  Together the Facebook pages of these 5 groups total slightly more than 100,000 supporters and this number probably represents numerous duplicates. The NRA is just shy of 2.5 million.  That’s a joke, and not a funny joke.

People who want to see less gun violence aren’t going to get there by reminding gun owners to lock away their guns.  It’s not about websites or t-shirts or leading a seminar at the Aspen Institute.  It’s the tough, hard job of going into one inner-city classroom again and again to talk to 30 kids about staying away from guns.  I’m going to start doing it in September and if I can save one life by making these 30 kids think about gun violence every time I stand in front of the class, then I’ve done something that all the talk, all the organizational activity and all the world’s great opinion-makers and influencers have been unable to do.

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