Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 66

Want To End Gun Violence? Stop It Before It Occurs.

I’m an East Coast guy, but the one time I drove through Oregon I made a point of stopping off at the Pendleton factory store because I can’t remember the last time I walked into a sporting goods store anywhere in the United States and didn’t see a rack of Pendleton shirts. And I have always been fascinated by Oregon because the country expanded from ‘sea to shining sea’ when settlers hitched up their wagons and rolled across the Oregon Trail.

[image error]             So it came as something of a shock to read an op-ed in The Oregonian about the state’s terrible problem with gun violence because you would think that a state with such a vibrant pioneer tradition would have a pretty good record when it comes to the use of guns.  But in fact the record is bad and getting worse.

Back in 2001, the state recorded a total of 358 gun deaths, for a per-100,000 rate of 10.16. In 2015, the raw number was 486, an increase of 35%, and the death rate had climbed to 11.36.  Between 2011 and 2015 there were 1,862 motor vehicle deaths in Oregon; during the same five-year period gun deaths have totaled 2,308.  That’s not bad, that’s real bad.  Most of the Oregon gun deaths involve suicide, which accounted for 1,894 of the 2,308 deaths between 2011 and 2015. But gun homicides jumped from 68 in 2011 to 105(!) in 2015, so what’s going on?

It used to be a fundamental Gun-nut Nation axiom that the availability of guns had nothing to do with suicide at all. I even received emails from gun nuts who would pompously lecture me on the ‘right’ of persons suffering from severe mental distress to choose the way they wanted to die. But those loony emails have disappeared since the NSSF announced a partnership with the American Foundation for the Prevention of Suicide which, we hope, will bring gun-suicide rates down.  But they haven’t come down in Oregon; au contraire, they keep going up.

Which brings us back to the op-ed in The Oregonian by Dr. Leigh Dolin, an internist in Portland, who happens to have been President of the Oregon Medical Association and now sits on the OMA Board.  Dr. Dolin has been a tireless advocate of sensible gun laws and his editorial is an effort to raise awareness about two bills before the Oregon Legislature, one of which, Senate Bill 868, would create a lawful process for law enforcement or family members to take guns away from individuals whose access to a gun would probably result in a suicide attempt or a gun assault.

The proposed ‘extreme risk’ law requires that the gun-owner in question be served notice to surrender all guns.  He can request a court hearing to determine whether, in fact, his guns should be taken away.  Before such an order can be issued, law enforcement or family members have to produce evidence that the gun-owner is, in fact, a danger to himself and others, and the order can be ended if the gun-owner presents evidence that he is no longer a threat to himself or anyone else. A similar law was enacted in Connecticut in 1999, and probably saved dozens of lives.

Leave it to the NRA to oppose the new bill because the individual who might be an ‘extreme risk’ will lose his 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ The Oregonian says that Dr. Dolin’s statement is an ‘opinion’ but the only people who believe there’s no link between gun access and gun violence are the same bunch who swear the government’s hiding something at Area 51.

There’s nothing in the 2nd Amendment that says we can’t protect ourselves against gun violence before the violence occurs. And despite what a few people still believe and will tell you every time they get a chance, you just can’t commit gun violence without a gun. If you don’t believe me, make your hand look like a gun, hold it against your head and go – click.

 

 

The Latest In Health-Aid Products: Gun Silencers.

Now that the Senate is on Its way to confirming a Supreme Court nominee who was backed to the hilt by the pro-gun gang, that august body can begin deliberating the next item on the NRA agenda, which is to make gun silencers as legal and easily purchased as a kitchen appliance that is used to make toast. Actually, a gun silencer is safer to use than a toaster, because a kid can’t stick his hand in a silencer and receive an electric shock. Of course that same kid might get a much bigger shock, so to speak, if the silencer in which he sticks his finger happens to be attached to a gun.  But that’s a minor safety concern for the people who are pushing to normalize gun silencers; after all, guns actually keep us safe, not the other way around.

[image error]             And in case you thought that there was a safety issue with silencers, according to the pro-silencer folks, in fact they are good for your health. Why? Because silencers are being touted as helping shooters and hunters avoid hearing loss, which happens to be a very common health problem as we get older, whether we have been around guns or not.  And since silencers are rarely used in criminal events, why should the public be deprived of this health aid just because some liberal, gun-grabbers always want to make it more difficult to add a harmless accessory to my gun?

Silencers have been considered dangerous since the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA) which imposed a lengthy and detailed registration process as well as a $250 federal tax. In addition to silencers, the NFA also imposed the same registration requirements on full-auto guns (‘machine guns’), sawed-off shotguns and rifles, and certain other weapons.  The law also required a separate registration process for any gun dealer who wanted to engage in buying and selling NFA guns and required all NFA transactions to be conducted only by such dealers.

How many machine guns and other NFA devices are in private hands?  We really don’t know because anyone who owned such a device before 1934 was not required to register the weapon, and if you think that a gun manufactured before 1934 won’t work today, think again. In fact, that’s the big problem with the gun industry – the damn things just don’t wear out. So either you come up with new products that gun-nuts like me just have to have (yes, I own a full-auto gun) or you’re s**t out of luck.

And despite the commendable efforts by Donald Trump, Jr., and other silencer promoters to pretend that sticking a noise suppressor on the end of a gun barrel will save the hearing of hunters and other sport shooters, this is not the real reason that Gun-nut Nation is trying to ram this legislation through. The truth is that if the gun industry can get the NFA amended so that silencers are dropped from the regulated list, this sets in motion efforts to get other products dropped from the NFA list as well. And don’t think there aren’t plenty of folks out there who believe that the 2nd-Amendment should give them the ‘right’ to own a machine gun.

Incidentally, de-regulating silencers not only widens the market for such products, it also would generate more gun sales as well.  This is because you can’t just stick a silencer on any old gun. It has to be screwed onto the barrel, which means the gun needs a barrel that is cut to accept the suppressor, which means either changing the barrel or buying a new gun.

The last thing I want to do is go hunting with other hunters whose guns don’t make any noise when the trigger is pulled. A gun going off alerts me to the possibility that another hunter may be where he shouldn’t be, and that’s a much more important health aid than anything affecting my hearing at all.

Should The ATF Change How It Operates When It May Not Operate Very Well Now?

Our good friends at The Trace have just mounted coverage of the Congressional hearing where an ATF official, Ron Turk, faced blowback from Democrats over a memo he sent around questioning the necessity to maintain various gun regulations, such things as keeping silencers on the NFA list, restricting the import of assault-style rifles, prohibiting dealers from one state from selling direct to customers in another state – you know, little things like that.

[image error]             The word around town is that Turk the Jerk is pimping to become ATF Director, a position vacant since the last Director, Todd Jones, abruptly quit after the agency was buried in an avalanche of pro-gun protests when they tried to restrict the sale of surplus military ammunition which was seen as yet another infringement of 2nd Amendment ‘rights.’  Turk the Jerk claimed that he wrote his memo without input from the NRA, but he admitted during the hearing that, uh, maybe he had ‘heard’ from people in the industry who, uh, told him that they, uh, supported what he said.

My purpose, however, is not to rehash what Turk the Jerk said about his memo; Ann Givens did a good job on that score. What caught my eye was a link to the very critical report of ATF’s oversight of its confidential informant program which, according to the Justice Department’s Inspector General, is managed about as well as the White House is currently managing the behavior of the Commander in Chief.

The audit was conducted to evaluate the practices “for the identification, approval and oversight of confidential informants,” which number more than 1,800 individuals and costs the agency more than $4 million each year. Confidential informants (CI) are a necessary and important tool for law-enforcement investigations, but their use obviously involves risks regarding the validity of the information which they provide, as well as their involvement in illicit activities. The report concluded that “ATF’s oversight of its CI Program required significant improvement,” which is bureaucrat-ese for saying that the program isn’t run very well.  Gee – what a surprise that when it comes to conducting detailed and complicated field investigations, the ATF keeps screwing it up.

This is the same agency which carried out an armed invasion of the Branch Davidian compound outside of Waco in 1993 because they believed that members of the sect were manufacturing machine guns that would be used in an Armageddon-type attack on the nearby town. The assault resulted in the deaths of 4 ATF agents and at least 80 men, women and children, even though not a single full-auto weapon was ever found.

Then under the administrations first of George W and then Barack, the ATF went looking for machine guns again and put together an operation called ‘Fast and Furious,’ in which gun dealers were encouraged to sell lots of AK-47s to Mexican gunrunners who, it was believed, were turning the semi-auto rifles into full-auto weapons before they were smuggled over the Rio Grande. This brilliant program resulted in the death of an ATF agent and the disappearance of more than 2,000 weapons before it was curtailed. How many machine guns were recovered? None, as in not one.

The ATF not only botches field investigations, they can’t even bring the technology they use for regulatory activities into the 20th Century, never mind the 21st. Know those 300,000 traces they conduct every year to figure out the initial sale of all those ‘crime’ guns? Forget that most of those traces have nothing to do with serious crimes at all, the ATF still sends trace requests to dealers by fax. Have these guys heard of email and pdf?

If Turk the Jerk really wants to modify regulations to, as he says, ‘free up resources to fight crime,’ why doesn’t he first look at the way in which the ATF operates day-to-day? Before the regulations are changed to make the job easier, perhaps we need to know whether the agency knows how to operate at all.

It’s Not Just Gun Sales That Matter, It’s The Argument Behind The Guns.

The FBI just released its figures for NICS background checks processed in March, and the number of background checks for gun transactions, as opposed to gun licenses, has swung slightly back up.  This information, of course, has unleashed paroxysms of joy in Gun-nut Nation, because everyone has been saying that gun sales will continue to slip during the Age of Trump. Now one month’s sales don’t really tell you all that much, particularly since I suspect that many of those sales represented consumers taking advantage of price cuts by gun retailers who have to move unsold inventory off their shelves.

 

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John Lott

To me, the much more important impact of the Trump election is not the impact on sales, but the degree to which his pro-gun stance alters the basic narrative about the value and importance of guns. Because let’s not forget that the NRA and the other purveyors of guns as the all-American item of choice were able to promote gun sales primarily by arguing, with some degree of truthfulness by the way, that a guy like Obama in the White House meant that guns might be taken away.  And the same argument was used against Hillary’s Presidential bid and the same arguments about alleged ‘threats’ to 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ have been used to spur gun sales over the last twenty or thirty years.

But now the NRA is hoisted by its own petard, because you can accuse the Trump administration of all kinds of things, but one of the things you can’t accuse them of being is against guns. And just today our friends at The Trace posted a quick analysis of the views of incoming Justice Department attorneys, and all of them are decidedly (and somewhat stupidly) very pro-gun.

A secondary theme supporting the idea of a gun in every garage is the notion that we need all the protection we can get in an age when terrorists can penetrate the country as quickly as a new strain of the flu, and can or will mount deadly attacks wherever and whenever they please. But this argument also falls flat in the face of constant bromides from Herr Trump about how he’s going to keep us all safe. After all, if the new, tough Trump government is going all-out to protect us from harm, how can one argue that we should be concerned about personal protection at all?

So if the pro-gun narrative that preceded Trump is no longer working, what happens to the people and organizations whose mission is to spread that narrative every chance they get? I’m thinking, for example, about the fortunes of my good friend John Lott, whose books and lectures on the value of guns to protect us from violent crime has made him a visible media personality on shock-jock radio and FOX.

John runs something called the Crime Prevention Research Center, basically a home-grown website devoted to spreading his version of gun information far and wide. Actually, the site is an advertisement for his media appearances and public speeches; the truth is that John is an advocate much more than a researcher – I don’t recall the last time he actually published peer-reviewed research unless the definition of ‘research’ includes any time that someone opens their mouth.

The website and John’s advocacy activities are funded by donations from loyal supporters but the revenue levels recently haven’t done so well.  In 2013 the CPRC brought in $218,106, the following year donations zoomed upwards to $310,839, and then they dropped in 2015 to $166,736.  I don’t see the 2016 numbers but I did see an interesting comment from those idiots Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership site, who quoted an email fundraising appeal from Lott: “Unfortunately, the CPRC is literally almost out of money.  Donations have fallen off dramatically since the election.”

Gee, what a surprise. Gun-nut Nation doesn’t have to worry about losing their toys so support for pro-gun noisemakers like Lott immediately dry up. Will the same situation also begin to impact the NRA?

Maybe The Gun Industry Doesn’t Know The Difference Between An AR-15 And A Hunting Rifle, But PA Hunters Do.

Back in January, the state of Pennsylvania became the very last state to approve the use of semi-automatic rifles for hunting, a decision that was then revised when the final rules were published last week by the Board of Game Commissioners, who set all hunting rules and regulations within the Keystone State. The revision of the rule that was initially voted back in January and then put out for public review, has serious implications not just for the hunting community, but for the gun industry as well.

[image error]The initial regs allowed Pennsylvania hunters to use a semi-automatic rifle to hunt every type of game, which meant that hunters could tote any kind of semi-automatic (one trigger pull, one shot) rifle into the woods, including the newly-minted ‘modern sporting rifle,’ which is just an assault rifle by a different name. Now I’m not going to waste any reader’s time by going over that stupid ‘it’s not an assault rifle because it can’t be fired full-auto’ argument again. And if anyone wants to send me an email or a comment on my blog about how Mike the Gun Grabber doesn’t know anything about guns, you go right ahead. The bottom line is that the whole promotion of the ‘modern sporting rifle’ is a cynical attempt by the gun industry to create demand for a long-gun product which compensates for the fact that hunting just isn’t that popular any more.

When the rule that opened up all hunting to the AR was initially proposed back in January, the pro-gun bunch immediately began pushing the ‘modern sporting rifle’ nonsense, led of course by the NRA.  Here’s what the NRA said when the new rule was first announced: “Semi-automatic rifles simply give hunters a much greater ability to fire a timely and accurate follow-up shot, which can be the huge difference between wounding or quickly taking a game animal.”

Now that statement happens to be completely true, by the way, but what the NRA neglected to add was that the real issue involving the use of an AR to hunt game like deer, bear and elk is not the fact that a semi-automatic rifle can give the hunter a quick, second round, but that the usual AR caliber, 223 Remington or 5.56, throws a bullet which is simply not large enough to bring down a full-size game animal, even if you hit the animal with more than one shot.

Evidently, the Game Commissioners heard from enough folks to conduct a poll of 4,000 hunters, of whom a strong majority favored the use of semi-automatic rifles for hunting but did not want 22-caliber semi-autos to be approved for big-game hunting.  As a result of the public response, the January regulations were amended to allow 22-caliber, semi-auto rifles to be used only for small, fur-bearing game like woodchucks and other varmint types.

In other words, hunters in Pennsylvania clearly rejected the attempt by the gun industry to promote the idea that an AR-15 rifle is no different from any other type of ‘sporting’ gun and therefore should be approved equipment for any type of hunt. To the contrary, a majority of the folks who really know guns understand the difference between a real ‘sporting’ gun and what the industry is trying to pass off as an updated version of the gun that Grandpa used to take into the woods.

Leave it to the NRA, of course, to issue a statement about the decision of the Pennsylvania Game Commissioners which was totally, completely and almost laughably false: “Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Game Commission chose not to respect the rich hunting heritage of Pennsylvania gun owners,” said the NRA, “by rejecting the rule which would have allowed hunters to use semi-automatic rifles in some of the most popular seasons throughout the state.”

To the contrary, the Game Commission’s decision actually showed respect for Pennsylvania’s gun owners who evidently know the difference between a real sporting rifle and an assault rifle masquerading as a sporting gun.

Do Background Checks Equal Gun Sales? Not By A Long Shot.

Like most of us, I’m sick and tired of the alt-right’s attack on mainstream media by calling it ‘fake news.’ Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, or worse. But every once in a while our friends in the real news media get it wrong, and this seems to happen frequently when the issue involves guns. Which is not surprising given the fact that liberals and educated folks in general are usually not that versant with guns or gun cultures, which is all the more reason they should be extra careful when they wander onto the gun-owning/using turf.

An example of this lack of knowledge about guns came out today in an NPR story about background checks in which the writer, Uri Berliner, used the latest FBI-NICS check numbers to craft an article about the post-Trump decline in gun sales.  Now young man Berliner has some impressive journalistic creds; according to the NPR website, he is part of the Planet Money team and previously worked as a reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune. All of which I am sure has given him lots of experience in how to research a story before he sends it out. But this particular story, unfortunately, shows little, if any understanding about trends in the gun business at all.

What Berliner has done is taken the most recent news release from the FBI which gives the overall number of background checks for the previous month, and then assumed without bothering to look at the actual data, that each background check equals the transfer of at least one gun.  His story contains a neat little graphic which shows that monthly background checks have declined from 2.8 million in December to 2.2 million last month, numbers that are far below comparable monthly numbers for 2015. I reproduce the graphic here:

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There’s only one little problem. Berliner is using overall background check numbers (which is what the FBI uses in its press releases because it would like you to know how hard they are working down in West Virginia) which do not distinguish between background checks for gun transfers as opposed to background checks for gun license applications, concealed-carry permits and guns taken out of pawn. You see, the FBI-NICS system isn’t just utilized to make sure that a dealer isn’t putting a gun into the ‘wrong hands.’ It’s also used by law enforcement agencies who don’t have the ability to determine whether a resident of their state applying for a gun or CCW license hasn’t committed a disqualifying crime in some other state.

Had Berliner taken the trouble to look at the actual FBI-NICS data which can be seen here, he would have discovered that of those 2.2 million background checks processed in February, more than half had nothing to do with gun transfers at all. In fact, February, 2017 was the first month that background checks for something other than gun transfers actually exceeded background checks on guns since the FBI started breaking out their numbers back in 1998. And when you examine the background check data in detail, what jumps out is the degree to which the sale of guns (using NICS as a proxy) has declined much more than what the NPR story would lead us to believe.

I’m not saying that Berliner is incorrect when he claims that the gun industry is in the midst of a post-Trump slump. But let’s remember that the whole background check issue is the Numero Uno issue being discussed and debated among organizations that seek to reduce gun violence and believe that expanding background checks is a proper way to proceed.

You would think that NPR would at least understand the necessity of verifying the data which they use to construct a story based on background checks. You would think that the gun violence prevention (GVP) community would want to understand what the data actually means.

You would think….

Trump Gives The Gun Lobby What They Deserve – Nothing.

[image error]Just a few days before the election and the beginning of the end of American democracy as we know it, Fuhrer Trump announced the formation of an advisory group, or what he called a ‘campaign coalition,’ that would advise him on matters of importance to the gun industry and to all those gun owners who were depending on Der Fuhrer to protect their 2nd-Amendment rights.  The group was to be led by Donald Trump, Jr. and Chris Cox, chief lobbyist for the NRA, and its 62 co-chairs represented the true flotsam and jetsam of the gun world, including various self-appointed conservationists and outdoor types, heads of gun-rights organizations that had never been heard of before or since, a few gun makers from second-tier companies (none of the major industry players like Glock, S&W, Ruger, etc., were part of this cabal) and a number of members of the NRA Board.

The purpose of this group, as it was explained by co-chair John Boch in an interview with USA Today, is to provide “policy and legislative recommendations for the new administration through Donald Trump Jr.,” except that such activities take on a much different hue when the individual being counseled is no longer a political candidate but happens now to be President of the United States.

One of the many things that neither Trump nor his circle of advisors seem to understand is that you can’t run the Executive Branch of the Federal Government the way you run a private company because the people who elected you, and even the people who voted against you, have certain legal prerogatives to know just what the hell you are doing in their name. If an organization comes into existence for the purpose of advising the President, its structure and functions fall under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which might require the group to have a charter, hold public meetings, maintain open records, and have procedures for public input. So far, this particular group meets none of those requirements.

But the reason that the group doesn’t yet carry out its functions in line with the Federal Advisory Act is that, in fact, the group has never actually met and nobody seems to know whether it will ever meet or do anything else which might actually represent even the slightest effort to protect gun owners and their precious, 2nd-Amendment rights. The USA Today reporter who wrote this story couldn’t actually find anyone at the White House who knew anything about the organization; requests to interview Trump Jr. were ignored, ditto requests for comments from Chris Cox.

There’s a lawyer in Texas named Ben Langlotz, who has published the complete list of co-chairs on his website, along with an effort to identify what each of these folks actually does.  Seven of the members of this gun coalition are described as ‘affiliation unknown,’ another is referred to as ‘musician, army veteran,’ another is a ‘retired police sergeant,’ and another is described as a ‘NRA volunteer.’ Of course there’s someone from the Tea Party and a gal named Theresa Vail who is described as a ‘television personality’ but is, in fact, a former Miss Kansas, now appearing on the Outdoor Channel, who was arrested in 2015 for illegally killing a grizzly bear. Her lawyer claimed it was an accident but later admitted that ‘errors of judgement occurred.’

Folks who believe that Donald Trump threatens to undo even the most benign gun regulations are probably not far from the truth. But let’s not forget that this new Administration is also showing itself to be politically inept to a degree never previously seen. So whatever plans they have for expanding the rights of Americans to go about killing themselves with their guns, there’s also a good chance that through sheer stupidity and incompetence many of those plans, like the aforementioned gun advisory group, will never see the light of day. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

It’s Not The ‘Gun Lobby’ That Wants To End Gun Regulations – It’s The Gun Owners Themselves.

The Chicago Tribune has just published an op-ed by Fermin DeBrabender, who wrote a provocative book (Do Guns Make Us Free?) arguing that gun ownership actually reduces freedom by restricting the degree to which citizens will engage in open, political discourse when members of the audience show up toting guns.  In his Tribune piece, Professor DeBrabender makes the argument that the gun industry is facing a “market crisis” due to the collapse of demand since the election of #45 and is responding to this crisis by promoting all kinds of laws and legalisms – open carry, campus carry, permitless carry – that will “make owning and carrying a gun more common, more normal, more ingrained in our culture and everyday life.”

[image error]              This is hardly a new thesis and the gun industry’s promotion of the ‘normalization’ of toting around a gun long precedes the collapse of retail sales since the replacement of anti-gun Obama and the appearance of pro-gun Trump.  But to ascribe the easing of gun restrictions to some kind of evil hand belonging to some nefarious entity known as the ‘gun lobby’ is to obscure what I believe is a necessary understanding of what gun ownership in America is really all about.

The truth is that there isn’t a gun ‘lobby’ if what we mean is the existence and activity of some kind of organized, institutionalized effort to support or promote the aims of the gun industry wherever guns are sold. Yes, the NRA has a lobbying arm known as NRA-ILA, which promotes and coordinates pro-gun legislative initiatives both in individual states as well as with the feds. There are also independent pro-gun groups in many states whose members will show up at a public hearing whenever a gun law is being discussed. And make no mistake, these groups are well-funded, they are active and they claim to be able to sway elections with their pro-gun votes.

Except if you look carefully at the history of pro-gun legislation, particularly its spread since the late 1970’s when the first wave of laws liberalizing concealed-carry began to appear, you will note that, again and again, these laws have changed the legal landscape much more in states owned politically by the GOP; gee – what a surprise considering the fact that gun owners, in the main, tend to vote red.  There are still 9 states where the issuance of permits to carry a gun are dependent upon the discretionary judgement of law enforcement officials – every one of those states happens to contain a majority of residents who usually vote blue.

What Professor DeBrabender has overlooked (and I mean no criticism of his otherwise-excellent op-ed in this regard) is that much, if not most of the impetus for liberalizing or discarding gun regulations comes not from the top, so to speak, but from the bottom; i.e., the basic attitudes on the part of gun owners themselves. When the NRA refers to gun owners as ‘law-abiding’ citizens, this may be the one statement they make which is absolutely true.  Most gun owners are law-abiding because otherwise you can’t buy or even own a gun. And guns are the only consumer product which can only be sold to legally-qualified consumers, you don’t need to pass a background check to buy a car.

Every time I go into a gun shop I’m made instantly aware of the fact that just my presence in that shop carries with it the necessity that I must follow various laws. And every weekend when tens of thousands of people visit gun shows they are all equally cognizant of the fact that their legal status is a verifiable issue if they walk up to a dealer’s table to purchase a gun. The existence of 40 million legal gun owners is a much more potent force for doing away with gun regulations than any strategy employed by the ‘gun lobby,’ and talking with those gun owners about gun violence should go hand-in-hand with worrying about whether the gun industry will sell more guns.

An Idea For Regulating Gun Dealers That Would Really Get Results.

I received an interesting email today from the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence (ICHV) with a link to a new website which compares regulations and laws governing the manufacture of teddy bears with the regulations and laws covering the manufacture of guns. To sell a new teddy bear at a retail store or anywhere else, for that matter, the toy must meet more than 20 separate laws and regulations, including whether the teddy has sharp points, contains lead or could result in choking or some other health hazard from too-small parts. As for guns, all you need is a federal firearms license which basically says that you’ve never been in jail, and with this license you’re good to go.

[image error]             The point of the website, of course, is to draw attention to the fact that guns are the most unregulated consumer product around, largely because the gun lobby succeeded in getting guns exempted from regulation when the Consumer Product Safety Commission was created back in the 1970’s, and the exemption has remained in force up through today. There are a handful of states which set safety standards for new handguns and require that any new gun sold in those states must first be tested to meet certain design standards such as trigger pull, drop test and multiple safeties for pistols; there are no safety design requirements for long guns imposed by any state.

What drew my attention to the ICHV website, however, was not just the eye-catching graphic comparing consumer regulations of teddy bears versus guns; what I also read with interest was the notice of a new law that was initially introduced in 2015 but has not yet seen the light of day.  The law, known as the Gun Dealer and Ammunition Seller Act, would for the first time create a state gun dealer licensing procedure which currently only exists in 16 states. Every gun dealer of course has to obtain a federal license from the ATF, but on average the ATF gets around to inspect less than 10% of all dealers, and less than half the licensed dealers have been inspected within the last five years.

Even in gun shops which have been identified as sources of large numbers of crime guns it’s really not clear whether guns were purchased for immediate (and illegal) resale or whether the guns were simply stolen and then at some later date ended up in the street. The average time-to-crime for all traced firearms, according to the ATF, is over 11 years, and while there are shops where lots of crime guns show up in the wrong hands within two years or less after they are first purchased, this is the extreme exception and hardly the rule.

The bottom line, however, is that if gun dealers had to abide not just by federal law but also local regulations, there’s no doubt that gun retailers would be less of a factor in being the source of crime guns, if only because the bad guys would know that using a local store for getting their hands on guns would have the local cops chasing them, not just the faraway feds.

In this regard, I found a part of the Illinois law very interesting because it mandates as part of the licensing requirement that every dealer install a functioning video system that would capture the identity of every person who actually purchases a gun. This law also requires that dealers post a sign which warns that a video system is in use – you would be amazed at the extent to which active video serves as a real deterrent to criminal behavior in a public place.

I think the new ICVH website is a really good job; I’m sending them a donation to support their Teddy Bear campaign and I hope their effort to get a state dealer licensing law bears fruit. Asking dealers to protect themselves and their law-abiding customers is no violation of anyone’s 2nd-Amendment rights.

Some Physicians Talk About Their Experiences With Gun Violence Victims.

There’s a cute little website out there called Dr. Oz – The Good Life, which purports to be one of those ‘wellness’ websites that gives you information on diet, exercise, skin care, you know what I mean.  Dr. Oz is actually a television personality named Dr. Mehmet Oz whose medical advice over the years has been attacked by other physicians as ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘quackery,’ even though he still retains his position as Director of Integrative Medicine at Columbia University. His online CV he lists his highest honor as his Emmy Award for Best Daytime Television Host, which is what ‘integrative medicine’ is really all about.

[image error]              The website is really a vehicle for health and wellness advertising, the products you can purchase to help you lose weight, gain control over your thinning hairline, etc., etc., etc., just abound. But the website also contains an occasional article of some medical value, with a current article entitled, “When Bullets Meet Bodies: What Doctors Think About Gun Violence” written by a faculty member from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The article is a series of interviews with professionals who have treated gunshot victims, including a several surgeons, an occupational therapist, a pediatrician and an EMT chief.

As you can imagine, these interviews reflect the reality of gun violence at the level at which it really occurs, namely, in the medical facilities that have to deal with the people who get shot and whose lives often hang in the balance based on whether the attending medical staff gets it done timely and gets it done right. Gunshot wounds are probably the worst kind of injury because a bullet can and will travel through the human body damaging multiple organs at the same time. So a bullet that enters someone’s torso might go through a lung, sever an artery, smash a rib or two – what do you work on first? Most of the stories collected by the writer, Jennifer Wolff, are first-hand accounts of the difficulties and dangers involved in patching someone up.

Every physician interviewed for this story advocated stricter controls over firearms and clinical interventions by physicians to reduce gun violence before it occurs except one. And the one doctor who felt that his colleagues should basically stay outside of the gun debate is a psychiatrist named Robert Young, who happens to be affiliated with something called Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, which claims a national membership of physicians except they have never given out an actual number of the size of their organization, even though they have managed over the past twenty-five years to inject their stupid views into all kinds of public discussions about doctors and guns.

I say ‘stupid’ because not only do their uninformed, pro-gun views clash directly with the stated positions on gun violence published by every, professional medical society in the land, but when they get up and say something in public they just as often get it wrong. In the OZ interview, Young states that the Florida gag law which criminalizes doctors who talk to patients about guns is “under appeal and not yet enforced.” Well I guess Dr. Young hasn’t yet heard about the decision of the 11th Federal Circuit on February 17 which overturned the Florida gag law for good. But the even more remarkably stupid thing he says is that if he has a suicidal patient, “I make a plan with whoever else lives in their house to keep them from potentially lethal things. That includes firearms, but it also includes knives.” Is he joking? Is he comparing the lethality of a gun to the lethality of a knife?

I suspect that the reason Jennifer Wolff gave Dr. Young some space is that she didn’t want to be accused of only hearing from one side. But with all due respect to the canons of journalistic practice there is only one side with respect to the medical risk caused by guns. And except for a few brainless physicians like Dr. Young, this is something which, thankfully, the medical community fully understands.