Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 52

John Adams – How To Shoot A Pistol More Accurately.

If you’re a new shooter, shooting a pistol/handgun/revolver or whatever sort of weapon can be overwhelming, mainly due to the recoil of the weapon. The two biggest mistake made by gun rookies are looking at the target instead of the front sight, when the weapon is drawn out. Another mistake is that a new shooter will most likely jerk the trigger, thereby developing a bad flinch-mainly caused by the recoil of the gun.

[image error]The bad flinch in return would cause the shot to stray away from the target itself. Hence why, the key points on acquiring an accurate shot are mainly the side alignment and trigger control. Master both these aspects and you will most likely hit bullseye with every shot you take!

Basic Fundamentals for Good Pistol Shooting

  Stance

No matter how amazing your shooting skills are, the right stance will ensure that you have a stable shooting platform, therefore contributing to consistent as well as accurate shots. You can say that the stance is basically the foundation of the shooting platform.

Ever heard of the popular ‘Isosceles’ stance? For this type of stance, the shoulder and hip are both parallel to the target meanwhile both hands are extended out. These shoulder, hip and hand stance and orientation contributes to the name of the stance, ‘Isosceles’ because it resembles an isosceles triangle from a top-down look.

The Weaver stance on the other hand is another shooting technique, suitable for handguns. The plus point of this type of stance is that it manages recoil fairly well. For this stance, you have to blade your body, placing your foot on the firing side back while turning the support side aimed towards your target. With arms extended, you are entitled for a stable push-pull grip.

Therefore, proper stance is very important for excellent stability when firing the shot. That being said, both of your feet should be planted firmly on the ground. Your knees should be approximately shoulder width apart and one leg slightly back from the other to manage recoil a lot better. If you’re practicing sitting however, to test your skills for example, the shoulder holster makes it rather easy to draw the weapon when you’re sitting.

Grip

There are ample as well as varieties of accessories available in the market so you are able to customize your grip, in order to provide perfect fit for your hands, when holding the firearm. In terms of hand orientation, firstly you need to get high on the tang with your dominant hand. Have your finger pointing towards the target and the rest of your hand placed comfortably on the grip.

The weaker hand (less dominant) is then used to wrap around the dominant hand comfortably, therefore locking the gun in place for excellent grip and to manage the recoil, when the pistol is fired.

Sight Picture

The sight picture refers to the picture of the target you’re aiming at. For proper aim and shooting at your target, you need to firstly focus on the target so you can roughly position your weapon. When you bring your weapon up, you will notice that the rear sights will come into a blurry focus.

Therefore, you should focus completely on your front sight post before taking a shot.  An important tip is to make sure that the top of the front sight is properly and evenly aligned with the top of the rear sight. Once that is checked off your pre-shooting list, all you have to do is aim at the center of your target and voila, fire the shot.

Trigger Control

The main theory behind the trigger press is that you need pull the trigger straight back as smoothly as possible. I know it’s easier said than done, hence why you need to learn the right technique and apply the knowledge you know in the field during practice.

The smooth trigger pull will prevent bad flinching. For your information, flinching leads to the dropping of your muzzle and pulling of the weapon to the side. Having said that, your finger placement is the factor that mainly contributes in great trigger control. You shouldn’t place too much or too little of your finger on the trigger.

Putting the right amount of finger placement will ensure that the shot directly travel to the target. What happens if you put too little or too much finger? Well, your gun will swerve to either the left or right direction upon taking a shot, thereby causing your shot to stray from the target. Hence why, practice is essential so that you discover the right finger placement (vary according to the individual) when pulling your trigger.

Conclusion

Another extra tip! It’s better to bend or squat to retrieve your weapon because it would be rather slow to draw while standing so check out this ankle concealed carry to draw your weapon more efficiently. Once you have mastered all these fundamentals of shooting, you can improve the accuracy of your shot over time. Not only that, keep in mind that the two key points that influences the precision of your shot is the trigger control and side alignment. With all these techniques put into proper practice, you’ll surely become a great shooter.

Author bio: Meet John, an average man that enjoys everything outdoors. Check out his experiences and tips over at his blog !

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Gabor – Blaming Mass Shootings on Mental Health Issues Alone is Disgraceful.

 

Just one month after the worst mass shooting in modern American history in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in a place of worship occurred at The First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, killed 26 people and wounded 20 others on Sunday with an AR-556 assault rifle.

[image error]President Donald Trump condemned the act as “evil,” and called it “a mental health problem,” not a “guns situation.” However, a study of 133 mass shootings has shown that, as in the Texas attack, most mass shootings have a domestic violence link, while in just 11% of the incidents were concerns about the mental health of the shooter brought to the attention of a medical practitioner, legal authority, or school official. That study also showed that when assault weapons or high-capacity magazines were used, an average of eight more people were shot, indicating the pivotal role of the weapon in increasing the carnage. Therefore, the prevalence of high-powered weapons in the U.S. is an enormous contributing factor to the growing frequency and lethality of mass shootings. The call to address the nation’s mental health issues is a familiar dodge of those seeking to avoid a discussion of gun policy.

If the president truly believes mass shootings are a mental health issue, why did his administration block the Social Security Administration from reporting mentally impaired recipients of federal aid to a national background check database? These are individuals on disability support who suffer from severe mental illnesses. President Obama had introduced an administrative rule to keep people with severe mental illnesses from purchasing guns, and Trump, demonstrating perhaps his support for the gun lobby’s agenda, signed a measure to overturn this policy.

The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, but over a third of the mass shootings. Rates of mental illness, while somewhat higher than other countries, fail to account for the enormous gap in the number of mass shootings between the U.S. and other advanced nations. Countries such as the U.K., Germany, and Japan have at most a few dozen gun homicides, and no more than one or two mass shootings per year. By contrast, the U.S. already has had more than 300 mass shootings this year. Therefore, the gap in mass shootings is too great to be explained by more modest differences in the rates of mental illness.

Psychiatrist Richard Friedman writes that psychiatry cannot protect us from mass murderers. He states that while many mass shooters have a severe personality or psychotic disorder, they often avoid the mental health system altogether, as they are not interested in treatment and do not see themselves as ill. He adds that it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict which individuals will become violent. While millions of Americans have a mental disorder or a serious anger management issue, just an infinitesimal fraction will commit these atrocities. Friedman argues that the focus should not be on detecting mass killers in advance, but on the availability of lethal weapons. He points to Australia, a country that has virtually eliminated mass shootings since automatic and semiautomatic long guns were banned.

A greater propensity toward violence also does not explain the disproportionate number of these massacres in the U.S. International crime surveys show that the U.S. is in the middle of the pack with regard to violence in general. But it’s an outlier in lethal violence. This finding suggests that it is the greater prevalence of lethal weapons in the U.S. that leads more altercations to escalate to homicides.

 

Those seeking reform are likely to be frustrated once again by the absence of bold national legislation, such as that adopted by Australia. We have a president who believes that mass shootings are not a “guns situation,” and a Republican-dominated Congress that has no intention of defying the gun lobby. Recent polling shows that gun rights advocates are more likely to be single-issue voters who are politically active than are those who favor reform. Partisan gerrymandering has also contributed to a more polarized political environment in which representatives in Republican-controlled districts resist gun policy changes, fearing that more conservative candidates, backed by the gun lobby, will challenge them in the primaries.

In this environment, the disgraceful avoidance of this issue by lawmakers is likely to persist, and one wonders what type or level of atrocity will stimulate bold action on their part. When will our elected representatives place a higher value on the lives of their fellow citizens than on weapons of war designed for one purpose: to kill the largest number of people as quickly as possible?

Tom Gabor is a criminologist, sociologist, and author of .

 

 

Are We Finally Getting Sick Of Guns?

Thanks to a note from Mark Bryant, who founded and runs the awesome Gun Violence Archive, I remembered this morning to go and look at the monthly report from FBI-NICS, which details the number of background checks for every gun transferred over the counter by a federally-licensed dealer anywhere in the United States. I know, I know, background checks still don’t cover most private gun transfers, but since NICS does cover every sale of a new gun, the month-to-month comparison is a very exact way to understand the state of the gun industry and, by extension, the degree to which Americans want to own guns.

[image error]             The NICS numbers for October are probably the most important monthly numbers of the entire year because the hunting season gets going in the Fall and even though a majority of American gun-owners don’t engage in hunting, this is when big-box stores like Cabela’s start running sales, this is when the Outdoor Channel starts showing hunters trekking through the Great Outdoors (although most of them go out to their blind in an ATV) so this is when the talk about guns is in the air.  Bottom line: if you are a gun dealer and you don’t have a good monthly sales in October, you can kiss the year goodbye.

Ready for the October numbers? Hold on to the seat of your pants. Not only do the numbers for October show a remarkable lack of gun sales, the drop is much greater than what has been going on throughout the year. Everybody assumed that gun sales under Trump would never match what went on under the Kenyan, but to the great surprise of Gun-nut Nation, the drop-off following Trump’s inauguration was only about 10 percent. And given the extent to which sales during the Obama ‘regime’ were somewhat inflated due to the irrational fears pumped up by the boys in Fairfax about how all guns were going to disappear, dropping back to 90% of sales levels recorded in pre-Trump years wasn’t seen as all that bad.

On January 22, Smith & Wesson’s stock price was $20 bucks a share, yesterday it closed at $13.65.  The old joke is that if you want to make a million in the gun business, start with two million. The joke seems to be coming back – this time in spades!

Now here are the actual numbers from NICS. Total background checks in October 2016 were 1,267,000.  Background checks for last month were 1,037,628.  For the nine months ending September 30, 2017 the overall drop in NICS was somewhere around 10 percent.  For October it’s more like 20 percent!  And remember that October is the beginning of the gun season; yea, some season.  And by the way, the decline was greater in handguns than in long guns, and it’s handguns which now determine the health of the gun industry because everyone is supposed to be walking around armed, remember?

What the NICS numbers tell us is not just that the bloom is off the rose for the gun industry, but more important, that the attempt to promote gun sales by appealing to fears about crime and violence may be falling flat.  And I have to assume until someone tells me otherwise, that what happened in Las Vegas last month and in Sutherland Springs this week may have finally been a game-changer when it comes to believing that someone, anyone is safer if they’re walking around with a gun.

Gun-nut Nation can celebrate all they want about the ‘good guy’ in Texas who stood outside the First Baptist Church, put a couple of slugs into Kelley as he was driving away. What about inside the Church which, by the way, certainly wasn’t a gun-free zone? As horrible as it seems, it may take deaths and injuries to hundreds of people in Vegas and Texas to finally convince Americans that ‘good guys with guns’ don’t offer any real protection against violence or crime. Is this worth the lives that have just been lost?

Thanks again Mark.

Why Do Kids Like Guns? Because They Do.

In 1972 a brilliant scholar, Marvin Wolfgang, published Delinquency in a Birth Cohort, which tracked the lives of 10,000 males born in inner-city Philadelphia in 1945, and through a combination of school records and social service data, he was able to account for the whereabouts of nearly all his research subjects between their 10th and 18th birthdays. Wolfgang was looking for patterns which might be predictive of delinquency among juveniles and serious crime among adults.  What he found was roughly one-third of his sample had some contact with juvenile authorities with half of them coming to the attention of police or social service only one time, while less than 5% of the 10,000 male teens ended up as ‘serial’ delinquents who were also the group which committed the most violent crimes.

[image error]              What Wolfgang did not consider (because it was beyond the scope of his work) was that most of these youthful, serial offenders were exhibiting anti-social behavior by the ages of five or six and becoming delinquents by ages seven or eight. Study after study has demonstrated that the earlier a child is referred for delinquent behavior, the greater the chance that this behavior will become chronic and lead to serious crime.

These kids become what we used to call ‘troublemakers’ in the early grades, by the 3rd or 4th grade they are often pushed into a separate class or isolated group, by the 6th or 7th grade they are considered violence-prone and spend more time in detention than learning how to read or write and by 9th grade they have effectively dropped out of school.  Marvin Wolfgang began studying the adolescent years of these kids; by that time the damage was already done.

These are also the kids who start getting their hands on guns, according to Alan Lizotte’s superb work, when they are 12 years old.  By the time they are 14-15, the gun has become a tool of their trade.  In 2014 I interviewed 61 adolescent inmates at a youth jail who were all confined for serious crimes (read: drugs and possession of guns.) Inside they were as clean and law-abiding as you could imagine, they all said they would return to ‘the life’ when they got back outside. I asked them two questions: (1). How did they get a gun? (2). Did they believe that having a gun increased risk? The answer to the first question was: ‘they around;’ to the second they all believed that their risk was much greater if they didn’t have a gun.

Of the 115,000+ fatal and non-fatal gun injuries that occur each year, young men ages 15-25, disproportionately non-white, account for two-thirds of the total, and if you subtract hunting accidents and gun suicides that are rational, life-ending decisions for the very old set, we end up with more than 75% of all gun violence being committed by a population whose propensity for violent behavior was being exhibited and witnessed before they were ten years old. If some way could be found to isolate this population from access to the most efficient consumer item which can be used to injure someone else, our gun-violence rate would fall somewhere right in the middle of the OECD.

Unfortunately, the discussion about this issue, which should be held within the gun violence prevention (GVP) community, is currently owned by whomever writes advertising copy for the NRA.  Every time a pandering idiot like Dana Loesch talks about the God-given ‘right’ to protect yourself from ‘street thugs,’ she reinforces a false narrative that has promoted gun sales for the past twenty years.

When it comes to reducing gun violence where we have failed most tragically is not keeping guns out of the ‘wrong hands’ per se, but not intervening in the lives of children who exhibit delinquent behavior at an early age, then end up in the street, then end up working for the local dope dealer, then end up at the wrong end of a gun. And for such kids, either end of the gun is the wrong end.

A National Gun Buyback On December 16.

It was November 2, 1981. Mike Hirsh and John Wood, surgery residents at Columbia University Medical School, were sitting in a meeting when John told Mike he was going to go across the street to a deli and get them some snacks. Ten minutes later John Woods was dead, gunned down in the street by an armed robber who had come up to him, demanded money, then shot him and ran away.

[image error]             This event has remained in the forefront of Mike Hirsh’s emotional fabric in the more than thirty years that he has practiced pediatric surgery, knowing that had it not been for a random, violent event, his dearest and closest friend would have enjoyed the same positive and beneficial life. Gun violence is random, it robs someone of the life opportunities the rest of us take for granted, its impact can only be felt by the ones who knew the victim before he or she died.

And this is the reason why Mike Hirsh began working on gun buybacks and will now run a buyback in Worcester, MA for the sixteenth consecutive year. It’s not just that as a pediatric surgeon he sees the results of violence first-hand in the operating room. It’s because the buyback is his way of remembering the dear friend he lost to gun violence just because his friend stepped out of the hospital for a minute to go buy a sandwich and a drink.

But this year the buyback being run by Mike Hirsh is taking a decidedly different turn. On December 16, two days past the 5th anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook, the event in Worcester is being copied by buybacks in two other cities in Massachusetts, cities in five other New England states, a site in California and perhaps several more states coming on. In other words, for the first time there will be a national gun buyback day, and next year plans are already being made to hold buybacks on the same day in at least 12 states.

The plan is to eventually extend to all 50 states using the resources and staff of medical centers in each state whose emergency, trauma and primary care departments are only too well aware of the medical and human costs of violence caused by guns. A National Gun Buyback Day will not only get guns off the streets, but will also serve as learning opportunities for physicians and medical students to talk about gun violence with folks who turn in the guns. Now that the 11th Circuit has thrown out the crazy Florida law which criminalized doctors for talking to patients about guns, physicians can move themselves back into the middle of the gun debate which is where they belong.

National Gun Buyback Day has also allied itself with a new effort in California, Gun By Gun, whose organizers want to provide cash for buyback incentives through receiving public donations and then funneling revenues to buyback activities that might need some extra help beyond what their own community can provide. If you want to make a tax-deductible donation for the National Gun Buyback Day on December 16, you can do it here.

What binds the pro-gun movement together as a social and political force is the simple fact that most folks who consider themselves to be pro-gun also happen to own a gun. So there’s a tangible connection between what they say and what they do. And this has always been something of a problem for the gun violence prevention (GVP) community, because GVP supporters are rally around a moral absolute (‘thou shalt not kill”) rather than around defending what they like or want to do.

But an ongoing, national activity like buybacks gives the GVP community to get their hands ‘dirty,’ so to speak, which always has a way of creating more energy, more commitment, more buzz. So let’s get going and get behind the December 16 event!

Why Don’t We Talk About The Real Gun-Violence Numbers?

You can’t go to a gun violence prevention (GVP) website without being confronted with the horrific numbers of people killed or injured by guns.  It’s well above 100,000 each year and it’s far beyond anything experienced by any other advanced country, like 20 times as high.  But if you think that such numbers really illustrate how big a problem we have in this country with guns, think again. In fact, the gun-violence numbers bandied about happen to be only a part of a much larger whole.

[image error]              The GVP community relies for its gun-violence victim data on the CDC because in theory, hospitals do a pretty good job of keeping track of their patients, and showing up with a bullet in your stomach or your leg has a way of attracting lots of attention from the medical staff. The only problem with these numbers is that a lot of people who suffer physical injuries from guns don’t show up or aren’t counted – either way, we need to better understand this issue before we can assume that we really know the health toll caused by guns.

The FBI has just issued its 2016 crime report, a document which breaks down crimes in terms of what type of weapon was used.  For 2016 homicides, the feds say that 15,000 people were murdered in 2016, of which 11,000 murders, or 73%, were caused by guns. They also say that 735,000 people were arrested for aggravated assault, in which 190,000 attackers or 25%,  used guns. All fine and well except for one little problem – three out of ten non-fatal gun assaults are never reported to the police.  So to our gun-violence totals, we should probably another 60,000 or so events.

The gun homicide numbers reported by the FBI are close to what we get from the CDC. On the other hand, the FBI numbers on intentional, non-fatal gun injuries bring the overall gun-violence toll close to 200,000, and that’s just a start.  Because if the GVP wants to rely on the medical profession to tell them how many people are gun-violence victims each year, they should use as their calculus the definition of violence that physicians have adopted which comes right out of the World Health Organization (WHO) and goes like this: “the intentional use of physical force, threatened or actual, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death [or] psychological harm….”

You think it’s not harmful to have a live gun pointed at you even if it doesn’t go off? Because that’s what happens to the 125,000 people who are robbed each year at gunpoint, a violent crime whose ‘clearance’ rate is around 30 percent. So let’s add another 150,000 gun-violence victims to the total above and we wind up with what I believe is a realistic number of people who suffer physical or psychological injury from guns of around 350,000 or more. Which happens to be about three times the number of gun-violence victims that is usually pushed out.

Why does GVP only count gun violence victims who are physically injured by guns? Perhaps because we don’t have a precise method to measure the psychological impact of looking down the barrel of a loaded gun.  I’m not sure we have a workable research methodology that can come up with an y kind of legitimate statistical result. So we end up falling back on vague generalizations about the ‘cost’ of violence in a community-wide or society-wide sense, and the specific number of people who suffer from the mental effects of being threatened by guns disappears.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) says that 284,000 Americans were ‘victimized’ but not killed by guns in 2015. Which isn’t far off from the calculation I made above and translates into more than 800 victims of gun violence every day. If the GVP community wants to keep saying that 315 people are killed or injured each day with guns, I only wish the real gun-violence number was that low.

Did The Cops Miss The Boat On Stopping Sandy Hook?

Last week the gun violence prevention (GVP) community went into overdrive when the release of a batch of FBI Sandy Hook documents indicated that the Newtown cops were warned about Adam Lanza’s intention to commit mayhem at least four years before the actual event took place. The information appears in interview notes of an unidentified man who claimed he heard Adam Lanza make the threats which the man claims he transmitted to the local police. According to the man’s testimony, the cop who took the call told him that Nancy Lanza was the legal owner of the guns which meant there was nothing the cops could do but the caller could contact the State Police.

[image error]Coming on the heels of Las Vegas, where another shooter evidently killed and wounded more than 500 people with a legally-owned AR, the story out of Newtown only adds fuel to the GVP argument that some way has to be found to keep guns like the AR-15 out of civilian hands.

But there’s only one little problem, namely, that the story full of holes.  And it cannot be accepted even on face value, never mind the fact that the Newtown police can’t find any record of someone making such a call, because it would have been simply impossible for someone answering the telephone at the police station to have said what was allegedly said.

Please believe me when I say it’s too bad that facts keep getting in the way of opinions, but the fact is that nobody working for any police agency in Connecticut would have been able to know whether: a) Nancy Lanza owned an AR-15; b) whether she had purchased it legally or where it came from; or, c) whether the State Police should have been contacted or not. Why? Because first of all before 2014, when Connecticut passed a new gun-control law in response to Sandy Hook, purchasing a long gun from a dealer did not require anything other than the standard FBI-NICS check, information which the FBI has to destroy within 24 hours after the check is complete. Purchasing a handgun in CT in 2008 required an additional background check conducted by the State Police and this procedure was then extended to long guns but only after the new law was passed in 2014.

It would have been impossible for anyone employed by the Newtown Police Department to tell a caller about the legal status or even the existence of an AR-15 allegedly owned by someone else. On the other hand, if someone contacts a police department in Newtown, CT or Oshkosh, WI or anywhere, reporting a threat that involves potential injury to numerous individuals isn’t brushed off. There isn’t a police department in the United States which doesn’t have a very clear procedure for responding to a report about the possible commission of a serious crime. Maybe the cops don’t respond immediately, maybe the patrol car goes to the wrong address, but don’t tell me that if I called up and said that someone just told me they were going down to the local elementary school to shoot everyone in sight that I would lean back, yawn and tell the caller to contact the State Police.

Remember when Elliot Rodger rampaged through Isla Vista, CA and killed six people on May 23, 2014?  Three weeks earlier his parents contacted the Isla Vista PD and said they were concerned because their son had voiced threats and they were worried about his mental state. The cops dispatched no less than three officers who confronted Elliott outside where he lived but unfortunately made the mistake of forgetting to ask him whether he had any guns. But the bottom line is that police don’t dismiss credible reports about violence which has not yet taken place. And if we are going to advocate measures to reduce gun violence, let’s just make sure our strategies align with the facts.

Everyone Supports Universal Background Checks. So What?

As a member of the NRA (I’m actually an endowment member so they can’t throw me out no matter what I say) I get emails from the NRA-ILA alerting me to state and federal gun laws which either weaken or strengthen gun ‘rights’ and the NRA’s response to such laws on both sides. The NRA has never bumped into a law which might make it more difficult for red-blooded Americans to exercise those precious 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ but as a follower of don Corleone’s admonition to Michael about keeping friends close but enemies closer, I always read what the NRA-ILA has to say.

[image error]   The last missive I received contained a summary of laws recently introduced in Congress which represent “longstanding proposals that would burden innocent Americans at every turn.”  Chief among these proposals is the old bugaboo about ‘universal’ background checks which the NRA characterizes as a “perennial favorite of the gun control crowd,” because it “seeks to interpose the government (and expensive fees) into every exchange of firearms, including between trusted neighbors, close friends, and even family members,”  This warning is then followed by the NRA’s coup de grace statement about all GVP-backed legislation, namely, that it will “chip away at the right to keep and bear arms until it becomes out of reach to the average American.” The same, old, slippery-slope argument which is used against ‘responsible’ gun regulations every, single time.

The gun violence prevention (GVP) community always cites the endless public surveys which allegedly show that a solid majority of Americans, even gun-owning Americans, even NRA, gun-owning Americans, are in favor of some extension of background checks beyond the initial, over-the-counter sale. I don’t believe these polls not just because the NRA is totally against such an idea, but because those survey results don’t square with anything I ever experienced in selling more than 12,000 rifles, shotguns and handguns in my own retail gun store.

I can guarantee you that every time I sold a gun in my shop, the purchaser filled out an ATF Form 4473 which I then used to contact the FBI-NICS examiners in West Virginia in order to get an approval for the sale.  When the ATF audited my shop in 2013, they couldn’t find one, single instances in which we failed to get FBI-NICS approval before completing a sale. But I can tell you that at least half the customers made overt and nasty comments about the ‘goddamn government,’ or the ‘goddamn Kennedys,’ or the ‘goddamn Clintons’ while they were filling out the 4473 form.  And I can also say without fear of contradiction that had the instant FBI-NICS check been voluntary, those same customers would have turned it down.

Nobody likes the government when it comes to be told what we must do.  We pay taxes because we have to pay them, we (usually) drive at the speed limit because otherwise we might end up adding points to our license, paying a fine and seeing our insurance rates go up. In fact, many of us wouldn’t even bother to buy automobile insurance except we don’t have a choice. So why would anyone believe that just because people say that FBI-NICS is a ‘good thing,’ that those same folks can’t wait for the imposition of universal background checks?

Last month more than 26,000 guns were purchased in New York. How many private gun transfers took place? Less than 700. In New York State every gun transfer now requires a NICS background check, and it is simply not possible that in a state as big as New York that less than 3% of all gun transfers go between private hands. And yet many of the same folks who can’t be bothered to walk into a gun shop to give a gun to someone else will say they support universal NICS checks.

Know why the NRA opposes NICS checks? Because they know how gun owners really think, which is still something of a mystery for the GVP.

What Happened In Las Vegas? Nobody Knows And Nobody Cares.

Our man Shaun Dakin sent me a note the other day expressing profound grief at the degree to which the Las Vegas shooting has slipped from public view. And there’s no question that he’s correct. The issue of bump-stocks is now morphing into a regulatory problem for the ATF and I notice that bump-stock manufacturers are no longer pretending that they’ve shut down and left town. As for any new gun laws, those are just as dead post-Las Vegas as they were dead prior to the rampage event. Shaun also asked me to come up with a theory as to why this event has had such a brief media shelf-life, so here goes.

[image error]    You would think that the worst mass shooting not just in U.S. history but in the entire history of small-arms would still be making some media noise. But the only media mention in the last few days has been a story about how off-duty cops from California who were in the concert crowd and performed heroic, life-saving efforts have been temporarily denied workmen’s comp so that they can spend some time off the job nursing both physical and mental wounds. The problem may eventually be sorted out but the story has already disappeared.

Talk about disappearing, it now turns out that the shooter, Stephen Paddock, is presumed to have removed a hard drive from his laptop computer before ending his own life. But the hard drive evidently can’t be found. Which raises two interesting questions: How do investigators know that it was Paddock who removed the drive; and where the hell is the drive? Computer memories tend to be a basic piece in evidence when law enforcement attempts to figure out motives, or movements of someone being investigated, particularly if the suspect happens to be dead. I’m still waiting for the Las Vegas Police to announce the results of the ‘internal’ investigation which was going to tell us which cop walked into Paddock’s hotel room and took pictures of him lying there dead. Now we can add another reason for this investigation never to be done.

Getting back to Shaun’s question about how come nobody’s interested in what happened at the Mandalay Bay, I think the quick way in which the whole thing has simmered down is basically a reflection of how the issue was handled by the man at the top. I’m referring here to Trump who made his first statement on Monday which sounded like either someone had put part of Obama’s brain into his head or at least doped him up to the point that he sounded restrained and dignified for the first time in his entire public life. Then he went out to Vegas and not only was quiet and respectful again, but even said words like ‘gun laws,’ a nomenclature which has never previously slipped out of his mouth.

This is the same Trump who bowed and scraped every time Gun-nut Nation accused Hillary of ‘politicizing’ the gun issue whenever she talked about gun violence during the campaign. This is the same Trump who continues to wax eloquent about how mass shooters are just really ‘sick’ guys even though most mass shooters do not present any symptoms of mental illness prior to engaging in a rampage-shooting event.

The afternoon that 28 people were killed at Sandy Hook, Obama went on television and mentioned other mass shootings, said that such events had occurred too many times, and promised to work for a political solution to keep such events from happening again. Two days later he appeared at a prayer vigil at Sandy and promised to “use whatever power this office holds” to stop mass violence caused by guns.

Know what? It’s not mass shootings that have stopped – it’s the attempt to regulate the use of guns which produce mass violence that has come to an end. Which is why Las Vegas is no longer an issue of  media concern. Which is why Shaun Dakin’s grief will continue to be profound.

 

 

Guns And Black Swans Go Together.

As the gun violence prevention community (GVP) continues its search for narratives about gun violence which may find a responsive echo within the gun ‘rights’ movement, I suggest that everyone take some time and read Nasim Taleb’s remarkable book, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Because the basic point in this work is the degree to which strongly-held beliefs are based on things which are simply not true. And if there’s one Black Swan belief which is as improbable as any, it’s the idea that walking around with a gun will protect you from crime.

[image error]             That gun ownership is a necessary response to crime is the fundamental axiom upon which the entire gun ‘rights’ movement and narrative is built. After all, being able to protect yourself is a God-given right, recognized in every legal tradition. And if packing a gun gives you the best chance of defending against an attack, how could anyone support any law that might threaten or limit the ownership of guns?

The fact is, however, that credible studies clearly show little, if any connection between access to a gun and protection from crime. This is mostly because the probability that someone packing a gun will actually be attacked ranges from scant to none. Further, even if John Lott is correct in arguing that because criminals believe that more Americans are frequently armed, this tends to make them shift their criminality to non-violent crime, the data to support this idea remains in dispute.

We are all familiar with surveys which show that a majority of gun owners now say that the primary reason they own a gun is for self-defense. But is this a classic Black Swan or is it based on some degree of reality or truth?  I decided to test this Black Swan with a survey which I am asking gun owners to take, and nearly 100 self-described gun owners have been engaged. You can view the survey here.  My selection methodology is based on running Facebook ads sent to FB pageholders who have indicated an interest in guns with the usual key words: guns, hunting, shooting, etc.  In another week or so I am going to publish the final results, but here is what I have learned so far.

Nearly 80% of the respondents believe that having access to a gun makes them less afraid of being a victim of violent crime. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly 1% of the American population age 12 or over are victims of a violent crime each year.

In my survey, 4% have been victims of a violent crime. One of the victims claimed that his sister was raped, one was assaulted, another was held up while pumping gas late at night. One victim, a man above the age of 50, was kidnapped but provided no details.

I inserted a number of demographic questions in the poll to make sure I was capturing real gun owners and I am.  Respondents are, on average, older white males, have owned guns for more than 15 years, purchased a gun in the last 12 months and 65% live in the Midwest or the South.

Now here’s the Black Swan. I didn’t ask poll-takers to tell me whether they had ever used a gun for self-defense. But 96% of the respondents couldn’t have done so because they had not been victims of a serious crime. So why do more than 80% of the respondents believe that having access to a self-defense gun will make them safe?

Here’s what I have learned from the more than 90 people who took the time to answer my survey. Just about everyone who believes in the validity of armed self-defense is holding that belief for reasons other than what has happened to them. And all these surveys which show that a majority of gun owners support self-defense use of guns don’t tell us anything at all. In particular, these surveys shed no light on how to turn the Black Swan into a White Swan.