Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 77

Do Guns Make College Campuses Safer? Not At All.

The Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University has just issued an important report on guns and college campuses which is summarized in a Washington Post op-ed or you can download the entire report here. Basically, the report argues that, Gun-nut Nation’s claims to the contrary, allowing guns on college campuses does not enhance security or safety, but will result in more, not less gun violence in academic environments.

 

The Texas Tower

The Hopkins report follows shortly after the University of Texas ended its ban on campus-carry, which makes it the eighth state to allow people with concealed-carry permits to bring their guns with them to school.  But there are also 24 states which grant colleges and universities a local option to allow guns within their campus domains, which leaves only 18 states whose college campuses are still gun-verein.  Some of the states where guns aren’t allowed in academic environments are heavily regulated states like New York, Massachusetts and Illinois.  But there are also some surprises on the no-campus list, including gun-rich states like Missouri, Georgia and the Gun-shine State most of all.  Gun-nut Nation tries year in and year out to open college campuses to guns in Florida, but so far common sense prevails.

In trying to assess whether guns are a risk or benefit to college life, the authors note that they are forced to rely on data which measures this question for society as a whole. But this approach still yields sufficient evidence to make a judgement about one of the cardinal tenets of Gun-nut Nation’s infatuation with campus carry, namely, the notion that educational settings attract the real gun nuts – the mass shooters – because colleges and universities tend to be gun-free zones.

The evidence that gun-free zones attract mass shooters comes from one place and one place only, namely, the alt-right media postings of my good buddy John Lott.  I enjoy following his rants if only because you can always count on John to invent a definition that will justify what he is trying to argue regardless of whether the definition bears any relationship to reality at all.  His latest attempt to promote the idea that gun-free zones attract mass shooters is to define a gun-free zone as any place where residents don’t have easy access to owning guns.  So even though mass shootings have never been a feature of New York City life, as far as John is concerned, the Big Apple is a completely gun-free zone.  Get it?

The real problem with any analysis of mass shootings is that we are forced to infer the motives of mass shooters because most don’t survive the shooting incident itself.  These events are usually, but not always, homicides followed by a suicide, thus our understanding of the how and why of such events is a function of looking for similarities in the circumstances surrounding those shootings, such as where they took place, who were the victims, and so forth. The one mass shooter who has supplied an overwhelming amount of in-person, forensic evidence is Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, but if you want to download, read and try to figure out his motives from the 1,500-page Manifesto he posted online prior to the event, good luck and Godspeed. Even the court-appointed psychiatrists who examined him prior to trial couldn’t figure him out.

While nobody can say for sure why gun violence, particularly mass gun violence, occurs in certain places and not others, the Hopkins report aggregates and summarizes enough research to state (beyond any doubt) that gun assaults and gun suicides occur much more frequently wherever guns are present, regardless of whether concealed-carry is sanctioned or not.  If John Lott didn’t exist, Gun-nut Nation would invent him, because there is simply no research which shows that our society, and particularly our college campuses are safer because civilians are walking around with guns.  But since when did the pro-gun argument have anything to do with facts anyway?

 

 

Trump May Believe That The 2nd Amendment Protects Gun Ownership, But He Happens To Be Wrong.

It only took about two minutes Wednesday night for the Hillary Clinton – Adolph Trump debate to get to the question of guns. And it was Adolph who raised the issue when he said he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would uphold the 2nd Amendment because it was ‘under siege.’  So Wallace then flipped he question to HRC and asked her to explain her comment that the 2008 Heller decision was ‘wrong,’ to which our candidate gave a fairly sensible and cogent response:

     “You mentioned the Heller decision. And what I was saying that you referenced, Chris, was that I disagreed with the way the court applied the Second Amendment in that case, because what the District of Columbia was trying to do was to protect toddlers from guns and so they wanted people with guns to safely store them. And the court didn’t accept that reasonable regulation, but they’ve accepted many others. So I see no conflict between saving people’s lives and defending the Second Amendment.”

Let’s not waste our time with Adolph Trump’s rejoinder because it was an incomprehensible ramble about how he was going to do this and that. The bottom line is he said what he needed to say, namely, that if she won the election, guns would be taken away.  Because to Gun-nut Nation, saying that the 2nd Amendment is ‘under siege’ is just code for saying that private gun ownership won’t be allowed.

Incidentally, I don’t care if anyone reading this column gets offended because I refer to Trump by the first name of a certain Fascist dictator who’s ass we finally kicked in 1945. This new guy has done everything he can to demean the democratic process, to pander to the worst, most violent and extremist elements of the far Right, and his narcissism and arrogance knows no bounds. So screw him, the horse he rode in on and the whole cavalry behind him.  I’m done being polite.

Anyway, as I was saying above.  So what we got from Hillary Wednesday night was a reasoned and sober attempt to balance the constitutionality of private gun ownership against the government’s need and legitimate interest in regulating safe behavior with guns.  But why is it necessary to worry about abiding by the 2nd Amendment?  Whose constitutional ‘rights’ are even threatened if the 2nd Amendment is ‘under siege?’

I bought my first, real gun in 1956 when I was 12 years old.  I was walking around a flea market in the Florida Glades, old boy had a Smith & Wesson blue box on the table with a 38-special banger inside, wanted 50 bucks for the gun which sounded like a good deal to me.  I wasn’t a Florida resident so for some reason that wasn’t explained, give the fifty dollars to ‘nuther ol’ boy standin’ down yonder at the end of the table and he gives me the gun. Things were much simpler in those days.

Between 1956 and 2008 I probably bought and sold 500 personally guns.  Sound like a lot? Hell, it’s less than ten guns a year.  That’s not a lot of buying, selling and trading if you’re a gun nut like me. Know how many of those transactions were protected by the 2nd Amendment?  Not one.  Know how many of those transactions made me legally vulnerable because I didn’t have the blessed 2nd Amendment protecting my back?  Not one. The Supreme Court ruled in 1939 that I did not have any constitutional protection for any of my personally-owned guns, and that ruling remained law of the land until 2008.

The truth is that all this crap about the 2nd Amendment is nothing more than a cynical and nonsensical attempt by pro-gun noisemakers to persuade gun owners like me to fork over our $30 annual dues to the NRA.  And while I’m at it, I can send a few bucks to the Adolph for President campaign. After all, without Adolph running things, maybe all my guns will be taken away.  Like all my guns were taken away before the Court handed down Heller in 2008.

 

What Do States That Vote GOP Have In Common? They Love Their Guns.

Take a look at the projected electoral map on Nate Silver’s website.  Now take a look at the map which shows state-level gun-violence rates constructed by our friends at the Center for American Progress (found on Page 6 of their report, America Under Fire.) Notice anything?  I’ll give you a little hint: The states with the highest levels of gun violence are also the states that will probably end up voting for the GOP.  And if you want to talk about the elephant in the living room when it comes to guns, this is it.  Simply put: red states are where most gun violence occurs.

           You won’t ever see this elephant if you listen to Gun-nut Nation, because as far as they are concerned, gun violence is only a problem in minority neighborhoods, and many, if not most of those neighborhoods are located in cities (Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles) within states which contain relatively few voters who back the GOP.  So when The Groper stands up at one of his Klan rallies and says that violent crime will go down if we make sure to be armed when we walk around those crime-infested spots, he’s pandering to the racist mentality of the lunatic fringe, but he’s also saying something that simply isn’t true.  Gee – what a surprise that Groper Trump would say something that isn’t true.

What is true is that gun violence appears to correlate most of all with lax gun laws, which is a polite way of saying that in many red states that there are no gun laws at all.  Or if there are any laws covering guns, they tend to be laws that actually give people more, not less legal use of guns.  The worst in this respect are ‘stand your ground’ laws (SYG) which allow people to use any level of lethal force if they believe they might otherwise face imminent harm, and they do not have to retreat or otherwise try to avoid the problem before yanking out a gun.  These laws now exist in 22 states, of which The Groper will probably win 17 or 18 of those states unless he screws things up a bit more. And what happens when an SYG law is put into effect?  According to a very comprehensive study from Everytown, the justifiable homicide rate goes up by more than twice.

Why are red-leaning states so resistant to passing laws that reduce gun violence, in particular laws which in other states appear to work?  Why is it so hard, for example, to get extended NICS-background checks in these states when all the polls show that even a healthy majority of gun owners believe that requiring background checks for private transfers would be a good thing? It would be tempting to put it down to the fact that since these are the states where most people own guns, therefore Gun-nut Nation can easily rally the troops, so to speak, whenever a new gun is being discussed.  But the issue goes deeper than that, and here is what it’s really all about.

The most powerful argument that Gun-nut Nation puts forth to block any kind of gun regulations is the ‘slippery-slope’ argument; i.e., if you let ‘them’ have any new law at all, then they’ll take another bite here, another bite there, and sooner or later there won’t be any guns at all.  And there happens to be a bit of truth to this argument, if only because most gun-sense activists, no matter how much they claim to ‘respect’ the 2nd Amendment, would be just as happy if all the guns really did go away.

Because the truth is, and here’s the real elephant in case you didn’t know, there’s one thing and one thing only which accounts for every act of gun violence, and that’s the existence of a gun. I apologize for putting it in such clear and uncompromising terms, but if you pull the trigger of a loaded gun, it’s going to go – bang!

 

 

Want To Help Reduce Gun Violence? Support The Children’s Firearm Safety Alliance.

A new gun violence prevention organization has just popped up and their goals are worthy of mention here and elsewhere.  The organization is called the Children’s Firearm Safety Alliance (CFSA) representing a coalition of physicians, law enforcement, prosecutors, lawmakers and gun violence prevention (GVP) advocates, and its goal is to reduce gun violence committed by or against kids.

         You may recall that back in 2011, Granny Hammer got a bunch of her ass-backward Florida legislators to pass a bill that basically made it a felony for physicians to counsel patients about guns.  The case is still awaiting a final appellate decision and there are several other dumb states that have enacted similar ‘gag’ laws.  Until Docs vs. Glocks was enacted, the medical community had been fairly reticent to speak out about gun violence beyond the obvious policy pronouncements about the dangers of guns.  But one thing that always seems to happen when it comes to any kind of public policy – push hard in one direction and someone will push back.  Which is exactly what has happened when it comes to physicians and guns.

Last year eight of the most important medical associations, along with the American Bar Association, published a manifesto which declared that gun violence was a serious public health problem that required the medical community to get involved.  And many of the national and state-level organizations followed by issuing their own statements of concern, as well as supporting and sponsoring educational programs to bring the issue of gun violence to the fore.

The CFSA represents another important step towards the involvement of the medical community in efforts to reduce gun violence, because although it is a physician-led organization, its membership embraces all of the major stakeholders who have an interest in GVP. According to the CFSA website, its mission is: “To reduce senseless child unintentional deaths and injuries in every state by advancing legislation holding adult gun owners responsible and educating the public how to keep children safe if a gun is in the home.” And to that end, their intention is to advocate for stronger and more comprehensive child access prevention (CAP) laws, of which there are no laws at all in more than 20 twenty states.

Of course the response of the Gun-nut Nation noise machine to physicians getting involved in gun safety is that such activity should not be within the scope of medical activities because most doctors don’t know anything about guns.  This is the argument made by a handful of dopey doctors who run a website called Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, which happens to be supported by the 2nd Amendment Foundation, get my point?

But the fact is (note use of the word ‘fact’) that physicians have played a leading role in campaigns to protect children from all kinds of injuries and unintentional harm, including efforts to mandate harnesses and seat belts, safety barriers around in-ground pools, removing lead from paint and toys, and child-resistant bottle caps to guard against the ingestion of toxic substances and meds.  I don’t hear anyone stating that doctors need to get certified as automobile mechanics before they remind parents to buckle in the kids.  Nor for that matter do they need to become lifeguards in order to ask whether there’s a fence around that pool which just got installed in a patient’s backyard.  But guns?  Nobody except a licensed gunsmith should be allowed to voice an opinion about safety and guns, right?

I am pleased to be able to spread the word about the Children’s Firearm Safety Alliance and I urge you to give them your full support. Yea, yea, I know you just have to send Hillary a few more bucks this week but as regards the CFSA, you might also consider sending a donation their way.  And just in case you missed their website address up above, don’t bother to scroll up because here it is again.  Click here, check out their website and sign up for a great cause.

 

You Might Think The NRA Supports Trump, But They Really Support The NRA.

I’m going to way out on a limb and before I saw myself off, assume that HRC is going to win. I know, I know, the old evil eye.  But if every poll except that crazy LA Times tracking poll is somehow correct, then it looks like this one can be put to bed. Which brings me to ask myself (and all of you) the following question: If Trump-o really gets stomped, what does this result portend for the future of the NRA?

           Because the NRA has done several unprecedented things in this election cycle which deserve to be better understood.  To begin, the organization endorsed Trump at their annual meeting in April, and turned what is usually a stop-off for all the national Republican candidates into a showcase for just one.  Then they followed this unprecedented move by ponying up more than $21 million for television ads which, according to our buddy Tim Johnson, is almost twice as much as they have ever spent on any previous Presidential campaign.

For me, the most inexplicable thing about all this spending is that it’s not as if the NRA’s membership needs to be convinced to vote for Trump.  Talk about preaching to the converted, isn’t Gun-nut Nation and Make America Great Again basically one and the same? And while states like Florida and North Carolina are important swing states where lots of people own guns, what makes them swing states is the potential voter turnout by demographics that don’t own guns.

Given the degree to which Hillary has been the NRA’s favorite punching-bag for longer than I can recall, and given the fact that the average NRA member can be counted on to vote for the Red Team no matter who is quarterbacking the squad, why did the NRA go so far out on a limb for Trump? Or to put it another way, what did they hope to achieve? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that, if nothing else, Clinton really represents a threat to Gun-nut Nation far beyond what has previously been faced. She is the first blue national candidate to make gun control a central plank of her campaign; and she didn’t do this just to outflank Bernie, she did it because she knows that in a national campaign against someone like Trump, trying to present herself as a ‘defender’ of the 2nd Amendment is a waste of time.

But I also have to assume that at some point Trump made it clear to the NRA leadership that, if elected, he would consider himself to be their President in terms of advancing and supporting a political agenda that meets NRA’s needs.  And this agenda would primarily consist of a national concealed-carry permit valid in all 50 states, as well as using the 2nd Amendment as a litmus-test for nominations to the nation’s highest court.

The only problem in this little NRA-Trump love fest, of course, is that even back in April, the polls showed that Trump’s chances of actually succeeding Obama were slim to none.  So why does the NRA continue to dump money into his campaign when the campaign has become nothing more than the candidate claiming that he didn’t say and do what we all know he said and did?

Because what the NRA hopes will come out of this campaign is a feeling on the part of Gun-nut Nation that America’s oldest civil rights organization is really fighting for them. In 2013 the revenue from membership dues was $175 million, in 2014 it dropped to $128 mill.  So in 2013 they ended up more than $50 million in the black, in 2014 they lost $35 million bucks.

And the greater the victory margin (we hope) for Hillary, the more the NRA can say that when it comes to protecting the 2nd Amendment, they’re the only game in town. In fact, their advertising campaign isn’t about Donald Trump; it’s about the NRA.

And As For All The Gun Nuts Who Love Trump – Enough Is Enough.

The Boston Globe carried a Sunday story about how some of Trump’s supporters are beginning to lay the groundwork for an armed rebellion if their man loses the election come November 8th.   Here’s a quote from a 50-year old man at a Trump rally: “‘We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed.’” A female supporter chimed in, “’All I know is our country is not going to be a country anymore, I’ve heard people talk about a revolution.’”

            And while Trump’s campaign disavows such statements, he has promoted and approved violence at his rallies and let’s not forget his claim that his people would stand behind him even if he shot someone dead in the street. He’s actively telling people to watch out for voter fraud, he’s already whining that he can’t win because the system is ‘rigged,’ and instead of buying hats that say ‘Make America Great Again,” how about an armed rebellion instead?

I really hope Mister Trump gets his ass kicked in on November 8th. And then I hope he refuses to concede. And then I really hope that a hardy band of Trump Minutemen throw their gear into their F-150s, go out to an abandoned small town in some dumb state and declare that the revolution to take back America has begun. They’ll occupy the empty post office building, issue a stamp which they’ll sell on their Facebook site, and their first law will be a requirement that nobody can live in this new republic who doesn’t own an AR-15.

Back in 2013 a goofball named Adam Kokesh, who is some kind of libertarian radio jock, announced that he and a group of goofballs were going to march from Virginia into Washington DC, openly carrying rifles on July 4th. He then decided to cancel the event, claiming that he didn’t have the time or resources to put the whole thing together.  But the truth is that the only resource he lacked was the cash he would have needed for bail, because the cops let it be known that he and all the schmucks who were planning to liberate the District of Columbia would wind up in jail.

And how about those other freedom fighters led by the sons of Cliven ‘Let me tell you about your Negro’ Bundy, who took over and barricaded themselves into an empty administrative building on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge at the beginning of this year?  They stayed up there for a week or so, wives and girlfriends dutifully trudged through the snow to supply them with home-cooked meals every night, and then that was the end of that.

But let’s get back to the rebellion that Trump Nation is planning to undertake.  By the second day of their ‘occupation’ of some buildings in what once was a small town will become a media circus because, of course, Trump himself will appear.  Then Wayne-o and Chris Cox will come by and issue honorary NRA memberships to the insurgents who will, of course, announce that the entire Constitution of the new Republic will consist of the words from the 2nd Amendment alone.  Boy, I’d give anything to have an exclusive pizza concession for the duration of that event.

I’m getting sick and tired reading about all these patriots who believe that the present government is so corrupt that we need a violent rebellion led by Donald Trump. Funny how these jerks only get exercised about government ‘tyranny’ when the government happens to be led by a progressive guy from Chicago who also happens to be black.  Funny how 16 other Presidents have issued more Executive Orders than the guy who we know was born in Kenya, regardless of what his birth certificate says.

Know what? Let’s get back to what I said above – Trump really needs his ass handed to him on November 8th.

Can We Prevent Gun Accidents With Better Safe-Storage Laws? Maybe Yes, Maybe No.

USA=-Today is carrying a story on accidental gun deaths of children in which the paper discovered that the CDC number for such events is probably undercounted by about half.  The story describes specific accidental gun deaths, one in which a 4-year old shot himself with a handgun found in his grandparents’ home, another when a 6-year old killed his younger brother with a gun that was lying inside a motel room where the two kids and their parents were spending the night.

           Undercounting accidental shootings (or intentional shootings, for that matter) by the CDC is hardly new news. Our friends at the Gun Violence Archive deliver data on and invariably the numbers they get from open media sources are higher than what either the CDC or the FBI report in just about every category of gun violence. And while the NRA will tell you that it’s never the gun but always the person who is to blame for someone being injured with a gun, blaming a 4 year-old for shooting himself is something of a stretch.

The way we usually think about gun violence is to analyze it by creating different categories that cover both the type of violence (intentional, unintentional, homicide, suicide, legal ‘intervention,’ etc.) and the identity of the victim (location, gender, race, age, etc.)  We create these categories because we believe this will make it easier to craft sensible solutions to the problem, such as better CAP laws to prevent accidental shootings, temporary removal procedures for persons at-risk for suicide, and so forth.  It turns out, of course, that the states with the highest rate of accidental shootings, according to the USA-Today article, have no mandated safe-storage requirements at all.

What I am about to say may appear heretical to many of my friends in the Gun Violence Prevention community, or what I prefer to call Gun-sense Nation, but I think that the value and efficacy of safe-storage solutions as a response to accidental gun violence needs to be more clearly understood.  Because when I think about the root causes of gun violence, any kind of gun violence, I prefer not to think about the differences in circumstances or the people involved, but the commonalities which virtually every type of gun violence share.  And the single commonality which appears in every, single act of gun violence, is that the person who pulls the trigger has done something impulsive, careless or both.

The number one reason for car accidents isn’t DUI or speeding, it’s carelessness, which is why we mandate wearing harnesses or belts. But you don’t have seatbelts on guns, which means that no matter how many times people are told to lock up or lock away their guns, sooner or later they’ll forget.  And most accidental shootings don’t result in a young child getting hurt, but involve the owner of the gun who took it out to fool with it, show it to friends, clean it without checking whether or not it was loaded, and on and on and on. I personally know (or knew) three guys who shot themselves with their own guns; one died, two survived.  All three were fooling around with their guns.  The guy who died was playing ‘fast-draw’ down in his basement. Yanked the gun out of the holster, hammer snagged on his belt – bang!

I’m not saying that Gun-sense Nation should back off from safe storage, or CAP laws or anything else.  What I am saying is that there is simply no other consumer product that you can hold in your hand which is in any way, shape or function as remotely lethal as a gun. And if you believe that this lethality can somehow be mitigated by remaking the human brain so that we will stop being careless, then you go right ahead.  Frankly, I prefer what Walter Mosley says, “Walk around with a gun and it will go off sooner or later.” He’s right.

Center For American Progress Has Issued An Absolutely ‘Must Read’ Report On Gun Violence.

Our good friends at the Center for American Progress (CAP) have published a new study on the link between gun laws and gun violence which is a ‘must-read’ for everyone who is concerned about reducing gun violence.  Which means that nobody in Gun-nut Nation needs to read this report because Gun-nut Nation doesn’t believe that we need to regulate guns at all.  But notwithstanding the dwindling Trump supporters, for those who support the concept of reasonable discourse based on at least some attention to facts, the CAP report is a significant effort to figure out (I’m now quoting the report) “whether strong gun laws are effective at reducing gun violence.”

           What makes this report so important is not the fact that the authors attempt to answer the problem stated above about the effects of strong gun laws on rates of gun violence, but for the first time we have an attempt to connect the effect of gun laws to the totality of gun violence based on data covering 10 different categories of gun violence recorded in every, single state.  This is not the first time that scholars have attempted to link gun violence to the legal environment, the CAP study references the work of my good buddy Eric Fleegler and his colleagues, who found a clear link between gun laws and firearm-related deaths in a 2013 article which you can download here.

But there are two important differences between the Fleegler research and what CAP has now produced: first, the 2013 study only defined gun violence by combining state-level homicide and suicide rates, the CAP study breaks down gun violence into 10 separate categories covering every type of incident where the use of a gun creates physical harm; second, Fleegler’s group analyzed state-level gun law environments using the Brady Center–Law Center reports from 2012, and it was after 2012 (following Sandy Hook) that many states changed their gun laws, in most cases making the legal environment less restrictive in terms of access to guns. So what we get from this CAP report is not only an updated analysis of the relative strength (and weakness) of gun regulations on a state-by-state basis, we also get a much deeper analysis of the different ways in which gun violence occurs.

And what is the result?  Same old, same old, namely, states with stronger gun laws suffer less gun violence, states with weaker gun laws suffer more.  Gee, what a surprise!  But don’t take my cynicism as in way a criticism of the CAP report. Because if you break gun violence down into its component parts, this at least gives you some leverage in trying to figure out not just whether gun laws work to reduce gun violence, but what kind of new gun laws might be implemented or current laws strengthened to address this issue in states where gun violence rates are simply out of control.

Montana is one of those mountain states which has a very high gun-suicide rate but very few gun homicides. It ranks 9th overall for gun violence, but 3rd for gun suicides and only 36th for gun homicides, which puts it below Massachusetts for gun homicides even though Massachusetts ranks dead last for gun violence overall.

But guess what? Montana goes back up to 16th for IPV female homicides, so gun violence in Montana isn’t just driven by suicides, it’s also a very deadly place for women involved in domestic disputes.  Which means that a safe storage law in Montana might have an effect on suicides, but you can be sure that a law which allowed cops to pull guns away from people engaged in domestics would save some lives in the Big Sky State.

By breaking down gun violence into its component parts, the CAP report gives us a realistic view of what gun violence numbers really mean. Which makes this report an inestimable resource for crafting proper laws.  But isn’t that what we expect from CAP in the areas of their concern?

There Are All Kinds Of Myths About Why We Love Guns, But Myths Don’t Help Us Reduce Gun Violence At All.

What is a myth?  According to most dictionaries, a myth is a widely held but false idea or belief.  And if there’s one area where myths abound, it’s in the statements made by Gun-nut Nation to justify their ownership of guns.  Now I have no problem with tall tales – we all learned fairy tales as kids, we then went on to be enchanted by The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland, but if you get into a discussion with someone and want to prove a particular point, you’re not about to use a rhyme from Doctor Seuss as your source.

           Unless someone wants to explain why they just went out and bought another gun. Because the one thing that nobody in Gun-nut Nation will ever admit is that they just picked up their tenth, or twentieth, or thirtieth gun because they had a few extra bucks in their pocket and the truck doesn’t yet need a new set of brakes.  But nobody wants to admit that they didn’t have a good reason to lay down some real, cold cash, so out comes the nonsense about they ‘need’ the gun because guns are our American heritage and without guns we would not have ever settled this great land.  Or if that one doesn’t work, they can always trot out the 2nd-Amendment script about how guns make us ‘free,’ and if that one doesn’t fly, let’s not forget that ‘guns protect us from crime.’

These slogans are all nothing but myths but the reason they are so powerful, the reason why people believe them, hold onto them, often shape their views of themselves and the world around them is because every myth has just enough reality within it to appear plausible, logical and true. For example, let’s look at the myth about how guns made it possible to conquer the frontier and turn an inhospitable wilderness into a verdant and rich landscape from sea to shining sea.

The settlers who got off the boats first in Virginia and then at Plymouth Bay came armed with guns.  And they used these guns to hunt game and, on occasion, shoot a few pesky Native Americans who got in the way.  But the forest which started right at the water’s edge stretched clear through to the Great Plains.  And in order to open land for crops and animal husbandry this immense woodland had to be cleared.  And what cleared it was controlled burning, called swidden, and then mechanized farm implements like plows.

Daniel Boone didn’t discover Cumberland Gap by using a gun.  He got friendly with Indians and followed them through the valleys that had been used by Native Americans since prehistoric times.  And there was so much rich, open land that the early settlers didn’t have to rotate crops as they did in Europe in order to keep land fertile; the moment a piece of land became less productive, they picked up, tramped a couple of hundred miles further west, and started a new farm over again.

From earliest times guns were used for hunting and self-defense. But what settled America wasn’t the frontiersman, or the mountain-man, or the hunter.  It was the farmer and then the stock breeder, all of whom owned guns but didn’t use those guns either to clear forest land or fence off the plains. And when guns were used to pacify and exploit the wilderness, this was largely the work of commercial hunters whose furnishing of hides and feathers to urban markets drove many game species almost to the point of becoming extinct.

And that’s what gun myths are really all about: take a tiny bit of evidence and turn it into an explanation for how a whole country developed and grew which then validates the way you behave today. But guess what?  You don’t reduce 115,000+ yearly gun injuries by inventing a myth. You reduce that kind of violence by understanding its true cause – the existence of guns.

If We Don’t Want People To Use Guns For Self-Defense, What Options Do They Have?

Our good friends at the Center for American Progress (CAP) have just released an important and valuable study, America Under Fire, which I am going to review in detail later this week. But since the report is, so to speak, hot off the presses, I would like to raise one issue which needs to be considered when we try figure out whether gun violence can be reduced through new or expanded laws.

           Which is not the intention of the CAP report per se; the tree they bark up is to determine whether gun regulations have any impact on gun violence at all.  And with a judicious use of data from a variety of sources, the authors of this report believe, as they state, that “the link between weak gun laws and higher rates of gun violence cannot be ignored.”  For the moment I’ll hold off on exploring the ins and outs of that link; my goal today is to raise a wider issue coterminous to the report but not a focus of the report itself.

The latest research from the Harvard-Northeastern team indicates that 22% of American adults admit to being owners of guns.  Within this population, two-thirds of these gun owners claim that their primary reason for owning a gun is for self-defense.  That gets us down to roughly 15% of American adults who have decided to respond to their concerns about personal safety by going out and getting a gun.

According to other surveys, two-thirds of all Americans also believe that a home is a safer place if it contains a gun.  And more than half of all Americans worry a ‘great deal’ about crime and another quarter worry about crime ‘a fair amount.’ So the bottom line is two-thirds of all Americans are concerned about their personal safety, two-thirds believe that a gun will make them more safe, but at best only a small portion of people who are worried about personal safety and believe that a gun is a proper and perhaps positive response to this problem actually invoke that response.

Now the gun industry would love it if everyone would run out a buy a gun, or at least everyone who is concerned about personal safety but has not yet acquired a gun.  The industry has been promoting using guns for self-defense for more than twenty years, and God knows a day doesn’t pass without another scam website opening up which promises to deliver the be-all and end-all training for everyone who just received their concealed-carry permit or lives in a state where walking around with a gun for self-protection (or any other dumb reason) doesn’t require any kind of licensing at all.

But the fact remains that most people who claim to be concerned about their personal safety, or at least believe that violent crime getting worse (if you don’t know anyone like that you might try going to the next Trump rally, even though there may not be many more Trump rallies) have made the conscious decision not to protect themselves with a gun. And for all the talk about guns and self-protection, I have yet to see one, single survey which asks people who don’t own guns how they protect themselves from crime. Not a single survey. Not one.

What I think would really move the GVP debate forward would be an attempt to figure out how people deal with their fears or concerns about personal safety without using or buying a gun.  Because if we are going to reduce gun violence, no matter how effective we believe certain laws might be, we have to be able to offer viable, non-gun options to folks who simply don’t believe they have any choice except to rely on their guns. If GVP can develop a strategy that makes gun owners feel they can be safe without relying on their guns, this would mark a fundamental change in how the debate about gun violence is currently framed.