Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 42

That Old Time Religion Ain’t So Pro-Gun.

Back in April, 2016 when D.D.D. Trump showed up at the NRA meeting and was endorsed by America’s ‘first civil rights organization,’ a lot of folks in the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement began to think that if the worst of all possible worlds happened and Schmuck-o Trump actually became President, their efforts to reduce gun violence might come to a crashing halt. Because it’s one thing to have a President who is ‘pro-gun’ just because every Republican politician is pro-gun; it’s another to have a President who builds an entire political campaign out of being pro-gun.

[image error]             But it now appears that not only has the presence of D.D.D. Trump in the White House provoked a resurgence of GVP activity, along with significant political gains, but more important there has been a growth in the number and type of GVP organizations which did not exist a year or even six months before.  Part of this new GVP wave is due, of course, to the kids from Parkland, make no mistake about that. But I am seeing something much deeper and wider than just a response to the mass shootings; I am seeing what appears to be a significant social and cultural change.

How do you explain the fact that a billboard telling Christians to support gun control has just gone up in a North Carolina county that gave Trump-o 55% of the vote?  Now granted, the group which paid for this – the North Carolina Council of Churches – has always been a liberal voice among religious groups. But they didn’t run a roadside message like this after Sandy Hook, and evidently this billboard is going to be placed in other locations throughout the Tar Heel state.

When the groundswell first started after Parkland, the immediate response of the gun-rights noisemakers was to dismiss the entire effort as just another example of how the gun-grabbing elitists were ‘using’ kids like David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez to promote their own, nefarious aims. And in previous pro-gun, anti-gun contests, selling the idea that the liberal elite was trying to deny average Americans the ‘right’ to defend themselves was an argument that usually worked. But this is different. You can argue with Bloomberg, you can argue with Soros, but it’s not all that easy to argue with Jesus Christ.

Over the years, much of the so-called strength of the pro-gun movement has been explained as not reflecting the size of their movement per se, but the degree of energy and commitment that promotes their cause. Again and again, public surveys find that gun owners are much more likely to engage in political activity about regulating guns than advocates from the gun-control side.  But when outfits like Delta, United, Avis, Hertz and the bank which was issuing NRA credit cards all cut their ties to the Fairfax boys, this sends a much more powerful message than some jerk-off ‘good guy’ who sends a snarky or profane email to a Facebook page promoting more regulation of guns.

How much of the new-found GVP effort is tied directly or indirectly to the growing disillusionment and disgust with Trump? Just as nobody was willing to imagine or predict that Schmuck-o would win the election, so nobody ever imagined that his behavior since moving into the Oval Office could provoke such an anti-Trump storm. But the good news about building a political movement is that it’s always easier to attack than defend, something which the pro-Trump collective is now realizing in spades.

Take a look at the new gun law that just went into effect in Vermont.  This law takes Vermont from the least to one of the most regulated of all 50 states, and it was signed by a Republican governor who, until last week, was rated an ‘A’ by the NRA. Vermont has an active and energetic gun-rights group, some of whom showed up to heckle Governor Scott as he signed the gun bill. Guess what?  The ‘good guys’ lost a big one and the virus may spread.

How Does U.S. Gun Violence Compare To Other Nation-States?

If there is one argument about gun violence which has taken on a life of its own within the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement, it’s the idea that the U.S. has a much higher level of lethal violence because we have so many more guns. The most recent research in this respect was published several years ago by two eminent GVP scholars who compared the rate of intentional mortality injuries in the U.S. to the same injury category in 23 other ‘wealthy’ nations and found the U.S. rate to be much higher than anywhere else.

[image error]             Here is their basic finding: “U.S. homicide rates were 7 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher.” Wow.

It’s always tricky to make cross-national comparisons when it comes to gun violence because often the data required to develop and study a problem just isn’t there. Or if it is there, sometimes the researcher won’t let anyone have access to the information, so it’s as if the numbers don’t exist even if they do.  A case in point is a celebrated article by Adam Lankford, who claims to have done a cross-national comparison of 171 countries and determined that the U.S. rate of mass gun violence is much higher than anywhere else because Americans own so many guns.  But nowhere in his paper or downloadable from the journal in which it appeared can we even view the figures which he allegedly used.

The good news about the study which compared mortality in the U.S. to other high-income countries, however, is that all the data either accompanies the article itself or is referenced to other published works (Small Arms Survey, World Bank, et. al.) Which brings me to a much more concerning problem with this research, namely, the decision to base murder rates on overall population totals, which could distort the whole issue of violence caused by guns.

In fact, there are two issues which need to be addressed if we are going to make a valid comparison between the United States versus everywhere else. First, the fact that a country’s civilian population owns a lot of guns doesn’t really explain any causal connection to gun violence unless we know what kinds of guns are actually owned. Of the 24 ‘wealthy’ countries whose violence rates were compared, the United States is the only country that grants its residents more or less free access to handguns, which happen to account for at least 80% or more of all intentional gun deaths. In terms of understanding relative gun risk, counting Grandpa’s rusted old shotgun sitting in the basement doesn’t explain anything at all.

The more important issue, however, is whether we should be comparing gun-violence rates from an epidemiological perspective (i.e., creating an injury rate on overall population, the way we create a rate to understand the risk of an infectious disease.)  By using overall population counts to compute gun violence rates, we are assuming that a gun injury is just like any medical event which causes an injury, but it’s not. Intentional gun injuries can only occur if someone makes a series of conscious, calculated decisions to get their hands on a gun, load a gun, carry a gun, and use the gun in an improper or illegal way.  There is no other medical event of any kind, even other intentional, physical injuries, that require so much forethought and work.

Know what happens when we compare gun violence rates between wealthy countries using the number of civilian-owned guns found in each nation-state? The U.S. rate is no longer 7.5 times higher than any other country; in fact it is right smack in the middle of the average rate for all 24 ‘wealthy’ states.

It would be folly to argue that we don’t have a serious and protracted problem with gun violence. Of course, we do. But when we compare gun violence on the basis of ownership rates, we discover that the U.S. may not be such a violent place.

 

No Matter Where It Happens, Gun Violence Is Still Gun Violence.

Like it or not, much of the discussion about gun violence flows over to the issue of race, or more specifically, how racial minorities are disproportionately the victims of violence caused by guns. According to our friends at the Violence Policy Center (VPC), black Americans “are only 13% of the U.S. population, yet represent 50% of homicide victims,” of whom 83% were killed with guns.

[image error]              Things don’t get any better when we break the numbers down by racial and age groups. In 2016, the leading cause of African-American mortality for men and women ages 15-24 and 25 -34 was homicide, accounting for 42% of all deaths for the 15-24 group, and ‘only’ 26% for the age group 25 to 34.  For whites in those some age groups, homicides ranked 7% and 5% respectively for all deaths.

These are terrible numbers, for the most part reflecting the degree to which African-American communities continue to experience the socio-economic manifestations of poverty which divide such populations from everyone else. I recall the shock and dismay when Michael Harrington ‘discovered’ this seemingly-intractable indigence in his classic The Other America, published in 1962. In the more than half century since that time have things really changed?

I think it’s a major step forward when a Parkland kid like David Hogg, who refers to himself as ‘white and privileged’ makes it clear that he wants to speak not just for his classmates but for “all of the people that have died as a result of gun violence and haven’t been covered the same can now be heard.” As terrifying as mass shootings are, let’s not forget that such events add a tiny fraction to the overall gun violence body count, and most of that count are bodies which are young and black.

The purpose of this column, however, is not to advocate for more attention paid to inner-city gun violence, but rather to discuss another aspect of the gun violence issue which is too-often ignored.  Because if we are going to concentrate our concerns on what gun violence does to the quality of life and the length of lives in our inner cities, we skip over what gun violence does in communities not of color, but communities where only folks in the majority race tend to live.

Ever been to Wirt County in West Virginia?  It covers some 250 square miles of rolling hills and small farms some 40 miles north of Charleston, in 2016 four out of five voters marked their ballots for D.D.D. Trump. The county is home to some 5,800 people, median family income is around $36,000 (the U.S. median is now just under $60,000) and the racial diversity is zero; i.e., it’s all white.  In 2014, there were 9 murders in Wirt County, which doesn’t sound like a heckuva lot except on a per-100,000 basis, which is how we figure crime rates, it works out to 155.  The last time I checked, the murder rate in gun-happy Philadelphia was 16.

Look at the murders in Wirt County from another point of view.  The population density in New York City is 66,000 per square mile, which means that in Manhattan, the average city block is home to roughly 3,300 folks.  Put two city blocks together and you have about the same number of people that live in Wirt County.  How would you feel if 9 people were murdered in one year on the block where you lived?

In 2016, more than 8,600 white men and women were murdered, three-quarters with guns. But we don’t hear about these killings because they take place in small, dispersed, isolated places like Wirt County, and believe me, there are plenty of Wirt Counties all over the national map.

I’m really hopeful that the Parkland kids will create more pressure on the media to talk not just about the spectacular, rampage shootings, but as well spend more time reporting about the humdrum, one-on-one shootings which happen every day. But let’s just remember to include all the victims of gun violence in those reports.

 

Ted Nugent And Alex Jones: A Perfect Pair.

Let me say this about Ted Nugent.  He is a remarkably-talented musician.  And the few moments when he played some licks for Alex Jones demonstrated why this guy has sold more than 30 million albums in a musical career that is in its sixth decade. Unfortunately, in order to enjoy Ted’s music, you also have to listen to him and Jones repeating the same clichés over and over again although the media reports that he wanted liberals shot down like ‘rabid coyotes’ wasn’t exactly true.

[image error]              Ted’s beginning to remind me of what I experienced every time I went to Florida to visit my grandparents who lived in South Miami Beach before it became known as South Beach. My grandfather and several of his cronies would sit on a bench in Flamingo Park debating this subject and that, and whatever came out of their mouths was true because it came out of their mouths.  God knows what the filtering mechanism was that put the ideas into their brains in the first place. But what always struck me about their conversations was the degree to which they knew that what they said was completely and totally true.

I’m not sure how many times in the hour-long conversation Ted said that he was always guided in everything he did by “truth, logic and common sense.” I stopped counting when he repeated this brief homily for the ninth or tenth time. But every time he repeated this profound phrase his interviewer, whose entire career has been built on never saying anything which remotely connect to the truth, nodded his head up and down.

I never realized until I watched this video that Nugent considers himself to be a true, civil rights pioneer.  He pridefully mentioned how much he loved various Black musicians like Little Richard and James Brown, noting that it was America’s ‘freedom’ that allowed these artists and other Black performers to achieve fame and renown. That civil rights laws were the handiwork of all those liberals and Democrats who are trying to destroy what patriots like Nugent try to protect went unmentioned. But why let a few facts get in the way of opinions, right?

The best part of the show was when Nugent and Jones were out on the shooting range and Ted was trying to explain to Alex why the AR-15 was just like any other sporting gun. What makes the AR just another sporter, according to Ted, is the fact that it only shoots in semi-auto mode, and “no society would be so irresponsible to send the military into war with a semi-automatic weapon.” The fact that the current battle rifle carried by U.S. forces can be set to semi-automatic firing status probably means that the guns will only be shot that way when a trooper is wandering around Ted’s ranch.

Ted also made a point, multiple times, about how he’s ‘studied’ all the mass shootings, and every such event, including the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, could have been prevented if patrons inside the club had been allowed to carry guns. You may recall that D.D. Trump said the same thing during the 2016 campaign, and it was left to Chris Cox to remind him that the NRA didn’t support the idea of people mixing booze with guns.

The one thing I never did while listening to my grandfather and his friends concoct one harebrained explanation after another was to speak up and interject my own ideas. Because if I had said anything that didn’t support their nonsensical views, I would have been immediately told to shut up and learn something from what the older generation knew to be true.

When Ted Nugent stops playing his guitar and starts shooting off his mouth, what you have is a quintessential case of arrested mental development; here’s a guy who has not been told to his face that he’s full of sh*t for at least fifty years. But he sure knows how to play that guitar.

Thank God The Liberal Media Can Still Find Someone Who Loves Guns.

Now that the Parkland kids have managed to put gun-control laws in the middle of the upcoming off-year election campaign, we have to assume that Gun-nut Nation will rev up their noise machine and say whatever they can say to deflect attention away from the whole issue of violence caused by guns.  Except the last time I looked, all those 2nd-Amendment stalwarts who have been marching around with their trusty AR-15 rifles slung over their backs seem to have quit the scene.

[image error]            But where are all the pro-gun marches that were going to be held to counter the national protests on March 24th?  Where are all the gun-toting patriots screaming to lock up Hillary at all those Town Halls? Even Ted Nugent ends up going from a White House dinner to a boring interview with Alex Jones.

But not to worry about how the 2nd-Amendment gang is being marginalized and pushed to the sidelines in the continuing discussion about guns. Because we can count on the mainstream media (read: liberal, gun-grabbing media) to keep Gun-nut Nation alive.  Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story about a young guy down in Texas who finally saved up enough dough to buy his first AR-15.  The compassion, the humanity of this new AR owner dripped from every page.  Here’s some of the better quotes:

“He’s here this weekend [at a gun show where he bought the gun] not because he worries about an imminent ban, but because he just sold his Mustang and finally has the cash.”

“Rodriguez has long been a gun enthusiast. He learned how to shoot when he was in elementary school, and he purchased his first gun at 18.”

“He learned more about guns through YouTube, got a job and settled into a responsible life with a gun hobby on the side.”

Get it?  This guy’s not a nut; he’s not going to run into a school with his AR and start blasting away.  He’s actually a married man with a real job and he always wanted an AR because taking it out to the range is a “lot of fun.”  He’s not even worried about a terrorist attack and says that for self-protection, he would rather rely on a handgun than on his newly-purchased AR.  Of course, it turns that he’s never actually been involved in a criminal event of any kind. But he knows that if it actually happened, he would have no trouble engaging in defensive gun use because, “Can you think of a more honorable way to [die] than trying to save people’s lives?”

Okay, our boy has a few fantasies about life and death, so do we all.  But does the WaPo reporter at any point even hint at the possibility that this kid just spent a thousand bucks on a new toy?  Of course not. Because the truth is that these same reporters couldn’t stop writing about all those gun-toting, proto-fascist kids last year who were getting ready to mount the barricades and defend freedom against the Antifa hordes.

What happened to all that nonsense?  I’ll tell you that happened. It was nothing except whatever the mainstream media decided it should be. And once the brouhaha about Charlottesville died down and nobody really cared whether this Civil War statue or that Civil War statue stayed up or came down, the whole big deal about crazies running around with guns also died down. Instead, we now have an African-American gun instructor, Michelle Tigner, whose goal is to train one million women to use guns and also touts herself as “the  perfect mediator for a civil dialogue between ‘unwilling’ to talk gun advocates and ‘uninformed’ anti-gun crusaders.”

All of a sudden everyone’s interested to talking to both sides. Am I the only person out there who sees this as nothing more than the latest manifestation of good, old American entrepreneurship to make a quick buck by promoting the idea that most gun owners are actually normal people when it comes to what they do with their guns?

Should I Join The Golden Eagles? You Decide.

Yesterday in the mail I received my 2018 Defender of Freedom Award from the National Rifle Association.  I am proud to place this plaque on my wall just below my 2017 NRA Freedom award.  The plaque comes with a very inspiring letter from Wayne-o LaPierre, which even appear to be personally signed by the NRA’ distinguished Executive Vice President. You know, Wayne-o is the guy who has actually sat right next to Draft Dodging Trump in the White House, so getting a letter from Wayne-o is like getting a letter from Draft Dodger himself.

[image error]             I am so proud and humbled to receive this award that I want to quote directly from Wayne-o’s letter to me.

“Whenever powerful anti-gun politicians and their allies launch an all-out attack on the Second Amendment, you always stand firm and fight to defeat gun bans, ammo bans and gun owner registration.”

This Award is only bestowed on exceptional NRA members who have demonstrated outstanding leadership well above their peers – and whose inspiration to gun owners has contributed significantly to the defense of the Second Amendment.”

Now I’ve heard all about the push for a new assault weapons ban, but I didn’t know that the gun grabbers were also going after ammunition as well. On the other hand, we all know that extending background checks to personal gun transfers will certainly push us down the slippery slope to gun registration, then gun owner registration, then gun confiscation, then Fascism, then another Holocaust – no wonder I have just been recognized as a Defender of Freedom. It’s one and the same package after all.

But the letter from Wayne-o contains something else beyond congratulating me for my fervent defense of America’s most important civil right.  It also states that because I am a Defender of Freedom I can join the NRA Golden Eagles Club, which is certainly a rare honor and one I should not pass up.  The Golden Eagles, according to Wayne-o, “have stood on the front lines of the greatest gun rights battles of our generation. Golden Eagles recognize that there I no greater gift we can bestow on future generations than to win the battle for freedom today.”

I can’t believe it. Little ol’ Mike the Gun Guy gets to serve the cause of freedom alongside such patriots as Oliver North and Dana Loesch! That’s right. They’re also Golden Eagles and I can’t believe that I could be counted as being in the same company as two fine, upstanding Americans like them. In fact, my Defender of Freedom plaque is embossed not only with Wayne-o’s signature but with the signature of LtCol North – I can’t wait to show this to my kids and my grandkids.

Of course, in order to be a member of the Golden Eagles, I have to demonstrate that my commitment to America’s first freedom doesn’t run just skin deep. Wayne-o’s asking me to give him two hundred bucks to help keep freedom alive. This dough will also help the NRA fight the good fight in the upcoming elections because if the ‘tens of millions’ that Bloomberg and Soros are pouring into ‘gun-ban schemes’ bears fruit, the gun-grabbers could “wipe out everything you and I have worked so hard to achieve.”

I have until May 21st to make a decision, but this is too important a decision to make on my own. So, here’s what I’m going to do.  I’m asking you – my readers – to tell me whether I should support America’s freedoms by taking this poll. I’ll run it until May 15th or so and then announce the results. If you tell me to join the Golden Eagles I’ll whip out the ol’ checkbook and join away. I’ll be guided by what you say and thanks for helping me decide what I should do.

 

 

 

How Come Gun Sales Haven’t Shown A Parkland ‘Spike?’

Whenever a mass shooting occurred under the Obama ‘regime,’ the President would deliver a teary speech, the usual suspects in Congress and the gun violence prevention (GVP) community would call for a new gun-control law and gun sales would go through the roof.  This was the scenario after Aurora, after the shooting of Gabby, after Sandy Hook.

[image error]              Parkland has been different because the gun-control organizations won’t be getting their marching orders from the liberal political establishment and Draft Dodging Trump; this time the whole shebang is being led by a bunch of kids. And if you don’t think that Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg haven’t pushed the whole issue of gun control into a totally different context, just ask Laura Ingraham how she’s doing getting new sponsors for her television show.

What has also changed since Parkland is the degree to which the gun industry can no longer live off of panic buying generated by fears that guns will no longer be around. The FBI has just released its NICS numbers for March, an event which used to be greeted by Gun-nut Nation with paroxysms of joy, but the numbers for last month landed with a dull thud.

Here are the relevant numbers:  Handgun checks in March 2018 were 781,452; the number for March 2017 was 751,866, which is basically the same. Overall month-to-month NICS checks did increase from 1,274,419 in 2017 to 1,417,463 this year, a gain of 11%, but checks in February 2013, when Obama was ramping up his post-Newtown gun bill were more than 1.5 million, a number that won’t happen again.

One interesting caveat is that the number of NICS checks for the category known as ‘other’ doubled from 38,684 in 2017 to 68,192 this year.  For the most part, a background check classified as ‘other’ is used when someone buys a serialized receiver which isn’t connected to a barrel or a stock. The transaction still requires a background check but the owner has to then add various components so that he actually can fire the gun, which is increasingly how AR-15 rifles are now sold. One of the reasons the AR-15 is so popular is that the polymer frame can easily be adapted to all kinds of accessories and do-it-yourself parts; this also reduces the price of the gun by as much as half.

I truly believe that the Parkland kids have accomplished what none of the organizations which comprise the GVP community have ever done before; namely, they have shifted the argument about gun violence away from the political arena to where it really belongs, namely, as an issue which ultimately needs to be decided by the people who own guns. Because either the gun-owning community will realize that they simply don’t need to own any more of the damn things or people who don’t own guns will decide that they don’t need to own them at all. If Gun-nut Nation stops registering its fears about losing their guns by stampeding into gun shops every time a liberal politician says something about needing more gun control, passing sensible and effective gun laws will be a piece of cake.

In the interests of full disclosure, however, I must add a note about the current regulatory environment itself. I am not particularly sanguine about enhancing gun regulations if it means granting more power or authority to the ATF.  The ATF lab is probably the best forensic lab in the world, but the regulatory division contains the biggest bunch of liars, inept fools and misfits who could ever be put together in any federal agency at all. This is the bunch that violated countless laws because they thought that a repair garage in Arizona was converting semi-auto AK rifles into full-auto jobs. This is also the bunch which convinced themselves that David Koresh was making machine guns in his compound outside of Waco, a totally-mistaken belief which cost 75 lives.

I am really happy that a bunch of kids are leading the effort rather than a bunch of GVP organizations taking their cues from on high. But give the ATF more authority to regulate guns?  Please.

 

 

 

What The Assault Weapons Ban Needs And Doesn’t Need.

Let’s say that Congress actually passes this assault weapons ban (AWB) and El Schmuck-o signs it into law.  And let’s say that a year after the bill becomes law the cops come into my house and find my Colt H-Bar, which I am allowed to have around because I owned it before the law was passed.  And let’s say I don’t have any paperwork to show when I bought it (which I don’t.)  How do I prove that I’m not breaking the assault weapons ban?  I can’t.

[image error]            Here’s Problem Number Two. Let’s say that after the law is passed I want to sell my H-Bar to someone else, which I can do because I legally own the gun and therefore can transfer it to anyone else who can legally own the gun. But the proposed AWB law as it now stands requires that all transfers of grandfathered assault guns be done in a dealer’s shop. Which means that, for all intents and purposes, a ‘universal’ background check system has just begun to creep in through the back door.

I’m not listing these problems because I personally care whether Americans can own these particular kinds of guns or for that matter whether they can own any guns at all. My task, as I see it, is not to advocate but to inform and the chips will fall where they may. Obviously, Gun-nut Nation will oppose any kind of bill which regulates anything having to do with guns. But the two issues I have just raised might also create serious opposition to this bill even among people who might otherwise be in favor of regulating assault-type guns.

One thing I wish the supporters of an AWB would eliminate from this bill and from their brains is all the nonsense about banning a gun because it has features like a pistol grip, a barrel shroud, a grenade or rocket launcher, or a folding stock. What makes an AR more lethal than other kinds of rifle designs is the bottom-loading, detachable magazine, which by taping two mags together gives the gun a capacity of 60 rounds or more.  As far as threaded barrels are concerned, if the harebrained scheme by harebrained Donald Trump, Jr., to pull silencers off the NFA list is dumped in the trash can where it belongs, owning a gun with a threaded barrel won’t create any real safety risk at all.

Some of the guns that are banned, such as the Hi-Point carbine, load ammunition through a magazine in the grip rather than underneath the frame. Guns like this simply aren’t assault rifles the way the term is defined in this bill, and if the bill begins to gather some traction, I hope the list of both banned and approved guns will be reviewed by someone other than a well-meaning ‘expert’ from the ATF.  In case you don’t remember, the ATF is the bunch whose mistaken belief that David Koresh and his Waco followers were building full-automatic weapons ultimately led to 75 deaths.  I don’t notice that Waco is ever mentioned in discussions or studies about mass shootings, by the way.

The United States is the only advanced country which regulates gun ownership not by how a gun is designed, but whether the gun’s owner can be trusted to use the weapon in a proper way. And despite Gun-nut Nation’s self-serving attempt to push some cock and bull about how any rifle that shoots in semi-auto mode is a ‘sporting’ weapon, the truth is that a rifle which allows the shooter to touch off 60 rounds in less than a minute is a lot of fun to shoot, which I guess meets the definition of a ‘sporting’ gun.

What’s wrong with going to a video arcade and popping off a hundred rounds in 10 seconds, complete with great graphics and realistic sounds? Oh, I forgot. Not only can you do the same thing with a real AR-15, but the gun will also protect you from ISIS or maybe even an invasion from Mars.

Tom Gabor – A New Approach to Regulating the Most Dangerous Weapons.

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Much has been said of late about the need to ban “assault weapons” (AW) or “weapons of war”. Polls show unprecedented support for a nationwide ban on these weapons.  When used in the context of legislation or bills, these terms have been defined in a variety of ways, needlessly offend certain gun owners, and may even serve as impediments to effective laws.  In this article, we propose a different approach and one that avoids the pitfalls of previous AW bans as well as bills filed since the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

 

The Problem:  Unless one has lived in a cave over the last 20 years or so, it has become apparent that mass shootings have become an increasing concern in the US.  The largest massacres have almost always involved the use of weapons like the AR-15 and its relatives in Las Vegas (with the aid of bump stocks), at the Orlando Pulse nightclub, Virginia Tech, Aurora Century Theater, and Sandy Hook Elementary School, as well as in Parkland. One analysis has found that an average of 9 more people are shot and 3 more people are killed in mass shootings in which these weapons or high-capacity magazines (HCM) are used, illustrating the emptiness of the slogan:  “Guns don’t kill, people do.”

An analysis conducted for my book, Confronting Gun Violence in America, shows that the number of public mass killings by firearm more than doubled from the 1980s to the 1990s and 2000s. Between 2010 and 2015, the annual number of incidents has again increased sharply, at over four times the frequency observed in the 1980s.  More than half of the 30 deadliest mass shootings since 1949 have occurred since 2007.  The average number of deaths per year resulting from mass public shootings also has increased and, since 2010, was almost four times that of the 1980s.  It is worth noting that the acceleration in the number of large-scale mass shootings occurred following the expiration of the national AWs ban.

 

The increasing annual number of fatalities is especially noteworthy because great strides have been made in the management of bullet wounds over the last 15 years or so due to lessons learned on the battlefields of Afghanistan.  Thus, despite higher survival rates, we see an increasing toll from mass shootings, reflecting the greater lethality of weapons and an increasing proportion of victims who incur multiple bullet wounds.  This makes sense as we know that there is a growing number of military-style weapons in the civilian market.  The gun industry introduced these weapons into the civilian market in the 1980s in response to the saturation of their core market (white, rural males) with conventional firearms.

 

The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994:  The federal AWs ban, in force between 1994 and 2004, prohibited the manufacture, transfer, and possession of those semi-automatic firearms designated as AWs.  The weapons subject to the ban were characterized by features (see below) suitable to military and criminal applications rather than sport shooting or self-defense.  Over one hundred firearm models, including certain pistols and shotguns, were covered by the ban.  The ban also covered HCMs holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.   This aspect of the ban extended beyond designated AWs as it applied to many non-banned weapons that could be equipped with these magazines.  At the time the ban took effect, it was estimated that 1.5 million AWs were privately-owned in the US along with about 25 million HCMs.  Millions more of the HCM’s manufactured before the ban were imported into the country by 2000.

 

The ban yielded mixed results with regard to its effect on violent crime.  While there was no discernible reduction in gun crime or gun homicide, in six major cities—Baltimore, Boston, Miami, St. Louis, Anchorage, and Milwaukee—the share of gun crimes committed with weapons covered by the ban declined by between 17 % and 72 % during the ban.  Nationally, traces of guns used in crimes were 70% less likely to involve AWs during the ban.  Louis Klarevas, author of Rampage Nation, found that gun massacres, defined as incidents involving six or more fatalities, were nearly cut in half during the ban in comparison with the ten-year period preceding it.  In the decade following the ban’s expiration, fatalities again increased dramatically, more than tripling the deaths seen during the ban.

 

The reduction in crime by assault weapons was, in part, offset by the substitution of military-style firearms that technically did not qualify as AWs. Also, during the ban, a study of four cities indicated that guns with HCMs actually rose as semi-automatics were being equipped with them.  In addition, the grandfathering provisions of the AWs ban, which allowed weapons and HCMs already manufactured to continue to be sold, undercut its effectiveness.  Approximately 25 million of these magazines remained in the country and millions more were available for import from other countries.  In fact, manufacturers took advantage of the grandfathering provisions by boosting production of designated AWs in the months leading up to the ban, creating a large stockpile of these items.  By contrast, in Australia’s well-known and successful ban, pre-ban weapons were bought back rather than exempted from the ban.

 

The manner in which weapons covered by the ban were defined also undermined its effectiveness.  The federal ban and current state laws define “AWs” by their features, some of which are irrelevant to the harm the weapon can produce.  Under the 1994 ban, an assault weapon included semi-automatic rifles capable of accepting detachable magazines and possessing two or more of the following features:

Folding stocks for concealment and portability;
Pistol grip protruding conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon;
A bayonet mount;
A flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor; or
A grenade launcher.

 

Definitions based on these features create a loophole by allowing manufacturers to circumvent the law simply by making minor modifications to a weapon.  For example, removing flash suppressors and bayonet mounts makes a weapon no less dangerous but can get around a features-based definition.

 

Overall, the 1994 ban showed some promise but the potential effectiveness was reduced by the grandfathering provisions and the features-based definition of “assault-style” weapons.  In addition, those evaluating the law made the point that the ban’s exemption of millions of AWs and HCMs manufactured before the ban meant that the impact of the law would be gradual and would not be fully realized for several years beyond its expiration, especially as HCMs made before the ban kept pouring into the market.

 

A New Approach Focusing on Weapon Lethality: The first AW ban in the US, The Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989, was enacted in California following the massacre of schoolchildren by a drifter who fired 106 rounds of ammunition in three minutes with a semi-automatic military-style weapon.  The law defined an AW as one with “a high rate of fire and capacity for firepower that its function as a legitimate sports or recreational firearm is substantially outweighed by the danger that it can be used to kill and injure human beings.”  Unfortunately, the law failed to explicitly define such terms as ‘high rate of fire,’ and ‘capacity for firepower”.   Instead of defining these terms and banning weapons that met these definitions, the law listed over 50 specific banned guns, and added some cosmetic features (collapsible stock, flash hider, etc.) which have no impact on a gun’s lethality.

When the Federal Government enacted its AW ban in 1994, it borrowed the list of California-banned guns, included the various design features but dropped any reference to lethality; i.e., no mention of ‘high rate of fire’ or ‘capacity for firepower’ at all. This opened the door for gun rights advocates to claim that, functionally, there is no real difference between an AR-15 and any other kind semi-automatic rifle.

To address this void, I propose identifying the most dangerous firearms and regulating them, not on the basis of what they look like but on their ability to kill and injure as many people as possible in the shortest time frame.  National gun expert Mike Weisser proposes a method of scoring the lethality of a firearm on the basis of five factors:   This system is an objective one which is not influenced by cosmetic modifications intended to circumvent regulations.

Caliber – Larger and faster projectiles tend to cause more damage to human tissue, although the design of bullets and the materials used to make them are also important;
Capacity – The number of cartridges that can be fired without reloading;
Loading mechanism – The speed at which a rifle can be reloaded;
Action – Time required to fire a single cartridge and bring the next cartridge into the breech;
Design flexibility—the ability of a firearm to accommodate accessories, some of which increase lethality (e.g., lasers, electronic aiming devices, fore grips).

Once a scoring system is in place, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has the expertise and facilities in place to evaluate each firearm on the market and give it a lethality score.  This will allow for a classification of firearms on the basis of their lethality, with regulation increasing with the growing lethality of the category in which a firearm belongs.  Restrictions that might be considered can vary from complete bans to special licenses and vetting for owners of more lethal weapons, registration requirements, special taxes, longer waiting periods, increasing penalties for noncompliance, and storage requirements for more dangerous weapons.  One option for semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 is to regulate them under the National Firearms Act, as is done with fully automatic firearms.

 

Thomas Gabor, Ph.D. is a criminologist, sociologist and author of Confronting Gun Violence in America

 

 

 

 

 

Quinnipiac Poll, February 20, 2018; https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-...

Everytown for Gun Safety, Analysis of Recent Mass Shootings; https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/...

https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Vi...

Christopher S. Koper, America’s experience with the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.  In D. Webster and J. Vernick (eds.),  Reducing Gun Violence in America.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p.161.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...

 

https://www.factcheck.org/2013/02/did...

Christopher S. Koper, America’s experience with the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.  In D. Webster and J. Vernick (eds.),  Reducing Gun Violence in America.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p.166.

Mike Weisser, Measuring Gun Lethality; https://mikethegunguy.files.wordpress...

When The 3rd Way Gets It Wrong, They Really Get It Wrong.

Far be it for the little ol’ gun guy to question the creds or experience of political activists like Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler, but every once in a while, even the self-appointed gurus of the Left get it wrong. And not just a little bit wrong. Completely and totally wrong.

[image error]             Actually, the Third Way group isn’t really Left, they are…gee, I’m not sure what they are. But they certainly aren’t on the alt-right/white. And they certainly believe that their ‘high-impact advocacy campaigns’ will help liberals figure out what to say and what to do about the important issues of the day. And with all those Parkland kids marching around, what could be more important than gun control today?

What Kessler and Cowan have come up with is the idea that the NRA has never been as panicked as it is right now, that the future for America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ is even more dim, and that the boys from Fairfax  are “the most vulnerable they’ve been” in the combined 50 years that the authors of this piece have been “battling” the NRA.

There’s only one little problem.  All the facts used to bolster their narrative are true (remember, Third Way is a ‘think tank’ so they only base their arguments on real facts) but these facts are mostly besides the point. Yes, the NRA has lost some contests at the ballot box; yes, their rural base is shrinking; yes, their advocacy magazine has ‘only’ 650,000 subscribers; yes, they joined the rest of the alt-right/white in demonizing the Parkland kids.

But here are some facts that Cowan and Kessler didn’t mention, and the reason they didn’t mention these facts is that for all their combined 50 years of battling Gun-nut Nation, these two guys don’t really know anything about gun-rights organization and they certainly don’t know anything about guns. Which happen to be typical among members of the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement, but since these groups only talk to each other, this lack of knowledge and experience makes no difference at all.

I subscribe to the American Rifleman which, along with American Hunter, are the two NRA magazines which Cowan and Kessler believe aren’t read by the gun-activist crowd. This only proves that neither of them has ever bothered to look at Rifleman or Hunter because they would discover that both contain countless advocacy and activist content, it’s basically the advertising which appeals to a different readership, not what the editorials say. True, the rural base is shrinking and this could affect the electoral landscape after 2022.  But what do Cowan and Kessler have to say about the upsurge in concealed-carry (CCW) licenses, most of which are issued to people living in the burbs? Finally, Stinchfield did some Gonzalez-bashing on his NRA television show, but did the NRA say anything after Parkland which remotely resembled Wayne-o’s crazy rant a week after Sandy Hook?

Let me break it gently to Cowan and Kessler: In 1960 Gallup asked Americans how they felt about a ban on handgun ownership. Not restrictive licensing or more regulations – an absolute ban.  And 60% of the respondents said it would be a good idea.  Know what that number fell to last year? Less than 25 percent!

The fact is (note the use of the word ‘fact’) that a majority of Americans believe that keeping a gun in the home is more a benefit than a risk. And since less than 40% of American homes contain a legal gun, obviously the majority who believe in the positive social utility of personally-owned weapons includes many people who don’t own guns.

This dramatic shift in how we think about guns isn’t the handiwork of the NRA. It’s a function of how American society has evolved and what America thinks and believes about violence, crime and serlf-defense. Until and unless organizations like Third Way acknowledge and understand what this means, casting the NRA as the bogey-man preventing gun control won’t accomplish a thing.