Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 3

What’s Wrong With Armed, Self-Defense?

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              When I got into the gun business back in the 1960’s, if
you wanted to buy a handgun, you bought a Smith & Wesson, a Ruger or a
Colt. If you wanted a shotgun, you chose from Remington, Winchester, Mossberg
or maybe Ithaca Arms. And if you needed a rifle to go out after a white tail,
it was a Remington 700, a Winchester Model 70, a Savage, a Marlin or maybe you
went high end with a Browning or a Weatherby just for kicks.

              That was then, this is now. And thanks to the invasion
of polymer into gun manufacturing, which completely obliterated the distinctive
finish and design of each brand, the only thing which determines what gun goes
across the counter in the dealer’s shop is price. If you walked around a gun
factory in the olden days, you saw a whole bunch of craft shops operating under
one roof. Now what you see is one guy sitting in front of a computer, locking a
trigger, hammer and barrel assembly into a frame, then carrying the gun from
the finishing room into the range where someone shoots it two or three times
and it’s good to go.

              Yesterday I received the monthly sales sheet from one
of the national gun wholesalers, and I didn’t recognize the name of one company
producing a gun being sold to retailers by this distributor at a ‘bargain’
price.  Ever hear of a gun company called
TriStar? How about an outfit called Canik? Maybe instead of a name-brand assault
rifle like Bushmaster you’d rather buy an AR receiver from Aero
Precision, Anderson Manufacturing or a company called Spike’s.

              In all the hue and cry coming from Gun-control Nation,
I have never understood why guns are the only consumer products which somehow
escape being regulated both in terms of safety and use. Oh no, you say –
we can’t regulate the gun industry thanks to the PLCAA law the gun industry
received as a gift from George W. Bush in 2005. But as David Kopel has pointed
out (and Kopel is no friend of the gun grabbers), PLCCA does not shield the
gun industry from any liability if someone uses a gun in a ‘lawful’ way and
injures someone else. In other words, after I pull out my Glock and shoot you
in the head, I still have done nothing wrong if I can just convince the cops
that I was protecting myself from a threat.

              This idea that we should all be carrying guns to
protect ourselves has a long and storied history
in the United States, going back to when we were still a bunch of colonies
operating under British Common Law. But Common Law doesn’t recognize the use of
violence to prevent violence unless you happen to be wearing a Crown on your
head. And the idea that ‘stand your ground’ laws reflect how White men stole
land away from indigenous tribes is total nonsense because White men stole
millions of square miles from indigenous peoples in Australia and South Africa
and neither country has ever promulgated a ‘stand your ground’ law.

              I am still waiting for the very first attempt by all my
public-health researcher friends to explain how and why a majority of Americans
believe that keeping a gun around is the best way to defend themselves from
crime. As of last year, Gallup
says that 37% of American homes contain a gun.  Meanwhile, a majority of Americans also told
Gallup they believed the country would be a safer place if more people were walking
around with guns. Think the NRA is the reason why even many non-gun
owners believe in armed, self-defense? It’s the other way around.

              This country has a unique love affair with small arms,
and I’m in the process of writing a book that will attempt to explain it but
don’t hold your breath. I don’t even really understand why I’m a gun nut, so
how could I possibly figure out anyone else?

Do Safe-Storage Laws Protect Our Kids?

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A group
of medical researchers have just published a JAMA article about the
effectiveness of child-access prevention (CAP) laws, which are also
referred to as safe-storage laws. You can download the article right here.
Or you can go to JAMA and read it there.
 Either way, this is an important article
for two reasons:

CAP laws have become a priority with
all gun-control organizations and now exist in 27 states.For the first time, we have a major
piece of gun-violence research which clarifies the definition of ‘child.’

Most gun
studies define children as being 0 to 20 years old.  The articles cited
in the above link to Giffords use 17 and 20 as the maximum age for their
studies. But virtually all 50 states grant hunting licenses to anyone above the
age of 15, so to refer to them as ‘children’ is nothing more than an attempt to
make the problem of gun injury worse than it is, since most gun injuries,
intentional or unintentional, occur after the age of 14. To the credit of the
researchers who wrote this JAMA piece, they use the age of 14 as their
cut-off point.

Here’s the headline: “more-stringent CAP laws were associated with statistically significant relative reductions in pediatric firearm fatalities. Negligence laws, but not recklessness laws, were associated with reductions in firearm fatalities.” Fine – all well and good. But as usual, the devil’s in the details and I noticed one detail which remains unexplained.

This study looked at changes in gun injuries to children beginning in 1991 and ending in 2016, with the before-and-after comparison being set at 1997 when injury rates began to decline in both CAP and non-CAP states. Over the next eleven years – from 1998 through 2008, the decline was greater in the non-CAP states. Only after 2008 do injury rates in CAP states continue to level off (although they do not continue any downward trend) whereas injury rates in non-CAP states show an increase over the last few years.

The research team carefully explains a number of factors that might influence the results, such as an awareness of CAP laws, misclassification of data, etc. But what they don’t discuss is possible explanations for the decline of child gun injuries in non-CAP jurisdictions. A decline which, until 2008, was almost the same in both CAP and non-CAP states.

If you want to understand the effects of any law designed to require a certain type of behavior, at the very least you need to compare the effects of that law to whether or not the same behavior changed in places where the law didn’t exist. But there is also a bigger issue involved with this research.

The researchers make a distinction between laws which deal with access of children to guns in terms of ‘negligence’ (not locking the gun up or away) to ‘recklessness,’ which basically means that someone took a gun out of safe storage and used it in a stupid or careless way.

I happen to live in the state – Massachusetts –
which has the most stringent CAP law of all states with such laws. The law states
that unless the gun is under ‘direct control’ by a qualified (licensed)
individual, it must either be fitted with a ‘tamper-proof device’ or be locked
away at all times. No exceptions of any kind.

Guess what happens? The guy is fooling around
with his gun in the living room; his son is playing a board game with a friend
on the floor. Phone rings in the kitchen, guy jumps up to answer the phone but
leaves the gun behind. Kid picks up the gun, points it at his friend – boom!
 This act of utter recklessness,
which cost an 8-year old his leg (but at least he’s still alive) was committed by
a long-time veteran cop who had served his town with distinction for more than
20 years.

I want to commend the authors of this piece for bringing some important clarity to the CAP debate. I also want to remind them and everyone else that we don’t require seat belts for guns.

Time To Go Tactical!

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              Last week I received an email from an internet ad
agency asking if I would allow one of their clients to post some ads on my website.
I told the internet marketer to send me the URL and I would list it for
free.

              I’m happy to help any small business out with a free listing
on my website, as long as it isn’t that bunch of scam artists and so-called physicians
who own an outfit called Stop the Bleed. Any physician involved with
that bunch should hang their heads in shame. Otherwise, I’m just about open to advertising
by anyone who wants to promote something on my site.

              This particular company, whose logo and link will
shortly appear on mikethegunguy.com is an outfit called Tactical
Gear Hut, which contains some pretty good reviews of various kinds of ‘tactical
gear,’ which is a catch-all category for accessory items that shooters and
gun-nut enthusiasts might like to buy. 

              In the olden days, when someone walked into my gun shop
to buy a handgun, I might also get them to buy a holster and a box of shells. The
leather and ammo would add $30 or so to the sale. If they bought rifle or a
shotgun, I might also add a box of ammunition to the order and on occasion a cheap
piece of cloth to wrap around the gun – another $30 added to their tab. I
rarely sold scopes because my shop’s in an Eastern state where a long-range
shot during hunting season might be 50 or 60 yards.

              That was the olden days. Now welcome to the new days,
in particular, welcome to the ‘tactical’ days thanks to the appearance and
popularity of the AR, which happens not to be an acronym for ‘assault rifle,’ but
was the designation for the gun designed by Gene Stoner and first manufactured
by Armalite (as in ‘Armalite Rifle), a gun company which has gone in and out of business more times than I can count.

              Of course, once the gun-grabbing contingent led by our
friend Dianne Feinstein got their hands on this product and limited its use in
California, a law which then morphed into the 1994 Clinton assault rifle ban, how
anyone then talked about this product became the acid-test for their views on
guns. If you are pro-gun, you believe that everyone should keep an assault
rifle around; if not, not.

              The problem that the gun industry faced by using the
term ‘assault rifle’ is that it cuts both ways. Because again and again
whenever someone went into a school or a movie theater and shot up the place,
he used an AR, which was then described as a ‘mass assault.’ Which is
exactly what it was.

              So, the industry came up with a new way to market these
products, by replacing the word ‘assault’ with the word ‘tactical.’ After all, tactical
guys are the good guys. We send them out on those high-risk missions to kill
Bin Laden, we expect them to protect us against all kinds of threats.

              Meanwhile, I’m sitting here in my living room and
around my house there are 15 acres of trees. Maybe what I need to do today is
go out and select a spot in my woods where I can put up a stand to give me and
my AR the necessary cover for when I have to defend myself and my family
from a terrorist attack. And maybe I also need to go to the Tactical Gear
Hut website and pony up five hundred bucks to get my hands on a tactical
scope. After all, what’s a tactical rifle worth if I don’t have the optics
required to get the job done?

              Know why the United States is the richest country on Planet
Earth? Because it’s the only country where any law-abiding citizen can go out
and blow a couple of thousand bucks on some equipment that will never be needed
for anything at all.

Want To Train Yourself To Use A Gun? Try This Crazy Scheme.

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Several weeks ago I posted a column to give an award to the dumbest pro-gun legislator this year. The award went to a State rep in Michigan who showed up at a hearing on a gun bill with an AR slung over his back, and then had the rifle plus a handgun stolen out of his house. Now maybe someone else will top this guy for being the dumbest pro-gun legislator around, but it won’t be easy.

In the interests of fairness and honesty, however, I’m also obligated to give an award to the dumbest, anti-gun legislator each year. And while it’s only March, I’m willing to bet that the award I am about to present might also be regarded as the dumbest, anti-gun legislative idea for 2020, or maybe of all time.

I am referring to Massachusetts House Bill 2091, filed by Representative David Linsky, which can be downloaded right here. The bill is entitled, “An Act Requiring Live Fire Practice For A Firearms License,” which is a tip-off that no such licensing requirement exists in the Bay State right now.

Massachusetts is currently a B+ state according to the Brady campaign, which means it is one of the 10 most-regulated gun states within the country as a whole. In 2018, it also registered the second-lowest rate (3.63) of gun violence of all 50 states, a situation usually explained as resulting from its strict gun laws. The state’s most restrictive and comprehensive law took effect in 2000, and it not only required all gun transfers to be done with a background check, it also mandated that all new guns meet certain design and safety features before they could be brought into the state.

In the interests of what my medical friends refer to as ‘full disclosure,’ it should be pointed out that the 1999 gun-violence rate in Massachusetts, the year before this new law took effect, was 2.99. In other words, the result of the law which made Massachusetts one of the most heavily-regulated gun states, was that gun violence went up, not down. Oh well, oh well.

Representative Linsky has decided that perhaps a pathway to reducing gun violence in Massachusetts might be to require some kind of live-fire exercise prior to applying for a license to own a gun. Currently, any state resident who wants to own a gun must first take a safety course approved by the State Police, the usual nonsense where you sit in an overheated room, some old guy drones on and on from some book for a few hours, you take a quickie test which everyone passes and you’re good to go.

Several years ago our friends at The Trace discovered that 26 states did not require any live fire in order to apply for a license to walk around with a concealed gun. Massachusetts happens to be one of those states. In fact, for all the talk about how the gun restrictions make Massachusetts such a safe state, it happens to be one of a handful of states in which the license to own a gun and the license to carry a concealed weapon are one and the same. The cops do have the authority to restrict the right to carry, making Massachusetts a ‘may issue’ state, but this authority is almost never exercised outside of Boston and a couple of other large, urban sites.

So now along comes Representative David Linsky who’s going to solve the whole problem because his bill mandates a five-hour practice session at a shooting range before a gun application can be approved. Not to carry a gun, but just to own a gun. There is no other state which requires that an applicant for a gun license first engage in no less than 300 minutes of range time.

But the five-hour time requirement is not what makes Linsky the dumbest, anti-gun legislator to date. The bill says and I quote: “Said curriculum must include a minimum of at least 5 hours of live discharge of firearms, rifles, and shotguns at a license gun club, including the discharge of at least 50 rounds of ammunition.” Note that it’s not either 5 hours or 50 rounds. It’s both.

I can just see it now. Some newbie will show up at the Rod & Gun Club, pop off a box of reloads in about 10 minutes, then sit around for the rest of the afternoon until his five hours has expired and he can go home. Incidentally, according to the way the bill is written, the would-be candidate could fire all 50 rounds into the air.

If any of my Gun-nut Nation friends can come up with a better example of stupidity on the part of any legislator who wants to promote restrictions on guns, please send it along and we’ll consider it as competition against the Linsky award.

Thanks to Dave Buchannon for this tip.

There He Goes Again. Biden Makes Another ‘Mistake’ About Guns.

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Last night Joe made a comment about gun violence that is buzzing all over the internet and once again being taken to prove that maybe our boy Biden just can’t keep from saying ridiculous things. Joe criticized Bern for voting in favor of the 2005 PLCCA law which protects gun makers from torts, asserting that more than 150 million Americans had died from gun injuries since 2007. Biden’s campaign quickly covered up this silly gaff with his PR folks issuing a statement which brought the gun-death number down to 150 thousand, not million.

Actually,
the number of gun deaths since 2007 through
2018 is 413,403, which will probably increase by another 70,000 or so if we
could count right up to today. Now in fact, while 400,000+ deaths is nothing to
sneeze at, it’s not 150,000.  On the
other hand, the category of gun injuries would rank it as the 11th
leading cause of death in the United State, just below suicide, except that
half of that suicide total also happens to have been caused by using guns.
Which puts gun deaths into the Top 10 of all deaths. 

This
exchange between Bernie and Joe reminds me of another gun-comment that Joe made
at a 2013 White House meeting of video-game executives when he said that not
only did he have no problem with people keeping guns in their
home for self-defense, but in fact his wife Jill had access to a shotgun in
their Delaware home which she kept handy to protect herself and the kids when
Joe was on the road.

For the
very first time a national politician openly supported the idea of using a gun
for self-defense. And Joe made it clear that if Jill heard something which
sounded like someone was trying to break into their home, here’s what he  expected her to do: “`Jill, if
there’s ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony … take that
double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house,”‘ Biden said.
“You don’t need an AR-15. It’s harder to aim, it’s harder to use and in
fact, you don’t need 30 rounds to protect yourself.”

When I read Joe’s comment, I couldn’t believe that a national
political figure could speak about guns in such a rational and reasonable way. Had
I been the owner of Mossberg, Remington or one of the other companies that makes
shotguns, I would have immediately packed up one of our guns, run to Joe’s
office and presented the gun to him on behalf of both the gun industry and all
gun-owning Americans.

Nothing of the sort occurred at all. To the contrary, Joe was
lambasted by just about every hot-air balloon who speaks for Gun-nut Nation in
the gun debate. Mike Huckabee got on Fox News and told his audience
that two rounds from a shotgun wouldn’t be enough ammunition to protect yourself
from an intruder who had a gun with more ammunition in the mag. I suspect that
even Huckabee had trouble maintaining his TV composure while saying something
so dumb.

You know going forward that no matter who heads the
Democratic ticket, the gun ‘issue’ will be front and center during the 2020
national campaign. Which is all fine and well except I suspect that neither
candidate, Trump versus whomever, will say anything as remotely logical and honest
as what Joe said back in 2013.

No matter whether he’s talking about immigration, or the
economy or anything else, what Trump has managed to accomplish in less than
four years is to take all political rhetoric and all political debates to the
extreme. Which is where the gun debate has always been, but now every other
topic appears to be catching up.

If Trump said that 150 million Americans had died from gun
injuries over the last twelve years, nobody on his staff would bother to
correct him at all. Maybe it’s time for the Democrats to stop worrying about
Joe’s gaffes and realize that the overblown rhetoric used in the gun debate has
become the accepted verbal currency for every political exchange.

Here Comes Bernie With Or Without His Guns.

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              Now that Crazy Bern seems to be moving into a
commanding lead in the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination, a lead that may
well get him near to the brass ring on Super Tuesday, which happens to be just
one week away, his record on guns and gun-control laws comes up because he has
always been pictured as being too ‘soft’ on guns.

              The image of a pro-gun Bernie was used by Hillary in
2016, even though when she campaigned against Obama in 2008, he was the
gun-control candidate while she waxed lyrical of going out hunting with her
father in the woods. How much reality was there behind her attempts to appear
comfortable with 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ God only knows. But she had
no trouble jumping to the other side of the fence once she discovered that her
2016 primary opponent was himself something of a pro-gun guy.

              What vote was used in 2016 and again this year to paint
Crazy Bernie as a stooge of the NRA? 
The first pro-gun vote he cast was against the Brady bill, the second
time he voted in favor of the PLCCA which immunizes
the gun industry from class-action suits. In both instances, Bernie justified
his vote on the fact that he represented a rural, gun-owning state. In fairness
to him, it should be noted that Vermont’s Democratic Senator, Pat Leahy, also
voted against the Brady bill.

              I happen to think that this attempt to paint Sanders
into a corner over his record and views on gun control is a dead duck before it
ever gets off the ground. To begin, if Bernie has flip-flopped on certain gun-control
measures, how do you compare what he has done this year to what Hillary did in
2016? When she ran against Obama in 2008 she sent mailers around before the
Indiana primary accusing
her opponent of being ‘soft’ on ‘gun rights.’ In 2016 she not only went after
Crazy Bern for being pro-gun, she made gun control one of the building-blocks
of her entire campaign. If anyone in Gun-control Nation found her shift from
pro-gun to anti-gun a little difficult to believe, all I can say is they voiced
their concerns in a very quiet way.

              Where does Bernie stand right now on guns? He’s in
favor of universal background checks, red flag laws, and co-sponsored the
current assault rifle ban which will go nowhere at all. He is also a co-sponsor
of Dick Blumenthal’s bill (S. 1939) to repeal PLCCA. At various campaign
stops, Joe has gone after Bernie for voting against the Brady bill in 1994.  Criticizing someone for a vote cast
twenty-five years ago is like using the Paleozoic era to define political time.

              What I find most interesting about the gun issue in
2020 is the degree to which it has become much less of an issue than it was in
2016. There was a little dust-up from Gun-nut Nation when Beto O’Rourke proposed
an assault weapons buy-back plan, but when his campaign ran out of gas and
money in November, the issue was politely shelved.

              There have been two federal gun laws passed in my
lifetime: GCA68 and Brady in 1993. Both laws came about because a liberal President
from a Southern state was able to count on blue majorities in both the Senate
and the House. It should also be remembered that the genesis of both laws was the
successful assassination of one President and the unsuccessful assassination of
another. I’m not a Trump fan by any means, but I certainly wouldn’t want to see
him shot. For that matter, the odds that both houses of Congress will return blue
in 2021 is far from assured.

              No Democratic Presidential candidate will say anything
about gun control other than supporting the standard legislative proposals that
have been flopping around now for more than twenty years. So, if anyone in
Gun-control Nation thinks they should decide how to vote because of how the
candidates differ on guns control, they might want to think again.

Don’t Ban Guns. Just Ban The Ammunition.

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              Ever since
my late friend Tony Scalia decided that the 2nd Amendment protected
the personal ownership of guns, Gun-nut Nation has been falling over themselves
reminding everyone that any attempt to regulate gun ownership is an infringement
of their 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ Now the fact that a Constitutional
Amendment isn’t a ‘right’ of any kind, so what? 
It still sounds good.

              Meanwhile,
the Scalia opinion does create some problems for Gun-control Nation because the
last thing that any liberal wants to be accused of, is being against the
Constitution. After all,  wasn’t it a
very liberal Constitutional scholar, Sandy Levinson, who reminded
us liberals that if we want to use the Constitution to protect free speech, we
also have to use it to protect private ownership of guns?

              But it
occurs to me that in all this talk about what the 2nd Amendment
means or doesn’t mean, there’s one thing for sure that it doesn’t cover.
Nowhere in the Constitution can we find the slightest mention of ammunition,
and since it’s the ammunition which is what really causes all those gun
injuries every year, who cares about whether or not everyone can walk around
with a gun?  Just ban the ammunition for
those guns; there’s absolutely no Constitutional protection for ammunition at
all.

              Hey, wait
a minute! How can you have a gun without ammo? 
How can you use a gun without ammo? 
I play around and shoot unloaded guns all the time. Last night I was
watching one of my favorite movies, The Usual Suspects, and every time
that Kevin Pollak (Hockney) or Stephen Baldwin (McManus) stuck his gun in
someone’s face, I raised my Sig 226 and shot the guy dead.  I have probably pulled the trigger of my Sig
or my Colt Python thousands of times sitting on my couch and nobody’s ever
gotten hurt. You show me a gun-nut who doesn’t dry fire his guns all the time
and I’ll show you a gun-nut whose wife made him sell all the guns.

              If you
take the trouble to read Scalia’s Heller opinion, you’ll
note that he makes a distinction between guns that have always been found in
the home, as opposed to ‘unusual’ weapons; i.e., weapons of war. The former are
protected by the 2nd Amendment, the latter not. So, in making a
somewhat arbitrary definition of civilian versus military arms, his opinion
rests on what he and other conservative judges call the ‘originalist’ interpretation
of legal texts. But when it comes to the ammunition used by these so-called personally-owned
guns, the argument falls flat on its face.

              The most
popular ammunition caliber currently sold to civilians who own all those
self-defense guns is the 9mm caliber, sometimes called 9×19, sometimes called
9mm Luger, but whatever it’s called, it was designed specifically for military
use. The inventor of this caliber was Georg Luger, who also happened to be the
inventor of the Luger pistol, a.k.a., the P-08. The gun and the ammunition were
standard issue to the German Army from 1900 until 1943.

              Want the
second most popular ammunition caliber? It is probably the 45acp round that was
developed by John Browning for his Colt 1911 pistol, the military sidearm for the
U.S. Army until 1976.  Both the 9mm and
45acp calibers were developed for one reason and one reason only – to give soldiers
and other armed forces a highly-lethal round that could be carried in a
handgun.  Now if anyone out there wants
to claim that ammunition developed for the sole purpose of killing human beings
is a ‘sporting’ round, go right ahead.

              It seems
to me that if my friends in Gun-control Nation really want to get serious about
reducing gun violence, they might consider coming up with a plan that will
strictly regulate the ownership of ammunition because those products don’t have
any Constitutional protection at all.

              Of course,
I can just see my Gun-nut Nation friends starting to yell and scream about ‘threats’
to their ammunition ‘rights.’ Good. Let ‘em yell and scream.

When Are We Really Going To Start Talking About Gun Violence?

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Last week I wrote a
column raising concerns about the so-called ‘consensus-based’ approach to
gun violence being promoted by physicians and public health researchers, many
of whom seem to be convinced that as long as they claim to ‘respect’ the 2nd
Amendment, that Gun-nut Nation will be more amenable to support all those ’reasonable’
gun laws, one such law having just been blocked
by the Virginia State Senate.

This idea of not being opposed to the
2nd Amendment is a riff on another idea which started to appear in
the medical literature when doctors began talking about counseling patients who
own guns, the riff being the importance of ‘respecting’ the ‘culture’ of people
who own guns. Here’s a sample of this approach from several of our most
dedicated and respected gun-violence
researchers:  ”The provider’s attitude is critical.
Patients are more open to firearm safety counseling when providers are not
prescriptive but focus on well-being and safety—especially where children are
concerned—and involve the family in respectful discussions. Conversations
should acknowledge local cultural norms; be individualized; and, when possible,
occur within a well-established clinician–patient relationship.”

Given
the fact that most physicians aren’t gun owners themselves, exactly how should
these clinicians gain the knowledge they need in order to counsel about guns
while taking care not to make negative judgements about ‘local cultural norms?’
The only peer-reviewed resource which attempts to define the cultural ‘norms’
associated with gun ownership is the
research published by our friend Bindu Kalesan, who asked 4,000 respondents
to report on the degree to which their social activities were in some way or
another connected to their ownership of guns. What she found was that roughly
one-third of the gun owners reported some degree of social contact with other
gun owners.

Based
on this research, should physicians assume that a patient who owns guns may
also feel somehow identified with the social activities that revolve around gun
ownership and gun use; i.e., shooting range visits, hanging around a gun shop,
joining a gun club? Sounds fair to me.

There’s
only one little problem. What do all these social activities involving guns have
to do with reducing gun violence? Nothing. Why do I say nothing? Because the
guys who go to the shooting range to sight in their beloved shotgun before hunting
season, or the guys who stop off at the gun shop to play around with the latest
toys on display, or the guys wandering around the gun show munching on a donut because
the wife doesn’t need the grass cut or the driveway cleared that weekend, aren’t
the folks whose behavior or culture or whatever you want to call it creates 85%
of the injuries that we define as ‘gun violence’ each year.

That’s
right. Assuming that intentional, non-fatal gun injuries run around 75,000 –
80,000 a year, add that number to the 15,000 fatal intentional gun injuries in
2017, and divide it by that number plus the 20,000 suicides.  Sorry, it’s only 83%. Of course, we know that
all this mayhem is created by legal gun owners, right? Yea, right.

The public
health ‘threat’ known as gun violence happens to be the handiwork
of young men, most of whom live in inner-city neighborhoods and start fooling
around with guns by the time they are 14 years old. And by the way, these are
also the kids who have overwhelmingly dropped out of school, even though school
attendance is never (read: never) used as an indicator of gun risk by all my
friends doing all that public health research designed to ‘inform’ policy-makers
about the efficacy of various ‘reasonable’ gun laws.

Want to
sample gun culture?  Try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZGJcV19gRw.
After you watch it, watch it again. Then talk to me about how we need to ‘respect’
the culture of gun owners, okay?

What I am saying is simply this:
Either we begin to talk realistically about the causes of gun violence or we
don’t. Right now, we don’t.

Join Americans Against Gun Violence.

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              Before I begin this column, I need to make it clear
that I am not an advocate for either side in the gun debate. The fact that I
agree and promote many gun-control strategies doesn’t make me a hostage of Mike
Bloomberg, nor am I a stooge for the NRA jut because I have been a
member of the organization since I was eleven years old. On the other hand, when
I discover an organizational development that fits my perspective for what to
do about gun violence, I’m not going to hold back.

              And what I recently discovered was an organization, Americans Against Gun Violence,
started by a retired ER doctor in California, Bill Durston, who just
happens to be a former Marine decorated for ‘courage under fire’ during the Viet
Nam war. Bill started his group because he would like to see ‘definitive action’
taken against gun violence, and while he and his members support the ‘reasonable’
public measures being advocated by other organizations – background checks,
red-flag laws, blah, blah, blah and blah, this group also has a much different
agenda.

              To put it bluntly: what Bill and his folks say is that
we will reduce gun violence by doing the same thing that every other advanced
country has done; namely, create a national database of gun ownership and
initiate ‘definitive’ (i.e., severely restrictive) policies, such as banning
assault rifles, creating a national gun database – exactly the kinds of
policies which everyone knows will reduce gun violence but are policies usually
considered too unyielding to be bought by the gun-owning crowd.

              Where Dunston’s group departs from the accepted,
gun-control narrative can be found in their response to the
very first question under the FAQ tab: “Should law-abiding people own
guns for self-protection?” Answer: “In general, no.” They don’t say that people
should be walking around with guns after they have been ‘trained.’ They don’t
say that everyone has a ‘right’ to keep a gun for self-protection because of
what my late friend Tony Scalia said in 2008. They say – no. Which makes this
group the only gun-control group that is willing to take an entirely
uncompromising position with Gun-nut Nation over the issue of using a gun for
personal defense.

              I started writing about gun violence when I got sick
and tired of the gun industry trying to maintain full employment in their factories
by promoting the nonsense about how everyone would be more safe and secure if
they walked around with a gun. And to make sure that the gun industry wouldn’t
be accused of promoting unsafe behavior, they got the NRA to ramp up their
training program which now focuses
on what the boys in Fairfax call ‘Basic Shooting Pistol,’ a course that
prepares someone to use a pistol in self-defense with the same degree of
proficiency they would get if they took a lesson from Leonard Mermelstein, who
happens to be my cat.

              If the NRA would promote what I consider to be the
proper use of guns; i.e., hunting and sport shooting, they’d get no argument
from me. But pretending that the only difference between a video shooting game
and a live gun is that you have to pass a background check to spend money on
the latter, is to foist a marketing scheme on current and would-be gun owners
that is completely and totally wrong. Not just wrong, but unsafe to the extreme.

              Unfortunately, most of the gun-control organizations,
along with their friends in medicine and public health, find one way or another
to somehow avoid taking this direct and no-nonsense approach. Which is why I
find the intentions and efforts of Americans Against Gun Violence to be
commendable in every respect and I urge you to do what I have just done.

              Which is to join up, send them a donation and help keep them in the game.

The ‘Consensus-Based’ Approach To Gun Violence Is Wrong.

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              Now that physicians no longer have to fear being
prosecuted for talking to their patients about guns, a whole cottage industry
appears to have sprung up within the public health and medical communities to explain
to doctors how they should talk to patients about guns. Because most doctors
don’t own guns, and while the medical associations have all issued statements
deploring gun ‘violence,’ such statements don’t give doctors any real insights
into talking about a particular consumer product found in many of their
patients’ homes. It’s easy to talk about seatbelts – every doctor drives a car.
It’s not so easy to talk about guns.

              Now it just so happens that guns as a medical risk has
been understood for more than twenty-five years, thanks to the two New
England Journal of Medicine articles published
by Kellerman, Rivara and colleagues in 1993 and 1994. When these two articles
appeared, Gun-nut Nation went on the offensive, a political assault which
included getting CDC gun-research money thrown out. Nevertheless, from a
medical point of view, what Kellerman and Rivara said back then still stands
now.

If only
the current-day physicians clamoring most loudly for increased concern about
gun violence would follow the evidence-based findings of Kellerman and Rivara –
but they don’t. Instead, the narrative being promoted within the medical
community is to take a ‘consensus-based’ approach to counseling patients about
guns.

              With all due respect to my many friends in the medical
and public health communities who are trying to find some way to reduce the
125,000+ intentional and unintentional gun injuries which occur every year,
this ‘consensus-based’ approach
is not (read: not) supported by any evidence-based research. Instead, it
reflects the adoption of a narrative designed to shield these physicians from
what they believe would otherwise be another assault from Gun-nut Nation and
the alt-right.

              If doctors actually believe that by saying they respect
the ‘rights’ of their patients to own guns, they will somehow protect
themselves from criticism from gun-rights groups, they have absolutely no idea
how Gun-nut Nation views any attempt to question access to guns, particularly
by people who, for the most part, don’t own guns. Much of the evidence-based
data on gun violence comes from solid studies done at the Bloomberg
School. That’s B-L-O-0-M-B-E-R-G.  You think there’s a single gun owner out there
who would ever believe anything coming from a program funded by the person now
being referred to in gun magazines and gun blogs as the head of the ‘nanny
state?’

              And once the physician who wants to counsel his patients
on gun risk makes it clear that he ‘respects’ the patient’s ‘right’ to own
guns, he then can continue building his consensus-based approach by telling the
patient that all he has to do is safely store his guns. To be sure, there are
studies which find that when patients are counseled about safe
storage, they go home and sometimes store their guns in a safer and more secure
way. Is there one, single study which compares before-and-after safety
counseling to changes in gun-violence rates? Not one. The assumption that safe
storage leads to a significant decrease in gun violence is a nice idea, but medical
treatments and counseling aren’t based nice ideas.

              Let me break it gently to all my medical friends who
find it easy and convenient to believe that once they tell a patient to go home
and lock up his guns, that they have done what they need to do in this area of
public health.  The Kellerman/Rivara
studies which indisputably found both a suicide and homicide risk from guns in
the home did not – ready? – did not find any significant difference between
stored and unstored guns. A slight difference perhaps in suicides; no
mention of storage issues in homicides at all. Nor is there any mention about the
need to be concerned about those beloved 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’

              Take it from a lifetime gun-nut like me. Want to reduce
gun violence? Cut the bullsh*t. Get rid of the guns that create this violence –
semi-automatic pistols, assault rifles and tactical shotguns.

That would only leave about 250 million guns floating around the United States.  That’s not enough?