Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 73

A Little Early But Here’s My GVP Resolutions For 2017.

 

The truth is that nothing succeeds like adversity, and if there’s one group that probably feels they’ve been hit with adversity it’s the community that really cares about gun violence prevention, a.k.a. GVP.  Because if this election was anything, it was something of a plebiscite on America’s gun culture and the American fascination with guns.  Talk about making the country exceptional – what other country has more than 300 million small arms stacked away in closets and drawers?  And you can’t argue with the fact that Hillary made new gun regs a major part of her pitch and Shlump made a point of promising to protect the 2nd Amendment at every campaign stop that he made. No, I take that back – the one place he didn’t mention gun ‘rights’ was when he tramped around Flint.

[image error]             For many GVP advocates, having a virulently pro-gun President in the White House is a new state of affairs, which is why it’s understandable that the GVP community would feel somewhat vulnerable going into 2017.  Let’s face it, we all had visions of expanded background checks to secondary gun transfers under Hillary – was there a single pollster who told us it wouldn’t come true? But maybe, just maybe, the Age of Trump will prove to be a blessing in disguise for GVP because, if nothing else, his continued pandering to the lowest common denominator on the gun issue will waken people up to the fact that now’s really the time to get involved.

Which is why although I usually wait until after Christmas to publish my gun violence prevention (GVP) resolutions for the next year, I’ve decided to get started now.  And the reason I’m doing it early this time is because of some postings about how Vanity Fair’s subscriptions soared after the magazine was attacked by Trump, ditto a massive wave of new subscriptions for The New York Times after the results on November 8th.  So I think we need to get ready because sooner or later El Shlumpo will say something stupid or really stupid or really, really stupid about guns and GVP better be ready to respond.  So my New Year’s GVP resolutions are aimed at making my own response as effective as it can be.

Resolution #1. – I will never write anything that contains the slightest concern for, or support of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ The second that a GVP advocate says that Americans have a ‘right’ to own a gun, the other side has won.

Resolution #2. – I have absolutely no interest in trying to figure out how to communicate a GVP message to ‘responsible’ people who own guns.  If they’re so responsible, let them figure it out.

Resolution #3. –  I am not going to bother any more with explanations about the difference between a ‘modern sporting rifle’ and an AR-15.  There is no difference except that the latter is designed to kill people and the former is an entirely made-up name.

Resolution #4. – I will not entertain any discussion about whether there should be a training standard for civilians who want to carry concealed (or open) guns.  Anyone who wants to carry a self-defense gun can join the military or, if you’re too old to enlist, you can always move to Israel because up to age 60 you can serve in the IDF reserves.

So those are my New Year’s resolutions when it comes to GVP.  And if you’ve bothered to read them you’ll notice one common thread, namely, that when it comes to reducing gun violence, the GVP community needs to take a very strong, aggressive and uncompromising stance.  The fact is that 90% of the small arms being manufactured and sold in the United States are designed to do only one thing.  And if they weren’t designed to do that one thing we wouldn’t need to be advocates for GVP.  Get it?

Lawyers Take On Gun Violence – Will It Make A Difference?

I’m not an expert or even a novice on what I know about America’s legal profession, but when firms like Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Arnold & Porter and Covington & Burling announce that they are joining forces to tackle a legal issue, it’s worth my time to figure out what’s going on.  And when these firms and a bunch of other legal powerhouses announce that the issue they want to pursue is gun violence, then it’s something I need to understand.  And what better way to understand what’s going on than a long and detailed article in The New York Times which says these firms are committing “tens of millions of dollars in free legal services” to aid the gun violence prevention community (GVP) in its efforts to reduce the annual carnage caused by America’s love affair with guns.

[image error]             Predictably, Gun-nut Nation immediately responded to this announcement by accusing the lead Arnold & Porter attorney, Michael Schissel, of “lying through his teeth” in an interview with NPR because he wouldn’t admit that his real reason for getting involved was to help his firm get “rich off frivolous lawsuits” that would be filed once his firm helped dispose of the gun-immunity law known as PLCAA. And to prove just how much the gun industry doesn’t need any more anti-gun lawyers poking around, the whine about Schissel mentioned the sad case of Stag Arms whose owner was barred from the industry for life simply because he couldn’t provide the ATF with documentation about a pile of full-automatic assault guns.  We’re not talking about the semi-automatic assault rifles which Stag manufactures in boatloads every month.  We’re talking about weapons where you pull the trigger one time and the gun barks roughly ten times per second until all the ammo is used up.

Of course what the new legal alliance is facing isn’t some small fry in Connecticut who forgot to do the paperwork on his machine guns.  What they are really facing is the power and authority of the Executive branch of the Federal government whose new occupant better not forget the television ads that NRA ran during his Presidential campaign. I find it interesting, incidentally, that there was absolutely no mention of anything having to do with the 2nd Amendment in the hundred-day agenda that Trump released back in October when he delivered his version of the Gettysburg Address. And what really concerns me in this respect was the statement coming out of the new legal coalition formed to help reduce gun violence that their effort “was not aimed at eroding gun rights.”

The problem with this approach on the part of advocates for GVP is that the statement simply flies in the face of reality, or at least the reality of gun ownership as it is understood by most people who own guns.  Take, for example, the surveys which show a majority of gun owners and even NRA members allegedly supporting the extension of FBI-NICS background checks. Yet none of those surveys ever ask these same NRA members how they feel about the NRA’s explicit rejection of any additional background checks at all.  I can guarantee you that if those same NRA members had to choose between supporting background checks and supporting the NRA, the folks in Fairfax would get their money and their votes.

The search by this new legal coalition to identify and speak to all those ‘responsible’ gun owners reminds me of all those ‘responsible’ Republicans who were going to desert the party and vote for Hillary because they just couldn’t accept the rantings and ravings of this new guy named Trump.  Know what happened to all those ‘responsible’ Republicans when they walked into the voting booth on November 8th? They voted the way they always voted, which is exactly what will happen if gun owners have to choose between gun regulations drawn up by liberals (and their attorneys) or the protection of the NRA.

The Dumbest Writing About Guns In 2016.

Our good friends at The Trace have just published what they call the gun violence reporting which inspired them in 2016.  It’s a good, solid list and it contains some reportage that I hadn’t previously seen, so I recommend it highly for everyone in the gun violence prevention (GVP) community, as well as for everyone in Gun-nut Nation (I’m trying to be more compassionate and inclusive as we head into 2017.)

[image error]             I’m going to steal a little thunder from the folks at The Trace and publish my own list of don’t-miss gun journalism, but in this case I’m going to nominate one article for my list known as The Dumbest Gun Article of the Year.  Now you might think that I would nominate something written by John Blowhard Lott, or maybe an editorial from NRA-ILA, or perhaps a prancing video produced by Colion Noir, but nothing from Gun-nut Nation comes even close to making my dumbest list for the simple reason that I expect gun messaging from the Gang That Can’t Think Straight to be dumb. Anyone who sincerely believes that owning a gun makes him ‘free’ is simply incapable of understanding any discussion about anything that uses language taught beyond the second grade. Consequently, I reserve my concerns about dumb gun journalism for writers who should know better because they are allegedly crafting their messaging for folks from our side; i.e., the population that is concerned enough about gun violence to think and talk about it in intelligent terms.

Okay, enough with the forshpayz and here we go. For dumbest writing about guns in 2016 I nominate an article just published in GQ, written by someone named Ashley Fetters, entitled “Why Women Own Guns.” I did a quick online search and I can’t find any other article that Ms. Fetters has ever written about guns; her reporting specialties appear to focus on pop culture, a smattering of political stuff and some articles about restaurants and food. Now maybe she knows how to hold a knife and fork, but she sure doesn’t know how to hold a gun. Just take a look at the pic which leads off the story and notice that the lady’s trigger finger is stuck behind the trigger which is one place your trigger finger should never be.  But that bit of stupidity pales with what comes next.

The article’s second sentence states that “a curiously large proportion of U.S. gun owners are women,” and then cites the standard NRA noise about women getting into shooting which has never been validated at all.  She further says that a Harvard-Northeastern study found that 50% of gun owners with one gun are women, but what she doesn’t say is that most male gun owners own more than one gun. She then gushes over the comments made by four women gun-toters, including a woman who hucksters a product called the Flashbang Bra Holster which both gives her more ‘lift’ and puts her on equal ground with anyone who might do her harm.

Now here’s where things get about as stupid as they might get.  The author wants you, the reader, to know why she’s writing this piece.  Because she believes that “a gun isn’t just a weapon – it’s also an unambiguous way to signal to someone that they should fuck off and leave you alone.”  Wow! How decisive!  How hip!  How cool! How…GQ! We are then treated to the requisite stories about the bad guy standing on the back porch and the stranger at the front door, both to convey the vulnerability of womenhood in the modern age.

Let me break the news to you gently Ashley.  Gun-nut Nation has been peddling guns based on fear for the past thirty years, and the idea that women constitute a special type of victim if they venture outside the home is really rather quaint.  Women are as capable today as men (if not moreso) of making informed decisions about everything in their lives. And grabbing a gun just isn’t all that informed.

Gun Violence Isn’t Just A Big-City Thing – It Happens In Small Towns Too.

One of the gun violence issues that has come to the forefront over the last several years has been what is politely referred to as ‘legal intervention,’ which is what happens when a civilian is shot by a cop.  It became front-page news in August, 2014, when an 18-year old kid, Michael Brown, was gunned down by a police officer in Ferguson, MO, an event that led to community protests and the usual media noise from both sides when a Grand Jury refused to indict. So far in 2016 there have been at least 900 people shot and killed by police, a number more than twice as high as the ‘official’ count that we get each year from the FBI.

[image error]             When we think about police shootings, we tend to think that most of them involve black civilians shot by white cops.  After all, that was the situation in Ferguson, it was also what happened in another cop shooting that made the national news involving a victim named Philando Castile.  But according to the cop-shooting tracker on the Washington Post, white victims of fatal police shootings outnumber blacks by two to one, and in some places the white-black racial disparity in cop shootings is even greater than that.

Take a look, for example, at Oklahoma, a state whose rate of cop shootings in 2015 was an alarmingly 1.14.  Now you might think that a gun violence rate of 1.14 isn’t very high; after all, we have cities like St. Louis, Newark and New Orleans with gun violence rates of 40 or more.  But we’re not talking about civilians shooting civilians, we’re talking about cops using their guns. So, for comparison, Texas this year will have a police shooting rate of 0.29; in Florida the rate will be somewhere around 0.27; in other words these states have one-fifth the rate of police gun violence than what was racked up in Oklahoma last year.

Not only are cops shooting civilians all over the place in Oklahoma, but most of the victims happen to be white.  Since the beginning of 2015, there have been 57 fatal legal interventions, of whom 35 were white, 5 were Native Americans, 3 were Hispanic and 12 were black.  Incidentally, the state’s population is roughly 70% white, so the number of white victims is pretty close to the percentage of the white population as a whole.

What’s going on in Oklahoma?  How come there are so many police shootings and how come this particular type of gun violence never makes the national news? The chief reason, it seems to me, is that most of these events took place in small towns that, from a media and news point of view, are way off the beaten track.  Ever hear of Okemah?  It happens to have been the birthplace of Woody Guthrie but right now the population stands at barely 3,000 souls.  On November 7, a sheriff’s deputy killed a 26-year old resident after the young man tried to run the deputy down with his car.  Or try Schulter, which has around 600 people living in the town.  Back in February the cops in Schulter got into a firefight with John Neuman who, as it turned out, had been released on bail having been previously arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife.

If the police gun violence which occurs in small towns like Okemah and Schulter took place in Philadelphia or New York, it would be all over the internet and all over the news.  For that matter, if any kind of gun violence that was five times the national average was occurring in a major city there would be meetings, marches, all the usual things which happen when a large urban community gets aroused. But let’s not forget that America isn’t just big cities; it’s also small, out-of-the-way places and, make no mistake about it, those little places often contain lots of guns.

 

When It Comes to Gun Violence Chicago Is Bad But It Ain’t The Worst.

Chicago was ablaze with gunfire again this weekend and as of Sunday morning, five people were dead in a single house and another fifteen were in various hospitals with wounds.  There’s a good chance that the Windy City will rack up more than 800 gun deaths in 2016, almost double the number of gun murders in 2015, which was a 12% increase from the year before.  The city is looking at the newly-issued report of a taskforce that is calling for new measures to deal with the violence; you know, another taskforce, got it?

[image error]             Last year I looked at the map of shootings for Chicago that is carried in The Tribune, and noticed that some neighborhoods, particularly parts of the South and West Sides, appeared overwhelmed with gun violence, whereas other areas of the city seemed to have little or no gun violence at all.  But the map for 2016 is different because although gun violence is still concentrated in neighborhoods like Austin in the West and New City in the South, shootings occur in every neighborhood, even in places like Rogers Park.  I lived in Rogers Park in the 1970s and forget about violence or crime, our apartment on Greenleaf Avenue didn’t even have a front-door lock.  This year there have been 25 shootings in Rogers Park, although that’s an improvement because shootings numbered 40 in 2014.

Doing a quick calculation brings the murder rate in Chicago (per 100,000 residents) to just around 30, give or take a few. The national gun homicide rate is around 3.5 per 100,000, in other words, one-tenth of what’s going on in Chicago these days, no wonder the weekend shooting deaths of five people in one house made the national news. Incidentally, I just went back to the browser and the city’s shooting toll since Friday afternoon has been upped to 9 dead and 26 wounded with most of Sunday still to be gotten through.

So what makes this city such a human shooting gallery with no end in sight?  It’s almost like you could walk down any street in the Second City and a bullet might go whizzing overhead.  Except the fact is that Chicago, compared to some other places, isn’t so dangerous after all.  St. Louis this year has a murder rate of 61, New Orleans is 46, Newark is 39.  I don’t know how many of these murders were committed with guns, but if the usual 70% average for guns used in homicides holds true in these towns, then all of them, and some others, rank well ahead of Chicago when it comes to the number of residents who are being gunned down.

If the gun-violence problem in Chicago was just related to Chicago, we could probably come up with some quick and easy reasons why such an exceptional situation existed in only this one place.  But gun violence, more particularly the increase in gun violence, isn’t just a Chicago problem at all. It seems to be occurring in many places, and I am not sure that this generalized increase in gun violence is only found in high-density, inner-city neighborhoods. The FBI says that the murder rate is lowest in cities with less than 100,000 residents, but the town of Mangonia Park, FL (which has a great waterslide) registered two murders in 2015 which gave this place a murder rate per 100,000 of 151!  When a homicide occurs in a place like Mangonia Park it never makes the national news, but there are little towns (what the FBI calls ‘tiny cities’) all over the place and violent crimes, shooting crimes, take place in these spots as well.

Violent crime and, in particular gun violence dropped steeply in the 1990s and 2000s but levelled off but let’s stop patting ourselves on the back and pretending that we’ve got the problem under control. As the accuracy of gun-violence reporting gets more accurate, it’s clear the numbers are moving up.  And they are moving up everywhere, not just in the city on the lake.

Has The Number Of Gun Dealers Declined? Not Lately.

Our friends at the Violence Policy Center (VPC) have just released a new report which details a 77% decline in federal gun dealers since 1994, which they believe reduces the number of dealers who might be “a known source of weapons for criminal gun traffickers.”  Exactly how large a role FFL-dealers actually play in pushing guns into the ‘wrong hands’ has never been adequately analyzed or explained, but looking for any piece of silver lining when it comes to regulating guns in the Age of Trump isn’t a bad thing.

[image error]             The only problem with this particular piece of silver lining, however, is that the data actually gives a somewhat different perspective on the whole issue of FFL-dealers than what the VPC would like us to believe. Because while it is true that the number of FFL licenses has declined by more than two-thirds over the past twenty years, the number has actually increased by more than ten percent in the last nine years.

And why has there been an increase in FFL dealers after the drop in license-holders after 1994?  Remember this guy named Obama and a doubling in gun sales beginning in 2008? Remember an even greater sales increase after the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook and an abortive attempt to widen NICS-FBI background checks to cover secondary sales?  Between 2007 and 2016 the number of gun dealers increased in 38 of the 50 states.  North Carolina dropped from 6,486 dealers in 1994 to 1,327 in 2007, but FFLs in the Tar Heel State are back up to 1,921, an increase of 45%!  In South Carolina the numbers went from 2,332 in 1994 down to 529 in 2007 and now back up to 886, not a bad jump in just nine years.

The real reason that FFLs dropped so steeply after 1994 (mentioned in the VPC report) was the cost of the license went up from $30 to $200, which meant that many of the pre-94 dealers were not really in business so a 700% increase for the license fee was just too steep. But it’s not as if the Treasury Department lost any money when all those guys buying guns for themselves at wholesale prices gave up the ghost. The license fees under the pre-94 regime would have generated around 7 million bucks.  When the fee went to $200 the revenue from the 56,000 current dealers amounted to 11 million and change.

The fact that there are roughly one-quarter the number of FFL-holders today as compared to 1994 says absolutely nothing about the relationship between the number of dealers who actually sell guns to consumers as opposed to selling guns to themselves or to a few friends.  Even with the ATF’s backslapping about their vaunted programs to keep dealers in line, probably no more than 5,000 dealers are actually bringing new inventory to the civilian market and thus might be contributing to the spread of crime guns.

Where do I get that number?  It’s simple – just go to the website of Smith & Wesson or Glock or one of the other gun manufacturers and do a search for their stocking dealers in any particular state.  Gun makers go out of their way to promote product sales by listing every dealer who stocks and sells their wares.  Glock lists 272 dealers in North Carolina and the ATF says there are 1,921 FFL-holders in the state.  Smith & Wesson has about 50 dealers in its home state of Massachusetts and there are 386 active FFLs in the Bay State.

If you want to write about regulating any industry you need to know how to figure out how to understand the industry itself.  And you’re not going to get a complete view by using information created outside the industry by regulators like the ATF. Remember, in the Age of Trump it doesn’t matter whether anything is based on facts or not. All the more reason why folks who don’t share his love of the gun industry need to know how that industry really works.

 

Want To Keep Guns Out Of The Wrong Hands? Check The 3rd Grade.

While the gun violence community (GVP) approaches the question of reducing gun violence from many different perspectives, there does seem to be a basic consensus around the idea that the 120,000+ gun injuries (more than 35,000 fatal) suffered each year by Americans can be substantially lessened by keeping guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’  This basic approach was embodied in the first, major effort at gun regulation, the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA68), which stipulated that certain individuals who were felons or fugitives, among other unsavory types, shouldn’t be allowed to get their hands on guns.

[image error]            Over the years a few more ‘wrong hands’ categories have been added to the list, as well as attempts to make it more difficult for wrong-handed people to get access to guns which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is what was behind the FBI-NICS background check system implemented under the Clinton Administration and has become the great GVP battleground over the extension of background checks to secondary sales.

Despite the stupidities of Gun-nut Nation regarding the uselessness of background checks, I’m willing to bet that the NICS system has probably been somewhat responsible for the more than 50% decrease in gun violence between 1995 and 2005, but while the system has become more efficient over the last ten years and secondary background checks are now conducted in 20 states, the overall rate of gun violence has plateaued over the last ten years and now appears to be edging back up.  So perhaps it’s time to re-examine the entire ‘wrong hands’ approach to dealing with gun violence, if only because more ‘bad hands’ seem to be getting their hands on guns every year.

The basic assumption that lies behind ‘wrong hands’ is the idea that people who behave in violent ways will become even more violent if they get their hands on a gun.  But the problem is that even if we had airtight reporting of all criminal behavior, even if the NICS database contained an absolutely complete and comprehensive list of everyone convicted of a violent crime, particularly crimes related to domestic abuse, these records only reflect the behavior of adults, which is way too late to predict who might be a threat to themselves or others when/if they got their hands on a gun.

The life-cycle of gun access has been studied by some of our most eminent public health and criminology researchers and they all agree: guns start showing up in the ‘wrong hands’ beginning around age twelve.  Because a real gun in the hands of any twelve-year old is, by definition, a gun in the ‘wrong hands,’ but that’s when they start showing up.  And the kid who starts carrying a gun to show off at twelve will be carrying it to use it when he’s sixteen. And he will have used it or had another gun used against him over the next ten years.  The studies that confirm the recidivism of gun violence by perpetrators and victims are conclusive in this respect.

But here’s the problem. By the time the kid with a gun reaches the age of sixteen, he no longer can be found.  And he can’t be found because he dropped out of school at age fourteen.  And now he’s wandering the nabes or the hood and he supports himself by doing things that require carrying or using a gun.  The city of Springfield, MA has a gun-homicide rate more than three times the national rate.  It also has a school drop-out rate of 40%. Who’s watching these kids?  Nobody’s watching these kids.

Youngsters don’t wake up one day in the 9th grade and announce they are quitting school.  These are kids with all kinds of behavioral and learning issues which appear by the 2nd or 3rd grade.  And then, ten or fifteen years later, they get shot or go to jail for shooting someone else.  Want to keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands?’ Those hands are attached to someone jumping around in the classroom right down the hall.

 

It’s Not The Caliber That Counts – It’s The Size.

Our friends at The Trace carried an article this week by Alex Yablon which illustrates some of the best aspects of independent gun journalism that hopefully will continue to expand.  Note the words ‘independent’ and ‘journalism,’ which basically rules out any and all of the writing found on the various pro-gun blogs, several of which immediately attacked Yablon because their basic job is to attack anyone who says something which might interfere or diminish the American love affair with guns. Don’t worry Alex, now that the guys have been told by the puppet master that he no longer wants them to ‘lock her up, the pro-gun noise machine will have more time to come after you.

[image error]             Anyway, what Yablon argues is that the types of guns being picked up at crime scenes continue to show a steady increase in the larger, more powerful handgun calibers like 9mm, 40 S&W and 45acp.  These calibers have increasingly come to dominate the handgun market which means they end up being found in large numbers in the illegal gun market as well.  Not only are these guns more lethal because of their high-powered calibers, they can hold magazines which contain 15 rounds or more.

As Yablon points out, in the olden days most ‘street guns’ were small, cheaply-made and chambered for 22 or 25acp.  Now these bullets will kill you just as quickly as a nine, but the shooter has to hit a lethal spot.  Back in the early 1970s, one of the pioneering gun researchers, Frank Zimring, did a study of the lethality of calibers in guns picked up by the Chicago police, and he found that not a single victim of a shooting died if he was hit by one round from a 22-caliber gun.

That was then, this is now.  According to ATF data, the number of high-caliber guns found at crime scenes between 2012 and 2015 increased by 30% to 39% depending on caliber, whereas the number of 22-caliber guns recovered in the street remained about the same. Anyone who thinks that when a quarter-ounce of lead snapping along at 1,000 feet every second won’t blow the bejesus out of anything solid with which it comes into contact, has never seen what the wound looks like after someone is shot by a gun.

I got into the gun business back when I went down to North Carolina and at the age of 21 and spent the summer working for my Uncle Ben.  He manufactured a 22-caliber revolver which he sold in his pawn shop for a Jackson plus five.  The gun was a quintessential ‘Saturday Night Special’ which Ben stopped making around the time the big gun law was passed in 1968.  I still see them for sale on internet sites, which brings back fond memories of Kinston, NC in 1965.

That was also then, this is also now. And now means polymers, modular manufacturing and all the other technology advances that have the gun industry to meet the demand for small, highly-lethal guns. And here is where Yablon’s article contains a small but important deficiency in understanding guns, because he makes the assumption that a gun with a powerful caliber has to be a big gun, when in fact what is really happening in the gun industry is that more powerful calibers are now found in increasingly smaller guns.

“The vogue for big, powerful semiautomatic handguns has taken over the industry,” says Yablon, but that’s not really true. What is driving the gun industry are handguns that are no larger than my droid, yet the shoot the most lethal handgun ammo around.  Sig, Ruger, Glock, Smith & Wesson and Kahr are all marketing pistols whose overall length is six inches or less.  And it is the concealability of these guns which is much more a factor in their lethality than the caliber of the guns themselves.

The Glock 42 is 5.9 inches long.  My Samsung G5 is 6.2” – shouldn’t everyone with a Droid also carry a Glock?

What To Talk About Gun Violence? Facts Aren’t Enough.

When all is really said and done, there’s one basic point of disagreement between Gun-sense Nation on the one hand, and Gun-nut Nation on the other. And the difference goes like this: Gun-sense Nation believes that 120,000+ or more gun deaths and gun injuries each year is a public health crisis which needs to be addressed the way we deal with all threats to public health, namely, through a combination of research, education, and enforced legislation. Gun-nut Nation, on the other hand, does not believe that guns cause any kind of threat to public health; to the contrary, legal gun ownership protects the public from threats to its welfare both from within the country and without.

           I think that the gun violence prevention (GVP) community needs to stop worrying about what the other side says or what the other side thinks. To be honest, I’m not sure that anyone who truly believes that the 2nd Amendment keeps us ‘free’ or protects us from an invasion by ISIS has actually thought about the issue at all. And let’s not forget that we now have a real bully in the bully pulpit who appears to share Gun-nut Nation’s point of view. Nevertheless, the folks who want to do something about gun violence still need to figure out what to do.

Or more specifically, what to say.  Because the argument between the two sides resembles a similar argument that made a brief appearance during the 2016 Republican primary campaign, when Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, made a remarkable statement during the 2nd debate when he said there were many vaccines that aren’t really necessary, a claim that medical science has long ago decided is simply not true.

Carson was responding to a slimy attempt by Trump-o to thrill his supporters with yet another conspiracy theory, in this case the idea that childhood vaccines lead to autism, a loony and completely disproven idea that’s been floating around on the fringes of the mentally-challenged population for years. Unfortunately, what’s scientific fact to one person may be fiction to someone else, and if you don’t believe me, just spend some time perusing websites which claim that global warming is a complete and total hoax.

In essence, the GVP community faces the same issue every time they talk about gun violence as a public health problem, because they run smack up against a response from Gun-nut Nation which has nothing to do with science, or research, or facts at all.  How many peer-reviewed articles have appeared in scientific/medical journals over the last 50 years which provide substantive data showing that access to guns increases the risk of getting shot or shooting yourself with a gun?  Probably somewhere around 1,000 articles, give or take a few. How many articles have appeared in scientific/medical journals over the same time period which provide data supporting the idea that access to guns protects us from harm?  None.  That’s another way of saying ‘zero,’ in case you didn’t know.

So when it comes to figuring out whether guns are a good thing or a bad thing, or what I call the ‘social utility’ of guns, the scientific evidence goes in only one direction, the research uniformly says one thing: i.e., the social costs of free access to firearms outweighs the social benefits – period, done

There’s only one little problem.  The people who promote free access to guns, who want everyone to walk around with a gun could care less about what the scientific evidence shows.  And didn’t they just help elect a President who could also care less about the difference between fiction and fact? So Gun-sense Nation better figure out some messaging which can respond to how Gun-nut Nation feels about their guns. Because talking about gun violence by citing this or that scientific study works fine when you’re talking to someone who believes in science and facts.  But what happens when you find yourself in a discussion about gun violence with someone who believes that Martins really did land in Area 51?

 

 

 

 

A New PSA From Sandy Hook Promise Which You Should Watch.

This week a PSA was released by Sandy Hook Promise which is a graphic and disturbing effort to draw attention to behavior which might indicate that someone is at-risk for engaging in violence with a gun.  The purpose is to build awareness about gun violence prevention through collaboration, training and group discussions in schools and other public venues.  The group claims to have trained more than 1 million educators, parents, community leaders and students in their “Know The Signs” program, and they must be doing something right because Gun-nut Nation has lost no time in warning their folks that the project is nothing more than another attempt to take away everyone’s guns.

           One part of their website which drew my attention is a downloadable factsheet on gun violence with data divided into daily and annual numbers based on an average for the years 2003 to 2013.  Thanks to our friends at the Gun Violence Archive, some of the gun violence numbers, which come from the CDC, have been shown to be pretty far off, particularly true for accidental shooting deaths and even moreso for the number of individuals shot by cops. But the number I found most interesting was the topmost category of the Gun Facts sheet, something called “Acts of Gun Violence” which is a category of gun violence that I have never seen before.  And the number, which is an average of 549,380 each year between 2003 and 2013, is so astonishingly large that I decided to look further and try to figure it out.

The number comes from a DOJ – Bureau of Justice Statistics publication, “Firearm Violence, 1993-2011,” used by the Sandy Hook people to come up with their half-million average gun violence figure by averaging yearly numbers from 2003 to 2011.  What pushes the overall average up to just slightly under 550,000 is a big jump in one year- 627,200 shootings in 2006 – moving the annual average to what otherwise would have been around 475,000 gun assaults each year. I’m not saying that 550,000 criminal gun assaults is something to sneeze at; I’m saying that the ‘annual average’ of just under 550,000 does not accurately represent these stats.

The number that DOJ calls ‘criminal firearm violence’ and Sandy Hook calls ‘acts of gun violence’ comes from the annual survey of criminal victimization known as the National Crime Victimization Survey or NCVS. This annual survey is mandated by Congress because the only other national crime data is generated by the FBI, and their numbers are based on how many people are arrested or crimes are reported, both of which, as we know, are far below the actual number of crimes.  The NCVS numbers are collected from interviews with more than 160,000 people each year and I can tell you from personal experience that the NCVS analysts know how to crunch numbers and crunch them very well.

There’s only one little problem with the NCVS numbers on gun violence. They are based on nothing more than a good guess. Because if you take the trouble to drill down to the actual survey questions from which this data is derived, you discover that respondents are asked whether they were attacked with a knife or a gun but they are not asked to specify which was which.  And since the FBI tells us that for every ten reported assaults, six involve a gun and four involve a knife, I guess this is how the NCVS come up with their number on gun crimes which then are used by BJS which then end up in the factsheet published by Sandy Hook.

Now you would think that for something as serious and costly as gun injuries that we would try to establish some numbers that are even reasonably accurate, never mind simply meeting the test of good, common sense.  But neither accuracy nor common sense will define how government will collect or use data over the next four years. If they bother with data at all.